Marie Brennan's Blog, page 104

Elfquest Re-Read, Captives of Blue Mountain: Winnowill

(This is part of my Elfquest re-read. There will be spoilers.)

I can’t think of any character in this entire series who more strongly merits their own post, with the possible exception of Two-Edge.

Winnowill is a villain, and the story makes no attempt to pretend otherwise. When we see Strongbow being psychically tortured at the end of The Forbidden Grove, his tormentor is shown only as a silhouette — but the fact that she speaks telepathically tells us she’s an elf. And in case you had any doubt as to whether you should still give her the benefit of the doubt, her sending gets its own special mark, a malevolent red and black star. It takes the characters a while to confirm that she’s the great danger Savah warned Suntop about, but the reader knows from the start.

But saying that she’s a straight-up villain doesn’t mean she’s inherently evil, in the “dyed in the wool” sense. From Lord Voll we get tantalizing hints about the Winnowill of the past — I would have loved to see a short-run series of backstory about the early days of the Gliders. She was probably ambitious from the start, and likely somewhat manipulative, but those aren’t the same thing as the unrelenting malice she exhibits in the present day. No, her spirit has been warped over the millennia: by the isolation and ossification of the Gliders, by the lack of any real purpose to her endless life, and by whatever happened to her when she vanished underground for a time. If memory serves, that’s when she met the troll by whom she conceived Two-Edge, but whether she herself suffered any trauma or was only ever the inflicter of same, I don’t recall.

Everything that’s wrong with Winnowill is, for lack of a better term, a human problem. By that I mean she’s not supernaturally corrupted or anything like that; her flaws are the same flaws real people have in the real world. Arrogance. Hunger for power. Lack of empathy. A desire to cause pain, simply because it demonstrates her power and it’s the only thing she finds interesting anymore. Where magic comes in is with the suggestion that she could be fixed . . . if she wanted to be. But when it comes to a choice between allowing Leetah to change her and stepping to her almost-guaranteed death, Winnowill chooses death. I find myself sorely tempted to request Winnowill fanfic next Yuletide, because I think it would be fascinating to see the inside of her mind.

That impulse surprises me because, although I very much like Winnowill’s role in this volume, overall I find she demonstrates the same problem exhibited by villains in many other stories: the more the plot focuses on her, the less interesting I find the result. She’s great here, okay in Siege at Blue Mountain and The Secret of Two-Edge, largely unnecessary in Kings of the Broken Wheel (Rayek’s own choices are far more compelling), and then she just . . . keeps going. It’s partly a function of the otherwise intriguing worldbuilding twist that killing her would accomplish jack, and might make things worse: then they’d have to contend with her spirit, which would be no less dangerous and a lot more difficult to hit. As I recall from later canon, she does wind up dead and Rayek has to serve as her prison, but I don’t think the problem she represents ever got resolved; nobody manages to de-toxify her spirit. I really wish they would, because there’s a point at which she starts to feel like a drag on the story to me.

Before that point, though, she’s a fantastic villain. I love her conversation with Leetah, when she tries to use the secret of the Wolfriders’ heritage as a lever to force them out of Blue Mountain before they can threaten her control of the place. Her menagerie of pet humans is incredibly twisted. And Two-Edge — well. He may wind up getting his own post; we’ll see.

I also have to make mention of Winnowill as a specifically female villain. Taken in isolation, her gender and behavior might bother me a lot, because she’s very much the stereotype of the femme fatale: beautiful, seductive, manipulative, and so on. In fairness, I should say the fact that I don’t have a problem with that probably owes something to the age at which I read this story; I was a lot less critical about that sort of thing when I was twelve. But I also think it owes a lot to the larger context of the story as a whole, because Winnowill is only one female character, in a cast that features a broad array of contrasting figures. Leetah as Winnowill’s “dark sister” is particularly noteworthy — there’s a whole metaphorical layer there about how we associate “dark” with “evil,” but Winnowill is the pale one of the pair — but also Dewshine and Aroree and Moonshade and Clearbrook and Nightfall in this volume, many others in the series as a whole. We don’t have to excise the femme fatale from our narrative lexicon; we just have to make sure she isn’t the only option on offer.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Giving away one (or two!) ARCs of WITHIN THE SANCTUARY OF WINGS

Wanna know how Lady Trent’s story concludes — before the book hits the shelves?

