Marie Brennan's Blog, page 127

In which I help to launch THE DRAGONS OF HEAVEN

You may recall that my good friend Alyc Helms just published her first novel, The Dragons of Heaven. Well, this Saturday at 3 p.m. she is doing a reading and signing at Borderlands. And if you come to that event, you will get to see something special . . .

. . . which is to say, a cast of thousands* performing a certain scene from Alyc’s novel. Including yours truly, in the role of a fox spirit, for which I will trot out my best “bored Cate Blanchett” voice (as Alyc tells me that’s what all of her fox characters sound like in her head). So come at 3 p.m. to see the extravaganza!

*by which I mean about half a dozen

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

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My Westercon Schedule

I’ll be at Westercon this weekend, and around a fair bit for programming. I may not have a huge amount of time to socialize outside of scheduled items, though, because I also have a copy-edited manuscript that’s due back on a very tight timeline, and the only way to get it done is to bring it with me to the con.

***

The Urban Supernatural: Open vs Hidden (Thu 7/2 4:00 PM)

Most urban fantasy assumes a hidden underworld of paranormal beings, but in some works the general populous [sic] knows about the supernaturals. How do these two assumptions play out differently in the storylines?

Bring Me That Horizon: Exploration as Fantasy and Science Fiction (Fri 7/3 12 Noon)

Sometimes the goal is not to bring down an enemy or win a war. Sometimes it is to voyage into the unknown to see what you find, to explore uncharted territories for wealth or country or even for knowledge.

Etiquette for Gamers (Sat 7/4 12 Noon)

A lot of the problems of RPG groups may actually be problems in etiquette. Panelists will talk about situations they’ve encountered and ways of solving them. Are there rules for good gaming manners?

Adapting Victorian Science (Sat 7/4 3:00 PM)

What are some of the more interesting Victorian scientific concepts and potential technologies that can be adapted for Steampunk?

Readers as Detectives-Invented Worlds as Mysteries (Sat 7/4 5:00 PM)

Since the canned lecture went out of style in science fiction, readers have had to figure out its imaginary settings from clues and hints. How much information is too little or too much? How do you make sure your readers will figure things out, without hitting them over the head?

Narrative and Dramatic Structure of Role Playing Games (Sun 7/5 11:00 AM)

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

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THE DRAGONS OF HEAVEN is out today!

Full disclosure: I’m not going to pretend I’m anything like objective here. Alyc Helms and I have been friends for fifteen years; we met at an archaeological field school in Wales, the same field school where I wrote a sizable chunk of Doppelganger. She’s one of about half a dozen people who read the original draft of the book that eventually became Lies and Prophecy, way back in the day. She crits most of my short stories; when I’m working on a novel and my plot runs headfirst into a wall, she’s the one I fling the manuscript wailing at her to hellllllllp meeeeeeeeeeee. I critiqued this book in an earlier draft — heck, I was a player in the game where Missy Masters first got created — and so when I tell you to go read it, I am very, very far from being an impartial judge.

You should still go read it anyway. :-)

Cover copy:

Missy Masters inherited more than the usual genetic cocktail from her estranged grandfather. She also got his preternatural control of shadows and his enduring legacy as the legendary vigilante superhero, Mr Mystic. After a little work the costume fits OK, but Missy is far from experienced at fighting crime, so she journeys to China to seek the aid of Lung Huang, the ancient master who once guided her grandfather. She becomes embroiled in the politics of Lung Huang and his siblings, the allegedly mythical nine dragon-guardians of all creation. When Lung Di – Lung Huang’s brother and mortal enemy – raises a magical barrier that cuts off China from the rest of the world, it falls to the new Mr Mystic to prove herself by taking down the barrier. It’s a superhero novel, a pulp fantasy novel, with lashings of kung fu, immense kick-ass dragons and an unfailingly sympathetic heroine – yes, it’s another wonderful Angry Robot title.

Alyc talked a while ago at Fantasy Faction about the trope of white protagonists going to the Far East for their training montage and coming home essentially unchanged. This is not that kind of book. Nor, for that matter, is it what I think of as the “Eat, Pray, Love” kind of book, where the exotic locale definitely changes the protagonist — because that’s its sole purpose in the story, to play catalyst for the outsider. Missy goes to China, yes, to learn from the dragon who trained her grandfather . . . but she gets caught up in his story, rather than the other way around. “It falls to the new Mr. Mystic to prove herself by taking down the barrier” not because the Dragons of Heaven need a white person to save them, but because somebody has decided that Missy makes a useful pawn in their game. She’s not so much rescuing anybody as trying to fix the mess she inadvertently helped create.

Style-wise, it’s like a mashup of The Shadow with Big Trouble in Little China, with a narrative structure that goes back and forth between “then” (when Missy, realizing she didn’t have the skills necessary to operate as Mr. Mystic, went to find her grandfather’s teacher) and “now” (when the repercussions of that decision are playing out). It is available in many lovely formats, from many lovely retailers. It is a very fun book (actually, I believe my description that wound up on the front cover is “a hell of a lot of fun”), and I highly encourage you all to go check it out!

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

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Reading to the T

When I was in grad school, I got a small amount of instruction in pedagogy: the art of teaching. Not a lot, because grad school tends to just chuck you into the deep end of being a TA and leave you to figure out swimming on your own, but a little. And one of the pitfalls I remember being warned about is “teaching to the T.”

