Marie Brennan's Blog, page 106

A Trip Down Juvenilia Lane, Vol. 4

My fourth notebook dates to my senior year of high school (because there are calculus notes and Latin translations in it) and my freshman year of college (because there are personal notes in it, which I have no compunctions about tearing out before I send this off to be archived).

It is probably fair to say that my writing process has never been so well-documented as it was in this period, simply because of the circumstances of my life. In high school and early college I didn’t really take notes in class, because I mostly didn’t have to. (When the “lecture” consisted of the teacher going over the information that was already in the book, I didn’t see much point.) I just listened . . . sort of . . . and remembered stuff. But I needed to look like an industrious student, so I wrote stuff in my notebook, and sometimes it had to do with the topic at hand but most of the time it didn’t. The result is things like this:

Right there, documented for posterity, is the moment I had the idea of using the triquetra knot as the symbol of Starfall’s witches. There are countless little tidbits like that scattered through here: Poltergeist activity in Talman? says one page, a four-word query that led to a major scene in Lies and Prophecy. Another page has Five sections of witches. Name? followed by Ray in a different pen, as I worked out the structure of witch society in Doppelganger. There are worldbuilding tidbits that got abandoned, like the modes of address for the Primes; there are worldbuilding tidbits that got kept, like the top margin that has a few scribbled details on the psi-virus. There are two entire pages of me brainstorming setting details for the Nine Lands, evidence of me pursuing my goal of a world whose countries really were culturally distinct from one another — and given its placement in the notebook, after I had arrived at college, also evidence of how anthropology was feeding my brain.

I don’t know exactly when this habit ended, but I know it didn’t last beyond my days of taking classes, because it only happened when I was sitting around with a notebook in front of me for hours each week. These days my ideas sometimes get scribbled down on scraps of paper, but they’re more likely to stay in my head until they go into a story. There’s no record of the moment when I figured out the end of In the Labyrinth of Drakes, because it happened in conversation with Alyc Helms instead of when I was pretending to listen to a teacher. For years I had a tendency to jot down random names, phrases, cultural snippets, plot twists, and anything else that came into my head; eventually I developed a mark to put in the margin so I’d know which parts of any given page were about writing instead of class. It means I can watch myself think through things from back then in a way that just isn’t true of later work.

It reminds me of where certain ideas came from, too. For example, this notebook contains a lot of game notes: for my Vampire character, for my very short-lived Mage character, for Vampire sequel game I thought up and never ran, for the Highlander game I was running online. That latter had a female PC named Miryoko, and I remember that I knew “three syllables ending in -ko” was a common form of Japanese name (didn’t learn until later that it wasn’t that way in the time period the PC lived in), but I looked up “miryo” to see whether it was a legitimate Japanese word, and found it meant “charm or glamour.” Looking at it now, I’m pretty sure it means in the social sense, but it stuck in my head as the magical one, and yep, that’s how one of the protagonists of Doppelganger got named. The Head/Hand/Heart division of the witches comes from the comic book Elfquest, the three trials Cutter and Rayek go through when their rivalry over Leetah annoys her enough to make them fight it out with each other. Old forms of the stories get preserved: the scenes from Lies and Prophecy in here still feature a professor named Shields, because that was a perfectly innocuous name for Grayson until the plot headed off in directions that had a lot to do with shielding and it became a distraction. (And yet for all of that, startling amounts of text in here went almost verbatim into those first two novels.)

This notebook also features extensive evidence of a writing habit I had to kick before I could really make progress. It used to be that I would get an idea for a scene or even just a brief interaction, and I’d write it — out of context. Both Lies and Prophecy and Doppelganger got started that way, me hopscotching around to do the fun bits and then having to stitch them together into a coherent narrative fabric afterward. I didn’t manage to finish a novel, and I’m not sure I could have managed to finish a novel, until I made myself write more linearly, because that was the only way to make sure the stuff in between the fun bits was also good story rather than the bare minimum of connective tissue, and to make sure the key moments were properly grounded in the preceding text. These days I’ll sometimes let myself skip ahead if I’m really stuck and need to remember why I’m excited about the project — but even then, I usually write it in a separate file, to remind myself that any and all of it is subject to change once I get there properly. Non-linear writing works great for other authors, but not me.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/788720.html. Comment here or there.

