Marie Brennan's Blog, page 125

You're a handsome devil. What's your name?

This came up in the comments on Sovay’s LJ, and it turns out to be much too long to fit into the comment limits. Besides, I’ve told gaming stories here before and been assured that I can actually make them interesting, so why not share the story with all of you?

This is the tale of Hantei Seikiro Shosuro Arikoto the man currently known as Ensō, an NPC in my Legend of the Five Rings campaign. Also known as, my best effort to date at creating a Magnificent Bastard.

For those who don’t know L5R, its setting, Rokugan, is very much fantasy!Japan with some other Asian elements thrown in. It has the courtliness of the Heian Period, the warfare of the Sengoku Period, and the bureaucracy of the Tokugawa Period, with a dose of folklore and mysticism. My campaign takes place in the Togashi Dynasty AU I created when I started freelancing for the game, wherein the canonical founder of the Dragon Clan instead became the first Emperor, and Hantei (who in canon was the first Emperor) instead founded the Owl Clan. The effect of this is that our Rokugan is much more wuxia and supernatural than the usual run of L5R.

When we were setting up for the campaign, one of my players told me that a) she wanted to play a male character and b) wanted to have a tragic romance in the vein of Subaru/Seishirō —

<pauses to allow people familiar with those characters to stop screaming>

— wherein her PC would fall in love with some guy and then be horribly betrayed* by him.

She expressed no opinion as to whether this should be a matter of him heel-turning for some reason, or him being evil all along and it only becoming apparent at the moment of betrayal (which would be the Seishirō model). I contemplated a bunch of different possible flavors of villainy — but in Rokugan, a lot of the chief options involve spiritual corruption of the sort that can only be healed by Plot Hammer. Besides, if the corruption was involuntary it wouldn’t be much of a betrayal, and if it were voluntary . . . that would be kind of hard to forgive. (She wanted at least a thin thread of hope for her PC to cling to, that the guy could be redeemed.) It would fit the setting for his betrayal to be of the sort where he chooses his duty over his heart, but that didn’t really fit the flavor we were going for.

Enter the Scorpion Clan.

I think of the Scorpion as the Malkavians of L5R. Just like Malks in Vampire: The Masquerade, they’re a type of character lots of people think would be cool to play, but doing them well? That’s a different matter. The Scorpion are the Clan of Secrets, the Clan of Lies, the Emperor’s Underhand. In an empire of honorable samurai, their ethos is “necessary villainy.” Their job is to be the bad guy so the clans will have an enemy to keep them from uniting against the throne, and to do dishonorable things so their more honorable cousins don’t have to. The failure mode of the Scorpion, naturally, is unnecessary villainy, because when you’re a pack of ninja and dirty tricksters, it’s easy to get into the habit of doing whatever you like. But done right? The Scorpion are awesome. And I was determined to do it right.

The PCs are all Owl Clan samurai, so I made a Scorpion sleeper agent posing as one of their own. He trained as a Shosuro Actor — a school whose students learn to masquerade as other kinds of people. When he finished his training, the Scorpion murdered a Hantei kid who was about to go train as a bushi (warrior), used magic to face-sculpt their guy into passing for the dead one, and sent him off to start a new life as an honorable Hantei bushi. Which he did, quite successfully, for a number of years.

Here I should note that in L5R, “Honor” is one of the stats on your sheet. It changes based on your actions, can be perceived by other people, and has a mechanical effect on how well you do at resisting things like Fear effects. So the man now known as Hantei Seikiro was performing all the actions of a high-Honor samurai, all the while knowing that he was a despicable liar. I ended up resolving this by giving him several ranks of the Perceived Honor advantage, while capping his actual Honor at 3.9, meaning he could never rise out of the category labeled “Untrustworthy.” It seemed the best compromise, and ended up being a good way of representing his eventual conflict, which was that he got so good at pretending to be honorable that he started to wish he really was.