Imagine your students are seated in rows of desks. Two groups will fall naturally under your gaze: the students in the front row, and those in a column through the middle of the room. That’s your T. By default, you will call on those students more often, give them more of your eye contact and attention, notice more quickly when they’re dozing off or misbehaving, because they’re in the places you will most commonly look. Students on the sides of the room and at the back, by contrast, will be neglected. In order to counteract this bias and be a good teacher, you have to remind yourself to look outside the T, to keep the entire room in your mind and distribute your attention equally.

Why do I bring this up? Because in the brouhaha over the Hugos, I’ve seen a lot of accusations to the effect of “all you PC liberals are the ones Doing It Wrong, because care more about the skin color or gender of the author than you do about the story.” And the other day I thought, no: it’s just that we’re trying not to read to the T.

The publishing industry — really, society at large — is a classroom with assigned seating. And you, the reader, didn’t assign it. Somebody else decided to stack the front row and that center column with mostly straight white guys: to give them more in-house backing, more marketing support, more reviews in major outlets. If you let your gaze rest in the default spot, those guys are the majority of the ones you’ll see. And they may have good things to say! Excellent contributions to the class! . . . but so may the students who have been relegated to the sides and back of the room. The ones you’ll wind up ignoring, if you aren’t conscious of the problem and taking steps to counteract it.

These calls to increase the attention paid to minority writers aren’t about prioritizing the identity of the author above the story. They’re about being aware of our tendency to read to the T, and working to overcome it. They’re about recognizing that being seated in the back corner of the classroom doesn’t mean a person has less in the way of interesting things to say than the writer who got put front and center. You can pretend all you like that publishing is a pure meritocracy, that the authors who get the bulk of the support and attention earned that purely on the basis of their own awesomeness — but doing that requires two things: 1) ignoring a heap of evidence to the contrary, and 2) concluding that yeah, all those women and minorities and so forth really just don’t write very good books compared to the straight white guys.

Don’t read to the T. Look at the whole room. See what’s out there, that you’ve been overlooking all this time.

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

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random stats for a Friday night

There’s a certain margin of error in this, because the word counts I record are for final drafts (when I remember to go back and update them from the original number), and sometimes final drafts don’t happen in the same calendar year as first drafts. But I just crunched the numbers, and while last year was my worst for short fiction* since I started actually writing short fiction — only 7700 words in two stories, one of which is a Bad Draft that needs a complete rewrite — it was my best year for total wordcount since 2001 . . . which was, not coincidentally, the last time I wrote two novels in one year. (I also wrote ten short stories that year. It was not long after I figured out how to write them, and I was on a roll.)

I like crunching these numbers occasionally because it puts things in perspective. My default tendency would be to mope and castigate myself for not writing more short stories in 2014; ergo, it is useful to be able to look at the number 192,700 and tell myself that no, actually, that was a pretty good year. I will never be one of those people who cranks out half a million words a year: trying would kill both my hands and my brain. But that’s two full-length novels and some short fiction. It ain’t bad.

. . . of course, it also makes me ambitious to top both of those metrics this year. I’ve already written two pieces of short fiction, so it’ll only take one more to cross that threshold. And with one of those “short” pieces being a novella, and a novel already under my belt with another one planned for this summer, I might actually make it. Depends on how long this second novel turns out to be . . . .

*not counting fanfiction

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

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A Rose by Any Other Title

I have this novella I’m trying to title, and the search . . . isn’t going well.

In the course of hunting for a suitable title, I’ve been thinking about the structure of such things. And, of course, having thought about that, the next thing to do is look at my own ouevre and investigate what sorts of patterns I use more or less frequently.

(What? I may not be a biologist, but Isabella gets her scientific turn of mind from somewhere. Also, procrastination.)

The material below the cut is a breakdown of every title I’ve put on a piece of fiction — and in one case, a piece of nonfiction — since I produced my first piece of theoretically professional work, leaving out those where the title was not wholly up to me. (Mostly pieces that amount to work-for-hire.) I’ve included unpublished works and fanfiction in the mix, since that expands the data set by quite a bit, but not titles that ended up being discarded along the way.

NOUN — 16

Chrysalis

#Coyotaje [transportation of illegal immigrants]

Doppelganger

Driftwood

Footprints

Gold

Kingspeaker

#La Molejera [The Grinding Woman]

Majesty

Mule

#Nesu-a [My Prince]

Ouroboros

Selection

Sovay

The Rest

The Rose

ADJECTIVE — 3

Eldest

Unlikely

Unquiet

NOUN’S NOUN — 5

The City’s Bones

Beggar’s Blessing

Schrodinger’s Crone

Shadows’ Bride

The Mirror’s Tale

NOUN AND NOUN/SEQUENCE OF NOUNS — 10

A Smile, a Laugh

Chains and Memory

Lies and Prophecy

Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing

Sunlight and Storm

The Moon and the Son

The Princess and the . . . .