Excerpts from MLK’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail

(Jim Hines posted this to his blog earlier today; I’m reposting it because it is timely and well-chosen.)

*

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

…

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

…

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured…

-From Letter From a Birmingham Jail

Written by Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 16, 1963

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/788264.html. Comment here or there.

It’s Appreciate a Dragon Day!

The internet tells me that today is Appreciate a Dragon Day. I can think of no finer way to celebrate this than to give away an advance copy of Within the Sanctuary of Wings. To enter into the contest, all you need to do is post a comment or email me describing the type of dragon you would most want to have. Is your dream dragon big enough to ride on, or small enough to keep in the house as a pet? European-style or Asian-style (or some other style)? Scaly or leathery? A fire-breather or otherwise? Do you want a teleporting Pern dragon, a magical D&D dragon, a feral beast of a dragon, Puff the Magic Dragon? Share your dragon dreams for a chance to win the book!

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/788008.html. Comment here or there.

Rogue One: The Villains

As promised, here is part two of my dissection of Rogue One and how, if I were given a magic wand to reshape the story, I would have done it. Spoilers ahoy, mateys! If you missed part one (all three thousand words or so of it), you can find that here.

Before I get to Krennic himself, two villain-related notes. First of all, I forget which friend/post/review pointed out there’s an easy solution to the Grand Moff Tarkin Uncanny Valley Problem, and it’s right there in canon: have him appear via projection, where the image quality is not very good. A blue and flickering Tarkin could chew out Krennic to his heart’s content without distracting anybody with the shortcomings of his skin texture or anything like that. And second, have Darth Vader’s first appearance in the film be when his lightsaber flares to life in that hallway.

That was a brilliant entrance! Except it wasn’t his entrance. First we had that pointless scene on Mustafar or wherever it was that I’m going to pretend didn’t happen because Darth Vader doesn’t make stupid puns. We didn’t need the scene, and if we needed the scene it didn’t have to be Vader Krennic was talking to. Save him for the end sequence, the moment when we realize the story is going to dovetail precisely with the beginning of A New Hope. In the midst of pyrrhic triumph, here’s Vader cutting apart a hallway full of Rebel soldiers like a black-armored Terminator. Why, for the love of little Yodas, would you undercut that? <sigh>

But those are side notes. I’m here to talk about Krennic, the central antagonist of this whole tale.

Todd Alcott, whose blog I’ve been following for years, has a great post about Krennic that looks at him as the Death Star equivalent of a film producer: the guy who “knows somebody” and can get a project from idea to completion. The way Todd sees it — and I think he’s right — Krennic’s underlying goal in this film is to be recognized for his work, to get a pat on the head from the Emperor for a job well done.

Which is where my problem with Krennic comes in. Okay, he wants recognition for his work. Unfortunately, I don’t give a damn one way or another whether he gets it.

Krennic is not a good guy, so I am not rooting for him to get any sort of imperial reward for building the Death Star. Does that mean I am therefore opposed to his goal and looking forward to seeing him fail? No — because pats on the head or lack thereof are wholly irrelevant to the story I’m invested in. From the outset, Rogue One faced a challenge: when I realized what the first anthology film would be about, my reaction was, “but we already know how it ends.” Steal the plans for the Death Star? We know you’re going to succeed, and the Death Star will be destroyed. Now, the writers of this film understood the answer to that challenge, which is that when the What is already known, you make your story about the Why and the How. (Romance writers understand this better than anybody. The point of a romance novel is not to surprise anybody by the fact that the leads wind up together; it’s to build a story out of how they get there.) Rogue One sets out to explain A New Hope, how Leia got those plans and why something like the Death Star has such a crippling weakness that a single shot can blow the whole thing up. It does a pretty good job of answering those questions. But Krennic’s quest for glory has no bearing on them: he won’t get accolades if the Death Star is destroyed, obviously, but whether he gets accolades will not influence the fate of the Death Star in the slightest.