So the PCs come along and Seikiro hitches himself to their wagon as the yojimbo (bodyguard) to Kitsune Reishin, the one he’s going to have the tragic romance with. (This is slightly hilarious because Reishin is Chosen by the Oracle of Earth, and your Earth Ring is the stat that supplies your hit points. Reishin needs a yojimbo less than just about anybody in the party: looks like a delicate flower, takes damage like a concrete bunker. But falling in love with your yojimbo is a classic scenario, one that comes equipped with all the hurt/comfort opportunities you might want.) Things go along swimmingly for a while, with Seikiro using his Shosuro Actor training to encourage Rei to fall for him . . . and, of course, falling for Rei in return, which he isn’t supposed to do. The player knows this will go wrong at some point, but doesn’t know when or why.

It starts to fall apart when the PCs find a mirror in the haunted forest they’re assigned to patrol (the Shinomen Mori, for those playing along at home). It’s Shosuro’s Mirror: an obsidian artifact created by the founder of Seikiro’s real family, and given to the founder of the Scorpion Clan. Centuries ago in my campaign’s timeline, it wound up at an Owl Clan monastery, by means that make Owl samurai look uncomfortable and change the subject. (The Hantei in particular are supposed to be quite honorable. Like many of the setting’s high-Honor families, their failure mode is the arrogant assumption that they’re better equipped to deal with something than those dishonorable scumbags over there. If making sure an artifact as dangerous as the mirror is safely locked away means stealing it, well . . .) The Scorpion stole it back; their thieves were pursued and died in a battle in the forest; the mirror was lost. But now it’s found again, and Seikiro reports this fact to his handler.

A mad scramble ensues, with the Scorpion ambushing the PCs when they’re supposed to meet up with a Hantei who will guide them to the monastery where the mirror will be secured once more. The Scorpion plan involves killing all of the PCs and leaving Seikiro “nearly dead;” he’ll drag himself back to civilization and report the tragedy, with his cover secure. But because this entire enterprise had to be thrown together at the last second, it starts to fall apart, leaving Seikiro facing a choice: defend the man he loves and the people who have become his friends, or prove his loyalty to his clan by turning on Reishin and taking the mirror.

He makes the wrong choice.

Which you knew he would, because you read the beginning of this post. But there are two additional complications. First off, all four of the PCs are Chosen by one of the Elemental Oracles: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. But this is Legend of the Five Rings, and so their backstabbing Scorpion traitor companion? Is of course Chosen by the Oracle of Void. He knew for years that a day would come when he’d have to choose between the Owl and the Scorpion, and when that day came, he was determined to choose the Scorpion. But the actual choice ended up being between the fate laid on him by the Celestial Heavens and his temporal loyalty . . . and he chose wrong.

Second, the most unforgivable sin a Scorpion can commit is to betray his own clan.

I’ll skip over the weirdness wherein Rei’s non-existent ghost twin starts soul-popping Scorpion ninja out of their bodies and tries to do the same to Seikiro and when Rei stops him (because love, even if betrayed) Rei ends up getting pulled into the Void. Seikiro snaps his wakizashi in half, because in Rokugan that’s the symbol of your honor, and absconds with the mirror. The other PCs fight off the Scorpion attack and pursue Seikiro through the Shinomen Mori — tracking him by way of magical messenger birds bearing death poems — but because the forest is weird, they lose not only their quarry but an entire year in there. When they come out, they decide to go incognito to the Scorpion capital, where Imperial Winter Court will be beginning soon, because that will give them a chance to steal the mirror back (again) and fulfill their duty after all. Everybody thinks they’re dead, so the Scorpion won’t expect it, right?

The man formerly known as Seikiro is at Winter Court, now under his real name: Shosuro Arikoto. He’s a complete asshole and a borderline alcoholic, because the Celestial Heavens have cursed him for his betrayal, and he’s also lugging around a homebrew disadvantage reflecting the fact that he keenly feels the gap between the honorable man he pretended to be and the honorless piece of shit he actually is. Also, Rei is (completely unconsciously) sending him poems, which appear burned into the floorboards or etched into the inside of his mask**, which is enough to drive anybody insane. Eventually he figures out the PCs are still alive — not realizing that Rei is only quasi-alive, being an incorporeal manifestation projected out of the Void — and now, oh joy, he gets to make that choice again!