The Wood, the Bridge, the House

Warrior and Witch (Witch)

Wisdom and Power

NOUN OF NOUN — 19/25

A Mask of Flesh

A Year of Sarain

Centuries of Kings

Daughter of Necessity

Deeds of Men

Echoes of the Wolf

Kiss of Life

The Ascent of Unreason

The Choice of a King

The Faces of Halloweentown

The Gospel of Nachash

The Kindness of Sisters

The Legend of Anahata

The Tropic of Serpents

The Vengeance of Trees

The Waking of Angantyr

The Wives of Paris

To Rise No More

Voyage of the Basilisk

+A Natural History of Dragons

+The Basics of Being a Lady

+The Damnation of St. Teresa of Ávila

+The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe

+The Fall of the Fortress of Brick

+The Life and Times of a Crusader King

ADJECTIVE NOUN — 21/26/30

A Devilish Exercise

A Prepared Spirit

A Thousand Souls

#Die erste Königen [The First Queen]

False Colours

Historical Curiosity

Impossible Things

Lost Soul

Mad Maudlin

Many Faces

One Spark

The Drowning Ships

The Last Wendy

The Perfect Vessel

The Snow-White Heart

The Twa Corbies

The White Lady

The Wrong Side

True Flight

Two Pretenders

White Shadow

*Desert Rain

*Execution Morning

*Hunter Dance

*Solstice Night

*The Kestori Hawks

+A Special Limited-Time Offer

+My So-Called Perfect Life

+One Last Prize

+The Pontic Rapport: Or, the Curious Cousins

NOUN ADJECTIVE — 3

And Everything Nice

Sciatha Reborn

Stories Untold

VERBING X — 8/9

Calling Into Silence

Crafting Chimera

Dancing the Warrior

Dying Old

Remembering Light

Returning to the Nest

Waiting for Beauty

Writing Fight Scenes

+Smiling at the End of the World

PREPOSITION X — 4/8

For the Fairest

In Ashes Lie

On Dragonfly Wings

With Fate Conspire

+From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review

+In the Labyrinth of Drakes

+On the Feast of the Firewife

+With Magic or Without

X PREP X — 9/13

A Heretic by Degrees

Clearbrook vs. the Strangleweed

Conversation with a Wolf

Crushed Upon the Shore

Darkness in Spring

Games in the Dark

Silence, Before the Horn

Tower in Moonlight

Welcome to Welton

+A Thousand Paths in a Single Step

#+Dai long wenshen de nuhai [The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo]

+Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood

+The Tough Guide to Yuletide

QUESTION — 5

But Who Shall Lead the Dance?

Can You Hear Me Now?

If You Have No Light

If You Listen

If Your Hands Are Cold, and the Fiddle Is Old

IMPERATIVE — 2

Be As Stone

Sing for Me

ADVERB X — 3/4

Just Right

Oh So Pretty

Once a Goddess

+More an Antique Roman

PHRASE/QUOTATION — 17

A Star Shall Fall

And Always Shall Be

And Blow Them at the Moon

Every Moment, I Dream of Sleep

It ends in a small white room

It’s Betty from Apartment 2204

Midnight Never Come

No Harm Ever Came From Digging Up the Past

No Man Needs Nothing

Nothing But One of Your Nine Lives

Salt Feels No Pain

Some Strange Eruption to Our State

Such as Dreams Are Made Of

The Memories Rise to Hunt

The Only Way to Be Sure

What Lies in Books

What Still Abides

RIDICULOUS :-) — 3

An Abecedary of Tragic Ends, Explicated for the Reader

Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes

Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual

OTHER — 1

Love, Cayce

(“Ridiculous” is totally a structure.)

+ Complex: the title mostly fits the pattern where it’s listed, but complicates the structure with adjectives or other elements drawn from different patterns

# Foreign: the title is sufficiently unfamiliar in English that its meaning may not be transparent to the average Anglophone reader

* Noun as adjective: the title is technically Noun Noun, but the first noun is being used adjectivally

***

Categories, by frequency:

Adjective Noun (21/26/30)
Noun of Noun (19/25)
Phrase/Quote (17)
Noun (16)
X Prep X (9/12/13)
Noun & Noun/Sequence of Nouns (10)
Verbing X (8/9)
Prep X (4/8)
TIE: Question (5); Noun’s Noun (5)
Adverb X (3/4)
TIE: Adjective (3); Noun Adjective (3); Ridiculous (3)
Imperative (2)
Other (1)

***

Despite my general allergy to the “Noun of Noun” structure (which I consider to be the most overused thing in fantasy), it’s hanging in there in second place. Ah well: at least I do what I can to liven it up, either by complicating the structure, or by picking unusual components to plug into it. I’m also somewhat started to find that I’ve got that many simple “Noun” titles; I would not have guessed it was so common in my work. I’m not surprised to find “Adjective Noun” leading the pack, though. When I first learned to write short stories, there was a stretch of time where pretty much everything I wrote had a title in that format, until I kicked myself into thinking up other possibilities. On the flip side, I’ve made remarkably little use of the “Noun’s Noun” format, which most of the time is just “Noun of Noun” doing a do-si-do.

The two I find particularly noteworthy are the “Phrase/Quotation” catch-all category, and “X Prep X.” I hadn’t realized I used the latter so frequently, though I knew it was a structure I liked. As for the former, the Onyx Court novels and stories notwithstanding, a lot of the examples there are from fanfiction. That suggests I feel more freedom to play around with fanfic, as opposed to my professional work. Given that back in 2005, a part of me was concerned that “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood” was too overwrought to use, I suspect I could stand to loosen up more with my titles in general — though maybe not to the extent of the “Ridiculous” category. ;-)

(Actually, that’s exactly the kind of thing I want to do with this novella title. The problem is, my brain has latched onto “In Your Heart Shall Burn,” which would be perfect except for the fact that it’s the name of a main plot quest in Dragon Age: Inquisition.)

Does this get me any closer to having a title for the novella? Nope. But it’s interesting to look at anyway. I’d be curious to hear what patterns exist in other people’s work, and what titles — of your work or others’ — you find particularly striking.