And that’s why I walked out of the theatre wishing they’d taken a different angle with him. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea, because not only does it clean up his trajectory and create tension, but it provides us with a counterpoint to the themes of the Rebel side.

Quite simply: have Krennic’s goal throughout the movie be to find the leak, put a stop to it, and make sure nobody higher up the chain of command ever knows the leak was there.

There are three major places where Krennic acts: on Jedha, on Eadu, and on Scarif. Line those up so they’re an escalating series of Krennic trying to solve his problem — there’s a leak and it might undermine the Death Star — and coming up short. In his first scene, we see his pride about the Death Star suddenly stumbling when he finds out an imperial pilot has defected with vital information. (This is the one realm in which having that point repeated is justifiable: Krennic, being a bad guy, will have a completely different response to it than any of the heroes.) Krennic then scrambles to find and deal with Bodhi — and because Bodhi’s already vanished into the mess that is Jedha, Krennic decides to kill two birds with one very large stone. By blowing up the holy city, he can a) make sure he takes out the turncoat (nuke the site from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure) and b) conduct a small-scale test, making sure his precious Death Star is working like it should . . . before he has to demonstrate its capabilities for somebody important.

He doesn’t know that Bodhi escaped Jedha, but he’s got bigger problems anyway. The guy is just a cargo pilot: what does he know about the Death Star, anyway? Some underling of Krennic’s tells him, with the cringing behavior of a messenger worried he’ll get killed, that Bodhi seems to have gotten his information from somebody on Eadu. Like, one of the engineers. Off goes Krennic in a rage to find the source of the leak. It is, of course, Galen Erso — and here we get the alternative I mentioned in my previous post, which is that we have Krennic kill Galen instead of the Rebellion doing it. Not only does this avoid the problematic question of “why doesn’t Jyn hate the Rebellion forever and refuse to work with them anymore,” but it fits in with Krennic’s trajectory, which is stop the leak and hide the bodies.

But before he dies, Galen brags to Krennic that he’s been a worm at the heart of the Death Star apple this entire time. Having just whacked Galen/seen him whacked, Krennic is left in a panic: was he lying? He had to be lying. There’s no way the Death Star is vulnerable. Right? It worked just fine on Jedha. (An act that gets Krennic chewed out by Tarkin, because the Empire didn’t approve Krennic’s test and is now scrambling to cover up for it.) Surely everything’s all right.

. . . but what if it isn’t?

The only place with a complete set of schematics is Scarif. So off goes Krennic again, dragging one of Galen’s poor surviving subordinates, to study the plans and reassure him that there’s no problem, or if there is a problem, it is totally fixable and nobody will ever know.

Approaching Krennic this way means his goals are set directly in opposition to those of the heroes. If he succeeds in stopping the leak/fixing the problem before the heroes can take advantage of it, their attempt to destroy the Death Star will fail. Doesn’t matter that we the audience know they will succeed; stories of this kind work by putting us in the heads of the characters, who don’t know. We’ll be on the edges of our seats, watching Krennic try to close off avenues of progress one after another, knowing the heroes are continually working on incomplete information and staying barely half a step ahead of their enemy.

And — this is my favorite part — it creates thematic contrast. See, Krennic works for the kind of outfit where failure is meets with fatal punishment. We can underscore this by having him kill the subordinate who tells him the source of the leak is on Eadu. So even though Krennic could probably stop the Rebellion’s shoestring espionage effort in its tracks simply by admitting there’s a problem and letting his superiors take care of it, he doesn’t. Because going that route will almost certainly mean his own execution. (Do they really need him anymore? The Death Star is basically complete. The producer’s job is over.) So Krennic puts his own self-interest and survival ahead of the bigger picture. Why shouldn’t he? Nobody on the side of the bad guys, with the possible exception of Vader, seems to be a true believer, someone wholeheartedly invested in the idea that the Empire is great and good and must be triumphant even if it means laying down your own life to see it happen.

