Recently Jim Hines has been doing a “First Book Friday” series on his blog, inviting authors to tell the story of how they sold their first novel. This week, I’m up to bat, talking about how Doppelganger (later known as Warrior got sold to Warner Aspect, almost six years ago.
I’m a little baffled by the appeal of crossposting one’s LJ comments to Twitter or Facebook, but anyway, it’s definitely a bad idea that you can do that with comments on somebody else’s LOCKED post (complete with links back to that post). So if you want to disable that for your own journal, it’s easy to fix in the LJ settings, and there’s also a poll going that apparently has gotten the attention of at least one of the LJ Powers That Be.
Over on Dreamwidth, Toft has posted about discovering the crack that is Mercedes Lackey (specifically, Valdemar).
It’s prompted an outpouring of squealing fangirl love in the comments — I suspect it’s mostly fangirls, though there may be the occasional fanboy in there — with frequent deployment of CAPITAL LETTERS to properly channel the commenters’ sentiments. I’m in there with them; I, too, was once a twelve-year-old girl, and Lackey’s books once occupied a beloved position on my bookshelf.
Some of them still do. When I packed up to move to California, one of the things I did was go through our bookcases, pulling and re-reading out the things that were there because I’d loved them when I was in junior high. The idea was to say farewell, to squeeze out those last, precious drops of nostalgia and then free up shelf space for books that are, well, better. In a few cases, though, the nostalgia was still going strong — and those books, I kept.
Understand, it’s not that they’re good. It’s that they’re crack, and furthermore crack which, for whatever reason, still has the power to affect me. Yes, Vanyel is Emo McAngstyPants, and THAT’S WHY I LOVE HIM. The fact that Dirk and Talia and Kris refuse to have the one simple conversation that could end all their suffering is not a FLAW, it’s WHY I SHOWED UP FOR THE BOOK. Drizzt Do’Urden could give Vanyel a run for his money on the emo front, with bonus chunks of unadulterated inner monologue OF WOE (plus awesome fight scenes!). David Eddings may be writing the same series over and over again, but in the Belgariad/Malloreon instance it’s a series that features smartass characters being smartasses to one another and I could watch that ALL DAY, YO. And Robert Jordan . . . well, I dumped his books because they take up too much damn room, but I’m making up for it in other ways.
And you know, there’s something wonderful about seeing people admit their love for crack, whether it’s stuff they adored in childhood or just picked up recently. So have at it in the comments: what do you love, not despite its ridiculousness, but because of it?
This is officially a SHAME-FREE ZONE; no need to preface your comments with “These books are so bad, but –” That part goes without saying. Just tell us what books you adore, against all reason. Unleash the power of your caps-lock key because lowercase letters AREN’T ENOUGH TO CONTAIN YOUR LOVE. Admit your addiction to emo soulbonded sparklepony hurt/comfort Mary Sue wish-fulfillment CRACK.
You know you want to.
Okay, this is just about the perfect thing for me to come across on the launch day for A Star Shall Fall.
Courtesy of Jay Lake, it’s a history of science rendered in the form of a map like the London Underground: the colored lines represent different branches of science, scientists are stops along the lines, certain scientists are “transfer points” between multiple fields, there’s even zones to divide the history by century. It’s a wonderfully creative way to represent the idea; heck, now I want to see bus transfers or equivalent added on, to show where a given person was particularly influenced by someone else. You could probably make a number of tweaks to the thing, but the concept as a whole is just awesome.
Kate Elliott on authorial intent.
Word.
I’m smart enough not to respond publicly to reviews, of course; that pretty much never ends well. But if you want to know which ones get up my nose the worst, it’s the ones that make unfounded declarations about what was in my head while writing. If you read a particular thing out of the story, fine — far be it from me to say ur doin it wrong. But please don’t claim you know why I did things that way.
Mind you, the line between the two isn’t entirely clear. Sometimes — as Kate’s contrasting examples show — a lot of it comes down to phrasing; if you say “it seems the author felt X,” that creates a different impression than “the author felt X.” This is one case where I think it’s a good idea to use qualifiers for your assertions, even though in other circumstances it’s better to just say things directly. And, of course, if you’ve been reading my blog or an interview with me or whatever, anything I say there is fair game for use later; your review can say “because Marie Brennan is concerned with not taking events out of the hands of the real, historical people who were involved, she does Z” — though even there, it would be better to say you presume there’s a causal relationship, because when you get down to it I may have forgotten my own agenda and done Z simply because it looked nifty, or the rest of my plot required it.
