Books read, July 2013

I forgot to record books this month until nearly the end of the month, which has left me with the nagging feeling that I missed one (or maybe more than one). But I can’t remember what it would have been, so if there is indeed something missing, then clearly it wasn’t very memorable to begin with.

(Except that possibly the thing I was forgetting was The Tropic of Serpents, which I just remembered to add. Um. Please disregard above statement about my own book not being very memorable. Please.)

The Tropic of Serpents, Marie Brennan. My own books don’t count, of course, but they get listed anyway. This was copy-editing, aka What I Did With My Early July.

The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, Margalit Fox. Very readable nonfiction about the decipherment of Linear B in the early-mid twentieth century. Its specific argument has to do with the significance of Alice Kober to that process, and more to the point, how Alice Kober’s contribution has not been sufficiently recognized (in large part because apparently her papers weren’t available until quite recently). It gets a bit depressing toward the end, because a) you know from the beginning of the book that Kober died before she could finish the job, so you’re sitting there watching the clock tick down and b) it’s the 1940s, so you get to watch her being jerked around by Penn professors pretending that no, no, the fact that she’s a woman has nothing to do with them questioning whether they want to hire her for a cool job, and for bonus frustration the guy who’s trying to finally publish all of Evans’ Linear B inscriptions is basically using Kober as his transatlantic secretary and wasting vast quantities of her time — time that could have been spent cracking the code. But anyway. If you like reading about extremely nerdy people (and oh, the nerds in this book), and the mechanics of deciphering a script when you don’t recognize either it or the language it’s being used to write, this is a fun read.

The Book of Fire. The most recent L5R release, and the first one for which I was an official freelancer (though my part in here is very minor). Not the sort of thing anybody will pick up who isn’t looking to play L5R, but I will say that the sections on sword-smithing and glass-blowing and poetry were quite nifty. (No, those aren’t the parts I wrote.)

The Magic Circle, Jenny Davidson. A novel I picked up at Writers with Drinks, because Davidson was one of the other people reading, and she billed this as a book about LARPs and the Bacchae and how could I say no to that? Alas, the book itself isn’t what I’d been hoping. The early part is more about ARGs than LARPs, and even the latter isn’t the kind of LARPing I’m used to. Furthermore, the characters and the story never really cohered for me.

Daily Life in Ottoman Turkey, Raphaela Lewis. One of the installments in that Dorset Books series — you know the ones I mean, with the solid-color covers and the little box with an image on the front. (Er, some of you know the ones I mean.) This was published in 1971, so take it with appropriate grains of salt, but on the whole it did what I needed it to, which was to give me a starting image of the society. And that’s pretty much what books like this exist for.

Secrets of the Empire. I bookended my month with proofreading. This book (another one for L5R) hasn’t been released yet, but as a freelancer I can and have signed up to proofread things before they go to press. It looks like it will be very shiny, but my NDA says I can’t say anything more about it. πŸ˜›

a thought on racebending and genderbending

Which is to say, casting female performers for characters who are canonically male, or actors of color for characters who are canonically white.

Look at Hollywood. Look at TV. Look at how frequently they remake or reboot or sequelize existing narrative properties (for a host of reasons, not all of them terrible, but we won’t get into that here). For crying out loud, we’ve got three separate Sherlock Holmes franchises in progress right now.

If you don’t turn Starbuck female — if you don’t cast Lucy Liu as Watson — if you don’t make Idris Elba Heimdall — if you don’t break the mold of those existing texts in ways that will let in under-represented groups — then your opportunities for having those groups on the screen in the first place drop substantially. You’re basically left making them minor new characters, or else cracking the story open to stick in a major new minority character (and people will complain about that, too). Because all those stories we keep retelling? They’re mostly about straight white guys. And the stories that are new, the ones that aren’t being retold from one or more previous texts, can’t pick up all the slack on their own. You make Perry White black, or you make a Superman movie with no black people in it above the level of tertiary character.