His Cunning Plan ™ is this: he gets Rei alone while people are outside of Winter Court for an event, using this as his one last chance to kiss the man he loved and betrayed. (Because of course Arikoto is the one person who can touch Rei. Remember, the goal here is angst.) When Rei tells the others they’ve been made, Arikoto lures them to what looks like an ambush and goes Full Metal Bastard to provoke them into killing him — because that way they’ll get the satisfaction of revenge, and he won’t have to decide whether to report them to his clan or not. Unfortunately for him, they figure out what he’s trying to do (though not why) and decline to cooperate. One of the PCs tosses a piece of “Seikiro’s” broken wakizashi at him and they walk out.

At this point Arikoto can’t dodge the choice any more. Does he report the PCs to the Scorpion? Or does he keep their secret?

This is Rokugan. He chooses Door Number Three: he picks up that piece of wakizashi and commits seppuku with it.

Which brings Reishin sprinting back into the cave to heal him (scorecard now says Rei has twice saved the guy who betrayed him). A conversation ensues which features things like Arikoto saying “apparently I can’t serve either clan with honor” and having his abject state aired all for the world to see — or at least all the PCs — especially since Rei has used magic to see his various advantages and disavantages (missing only the one that says Arikoto loves him back). They don’t exactly trust him yet . . . nor should they, and he tells them that himself. They wind up leaving him in the cave to ponder his failure to kill himself and the untenable position he now occupies. For an added twist of the knife, one of the other PCs tries to reassure him that the Scorpion prize the virtue of Loyalty above all, so maybe they’ll understand his loyalty to the group?

His response, which she did not hear, was “You don’t know my clan. This path ends on a tree.”

After this, Arikoto was fresh out of fucks to give. He figured he would die horribly in the near future, so in the meanwhile, he might as well throw away what remained of his honor to help the PCs in their goal. This culminates him him pretending to help the Scorpion investigation against them, luring the leader of that investigation to attack the PCs with insufficient forces, and then cutting the guy’s throat — on holy ground, no less. Retrieving the mirror features enjoyable highlights like a “best of all possible worlds” dream realm where he really is Hantei Seikiro, meeting the ghost of the murdered kid whose place he took (which has been imprisoned in a bag for all the years since), and coming face-to-face with the founder of his clan, whereupon he has to admit that he’s betrayed the fundamental principles of the Scorpion***. Coming out the other side, after the mirror is delivered to the Emperor instead of the Owl, he has a lovely stretch of time wherein the Scorpion know he’s a traitor but, by imperial fiat, are not allowed to kill him — so instead they make his life a living hell. Oh, and that “murder on holy ground” thing earned him a type of divine wrath where sake = instant alcohol poisoning, so he can’t even drink his troubles away. Throughout this all, he is convinced that, while Rei does still have feelings for him, he’s doing this best to get over that and is making good progress. So naturally, the tiny shred of honorability that still remains in Arikoto’s soul says he should keep his own mouth shut re: feels. After all, he manipulated Rei into falling for him in the first place, their entire relationship is built on lies and betrayal, and Rei has a duty to his clan/family/lord to get married, not to moon after a worthless Scorpion bastard****. Plus the other Scorpion would totally use this against them both. Better to just stay silent and let Rei get over him.

Which blows up spectacularly when Rei recites a poem at court that is a coded but extremely public declaration of love for him.

