I’m a night owl. If I’m up to see the sun rise, something has gone horribly wrong at one end of my day or the other. And while I’m theoretically there to see the sunset, in practice I hardly pay attention to it, unless I’m outside for some reason.
This luxury is brought to me by ubiquitous artificial lighting.
Energy sources are a big topic of conversation these days. With fossil fuels being both damaging to the environment and increasingly difficult to acquire, we’re looking into a wide variety of alternatives — some of which are cutting-edge, and others of which are very old indeed.
The one option that’s been with us from the start has been muscle power. Our own to begin with; later, after we domesticated animals, we got to use theirs instead. For millennia, everything from agriculture to textile manufacture to metalworking has been carried out with sweat and toil, fueled by the food we and our livestock eat. But of course, you can’t elbow grease your way to everything. No amount of direct labor will cause food to cook, nor pottery to harden, nor ores to smelt.
For that, we needed fire.
Because fantasy in particular is full of tyrannical rulers and terrible governments, I suspect there are many readers who assume the reaction of a historical king or queen to a flood, fire, famine, or other disaster was “suck it up — and yes, you still have to pay your taxes.”
I’m not going to say that never happened, but it was less common than you might think. Telling the peasantry to suck it up and still pay taxes is a fantastic way to get revolts — and even if those revolts don’t threaten to topple the throne, every farmer marching against you is a farmer not growing the crops your economy relies on. While you did get the occasional ruler both cruel enough and shortsighted enough to shrug off that danger, most of them at least made some attempt to deal with the underlying problem, however ineffectively.
Finishing the draft of the third Rook and Rose book and then turning right back around to dive in on revisions means I never got around to posting about Yuletide until now!
But I definitely need to post, because the prize for going above and beyond the call of duty goes to LookingForOctober. I knew before the authors were revealed that someone had written me a Howl’s Moving Castle fic, “A Wizard of Wales,” followed by a sequel fic, “A Wizard in Ingary” — but not until reveals did I discover that the same person had also written me a THIRD story, this one for the Gabriel Knight series of video games: “Fate of the Children.” Three fics from one writer! And as if that weren’t bonanza enough, someone else wrote me a Howl fic, “In Which a Thesis Is Not Written.”
It makes me feel embarrassed that I didn’t have the time or energy to write treats the way I used to, in the misty past when I had more leisure. My assignment this year was “Gammer’s Garden,” a Chrestomanci fic for a prompt that made use of the decision to allow “Worldbuilding” as a character-style tag this year. No canon characters appear in the story, but it explores the history of the Pinhoe family and their dwimmer magic, with a connection to a detail of canon I’ve always found interesting.
Hopefully next Yuletide I’ll be able to pay it all forward!
(I failed to repost this essay here like I intended to. Apologies to anyone who tried and failed to reach the BVC site! We are working like mad to have the new site up soon.)
As I said in last week’s essay, it’s in the public interests of a society to keep fires from spreading. It’s even more in those interests to keep them from starting in the first place — and because of that, government regulations designed to prevent, spot, and slow down fires go back a very long way.
The New Worlds Patreon would like to join such luminaries as Smokey the Bear in reminding you that you can prevent fires. And it’s much better to prevent them than to fight them once they’ve started! Comment over at Book View Cafe.
(We are getting very close to BVC being up and running again! But we aren’t there yet, so once again, this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay is hosted here on my site.)
As devastating as fires can be nowadays, we have ways of dealing with them. In my kitchen there sits a canister of fire-suppressing chemicals; on my ceilings perch little disks that scream bloody murder when they smell smoke or carbon monoxide; if something goes wrong, a big truck will roll up and hook itself up to a hydrant that will spew out all the water I might need, at high enough pressures to reach upper floors with ease.
But rewind the clock, and things get ugly fast.
(We have great hopes that the Book View Cafe website will be back up and running soon! Until then, I will continue to post my Patreon essays here.)
If something goes wrong — a fire; a home intruder; but especially for the purpose of this essay, a medical emergency — I know exactly what to do. I’ll pick up my phone and call 9-1-1, the emergency number for the United States. Someone on the other end will send an ambulance full of trained medical personnel, who will administer some aid on-site and then (if necessary) take the patient to the hospital, siren blaring all the way.
There are many reasons to be glad I live in the twenty-first century, but it’s startling to me that if I rewind the clock just fifty-five years — to 1966 — this seemingly obvious and sensible concept would not have been available to me.