Which isn’t automatically a problem when it’s one movie. But it isn’t one movie: it’s a whole mass of them. Including most of our blockbusters.

So either we chuck out the old stuff wholesale (and as a folklorist, I entirely understand why we don’t do that), or we rewrite it to suit our times. (And as a folklorist, I entirely understand that too — and I cheer it on. Go, folk process, go!)

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screw subtlety

I’m running another role-playing game right now, and several times of late I’ve found myself saying the same thing:

“Screw subtlety.”

It happens because I’ll be planning some kind of plot, and chasing my own tail trying to figure out how to introduce a new element without making the player-characters suspicious. This is difficult when the PCs are being run by players — people very familiar with narrative conventions. When I told one of them the prospective fiancée for his nobleman was a meek, sheltered girl, his reply was “Gamer brain calls bullshit. I expect she has twenty-five skeletons and four fresh corpses in her closet.”

In a novel, you can get away with a higher degree of subtlety, because you control your characters’ thoughts. They don’t know they’re in a story (not unless you’re writing something very metafictional), so they won’t reflect on things the same way a player will. And while the same thing is theoretically true of a PC, any time you ask the player to ignore something that’s obvious to them out-of-character, you create a disjunct. Sometimes this can be fun, but other times it’s frustrating, because they have to role-play their character being blind to an idea they can see. Looping back around to novels, again, the same thing can be true of a reader — but since the reader isn’t actively participating in the story, the frustration is usually less severe. If you write your characters well, the reader will go along for the ride, blind spots and all.

So this is why I keep saying “screw subtlety.” Rather than bending over backwards attempting to make something not suspicious, embrace the suspicion! Why yes, this is weird; you have every reason to give it the side-eye. Knowing that up front doesn’t tell you what’s really going on. You’ll have to work to get the rest.

Doing that is surprisingly liberating. I think it’s a cousin to the notion of “burning plot” — making the cool stuff happen now, and letting it generate more cool stuff later, rather than trying to save it and have the lead-up be flat and boring as a result. Instead of making plot out of the characters figuring out there’s something weird with X, let them know that from the start, and move on from there. It doesn’t work in all situations or for all kinds of stories, but where it does, the result can be a lot of energy and momentum.

Which is why this is something I try to keep in mind for novels as well as games. Am I better off trying to come up with a plausible cover story for a given narrative element, or should I just let it show its face to the world?

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research question and icon contest followup

Icons first, because that’s the shorter bit: I had someone ask how large the icon should be for The Tropic of Serpents. Answer is, 100×100 pixels; that’s LJ’s size limit. And the door is still open for people to submit their efforts — not because the ones I’ve received are in any way unsatisfactory, but because I didn’t answer this question sooner, and I want to give everybody who’s interested a chance to try! Remember, winner gets either a hardcover of A Natural History of Dragons or an ARC of Tropic when those become available.

Now, the research question. First of all, my deep gratitude to everybody who has responded; keep ’em coming. Secondly, some clarification.

I almost feel like I shouldn’t have mentioned Hawai’i, because so many people have fixated on that. It doesn’t have to be Hawai’i specifically, so if you have recommendations for sources on other Polynesian societies, please share them — New Zealand, Samoa, wherever. Reason being, what I’m after right now is stuff that will give me a broad sense of what traits are shared across the Polynesian cultural sphere, such that we’re able to talk about there being such a sphere. I won’t attempt to drill down more specifically until I have that broad sense, because without it, I don’t really know where I want to drill.

This means that if, say, there are better writings about New Zealand than there are about Hawai’i, then I’ll happily go read about New Zealand instead. I don’t need the specific history of any one place, because I’m not writing about that place; I’m trying to invent a society with broadly similar social/political/religious/economic structures. Mind you, I know enough about the history of anthropological writing to know I’m going to be dodging bullets wherever I go (hi, Margaret Mead; how are you?) — but if there’s an area with fewer bullets flying, please do point me at it. πŸ™‚ As long as it’s part of the Polynesian sphere, it’s good for my purposes at this stage.

