For the month of July, the New Worlds Patreon turns its attention back to religion — this time for a look at some of its underlying concepts. We begin with what makes a god . . . which is something that differs quite a bit depending on what religion you ask! Comment over there.
Alyc and I still need to backtrack to fill in the additional chapter for Part Three, but that’s tied in enough with the need to plan out more stuff for Parts Four and Five that we haven’t tried to do that yet. While we work on that planning, though, we went ahead and did Chapter 16, because we knew what was going to happen there.
. . . or so we thought. The first two scenes were fine, but when we started the third one, various things about it weren’t working, and one of them was the placement. While we had good reasons for intending to put the second and (supposed) third scenes both in this chapter, when the time came to actually do it, they felt too same-y — weakening the impact of the latter by juxtaposition with the former. We came up with a reason to push it back, which wound up helping to solve another aspect that wasn’t working, and so hopefully that will go better when we take a second crack at it.
This is something I keep coming back to, as we work on this series: I think one of the essential elements of collaboration is a willingness to both say and hear, “This isn’t working.” If you get too strongly attached to your ideas to let them go when they don’t click for your writing partner, or if you’re reluctant to hurt your partner’s feelings by saying an idea isn’t strong enough, or if you two are just on sufficiently different wavelengths that you’re not getting fired up by the same concepts, you’ll wind up with problems. You’ve got to be willing to bend, but also to know when not to bend — when you need to stand your ground because sure, maybe that solution to the plot problem could work, but it’s not amazing and the story deserves better. If there’s something your partner loves about the idea, circle around and see if there’s another way to keep that good bit while taking a different approach. If you envisioned XYZ happening but the other person doesn’t think that makes sense, diagnose the reasons why, and look for ways to fix it. It’s the same process I go through when working alone . . . except there’s no ego or pride at risk when it’s all happening inside my own head. When there’s someone else involved, it can be trickier.
So anyway, we punted that scene into the next chapter and took one we expected to have happen there and moved it up to this one. Only when that was done, there was plenty of room in this chapter for another scene, because neither of our big pieces here wound up being as long as we had estimated; fortunately, in the process of discussing some other stuff, we had a moment of, “oh, yeah, we need to remember to have this INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS AND NECESSARY CONSEQUENCE HAPPEN.” In the end, we wound up with a Chapter 16 that only about 2/5 resembles our original plan for the chapter we thought we had all mapped out. đ But what matters is that it’s done, and it works, and also we added in a useful scene back in Chapter 4 (setting up a decision we unexpectedly made while writing Chapter 14), and sure, the roadmap for how we wrote this book may wind up looking like a plate of spaghetti — but if we do our job right, the reader will never be able to tell.
Word count: ~115,000
Authorial sadism: Yep, turns out this is your fault, too. I mean, not on purpose? But that won’t make you feel much better.
Authorial amusement: Making chalk angels on the floor, and shrieking and dropping A Certain Thing.
BLR quotient: Starts off firmly with love, but then I think the plot revelations swing it pretty hard toward a blood/rhetoric mix. Gotta admit, though, it’s wonderful to finally be able to talk about these elements directly!
Given how dangerous childbirth was in history — and can still be even today — I sometimes marvel that the human species still exists. This week the New Worlds Patreon delves into the perils and practices of delivering a child, both past and present. Comment over there!
No, you didn’t miss a progress report in there. The last report was on Chapter 13.
What happened was not that Alyc and I skipped over 14 in favor of writing the one after it. Rather, we’re rearranging things. When we mapped out what Part Three of the book was going to look like, we knew a huge pile of stuff was all going to collide at the end of it, and we divvied that stuff up across three chapters, because we estimated we had that much material.
But really, it isn’t the big climactic stuff where we tend to get wordy. That belongs more to the fiddly scenes in between, where our con artist is conning people, or some intricate political stuff is getting layered in, or — let’s be honest — the scenes where the actual motivation is us wanting to do some stuff with character relationships, but we can’t let anything get away with being pure fluff, so we have to provide some meat to go around that bone. When the fecal matter is hitting the fan? It tends to move along at a pretty good clip.
Our target chapter length here is roughly eight thousand words (. . . yes, I know; look, it’s the rhythm that fits this story). Upon writing our way through two of the four scenes for Chapter 14, we were just over 2600 — and the odds that the remaining two were going to boost that even as high 5K seemed low. Moreover, glancing ahead to Chapter 15, we agreed that it felt like that one was also probably going to run extremely short.
There’s nothing wrong with having a short-ish chapter. But two half-sized chapters in a row starts looking a lot like they should be a single unit.
We could have beefed up the hijinks that are going on here to be more complex, but honestly, that felt like it would just be padding. The problem with combining them is, we’ve also got some larger-scale structural things going on here. Because Reasons, we want this book to be divided into five parts of five chapters each. So we couldn’t just say, okay, 14 + 15 is now 14, and full steam ahead — that would leave our climactic events hanging out a chapter too early, and the end of the part would be the quieter aftermath. (There are scenarios in which I could see that working, but this isn’t one of them.) Which means 14 + 15 needs to be 15, and what was 13 needs to get bumped over to 14, and Part Three needs another chapter in the middle, circa 12-13.