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

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bright doesn’t have to mean flimsy

My husband and I are finally caught up on both Arrow and The Flash, which means I can finally make the post I’ve been drafting in my head for a while. The following contains mild spoilers for both shows, as well as Daredevil. It also contains a fair bit of complaining about how much The Flash disappointed me, so if you really love it and don’t want to see someone dissect its flaws, you may not want to click through.

I feel conflicted about my reactions to these shows, because I’m on the record as saying that I’m getting tired of grim ‘n gritty as a narrative aesthetic, and being “gritty” doesn’t automatically make you more worthy than the cheerful option. And yet . . . as much as I wanted to like The Flash, as much as I cheered the advent of a superhero show that was bright and cheerful, it felt to me like the pursuit of brightness and cheerfulness too often resulted in a flimsy story. It’s possible to be perky and substantive! Really it is! But this is not that show.

Part of the problem was an issue of mundane craft: my god, it was frequently so badly written. The Flash is supposed to be populated with a number of highly intelligent characters — but most of them demonstrate their “intelligence” by spouting incredibly painful technobabble and inventing improbable gadgets during the commercial break. They do not reason intelligently. In fact, the story often requires them to act stupidly, because otherwise the plot won’t go. The episode with the shapeshifter made me want to throw something through my TV: even after the characters knew what they were dealing with, none of them thought to take even the most basic security precautions to verify the identity of the person in front of them. When Cisco used his drink as a Reverse Flash detector, my husband and I both said “That’s good thinking!” Then we looked at one other and said, “We shouldn’t be saying that in a tone of surprise.” Of course, thirty seconds later Cisco ran into the Pipeline so he could be conveniently trapped inside it with Joe. Because that was what the plot needed. Also: seriously? You guys decide to play around with changing the past, and Cisco — Mr. “I have seen popular media and the rest of you have not” — doesn’t have an immediate aneurysm at the thought of the possible paradoxes that might result? Even if he thought about it and ended up deciding it wasn’t really a danger because shutupjustpretendthismakessanysense, I want to see him address it.

Which is not to say that Arrow always has good writing. It doesn’t, and in particular the beginning of the first season was pretty weak. The only reason I kept watching was because I’d been told it got better when some character named Felicity showed up. Felicity? Is a “smart character” who actually behaves intelligently. She figures things out. She does the technobabble thing, but not all the time; she also solves problems in ways that actually make sense. It’s one thing to have your characters make bad decisions because of their flaws and psychological hangups and so forth. It’s another to have them just not think of doing the intelligent thing, when we’re supposed to believe that they’re smart.

But that’s the smaller of my two complaints.

My bigger one is that, while I don’t believe handling complex themes and ethical issues requires one to tell a story with a grim aesthetic . . . both Arrow and Daredevil do a substantially better job on that front. I could forgive stupid technobabble if The Flash explored how to navigate problems while still being a good, upbeat person. Alas, not so much.

Let’s start with the women. In the first season of Arrow — because I don’t think it’s fair to draw from all three seasons, against one of The Flash — female characters I recall being around on a regular basis include Thea, Moira, Laurel, Shado, and Felicity. (There may be others, but those five are an ongoing part of the story for sure.) I will not claim I liked all of those characters: Thea felt like the obligatory Delinquent Younger Sister, and Laurel was a pretty unconvincing excuse for a love interest. But there were five of them, and they all played important roles in one way or another, with their brains (Felicity) or their brawn (Shado) or their political connections (Moira). In Daredevil you have even fewer episodes to work with — but you still have Karen, Claire, Vanessa, Elena, and Madam Gao. And as I’ve said before, Karen is clearly a protagonist in the story, rather than a sidekick or love interest for the main hero.

In The Flash? We have Caitlin and Iris. (Plus Felicity as a guest star.) Caitlin exists almost entirely to facilitate Barry doing stuff (except when she gets her Boyfriend Plotline), and Iris exists almost entirely to be a romantic volleyball between Barry and Eddie. The whole business with her investigating the Flash is a narrative dead-end: I’m glad Iris figured it out, but she didn’t do so on the basis of of her investigation. (Also, apparently she has never been shocked with static electricity in her life.) It felt like make-work, a plot to keep Iris busy while the other characters did something useful.

And can I just say how much I DO NOT LOVE Joe’s behavior towards her? The show often seemed to think his proprietary attitude toward his daughter’s romantic life was endearing, but I am so very, very over the trope of fathers policing their daughters’ sexual lives. The guard-dog approach to potential boyfriends is creepy, not cute — and I just about wanted to punch Joe’s teeth out the other side of his skull when we got the scene of Eddie asking for his blessing before proposing to Iris. Not only does that approach piss me off (because it reinforces the idea that Joe is the gatekeeper to Iris), but Joe does everything he can to cock-block Eddie. Why? Because he’s certain his daughter will accept, and it will be a mistake, and a few years down the road she’ll be regretting ever having said yes because she really loves Barry, but she’ll be locked into that marriage because she won’t want to break her promise. And instead of, y’know, treating his daughter like a goddamned adult and talking to her about this, he’d rather try to save her from her own decisions. Like she’s still four or something.

Which Iris calls out! Yay! . . . and then five minutes later, it’s entirely forgotten. She yells at her father for infantilizing her, then gets over it in the next scene. She yells at Barry for lying to her about the most important thing in his life, then gets over it in the next scene. I can’t chalk this up to “their relationship overcomes the problem,” because I can look at Daredevil to see that approach done well. Foggy yells at Matt for not just a scene but an entire episode — and the fallout from that lasts even longer, as they tiptoe their way back toward something like a functional dynamic.

“Bright” doesn’t have to mean dismissing problems as if they don’t matter. It means that the problems are overcome, instead destroying everything forever.