. . . oh, hey, that rings a bell. While Krennic is undercutting his own salvage efforts in a doomed bid for survival, our heroes are risking and ultimately sacrificing their lives for something bigger than them.

All of this is a relatively small change for Krennic. He still goes the same places and does pretty much the same things; you’re only changing his dialogue (e.g. on Scarif he’s not looking at Galen’s communications but rather going directly for the same goal the heroes have) and cutting some extraneous crap (the Mustafar scene). But by rotating the pieces of his story just a little bit, you can make them click into a stronger whole: one where, instead of ricocheting between “there’s a problem and I have to do something about it” and “I want my pat on the head from the Emperor” he’s focused on a single goal, and that goal is bringing him head-to-head with the protagonists every step of the way. Add the icing of the thematic contrast, and I think it would have worked very well.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/787827.html. Comment here or there.

Rogue One: The Heroes

I wanted to make this post weeks ago, but I was in a cast and not typing much. So instead you get it now — which might be better, since at this point I imagine that most people who intended to see Rogue One in theatres have already done so. This post and its sequel will be spoileriffic, so don’t click through unless you’ve either watched the movie or don’t care if I talk about what happens.

Outside the cut, I will say that I enjoyed Rogue One . . . but it also frustrated me immensely, because I felt like it had so much excellent narrative potential that it just left on the table. In the comments on several friends’ posts, I said that it could have really punched me in the gut, but instead it just kind of socked me in the shoulder. I wound up seeing it twice, because we went again with my parents, and on the second pass Writer Brain kept niggling at things and going aw man, if only you’d . . . I know there were extensive reshoots, and I’m pretty sure I can see the fingerprints all over the film, though I can’t be sure which underdeveloped bits were shoehorned in by the revisions, and which ones are the leftover fragments of material that got cut. (The trailers offer only tantalizing clues: apparently none of the footage from the first two wound up in the actual film. You can definitely see different characterization for Jyn, but the rest is mere guesswork.) I just know there are all these loose ends sticking out throughout the film, and since story is not only my job but my favorite pastime, I can’t help but think about what I would have done to clean it up.

There will be two posts because my thoughts are extensive enough that I think they’ll go better if split up. First I’m going to talk about the good guys — what worked for me, what didn’t, and how the latter could have become the former — and then I’ll talk about the villains.

Part of what undercut Rogue One is how inefficiently it starts. The prologue is fine, but after that it goes all over the place and does very little in any of it. Having seen ickle!Jyn be rescued, we cut to her in prison. All this accomplishes is to tell us that a) time has passed and b) Jyn is in prison, because after a few seconds we move onward. Now we’re watching Cassian on some other planet meeting a guy we know nothing about and will learn nothing about because he dies a moment later. This tells us that a) Cassian sometimes does ruthless things for the Rebellion and b) there’s an imperial pilot who’s defecting. Zip, on we go to Jedha, where Bodhi meets some of Saw Gerrera’s men and gets black-bagged. From this we learn that . . . there’s an imperial pilot who’s defecting. Back to Jyn! She’s just been rescued by some guys, who if memory serves do not include Cassian in their number. Back to Bodhi! He meets Saw and declares that he’s an imperial pilot who’s defecting. Back to Jyn, now meeting Cassian in a context where they basically don’t interact; we find out that there’s an imperial pilot who’s defecting OKAY THANK YOU WE GOT IT THE FIRST THREE TIMES.

This is one of the places where I suspect we can see the reshoot messing things up. We seriously did not need to be told four times about the imperial pilot. Once was plenty, thank you.

Foz Meadows has done a very good job of pointing out what a bad job Rogue One does of developing its characters. It’s all the more frustrating because we’re given all the signs that the material for it is there; the characters have the outlines of interesting backstories, and the actors imply a lot of depth outside their lines. But the movie never fills in the sketches. Maybe the information I want is off somewhere in a tie-in novel, or maybe it’s left for the fanfic writers to provide, but either way it’s supremely aggravating, because if the movie had brought them to three-dimensional life, the ending would have been the fabulous gut punch I wanted. And I think the writers/director/etc could have done it pretty easily, if they had just had a clearer sense of where their narrative priorities lay.