Ultimately, I think this will be a very good change. We’d already been feeling like some plot strands had fallen by the wayside for longer than is ideal; now we have the space to attend to those. Of course, that requires us to figure out what intermediate steps will best help develop them at this stage in the timeline — right now the additional chapter is a fair bit of ???. And I’ll admit my brain is making grumpy faces at the feeling that we have to “go backward,” even though filling in that middle bit is still vital forward progress. Being closer to the end of the book is not meaningful if there’s a big hole behind you somewhere. But still: my subconscious wants to say “woo-hoo, we’re 60% of the way done!,” and dislikes having that achievement tugged out of reach again. (Even if it isn’t actually within reach yet anyway.)
What I can say “woo-hoo!” to is that the Super Exciting Stuff we’ve been looking forward to for aaaaaaaaaages has finally arrived. đ
Word count: ~105,000
Authorial sadism: “What will this do?” Another instance of something we totally did not see coming until Alyc was writing it . . .
Authorial amusement: Look, this time we had a very good reason for stripping a character!
BLR quotient: That much near-death ought to be blood, but the actual takeaway here is 100% love. (Well, maybe 90%. There’s that thing Ren saw, though she won’t know the full story there until later.)
I’ve been doing a lot of teaching with the Clarion West writers’ workshop this year — first an in-person workshop on writing fight scenes; then four one-hour online workshops on different small worldbuilding topics during their free offerings in April; then a six-hour online workshop on worldbuilding more broadly in May — and now I’m partnering with them in a different way, by participating in their write-a-thon. This raises funds to cover their costs, including scholarships for marginalized students, so if you can spare a little for them, please do! You can either sponsor me at that link, or browse the list of participants and choose someone from there. I’ve pledged to do a whole pile of stuff: forty thousand words on the second Rook and Rose book with Alyc (uhhhh, 40K together; not 40K for my half), revision on The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons, and two short stories completed. Wish me luck . . .
As the New Worlds Patreon proceeds through the topic of childbearing, we’ve finally arrived at the pregnancy stage of the process — or more to the point, all the cultural requirements and prohibitions surrounding that. Comment over there!
Lucky number 13!
. . . maybe not so lucky for our characters.
This is the start of an avalanche; it is too late for the pebbles to vote. I recently put together a “relative timeline” for the chapters so far, marking the few scenes that take place on set dates, and then positioning everything else on the basis of “these take place on the same day,” “this is a day or two later,” “this gap can be as long or as short as we need it to be,” and so forth. (This is important because a certain event in Book 3 needs to take place on a fixed date, and until we’ve finished this book and done some amount of planning for the next, we’re not sure how much time we want to have elapse here.)
In that timeline? This chapter and the next two all take place on the same night.
And they are frickin’ loaded with narrative catnip. To the point where Alyc and I rolled through nearly half the chapter in a single day, and the only reason we aren’t already up to our elbows in Chapter 14 is that extenuating circumstances are requiring us to pause briefly. Our chat messages back and forth as we swap off writing have featured comments like “unf,” “bwahahahahah,” and “MAXIMUM WHUMP!” All the work we’ve done setting up the relationships and conflicts between our central characters? Here is where it pays off — not in the sense that after this we’re done, but rather that we’re doing a full Transformer on how those are all configured, and going forward it’s going to be a brave new world. (One in which our characters are somewhat physically and emotionally bruised, and in need of recuperation. They’ll get . . . at least a little?)
Though man, right now I have no idea what I’ll even be able to say when I report on the next two chapters. The further I go along, the harder it is to avoid spoilers, while still saying things of moderate substance.
Word count: ~97,000
Authorial sadism: Under any other circumstances, the prize would go to the punch we didn’t see coming until Alyc typed that sentence. But the unexpected turn that scene took can’t hold a candle to the “death from above” moment we’ve been planning from the start.
Authorial amusement: We’ve been waiting an equally long time to make a certain character lose his ability to language. đ
BLR quotient: However romantically this chapter started off, there is way too much open conflict here for this to be anything but blood.
Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?
Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
Hugh Fennyman: How?
Philip Henslowe: I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
I wound up quoting the above at Alyc early last week, at the end of about an hour and a half of us beating our heads against the wall of a certain plot problem for this chapter. We still didn’t have an answer, but we’d both hit a point where we could tell that continuing to work on it right then wouldn’t do any good; we had to walk away and let our thoughts turn to other things, and trust — hope — that a solution would present itself while we weren’t looking. (My other go-to quote in such situations is “Cudgel thy brains no more, for your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating.”)