Talk all you like about the product. What you say may sound very odd to me; I may blink in surprise at the cool thing I apparently did without noticing, or wonder exactly what novel you read, but in the end “the book” is the product of a chemical reaction between the words on the page and the contents of the reader’s head, and I only control one half of the ingredients. The contents of my own head, on the other hand, do not belong to the reader, and so I would prefer that reviewers phrase any speculation as speculation. Don’t be the guy who went around telling people what Ursula LeGuin “intended” with the Earthsea books. Don’t presume to speak for the author. If I’m going to bite my tongue and not tell you how to read my work, don’t tell me how I wrote it.
I’ll be at a wedding tomorrow, so this is your final heads-up (from me, anyway) that the auctions end tomorrow. Lots of great stuff on offer over there, and a chance to win your own bit of Onyx Court secret history in the name of flood relief. Go forth and do good!
<bounce> I’ve been looking forward to this.
“And Blow Them at the Moon” has gone live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. This is an Onyx Court story (though not the one I sold yesterday), and I am very pleased with how it’s turned out. It also constitutes the last pre-publication goodie for A Star Shall Fall, which comes out (eek) next Tuesday; Magrat, the main character from this story, will be showing up in the novel, too.
And, because chances to win a signed copy of the book are just FALLING OUT OF THE TREES, YO, the editor at BCS has conspired with me to give one away over there: all you have to do is leave a comment on the story thread in their forums. (You’ll need to be a registered forum user, so we can contact the winner.) That runs two weeks, i.e. until the next issue goes live. Together with Laura Anne Gilman’s virtual birthday party and the Onyx Court discussion threads on the Sirens community, you have three, count ’em three chances to get your hands on a copy. And don’t forget, there’s the secret history charity auction, going until Saturday! Bidding stands at twenty dollars, and every bit of it goes to help flood relief efforts in Pakistan.
(I promise actual content will return to this LJ pretty soon. But I’ve got a friend’s wedding this weekend, and the book release next week, so at the moment spare time to write interesting posts is in short supply. If you want reading material from me, have a story.)
If you want, not just a signed copy of A Star Shall Fall, but a whole stack of other books, go wish Laura Anne Gilman a happy birthday. That’s right, she’s celebrating by giving other people presents, in proper hobbit style.
Plus you can comment on the Sirens LJ for a book giveaway, as I mentioned yesterday, and there will be a third opportunity cropping up before long. It’s books, books, everywhere you look!
You may not know who Norilana Books or Vera Nazarian are, but you’ve heard of some of what they do, because they’re the lovely people who put out the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies.
It’s their fourth anniversary of being in business, and I cannot encourage you enough to go buy something from their site. The CP books particularly, because Mike Allen’s done a fabulous job with them — and I don’t just say that because he’s bought three stories from me — but they’re also the ones who have taken over the venerable Sword and Sorceress series, and I’ve been meaning to pick up Lace and Blade for a while (in fact, I’m doing that now). In short, they have a lot of very nifty books, and Norilana is a great small press. Help them celebrate their fourth anniversary, and check out what they do.
Various things slowed the forward progress, but I finally have crossed the 100K mark on the Victorian book last night. Huzzah!
For those who missed it over the weekend, I’m doing another Onyx Court secret history auction for . Bidding has begun; you have until Saturday to make your own.
Ten days until A Star Shall Fall hits shelves. The last pre-publication goodie will come in a few days, but I have something else for you: another Onyx Court secret history auction. The community is raising funds for relief after the flooding over there, so I’m offering “authorial fanfic” of the Onyx Court series; you pick the historical person or event, and I tell you what the faeries had to do with it.
(Confidential to CEPetit: if you want an actual story about that thing you mentioned over e-mail, now’s the time. <g>)
The auction runs until next Saturday. Unlike previous comms, the offers and bids are entirely conducted as comments to a single post, so I’m currently on page 12; follow the link above to find my offer.
If it goes for the “Buy It Now” price, I may follow up with a second offer. We’ll have to see.
Fred Clark of Slacktivist hits the nail on the head, with a rocket launcher: “Please forgive me for the actions of extremists I have never met who commit acts of violence that I have never advocated.”
Over at SF Novelists, I get my rant on again, this time about subjects ranging from armor in Dragon Age to Wonder Woman’s lack of pants: T&A on Parade.
As usual, comment over there; no registration is needed.
Today has not started off terribly well, but it’s at least partially ameliorated by the fact that I got author copies for A Star Shall Fall! They are so very shiny. (Okay, they’re actually not shiny at all; the cover is matte, not glossy. But you know what I mean.)
