New Worlds: The Tools of Writing

Normally when authors talk about “writing tools,” they mean things like software for word processing or blocking out distractions. But in this case I mean the physical paraphernalia of recording words: paper and clay, pen and brush and stylus, all the different media we’ve put words on and the devices we’ve used to do it. That’s right, folks, it’s Friday, which means it’s time for another installment of the New Worlds Patreon! Comment over at Book View Cafe . . .

(And don’t forget that the book is on sale now!)

NEW WORLDS, YEAR ONE is out now!

The Patreon tree has delivered its first crop of fruit!

(All the fruit trees in my backyard are currently in flower. I have agricultural metaphors on the brain.)

The New Worlds Patreon has been trucking along for more than a year now, building up a huge pile of material. I’ve gathered the initial mass of it into New Worlds, Year One: A Writer’s Guide to the Art of Worldbuilding: all the posts from that first year, edited and reorganized for your convenience. That’s on sale now, and other installments will follow in due course! If you are a writer, or an artist, or a game designer, or a GM — anybody with a need to invent worlds, or heck, just anybody who likes thinking about different ways of living in real or imaginary worlds — this book is for you.

NEW WORLDS, YEAR ONE: A Writer's Guide to the Art of Worldbuilding

New Worlds: Writing Systems

In hindsight, writing systems are such an obvious topic for a series on worldbuilding for writers that I’m surprised I didn’t get around to them sooner! But I’m there now, with the latest New Worlds Patreon essay, in which we discuss everything from pictographs to featural scripts, along with some of the practical implications of each approach.

Comment over there!

Hugo FAQ

People have been asking various questions about the Memoirs and the Hugo Awards, so here’s a quick set of answers to share around (so I don’t have to type them over and over again — which, I just recalled, is Isabella’s in-story reason for writing her memoirs, so this is rather meta):

1) Is the series complete?

Yes! The book I’m writing right now is a related sequel, but it concerns Isabella’s grand-daughter Audrey; the Memoirs of Lady Trent themselves are finished. There are five books: A Natural History of Dragons, The Tropic of Serpents, Voyage of the Basilisk, In the Labyrinth of Drakes, and Within the Sanctuary of Wings. There is also a short story, “From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review.”

2) I’m not sure I’ll have enough time to read everything. Where should I start with the Memoirs?

If you need a quick taster, “From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review” is probably the easiest way to get that. It’s somewhat different from the Memoirs, being told in the form of letters rather than, y’know, a memoir — but it will give you a decent sense of Isabella’s personality and some of the series’ core concerns, in only 2100 words, and you can read it for free on Tor.com or get it in ebook. It takes place between the third and fourth book, but neither contains any significant spoilers nor requires you to have read the series to understand it.

Where the novels themselves are concerned, well, the traditional place to start is at the beginning. 🙂 But the challenge of the Best Series Hugo, of course, is that it isn’t the Best First Book of a Series Hugo. A Natural History of Dragons is a fine introduction, but if you’re pressed for time and want to jump in deeper, I recommend either The Tropic of Serpents or Voyage of the Basilisk. (Labyrinth and Sanctuary are distinctly dependent on the preceding books for their full effect.) I think Voyage does the best job of being both comprehensible on its own and a showcase for many of the series’ aesthetic and thematic concerns, but it also does so in the context of a story that’s a little more decentralized, because (as the title suggests) it’s Isabella’s Darwin-esque trip around the world. If you’d rather a more focused milieu, Tropic is the one to look at.

3) How does one go about voting for the Hugos?

The Hugo Awards are bestowed by the membership of the World Science Fiction Convention, so if you want to vote, become a member! A supporting membership gets you the right to vote on the 2018 award, the right to nominate for the 2019 award, and (in all likelihood) access to the Hugo Voter Packet, which assembles ebook copies of as many of the nominated works as publishers are willing to provide — usually quite a lot of them. An attending membership gets you all that and access to the convention itself, which will be August 16th-20th in San Jose, California.

