The revised draft of this novel is due in to my editor in about a week and a half. Plus, due to problems with my financial institution, I’m going to have to do all my tax-related work in the same span of time.
So, naturally, my brain is trying to write three short stories at once.
Argh.
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Slightly belated, the final round-up for the blog tour. There will be other posts still forthcoming, but only in the sense that, y’know, I talk about my books sometimes, in interviews or guest posts or whatever. This is the last of the actual formal book tour.
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Interviews:
The Sleeps With Monsters interview isn’t about ANHoD specifically (but then again, by this time that’s probably a point in its favor). Ditto the Skiffy and Fanty podcast, which isn’t even really an interview per se; it’s just us talking about mythology and fantasy and Star Trek and I can’t even remember what all.
Guest posts:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghara)
Again, that last one isn’t ANHoD-specific; it’s more of a post I was asked to write, in which I mention ANHoD in the course of discussing how I name characters. But as long as I’m rounding up everything I’ve been posting on the internet lately, I might as well include it.
In that vein, I’ll also mention my most recent BVC post is “The folklore mode of fantasy,” in which I present my own personal home-brewed theory of which folkloric style fantasy as a whole most closely resembles.
And that’s it for now. I’m revising the second book (and also facing some hassle wrt getting certain financial records for tax purposes), so I may be scarce around here for a bit.
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I have other things I should be doing, but wshaffer made a very good point in the comments to my last post, so I’m back for another round. And at this point I’ve made a tag for the grimdark discussion, because I’ve said enough that you might want to be able to track it all down.
To quote wshaffer:
The thing that strikes me about the grimdark discussion is that there are multiple different-but-interlocking conversations going on at once. One is an argument about whether “realism” is grounds for granting a work a higher degree of artistic merit. Another is an argument about to what extent realism actually requires focusing on the darker and more unpleasant aspects of life. And the third is: supposing that we grant that the historical prevalence of misogyny and rape requires that they be addressed in realistic fiction, are there ways of portraying them that do no themselves reinforce misogyny and rape culture?
I love things like this, because they simultaneously clear up a bunch of confusion in my head, and make it possible to see things I couldn’t before. Let’s take her questions one at a time.
Yeah, I’m still thinking about this topic. Partly because of Cora Buhlert’s recent roundup. The digression onto Deathstalker mostly went over my head, since I haven’t read it, but she brings up a number of good points and also links to several posts I hadn’t seen. (Though I use the term “post” generously. I have to say, when the only response you make to this debate is “meh” followed by links to people who already agree with you, you might as well not bother. All you’re doing is patting yourself on the back in public.)
So I’m thinking about our terminology — “gritty” and “grimdark” and so on. What do we mean by “grit,” anyway? The abrasive parts of life, I guess; the stuff that’s hard and unpleasant. Logistics and consequences and that sort of thing, the little stony details that other books might gloss over. It’s adjacent to, or maybe our new replacement for, “low fantasy” — the stories in which magic is relatively rare, and characters have to do things the hard way, just like us. Hence laying claim to the term “realism”: those kinds of details that can ground a story in reality.
But that isn’t the same thing as “grimdark,” is it? That describes a mood, and you can just as easily tell a story in which everything is horrible and doomed without those little details as with. (As indeed some authors do.) Hence, of course, the counter-arguments that grimdark fantasy is just as selective in its “realism” as lighter fare: if you’re writing about a war and all the women are threatened with sexual violence but none of the men are, then you’re cherry-picking your grit.
What interests me, though, are the books which I might call gritty, but not grimdark. I mentioned this a while ago, when I read Tamora Pierce’s second Beka Cooper book, Bloodhound. The central conflict in that book is counterfeiting, and Pierce is very realistic about what fake coinage can do to a kingdom. She also delves into the nuts and bolts of early police work, including police corruption . . . I’d call that grit. Of course it’s mitigated by the fact that her story is set in Tortall, which began in a decidedly less gritty manner; one of the things I noticed in the Beka Cooper books was how Pierce worked to deconstruct some of her earlier, more romantic notions, like the Court of the Rogue. But still: counterfeiting, a collapse in monetary policy, police corruption of a realistic sort, etc. Those are the kinds of details a lot of books would gloss over.