In celebration of this, and of the A Star Shall Fall contest, and of the discussion for Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie, I’m giving away some more copies on GoodReads — three this time, actually. Plus you still have one day to put your name in for a copy of In Ashes Lie. So it’s Yay Book Day here at Swan Tower, and you’re all invited!
I promise I won’t keep going on about this forever. But if you want a one-stop shop for the highlights of Judge Walker’s decision on Perry v. Schwarzenegger, this one’s pretty good; for bonus points, you can read about what’s up with those “strict scrutiny” and “rational basis” things.
I am so very much not a lawyer, so if there are flaws in either of those posts, I cannot point them out to you. (Actually, can anybody explain to me what’s up with the way the material from this trial will be used going forward? I’ve gotten the impression that the testimony offered there, and the way Walker approached the decision, is going to be really important to how the appeals process goes — i.e. it’s a really, really good thing for the Prop 8 opponents that Walker was so thorough from the start, because it will make it harder to defend Prop 8 in the future — but I don’t really know how that works. Back to my original point –) Those two posts did a lot to help me understand what the points at stake were, why Walker shot the defense down, and what kind of standard(s) will have to be met in order to deny sanction to same-sex marriage. If you need clarification, those two posts seem a good place to start.
With various responses to the Prop 8 decision floating around out there, I was particularly struck by this tweet, which articulates a divide I’ve been chewing on for some time: Californians knows that marriage is a civil right, not a privilege.
“Privilege” is a word that’s seen widespread use lately, in the context of society’s treatment of different groups of people: white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, able-bodied privilege, etc. There are many lists out there pointing out what kinds of advantages a person is likely to enjoy if they fit into the preferred group, and how many of those advantages aren’t even the kind of thing you think about in your daily life (unless you don’t have them). But I think there’s a blurring that happens in some of those lists, which I want to look more closely at: the difference between privileges and rights.
Privilege is, literally, private law. It’s a special exception made for favored individuals or groups. Centuries ago, a nobleman might be given the privilege of hunting deer on the king’s land; today, I pay for the privilege of checking books out from Stanford’s libraries, which is otherwise reserved only to their students and staff. If the king decides he doesn’t want anybody shooting his deer, or Stanford decides they don’t want to deal with outside users, then they can take that privilege away.
A right, on the other hand, is something everybody has, unless we permit laws or behaviors that exclude disfavored individuals or groups from it. Voting is a right belonging to all U.S. citizens, unless they’re children (excluded on the basis of immaturity) or incarcerated felons (excluded as part of their punishment). Freedom of speech is a right. Fair trials are a right. You can’t take somebody’s rights away without a damn good reason.
The distinction is important because it affects how a problem can best be solved. One of the white-privilege lists I saw mentioned the privilege of being able to walk around in a store without the employees watching your every move to make certain you aren’t going to steal anything. I had a visceral reaction to that: for god’s sake, that should be a right! Our default should be to assume that a given customer is not a criminal, unless we have evidence to the contrary. (Evidence other than skin color, which doesn’t count.) You don’t fix that problem by telling your employees to give every customer the hairy eyeball; you fix it by telling them not to discriminate against the black (or Latino, or etc.) customers. On the other hand, being able to make an offensive joke about a member of a disfavored group and not suffer any consequences for it? That’s a privilege. You fix that by calling people on it, making sure there are consequences; the privilege harms other people, and so you take it away.
Both of these are important things. But I don’t want to lose sight of the rights, in all the talking about privilege; it downplays the importance of the former, while creating the sense that the only solution is to take things away from the advantaged groups. Sometimes that is the solution — but sometimes it’s better to share the advantages with everybody. Improving the world doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.
In the case of Prop 8, you don’t resolve the situation by making civil marriage a privilege, granted by the government to those (heterosexual) couples of which it approves. You resolve it by acknowledging that marriage is a right, which cannot be withheld simply because the couple is same-sex — or mixed-race, or one or both parties are incarcerated felons, to choose a few of the relevant legal precedents. Nobody has to lose anything for other people to gain.
Here, have a ridonkulously cute picture of a kitten in a shoe.
So apparently it’s been standard practice since Kennedy’s day to pick one official White House photographer, who then hires a flock of other photographers, and the minions shoot various public events but the head guy is the one allowed to wander around behind the scenes, snapping pics while the President is in meetings or on the phone.
According to this Daily Kos diary, Pete Souza is the current White House photographer, and previously held the post during Reagan’s second term. What’s different from Reagan’s day is twofold: first, Obama has apparently given the guy much more extensive access, and second, the White House posts his photos on Flickr.
