Half an hour before the end of 2019, I got an email notifying me that the magazine Daily Science Fiction wanted to buy my flash story “Cruel Sisters” (available to read for free at that link) — a story which may be glossed as “that continuity error had bugged me for years, thanks a lot, Loreena McKennitt.” Except it’s actual thanks now rather than sarcastic, because in the end I got a story and a sale out of it.
I’ve been putting off tackling the topic of law in the New Worlds Patreon for about three years now, because it’s so complex and interwoven with other things. But I finally made myself put it into the poll, and my patrons voted for it, so as a law-abiding Patreon creator, I have obeyed their wishes. Starting with the basics of legal systems — themselves rarely the direct subject of fiction, but a necessary foundation for what comes after. Comment over there!
I am resurfacing to let you know that “From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review” finally has an audio version! Brought to you by the lovely folks at Cast of Wonders, including the inestimable Alasdair Stuart, who does a splendid turn as Mr. Benjamin Talbot, F.P.C.
In the meanwhile . . . yeah, it’s been dead around here, hasn’t it? In early February I went to Seattle to teach a one-day workshop at Clarion West on writing fight scenes, and while I was there I seem to have picked up a cold that knocked me flat for a solid week. When I picked myself up from that, I found out a hacker had apparently compromised my laptop, necessitating a complete re-OS for security. I’m still in the process of getting everything set up again after that. And then — because February was a month, let me tell you — somebody attempted to steal the catalytic converter out of our Prius while my husband and I were at the dojo. They didn’t succeed, possibly because they got scared off . . . but they sawed through a hose and partway through the exhaust pipe. So now we’re waiting to hear from insurance whether the repair bill would be high enough to warrant just totaling the car.
Yeah.
Now, I should make it clear that this is not an apocalyptic problem for us. We’re annoyed, because the Prius has been trundling along pretty well for going on thirteen years now; it’s long since paid off, and life without making regular car payments has been nice. We can afford to make new car payments, though, and I think my husband’s irritation is tempered by the possibility that we might go from having a hybrid to a fully electric car (something he’s been keeping his eye on for a while, though we weren’t intending to buy any time soon). Still — it isn’t fun.
And my February was really not as full of productivity as it probably needed to be. So if you’ll excuse me, I need to go attempt to make March better on that count.
The New Worlds Patreon closes out its third (!!!) year on something of a dishonest note — because where games and sports go, gambling isn’t far behind . . . nor is its false-faced cousin, cheating.
Comment over there!
Quidditch may not be a very well-designed sport, but one thing J.K. Rowling got right — sports can be an important part of a fictional society. Comment on the latest New Worlds Patreon essay over at Book View Cafe!
It’s a good thing I happen to have this month’s New Worlds posts written in advance, because I have been slapped flat by the Cold of Doom. But thanks to prep work, that doesn’t prevent me from sharing with you this week’s essay on games! Comment over there.
I know that some people who were interested in my fight scenes workshop weren’t able to make it out to Seattle this past weekend. I have good news for you: I’m teaching an online version this upcoming weekend! From 1-3 p.m. Pacific time (4-6 p.m. Eastern), through the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers. To register, send an email to catrambo@gmail.com saying you’d like to sign up for this one, and telling Cat whether you would prefer to pay via Paypal, Venmo, or some other route; whether or not you are a former student or Patreon supporter of hers; and how you heard about Cat’s classes. There are also three scholarship slots available, if you are unable to pay — details at that link. (Note that she particularly encourages QUILTBAG and POC people to apply.)
Another month, another theme for the New Worlds Patreon! To kick off our spin through leisure activities, we’re starting at the young end, with toys for children. Or, y’know, objects “for ritual use.” Depending on how much the archaeologists are throwing their hands up into the air and shrugging. 🙂
Comment over there!
I keep falling out of the habit of recording what I read, much less posting about it — the last such post covered my reading from August of last year. But I remember some of the things I’ve been reading, and an incomplete booklog is better than nothing, so.
A Golden Fury, Samantha Cohoe. Sent to me for blurbing purposes. Historical fantasy focused on alchemy, with a very interesting spin on the Philosopher’s Stone and what it really means. The beginning was fine, and then the story hit a point where it really took off for me — I inhaled quite a bit of it in the space of about a day. Ultimately I was left with a few questions about how the logic of it all hung together (there was an instance of someone being uber-selective about a thing for unclear reasons, to seemingly counterproductive result), but I enjoyed the overall tale a fair bit.