As for history in my own setting, I need to invent the nearest continent before I’ll know what I’m doing with that. πŸ˜›

(Speaking of which, I should inflate my globe-beachball again and start doing some more worldbuilding.)

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tonight’s random experiment

My braid weighs approximately six ounces.

For those of you who were wondering.

(It doesn’t sound like that much, does it? Though when I said “so my hair in its entirety probably weighs about half a pound,” that sounded like a good deal more.)

(This experiment was brought to you by the bun into which I had put my hair for karate starting to pull painfully on my scalp, and me wondering just how much weight I had hanging in a lump off the back of my head.)

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Four! It’s a miracle.

Wow. This may be the ugliest first draft I’ve produced in ages . . . but it’s a draft, and a draft is fixable. Much more so than a story that doesn’t actually exist.

No title. It’s the Catherine Rochester story, for the tiny number of people who know who Catherine Rochester was. Though about all it has in common with the original character by that name is, well, the name, plus shapeshifting, undercover work, and the world’s worst identity crisis. (I made it much worse this time around. In fact, that’s the core of what the story is about.)

Four short stories in the last four months. It’s like I’m an actual short story writer again.

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The Littlest Brown-and-Black Belt Works Her Butt Off (perhaps literally)

I got no exercise while I was at TIP — which was okay in some respects, because right before I left for that I got a plasma injection to deal with a tendon problem in my hip, and was supposed to be taking it easy for a month or so after that. But it meant that by the time I came back, I was very grumpy about lack of exercise, and determined to fix that.

My schedule for the last couple of weeks:

  • Mon. 7/8 — two hours of karate and kobudo
  • Wed. 7/10 — two hours of karate and kobudo
  • Thu. 7/11 — one hour of karate
  • Fri. 7/12 — swimming (250 breast-stroke, 250 freestyle, 25 fly)
  • Sat. 7/13 — half hour of stationary bike
  • Mon. 7/15 — two hours of karate and kobudo
  • Wed. 7/17 — two hours of karate and kobudo
  • Thu. 7/18 — one hour of karate
  • Fri. 7/19 — swimming (250 breast-stroke, 250 freestyle, 25 fly)
  • Sat. 7/20 — no exercise per se, but several hours of walking around museums etc
  • Mon. 7/22 — two hours of karate and kobudo
  • Tue. 7/23 — one hour personal training (upper body strength)
  • Wed. 7/24 — two hours of karate and kobudo
  • Today — another hour of personal training

I won’t keep this up forever, of course. The Thursday karate classes are a summer-schedule thing, so those will end mid-August, when I leave for a trip. I won’t always make it to both kobudo and karate on both Monday and Wednesday, though I’m trying to get back into doing that more reliably. Swimming is something I’ve been wanting to start up with for a while; we joined a gym at the beginning of this month, and it’s a five-minute walk from our house, so the activation energy for that is about as low as it gets. And kniedzw and I are trying to institute a habit of going to the gym on Saturdays.

Regardless, it feels good, and I’ll try to make it last.

stories for reading and voting upon

Thank you to everybody who’s been offering feedback on the research thing; I’ll be posting more about that in a little bit, and also the icon dealie from before. (A lot of things have been delayed by busy-ness around here.)

But first!

First, I must tell you the happy news that Mythic Delirium has begun its spiffy new relaunch. And as part of that relaunch, you can read “The Wives of Paris”, which might just be one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written. It isn’t the story I intended to write, mind you — there’s an author’s note about that at the end — but it’s the story that came out of my fingers when I started typing, and it’s apparently what happened when my Inner Folklorist slips her leash (and takes the snark with her).

Also!

