I haven’t the faintest idea what this means, but it sounds good.

According to my editor, Warrior and Witch hit the Barnes & Noble mass market bestseller list at #37. Bookscan, the program that tracks point-of-sale at many stores, puts me at #10 on the fantasy bestseller list, and #4 for mass-market fantasy.

I am completely lacking in the experience needed to translate those facts into something meaningful, but damn, they sound good. And if my editor’s e-mailing me about them, they’re probably good enough to be worth taking note of.

So yay!

Happy Street Date Day!

Today is the official street date for Warrior and Witch. Not that this means all that much, since bookstores are rarely rigorous about enforcing such things, but y’know. Go buy the book. ^_^

Also today — since they put up their new issue on the first of the month — you can go read my interview with Sequential Tart. Mostly they do comics stuff, but the Culture Vultures cover other material, and one of them was kind enough to get in touch with me. Writing, gaming, academic life — the interview covers it all.

not quite three months behind

Since September isn’t quite over yet, technically I’ve only fallen two months behind with my recommendations. Or rather, I’m now one month behind, but that’ll go back up to two on Sunday, since I doubt I’ll manage another one tomorrow. But I’ve written one (the July one) for Charles Stross’ The Family Trade. It’s more lukewarm than my usual, since I have some personal issues unrelated to the book’s quality, but I think it’s worth taking a look at.

stunt gaming

Elizabeth Bear has talked on her journal about stunt writing: “Which is to say, playing a narrative trick that does more than serve as a narrative trick, something that really justifies its existence.” (She specifies later that, to count as a stunt, it has to be difficult, too.) And it occurred to me last night that what I’ve been doing for the last nine months probably qualifies as the game equivalent, stunt GMing.

For those only now tuning in, we’re talking about a weekly, tabletop Changeling game that is structured like (and named for) the movie Memento. After an initial few sessions in 2006, we began flashing back to the characters’ previous lives in 1916, 1828, and so on, all the way back to the mid-fourteenth century. So while researching previous centuries (a new, or should I say old, one every month), I was also having to handle all the tricks of narrative and game backward: exposition in reverse, foreshadowing that was actually back-shadowing, use of backstory that was actually fore-story, character development that went in direct opposition to in-story chronological order. While the players were figuring out how to play nine different versions of the same people, I was coming up with nine guys to help them out, all members of the same family and with some similarities, but trying to make them individuals, too. And juggling the ever-changing question of how much they remembered of the past, balancing that against what it would be useful for them to know, and setting everything up so that they would arrive back in 2006 with the last pieces having only just fallen into place, half an hour and 650 years ago.

Oy.

Having just returned to 2006 during last night’s session, I officially render my personal verdict, which is that the narrative trick of this game’s structure did, indeed, justify its existence. Probably one of the best comments I got was Oddsboy’s, who, upon me saying they were back in 2006, said, “Wow, I’m so not prepared for this.” Which his character shouldn’t be, having just remembered 650 years of his own past. Forgetting momentarily who the hell you are right now is an appropriate reaction. I think the mental and emotional effect of moving through it all backwards worked out, in a situation where they-the-characters knew what they were doing when they started but forgot over the centuries, so they-the-players had no idea what they were doing initially but found out as they went back, and in between knowing nothing and knowing everything both a lot of time and none at all elapsed. I’m pleased it worked, but I’m more pleased that I think I made the right choice, running it that way, instead of going through things in chronological order. It’s nice to know I wasn’t just being an artsy wank; I did, in fact, have good reasons for siccing on myself (and my players) nine months of heavy-duty mental work.

(That’s my verdict. Said players can form their own.)

But I’ve got to say, I’m glad to be back in the present. From here on out (i.e. another month and a half or so), no more stunt GMing. I’m running a normal game, that will go in a linear fashion from where we are now to where we’re going to end, rather than dancing around in loopy little time circles. Causes first, consequences second, all very straightforward, and man, does that sound nice.

We have a winner!