You see, something like eight or nine months ago, we’d come up with a way to arrange for a certain cluster of plot things to all happen at once, in maximally exciting fashion. But either we’d forgotten (and failed to write down) some of the finer points, or we’d never actually thought it through in sufficient detail, because when we came back to it . . . there were some serious unanswered questions. How were the antagonists going to find out about a certain thing happening? Why was this character going to be in that place at that time? Did the timing even work? If we had [redacted] do [redacted], wouldn’t that be bad espionage, a mistake they ought to be too intelligent to make? We fiddled with the pieces we had, trying to make them line up. We brought in other pieces to bridge the gaps. And then still more pieces. We threw ninety percent of the pieces out because it was getting too complicated. Round and round we went. We whined at each other about why we’d decided to make our villains competent and our challenges challenging, and wouldn’t it all be easier if we could just let people be idiots?
There’s a fair bit of neurological science backing up the idea that you’re more likely to solve a problem when you’re not thinking about it, and as you can tell by the fact that I’m reporting another successfully completed chapter, that was indeed the case here. Both Alyc and I woke up the next morning with fresh ideas (well, I had mine on my way to bed, which is usually how it goes), and we managed to hybridize them in some useful ways. A story element that started life as a gratuitous bit of self-indulgence is now serving a legitimate plot function; we did a major plot-and-personality transplant on a side character. (Which is also something that happened in drafting The Mask of Mirrors, so now I’m wondering who in Book Three will wind up being totally rewritten halfway through.) And we managed to close out the book with a moment that doesn’t remotely measure up to the world’s most disastrous dinner in Bujold’s A Civil Campaign, but will hopefully have a bit of that feel. Given that our original plan for that particular revelation was kind of disappointingly sedate, this is far more entertaining. đ
Word count: ~90,000
Authorial sadism: “Hey, is that your dad?”
Authorial amusement: Beldipassi’s Incredible Can’t-Miss One-Time Offer!
BLR quotient: A surprising amount of love. Gotta soften everybody up for the beating that’s on its way.
As of right now, we’re about two months from the publication of Driftwood. It’s been getting some amazing reviews: I already linked to the starred review from Publishers Weekly; now that’s been joined by a starred review from KIRKUS, of all places — I think this might only be the second or third star I’ve pried out of them in my career to date. The full text is here, but the quotable bit is:
Through these stories, a portrait of Last as a tragic figure, accidental deity, and distant friend emerges. The patchwork quilt of his acquaintances’ tales mirrors the very nature of Driftwood itself, slowly peeling back the veil to reveal the livingâand departedâpeople who make up this strange and riveting new cosmos. Readers will close the cover aching to read more about Last and his world.
(Also, the beginning of the review calls me a “veteran author.” When the &#$% did that happen? I mean, okay, sure, my first book came out fourteen years ago . . . and okay, sure, I’ve got over a dozen novels out . . . but maaaaaaaan does that feel weird.)
I’ve also gotten some gorgeous blurbs from authors I hugely admire: Karen Lord called it “bittersweet and rich, like fine chocolate,” and both Mary Robinette Kowal and Max Gladstone referred to it as “haunting.” I could wish that the whole “hope in the face of apocalypse” thing (PW’s description) weren’t quite so timely right now, but on the other hand, it also feels like the right timing. While it’s not a great year to be putting out books, if there’s one thing I’ve written that I would want to see in the world right now, it’s this one.
And, I mean. Look at that cover. Don’t you want one of your very own?
This week on the New Worlds Patreon, we’re talking about one of the great advances in human history: birth control. Comment over there!
Hard on the heels of announcing the (extremely belated) pre-order window, I now announce the publication of Down a Street That Wasn’t There! Another novella-sized collection of my short fiction (joining the ranks of Ars Historica, Maps to Nowhere, and The Nine Lands), this one collects my urban fantasy to date. You can buy it from Book View Cafe (the publisher), Barnes and Noble, Google Play, iTunes, Kobo, or Amazon US or UK.
But I want to reiterate what I said before: if you have not yet donated to some organization fighting for racial justice and an end to the rampant police brutality in the United States (or elsewhere), then please take the money you would have spent on this book — or more! — and do that first. I don’t want to think anybody bought my collection instead of doing that. Both is fine! Both is excellent! But if your finances are tight enough that it’s a choice between one or the other, pick that one. It matters far more.
It’s always been weird to me that in the modern United States, we will readily tell our friends and even totals strangers about our medical problems and our sex lives . . . but talking about how much money we earn? How crass.
Well, there’s a hashtag trending on Twitter, #PublishingPaidMe, that’s aiming to examine whether there’s systemic bias in the industry against writers of color. You can certainly quibble with the methodology there — are you getting a representative sample? — but let’s face it, we know the answer is probably “yes,” because the alternative would require publishing to be some magical place that escapes the systemic bias permeating our society, and that seems unlikely at best. And since every past look at the stats of who gets published, and even what kind of characters the published ones are writing about, has revealed that bias is alive and all too well, I think it’s safe to assume the same is true here.