Beneath Ceaseless Skies is doing their annual reader poll to select stories for the “best of year” anthology. Despite not having done much on the short story front lately, I do have one in the poll: “The Ascent of Unreason”, aka the most recent Driftwood story. (And it’s a happy Driftwood story! For realz! Not all depressed about the ends of the worlds and stuff!) The story is free to read on the site (or to download as a pdf, epub, mobi, or audio podcast), and if you like it you can vote for it in the poll. And vote for other things, if you like them, too — you can pick up to five. Heck, you can even vote for five stories and leave mine out. πŸ™‚ But anyway, go forth and vote your conscience.

That’s it for now; more later on the aforementioned topics.

Help me, o Internets; I don’t know where to start.

So I know you all are still waiting for The Tropic of Serpents to come out, but backstage, we’re already ramping up for the third book of the series. And you know what that means: research!

. . . on a topic I don’t know at all. A large portion of the third book, you see, will take place in an area based on the Polynesian Islands. My knowledge of Polynesian culture pretty much consists of “tourism in Hawai’i,” which, y’know. Not so much. The sole book in my library on the topic is Pacific Mythology, which is an encyclopedia-style overview of the entire Pacific, Polynesian and otherwise.

So where do I start? Does anybody out there have recommendations for good early histories (pre-European contact, though not necessarily pre-other-people contact), “daily life in ancient Hawai’i” type books, local mythology 101, etc?

I also could use recommendations of appropriate music. I make heavy use of playlists to set my brain in the right gear, but I have zilch in the way of stuff from that particular milieu. I don’t even know what it sounds like, beyond “stereotypical hula tunes.” Traditional folk music, movie scores that draw on that kind of sound, all of those things are good.

Help me, o Internets. I’m dead in the water here.

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a belated announcement re: Mythic Delirium

I thought I had posted about this before, but apparently it’s on the list of things that have slipped through the cracks of my brain lately.

Mythic Delirium — long known as an excellent magazine of SF/F poetry — is reinventing itself as an online title, publishing both poetry and short stories. Its “zero issue” will contain my story “The Wives of Paris;” I’m looking forward to seeing that one out in the world.

But that’s not the point of this post! No, the point is to tell you all about the Mythic Delirium Kickstarter project, now in its last two days. It has reached its funding goal, and also the first stretch goal, meaning that there will be a print anthology of the first year. If they can make it up to $4K total, there will also be an anthology of the second year. This is all being run by Mike Allen, the same guy bringing you the excellent Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, so you know the result is gonna be good — quite apart from the nifty stuff you get for being a backer.

Head on over and check it out!

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a question for the gamer types

As you probably don’t know, Bob, [profile] kniedzw and I are running a Dragon Age game right now, using the Pathfinder system. A couple of our players have decided to go into business — they basically staged a hostile takeover of the trading contracts belonging to a certain noble house, since they knew in advance that said house was about to go down in political flames.

So now we’re trying to work out how to handle the business in a way that will make it rewarding and worth the investment of skill ranks/character effort/etc, without flooding the game with so much money as to completely unbalance things. I have some ideas for how we might do this, but I also know this is something other people may have dealt with in their games, so I thought I might as well toss the scenario out here and see if anybody has suggestions.

For context, these are level 5 PCs, so average character wealth is roughly 10K-11K gp. There are two PCs involved in the business. They took out a loan to foot the bill for buying out the contracts; we haven’t specified how much money that was, since the whole economy of D&D is borked in the first place and putting numbers on things would only highlight that fact. What I’m aiming for is a) some way to measure the scale of their enterprise, b) some way for them to draw off limited amounts of cash as profit, based on that scale, and c) some way to link the maintenance and growth of the business to their skills. (One PC has Profession: Merchant, and the other has a wacky good Diplomacy score.) As I said, I’ve got a potential framework in mind, but I’m interested in other ways of handling it. Thoughts?

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The Tropic of Serpents, revealed!

I can’t decide whether the people at Tor are mean, or love you very, very much. (Can they be both at once?) You see, The Tropic of Serpents won’t be coming out for another eight months . . . but we have cover art now, and they’ve decided to make it public.