The Scorpion can’t kill either Arikoto or Reishin (yet). They can, however, torture Arikoto and use magical messenger birds to send the sound of his screams to Reishin every night. Which they do. While Arikoto does his best to fuck them over any way he can during his daytime non-torture hours. This finally ends when the PCs resort to having a Nezumi (giant rat creature) enact a ritual that erases his true name from existence, causing everybody but celestial beings and themselves to forget anybody named Hantei Seikiro or Shosuro Arikoto ever existed. But hey, at least he’s spared one final indignity: only the Nezumi knows his true name was a dysfunctional hybrid of “Hantei Seikiro” and “Shosuro Arikoto,” reflecting the way he was torn between those two identities. Wiped clean and given a chance to start over, he asked the PCs whether he should be honorable or go on being their Scorpion Friend who would do the dishonorable things so they wouldn’t have to; they hemmed and hawed until Rei finally told him to be honorable. So now he’s going by the temporary name of Ensō and trying to remember how to not be an asshole ninja murderer.

This came up on Sovay’s blog because we were talking about characters having their shameful secrets aired in front of the people they’ve been trying to keep those secrets from. It’s an experience Arikoto has suffered through repeatedly; at this point, he has very few secrets left. Off the top of my head, the only things the PCs don’t know are (ROT-13 again) gung ur’f gur fba bs n Lbtb, gung ur fgntrq n qhry va juvpu ur tbg jbhaqrq qrsraqvat Ervfuva fcrpvsvpnyyl gb rapbhentr Erv’f nggnpuzrag, naq gur shyy rkgrag bs uvf qvegl gevpxf va gurve qrsrafr. Most of them have even figured out that he loves Rei back, though Rei is convinced otherwise. (Downside of being Chosen by the Oracle of Earth: Rei is stubborn like a stubborn thing, and is determined to filter all of this guy’s actions through a “he doesn’t actually love me” lens.) Will the two of them find happiness despite their flaws? In a normal world I would tell Rei to run for the hills, but this is a story, so yes, they will. Eventually. Once they get their heads out of their hakama.

After all, as Om Shanti Om taught us: if the ending isn’t happy, then it isn’t the end.

***

*Here I should note that at the time, I forgot she had only seen X/1999. Where those two are undeniably messed up — but not half so badly as they are in Tokyo Babylon, which she had not read. She only knew the general outline of what happened there. I . . . might have gone overboard in inflicting angst on her, because I took Tokyo Babylon as my yardstick. Oops?

**All Scorpion wear masks. It’s their thing. Also how the Owl didn’t recognize him the moment they showed up to Winter Court.

***In a way which perfectly upheld their fundamental principles. But like the instance of Cassiel’s Choice in Kushiel’s Dart, the Scorpion could never acknowledge that; doing so would make it no longer perfect.

****ROT-13’d in case my players read this: Ur’f npghnyyl gur onfgneq fba bs n Fubfheb ybeq. Nf gur Y5E cynlref nzbat lbh unir cebonoyl nyernql thrffrq, uvf zbgure jnf n Lbtb — obea vagb n snzvyl jubfr zrzoref ner nyy phefrq gb orgenl jungrire gurl ybir gur zbfg. Frvxveb vaurevgrq gung phefr, naq gevttrerq vg jura ur ghearq ba Erv.

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I aten’t dead

I came home from my trip with a broken toe and then promptly went down with a cold, so things have not been very exciting around here. Also I have page proofs to deal with. Page proofing while one’s head is filled with glue is fun times, lemme tell ya.

I have this vague ambition to post about all the ports of call on my trip, maybe with pictures. We’ll see if it happens. There’s no way on god’s green earth I’m going to get all my pictures edited in time for that to happen (I averaged 308 per day of sightseeing, which after an initial cull drops to a mere 191. Of which more will get deleted, I’m sure. But still); on the other hand, I might be able to pick out a couple of representative pics to clean up and post. None of that is happening while my head remains filled with glue, though. I mostly just want to nap. And stare vacantly at the TV. It’s very nearly all I’m good for right now.

Exciting news is en route, though. The sort of exciting news where I don’t quite know what it’ll be when I announce it, because right now multiple possibilities are up in the air. It makes my life complicated, but it’s a good kind of complication to have.