Start with the fact that Jyn is our central character (though not the only driver of the plot). Like Luke, she’s the thread tying the story together. Instead of leaping from character to character without context, introduce things as they come up along her path. Cut to Jyn in prison, that’s great — but then stay with her. Show us how she interacts with her cellmate, the guards, etc, because then we’ll get a sense of what adult!Jyn is like. (Is she patient? Short-tempered? Working on a longer-term plan?) Put her on that transport, send her out into the deserts of Jedha — and then we see the ambush lying in wait. Who are these people? Good guys? More trouble? We don’t know. They swoop down on the truck, and oh look, here’s Cassian! He’s here to . . . rescue Jyn? But he doesn’t give a damn about anybody else on that transport, prisoner or otherwise, so we’re not quite sure whether he goes in the “good guy” column or not. Jyn isn’t sure either, so she tries to bail, gets taken down by HK-47 K-2SO. Right, okay, this rescue is not optional.

Cassian takes Jyn to the Rebellion, where Mon Mothma explains that they really really need Jyn’s help, uh, sorry/not sorry for the way we went about asking for it. Here is where we introduce the reason for all this effort: there’s an imperial pilot! Who’s defecting! He has information on the super-weapon the Rebellion knows the Empire has been building in secret. But Saw Gerrera has gotten hold of him, and the Rebellion needs Jyn to get Saw to let them anywhere near the guy.

Saw is, to me, one of the most frustrating parts of the film, and if I had to place bets, I’d say the entire no doubt fascinating story of him and Jyn and the Rebellion is one of the cutting-room casualties. Because seriously, he and Jyn have all this history, but the dribs and drabs we get tell us pretty much nothing. I wanted there to be emotional weight in their interactions; instead we got what sounded more like a collection of random lines without much connective tissue. And then he dies, with a line of dialogue that makes no bloody sense — one of the most common complaints I’ve gotten is that people don’t understand why he didn’t try to get out of there. How could we understand? All we know about him is that he’s too much of a rebel for the rebels, wears Darth-Vader-levels of life support, and uses alien mind-rape to question people.

Let’s go back to the thread of the story. Do more with General Draven: establish him as the head of Rebel intelligence, i.e. Cassian’s specific boss. He’s the poster boy for the ruthlessness of the Rebellion, the pragmatism to counterbalance the idealism. He’s what Cassian will turn his back on when he decides to side with Jyn later on. Because one of the other core problems with the movie is that it didn’t construct a strong enough arc of transformation for Cassian’s relationship with Jyn: for the “I believe you” moment to have any impact, we need lack of belief first. We need Draven and Cassian talking about how they require Jyn to get in the door, but beyond that she can’t be trusted; she ran with Saw Gerrera for years and her father is an imperial collaborator, so nobody knows where her loyalties actually lie. Cassian is under orders to get the intel from the imperial pilot and evaluate its worth/whack the pilot if he turns out to not be what he seems to be, and has carte blanche to eliminate Jyn, too, if she — sure, let’s use the phrase — goes rogue on them.

On we go to Jedha, with suitably blunt K-2SO banter along the way. This is another place where I think we can see the reshoot goblins making a mess of things: why these references to the Jedi temple and kyber crystals and all the rest? That stuff’s 100% irrelevant to the story. Yeah, okay, power source, blah blah blah, but since the power source never matters to the plot, that information never goes anywhere. I’m betting its relevance is in the editorial graveyard, along with Saw’s history. Even on a smaller level, we get Cassian saying something about going to talk to Saw’s (?) sister, but then either never meets up with her or their meeting winds up being pointless in light of what happens afterward. The result is that we get an unnecessary amount of aimless wandering around Jedha getting shots of nifty-looking aliens and muttering ominously about how dangerous the place is, and then a fight that would be more interesting if we knew more about Saw’s partisans and their tactics. This needs major cleanup: other than introducing Chirrut and Baze, and then putting the whole group into Saw’s hands, what do we want it to accomplish? I think we want it to develop the tension between Cassian and Jyn, i.e. neither of them trusting the other, and possibly to show us Cassian’s ruthlessness (this time exercised on somebody more narratively relevant than Throwaway Redundant Exposition Guy). Then we can have our fight, and off to Saw we go.