Can I just take a moment to say how pleased I am with myself? Also with Todd Lockwood, of course, who once again has turned in an absolutely gorgeous piece of work, and let’s not forget Irene Gallo (the art director at Tor) and everybody else involved in making this happen. But myself, too, because a few months back I was sitting here chewing on concepts and trying to figure out how we could repeat the general look of A Natural History of Dragons without pulling the same anatomical cut-away trick every single time. Then I hit upon the idea of a motion study, and lo: it worked!

You all know what this means, of course. I need an icon! Post your best efforts in the comment thread, and if I pick yours, you can have your choice of either a signed copy of A Natural History of Dragons, or an ARC of the sequel when those become available.

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Deeds of Men, redux

Some of you may recall that years ago, just before In Ashes Lie came out, I released a novella called Deeds of Men, which took place before that novel and after Midnight Never Come. It was originally a promotional freebie, but after a while I took down the free version and put it on sale at Amazon, mostly as a random experiment — I knew zip about ebooks at the time. Despite that ignorance (which included things like me not bothering to give it a proper cover), it’s sold some copies over the years, though not a huge number.

Now that I’m a member of Book View Cafe, I decided to do it over again, this time the right way. It has a spiffy-looking cover, courtesy of Chris Rawlins and Leah Cutter, and some revisions (most of them minor; one correcting a narrative choice I’ve regretted ever since I released the novella), and this time it got formatted by somebody who knows what he’s doing (the inestimable Chris Dolley). That link will take you to the BVC site, where you can buy it in epub and mobi formats, good for most e-reading devices, Kindle included. It’s also up on Amazon, and should be live on the B&N and Kobo sites in the next day or so.

A special note about Kindles: if you already bought the novella from Amazon, I think, though I’m not certain, that you should be able to download the new version as an update, without having to pay for it again. I’d love to have that confirmed, so if you’re in that camp, please let me know.

For those who are wondering, the story does contain some spoilers for Midnight Never Come, though only of an aftermath-y sort — it doesn’t say what happened, just shows the characters where they are as a result. Otherwise it’s only really full of spoilers for early seventeenth-century European politics. πŸ˜›

And stay tuned for more news in the next few days, about what I’m doing next with BVC . . . .

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what I did with my June

As you know, Internet Bob, I spent most of June in North Carolina, teaching an intensive creative writing course on science fiction and fantasy. It was a splendid experience: the kids were really engaged, and bonded amazingly well with one another. There’s nothing better than teaching for a class where everybody wants to be there and supports one another.

Some people expressed an interest in seeing my syllabus for the course. I’m not going to upload the whole thing — it’s got a lot of extraneous detail — but I did want to talk about the readings, and the topics we covered in discussion.

With the readings, I made a very calculated decision not to go the route where you assign “classics of the genre.” Those classics are decades old, and almost exclusively written by white guys, with a cameo appearance by Le Guin; it was important to me that I show the kids a fresher and more diverse face of the genre. (I also thought at first that I could dodge the problem of getting permissions and paying for coursepack printing if I chose readings that were all readable for free online. This turned out not to be true, owing to the extremely limited availability of computers — but even so, it made getting the permissions much easier.) The oldest story in the pack was, I think, from 2004. Here’s the full list:

As you can see, it ended up skewing heavily female — owing in part to the fact that in many cases here I was approaching friends and asking if we could use their stories. (My budget was extremely limited, and I figured friends were less likely to demand a $200 reprint fee. Plus, I know a lot of really amazing writers!) The textbooks for the course were Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing and The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, making Richard Parks the only white guy on the entire syllabus. πŸ˜›

Regarding topics, I spent the first week on the usual suspects: ideas, grammar and dialogue, setting and worldbuilding, character, point of view, conflict, plot. Week two started off with some basics about research, writing habits, critiquing, and revision, and then we had three days of “here, have every major social issue in condensed form” — sex, gender, and sexuality; race and ethnicity; economic class and privilege; disability (and super-ability); religion; and violence and its role in stories. Week three had a day devoted to in-class critique and then a grab-bag of practical topics: intellectual property and fanfiction, writing for other genres or other media, and how the publishing industry works.