A Hero Born, Jin Yong. Read for review in the New York Journal of Books. This is the first in a projected four volumes translating the Chinese wuxia novel commonly known in English as Legend of the Condor Heroes, which I think might be compared to The Lord of the Rings in terms of both the author’s erudition and the popularity of the work. Reading it is kind of a fascinating experience, because I’m very accustomed to seeing the visual manifestation of these ideas, but have read relatively little of them in prose format. It is also not remotely paced like a modern Western fantasy novel — for example, one hundred and six pages into the story, one of the two main characters is finally born. A lot of page count is devoted to describing the characters’ various battles, which means the amount of actual incident is fairly small for the length of the book. But I’m very glad to get this translation, and hope to review the future volumes, too.
China’s Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty, Charles Benn. I love this kind of book. Benn is no Liza Picard, but then again few people are, and as overviews of a specific (albeit long) period go, this one is both specific and comprehensive. It’s clear he’s drawing from a lot of primary sources, because there are all kinds of incredibly random details about various incidents that happened in various locations, of a sort you would only cite if you read something that said, yep, this definitely happened.
Heroine Complex, Sarah Kuhn. Second book of her series about Asian-American superheroines in San Francisco, this time focusing on the character of Aveda Jupiter, aka Annie Chang — and I put the names in that order on purpose, because much of Aveda’s problem is that she really, really would like to forget that she’s normal human Annie Chang underneath it all. It’s frustrating to watch her spending most of the book doubling down on her errors (hint: the way to repair your relationships with the people around you is not to recommit to pretending you have no squishy vulnerabilities and in fact have never even met such a thing), but it’s clearly in service to her eventually getting past that mistake.
Crown Duel, Sherwood Smith.
Court Duel, Sherwood Smith. Listing these two together because I read them in the Book View Cafe edition (which is also the Definitive Edition). I can see why it is both a duology and a unified story; although ultimately there’s a single struggle going on, the first half of that struggle is carried out in a very different fashion (more warfare-oriented) than the second half (more politics-oriented). Which is, among other things, a nice antidote to the idea that all you need is a good climactic battle to settle things: here that’s just the midpoint of the process of achieving change.
Order of the Stick: Dungeon Crawlin’ Fools, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: No Cure for the Paladin Blues, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: War and XPs, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: Don’t Split the Party, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: Blood Runs in the Family, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: The Origin of PCs, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: Start of Darkness, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tails, Rich Burlew.
Order of the Stick: Good Deeds Gone Unpunished, Rich Burlew. Re-reads for all but the final title listed here. I spent much of late November and early December mainlining the collections of The Order of the Stick for my Yuletide story, but it also served as a good refresher before Burlew launches into the final arc of the series. I, uh, had pretty much forgotten Blood Runs in the Family. Like, to the scale of “they went to the desert? For a whole book? Ohhhhhh, right — yeah, the stuff with Gerard Draketooth.” Not because it wasn’t memorable, but because it was so long ago that I read it. Given the incredible gut-punch that volume delivers to one of the characters, I’m a little embarrassed that is slipped my mind.
A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, H.G. Parry. Read for blurbing purposes. This is the first half of a historical fantasy duology set in the late eighteenth century, and it manages to pack both the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution in, while also covering what was happening in Britain at the same time, because those things are very interconnected. I felt like the Haitian end got a little short-changed here, maybe in part because of viewpoint choices: the British and French ends follow some very famous individuals like Pitt the Younger, William Wilberforce, and Robespierre, but the Haitian end doesn’t follow (say) Toussaint L’Ouverture. Instead our viewpoint there is a female character who is, so far as my research has been able to turn up, invented for the story — and while she interacts with Toussaint et alii, it makes for a different, and more distant, angle on the events. But I also have the feeling we’ll see more of Haiti in the second half of the duology. Meanwhile, Parry does an excellent job of making the historical figures feel like real people rather than animated wax models. And it’s no small achievement, packing fifteen years of history into a single novel.
Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton. Re-read for research purposes, because I’m noodling around with an idea that would have some of the “trapped on a dangerous island and there’s a ticking clock for getting to safety” feel to it. I last read this when it came out, soooo, like thirty years ago? Criminy. The concept remains an excellent one, but the book version spends much more time on build-up than I remembered, with lots of one-off looks at the situation through the eyes of various minor characters. I had also (mercifully) forgotten how badly it did by its female characters: Ellie Sattler’s face-off with the velociraptors is good, but I could have done without every male character ogling or commenting on her legs, and Lexie basically does nothing but cause problems or make existing ones worse. Dennis Nedry is also pretty much the walking stereotype of the fat, greedy, computer nerd slob — and unfortunately, while I remember the film doing better by the women, I don’t believe they changed him at all.
Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat. Speaking of not being Liza Picard . . . it took me ages to get through this book, even though I love daily-life stuff, and at first I thought it was because Nemet-Nejat’s writing is very dry and factual, with little to no authorial personality coloring anything (apart from mentioning one artistic motif being repeated “ad nauseam”). Then I thought it was because it’s covering such a huge span of time. But while both of those things are part of it, ultimately I think the problem is that nothing here flows: a paragraph will start off with a line about X, but then the rest of the paragraph has to do with Q instead, and then the next paragraph is about V. So all the information in it winds up feeling disjointed, which makes it hard to maintain momentum while reading it.
Kingdom of Souls, Rena Barron. I liked the setting and concept of this one (which are based heavily on African inspirations, and I think specifically West African), especially the part where it avoids simplistically saying “Group A good, Group B bad.” But I had flow issues here, too — things like certain bits of exposition feeling like they arrived in the wrong place, or revelations at the end being insufficiently set up, or the narrative spending lots of time on interstitial bits and then very little on climactic moments. I also realized three-quarters of the way through that the protagonist had accomplished almost nothing meaningful: most of the things she attempts to do fail, and the ones that succeed rarely seem to have any significant effect on the trajectory of the plot. It’s possible to write a story that specifically explores helplessness or constraints on agency, but it didn’t feel to me like this was trying to be that story; it just felt like the gears never quite meshed.
Emerald Empire. This is the fifth-edition setting book for the Legend of the Five Rings RPG. Most of its content is already familiar to me (through my familiarity with fourth ed), but I decided I should read it properly to familiarize myself more thoroughly with the places where the new owner of the game has changed things. Most of those places have to do with the spiritual and religious side of Rokugan — toning it down from the “everything is Tainted and shugenja are basically wizards” feeling AEG fell into and instead making things more nuanced, subtle, and integrated with the rest of daily life. Which I appreciate.
Year Three of the New Worlds Patreon has had quite a lot of months with five Fridays, and this is the last one. Which means it’s time for a theory post! This time around, it’s the question of where to start the worldbuilding process — which parts of it should be high-priority, and which can be left until later. Comment over there!
One of the things that makes a writing career difficult is that all your payoffs are deferred.
Let’s say you’re writing a novel. Each day, or whatever schedule you work on, you add some more to the pile of words. Go you! But if you’re not someone who lets people read the draft in progress (I’m usually not, though there have been exceptions), then you do that work in a void. And it’s a long, long road to having a completed draft, so you’re in that void for quite a while.
Then you finish your draft. Go you! Now maybe you let somebody read it. But you know, in your heart of hearts, that this isn’t the end of anything; it’s just an intermediate stage. There’s revision, and that’s before the novel even heads out into the wide wide world.
Ah, but surely you get payoff when you sell the novel, right? Go you! Except . . . what “selling a novel” actually looks like is generally that your agent sends you an email saying “here’s what they’re offering,” and you say “that sounds great, let’s do it!” Whereupon your agent haggles for a while, because that’s their job. Or maybe this is the next book in a multi-book contract you already signed, at which point this stage doesn’t even really happen, because it happened years ago.
Assuming it’s a new deal, eventually somebody sends you a contract to sign. This comes probably weeks after the offer you said yes to, if not months. Is this the payoff? It doesn’t feel much like a payoff. On the one hand, you kinda sorta sold the book a while ago; on the other hand, you haven’t been paid yet, much less seen your book in print.
Some number of days or weeks after you signed the contract, money shows up. This used to be in the form of an actual check, but these days lots of people use direct deposit instead. So instead of a Real Live Check, you get an email saying “hey, we’ve deposited this money in your account.” Is that the payoff? Literally, yes; emotionally, no.
Edits.
Copy-edits.
Page proofs.