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

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Absent With Leave

Normally I remember to mention this more than 24 hours before I depart, but: I’m going on vacation. :-D

My husband and I are going to Venice for a few days, followed by a cruise to Barcelona, stopping in Dubrovnik (home of many locations you might recognize from Game of Thrones — I’m looking forward to taking photos), Kotor, Corfu, Naples (saw Pompeii last time, so we’re gonna go to Herculaneum, eeeeee), Rome (bring on the Etruscan necropolis!), Florence, Monte Carlo, and St. Tropez. Three weeks door-to-door, and most of it the lovely laid-back relaxing kind of vacation you get when you’re on a cruise ship.

I will not have internet access for most of that time, so if you send me an email, don’t expect a very rapid reply. :-) When I get back, I hope to have some exciting publishing-related news to share with you all . . . .

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

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Puppy Post-Mortem

So the Hugo Awards have been handed out, and the result is: fandom as a whole said in almost every instance that it would rather see No Award than a Puppy candidate win. I’ve heard the factoid bandied about that No Award has been given five times in the previous history of the Hugos; this Worldcon added five more to that total, in Novella, Short Story, Related Work, and both Editor categories, all of which contained no candidates not from one or both slates.

I’m okay with this, and in fact I’m one of the people who voted No Award with a liberal hand. I did this primarily as a way of registering my opposition to slate tactics (regardless of who uses them); in most cases, though, it was also an accurate reflection of my feelings on the nominees. In the work categories (as opposed to the personal categories) in particular, the items on offer were just . . . not that good. The best of them was moderately entertaining, but not, in my opinion, Hugo-worthy. Did the fact that they came from slates incline me to look more critically than I might have otherwise? Perhaps. But I’ll note that I also voted No Award in a category that wasn’t all Puppies, because I honestly didn’t think there was anything on the ballot, Puppy or otherwise, that really deserved the rocket.

Of course some of the Puppies are declaring victory, because they set this up as a situation where any outcome could be spun as a win. Their candidates win? Victory! Proof that there’s a cabal that has been unfairly locking Their People out, and the voters really just want good old fashioned fun! Their candidates don’t win? Victory! Proof that there’s a cabal which is unfairly locking Their People out, just like the Puppies have claimed!

Quite apart from the risibility of the entire “cabal” notion in the first place, I think there are two key items which undercut that narrative. The first is the success of Guardians of the Galaxy, which (if you look at the raw numbers) almost certainly would have gotten on the ballot anyway without Puppy support, and which held a commanding lead over all of its competitors through all passes of voting. In other words: people are happy to vote for good old fashioned fun, when they think it’s good. The second is the success of The Three-Body Problem, which several Puppy standard-bearers said they would totally have put on the slate if they’d thought of it in time. Again: evidence that people are not a priori conspiring against the kind of books Puppies like, just because of politics. Good books will win out, where “good” is defined as “sufficiently pleasing to a sufficiently large percentage of Hugo voters, according to whatever complicated set of criteria each voter uses to judge whether they are pleased.”

I want to make special note of three people: Larry Correia, Marko Kloos, and Matthew David Surridge. All of them were on the slates; all of them withdrew from the ballot early enough that the next item up could be added in their place. Correia’s withdrawal added The Goblin Emperor, which ran a close second to The Three-Body Problem in the voting stages. Kloos’ withdrawal added The Three-Body Problem itself — the book that ultimately won. The same goes for Matthew David Surridge and Best Fan Writer, putting Mixon (the eventual victor) on the ballot. I think it says quite a bit about the effect of the slates on nominations that the works they initially crowded out did so well when it came time to actually vote, and I want to thank all three of those men for withdrawing.

Going forward? Well, I haven’t heard yet whether the “E Pluribus Hugo” proposal fared well during the business meeting; I hope it did. I have heard rumors that next year’s Official Puppy Organizer intends to approach it more as a recommended reading list than a slate; I hope that pans out as described. In the meanwhile, I’m trying to keep track of things (and read more widely) for nominations next time around. I will be paying particular attention to those individuals from the slates whose work struck me as worthy in its own right, and nominating them for 2016 if they keep it up. It’s my way of compensating for all my No Award rankings this year: a small thing, maybe, but better than nothing.