This Wednesday, March 1st, I’ll be giving away an advance reader copy to one newsletter subscriber. If you’re already signed up, you’re set; if you aren’t, you can do that here.

And when I went on Twitter to post about the giveaway, I saw I’m quite close to having two thousand followers. When I hit the magical 2K, I’ll also pick one Twitter follower to receive an ARC. I’m @swan_tower over there, if you’re interested.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Elfquest Re-Read, The Forbidden Grove: Archaeology

(This is part of my Elfquest re-read. There will be spoilers.)

When I was a sophomore in college, I wrote an archaeology paper on Elfquest.

No, really.

It was supposed to be a paper looking at the Wolfriders as hunter-gatherers and the Sun Folk as horticulturalists/early agriculturalists. Naturally, when I finally had a paper topic I enjoyed and could have run well past the guideline of 10-12 pages, I had a professor who said anything past twelve pages he would chuck in the trash, and then dock us points for not having a conclusion. The result is that the paper wound up only addressing the Wolfrider half of the equation, because I ran out of space for anything else.

I was going to rehash the paper as my third and final post for The Forbidden Grove, but in re-reading it, I discovered that it was a) longer than I recalled (I thought it was 5-7 pages) and b) way more technical. So rather than trying to recycle the whole thing in a quarter the words, I decided it would be better to just post the paper on my website (pdf link), for those of you who actually care to see the whole thing, bibliography and all, and then use this post to talk about the things that didn’t fit into the paper.

Extremely condensed version of the original points: the Wolfriders are a reasonably plausible depiction of hunter-gatherers. Apart from the birthrate issue (which I first noticed when working on the paper), they pretty much pass the sniff test of “could this work under the conditions described?” The size of the tribe is in line with hunter-gatherer bands, especially if you look at what it was before the various calamities started dropping their population. (They are, however, massively inbred — this came up in the discussion of Recognition a couple of posts ago.) Their high-quality bows and ability to coordinate their hunts between both elves and wolves mean they’re probably more efficient predators than would otherwise be the case, so they can squeak by on the question of whether the environment would support that large of an elf/wolf/troll/human population under sedentary conditions, especially now that I’ve re-read The Forbidden Grove and caught the references to trolls cave farming (meaning they’re not dependent on above-ground resources to feed their population); the humans stretch that about to the breaking point, but they’re mobile instead of sedentary, so I’ll let it pass. Their social structure fits the type of society they have. Etc.

So what about the Sun Folk? They’re a lot harder to discuss, because they don’t get as much detail as the Wolfriders do. I’m too lazy to go look at a crowd scene and try to count how many of them there are; I think we have to take the art with a grain of salt, because the overhead shot of the Sun Village before the raid shows only seven buildings and four tiny fields, which seems unlikely. But assuming there’s an aquifer they’re drawing water from, they could manage oasis agriculture on a small scale. The better question is how it got started: general theory among archaeologists is that hunter-gatherers picked wild grains from natural stands, then probably noticed new stands cropping up where the stuff they’d gathered fell, then started shoving seeds in the ground to see what happened, then got organized about it. There aren’t any natural stands of grain or other plant-based food in the area — did the founders bring seeds with them? Their history is much too undefined to say.

What we see of their social structure is plausible, though, with Sun Toucher and Savah as their elder leaders, and more specialization than you see among the Wolfriders: Rayek and a few others as hunters, Shenshen as a midwife, Ahdri as Savah’s handmaiden, I think there’s a weaver, etc. You generally need sedentarism and a degree of bounty before you really get specialists, because other people have to be able to provide enough excess food to support the ones who aren’t engaged in subsistence work. Nobody here except for Savah seems to be highly specialized, i.e. totally divorced from the general work of the village — their society isn’t that complex and stratified. But they’ve got more of it going on than the Wolfriders do.

Technology-wise, the Sun Folk can work gold and probably copper, which is entirely reasonable for the tech level. The trolls work “bright metal,” probably steel; how their forges operate is completely hand-waved. (Coal? If so, how do they ventilate their caves? Trees from the surface? If so, how do they gather the wood? Who knows.) The humans use stone tools, and so do the elves in pre-troll-contact flashbacks; Pike’s spearhead is made of stone. I think Wendy Pini said the world was at roughly the Mesolithic level of technology; to me that sounds like an accurate description of when the High Ones landed, but by the time of the main narrative I’d put it closer to pre-pottery Neolithic. None of the images of stone tools get super-detailed, but they look more refined to me. And again, the humans live mostly in small bands, with leaders and religious specialists but not much in the way of stratification beyond that. Ideologically, they believe in a spirit world but don’t have a complex theology; there’s a background detail of the Hoan G’Tay Sho holding feathers from the giant eagles during a ceremony, which rings absolutely true.