Having said that, transparency is good. My agent once went about seventeen rounds on my behalf with a publisher, fighting against a confidentiality clause that would have prohibited me from talking about the terms of my contract; in California (where I live) that kind of thing is illegal in employment contracts, and while a writer selling work to a publisher is not an employee, the underlying principle holds. Barring the people being paid from talking about how much they’re being paid — or any other terms of their contract — is a move that only benefits the company, never the individual. So it makes me sad to see how many writers posting to #PublishingPaidMe have at least one contract where they can’t disclose the advance; it means that poison is threaded through the industry much more deeply than I thought.
Anyway. I posted my numbers to Twitter, but if you missed that and/or want a less cryptically concise version of them, here’s what the life of this particular full-time writer looks like, with footnotes:
After that, as I noted on Twitter, things get squirrelly in a variety of ways. For Born to the Blade, for example, I was paid on a per-episode basis, and each episode is basically a novelette’s worth of words, plus there was payment for the weekend where we all got together to hash out the story and break it into those episodes for writing. Driftwood, being a fix-up of short stories with additional material and also coming out from a small press, had a lower advance ($5000), which is entirely to be expected. For The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons I’m pretty sure I would be in the clear to name the advance, but since that contract does have a confidentiality clause (not unexpected when you’re working with existing IP and proprietary information), I’ll play it safe and say that it’s on the lower end of my range, but not the bottom, because Aconyte is just getting into those particular waters and nobody’s quite sure how things will play out. The Rook and Rose trilogy is $30,000 apiece for three books, but that’s split between me and Alyc — they’re buying the book, not the authors, so they don’t pay extra because there’s two of us.
Footnotes:
[1] These earned out in no time flat, and in fact went on to be the Little Novels That Could; they stayed in print for nearly a decade and earned me roughly ten times their advances in the long run. In case you are wondering, this — not a huge advance — is often how you make a living as a writer.
[2] Although I put the book titles there for clarity, in fact this contract was signed for “two books TBD” on the basis of how well the Doppelganger series was shaping up to do. So it had no bearing on the nature of the books themselves, which wasn’t decided until much later. They also earned out quite rapidly.
[3] This was where I shifted from what had been Warner Books and was by then Orbit to Tor. To this day I’m astonished my agent managed to get that much of a hike in my advance when I was moving in the middle of a series.
[4] I could have had $15,000 apiece for two books, but I accepted a lower per-book advance in order to make it a three-book contract. My reasoning was that I really, really wanted to make sure I’d get to finish the series, and getting Tor to commit to three books gave me more time to build enough momentum to make that happen. (Which wound up being completely unnecessary, as I seem to recall they offered for the rest not long after the first one came out, but I don’t regret the decision.)
[5] Technically the third book in this contract wasn’t Turning Darkness Into Light. It was originally “book TBD,” but I wanted to make sure I had at least a tentative agreement with my editor as to what the third book would be; said tentative agreement wound up being written into the contract, which didn’t stop us from swapping it for something else when we agreed that what I originally had in mind wasn’t the best direction to go in next.
If you’re wondering how I feed myself on an income like this, the answer is threefold: first, the advances aren’t the whole story. Many (though not all) of these books have earned me royalties, and/or have had separate audio deals or translation deals that bring in additional money. Second, I do other things like my Patreon and short fiction and the stuff I publish through Book View Cafe, none of which is earning me money comparable to those advances, but it does add up. And third, I have a husband who works in tech. For the last several years I’ve been bringing in enough money that if I lived somewhere cheap and didn’t mind a bit of financial uncertainty in my life I could probably survive on my income alone — but I live in California. So yes, like most full-time writers, I pull it off in large part thanks to the cushion of a spouse with a stable and lucrative job.
I don’t know how the numbers crunch for marginalized writers, except to repeat that I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that they don’t do as well on average. We won’t get properly analytical results from a Twitter hashtag — but even so, I think transparency is good. So here’s my share of it.
I occasionally post here about my adventures in cooking — which are, on a 1-10 scale of impressiveness, probably aspiring to a 2, but hey, for me that’s an improvement. The most recent adventure involves what we have dubbed Upgrade Pasta.
Yesterday my sister and I were discussing possibilities for dinner, and she mentioned that in the days when she lived alone in a San Francisco apartment the size of half a shoebox, she would sometimes fry up some kielbasa and dump it over pasta with some spinach. And to my surprise, the thought “huh, that sounds fairly tasty” was followed immediately by “I wonder if I could upgrade it?”
The answer is that yes, I could. With some sauteed onions and some salt and some garlic and tossing the spinach in at the end to wilt it a bit. And what makes me proud enough to post about this is, I assembled the whole thing purely on the knowledge I’ve accumulated over the last few years about what order to do things in and for how long and at what heat. There’s nothing earth-shattering about the result . . . but having that knowledge and the confidence in it? That’s a landmark for me. I have other recipes that I’ve modified in various ways (and which have acquired interesting names along the way: our meal planning sometimes lists dishes like The Transitive Property of Marjoram or Forgotten Pasta or Lorem Ipsum Salad), but this is the first time there really hasn’t been a recipe, just an understanding of basic principles. And the result was not only edible, but moderately tasty.
So, go me?