The Memoirs of Lady Trent are up for a Hugo!

Fortunately the Hugo people are kind; they don’t make you sit for very long on the news that you’ve been nominated. 😀

That’s right, ladies and gentlebeings: the Memoirs of Lady Trent have made the Hugo Award ballot for Best Series! (This was announced on Saturday, but I didn’t post about it here because I was incredibly busy that day, and then Sunday was, y’know, April Fool’s. Not a good day to announce real and major news.) And of course here we say the usual modest things about being so pleased and excited, but —

— look, can you keep a secret? Just between us.

I am beside myself over this. Because while I am proud of all the individual books, it is as a series that I think they truly shine. I did everything I hoped to with them and more — because while I planned a lot of things about the character arc and the exploration of the world and the discoveries Isabella would make along the way, the story also sprouted all kinds of thematic depth, above and beyond what I intended to include. I wound up saying things about women, and science, and women in science, motherhood, social class, romance, grief, being an outsider in a foreign land, the price of technological development, and and and. What I originally thought of as just kind of some fun pulpy adventure about studying dragons instead of killing them and taking their stuff — well, it’s still that, but it grew so much richer along the way.

And now it’s nominated for a Hugo.

I owe thanks to everybody who helped make this series what it is: Paul Stevens, the editor for the first three books, and Miriam Weinberg, the editor for the last two (herself nominated for Best Editor – Long Form!); Rachel Vater, who suggested I make Isabella an artist, and Eddie Schneider, who has championed these books the whole way through, and all my foreign agents who have brought them into French and German and Polish and Russian and Romanian; Todd Lockwood, whose art helped inspire the series and has graced its covers and interior pages throughout; Alyc Helms, who helped bail me out of plot tangles on all five of these books and more besides; and all the women, past, present, and future, whose determination and ingenuity and intelligence inspired the character of Lady Trent. Every year when I invite people to send her letters, I get missives from women working in various scientific fields, telling me about their dreams and their discoveries, and every year I have to sniffle back tears because the ink I use for Lady Trent’s replies isn’t waterproof.

It has been an honor and a privilege. And now, as the saying goes: before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. I’ve been nominated for a Hugo; now it’s time to go back to what I was doing before that happened, which is polishing up the tale of Isabella’s granddaughter and carrying it through to the end.

New Worlds Theory Post: Inventing Trees

Since this is a month with five Fridays in it, this is a month with a theory post! The New Worlds Patreon promises four essays a month, but one of the funding goals (which we reached some time ago) is a bonus in such months, discussing more theoretical topics: underpinning concepts in anthropology, or practical advice for how to approach worldbuilding in fiction. This is one of the latter, and it concerns the question of when you should invent a thing for your imaginary world, versus using something real.

Comment over there! And don’t forget, the first volume of New Worlds is available for pre-order now!

Take It Like a Man

(Content warning: I, uh, talk about violence in this. Rather a lot. Not in gory detail, but if the discussion of traumatic and/or sexual violence bothers you, you may not want to read onward.)

My husband and I recently went to see Tomb Raider (short form: it’s ridiculous, but if it weren’t ridiculous it would be doing it wrong, and it has more to enjoy in the first ten minutes than I remember in the entirety of the Angelina Jolie version), and it’s freshened up some thoughts that have been percolating in my mind for a while now about violence and gender in media.

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A question for the linguists

It feels to me like every time I read about the evolution of a language over time, the general pattern is one of it becoming grammatically simpler. They go from having lots of cases to fewer or none at all, shed moods or aspects or dual forms, even (on the phonological rather than grammatical end) give up on more difficult to pronounce sounds in favor of easier ones.

Which leaves me wondering: when and how do the complicated features develop in the first place? Are there particular conditions (e.g. isolation) under which a language is likely to make itself into a more elaborate system?

Or is this just sample bias, and the pattern I think I’ve been seeing isn’t really a pattern at all?