So despite the magic and the immortal characters and so forth, it hangs together on a realistic level. I do wonder if part of the reason for the Kings of the Broken Wheel storyline was to jump the narrative out of the constraints of Stone Age society: if memory serves, Rayek takes the palace ten thousand years into the future, which is about right for getting things from the late Mesolithic or early Neolithic to the more medieval-style period they wind up in. (Not that a fictional world has to change at the same rate as history, but that’s the yardstick we have to judge it against, so.) The story could still work even if the world was nonsensical — but it’s nice to have this solid underpinning anyway.

(Having said that: there’s one point on which the realism falls down a bottomless pit. After thousands upon thousands of years of separation, the Wolfriders and the Sun Folk and the Gliders and the Go-Backs and Timmain herself still all speak exactly the same language. And even if you handwave that on the basis of long life/immortality and telepathy slowing linguistic drift, Cutter and Skywise travel overland for three months — with good conditions, you could traverse the entire Oregon Trail in four months — and the human language they know still works without a hitch when they meet Nonna and Adar. I understand why the Pinis might not want to let linguistic roadblocks derail the momentum of the story . . . but it’s still wildly unrealistic.)

On to Captives of Blue Mountain!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Books read, January 2017

I’ve fallen comprehensively off the wagon of recording what I read and posting about it, but I’d like to get back to that. So, without any attempt to catch up on the year or so that I missed, here’s the log from January.

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, Charlotte Gordon. The premise of this dual biography is that Wollstonecraft and Shelley influenced each other, even though Wollstonecraft died a few days after giving birth to Shelley. The mother-to-daughter influence is easy to see; the daughter-to-mother influence is much more heavily inferred, based on the idea that Wollstonecraft was concerned with the future and with the lives of women, ergo with the life her daughter would have. I’m not quite sure I buy that half of the premise as much as the introduction made me expect, but that in no way stops this from being an excellent book that vastly expanded my understanding of both women. I had no idea how many other books both of them had written, nor the degree of respect Wollstonecraft had during her lifetime. (A respect that vanished almost immediately after she died, thanks to her husband’s misguided attempt to “rehabilitate” her image to the way he wanted to see her. She went from “respected intellectual” to “whore;” her daughter, who likewise got revised by her daughter-in-law, went from “whore” to “respectable Victorian wife.”)

Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee. [Disclosure: the author is a friend.] The opening battle scene was gruesome enough, thanks to the exotic technology used, that I wasn’t sure what I would think of the book overall. Once I got past that, though, I was thoroughly sucked in (and the rest of the book is much less gory). The genre is space opera, but because the functioning of exotics is based on the enforcement of a calendrical system and heretical deviations from that system can make the tech stop working, it reads to me like fantasy poured through a mathematical framework. The worldbuilding reminds me of Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning, not in any of its specifics, but in the sheer wealth of detail, much of it the sort of thing I don’t usually encounter in science fiction. And despite the fact that I am thoroughly sick of the “asshole genius who makes everybody dance to his tune because he’s so damn brilliant” trope, Jedao was my favorite character in the whole novel. There are ways to make that trope work, and this is one of them.

Women in Practical Armor, ed. Ed Greenwood and Gabrielle Harbowy. Anthology I backed on Kickstarter, themed around female warriors. Most of what’s in here is very much classic D&D/sword-and-sorcery fantasy. My favorite story was probably the one that took the antho title most literally: “Pride and Joy” by Eric Landreneau, wherein the hazards of boob-plate armor get hammered home.

The Just City, Jo Walton. First of the Thessaly series. Athena gathers together people from throughout history to found the city described in Plato’s The Republic and see how it works out. By dint of its subject matter, I mentally classify this with utopian SF, but from the start it’s clear that while the Just City is an attempt to create a utopian society, it is deeply flawed in multiple ways. (As Apollo says at one point, what Plato knew about love and relationships would fit on a fingernail paring.) If, like me, you are the sort of person who bounces in glee at the prospect of seeing Athena and Socrates square off in a public debate, this is the book for you.