As you can tell from that list, it was intense. Six hours of instruction a day, plus a seventh hour of evening study, in which they read or worked on their stories. And bear in mind that a number of my students had never even written a complete short story before! At least when you go to something like Clarion, you have some sense of what you’re in for and what you’re capable of. But as I told the parents in the final conferences, part of the point of TIP is to ask these kids to do more that they’re capable of — because that’s the way to find out just how far they can go. I’m ridiculously proud of the work they did and the amount their writing grew over those three weeks.

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two in one month?

I’m on my way home from North Carolina, but the timing of my ride to the airport meant I had five hours to kill here.

I was almost very lazy. There’s free wifi here, and I was tempted to just watch Doctor Who on my tablet. But the wifi is slow — slow enough that Netflix would play about five seconds of video, then stop to re-buffer. And so I thought, okay, it’s a message from the gods, and they’re saying: stop being so lazy!

Two hours later, I have a finished draft of the Penelope story, which I think was inspired by a passing comment in Diana Wynne Jones’ Reflections. It doesn’t have a title yet, but I wrote the entirety of it during this trip. Combine that with the 5K or so I wrote on “The Rose” during my first two weeks here, plus bits and pieces on some other things, and I’m reasonably pleased with myself: that’s two short stories in one month! I haven’t done that in ages. And during a month where I had very little spare energy or brain, to boot.

Now I think it’s time to find some food. I only have an hour or so layover in Chicago, so assuming I’ll have time to get dinner there strikes me as a very foolish move.

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this is how I spend my Saturday night

I’m still in North Carolina, and extremely busy (teaching six hours a day: not easy!), but today I had only a half day, and what do I do with my time off?

I finish the punk Tam Lin retelling, is what I do. Provisional title is “The Rose,” and it’s 7400 words long, of which 3K+ got written today. It’s entirely possible this thing will be a novelette by the time I’m done revising. But it makes kind of a good companion to “Mad Maudlin,” which is of similar length, and if I’m lucky, maybe I can sell it to the same place. πŸ˜‰

Now I’m wondering if this Penelope idea my brain is noodling around with could possibly get knocked off before I’m done here. That would be nice.

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livin’ la vida monastica

I’m in North Carolina now, for the TIP course I mentioned before. Ahhhh, dorm life: I’m living in a cinderblock box that normally houses two undergrads, and boy, do I pity them. This is not what you would call a spacious room.

It’s funny to watch myself fall back into a mode I’ve lived in before, which I tend to think of as “monk-like.” With so few possessions, I become very organized about putting them all away in their places. (You would think that’s a more necessary trait when you have lots of stuff, and you would be right. But I’m better about it when my life is spartan.) I’ll have a very organized schedule, too, including a much earlier bedtime than is my wont. This is how I lived on digs, and much like how I live when I travel, too. It’s a stripped-down existence, with my attention almost entirely focused on what I’m here to do.

Of course, since what I’m here to do is “teach creative writing,” there’s a certain overlap with my normal life. On the way out here, for no apparent reason, one of the short stories I thought I would never actually write stepped up and spat out nearly four hundred words. “Fate, Hope, Friendship, Foe,” the seedlet that for the last nine years has consisted of a set of signs I saw while driving from Dallas up to Bloomington, and the fact that I had a life-sized statue of Atropos in my backseat at the time. Will it turn into a complete story? Who knows. And I have a new idea, too. I don’t know if preparing to teach creative writing flipped a switch in my brain, or if this is the same switch that’s been flipped since early this year, when I found myself itching to write half a dozen short stories instead of the novel I needed to finish.

Anyway, blogging will likely be scarce around here for a while, as I am going to be very busy. But if there’s any cool news to report, I’ll be sure to let you all know.

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