Strong and Femme

I’ve never bought into the argument that dismisses a certain kind of female character as badly written because “she’s just a man dressed up in women’s clothing.” I myself am not terribly feminine in the stereotypical sense: I rarely wear skirts, prefer action movies to romantic comedies, don’t readily share my feelings, etc.

But that’s not the same thing as saying that I have a problem with skirts, romantic comedies, and talking about your feelings.

I’ve seen a bunch of conversations lately around the whole Strong Female Character schtick — and I capitalize that for a reason, because a Strong Female Character is a specific archetype, not just a character who happens to be female and in some sense strong. You know the type: she wears leather, carries a gun, doesn’t take anybody’s shit, et cetera and so forth.

I like that character just fine, when she’s done well. What I don’t like is the sense that she’s the only type of female character who is strong. I don’t like watching her spit on the women around her who do show conventially feminine qualities, as if that somehow makes them lesser.

Which is why it’s made me so happy that lately, I’ve seen a number of female characters in media who are strong and still girly, feminine, femme, use whatever word you prefer for it. Characters who are allowed to like lipstick and still go to Narnia. Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsis, and Mrs. Which in A Wrinkle in Time are in-your-face femme, and they’re amazing. Vice Admiral Holdo is a badass in a quasi-Grecian gown. Etta Candy is one of my favorite characters in Wonder Woman; Cassandra the math genius on The Librarians is 100% girly (and a useful counterbalance to Eve the ex-NATO counterterrorism expert). Having these things pinging on my radar led to me writing this passage in the sequel to the Memoirs of Lady Trent, after Audrey’s sister Lotte apologizes for writing her a letter full of gossip about her Season:

Never apologize for writing to me about frippery and husband-hunting. I might not have any interest in that for my own sake, but I care about it a great deal for your sake, because it makes you happy.

I used to not, you know. I thought I was obliged, as Lady Trent’s granddaughter, to sneer at all things feminine and frilly. I made the mistake once of saying something about that in Grandmama’s hearing, and oh, did she ever set me down hard. She didn’t raise her voice. She only explained to me, very calmly, that if any obligation accrued to me as her granddaughter, then it was to acknowledge the right of any person to pursue their own dreams instead of the ones I felt they ought to have. By the time she was done, I wanted to crawl under the rug and die. But I’m glad she did it, because of course she was right.

I’ve written Isabella as someone who, while not a Strong Female Character, is also not terribly interested in traditional femininity, and her granddaughter Audrey is in some ways the same. And I looked at that and thought, I don’t want my readers thinking I’m writing them this way because it’s the only good way for them to be. So Lotte is very conventionally feminine, and Audrey thinks that’s wonderful, rather than looking down on it.

I’d like our society to stop looking down on such things. If I could boil all the problems that worry and frustrate and upset and anger and baffle me right now down to one point, it would be the breathtaking failure of compassion that has overrun conservatism these days. The attitude that says, I’ve got mine, and if helping anybody else get theirs — or even just get by — costs me so much as a single penny or an ounce of effort, then they can go hang. The mentality that says, my ways is the only way, and everybody else’s way deserves to get paved under. The worldview that says, men and women are Totally Separate Things, and women’s side of things is stupid and unimportant and far less valuable than the men’s side, because it’s soft and soft is the worst thing you could possibly be.

We need the qualities that have long been labeled “feminine,” like compassion and caring and nurturing and empathy and kindness and a love of beauty for its own sake. We need to see there is strength in those things, too — not just in the willingness and ability to gun down whatever’s in your path and trample the corpse to get what you want.

So bring on your ladies. Give me more opportunities to revel in the awesomeness of women in skirts, women with lipstick, women who like all the girly things and that’s just fine. And while you’re at it, show me your Strong Female Characters painting their toenails and your badass men comforting small children and just people in general acknowledging that hey, being nice is a good thing. Solve some problems with compassion and understanding instead of violence.