On request, I’m reposting the next-to-last non-theory essay from the New Worlds Patreon, since the downing of the Book View Cafe website has rendered it inaccessible. Also, for those of you wondering what happened at over BVC, the short form is: we’re gearing up to give the site a major and long-awaited overhaul . . . and in the course of the gearing up, it, uh, went belly-up. >_< But the good news is that we’re on track to roll out the new! improved! site! very soon, and it’s going to be so much better once we do.
One last post, to close out the year.
I published an ABSURD amount this year, y’all. Six short stories, which is quite a respectable number for me these days . . . and thanks to the vagaries of publishing schedules, THREE novels in the same calendar year. That isn’t normal, yo. But yeah, 2021 saw the release of The Mask of Mirrors in January, The Night Parade of 100 Demons just two weeks later in February, and then The Liar’s Knot here at the end of the year. Ooof.
As for the short fiction:
. . . plus five reprints in various places.
2022 will not look the same, because it can’t. But here’s hoping for a good year, regardless.
Despite Alyc’s encouragement, I don’t think I have it in me to make three progress posts today, one for Chapter 27, and one apiece for the prologue and the epilogue. 😛 Yes, the prologue to this book was one of the last things we wrote: third from the end, to be precise, followed by the last scene of Chapter 27 and the epilogue. That last being, of course, a thing the previous two books didn’t have, but here it helps a lot to show some longer-term effects that would feel very shoehorned into the final chapter.
Alyc and I each have a traditional quote associated with having finished a book. Mine comes from The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel by Edward Gorey: “The next day Mr. Earbrass is conscious, but very little more.” Alyc’s comes from a Gilbert & Sullivan musical (Patience, I think): “Finished! At last, finished! The book is finished, and my soul has gone out into it. That was all. It was nothing worth mentioning. It occurs three times a day.”
We may not do this three times a day, but yeah. Soul gone out. Conscious. Very little more. Ima go flop now.
Word count: 198,360 — we undershot in our zeal to not go over, and will be fleshing out things we short-changed during revisions.
Authorial sadism: Alyc is right that a certain departure needed to happen . . . but it still hurts. Us as well as the characters.
Authorial amusement: The introduction Ren gets in the epilogue.
BLR quotient: Love is healing the wounds, and the turbulent waters of rhetoric are calming. It won’t be smooth sailing from here into eternity, but the storm has passed.
(Because Book View Cafe is still having technical difficulties, I am posting this week’s Patreon essay here.)
The last few theory essays have discussed language on the page. For the final one of both this calendar year and Year Five of my Patreon, I’d like to offer some concrete advice on how to create words and names that support the feeling of a plausible secondary world.
This isn’t about the phonology and orthography, the sounds and spellings used in a name. (We already discussed that way back in Year One.) Instead it’s about structure, about the underlying patterns and quirks that will make names come to life. In the real world, we don’t name things randomly, so following a few patterns in your story creates verisimilitude.
I’ve learned more about naming in fiction since I first touched on the subject in New Worlds, Year One. So for the final New Worlds Patreon essay of the year — on a fifth Friday, and therefore a theory essay — I’ve got concrete advice on how to make your invented names seem more real. Comment over there!
EDIT: updated with a new link, as before.
The climactic chapter!
Unlike the previous two books, we did not write this one in a single day. Which was for the best; neither Alyc nor I have the kind of physical or mental energy for that at the moment, not when what we had to comb through for the final scene was so complex. We finally hit the right notes, and with those in hand, we now know what kinds of hints we need to seed earlier to set that up properly.
. . . everything else I want to say about this would be a spoiler, so I’ll stop there.
Word count: ~188,000
Authorial sadism: We were going to give something back. But then we wrote how this actually plays out, and nope, that character just has to live without it.
Authorial amusement: We damn near sprained something trying to avoid echoing The Princess Bride in a very inappropriate way.
BLR quotient: Look, we’ve said many times this series is anti-grimdark. What do you think wins out, here at the end?
(Because the Book View Cafe blog, which usually hosts my New Worlds essays, is having difficulty right now, I’m reposting the piece in question here.)
I’ve already apologized to my faithful New Worlds patrons, but I’ll repeat it here: when I put up the poll for them to vote on the theme for December’s essays, I didn’t do the math and notice that if “sexual behavior” won out, that would mean I wind up posting about sexual misbehavior on Christmas Eve. And not in the wink-wink-nudge-nudge sense, but in the sense that this post comes with trigger warnings. So my apologies for the bad timing . . . but if you still want to read, you can comment over there. [Edited to provide new link due to BVC site difficulties.]
It’s a real progress blog! By which I mean that, after months of me posting well after the fact because I didn’t actually start progress-blogging when we started writing, I am for realz posting right after we finished a chapter!