Or an example closer to home: With Fate Conspire. I was discussing it over e-mail recently, and it occurred to me that I put a lot of unpleasantness into that book. Off the cuff, it includes betrayal, slavery, slavery of children, imprisonment, torture, horrible disease, poverty, racism, terrorism, massive amounts of class privilege and the lack thereof, rape (alluded to), pollution, fecal matter, and an abundance of swearing. All of which is the kind of stuff grimdark fantasy revels in . . . yet I have not seen a single person attach that label to the novel. Nor “gritty,” for that matter, but I would argue that word, at least, should indeed apply. A great deal of that story grinds its way through the hard, unpleasant details of being lower-class in Victorian London. Realistic details, at that.
Of course, the book has a happy ending (albeit one with various price tags attached). Which makes it not grimdark — and also not gritty? Or maybe it’s that I was writing historical fiction, not the secondary-world fantasy that seems to be the locus of the term. Or, y’know, it might be that I’m a woman. One of the posts Buhlert links to is from matociquala, who — unusually for this debate — names some female authors as having produced gritty work, and Buhlert takes that point further. This is a highly gendered debate, not just where the sexual abuse of characters is concerned, and if we don’t acknowledge that, we’re only looking at a fraction of the issue.
I’m sort of wandering at this point, because there’s no tidy conclusion to draw. You can have grit without being grimdark, and you can be grimdark without grit, but doing either while being female is rare? Not very tidy, but something to keep in mind. I think I’d be interested in reading more gritty-but-not-grimdark fantasy, from either gender. Recommendations welcome.
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mrissa has posted her Minicon schedule, with a panel on which comes first: the story or the setting. To quote the description,
Which Came First
The chicken or the egg? The story or the world? Does the story you want to tell determine the setting, or does your chosen setting demand a certain kind of story to be told in it? Are there some types of stories that simply cannot be told in a particular setting? How do creators balance these seemingly opposing forces in imagining their tales?
Which has gotten me reflecting on that question and how I would answer it. Off the cuff, I thought I probably start more with the setting — hi, anthropology, yeah. But does that hold up when I actually look at the data?
(For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to keep this to novels, but I will include unpublished novels in the list. It’s probably a different ballgame if I look at short stories; that, however, would require more time than I want to devote to this right now, and a refresher course as to what the heck I’ve written.)
Cut for length; I have more novels than you guys know about.
Only just now remembering to link to it, but this months’ SF Novelists post is “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” in which I challenge the notion that so-called “gritty” fantasy is a) realistic and b) superior on account of its realism.
(Both that post and the rest of this one discuss sexual violence — quelle surprise, given the obsession gritty fantasy has with that topic — so if you don’t want to read about them, click away now.)
This is part of a much larger discussion floating around the internet right now, which I keep encountering in unexpected corners. The most recent of those is “The Rape of James Bond,” which makes a lot of good points; toward the end, McDougall talks about her own decision-making process where fictional sexual violence is concerned, and whether you agree with her decisions or not, her questions are good ones.
But the part I found the most striking was where she talked about reactions to Skyfall and the first encounter between Silva and Bond.
Cut in case you haven't seen the movie and want to avoid a spoiler.
Below the fold, the latest offerings from Book View Cafe: novels from Judith Tarr and Patricia Rice, plus a romance sampler edited by Pati Nagle.
Just a reminder that this is your last chance to enter the Ides of March Book Giveaway, with seventeen books from seventeen fantastic authors, including people like Kate Elliott and Mary Robinette Kowal (I know I have fans of both among my readership). And, y’know, a copy of A Natural History of Dragons, too. Go forth and enter! You have until midnight EST, which is seven hours from this posting.
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John Scalzi has been doing a splendid job of chronicling the problems with Random House’s new e-book only imprints and the evolution of same: index post here, with updates here and here.
He’s already covered most of what I might want to say on those matters, but I do want to pull out one particular thread and swipe it a few times with highlighter:
Random House is referring to this model as “profit-sharing.”