I’ve set this up very much at the last minute — as in, it’s coming out Tuesday. But I’m putting out a new short story collection! Down a Street That Wasn’t There pulls together my urban fantasy to date — seven stories set in the real world or something very close to it.
Here’s the thing, though. I scheduled this before the most recent round of inexcusable police brutality took over the news (where it well deserves to be), and . . . I feel weird saying “hey, buy a thing from me!” when there are much more urgent needs out there. So let me say this: if you have already donated to a bail fund or Black Lives Matter or the ACLU or some other organization fighting for badly-needed justice, or if you’ve made purchases to support some local Black-owned businesses, and you want to pick up this collection, then thank you. But if you haven’t, I ask you to instead spend that money where it will do more good. I could say “all proceeds for now will go to X charity,” and there’s a sense in which that will be true, because my household’s been making a lot of donations lately and isn’t done yet. There are two reasons I’m not framing it in those terms, though. The first is that I don’t want to feel like I’m using a good cause to promote my book — it should be the other way around. And the second is that I think it’s more valuable to encourage lots of people to interface with these organizations, to take action directly rather than indirectly (i.e. through me).
So: please put the needs of the vulnerable ahead of this book. I’m still putting it out because I don’t want to leave Book View Cafe with a hole in its publishing schedule and because even when the world is on fire, we still need stories and diversions and entertainment; in some ways we need them even more badly in such times. But I really mean it. Donate if you can.
And if you’ve already done that, well, I have a new short story collection for you!
DOWN A STREET THAT WASN’T THERE
Step beyond the ordinary . . .
Beneath the surface of our reality lies a world of magic and danger â a world where buildings have guardian spirits, shapeshifting coyotes prey on the hopeful and the desperate, and ancient traditions prepare for an apocalyptic future. These seven urban fantasy tales from award-winning author Marie Brennan paint the everyday with a layer of wonder, inviting you to imagine what could lie just around the corner.
. . . what was that about a chapter in two days?
Admittedly, and as I mentioned before, we already had one scene more or less pre-written. More than that, if I count the portion of a later scene that got lifted more or less wholesale from its original version, and the tiny (<200 words) coda that follows it. So we had a bit of a leg up on this one. But still! That makes this a two-chapter week, which is excellent momentum to have.
We’ll have to slow down before the next bit, though, because we haven’t fully planned it out. Chapter 12 is currently looking like a grab bag of “uhhh, we need some stuff that will do XYZ” without a lot of specifics or shape to it. Really, the underlying unity of that chapter will be that it puts some key pieces into place for what follows — but that won’t be super apparent while the reader is going through it. So we’ll see what we can do when we actually sit down and work out the specifics.
In the meanwhile, though, this is overall the sweetest chapter we’ve written in a long time. There are multiple fuzzy animals in it! And characters taking naps! . . . sure, there’s also that horrible moment where somebody gets told to do something abhorrent, but even that works out in the long run. We needed a quieter moment in here for some healing, before things accelerate again.
Word count: ~83,000
Authorial sadism: That order.
Authorial amusement: Basically everything to do with the fuzzy animals. And also our mutual love for the line about turfing somebody out of bed.
BLR quotient: This is definitely a love chapter. We go squish for unbreakable loyalty and unexpected acts of kindness.
My patrons are awesome. No sooner do I put potentially “icky” subjects like sanitation or childbearing in the monthly topic polls than they vote for them — in this case with a much clearer majority than most of the polls get. Which is why this week’s New Worlds essay is about menstruation, and all the cultural baggage that surrounds it in various places and times. Comment over there!
You know what’s a good sign? Writing a chapter in two days. (That’s apparently what happens when it’s literally caper from one end to the other.)
With this, we’ve finished Part 2. In fact, we’ve even technically started Part 3 . . . or rather, we started it back in July of 2017. As some of you know, this book grew out of scenes Alyc and I wrote as side stories for the game they’re running. While the bulk of those are not actually going into the novels as anything more than loose concepts (if that), there’s one we’ve been able to port in with only minor revisions.
The same cannot be said of this chapter. It does have its roots in a game scene — but that was 3500 words of us nodding vaguely in the direction of “I suppose prisons ought to have some kind of security” while mostly concerning ourselves with banter. For a novel, we feel obliged to provide more than token amounts of difficulty for our protagonists to overcome. And also to make this caper do something more load-bearing for the plot, in ways that involve other significant characters. So now it’s a 3-4 person caper with about two dozen supplementary minions and an assist from someone who would be in SUCH deep shit if anybody ever realized he had something to do with this. But he’s not telling, and neither is anybody else.
The characters will get a bit of a breather for the next two chapters. (By the standards of our plotting, anyway.) They’d better enjoy it while they can, because after that comes a three-chapter rollercoaster that is going to be everything we love about this series.
Word count: ~75,000
Authorial sadism: Figuring out the most awkward possible arrangement of the sardines*.
Authorial amusement: “I need nothing more to blow the shit out of the cosmos.”