Somewhere in here, you get a cover. Awesome! It mostly has nothing to do with you, since at best you got to offer some ideas that your publisher may or may not have listened to, but at least it’s shiny! Meanwhile you’re busy with something else.
And then, one day, FINALLY, months after you got paid, months after you sold it, months or maybe even years after you wrote the book . . . it’s on the shelves! Everybody is so excited!
Except for you. I mean, sure, you’re happy. I’m not trying to say that it isn’t cool to hold your very own book in your hands and see your name on the cover. But . . . as a payoff for the long marathon of writing the thing, it isn’t much, because it comes way too late. By the time it arrives, you’re already doing something else. You’re in the void of a different book, probably, and when people talk about “your new book,” you have to remind yourself which one they’re talking about. To them, the one that matters is the one they can buy. But that’s not the one eating your time and attention anymore. And psychologically speaking, a reward that’s massively deferred from the behavior that earned it is pretty much useless.
This is why I’m coming around to the opinion that it is hugely important to set up some kind of ritual for yourself — in whatever form works for you — that celebrates the milestones. Two years may go by between finishing the rough draft and seeing the result on a shelf, but if you’ve done something meaningful to mark the achievement of that draft, or the other landmarks along the way, then you won’t run as much risk of the job starting to feel meaningless. If the way the circumstances work isn’t going to reward you in a timely manner, then you’ve got to do it yourself.
Writing advice books tend to go into great detail on things like how to structure your plot, or develop character, or describe things, or whatever.
They do not — in my limited experience; hence this post — bother to say much about how to decide where to break chapters, scenes, or paragraphs, apart from telling you to start a new paragraph if you’re switching speakers in dialogue. Maybe a vague nod at “cliffhangers are exciting!,” but that’s about it. You’re just supposed to figure that stuff out as you go, apparently. Or else (and this is entirely possible) it never occurred to the writer of the writing advice book that there’s an actual skill buried in there.
But I haven’t read a huge number of writing advice books, so I’m perfectly willing to believe that someone out there has at some point unpacked this stuff for the reader. Any recs? Because it’s one of those things that I do instinctively, without much ability to articulate how the decision-making process goes — and since I enjoy teaching writing, being able to articulate it would be useful.
As the New Worlds Patreon comes to the end of another month, we turn our attention to poison! Both the cause and the cure of suffering, depending on how it’s applied — as Paracelsus very wisely pointed out. Comment over there!
There is a sad lack of noodle soup in my cooking repertoire. What recipes do you guys recommend? The main requirement is that it be non-spicy, in the peppers/chili sense; other things are easy to leave out (cilantro) or substitute (eggplant for squash).
Following on the heels of the republication of Cold-Forged Flame, now Lightning in the Blood hits the shelves!
Once she had nothing: no name, no memory, no purpose beyond the one her master bound her to fulfill. Now the wandering archon known as Ree must walk an unseen path — one that will lead her toward the untold story of her origins. But the road to the truth is paved with blood . . .
It’s on sale now, at Book View Cafe, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Kobo, Indigo (Canada), and Amazon US and UK.
Warning: this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay includes quite a lot that is squicky or horrifying. Not in a super-graphic way, but simply in the realization that the medical treatments of the past were often howlingly wrong at best — and lethal at worst.
Comment over there!
One of the mediation apps on my phone (yes, I have several . . . I am the walking stereotype of “I really want to make a habit of this! Maybe if I find The Perfect Program, I’ll succeed!) is running a New Year’s Challenge, with a goal of meditating at least fifteen days in the first twenty-one, i.e. five days a week for three weeks. So far I’m 11 for 11 (it started on the 6th, not the 1st), which is good, and I sort of wish they’d launch another challenge after this one, because seeing that little gold medal does help with motivation and persistence.
But it’s gotten me thinking about a bunch of things. Like New Year’s resolutions, and the ways in which that whole concept tends to set us up for failure. One of the “ohhhhh” moments for me in trying to practice mindfulness meditation was when it finally got through my skull that those moments when I realize my attention has wandered away from my breath? That’s not me failing at meditation; that’s me succeeding. Because the point is not to achieve perfect tranquility from start to finish, but rather to be mindful: both to pay attention to a thing (my breath), and also to notice when my attention has strayed. “Begin again,” as several of the meditation teachers in this app have said — and as one of them pointed out, that applies to the practice of meditation in general as well as any individual session again. Missed a day? Begin again. Missed a week? Begin again. Missed six months? Notice that you’ve stopped. Be mindful of what you’re doing. And what you’re not doing.