Which isn’t false: it does involve sharing profits. But so does the standard model. That’s what royalties are; they’re a share in the profits earned from sales of the book. I’ve been sharing in my publisher’s profits since the first royalty accounting period for Doppelganger, because that book earned out its advance in a couple of months. And the advance, let us note, is an advance on royalties — meaning that the publisher shared with me some of their profits before they even earned any. The math for how an advance gets calculated is complicated, and not every book earns out, but the point is that we’ve always been splitting the proceeds, in one fashion or another.
Calling this “profit-sharing” is a bit of marketing speak, designed to make the author feel like the publisher is offering something that you don’t get under the advance-first model. Which may be true in degree (the royalty percentage), but not kind (the existence of royalties in the first place). As for the degree, it depends on the extent to which Random House hammers out the egregious flaws in the initial contract, such as charging production costs against the author’s share of net (not even gross). As many people have pointed out, that’s called “Hollywood accounting,” and it’s why no reputable Hollywood agent will ever recommend accepting net points as your compensation. The studios’ accountants will make sure that translates to nothing whatsoever. Not to mention that charging the author for production is what vanity presses do . . . but I digress.
One more time with the highlighter: don’t get suckered in by the terminology. All (non-scam) publishers share profits with their authors, one way or another. Random House’s way started out as insanely bad, is somewhat better now, and needs watching in the future. But whatever language they dress it up in, it is not some brave and generous new world.
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My post on writing a long epic fantasy has been generating some interesting discussion in a variety of places: the comment thread, Twitter, etc. I wanted to come back to it long enough to highlight a few lengthier responses that I think make very good points.
The first comes from C.E. Petit at Scrivener’s Error; scroll down to the third bit to find his thoughts. I tend not to talk about “theme” because the word has been so badly treated by high school English classes, but his point is a sound one, and can provide guidance as to how the author might gauge whether their story has begun to grow out of control. Are you diluting your thematic message by adding in all these other subplots? Or, conversely, are you hammering your reader too energetically with that message, by playing through sixteen variations on the motif? (Which is not, of course, to say that the work will have only one thematic message, especially if it stretches to four books or more. But a central line is still vital.)
The second, or rather the second and third, is Patricia C. Wrede’s two-part response to my own argument, which digs further into the question of why authors fall into these traps, and what they can do about them. I want to say that she is 100% right about the arbitrariness of your opening structural decision: even if you base it around some kind of pattern (as she suggests in the second post), ultimately that’s a framework you then try to pour your story into, rather than a natural outgrowth of the story itself. You don’t set out to write seven books because that’s precisely how much character and plot and so on you have to tell; you write seven books because you decided to build each one thematically around the seven deadly sins or chronologically around the years Harry will be in school, and then you try to scale everything else to match.
Note that we do this all the time in fantasy: it’s called a trilogy. You sign a contract for three books, okay, and so you plan your story based around that arbitrary decision. I’d venture to say that the vast majority of series that are planned as trilogies end up as exactly that. There are exceptions (Terry Goodkind, as discussed in Zeno’s Mountains; George R.R. Martin; the Hitchhiker’s series), but it seems that most of us are capable of sticking to three books when that’s what we said we’d do. It’s only when we go beyond three that our control seems so liable to slip — because we have so few models for how to do it right, and because one more book is much less expansion when it’s ten instead of nine than when it’s four instead of three. And, maybe, because if you’re selling well enough for your publisher to support nine books, they’re eager for you to make it ten instead.
But we manage it with trilogies, and TV writers manage it almost without fail when they write shows with season-long arc plots. Absent the network jerking them around, they finish their story in twenty-two episodes of X minutes each, period, the end, no “please just one more ep” or “sorry, this one ran twelve minutes long.”
Is that kind of discipline detrimental to the story? Sure, sometimes. But so, manifestly, is allowing one’s discipline to falter. And I say — with the spotless virtue of an author who has never yet had a publisher throw stacks of money at her, begging for a bestselling series to continue — that I would rather make myself find a way to tell my story more efficiently, with fewer digressions and wasted words, and end it while people are still in love with the tale, than risk losing sight of the original vision in a swamp of less productive byways.