BLR quotient: I’m honestly not quite sure where this kind of caper should go! Combo blood + love? It’s got several Unlikely Team-ups piled atop each other, which is one of my favorite tropes, but it’s all in the service of preventing something horrible.
*That . . . sounds so much more suggestive than I meant it to. But such is life when you’re trying to avoid giving spoilers.
I didn’t have a lot of time for reading during March and April because I was so busy finishing the draft of Night Parade. But my household placed several large orders with various bookstores, and since May began, I’ve been plowing through things at a good clip. So here’s a big catch-up post.
Beauty Like the Night, Joanna Bourne. I was delighted to see a new book in this series (the one romance series I’ve ever really gotten attached to). Unfortunately, this one didn’t really work for me; I’d put it down with the second book as very much the weak installments in the series. It says something that at this point, a couple of months on, I can’t even tell you what didn’t work about it for me — the whole thing basically faded out of my head the moment I was done with it.
The Fires Beneath the Sea, Lydia Millet. Hey, do you like Madeleine L’Engle? Lydia Millet clearly does. Which isn’t a bad thing, and points to her for real creepiness with the Pouring Man . . . but yeah, it reads a lot like L’Engle, so if that’s not what you’re looking for, this probably isn’t the book you want.
Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276, Jacques Gernet. The English translation of this book was published in 1962, so . . . it’s a little dated. (Dear M. Gernet: I suppose sweeping positive generalizations about The Character of the Chinese People are better than sweeping negative ones, but still, not so great.) However, I very much appreciate that Gernet goes out of his way to situate his details in their historical period: he will not only say “this is how they did it in Song times,” but also “this is how that’s different from what they did in Tang times.” For somebody like me, who’s still working on getting a good sense of the change between one historical period and the next, that’s valuable.
Ancient Magic: A Practitionerâs Guide to the Supernatural in Greece and Rome, Philip Matyszak. The tone of this book is very breezy and pop-culture, but on the other hand its citations are all from primary sources, so it isn’t the kind of book that’s just rehashing warmed-over New Age interpretations of the past. And serious props to Matyszak for pointing out that a certain class of “love magic” is identical in form and intent to cursing, and if it had worked, would be straight-up magical roofies. It’s one thing to pray to a god that you hope so-and-so might notice you and smile, but quite another to ask the god to make it so that person has no choice but to crawl to your feet and submit.
Lent, Jo Walton. I made the mistake of glancing at the Afterword when I was only partway through the book, whereupon I chanced to see a line that spoiled the big reveal of this book. That didn’t ruin it by any means — Walton’s too good of an author to have her books ruined because you know where they’re going — but I do wish I’d hit that reveal fresh. Anyway, historical fantasy about Savonarola, very steeped in Catholic theology and the politics of its time period. I quite enjoyed it.
A Master of Djinn, P. DjèlĂ Clark. Read for blurbing, and not coming out until (I think) 2021, so it was sent well in advance of publication and I don’t even think you can pre-order it yet. But it riffs off Clark’s short fiction set in an alternate history fantastical Cairo, with interesting worldbuilding around how supernatural creatures fit into everything, and plenty of attention to the diversity of religion and culture within Cairo itself. There came a point where I saw the answer to the mystery, well in advance of the characters figuring it out, but that didn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the ride there.
By the Fire: Sami Folktales and Legends, Emilie Demant Hatt, trans. Barbara Sjoholm. Recommended ages ago by Marissa Lingen. Stories collected in the early part of the twentieth century by a woman whose methods anticipated a lot of the advancements in anthropological fieldwork that wouldn’t become widespread for some decades afterward — though still not perfect in some ways, as it was the decision of the translator to include the names of the individual storytellers where known, drawn from Demant Hatt’s notes. (Demant Hatt herself mostly only named off the region of collection in the original publications.) These of course read very much like folktales rather than modern short stories, but if you like that kind of thing, this is a good one.
The Unkindness of Ravens, Abra Staffin-Wiebe. Epic fantasy novella in a setting with some distinctly African-derived elements. I’m not sure if it’s me as a reader, the genre collectively as writers, or a bit of both, but I keep feeling with novellas like their pacing is frequently off? That length is having a resurgence right now, but it seems like that means in part that we’re having to re-invent the best ways to structure them. I liked the ending of this one, but the beginning felt to me more like it was paced for a novel, and then when it got rolling faster it went a little too fast. This is the first in a series, so there’s more to come, but the shape of this installment felt a little lopsided.
Falling Angel, William Hjortsberg. Supernatural noir from the seventies that was made into a film whose voodoo elements eventually inspired Jane Jenson to create Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. I enjoyed some of the prose quite a bit, and it did a decent job of making its non-white characters meaningful agents in the plot — Epiphany in particular, who is both quick-thinking and much better educated than the protagonist — though the visual descriptions of them fell into many of the usual traps (and the protagonist definitely objectifies women’s bodies in some uncomfortable ways). When all’s said and done, though, the ending is bleak, which is not really my thing.