Kasi Spyker wins the tuckerization contest, having sent me the following picture:

I think I’ll have to make her one of the senators or representatives that’s on the less shady side; “Spyker” as an antagonist’s name just wouldn’t be subtle. 🙂

For posterity, I will note that hers was not the first picture I received, but I told Kurayami-hime that family were disqualified. Nonetheless, it’s good to see that there are quite a few copies on the shelf in this store, and even one of Doppelganger:

Send me more pictures! I’d love to know where the book has already made it into the wild.

more excerpt, and a contest

One week to go until the official street date for Warrior and Witch. You can now read a sample of Chapter Two online. (Sorry for cutting off where I do, but my contract limits me in how much I can post.)

Also, we return to the land of tuckerizing! The deal is the same as it was with Doppelganger: be the first person to e-mail me a picture of Warrior and Witch in a store, and I’ll name a character after you in the urban fantasy I’m working on. (You’ll probably be a senator or representative.) And even if you’re not the first, I very much appreciate reports (with or without pictures) of sightings in different places. Go forth, and find my book!

call for paper help

Looking for some help here. The conference topic for the next ICFA is “Representing Self and Other: Gender and Sexuality in the Fantastic,” and I’ve been trying to think of a paper that would fit in. (You’re not limited to the topic, but I’d like to give it a shot this year, instead of ignoring it entirely.) Gender and sexuality aren’t my usual stomping grounds, though, so it’s been a little tough. In fact, for a while the only thing I could think up was “Drow: The Black Hole of Otherness,” which is not so much a paper as an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel, and dead fish at that.

But I think I’ve found a way to develop that into a paper, by looking at the original appearance of the drow in a game module, and then their development since then in game materials and fiction — specifically, what work certain writers have done to try and rehabilitate them as something other than a horrible, horrible stereotype of Otherness. (I’ve gotten some indications that there have been some moves in that direction — enough to persuade me that reading a dozen or so new Forgotten Realms novels won’t be a complete waste of time that leaves me with nothing to talk about when I’m done.) So I’m halfway to being able to write an abstract. What I need now are academic references.

Y’see, I really haven’t taken any classes on this topic, and so I barely know where to begin. Who should I read if my focus is on the process of de-Othering a black-skinned, matriarchal, subterranean, racist, slave-owning, rigidly stratified, back-stabbing, religiously twisted and sexually perverted race of chaotic evil people? I think I can talk well enough about why it’s happening, but I need more on the how.

beet pulp, Russian countertenors, and election theft

I have a handful of links to get rid of. Don’t expect anything resembling a coherent theme to the topics of this post.

First and most serious: mounting proof that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. It’s long. Read it all. Cringe at the number of federal laws that were broken, let alone the rest of the shady, non-kosher polling practices.

Now, to cheer you up: the hazards of beet pulp. Don’t drink anything while you’re reading it.

Brave New Words. The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction has a publication date, at last.

Hey, Khet? I think you have some competition.

And, in conclusion, I give you Vitas. Watch a smirking little girly-man jump three octaves as if he hasn’t noticed that men aren’t supposed to be sopranos. (Countertenors weird me out a little.) If the smirk doesn’t entertain you enough — or if it does — then try the music video version, where in he’s a smirking little fish-boy instead. Then go watch him sing “Lucia di Lammermoor” — you know, that piece the female opera singer performs in The Fifth Element. Cracktastical, I tell you, and I’ve only watched a few of the videos so far.

That will do for now.

excerpt and other goodies

If you’ve read Doppelganger already, then check out the page on my site for Warrior and Witch, newly updated with all kinds of goodies — including the first chapter of the novel! It’s the revised version of what got printed in the back of the first book, and next week (one week from street date!) I’ll be adding a section from the second chapter.

If you haven’t read Doppelganger already, then please don’t follow either of those links, as they lead to spoilers that make Baby Jesus cry. Go read the first book instead.

they giveth, and they taketh away

What an appalling offense to archaic grammar. But that doesn’t stop me from titling the entry thusly.