(“You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” Speaking of tales planned as trilogies, and delivered that way, and in my opinion all the better for it.)
It isn’t easy. As Wrede points out, it requires frequent check-ins with your plan, however you may have built said plan. It may require you to murder some very beloved darlings. But just as a sonnet’s structure can force you to make really good use of your fourteen allotted lines, so can a fixed length to your series.
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The Devil in the Dust, Chaz Brenchley (desperance). On one of the flights for my book tour, the woman in the seat next to me apologized for not alerting me that the drink cart had come by. “You looked so wrapped up in your book,” she said. And I was. Sometimes in a disturbed fashion, since Brenchley really gets the pathological, Stockholm Syndrome extremes of medieval Christianity, but sometimes in a good way. I was fascinated by the not!Christianity of the setting and the utter weirdness (only partially explained thus far) of Surayon, and I want to know more about the djinn. Clearly the solution is to obtain the next book.
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison. Advance uncorrected manuscript, read for blurbing purposes. Intrictate political fantasy about the half-goblin son of an elven emperor, who inherits the throne when everybody ahead of him gets killed. Maia does not have an easy time of it, but watching him learn the hard way how to run a country was satisfying.
Spirit’s Princess, Esther Friesner. Part of Friesner’s “Princesses of Myth” series; this one follows Himiko, a figure in prehistoric Japan. I sort of wanted this either to be shorter, or to be combined with the sequel to make one fat book, because so much of its length is spent on “Himiko can’t have the life she wants.” Obstacles are good, but you don’t actually get the results of Himiko overcoming/bypassing them in this volume.
Kat, Incorrigible, Stephanie Burgis. AKA A Most Improper Magick. A fun fantasy-Regency YA. I think my favorite thing in this was the sisters: the first couple of pages primed me to see them as Evil (Not-Step-)Sisters, but they’re nothing of the sort. Kat’s relationship with them is complicated, with them getting along on some matters and not at all on others — which is entirely realistic. And I’m a sucker for good sibling relationships. The second book of this series is about to come out in paperback (in the US, I think? Already published in the UK?), with the third in hardcover next month, so I’ll probably zoom through the rest of these soon.
The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Deborah Blum. Read for a book club. Basically about the invention of toxicology as an investigative art during the early twentieth century, in the face of opposition from New York’s massively corrupt city government. Full of grotty details about “wet chemistry,” so if you’re squeamish, consider yourself warned. But also very interesting, and horrifying — as much or more for all the ways you could accidentally get poisoned by everything around you back then as for the actual deliberate murders.
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It’s better than a dagger in the back . . . .
I’ll have the usual book tour update for you all tomorrow, but I wanted to put this one out on its own: the Ides of March Book Giveaway, in which I join forces with sixteen other authors to reward the winners with a whole stack of books. To quote the official description:
Do you love books that take you somewhere you’ve never been before? Books with a unique sense of history or a fantastical premise, dark thrills or the sparkle of your favorite fairy tale–or perhaps all of these rolled up in one? Seventeen of your favorite, award-winning and best-selling authors have teamed up to offer this giveaway:
We’re giving away one set of books per 500 entries, so how many winners there will be depends on the number of entrants! To enter, fill in the form below — you have until March 15th. Please note that this contest is open to residents of the US, Canada and the UK only and by entering, you agree to be added to the authors’ mailing lists (don’t worry; you can always unsubscribe from any mailing list at any time).
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It took three years and two months rather than the two years I initially planned, but I have, at very long last, finished the Wheel of Time re-read and analysis. And as I promised quite some time ago, we’ll end with what I’ve learned.
This post, unlike the others, is not WoT-specific. I’ll be referencing the series, because it’s the primary source of my thoughts on this topic, but the point here is to talk about the specific challenges of writing a long epic fantasy series — here defining “long” as “more than a trilogy, and telling one ongoing story.” (So something like Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books wouldn’t count, since they’re a conglomeration of multiple trilogies.) My points probably also apply to non-fantasy series, but other genres are much less likely to attempt multi-volume epics on this scale, so I’m mostly speaking to my fellow fantasists.