Looking through them, what gets me is the role Souza’s work has in creating the narrative of a presidency. He’s not the only guy taking photos of Obama, of course, and photos are far from the only record we’ll have. But no matter how much you remind yourself that photos can be just as biased as any other form of art — timing, framing, post-processing — there’s still a subconscious tendency to accept them as “the truth.” And behind-the-scenes photos, doubly so: when the president is out in public, then of course we understand he’s performing a role, but surely in those moments when he’s alone, you see the real person behind the mask.
Except he isn’t alone, is he? The photographer is there. And just as the president is deciding, consciously or unconsciously, what face to show, the photographer is deciding — consciously or unconsciously — what to record.
There’s a startling amount of power in that.
When we see a shot of Obama with his feet on the Oval Office desk, it both frames him as a “regular guy” and connects him with a photographic tradition of other presidents. When we see his marked-up speech, it tells a story of intelligence and thoughtful preparation. When we see him standing alone before an event or while talking on the phone to some foreign leader, it reminds us of the burdens our nation’s leader bears; when we see him in a crowd, it connects him to the people. All of these things create a narrative, but a narrative always has a narrator, and in this case, it’s Pete Souza.
Let me be clear: I’m not bringing this up because I think it’s sinister. I think it’s an excellent idea to document these things, and given the circumstances, it’s amazing enough that one guy gets to run around in meetings and private moments, let alone the prospect of opening that up to multiple photographers. But it’s worth remembering that any documentation is always, always inflected by the person doing the documenting, and so it’s interesting to know who that person is.
Over on the community, they’re doing GoH book discussions leading up to the conference in October. In an excellent bit of timing, this is month my books are up to bat: Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie are on the table, and the first questions have been asked.
I don’t think you need an LJ account to comment over there (though it would probably be helpful to put some name on your posts). And I doubt they’d object to input from non-Sirens attendees — not everybody can make it to the conference that wants to. So if you want to jump in, feel free!
Another link I’ve had sitting around for a couple of weeks: Abd el-Kader and the Massacre of Damascus.
Read the whole thing. Yes, it’s long, and we live in an age of attention-deficit disorder, where any blog post longer than a few paragraphs threatens to trigger a tl;dr response. But you need to go through it to grasp the enormity of this man’s life: not just what Abd el-Kader accomplished in his fifteen years fighting the French (notice how many times he wrestled them into stalemates or surrenders or treaties?), but the incredible reversal of his image later on, while he was in France, and when he went to Damascus. It’s an amazing story.
I’m writing a novel set in 1884 London right now, and I’m running a game set in the 1875 American frontier, and I’m juggling a back-brain idea that would take place in a world a lot like our own nineteenth century but with differences, and coincidentally kniedzw is reading a biography of Sir Henry Rawlinson, who’s one of your crazy Victorian soldier-scholar-adventurers, and it really makes me want to know: what was it about the nineteenth century that spawned so many larger-than-life characters?
Some of it’s a matter of wealth and privilege. If you don’t have to work for a living, and you don’t particularly care what offenses you commit against your lessers, you can get away with much grander deeds than somebody constrained by budget and consideration. Some of it’s a colonial effect, as the collision of nations destabilized the world and created zones where individuals could make their own law. I think a portion, especially in the case of men like Rawlinson, was an invincible belief in the gospel of progress: there was nothing that they couldn’t do, and if somebody tried and failed and died, well, it was just a sign that you needed to try again harder.
That doesn’t explain Abd el-Kader to me, though. He probably counted as wealthy and privileged in the context of his own Algerian society, but not in comparison to the French, and part of what made his story awesome was that he did constrain himself not to harm those over whom he had power. He wasn’t a colonial adventurer, either, indoctrinated by the European belief in progress. He was just a leader and military genius with an unshakeable goodness of character that gradually won over even his enemies, who found himself in a position to save thousands of lives. And yet he hits that same button in my head, of people whose deeds loom so large in my head, I have a hard time imagining anyone following a similar path today.
Maybe it’s just the perspective of time. Maybe in a hundred years, people who seem ordinary to me today will have the same sheen of outrageousness. It doesn’t feel like it, though. Western history* has colorful characters at all stages, but it seems like there are more in the nineteenth century; and then the things we do today feel smaller, more hedged about by caution and limitation, less grand. In a hundred years, we’ll remember Bill Gates — but his autobiography won’t be stuffed with anecdotes about how as a boy he tried to summon the devil in an attempt to verify the existence of same**.
Possibly it’s better for society as a whole that we have changed (if indeed we have). But every time I come across another figure like Abd el-Kader, the narrative part of my brain lights up a bit with joy, and I wish current events could do that to me.
*My knowledge of non-Western history is intermittent enough that I don’t want to generalize about it.
**Unlike Charles Babbage.