I have on my desk a letter from Delia Sherman that would have me bouncing in happiness if it didn’t happen to reject “La Molejera” for Interfictions along the way. She and Dora Goss seem to have put a lot of effort into writing the rejection letters, which is above and beyond the call of duty for editors. So yay, but at the same time boo.

The reason given for the rejection, incidentally, was that it was too identifiably a genre story to fit the anthology. This confirms my suspicion that, provided they do manage to put out a second Interfictions antho, and provided I have not sold it by then, “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe” may be my best prospect with them. (Of course, this also requires the provision that I get off my ass and do something with that first draft. It won’t sell to anybody sitting on my hard drive.)

more than the sum of its parts

I don’t recall where I picked up this link, but it’s a discussion of media (all media) and its future. The major point is, presented in analogy, that a music album (frex) is a molecule, and songs are atoms, and we as a society are increasingly interested in atomic rather than molecular content; we download individual songs, make our own mix CDs, and even get to sub-atomic levels in creating mashups. Nor does this apply only to music.

Here are some of the issues I have with the post and its comment threads (one of which says, “Most consumers are just playing with the atoms and discarding them, and any art form that expects the consumer to understand a complex molecular structure, whether created from whole cloth or from other atoms, is in trouble”). First of all, I don’t think this trend is inherently going to keep on as it has been. Personal experience prompts this feeling; I like listening to my music on shuffle, but after a while of doing that I found myself craving whole albums again. Now, I can’t assume everybody’s like me, of course, but I have a gut feeling that playing around with atomic content is something we’re doing a lot of because suddenly technology’s making it easier; the novelty, however, may well wear off, and then the atomic approach will become one of many ways we interact with media, instead of the Tsunami of the Future that will wipe out all others.

Second, it sort of carries the assumption that the molecules are no more than the sum of their parts. “They don’t want to buy a whole album just for that catchy radio single” — true enough, but the fault then lies with the way we market music, promoting one good song on the radio while the rest of the album may be mediocre crap. I wouldn’t want to buy the album then, either. But a good album is well worth buying, because not only does it have more worth listening to than that one catchy song, it has more than its entire collection of songs; it is an artistic work in its own right, with carefully chosen beginning and ending tunes, a flow from one song to another, a journey that lasts more than four minutes. Atomic media can only offer you small experiences — powerful ones, perhaps, but limited in their complexity. And I think we enjoy complexity enough for molecular media to still have their place.

Finally, look at this on a more extreme level. The quarks of writing, if you will, are letters and punctuation, or words if you don’t want to go that far. Anybody can mix and match them to their heart’s content. But not everybody can do it well, and so we pay writers (and musicians, and TV show creators, and so on) to put them together for us, to present us with something compelling. I make characters soundtracks (i.e. themed mix CDs), but I don’t listen to them as often as I do to professional albums, and I sure as hell don’t write my own music. I could be vaguely interested in the notion of a “mix anthology,” collecting my favorite short stories in one place, but a professional editor can probably do a better job of that than I can. A mix anthology from a friend would interest me more as an expression of my friend and/or our relationship, but a professional anthology would interest me more as literature. I don’t mean that to slam my friends, of course; could well be that one or more would manifest a heretofore unsuspected talent for that sort of thing, and produce a work of sheer brilliance. But on the whole, I consume anthologies (books, albums, movies, etc) looking for someone else, someone who has spent a lot of time learning how to do it well, to present me with an experience. The more I chop up their media, the more I’m undoing their work, losing the crafted connections that made the whole more than the sum of its parts. That can be fun, and it can produce amazing new works, but I don’t think we’re going to forswear molecules for atoms any time soon.

I

And I <3 <3 <3 stunting.