Getting over stuff too fast is a problem elsewhere, too. It took until the penultimate episode of the season for anybody to mention that locking metahumans up in solitary confinement from now until kingdom come without benefit of trial is, y’know, not okay — and then it’s a minor secondary character, who’s more focused on the risk of prosecution than the fundamental immorality of the thing in the first place. Joe’s the only one who even seems to give her points a second thought, and — say it with me — he gets over it in the next scene. It feels like the writers said “all right, we’ve checked that box off the list” and went on with their business, never noticing that you need to do more than just check it off. Arrow started in a worse place (with Oliver murdering people, instead of just imprisoning them), but it not only pointed out the problematic nature of that, it actually did something about it: after people point out to him that, hey, he’s a serial killer, Oliver changes his behavior. Right now I’ve got no reason to think the heroes on The Flash won’t go right back to using the Pipeline the minute they have someone else to put in it. Because this is the cheerful show! The first rule of Basement Gitmo is, you don’t talk about Basement Gitmo!

I wanted the show to be better than this. People in Central City know metahumans are running around, even if they don’t know why; I wanted to see Barry argue that the Star Labs group needed to work with local law enforcement to develop a containment facility that could imprison such dangerous people after they got a fair trial. I wanted to see the characters respect one another, rather than taking away their decisions “to protect them.” I wanted female characters I gave a damn about, who weren’t guest stars from a different show. I wanted Cisco and Caitlin to be smart rather than “smart.” I wanted the driving incident of the show not to be a fridged mother. I wanted there to be things here I could admire.

Having ranted about all of that . . . there were parts of the finale I really, really liked. Barry acknowledging that Joe is his father, every bit as much as whatshisface in the prison is. Barry not playing roulette with the cosmos by rewriting the past. Somebody finally pointing out to Eddie that oh my god a holographic image IS NOT PROOF OF THE FUTURE — sorry, that’s me ranting again. I liked how Eddie stepped up after that, though I wish he hadn’t died. But those are spots of enjoyment in a sea of beating my head against the nearest surface.

I hope it gets better. (Arrow did.) I’d like to be able to enjoy this show on a regular basis, rather than sporadically every episode or two. But I don’t think I’m going to be watching season two, unless and until I hear people saying “man, it’s way stronger than it used to be!” I saw a blog post online months ago that opened by saying The Flash was a fundamentally better show than Arrow simply because it wasn’t angsty . . . but for me, that isn’t enough. Not remotely — especially when it contains material that ought to cause angst, but instead gets trivialized and tossed aside. If you just want to be perky, then don’t bring that kind of weight to the table. If you bring it, then carry it with grace, dignity, and compassion: show me such things are possible.

It can be done. But so far, The Flash isn’t doing it.

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

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Dear Fic Corner Scribbler

Dear Fic Corner Scribbler,

Welcome! I want to thank you for offering to write in one of my fandoms, and I can't wait to read your story. What follows below are some thoughts on each of them and what kind of story I'd most love to see, but of course feel free to follow your muse -- none of this is meant as a straitjacket.

***

Fandom: Howl Series
Characters: Howl Pendragon

One day I found myself wondering, out of nowhere: how the heck did Howl get from Wales to Ingary in the first place?

It's one thing to study magic academically; it's another to make it work, especially when you're coming (as Howl seems to have done) from 12-A, where magic is not really a thing. I have this notion that it involved the castle door -- that Howl didn't make the door, he just installed it in his Porthaven house and tuned it to the locations he wanted. But how did he find the door in the first place? Does he know where it comes from? What happened when he first arrived in Ingary? (Other than "hilarious antics," of course.)

If that's too daunting for you, then I'd also love to see the tale of Howl and Calcifer meeting, with Howl convincing Calcifer to become his fire demon.

***

Fandom: The Magicians of Caprona
Characters: Benvenuto

Normally Caprona gets nominated as part and parcel of the Chrestomanci series, but. Well. Look at the character I've requested. :-P

Yes, dear Scribbler, I am asking for fic about the Montana family's cat. I have no idea why this idea came to me one day, but it did, and then it refused to go away again, even though I got a fic for it last year. DWJ wrote fabulous animals -- dogs and cats both! -- and Benvenuto isn't just a strong personality, he's a major part of the Montana family culture. I want fic about his badass adventures in Caprona, his victory over rivals and courtship of lady cats, and most of all how he and the other cats fit into the magic of the city.

So I nominated this separately because I didn't want anybody to look at the Chrestomanci character list with the intent of offering or requesting "any" and then go, "what the hell? A cat? I'm not interested in the bloody cat." If you offered this fandom, seeing the sole character on the tag list, you are awesome and I love you already. And if you're just browsing for treat possibilities: c'mon. Benvenuto! How can you not want fic starring the Montana family cat?

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Fandom: The Chronicles of Chrestomanci
Characters: Christopher Chant, Cat Chant, Gabriel de Witt

While writing my Yuletide letter in a previous season, I came up with an idea that made me bounce in excitement at the mere thought of it. We know from the short story "Stealer of Souls" that Christopher took over as Chrestomanci and Cat arrived at the castle while Gabriel was still alive, which means that for a while there, you had no less than three nine-lived enchanters running around. How badass would it be if all three of them worked together on something? Especially given the wild differences in their personalities -- Cat earnest and young, Christopher sarcastic and adult, and Gabriel strict and old -- but all of them throwing around gobsmackingly large amounts of power, often in casual ways. I have no particular vision of what incident would involve all three of them; you can run with whatever suits your fancy. But I love the idea of seeing three Chrestomancis go to town on some problem, especially since it would give us a chance to see Christopher and Gabriel interacting when Christopher has grown out of being a twelve-year-old snot. :-P

I also have a (very optional!) crossover request involving this series, which is an idea that has really just possessed my brain and not let go. A passing reference in "Warlock at the Wheel" makes it clear that Chrestomanci's multiverse is the same as that in The Homeward Bounders. Which means that it's possible for Christopher to meet up with Jamie Hamilton.