I do not pretend this is in any way, shape, or form a recipe for commercial success with an epic fantasy series. After all, most of this is a checklist of errors I feel Jordan made, and you could paper the walls of Tor’s offices in fifty-dollar bills with the cash he made for them. Nor am I claiming artistic failure awaits if you fail to heed this advice; you might squeak through on luck, or just really good storytelling instinct. But I do feel that bearing these points in mind can help the would-be writer of an epic series avoid falling off some of the more common and perilous cliffs.
With all of that intro material out of the way, let’s get to it.
But first, a reminder: only a few days left to get a letter from Lady Trent. (If you’ve already written to her, the reply will be on its way shortly — I delayed a little bit in order to get something cool to include with the note.)
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New interview at The Adventures of Cecelia Bedelia, another interview at Short and Sweet Book Reviews, and a guest post at Head Stuck in a Book. There were supposed to be a couple of others, too, but the scheduling of those appears to have gone astray.
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I do, however, have my usual biweekly post up at BVC: “It happened to my cousin’s best friend’s roommate,” wherein I discuss legends. Comment over there!
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You get rambly thoughts. Yay!
Revenge: A bit muddled here and there, but still interesting, especially because of the extent to which (at least at the beginning) it’s framed as this faceoff between two women, both powerful in their own way. Because of the aforementioned muddling, it doesn’t quite stay that way, but it was still nifty while it lasted. And I kind of love the relationship between Emily and Nolan — all the more so because the show is unafraid to make Nolan a physical wimp. When somebody holds him at knifepoint, he gets scared. And then he turns around and calls Emily on her errors, and she generally admits he’s right.
kniedzw called it a “soap opera” at one point, which got me thinking about the extent to which a soap opera can be defined as a drama that caters to a female audience. There are other aspects, too — the daytime slot being a shallow one; the constant plot churn being a more substantial one — but “soap opera” has a connotation of “ridiculous,” and really, I don’t think Revenge (at least in its first season) is any more ridiculous than various evening dramas that cater to a male audience. So there’s that.
Lost Girl: The werewolf guy is hot, but the tone of the show really doesn’t do it for me, and I can’t help but roll my eyes at the extent to which the protagonist’s nature seems like an excuse to have her make out with people every episode. Not my cup of tea, I think.
The Vampire Diaries: Also not my cup of tea, but I watched the first two episodes out of curiosity (yay Netflix streaming!), and have to applaud the way Stefan goes against the stereotypical grain of the YA paranormal boyfriend. Which is to say, he’s not an asshole. In fact, he is an anti-asshole in some ways I can’t help but read as a deliberate response to Edward in Twilight, whether that’s the case or not. I still don’t find him that interesting, but at least I don’t want to deck him.
Coriolanus: And now for something that isn’t TV. Not one of Shakespeare’s better-known tragedies, but after watching this adaptation, I have no idea why. It’s been too long since I read the play (my sophomore year of college, I think) for me to recognize whether it’s a matter of how they edited the script, or just the bloody fantastic performances from Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler and Brian Cox and James Nesbitt and oh my god Vanessa Redgrave, but it fits all but seamlessly into a run-down, militarized present day, with weary politicians and some conspirators who are, when I think about it, weirdly honest. I think I may have to buy a copy of the movie and add it to my library of Good Shakespeare Adaptations.
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Just as a reminder, the “Con or Bust” auctions close this Sunday. Bidding on the double-signed copy of A Natural History of Dragons (autographed by both me and Todd Lockwood, with a bonus sketch from him) is up to $48, while A Star Shall Fall is at $15 and With Fate Conspire is at $20. Proceeds go to a good cause, and the books don’t suck either, if I do say so myself. 😉
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[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome.]
I pretty much covered my reactions to this book with the two liveblog posts. So now it’s time to set aside the straight-up “Oh my god I can’t believe this series is finally done I’ve been waiting for this for more than half my life”> stream of consciousness, and talk about this in a more sensible fashion.