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

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Writing Excuses Three-fer

If you’re a writer and you’re not familiar with the Writing Excuses podcast, you’re missing out. It’s a weekly show with Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler, Dan Wells, and Brandon Sanderson, on a wide-ranging variety of topics related to the writing of fiction. And if you remember me complaining during my Hugo Packet binge about how looooooooong most of the podcasts were? The tag line for Writing Excuses is “Fifteen minutes long, because you’re in a hurry, and we’re not that smart.” That last part is a lie (they are that smart), and the length is sometimes more like 15-20 minutes — but these are episodes you can listen to pretty easily, without having to set aside a cross-country trip or something to get through more than one.

They also have guests from time to time. So while Mary and I were in Salt Lake City during our tour, we got together with Howard and Dan (Brandon was absent) to record a few eps for later use. Three, to be precise, all of which have now gone live:

10.28: Polytheism in Fiction
10.30: Q&A on Middles
10.33: Combat

Recording those was a lot of fun. Like doing a panel, but more condensed. In and out before you run out of things to day — in many cases long before I ran out, but that’s a good thing, as it means I stayed energized and engaged the whole time. And if you like the general tenor of those episodes, you’ll like Writing Excuses: it’s like that all the time, except with Brandon Sanderson substituted in for me. :-) (And if you don’t like listening to podcasts, check out the comment thread; there’s a dedicated fellow who puts together transcripts a little while after each episode airs.)

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

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The Fitbit Effect

[If you are the sort of person for whom reading a discussion of fitness and weight is going to be detrimental to your state of mind, you may want to skip this post.]

I’ve been seeing the “ten thousand steps” thing around lately — the idea that your health can be improved by the relatively simple tactic of getting off your butt and walking more. I doubt there’s anything magic in 10K specifically, of course; it’s just a nice round number that’s easy to remember. The underlying point seems reasonably valid, though, in that we have a growing body of evidence to show that sitting for large stretches of time is not very good for you, and our species evolved on the assumption that we’d be spending a lot of time in motion.

One of the places where I saw the 10K thing added the statistic that a particularly sedentary person may walk only 1-3K steps per day. This made me wonder: how many steps do I walk on an average day? After all, I have a desk job, and my office is about twenty feet down the hall from my bedroom, so I was guessing the number wouldn’t be particularly high — but I didn’t really know. I’ve had a pedometer app on my phone for quite some time, but since I carry my phone in my purse, it doesn’t count the steps I take around the house when my purse is on the floor. Furthermore, at one point I decided to test its accuracy by mentally counting my steps on the way home from the post office, and checking it against my phone’s count. I didn’t expect the app to be terribly accurate . . . but it was off by such an appallingly large margin (roughly 50%, if memory serves) that I decided to go ahead and get a Fitbit. (Charge HR, for anybody who’s curious.)

The Fitbit isn’t perfectly accurate, either. If I’m carrying something in my hands or moving especially slowly (ergo not swinging my arm), it may not register the step. Conversely, it’s been known to count the movements I make while brushing my teeth as “steps.” I figure those two things come out in the wash — and besides, as one review I looked at pointed out, the real function of a Fitbit is not as a pedometer, but as a motivator.

And in that regard? It works brilliantly.

Turns out that I get roughly 3-5K steps in a normal day if I don’t leave the house. Most of these are attributable to the fact that the TV and the kitchen are downstairs, whereas the bedroom and my office are upstairs. (It’s not uncommon for me to climb 20 flights of stairs in a day, just moving between rooms.) If I leave the house for an errand, this increases to more like 5-7K. Not nearly as bad as I thought . . . but also nowhere near 10K. Unfortunately, the structure of my life means that increasing the amount I walk is easier said than done, unless I walk purely for its own sake. And for a while I did that — going to the gym just about every day, entirely so I could walk on the treadmill. I kept this up for long enough that it became apparent to me that, okay, the walking part is a habit I’m capable of maintaining; but if I have to go somewhere else to get it done, treating that as a separate part of my life from the stuff I normally do, then sooner or later I’m going to fall off the wagon.