Elfquest: Fire and Flight, Wendy and Richard Pini. Re-read. I love this series so much. For more detail, see the re-read posts (but beware spoilers).

Everyday Things in Premodern Japan, Susan B. Hanley. “Premodern” here specifically means the Tokugawa period, with some attention to what came before and after for context. Hanley’s main thesis is that, contrary to how Victorian travelers portrayed things, the quality of life improved massively in the Tokugawa period, in large part due to technological advancements that came out of the Sengoku/Warring States period immediately prior. What I found the most interesting was the discussion of how many aspects of what we now think of as traditional Japanese culture were Tokugawa-era responses to limited resources: with the country closed to outside influences, they had to make do with what they had in their islands, and this influenced everything from food to architecture to clothing to sanitation. (When you don’t have enough arable land to waste much of it on livestock, you don’t have animal manure to use as fertilizer, so human waste becomes a valuable enough resource that you not only put in place systems for removing it to agricultural areas, you start having problems with people stealing it.)

The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character, Samuel Noah Kramer. I must have bought this back in high school or early college, because the price sticker on it is from Half-Price Books, which I used to frequent in Dallas. The book itself is a mildly interesting read, but I would love to compare it against something more recent, because I imagine the state of Sumerology has come on a bit in the fifty years since this one was published. I welcome any recommendations from the commentariat.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Elfquest Re-Read, The Forbidden Grove: Humans

(This is part of my Elfquest re-read. There will be spoilers.)

When humans appear in Fire and Flight, they are quite simply and straightforwardly the enemy. They capture and torture Redlance; they burn the forest because they believe that’s what their god wants. They fear and hate elves, and elves fear and hate them right back.

But it doesn’t remain that simple.

In my previous post I mentioned the way the story opens up to depict side characters as fully three-dimensional people. There were humans on that list of characters, and the same deepening process happens to their species as a whole. We don’t just get good humans here: we get good humans and also bad ones, humans who are good for different reasons and bad for different reasons, humans who think elves are awesome and humans who think they’re scary and humans who really just wish they could find a place to live where there aren’t any elves at all.

It happens in three stages. The first, of course, is when a family of humans — starving and near death — arrive outside Sorrow’s End. The decision not to kill them is Cutter’s, but the reason he makes that decision is because of Redlance: having been victimized by humans so badly, Redlance wants to know the reason. Because of him, Aro has a chance to tell the human side of the story. Does it erase all badness from them and turn them into angels? No, of course not. But it, well, humanizes them. They, too, suffered from the destruction of the forest. They’re in the desert because they wouldn’t abandon Aro’s brother when he lost his mind — an impulse that would resonate strongly in a Wolfrider’s heart. Their motives are understandable, even when they aren’t likeable, even when the elves have paid the cost of their fears again and again.

Cutter’s decision isn’t necessarily a merciful one. Sure, the Wolfriders don’t kill the humans. But driving them out into the desert is almost certainly just a delayed sentence; Cutter doesn’t give them any water or food or shelter, and they don’t look like they’ll make it very far. We aren’t yet at the stage where harmony and friendship are possible, even to the extent of supplies — let alone permitting the humans to rest there for a while before continuing their journey. His actions aren’t really admirable . . . except insofar as they’re an improvement on what he would have done seven years ago.

Nonna and Adar constitute a nice little inversion of that scene. Cutter, sick and delirious, stumbles upon their home, inadvertently putting his life in their hands much like the lives of that family were in his. But Adar’s people, having never seen elves, aren’t a priori hostile to them, and Nonna comes from the Blue Mountain tribe, which (we’ll see next volume) literally worships them. That isn’t a good balance, either; Cutter later regrets having to deceive Nonna and Adar, performing his expected role of “spirit” rather than being able to relate to them normally. But it saves his life in this instance, because Nonna shows a lot more mercy than he did: she not only takes care of him, but goes to great lengths to avoid violence when first Cutter and then Skywise threaten them. The family in the desert made Cutter see humans as people; Nonna and Adar make him see humans as people who aren’t automatically enemies. People who might even be friends.