Chaucerâs People, Liza Picard. I recently discovered that there is one nonfiction author for whom I’m enough of a fan that I will squeal in delight, “oooh, she’s got a new book out!” Picard was an invaluable resource for me when I was writing the Onyx Court, because she has books about daily life in London during every century from the sixteenth through the nineteenth; well, now she’s added the late fourteenth century. This one is a little different because she uses the characters of The Canterbury Tales to structure it, grouping them into “Country Life,” “City Life,” “Religious Life,” and “The Armed Services,” and discussing topics that would be relevant to each character — so that, for example, the Wife of Bath’s chapter talks about both the wool trade and religious pilgrimages (because the Wife of Bath has been on many). In a few instances this leads to some unfortunate repetition, e.g. the Merchant’s chapter repeats the previous information on the wool trade, and you get reminded something like four times that the Black Death had recently decimated Europe’s population. It’s also less strictly focused on London, and more on English life in general. But I still love Picard’s books and find them incredibly useful as well as entertaining. (I wonder if I could bribe her to write one on Roman London?)
Whispers of Shadow and Steel, Mari Murdock. Legend of the Five Rings clan novella, focusing on the Scorpion, i.e. the clan that specializes in secrets and blackmail and so forth. The main character of this, Yojiro, is referred to as “the Honest Scorpion,” because unlike everybody around him he really wants to be honorable, and since he’s investigating a mystery, this is very much the kind of setup where you have the honorable detective working within a corrupt system. I found some of the corruption to be over the top, but the way it all fell out was pretty satisfying — I’m used to thinking of Aramoro as basically just an asshole in the other L5R fictions, and while that’s not wrong, I liked seeing him be kind of a good Scorpion here. (Which is not the same thing as an honest one.)
The Fire Opal Mechanism, Fran Wilde. Second novella in a series where I haven’t read the first, but the plots are separate; they just share a setting. The beginning of this felt very Jo Walton-y to me, with a librarian trying to save books from the destructive movement sweeping the land. Some of the descriptions felt to me like they were operating on a different wavelength than my brain, though, which meant I had difficulty in places following quite what was going on.
Daily Life of the Aztecs, Jacques Soustelle. I’ve had this on my shelf for ages and thought I’d read it before; I picked it up now because I needed to refresh my memory on this time period and culture. But it shed little bits of excess paper from the binding as I read, in a way that strongly implied I’d never so much as opened it before, so . . . ? Like the Gernet above, this is an older book, but fairly well-done despite its dated aspects. Soustelle gets very specific about the history of the Triple Alliance and its leaders, which is good because I know more about the culture than about the actual events and people. And he does a really nice job of showing how the mismatch between Mexican and Spanish ideas of war meant that, despite being a highly militaristic society, the Aztecs were wildly unprepared for the war they wound up fighting.
A Bond Undone, Jin Yong, trans. Gigi Chang. Second book of the quartet that Legends of the Condor Heroes is being broken into for translation, read for review. The beginning was a bit of a slog, since nearly the first hundred of its five hundred pages are taken up with a rolling series of battles all in the space of the same twenty-four-hour period as the end of the first volume. But after that it picked up and started doing some richer things with the characters and their history — along with a notable amount of humor.
A Murder of Mages, Marshall Ryan Maresca. Set in a world the author has written in before, but it’s the first in a new series. Mostly that worked, though I felt like I was missing some context regarding Circle mages — what they’re for and how they operate — that might have been in the other books. That aside, this is a fun fantasy murder mystery, with a team-up between two characters I really liked (and no, not just because “fantasy cop” and “con artist” rang some Mask of Mirrors bells in my head). In particular, I appreciated that both of them had families who are important to the story: in Satrine’s case, a badly disabled husband and two teenaged daughters, and in Minox’s case, a giant clan of relatives who are all mostly in one branch of the police/military/etc. or another. Also, if you’re tired of inevitable romances between the two leads, there isn’t one here. Satrine is married, and there are indications that Minox might be gay, though it’s underplayed enough in the first volume that I’m not sure.
The Perfect Assassin, K.A. Doore. Epic fantasy with a Middle Eastern-inspired setting whose economy and politics are heavily based around water. The most frustrating thing about this book was that on page 68 the main character hears someone say a thing which is very relevant to the plot . . . and then proceeds to not remember that he heard that. Even when he’s trying to find the answer to a question for which that thing he heard is the answer. Even when he’s trying to figure out how two people could be connected and that thing he heard would explain it. 166 pages later, somebody repeats to him that thing he heard, and even then, he doesn’t remember it. I know this happens in real life, but when it happens in a book, with a character who is not forgetful or scatterbrained but rather highly intelligent and trained to be observant, it grates really badly — all the more so because I think the author could have cut that bit where the thing got said without any harm to the story whatsoever, and a great deal of benefit. I spent most of my time reading this being annoyed that the obvious answer was sitting right there, rather than enjoying the story as much as I might have otherwise.
For nearly two and a half years now, I’ve been using 4thewords, which is a writing gamification site. You queue up monsters and defeat them by writing — or, if you’re me, by copy-pasting the words I’ve written elsewhere — which gives you XP and various item drops, which you then use to complete quests and progress in the storyline.