Which is why I’m now the proud owner of a Lifespan desk treadmill. I already had a GeekDesk; my office is just barely large enough that with a little rearranging, I can fit the treadmill underneath. I pull it toward me when I want to stand up and walk, and push it back when I’d rather sit (at which point it becomes a foot rest, because I can’t get it entirely out of the way). It’s heavy, but manageable. And it turns out I can manage a nice, steady 2 mph pace even while typing; if I’m only watching something or reading, I can go 3+. So now my treadmill time can be integrated with the stuff I’m doing anyway, and if I log my time and distance on Fitbit, it will estimate the steps I took — it doesn’t count very accurately when my hands are on the keyboard.

Result: I manage 10K quite easily, and often do more than that if I bother to try. I can trundle along for half an hour, forty-five minutes, even an entire hour, without really noticing the time go by. Getting started is (unsurprisingly) the hardest part, but once that’s done, it’s no problem. I can even work on a story while walking, though at the moment I think I still prefer sitting for that; this is best for email and blog posts and other such things.

Does walking more make a difference? Well, mileage varies (heh) and so do metabolisms — but in my case, yes. My weight has been creeping slowly upward for a while now, and it went a bit faster when I was half-immobilized by ankle surgery last year; it had reached a point I wasn’t all that happy with. Walking more, combined with some very minor changes to my diet (on the level of “stop eating when I’m no longer hungry, rather than when I’m full” and “if two restaurant dishes both sound good, go with the healthier one”) have caused me to drop about 5 lbs. in the last two months or so. It’s a slow change, and I’m sure I could make it go faster if I were more focused on making the numbers go down. I’m deliberately not getting more focused on that. Because what I really want to do here is train myself into habits that I know I can keep, rather than institute short-term measures that I’ll abandon once I hit my target weight. In fact, I’m trying not to even have a target weight, other than “whatever ends up being my equilibrium when I’m walking at least 10K steps a day and trying not to stuff myself.” We’ll see what that ends up being.

In the meanwhile, I’m less sedentary than I was. And when the Bay Area stops pretending it’s Texas (it was 98 degrees Fahrenheit here yesterday, for crying out loud), and my office stops being melty death hot, I think it will be a very pleasant way to work.

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

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Done.

I have finished my eighteenth (!) novel. Final tally, for those who have been following the dance of the yo-yo: 56,583 words, which means it ultimately fell about 3.5K short of goal. It will need some expansion during the revision stage, but that’s okay.

Yes, that wordcount is closer to the YA range than the adult range. More news on this front when I have any to report — but don’t hold your breath.

Now, I go to sleep.

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

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Eeeeeeeeeeeek!!!! Or, how many people actually scream?

A couple of hours ago I asked on Twitter how women react when they see something terrible. My proximate reason for asking was that I’ve discovered Netflix has Murder, She Wrote available streaming; in watching it, I’ve been reminded of the standard-issue scream uttered by women in TV and movies when they find a dead body. You know the one: hands to the cheeks, mouth and eyes wide in horror, a high-pitched and wordless shriek coming from her mouth.

It’s always seemed weird to me because I don’t do that. Okay, to be fair, I’ve never come across a dead body. But I have accidentally lit myself on fire — my clothing, anyway — and my reaction at the time was to bellow “FUCK!” at the top of my lungs while beating at the flames with my other sleeve until they went out. The top of my lungs . . . but not the top of my range. Same thing when my husband accidentally kicked my badly-sprained toe, causing me no small amount of pain. I don’t scream so much as yell, often with a great deal of profanity.

So I posted on Twitter because I wanted to know: how many women out there do scream at such things? Is it the majority, and I’m a weird outlier, or is that just a convention of media that doesn’t happen so much in real life? Twitter anecdata thus far suggests a moderately even split; there are definitely women who do the high-pitched wordless shriek thing, but not an overwhelming majority by any means. (Also, at least one guy has testified to uttering a scream of his own when subjected to sudden pain.) It seems the trope isn’t unfounded, then, but it’s also not universal. Which, because I’m an anthropologist at heart, means I’m now wondering whether that reaction has become less common over time (as women are no longer socialized in the same way as thirty or fifty years ago) and whether our media depictions have changed as well.