It might just work in the real world, too.

New Worlds: Body Modification I (Adornment)

From cosmetics (a temporary and easily removable alteration to one’s appearance), we move on to the more lasting or even permanent alterations grouped under the name “body modification.” But there are enough types of modification that I’ve had to separate them out into two posts; this first one discusses things I’ve decided to call “adornment,” i.e. small changes that mostly add on to the body’s appearance in some fashion. The larger changes that reshape the body to a more substantial degree will come next week.

Also, I’m pleased to say that the New Worlds Patreon is fairly close to its next funding goal! So if you’ve been thinking about becoming a patron, or sharing it with people who would enjoy this sort of thing, please do — then we can have a print edition of the collected essays, along with the ebook!

“Where do you get your ideas?”

When writers talk about questions they get asked too often, “Where do you get your ideas?” is often high on the list.

Which is odd to me, because I’ve rarely been asked that.

“Where did you get the idea for this book?,” sure. Got that one a lot with A Natural History of Dragons and the Memoirs of Lady Trent in general. But as a broad inquiry into my work as a writer, no. Still, it seems that other people do get asked about it frequently, so lately I’ve been pondering it, that I might be prepared when the question comes my way.

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New Worlds: Cosmetics

There was a brief period of time in junior high where I went to the effort of putting on makeup every day.

. . . that didn’t last long.

I am a fundamentally lazy creature, and especially now, when I work from home and can go days at a time without seeing any human beings I’m not related to, routine makeup is just a thousand times more trouble than it’s worth. I only bother with it now when I’m appearing in public professionally: going to a con or a reading, doing a video interview, or something in that vein. And even then, I rail a bit at the fact that I’m expected to do such things, whereas John Q. Author is not — but at the same time, I’m aware that we have a deep-seated bias toward pretty people, and I derive a benefit from looking my best. (A benefit John Q. Author can also reap, if he knows how to put on makeup subtly enough that he’ll just look polished rather than obviously made up . . . because unless you’re Johnny Weir or equivalently flamboyant, being a dude with a painted face is seen as strange nowadays.)

All of which is a lengthier than usual introduction to this week’s post from the New Worlds Patreon, which (you guessed it) is about cosmetics. What kinds do we use? What do we use them for? And how come I don’t see more magic or high-tech makeup in fiction?

Also, don’t forget that New Worlds, Year One: A Writer’s Guide to the Art of Worldbuilding is now available for pre-order! You can get it from Amazon US or UK (as well as other countries, but I don’t have direct links for those), Google Play, Kobo, and Indigo, with Barnes & Noble and iTunes to follow as soon as I can work out some technical issues. And, of course, it will be on sale at Book View Cafe (the publisher) on the release date, April 10th.

In which I talk about worldbuilding

I met Christopher Paolini on a panel at Denver Comicon last year, and we wound up chatting for a while afterward. Then we wound up chatting for an hour on camera, because he periodically interviews other authors, and invited me to be one of his guests.

In the video we talk about worldbuilding, writing process, and a bunch of other things. I’m only sad that we stopped recording when we did, because it means you miss out on the part where we started nerding at one another about kdramas and Bollywood and Nirvana in Fire — which, okay, drifted away from the professional focus a bit, but only bit, because we both still think like writers even when being fannish about stuff. But if we’d recorded that it would have been two hours and nobody would have watched the whole thing, so.

The Art of Cover Copy

Yoon Ha Lee recently posted about How to Write a Sizzling Synopsis by Bryan Cohen, which is a topic that’s been on my mind lately. I can’t swear that I’m a genius at cover copy — what Cohen calls a synopsis; it’s the stuff written on the back or inside flap of the book, or in the “description” field online — but I actually enjoy writing it. And lately I’ve found myself even thinking of various works in progress from that angle, because figuring out what I would put into the cover copy helps me focus on what’s core to the story, what I want to use to hook the reader.