Here is where you introduce Bodhi, because here is where he’s interacting with our other protagonists and therefore has context. The whole mind-raping alien thing is pointless and counterproductive: it makes Saw massively unsympathetic and winds up having no consequences at all, since apparently all Cassian has to do is say “Are you the imperial pilot?” to snap Bodhi out of having his mind “destroyed.” Drop that — drop all three of his early substance-free scenes — and give him a more vivid introduction here, one that will develop both the Rebellion (based on how Cassian interacts with this guy who may or may not be an imperial plant) and Saw (based on how he’s treated a possible but untrustworthy source of information). In the meanwhile, Jyn and Saw have a reunion that tells us more about what Jyn did with his partisans and why she’s no longer with them, before Saw brings out the pilot’s information: a holocron with a message from her father.

Dear god that message dragged on forever. It needed to be way shorter; its emotional weight was so spread out that frankly I was bored by the end. But some clever editing could counterpose Jyn listening to her father’s voice against Krennic preparing to Death Star-nuke the holy city of Jedha, which would have the excellent effect of making us want to yell at the screen ENOUGH TOUCHING PERSONAL NOTES FOR YOUR LONG-LOST DAUGHTER WHEREVER SHE MAY BE GET TO THE ACTUAL SUBSTANCE OF YOUR MESSAGE BEFORE THEY ALL BLOW UP. In fact, triple-layer it with Cassian breaking out, because he’s convinced Jyn has just gone back over to Saw’s side and is no longer (was she ever?) trying to help the Rebellion at all. Then Jedha blows and there’s a massive earthquake, which interrupts the holocron’s playback: Galen’s gotten as far as saying he’s built a vulnerability into the super-weapon, but not as far as explaining what it is. Cassian comes charging in, but everybody kicks over into Let’s Not Dying mode and so the question of loyalties gets put aside while they run for their lives. Saw stays behind for some reason more plausible than “my path ends here” or whatever he says: he can’t move fast enough, or he tries but his mechanical prosthetics break, or he’s dependent for survival on something in his fortress they can’t replace in time. Zoom off into the dust cloud.

Once clear of Certain Death, though, all those tensions come blazing out like whoa. Jyn claims she saw a message from her father saying there’s a weakness in the Death Star, but conveniently she failed to bring the holocron with her and the only way to find out about that weakness is to go rescue her father from Eadu. Dude, if I were in Cassian’s shoes, I wouldn’t believe her either. Bodhi swears blind that no really Galen is a saboteur on the inside, and the man who inspired him to become a turncoat for the Rebellion — but since Bodhi’s own bona fides are still less than 100%, the whole thing reeks to high heaven. When Cassian radios in, though, Draven tells him this is a great chance to eliminate the main engineer behind the Empire’s weapons program. Sure, by all means, use the imperial pilot to sneak into Eadu — to kill Galen Erso. Cassian expresses doubts: if the chance to rescue Galen comes up, wouldn’t that be the best course of action? Then they can question him and learn useful things. Draven says no. Cassian knuckles under, but we can see he’s starting to really chafe at being Draven’s blunt instrument, and the mentality that says eliminating potential threats is always preferable to taking the chance that some of them might actually be friends.

Eadu’s narrative shape is mostly okay, though I found its staging clumsy. Jyn somehow gets into a deep valley and then up the world’s longest ladder while Krennic’s having a very short conversation, Chirrut and Baze wander off the shuttle more or less so they can do five seconds of fighting and that’s it, Jyn goes charging out onto the platform as if she doesn’t have the first notion what she’s going to do once she’s out there — I want this to be the moment when Jyn’s experience with being a guerrilla fighter becomes really apparent. Anyway, Cassian sees Galen trying to defend his subordinates and decides that he’s not going to just drill the guy through the head like Draven wants. He’s on his way back to the ship to formulate a rescue plan with the others when the Rebellion comes swooping in, because Draven heard the doubts in their previous conversation and decided that overkill was the way to go. Kaboom, etc, Galen dies, but he uses his dying breaths to tell his daughter about the exhaust port and to insist that she give this info to the Rebellion so they can take down the Death Star.