I have a poster on my wall with the text of “An Invocation for Beginnings”. It’s one of the few “motivational” things that’s ever spoken to me on an emotional level. And to quote one pertinent bit: “Let me realize that my past failures at follow-through are no indications of my future performance, they’re just healthy little fires that are going to warm up my ass.” New Year’s resolutions, though . . . we treat them as rigid. If you resolve to do a thing, and then drop the ball, you’ve broken your resolution. Game over. Stop trying.
No. Begin again.
The app has been providing a meditation lesson for each day, which I recognize is so they can advertise the various series that require a paid account to use. But I’m still appreciating it as a tour of different things, like deep breathing techniques to reduce stress. Today’s was on “loving-kindness” meditation, which is about developing compassion toward yourself and other people. Chesed, maitrī, agape in its less-religious sense. What really struck me was the brief video beforehand, with Dan Harris (the guy behind the app) and Sharon Salzberg (the teacher for that session) discussing the concept of loving-kindness — and how we as a society tend to disparage the idea, as if compassion and kindness make us weak. The video was only a few minutes long, so I’m not surprised they didn’t attempt to unpack the gender dimension, but it’s there: loving-kindness is a trait associated with femininity, and therefore men are discouraged from developing it. Harris straight-up admitted that he was embarrassed to be seen reading Salzberg’s book — that he literally hid the cover when he was reading it on planes, etc. How messed-up is that? But he’s a white dude in America, which means he’s not supposed to be squishy and touchy-feely and nice.
Hello, toxic masculinity. And yet, so many of our religions praise this quality, not just for girls but for everybody. But it’s hardly news that we’re historically bad at actually practicing what we preach.
I don’t really have a point here that I’m trying to arrive at, except that getting back into meditation (begin again) is prompting a variety of thoughts in me. And that I’m hoping it will help me develop the internal equilibrium I’m going to need to survive 2020. Our whole society could use a mega-dose of loving-kindness, if only we had some way to inject it.
Temporarily, at least. 🙂
I’m currently slated to do two teaching stints in 2020. The first is coming up soon: Pen, Paper, Action!, a one-day workshop at Clarion West in Seattle on February 8th. There I’ll be covering not just fight scenes in specific, but action more generally.
The second is later this year, during the Sirens Studio that takes place before the main conference. I’ll be teaching a writing intensive on creating religions for fantasy worlds — going beyond deciding who the gods are, and delving into how beliefs can be integrated into the daily lives of the characters. Sirens is a beautiful event focusing on women in fantasy; I haven’t been to the Studio before, but I was one of the Guests of Honor at the conference in its second year, and had an amazing time.
Registration for both of these things is limited, so if you’re interested, sign up soon!
I never did post about Yuletide, did I? I blame the chaos that was the last several months of 2019 — I’m still picking myself off the floor.
I lucked into three (!) gifts this year. The first was “the three Chrestomancis,” the prompt for which was borne out of me realizing that Cat arrived at the castle before Gabriel passed away, meaning that for a while there were three nine-lived enchanters running around at once. (Not that any of them still had nine lives by that point, but it doesn’t affect their power.) Then I received “as wine pervades water,” which features exactly the kind of wedding I’d expect Rick O’Connell and Evy Carnahan (from the 1999 Mummy movie) to have, i.e. ad hoc and done at speed to save the world from a supernatural threat. I also got the Madness treat “When a Body Meets a Body,” and it amuses me how many Mummy fics I’ve seen involve bog bodies over the last few years; I credit Sovay and her comment that I quote in my Yuletide letter. 🙂
For my own part, I dove deep into the history of D&D for “Third-Party Supplements,” a fic for The Order of the Stick. My thanks to the various people who helped me research old editions, and especially whoever it was on Twitter (too difficult to dig back that far now) that linked me to the infamous Random Harlot Table. 😀 I legit rolled dice for this story, y’all.
Before there were synthetic chemicals, there were medicines extracted from leaves, flowers, seeds, nuts, fruit, bark, wood, roots, and every other bit of plant matter you care to name. This week, the New Worlds Patreon discusses the ancient art of herbal medicine! Comment over there.