I commented the other night that combat in Exalted isn’t all that quick (when I can blow a relatively cheap charm to get six actions in a round, or the bad guy can attack five times as often as I do, things get slowed down real good) . . . but despite that, I find it far more interesting than combat in most other games. Why? Because the system actively rewards you for being exciting. Say “I run up and stab him” in a normal game, and you roll your normal dice. Say that in Exalted, and you roll your normal dice. Say “I run up his enormous daiklave, feinting with my blade to all sides, then leap into the air, turn three backflips, and stab him in the back” in a normal game, and you have to make a crap-ton of difficult athletics rolls, then roll your normal dice (if you’re lucky; if not, then you’re at a penalty.) Say that in Exalted, and you get bonus dice and some of your magic juice back to boot, just for being awesome.

What’s not to love?

Obviously this approach wouldn’t work for all genres, and probably wouldn’t quite work in an Exalted game that wasn’t deliberately starting in the last chapter of an epic story. But I like the way it rewards you for describing what you’re doing, and doesn’t penalize you for trying the exciting and difficult thing over the safe and boring one. Seems to me that could be incorporated, on a less insanely over-the-top level, into more games.

It also makes me ponder something I’ve pondered before, namely, how one could go about trying to write Final Fantasy/wuxia/anime/etc-type-stuff as prose fiction. One difficulty is that the appeal of such sources is heavily visual, with both the flow of movement and the aesthetic arrangement of bodies; conveying those kinetic and spatial qualities in prose is hard. Another difficulty is simply that we’re not used to such things in our prose, and so a level of over-the-top-ness that you can swallow off a screen is much harder to digest off a page. I gradually toned down the martial arts in Doppelganger over the course of submitting it around, taking out some of the stupider wire-fu that had been in there; I wanted Mirage to be badass, but not so much so that she defied the laws of physics utterly. It might fit into another story, though, and so I ponder how it could be done.

my lunatic friends

Imagine, if you will, that you are in another city, wherein there is a chocolatier who sells the most divine hot chocolate you have ever tasted — thick and rich and beautifully bitter as the best dark chocolate can be. And you intended, while there, to go and buy more of their mix, so that you can continue to enjoy this divinity while at home . . . but alas, you planned poorly, and you will not have an opportunity to go there and buy.

Imagine that you mention this to your friends while sitting around and packing picnic baskets for that afternoon’s wedding.

Imagine — if you can — that not only will one of your friends take the time to go by that chocolatier before the wedding, but that the one who will take the time to arrange this is the groom himself, who really ought to have other things on his mind.

And then — because we’re not done yet! — imagine that you mentioned, during that conversation, the exorbitant price charged by the chocolatier if you order the five-pound bag of mix online (some of the exorbitancy stemming from the chocolate, some from the shipping charges), and that said groom friend gets it into his head that you intended to buy a five-pound bag (instead of the rather more reasonable two-pound bag), and therefore, during the picnic following his wedding, presents you with a sack containing two two-pound bags and one one-pound bag (owing to a lack of five-pound bags in the store), accompanied by the words “Happy Birthday.”

Thus did I acquire an absurd amount of Burdick’s hot chocolate, from a friend whose mind really really ought to have been on things closer to home. But I’m grateful to him anyway, and am now equipped to hand out samples of this divinity to all and sundry, for about the next three years.

The Egotism Post

Long-time readers of this journal will be familiar with today’s exercise, but for those who are new, an introduction in three points:

1) Today is my birthday.

2) So long as I continue to be involved in academia, my birthday will fall during a rather hectic and stressful period of the year.

3) I am perhaps a little too skilled for my own good at pointing the flaws in my accomplishments, how I’ve done this thing but not that other one, etc.

So, for several years now, to counteract my tendency to be in a bad mood on my birthday (for reasons that have nothing to do with my age) and my habit of denigrating my own achievements, I’ve made a practice of
posting, on this day, a listing of all the cool stuff I’ve done in the previous year. And I’m utterly forbidden to qualify my statements or include anything that isn’t positive (and you have no idea how much self-editing it takes to obey that rule).

So. I’m twenty-six today. What do I have to show for it?

This.