I got a story for this in a previous year, and could probably read a dozen more takes on it without getting tired of the idea. What would Christopher (as an adult and Chrestomanci, not, I think, as a kid) say to Jamie? How long has Jamie been wandering, by the time the two of them run into each other? Do they meet up in Christopher's world, or somewhere out in the Anywheres? It isn't the sort of encounter that could fix anything, I imagine, though Christopher would probably offer to try; the anchor has to keep moving, and even Chrestomanci can't change that. But the encounter could be really intense. For all his sarcasm and flaws, I think Christopher would have a deep empathy for what Jamie's going through, and why. If that fires your imagination the way it did mine, then I'd love to read the result.

***

What follows are my standard "general notes" for fic exchanges, but in this instance I'll add that I'd like the level of violence and darkness to stay canon-compliant -- which means that stuff can be there (DWJ had a lot of surprisingly dark stuff in her work), but I don't want it to dominate the tone. I'm also not looking to see these books get sexed up.

Things That Are Yay: plot! (Casefic, etc. If you have the time and energy -- I know it can be a lot of work.) Exploration of character motivations, exploration/expansion of the setting. Fic that could fit into canon. Drama, up to and including aaaaaangst. Characters getting whumped on. Witty humour, especially if it's used as the jab to set up the dramatic roundhouse that follows.

Things That Are A-okay: violence, up to a point (see below). Non-explicit sex. AUs of the "what if this event went differently?" sort. Inclusion of nominated characters I didn't request. Inclusion of canonical characters who haven't been nominated. Original characters as needed for the story. Most povs, tenses, narrative formats, etc.

Things That Are Meh: straight-up character introspection. Nonfiction-style worldbuilding. Pure fluff. Second person pov without a really good reason.

Things That Are Nay: radical AUs like coffee shop, genderswaps, a/b/o, etc. Explicit smut and its associated kinks/tropes. "Five Things"-type stories (I've read some good ones, but that format rarely does it for me; I much prefer one continuous tale). Requested characters having only a cameo in the story, unless otherwise specified in the prompt. Gross-out humour. Humiliation. Characters being flat-out stupid. Character bashing. Torture porn, especially with female victims. Women being sidelined in general.

***

Thank you, and I hope you have fun!

Books read, May 2015

Read a good deal less than I expected to last month, mostly because my free time on tour was devoted much more heavily than usual to actual writing. I did get through a few things, though!

The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn, Usman Malik. Novella on Tor.com. I liked it well enough while reading it, but just a few weeks later I can’t remember much about it. I’ll note that I’m making an effort to read more short fiction this year, though (including short stories, which won’t get logged here), so I can have some idea of what to nominate when the Hugos roll around next year.

The House of Shattered Wings, Aliette de Bodard. Read for blurbing purposes; this will be out soon. The blurb I sent in was “If you think the image of Lucifer sitting on a throne in the ruins of Notre Dame sounds awesome, this is a book for you.” :-) Post-apocalyptic angel war fantasy in Paris. First, I believe, of an intended series.

Writing Fight Scenes My own books don’t count. Skimmed back through this one as a refresher for my own brain.

Hostage, Rachel Manjia Brown and Sherwood Smith. Sequel to Stranger, which I posted about here. This one moves somewhat away from the decentralized nature of the first one, which gave equal weight to something like half a dozen different pov characters; the structure of this one means there’s a stretch where the focus rests heavily on just two. Which entirely isn’t a bad thing; as I said about Stranger, having to shift between characters every chapter often risks losing my immersion in the story. It does give this one a different feel, though. I liked how Hostage was about the characters learning to live with the scars of what happened to them, and I also liked the ways in which Voske’s kingdom is dystopian without being wholly awful: the ruler is a terrible person, and terrible things happen there, but the residents also have things like electricity. I can look at that and see the possibility of major improvements in the future, if the cities start working together.

Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai, Michael Dylan Foster. Academic book on the supernatural creatures of Japan, and the changes in how they’re viewed between the Edo/Tokugawa period and the present day. Read for research purposes, and interesting, but way less about the details of actual yokai than I anticipated; he tends to pick out a couple of examples and explore them in depth, mostly through the lens of “here’s how this fits in with the zeitgeist.” Fortunately, I have other books headed my way that will take care of the other aspect.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/732929.html. Comment here or there.

thoughts on the depiction of rape in fiction

WARNING: this post is about rape in fiction, and considerations to bear in mind when including it.

Last week I posted some thoughts on Twitter about rape scenes in fiction — specifically, thinking about the possibility (the likelihood, sadly) that someone in your audience is a rape survivor, and contemplating what effect you want to have on that person. Those thoughts are the epiphany I arrived at while thinking through the larger issue; I want to write about that larger issue now.

If I felt like messing around with MS Paint, this would be a flowchart. It’s a sequence of questions I think you should ask yourself when you think about including rape in the story you’re telling, and points to consider depending on what answer you give. It should go without saying, but straw-man responses in the vein of “you want to ban people writing about rape!” will be summarily laughed out of the room. If I’m issuing any commands here, it’s don’t write about it blindly. Don’t make your decisions without thinking about them first.