Those dying breaths are important, because (again, as Foz pointed out), why the hell should Jyn help a Rebellion she’s not a part of when they just killed her father? The film just leaps over that chasm without comment. I might actually favor a different approach to Galen’s death entirely, but since it hinges on a fairly substantial change in Krennic’s arc, I’ll leave that for the next post.

Back on the shuttle. Confrontation between Cassian and Jyn; he points out that he didn’t shoot Galen as ordered, but this wins him very few brownie points. Jyn stonily insists that he take her back to the Rebel base so she can tell them what she learned . . . but again it’s information only Jyn heard, from an unreliable source, with no evidence to back it. Cassian is not optimistic. He’s right not to be: the leaders of the Rebellion argue (without the only black woman in sight being the one to argue in favor of giving up, kthxbye), Draven casts shade on Jyn every chance he can get, and even Mon Mothma points out that the only way they could make use of the intel was if they had complete schematics for the Death Star, and the only way to get those would be to stage a raid on Scarif. This suggestion gets summarily shot down, and Jyn scathingly condemns the entire Rebellion as a waste of her time.

Now we come to our emotional turning point — and with this kind of buildup, it will feel like an actual sea change. Cassian, having started from a position of “you are untrustworthy and I will shoot you in the head the instant I think you’re not on our side,” has come to believe Jyn. Furthermore, he’s tired of Draven’s lack of hope, his unwillingness to take a chance on people. He gathers a strike crew, Mon Mothma whistles innocently as she makes sure they have a chance to escape, and off they go, because the Rebellion is a many-headed beast and some of the heads are still more than ready to bite the enemy where it hurts.

Scarif? Scarif I would leave basically untouched, at least on the good-guy side. The beginning of the film was very weak for me, but by the time we got to the raid, I was all in, especially as I realized the movie was going to follow through on the fact that this was obviously a suicide mission. Foz Meadows said she would have been happier if somebody survived, but I’m okay with them all dying, because I think it makes a different — and to me, more powerful — statement about hope. The kind of hope where somebody involved gets to find out that yes, the risk was worth it and victory is on its way . . . that’s easy hope. The kind of hope where you give everything without certainty is harder. It makes me think of faith, of medieval Europeans pouring mountains of effort into cathedrals that would never be completed in their lifetimes. Jyn and Cassian and all their assault team die hoping, not knowing, not seeing. The resolution is left for others to enjoy.

. . . WordPress tells me I have written 2900 words on this post, and it’s only one side of the story. I suspect the villain side will be shorter, because I’ll mainly be talking about how I would restructure Krennic’s arc, which is less than half of the material. But yeah, uh: I have Thinky Thoughts about Rogue One. All the foundations are there, but the house built on them had a wall or two in the wrong place and was missing a lot of finishing touches.

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

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WITH FATE CONSPIRE now out in the UK!

If you’ve ever wished you could have a matched set of all four Onyx Court novels, now you can!

Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, and With Fate Conspire are all out now in the UK, in a lovely set of matching trade paperbacks. They’ve also had a few errors cleaned up, the dates reformatted to British style, and the spelling Anglicized, so on the whole, I feel comfortable in calling this the author’s preferred edition.

What to do with the pork seasoning?

I have a packet of really excellent-smelling pork seasoning.

I think I would like to make pulled pork sandwiches with it, because a slow-cooker recipe would be ideal for the logistics at hand.

How should I go about this? My pulled pork slow-cooker recipe calls for bbq sauce and a little bit of honey; should I just chuck the seasoning in with that (no, I have no idea what’s in it), or should I substitute something else for the liquid component? If so, what? Help me, o chefs more skilled than I!