Which brings us to Olbar’s tribe. I love Olbar: he’s the most complex human character we’ve seen yet, because unlike the others, he changes during the course of his appearance. He’s caught between conflicting forces, with the Bone Woman’s fearmongering and thirsting for power on one side, his criminal and outcast brother on another, Nonna and Adar returning from exile and forcing his hand, the loss of his daughter Selah to the Forbidden Grove, and then these “spirits” showing up and blessing his people but are they spirits really? He’s the final piece of the transformation: humans started out as the enemy, became people, became people who could be nice, and finally became people who could change. After Olbar, it isn’t possible for Cutter to view humans as a monolith. Any conflicts he has with them going forward will be conflicts with individuals, with groups, or with the forces that keep elves and humans from being able to reach some kind of equilibrium — not with the species as a whole.

The flip side of this will be the introduction of an elf as a villain. But that will have to wait for Captives of Blue Mountain, and I have one more post I want to make about The Forbidden Grove before I’m done.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Elfquest Re-Read, The Forbidden Grove: The Ensemble

(This is part of my Elfquest re-read. There will be spoilers.)

I like Fire and Flight, but this volume is where the story really hits its stride. After our simple, linear introduction, where the plot is straightforward and only a small number of characters get much in the way of attention, the narrative opens up: two strands, with Cutter and Skywise searching for more elf tribes, while back in Sorrow’s End Suntop receives a warning that sends nearly the entire tribe on the road again in pursuit of that pair.

The ensemble nature of this series has always been one of the things I like best about it. Yes, when all is said and done, Cutter is the protagonist. He’s the leader, not just in the sense that he’s the one making decisions, but also in the sense that it’s usually his needs and desires that are driving the main part of the story. (Keep his tribe alive; find more elves; get his kids back. Books five and six, Siege at Blue Mountain and The Secret of Two-Edge, are something of an exception to this.) But the Pinis are very, very good at making everyone around Cutter also matter.

Which is an achievement in comic book format, because in the end, you have such limited space to work with. One of the skills I hugely admire is the ability to characterize in an efficient fashion: Joss Whedon excels at that, and I wouldn’t put the Pinis far behind. In less than twenty panels of The Forbidden Grove, they give us a fantastic exchange between Redlance and Woodlock — two characters who barely got any lines in Fire and Flight — that brings both of them to vivid, breathing life. (For those who haven’t read it in a while, it’s the scene where humans show up outside Sorrow’s end. Woodlock wants to be one of their executioners; Redlance insists on hearing what they have to say because he wants to know why they tortured him; when Woodlock calls for their deaths again, Redlance tells him to shoot the kid first; Woodlock can’t, and Redlance consoles him.)

Those aren’t the only two that go from being images on the page to full characters in this volume. Nightfall, who got a little attention in Fire and Flight, gets more here. Strongbow has several great moments — and they’re not all the same kind of moment; his challenge against Cutter, his rare verbal outburst when the Sun Folk question Dart, and his annoyed “‘Think you can get him?’ Huh!” thought bubble when he’s about to shoot the bird show different aspects of his personality. I can’t off the top of my head recall Moonshade getting a single line in Fire and Flight; here the argument with Leetah about following Cutter, plus the single panel where she lets herself be taken by the eagles after they carry off Strongbow, sell us in four panels on Moonshade’s unshakeable traditionalism and devotion to her lifemate. (Since I posted about gender before, it’s worth mentioning that I 100% believe Moonshade would have delivered that exact same rant if she’d been talking to a male healer who stayed behind when his female chieftain lifemate went off to search.)

Plus there are new characters! Suntop and Ember both have personalities that don’t simply map to “kid,” and they aren’t the same personality; the differences between the twins are clear from the get-go. We get Picknose and Oddbit and Old Maggoty, Nonna and Adar, the Bone Woman and Thief and Olbar the Mountain-Tall and Petalwing. The cast in Fire and Flight was big, but almost entirely in the background. Here a much larger percentage of the characters get their moments in the spotlight, and those moments are not wasted. We’ll get even more as the series goes along, with narrative side strands that step away from Cutter’s concerns to show that other people have their own lives, their own problems, for which Cutter is the one playing a bit part (if he’s involved at all). Done poorly, a large cast winds up feeling like an undifferentiated mass, with the narrative flavor spread so thin nobody winds up with much at all. Done well, this is one of my favorite types of story.

I’ll be making a post at some later point about the art, but I want to note that the concern for rendering the characters with detail extends to how they’re drawn. Part of the reason I never got into the Wavedancers story was that I honestly couldn’t keep the elves of that tribe straight: I don’t know if that was because I read it in black-and-white and the artist depended heavily on color or what, but they all smeared together for me. The way Wendy Pini draws her elves, they can be tiny silhouettes in the background of a panel and I’m still able to tell which character I’m looking at. They are, in every respect, individuals.