Note: I’ll be speaking mostly of men raping women, rather than any other configuration. The rape of children is always, at least in my experience, treated as the horrific thing it is, rather than being titillating or background noise. The threat of men being raped (as opposed to the actual event) is often treated as comedy, which is appalling; some of the points below will apply to that, too. But mostly I’m talking about the problematic ways we depict men raping women.

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Question the First: Why am I including this in my story? What purpose does it serve?

There are a lot of reasons you might have one of your characters be raped. Some of them are better than others; all of them are things you should think about.

1. I need to show that my villain is evil.

. . . okay. But why rape? Why is that your go-to method for showing he’s evil?

It’s one thing if you’re writing a mystery about a detective hunting down a serial rapist. In a story like that, the bad guy raping people is the entire point. But if your villain is a genocidal tyrant? Then I kind of give the side-eye to the notion that you need rape to convince me he’s bad. If that’s true, you haven’t done a very good job writing the “genocidal tyrant” part.

But maybe you’re writing about somebody who doesn’t look like a villain at first blush. He seems normal; then you throw in some heinous act to reverse the audience’s perceptions. I ask again: why rape? Does it have to be rape?

The recent Daredevil TV series demonstrates handily that the answer to that last question is “no.” For those who haven’t seen it: they spent a fair bit of time (several episodes, I think) building up Wilson Fisk as a person — one involved in crime, sure, but maybe not thaaaaat bad. Then somebody pisses him off . . . and he beats the guy to death, with the finale being when he smashes his victim’s head with a car door until it literally comes off his body.

No rape. In fact, Fisk is notably courteous to the women he interacts with in the show. It doesn’t make him a good person; it just shows that antagonists don’t have to be misogynists. Rapist villains exist, sure — but I’ve seen so many of them lately that Wilson Fisk not falling into that pattern made him substantially more interesting.

If you want to write about rape to show a character is evil, stop and ask yourself why. Consider whether you’re just being lazy, leaning on that crime to save yourself from having to explore how dreadful his other actions are.

2. I need to motivate one of my characters.

. . . okay. But why rape? Why is that your go-to motivation?

In one of the recent discussions of this topic online, someone in the comment thread went into detail about his plans for a book he’s working on. (I won’t name the blog or the commenter; I don’t want to start a dogpile.) This example was admittedly unusual, because the victim in the story is a boy, rather than a woman. But the gist of the commenter’s point was that he needed something really, really awful to happen to the character in backstory, to explain his actions later in life.

To which many other people in the comment thread said: “What part of him seeing his father murdered in front of him and then being sold into slavery isn’t awful enough already?”

This is the flip side of the point I raised above. There are nine and ninety ways to motivate a character; it doesn’t have to be rape. Other possibilities include, but are not limited to: kidnapping, imprisonment, enslavement, wrongful conviction of a crime, theft or destruction of an irreplaceable possession, public disgrace, physical or mental abuse, physical or mental torture, death of a loved one — and that’s before we get into the non-traumatic motivations like love, idealism, ambition, and so forth.

And yet, time and time again, we have female characters being motivated by rape, and male characters being motivated by the rape and murder of their wives/sisters/daughters.

Try harder. Think about the emotional impact of everything else this character has experienced, and what else you can use if the current material isn’t enough. Ask yourself why rape is the best answer to this question, when it’s about as fresh as having a Dark Lord with Armies of Monstrous Minions as your villain. Even people who have been raped would not necessarily point to that event as their defining moment, the thing that propelled them into action thereafter. (Unless the “action” in question is “becoming an anti-rape activist.”)

3. It’s realistic. This kind of thing happens all the time.

True. (Unfortunately.) But are you applying the “realism” yardstick equally?

Men get raped, too. Quite often, actually, in wartime or military/prison situations. And yet — to use George R.R. Martin as a convenient example of this point — I don’t recall any instances of male/male rape in the Night’s Watch. Even though they’re an all-male military unit, many of whom are rapists already, deprived of female company, operating under increasingly lax disciplinary conditions. Martin tells us in detail about how they risk punishment to sneak away and visit prostitutes, but he doesn’t tell us about the in-house rapes that would logically be happening back at the castle. (It doesn’t matter that most of the men there “aren’t gay.” Neither are most of the men who commit this kind of rape in the real world.)

I haven’t seen any of Martin’s defenders say “his commitment to realism in sexual assault is great, but I really wish he included scenes of Jon fighting off Ser Allister Thorne’s rape attempts or coming across Pyp huddled in a corner after he’s been sexually assaulted again by some of the bullies.” You’re five books into the series before the issue really comes up, and then it’s in the context of needing to show that one villain is Super Awful Extra Bad, against the background radiation of all those guys who rape women as a matter of course.

The realism argument only holds water if you apply it fairly. Otherwise, it looks a lot like you’re actually engaging in misogyny and/or voyeuristic enjoyment, and using “realism!” as your fig leaf.

Also, consider this: there is an extent to which the realism argument contributes to normalizing rape — treating it as an inevitable occurrence we can’t really prevent. The sun rises, rain falls, and men rape women. But rape isn’t weather, and there’s something to be said for presenting worlds in which men do not rape women at the drop of a hat.

4. I have something I want to say about the causes and effects of rape.

This? Is a good reason. If you know the subject and have a thematic point to make about it, then you aren’t tacking it on for shock value or including it out of reflex. Which really ought to be true of everything you put in the story . . . but it’s especially important when you’re writing about a trauma that’s often been handled so badly in fiction.