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

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The “Best Series” Hugo

I’ve recently been reminded that the Hugo Awards are test-driving a new category, this one for “Best Series”:

…a multi-volume science fiction or fantasy story, unified by elements such as plot, characters, setting, and presentation, which has appeared in at least three volumes consisting of a total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the calendar year 2016, at least one volume of which was published in 2016.

Because I’d forgotten about this, I didn’t think to mention explicitly in my eligibility post that The Memoirs of Lady Trent qualify: the series is now four books long and roughly 370,000 words, and In the Labyrinth of Drakes came out in 2016.

Although I understand protests about the proliferation of award categories, I have to admit I’m glad to see this one added. A lot of SF/F work is done in series format, and delivering a good series is its own kind of challenge. I can read a bunch of books that aren’t individually the best books of their years, but the work in aggregate winds up being really memorable and satisfying, so I like the notion of having a way to recognize that fact. But I hope the final wording of the category, if it stays in, includes something about how a series that wins becomes ineligible for nomination thereafter; otherwise we may end up with a revolving-door situation where a small number of popular series win over and over again as their new installments come out.

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

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A belated Yuletide reveal

My cast is off; I’m still in a brace, but that’s as much to remind myself not to be stupid as for actual support. I’ll be easing back into things over the next week or two.

In celebration of my much-improved ability to type, let’s talk about what I wrote for Yuletide!

My assignment was for Mercedes Lackey’s Tarma and Kethry books, the Vows and Honor corner of the Valdemar setting. I wrote “Self-Reliance,” which attempts to recreate the case-of-the-week feel of the original book (which is partly or entirely a fix-up of the short stories Lackey had published). Kethry’s magic has been cursed to malfunction, but emergencies don’t wait while you sort that kind of thing out; she and Tarma have to go in anyway.

I’ve done at least one pinch-hit every year, and managed to uphold that streak with a fic I’d already written as a treat. Apparently I wasn’t the only one motivated to treat, because there were not one, not two, but three fics for the prompt “what if the Devil in the song ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’ was Crowley from Good Omens?” My contribution to the field was “The Devil Sauntered Vaguely Down to Georgia” (referencing Crowley’s description in the dramatis personae as “an angel who did not so much fall as saunter vaguely downward”).

Then there were two treats that stayed treats. The first is for the basically non-existent fandom of The LXD, a short webseries by the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers where dancing is basically a superpower. Because the third season ended on a cliffhanger and there never was a fourth season, my recip asked for fic resolving the fact that two of the good guys had been brainwashed into serving the villain. The result was “Breathe. Stay calm. You’re gonna be OK.” — which was an interesting exercise for me, because while I have thirteen years of dance in my background, the closest I got to the street styles that dominate the LXD was a small amount of hip-hop influencing my jazz teacher. But I like trying to put dance into prose, so this was fun to write.

My last fic was a treat for someone who has treated me in the past. They asked for fic of Zero Punctuation, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s series of breathless and colorful game reviews; I promptly thought of his distaste for quick time events, and thus was born “PRESS X TO NOT DIE,” which sends an amnesiac Yahtzee through the history of video gaming, starting with Colossal Cave Adventure and going on from there. I had a lot of fun researching this one, figuring out what game genres to represent, deciding which titles to use as iconic examples of same, and then watching YouTube gameplay videos so I’d know how to describe them.

As for my own gift, I got “A Day at the Cattery,” following Miss Climpson when the Cattery of Strong Poison has grown into a large and well-established enterprise.

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

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And so 2017 begins

It is the first of the month, and the first of the year. 2017 seems likely to be difficult, so let’s talk about tikkun olam.

The comment thread is open for your news of repairing the world. Have you made a donation lately? Have you given your time and effort to help out somewhere? Have you found a way to be a better citizen of the world? If so, please tell us about it. And if you have plans to do something along those lines in the coming weeks, tell us about that, too. Even if it’s a little thing. Even if it’s tiny. This is a time to share good things; good does not stop being good because it is small.

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

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