And we are in the home stretch! Very visibly so, in fact. You see, Google Docs doesn’t always cope well with very large files; much above 50K words, you can start having problems with lag and such. As a result, we’ve always divided our drafts up into multiple files, one per part, to keep them in the safe zone. But because this book is in three parts instead of four or five, that would mean each one is in the 60-70K range, and we didn’t want to find out whether Google was going to get stupid about it. In order to keep the feeling that the file divisions are at structurally relevant points, we actually have nine files for this book, each one containing three chapters. (Yes, this will be annoying when we have to collate them all.) With Chapter 25, we have officially created the last file!
(Shhhh, don’t tell me if Google has fixed that problem in the years since we started writing The Mask of Mirrors. This is tradition now.)
People who have read the first two books can guess more or less what’s going on at this point, not in its specifics, but in its shape. Although things have been building toward these events for a long time, this is when the avalanche starts to roar downhill. Different people each get signs of Something Rather Bad; when they compare notes, it’s clear that actually, Something Incredibly Bad is going down. Which they will deal with in the next chapter.
. . . but Alyc and I en’t writing that one until next week, because dammit, we get some amount of holiday off. (Please to be disregarding the other work each of us is doing on the book in the interim, because we have a few holes we want to patch before we officially reach the end of the draft.)
Word count: ~182,000
Authorial sadism: . . . honestly, I think the meanest thing in this chapter is what Alyc did to me, suggesting a certain thing to do with pattern.
Authorial amusement: Giving a minor spear-carrier who may not have even had any lines before a crucial role to play.
BLR quotient: They’ve been bleeding all this time. They only just now realized.
. . . I’m going to pretend I didn’t start writing the progress blog for Chapter 25 instead of this one, despite that chapter not actually being done yet. >_< I know I talk about the writing of this book being remarkably non-linear, but really, that’s a step too far.
I suspect some readers will find the structure of this chapter a little odd. The first scene contains a watershed moment — the sort of thing you might normally expect at the end of a chapter. But it’s part of what I discussed before, us having a plotline where everything isn’t in the hands of our main characters. Trying to make a Big Satisfying Finale out of this moment would, we think, make it feel too pat. Instead it’s a messy tangle that’s being driven largely by characters who don’t get pov, and the watershed here is more a shift in direction than the end of a journey, because this is the type of journey that doesn’t end. The victory is in the turn, not the arrival.
Which isn’t to say we don’t have a cool watershed at the end as well, of course! We absolutely do, and it’s one with much more intimate personal weight for our protagonists. A moment of grace, where they think they’ll be able to do a good thing . . . and find they’ve managed something even better.
Word count: 175,000
Authorial sadism: Having to make your peace with something awful, so you can get past that to compassion.
Authorial amusement: “It’s a good thing you’re not the face of this operation.”
BLR quotient: Rhetoric has its moment in the sun.
This week’s New Worlds Patreon essay is a touch Not Safe for Work, as it deals with our changing standards around what’s considered “normal” for sexual behavior. Comment over there!
The non-linearity of this chapter consists in us having Ren re-learn a thing she originally learned in Chapter 18, which we’ve decided to pull out of there and save for here, so that she’ll have more opportunity to react to it. What we have here still isn’t fully developed, I suspect, but I do think it’s in the right place now. (And once again, I’m glad that writing isn’t performance art; we get to revise what we’ve done before you lot ever see it.)
I’ve commented in various places about how this book is kind of terra incognita in a way the previous ones weren’t. The core of what we’d developed in the game can be found in The Liar’s Knot; when drafting The Mask of Mirrors, we knew we were writing our way toward that target. But this book is the onward-rippling consequences of that core, which is in part terrain that the game hasn’t gotten to yet — or if it has, it’s been in the context of plots and characters which are nowhere in this series. Plus there are a couple of long-term conflicts there that the PC version of Ren hasn’t yet gotten to resolve.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying, this chapter contains two events I’m really looking forward to in the game, even as I partially scratch the itch by dealing with the book renditions of those situations. 😀 One is a much-needed revelation; the other is a much-needed ass kicking. It’s nice when people get what’s coming to them . . .
Word count: 168,000
Authorial sadism: Normally I think of this in terms of us being mean to our lead characters, but in this case I should acknowledge that we took what was originally supposed to be mainly a social downfall and made it, uh, extra dramatic.
Authorial amusement: “No wonder you got in the habit of lying.”
BLR quotient: The last stitches of love are bringing the fabric together.