I have no idea. But it’s interesting to think about, because the standard-issue scream has always felt so very fake to me.

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

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a belated (but not too late!) plug for Helsinki 2017

I’ve been meaning to make this post for ages; please forgive me for the delay.

I wanted to take a moment to promote the Helsinki 2017 bid for the World Science Fiction Convention. Why? Lots of reasons, really — starting with the fact that for something which bills itself as the World Science Fiction Convention, it spends an awful lot of its time in the U.S. and occasionally Canada, every so often venturing overseas to Britain, and almost never anywhere else. There are other countries with SF/F fandom, many of which are really enthusiastic and friendly and eager to be a part of the broader genre world. Second, I have a good friend (Crystal Huff) involved with the Helsinki bid, and everything she’s told me about Finnish fandom is absolutely wonderful. I have not the slightest doubt that if they host Worldcon two years from now, they’ll do a splendid job. And third, Wendy Shaffer spent the entire month of June posting Finnish heavy metal videos to encourage you to vote for Helsinki. And who can argue with that?

If you’ve already voted, of course, this post comes far too late. If you haven’t, though, there’s still time! Email ballots will be accepted until 23:59 Pacific Daylight Time on Monday, August 10th (i.e. about twenty-four and a half hours from when I’m typing this post), and if you know somebody willing to carry your ballot to Sasquan for you, those will be accepted at the con itself. Instructions for how to vote are here. There are four bids for 2017: Helsinki, Japan, Montreal, and Washington D.C. With all due love and respect for the D.C folks, it would be lovely to see the con go farther afield than that.

Admittedly, there is a price tag on voting. You need to have a supporting membership for Sasquan this year, and you need to buy an advance supporting membership for 2017 (which will be valid no matter which bid wins). Even if you don’t think you can go to Helsinki or Shizuoka or Montreal, though (or for that matter, D.C.), that still gives you Hugo voting rights, so you get more for your buck than just a voice in site selection. If you can spare the $40 and want to participate in the process, you still have time. Give it a look!

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

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The Traditional Mid-Book Yo-Yo

As some of you know or have guessed, I’m writing a book on spec this summer — a Sekrit Projekt. It’s going pretty well, though right now I’m kind of wondering if I can fit the remaining plot into my remaining projected wordcount.

Earlier today, I was freaking out a bit because I didn’t have remotely enough plot to fill out the wordcount, and the book was going to run short.

Now, if you’re a normal person, you probably assume this means I thought up some additional plot in between then and now. You would be wrong. Before I freaked out about insufficient plot, I was convinced I had too much plot. And before that, I knew I didn’t have enough, not by a long shot. Because I’m at That Stage of the process: the Traditional Mid-Book Yo-Yo.

It happens every time. This is the seventeenth novel I’ve written, and so I know quite well that because I am not the sort of person who outlines rigorously, I have to eyeball the amount of material necessary to get from where I am to the target length. (The only time I can think of when this didn’t happen to me was with In Ashes Lie. I knew a quarter of the way into that book that there was no way in hell it would fit into 110K: I emailed my editor, and she gave me permission to run over, so long as I warned her if it was headed north of 180K. So that one didn’t have a target; it was as long as it needed to be, which turned out to be 143K.) As I draw near, I have to keep checking in with my brain and gauging whether any adjustments are necessary. And I’m constantly changing my mind.

But at least I know that. Which means I can take the yo-yo in stride, trusting that I’ll be able to tell if I’m really going to miss my mark in either direction. And since this book is a spec project, it isn’t the end of the world if I do miss: the worst that happens is I have to look for ways to flesh the book out during revision, or I don’t manage to complete it before my self-imposed deadline. Either of which is fine, if annoying.

I think I’ll be in the target range, though. I usually manage.

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

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