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Making the words count

In the course of all the protesting and petitioning and calling my representatives and so forth, I remind myself that my normal activities can also be used to make a difference in the world.

The VeriCon Charity Auction is live right now, with proceeds going to benefit Cittadini del Mondo, which is working to help refugees. My own contribution there is a signed copy of , but there are many, many other items on offer, and the cause is a very good one.

I’m also involved with Children of a Different Sky, an anthology of stories about refugees, whose profits will be used to benefit same. My intent is to write a new Driftwood story for it: that whole setting is about the survivors of calamity carrying on in a new place, which makes it very fitting for this kind of project.

The last thing is a bit more indirect, but still important. I’m one of the judges for Fantastical Times, a writing contest for Tampa Bay-area high school students. I know the likelihood that anyone reading this post being eligible to enter is small, but I want to mention it anyway. Because right now I feel especially bad for our younger generation, the people looking ahead to the future, wondering what they’re going to inherit from us — and wondering if they can do anything about it. Their voices matter. They’re the ones who are going to have to deal with the mess we leave behind. If you know of a similar opportunity for kids in your area, promote it. We need their vision, and we need them to know we’re listening.

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A Trip Down Juvenilia Lane, Vol. 8 (ish)

Appropriately enough, after the chronological trainwreck that was the previous volume, I never actually numbered this notebook. Because it was the one I was in the middle of using when I took the time to number the previous ones? Because I started using it after that? Not because I gave up on trying to fit it into the chronology; this one is remarkably coherent. Judging by the stories I was working on and the class notes that appear sporadically, this starts around the summer after my junior year, continues through senior, and fetches up in early grad school, without any huge skips or bits of Doppelganger showing up at the end.

I don’t know why, but I went through another phase here of writing a lot more stuff longhand — which is nigh unheard-of for me. I did it in high school because I spent all day in class and had to look like I was paying attention, but in college and grad school? Class occupied much less of my time per day, and I was taking much more in the way of actual notes. Not sure why I went on a kick of it here, but I definitely did; I have an almost-complete draft of “Such as Dreams Are Made Of,” a good-sized chunk of “Beggar’s Blessing,” and the entirety of “A Thousand Souls” — the latter with its wordcount helpfully written in the margins, because apparently I wrote it somewhere I didn’t have access to my computer right away, and that was the only way to figure out how long it was. (760 words in the first draft; counting wasn’t a very onerous task.) I have lots of planning for the still-unwritten novel that goes by the acronym TIR, including the page where I stumbled through a lot of phonemes on my way to the main character’s name. I have snippets from another unwritten Nine Lands novel, because I had an idea for an interaction between three characters and wanted to make sure I didn’t forget it. I have other planning for Old Project C, because this apparently coincides with another spate of work on that.

But the most interesting things in here, from my perspective, are the bits related to two novels that did get written. The first, from the standpoint of what shows up in the notebook, is Sunlight and Storm, the trunked novel I mentioned before. On the very first page I wrote:

I feel like I have this inability to tell the difference between an honest need for a break and simple procrastination.

Am I stuck on Sunlight and Storm? I don’t think so. Could I be writing something more powerful if I stopped and took a break and made some deep meaningful connection? Maybe. Or is that just laziness talking, uncertainty, stupidity. Who knows?

I can’t swear that taking a break would have produced any great improvement in my situation, but with the benefit of hindsight, I can say that powering through (which is what I did) left me with a completely lifeless first draft. The story had no energy; it was preachy and colorless and not at all what I wanted. It remains the one novel draft I have never tried to revise. Instead of attempting to clean it up, I wrote out a scene-by-scene outline of the story in its first incarnation, scribbled a few pages that I think are the single time in my life I’ve ever explicitly written out the themes of my story, and then started a white-page rewrite. I’m not sure I even looked at the original draft again, after I wrote that outline — I’d have to compare the files to see whether I kept any original text. My recollection is that I didn’t, but that could be mental erasure talking; that’s how much I disliked my first attempt.