I think I’ve mentioned this site here before, but I’m bringing it up again for three reasons:
1) I know a lot of people are having trouble writing right now, and if gamification and pretty graphics are the kind of thing that can motivate you, this might help.
2) The people who run this site (a very small cadre based mostly in Costa Rica) are really good about trying to make things inclusive and welcoming. Case in point: right now we’re in the middle of a 25-day special Pride event, amped up from the usual 10 days because so many in-person Pride events have been canceled. There is all kinds of related gear to customize your avatar with, including no less than fifteen palette swaps to represent a bunch of different Pride flags — not just the most well-known rainbow but flags for bisexual, non-binary, polyamorous, and other identities. This year they also wrote code for a virtual Pride parade, which you can choose to have your avatar march in; mine is there, decked out in straight ally gear (and a giant feather butt fan I picked up during the Carnival event a while back).
3) AND THEY GAVE ME AND ALYC ROOK AND ROSE FAN ART
Ahem. What I mean to say is, they’ve also responded to the pandemic by helping to support site users whose book releases may be affected. I tossed my name into the hat back when I thought The Mask of Mirrors was going to be coming out in November, so this is now more in advance of the release than I expected it to be, but . . .
They made a wardrobe item that’s inspired by a mask in the novel!
That is our first public piece of fan art for this series. And the Festival of Reading is going to continue for 44 days (not counting the eight teaser days they had in the weeks preceding the Festival itself), each of which comes with its own special reward.
So basically, it’s a really wonderful and supportive community, and a fun way to motivate yourself for writing, with a story about questing to save the world from a corrupting Dust. It says quite a bit that I’ve stayed active there for two and a half years, alternating between normal quests and the regularly-scheduled special events. I would link you to neat features like the Pride parade, but I think you have to be a subscriber to see those; however, the subscription cost isn’t very high, and there’s even a community pool where people who can manage a little extra donate subscription time to be distributed to users who might not otherwise be able to afford it. If it’s something that might be useful to you, I encourage you to check it out.
I make my living with words, but some things are so large and so awful, they leave me at a loss. The death of George Floyd, and what’s happened as a result, is one of those things.
But I should try anyway, because from the outside, you can’t tell the difference between silence caused by an inability to articulate, and silence from a lack of care. And even if my words are going to be inadequate, it’s my responsibility — it’s the responsibility of all those who care, but especially white people who care — to say something anyway. Because just sitting here feeling bad about things? Gets precisely jack shit done.
One of the things that really struck me in reading Ijeoma Oluo’s book So You Want to Talk About Race was her metaphor of the abuse victim, replicated on a society-wide scale. It’s easy to look at many things abusers do in isolation and think “well, that wasn’t good, no, but it wasn’t that awful, so why are you making such a big deal out of it?” But looking at them in isolation misses the point. If my husband says something hurtful to me, I can cope because he doesn’t usually say such things, and I know he didn’t mean to hurt me, and I’m confident that when I say “hey, that bothered me,” he’ll listen and apologize and avoid that in the future. In the case of an abuser, though, it’s yet another blow landing atop an existing bruise landing atop deeply-buried scar tissue — and all of that damage is also the abuser’s work.
In this situation, the abuser is society as a whole, white society most particularly, and the victim is marginalized people. Particularly marginalized ethnic groups, but others as well.
Jim Hines posted a good quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., and I’ve taken my lead from him in using part of that quote as the title for this post. What we’re seeing right now is the result of centuries of abuse, and centuries of America — white America — refusing to listen. Of white America making changes here and there, sometimes big ones (abolishing slavery), but more often small, grudging ones . . . or no changes at all. Read Jim’s post for the statistics on what institutionalized prejudice looks like. If you’re white, imagine raising your son knowing there’s a 1 in 1000 chance that he will die at the hands of the police, and ask yourself how okay you’d be with that. Imagine this has been happening to your people for decades, and before that it was Jim Crow, and before that it was slavery. And the genocide of Native Americans and everything else white America has done to people who look different.
Imagine those blows hitting, again, and again, and again, and again, while people around you say “why are you making such a big deal out of this? Why are you angry? If you want to see things change, you should ask politely.” While continuing to ignore the polite requests you’ve been making for years and decades and centuries.
And let’s be clear: if you’re thinking right now “we’ve got to vote Trump out of the White House in November,” you’re not wrong . . . but you are woefully undershooting. We can’t wait five months to start doing something, and we can’t pretend that swapping who’s at the top will be enough to fix things. Change needs to happen everywhere. And it needs to start yesterday. Right now, do you have a little money to spare? Donate to Black Lives Matter, or the NAACP, or the ACLU. Write to your local lawmakers — city, state, and federal — to push for change where you live. Ordinarily I would encourage you to find a local protest and join it, but in these times of plague, I don’t think in-person action is the best idea.
And speak up. Say something. Even if your words are inadequate. What I’ve written here certainly is — but it’s better than writing nothing.