Basic principles: you want the reader to know who your protagonist is and what conflict they face, and you want to do so in a fashion that’s consistent with the overall mood, whether that’s lighthearted or lyrical or grim. After that, you walk a tightrope between being specific enough to convey flavor and being general enough that you don’t drown the reader in new information. The latter is especially tough in speculative fiction, where sometimes presenting the conflict is nigh-impossible without first explaining the world. (Ask me some time about trying to summarize the Varekai novellas. Or better yet, don’t.) Writing cover copy requires you to develop your eye for what details are load-bearing (the text will make no sense without it), what details are beneficial (not necessary, but they add a lot), and what details are extraneous.

For novels, I often adhere to a three-paragraph approach. The first paragraph introduces the situation; the second introduces the problem; the third leaves the reader with a sense of momentum and/or tension, a clear awareness that you have shown them the tip of the iceberg, but there is much more to come. Yes, it’s formulaic — but formulas come into existence because they’re good, reliable workhorses.

Since discussing this kind of thing goes better with examples, I’m going to dissect my own copy for Lies and Prophecy, because I can say exactly why I made the choices I did. (It’s also my earliest effort, so not the best, but in some ways that makes it even more instructive.)

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My FogCon schedule

I’ll be at FogCon this upcoming weekend, with three times and places where you can be sure of catching me!

  • Friday, 8-9:15 p.m. — “Speculative Fiction, Science, and the Sacred” (panel with Terry Weyna, Michele Cox, Rebecca and Gomez Farrell)
  • Saturday, 10:30-11:45 a.m. — group reading
  • Saturday, 8-9:15 p.m. — “Infinite Gold Cheats, Cryptocurrency, and Credits” (panel with Nancy Jane Moore, Alex Gurevich, Caitlin Seal, and Terry Weyna)

New Worlds: Standards of Beauty + happy anniversary!

Can you believe it’s been a year since I started New Worlds?

I both can and can’t. On the one hand, the time has flown by. On the other, I have nearly sixty thousand words’ worth of posts I’ve written in that time, so, yeah, that’s a thing. In fact, it’s a thing that is in the process of becoming an ebook — there are some outlets where you can pre-order it now, and more to come. New Worlds, Year One will be released on April 10th, at which point I’ll be more than a month into Year Two. And in honor of that, I’ve made a new funding goal: if I reach $250/month, I’ll create a print edition of these books to go along with the ebooks.

Anyway, this week’s post is brought to you by Black Panther and all of its amazing visuals, especially as they relate to personal appearance. I’m not going to get through that whole field of topics in a month, but we’re starting off broad, with an overview of standards of beauty. Comment over there!

Spark of Life: E.C. Ambrose on ELISHA DAEMON

Some of the best moments I’ve had while writing have come when a character who was supposed to be a minor spear carrier insists on developing depth and color and an interesting relationship with the protagonist. You can engineer that kind of thing deliberately, of course, but the best ones (in my experience) are the characters who do it organically, without me planning for it, because my subconscious sees an opportunity there. And apparently E.C. Ambrose’s subconscious saw something in Martin Draper . . .

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E.C. Ambrose says:

cover art for ELISHA DAEMON by E.C. AmbroseOne of the most fun aspects of writing a book is when the characters take on a life of their own. It’s always surprising, and always delightful—though it often requires some re-jiggering later on to incorporate the character’s unexpected actions. When I was writing Elisha Barber, the first volume in the Dark Apostle series which ends with my new release, Elisha Daemon, meeting Elisha’s best friend was one of those moments.

Elisha, the protagonist of the series, is a barber-surgeon in 14th century London: cutting hair, pulling teeth, performing blood-letting, and other minor operations. In the first scene of the book, Elisha is shaving a man’s beard when Elisha’s brother barges in to call Elisha to a childbirth. The client, a wealthy cloth merchant, protests this departure, calling the brother’s pregnant wife a whore. Infuriated, Elisha insults his client, realizing he’ll have to apologize later. Their exchange made it clear that they knew each other well: in fact, that Elisha knew his client was gay. Apparently, this guy had hit on Elisha in the past, but they retained their working relationship in spite of Elisha’s rejection. Elisha had not denounced or blackmailed his client, which told me a lot about Elisha and his attitudes. Interesting.