Nor is that the only novel outline in this notebook. The other one is similarly an accounting of a book I’d already completed; I’ve never been much of one for outlining stuff before I write it. In 2001 I went to WorldCon in Philadelphia, and found that an editor I’d been submitting to was on a panel, so I hatched a plan to try and talk to her afterward. She’d written me a personalized rejection letter for what eventually became Lies and Prophecy, so I figured that would be my hook: introduce myself, remind her about the book, thank her for that encouragement, and then get out before I took up too much of her time.

I got as far as my name.

She remembered me. She remembered the book, before I even said anything about it. She remembered that I had another novel (The Kestori Hawks) in her slush pile. And she asked whether I was doing anything else in the setting of Lies and Prophecy. When I stammered out something to the effect of how I was thinking about revising it, she asked me to send it to her once I did.

And I know all of this because I wrote it all down in the notebook I’d taken to the con.

Elfquest Re-Read, Fire and Flight: Recognition

(This is part of my Elfquest re-read. There will be spoilers.)

I suspect I’ll wind up making several posts about Recognition during the course of this series, because it’s such an interesting and complex topic: a spontaneous soulbond, with bonus reproductive instinct. You can spin a bunch of different stories out of that, and the Pinis hit quite a few of them; in fact, I’m not sure there’s any point in what I consider the main canon (the first eight volumes, up through Kings of the Broken Wheel) where they play it completely straight. Cutter and Leetah come the closest — but before I get to that, let’s talk about Recognition itself.

I mentioned before that the Wolfriders have a serious birthrate problem, and this extends to basically all the elves except the Go-Backs (who have managed to ditch Recognition entirely; I don’t recall if we ever find out how). The instinct that drives Recognition is based on genetic matching; some magical instinct looks at another elf and says “yep, you’d make a good kid with me,” whereupon the two of you bond at a psychic level and feel an urge to get it on. Savah says in Fire and Flight that “Recognition insures that your offspring will number among the strongest and most gifted of our race” — which would run the risk of elitism, the special super-awesome Recognition-born children vs those who happen the normal way, except that apparently Recognition is just about the only way elves can have children. Out of the seventeen Wolfriders in the present day, only one (Pike) was born outside of it, and that’s considered a noteworthy thing. Later on, Nightfall and Redlance will need Leetah’s magical assistance to have a kid. Now, something I read — I don’t remember where this was; probably in an interview or something from the Gatherum or maybe even the RPG — said that the Recognition instinct gets less selective the older an elf grows, which is why an elf can turn around one day and find themselves bonded to a person they’ve known for centuries. But essentially, without Recognition, you’re unlikely to reproduce. And only the Go-Backs, who have ditched the impulse entirely, seem to have more than about two kids max.

When your birthrate is that low, your species is going extinct. I don’t care how long you live: if your replacement rate is that abysmal, then you’ll barely maintain population in good times, and bad incidents will whittle you down one bit at a time. Madcoil took out six elves who had only four children among them. Shale and Eyes High both died after a single kid. Rillfisher left only Dewshine behind, and Treestump hasn’t Recognized anybody else since then. This is especially a problem when your super-picky reproductive instinct may wait for three or five hundred years before deciding, okay, I guess that person will do. That’s three or five hundred years in which you might get killed without having any children at all.

So: Recognition is narratively fascinating, but logically kind of dumb. You’d either need to just run with the elitism, keeping Recognition-born children in the minority and having most being conceived the normal way, or you need Recognition to be way more active in an elf’s early years, so they have a better chance of reproducing before something takes them out. And either way, most of these elves need to be like Woodlock and Rainsong, bringing more than two kids into the world.

Of course, the story is less interested in the pragmatic implications of Recognition than it is in the narrative aspects. Which is fine, because that’s what I’m ultimately interested in, too.

Listen to Fred Rogers’ Mother

Fred Rogers, the uncanonized saint of American television, said it best: When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’

(via Making Light)

That is, in essence, what these tikkun olam posts are for: they’re a place to find helpers, to remind yourself that they’re out there, and even to motivate yourself to be one of them. So that when you’re like ickle Fred Rogers, the world might seem a little less scary.

So share your news of how you’re helping, be it big or small. Are you doing volunteer work, either through a formal organization or an ad hoc arrangement with someone you know? Are you changing your own life so that you’ll be a better citizen of your town, state, country, planet? Have you made a donation to some good cause? Don’t feel like everything you mention has to be new; continuing efforts are just as good as one-off or additional things. And remember that everything is fair game, even if it’s not very big. Sometimes the little gestures mean the most.

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