***

If you have decided that yes, you really do need this in your story, then you proceed to . . .

***

Question the Second: Does it need to be shown onstage?

It’s entirely possible to have one of your characters be raped, without showing the event itself to the reader/viewer. Ergo, if you have answered Question the First with “yes, I need to have rape in this story,” then the next thing to ask yourself is whether you’re going to show it happening, and if so, why.

1. I need my audience to know the rape happened.

If this is your answer, then I feel confident in saying that you are doing a shitty job of writing about rape.

Why? Because if the audience has no other way to know it took place, then ipso facto, the event itself has no fallout. Nobody’s traumatized by it; nobody suffers consequences for their crime. It’s context-free. So yeah: shitty job. Try harder.

2. I need the audience to understand how awful it is.

This can be a good reason. But because the depiction of rape has gotten so problematic (see Question the Third below), showing the rape itself may not be the best way to achieve your goal. In fact, it can be counterproductive.

What you can do instead — and too many writers cheese out on this — is show the aftereffects. And no, I don’t mean the thing where the woman goes on a psychotic rampage to avenge her violation, or the manpain where the male protagonist thinks about how traumatized he is by his wife’s trauma. I mean doing research into what actually happens with rape victims after the fact, both in terms of their own response, and that of the society they live in. That gives you the horror, without the risk of titillation — and it makes sure you don’t trivialize the event by skipping the fallout.

3. There’s something which happens during the event that’s really important to the story.

Above and beyond “the character gets raped,” of course.

Again, this can be a good reason. If something particularly revelatory or transformative of character occurs, or the victim sees something plot-important while pinned to the floor — then yes, you may need to show the event itself. I know reactions to this example have differed wildly, but this approach is why I’m okay with the depiction of Lisbet Salander’s rape in the Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: we need to see her walk into that situation, and see her behavior during it, so that we understand the turnaround when we find out she recorded the whole thing and is using that recording as leverage against her rapist. This makes it clear that we’re dealing with a woman who values her financial and social freedom above her body, and will cold-bloodedly sacrifice the latter in order to gain the former. It would not be as clear if we didn’t see the setup and follow-through.

Just make sure you aren’t so focused on whatever happens during the scene that you forget to think about what happens after.

***

So you need this rape in the story, and yes, you need to show it onscreen or on the page. Now you ask yourself . . .

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Question the Third: How am I going to depict this assault?

This is where things get difficult. The unpleasant truth is, we’ve gotten so inured to female victimization in media — especially sexualized victimization — that showing rape onstage, without it coming across as titillating, is not easily accomplished.

I can’t divide this point into a tidy list of potential answers and their pros and cons. Instead, you have to ask yourself more questions. Whose point of view are you using? Remember that point of view encourages the audience to empathize with the character whose head they’re in; if you use the villain’s pov, then you’re pushing them to empathize with the rapist and his enjoyment of the event. You’re on safer ground with the pov of the victim — and if she’s not actually a character who merits getting pov, if she’s just some random woman the villain is assaulting because it’s Thursday and why not — then there’s a high chance (though not a certain one) that the scene isn’t really worth including after all.

Ask yourself: what effect is this supposed to have, and on which characters? Are you focusing on the victim, or on someone else? The latter can work . . . but it falls verrrrrrry easily into the Manpain Trap, where we’re led to focus on how the hero is suffering because he saw/heard about someone else’s rape, instead of how the victim herself is suffering. (Cf. much of the outrage over the recent Game of Thrones scene. I will note that I haven’t seen it yet, much less subsequent episodes, so I can’t comment on that one in detail.) Think of it this way: rape is, among other things, about denying someone their agency. When you use that violation as a motivating force in someone else’s story, you are denying the victim agency again, by not allowing her to be the protagonist of her own tale.

And ask: where is my camera/language focused? Am I writing this like smut, with my attention on what the body parts are doing? Or am I looking at the psychological side, so that the reader will get the impact of the event rather than the mechanics of it? Even if you mean for the mechanics to be horrifying, some readers will not process it that way. And some of your readers will process you as being part of that aforementioned group, or at least as catering to them. It doesn’t matter whether this is fair: it is the unfortunate consequence of the fact that the rape of women has been fetishized to an appalling degree in our society. If you want to not contribute to that, you have to use different tools and approaches than the people who do.

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It was round about this point that I had the epiphany I posted on Twitter, which is that a writer tackling this topic would be well-advised to imagine their audience includes one or more rape victims. If your audience consists of more than the half-dozen friends you’ve pressured into reading your story — and maybe even if it doesn’t — there may indeed be such a person in your audience.

How do you want them to feel, when they read this story?

When I say you shouldn’t make them feel like they’re being assaulted all over again, I don’t mean that you should soft-pedal what’s happening. I mean that there’s a difference between showing the horror in a fashion that is compassionate to those who have suffered it, and showing it in a fashion that is cruel to them all over again. But to know the difference, you have to understand what being raped is actually like, for Real Live People who have experienced it. You have to learn about when and how it happens; the ways different people process it, based on circumstances and individual psychology; and what happens afterward, physically, emotionally, and societally. Because you can’t be compassionate if you’re just making shit up.

If that sounds like hard work: then step the hell up. Or else don’t write about rape. If you screw up the realistic details of astronomy or tall-ship sailing, you’re going to annoy someone; but if you screw up the realistic details of rape, then you’re going to hurt someone. And we have enough people doing that already, thanks.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/732796.html. Comment here or there.