Then, in chapter four, things got very interesting. Elisha’s sister-in-law has lost the baby, Elisha’s brother has lost his life. Elisha kneels in their bloody house, trying, literally, to pick up the pieces when Martin shows up, and Elisha immediately calls him by name—crossing several levels of the social hierarchy. It’s one thing for a lowly barber to maintain a polite relationship with a wealthy patron whom he knows to be gay, and another thing entirely for the man to show up at his house—to even know where he lives. In spite of his terrible day, Elisha apologizes to Martin. Martin’s warm, sympathetic reaction placed their relationship in a whole new light.

Martin gives him a gift, a scrap of cloth, that proves to be useful in more ways than one later on. I was writing this book by the seat of my pants—no outline, just a few notecards—so I often had to do a mental inventory to see what tools or clues I had left for myself to get through a given scene. Martin’s gift was one of these, a small, apparently worthless item that adds meaning throughout not only this book, but also the succeeding volumes. An unexpected character can be like that: a gift you don’t know you’ve been given until they make their power known.

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From the cover copy:

In this fifth and final installment of The Dark Apostle, barber-surgeon-turned-sorcerer Elisha must save plague-stricken England from its path of destruction–or risk succumbing to the very dark magic he is trying to eradicate.

Elisha was once a lowly barber-surgeon from the poorest streets of 14th-century London; now, he may be the most powerful magus alive. He faces the necromancers, a shadowy cult of magi who draw their power from fear and murder–and who have just unleashed the greatest plague the world has ever known upon a continent already destabilized by wars, assassinations, and religious conflict.

Empires and armies are helpless with no clear enemy to fight. The Church loses its hold upon the faithful as prayers go unanswered. Europe has become a bottomless well of terror and death, from which the necromancers drink deep as the citizens sink into despair. Elisha knows that if there is to be any chance of survival, he must root out the truth of the pestilence at its unexpected source: the great medical school at Salerno. There, Elisha might uncover the knowledge to heal his world.

But as he does, his former mentor, the beautiful witch Brigit, lays her own plans. For there may be one thing upon the face of the planet deadlier than the plague: the unfiltered power of Death within Elisha himself.

E. C. Ambrose is a fantasy author, history buff, and accidental scholar.

In which I am quoted in . . . Forbes???

If you pick up the current issue of Forbes magazine (the one that will be pulled from shelves Wednesday, not the special issue), you will find me and my words on the last page.

How did this come about?

My best guess is that, in assembling their usual page of quotes on a particular topic, the staff at Forbes head over to Goodreads and search for lines tagged with a particular keyword. In this case, the theme of the quotes page is “value,” and some Goodreads user put that tag on a line from The Tropic of Serpents: “One does not cease to treasure a gem simply because one owns another that is larger.” That’s Lady Trent talking about memories, actually, and how she regrets not having seen a particular thing even though she’s had many other awesome experiences . . . but hey, it works.

And how did I find out about this? Well, a bit over a month ago I got an email that I nearly binned as spam, asking for a photograph of myself to be used in Forbes. Let’s be real: as a general rule, the odds of me being quoted in a major business magazine are roughly nil. And I’d been getting a larger than usual volume of spam through the contact form on my site anyway. Fortunately I gave the email a second look, because this turned out to be a legitimate request, and the proof of it is now on my desk.

Had you asked me at the beginning of this year, I would have told you the member of my family most likely to appear in Forbes was my brother (involved with data security at Apple) or my father (international patent licensing). But no . . . it’s the fantasy author, with a quote from an imaginary Victoriain’t dragon naturalist.

The world is a weird place.