Marie Brennan's Blog, page 187

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Novel: A Novel, by Mirkwood Jones -- "I wept. I cried. I threw Proust and James and Woolf out into the street under a passing cement mixer, and put Jones in the place of honor."
The Interesting Professional's Family Member, by Nemo McBlanderson -- "An evocative tour de force from the critically acclaimed author of Something: A Novel, The Interesting Professional’s Family Member is a compelling meditation upon fundamental human truths."
Randy, by Anita Mann -- "He came for all the ladies in Sheboygan!"


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a final pack of dragons

Slightly belated, the final round-up for the blog tour. There will be other posts still forthcoming, but only in the sense that, y'know, I talk about my books sometimes, in interviews or guest posts or whatever. This is the last of the actual formal book tour.

***

Interviews:

Reflections of a Book Addict
Qwillery
A Word's Worth
Small Review
Bookalicious
Examiner (part of the "Never Have, Never Will" series)
Poisoned Rationality
Sleeps With Monsters (on Tor.com)
The Skiffy and Fanty Show (podcast)


The Sleeps With Monsters interview isn't about ANHoD specifically (but then again, by this time that's probably a point in its favor). Ditto the Skiffy and Fanty podcast, which isn't even really an interview per se; it's just us talking about mythology and fantasy and Star Trek and I can't even remember what all.

Guest posts:

On pulp adventure, Let Them Read Books
On finding the book's voice, Aine's Realm
On Judaism in ANHoD, AlmaNews ( anghara )
On the origin of my dragons, More Than Just Magic
The Victorians were crazy, Megan Likes Books
On the artwork, Starmetal Oak Reviews
Cultures and Obsession, Angels of Retribution (part of the Names: A New Perspective series)


Again, that last one isn't ANHoD-specific; it's more of a post I was asked to write, in which I mention ANHoD in the course of discussing how I name characters. But as long as I'm rounding up everything I've been posting on the internet lately, I might as well include it.

In that vein, I'll also mention my most recent BVC post is "The folklore mode of fantasy," in which I present my own personal home-brewed theory of which folkloric style fantasy as a whole most closely resembles.

And that's it for now. I'm revising the second book (and also facing some hassle wrt getting certain financial records for tax purposes), so I may be scarce around here for a bit.

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three conversations at once

I have other things I should be doing, but wshaffer made a very good point in the comments to my last post, so I'm back for another round. And at this point I've made a tag for the grimdark discussion, because I've said enough that you might want to be able to track it all down.

To quote wshaffer :

The thing that strikes me about the grimdark discussion is that there are multiple different-but-interlocking conversations going on at once. One is an argument about whether "realism" is grounds for granting a work a higher degree of artistic merit. Another is an argument about to what extent realism actually requires focusing on the darker and more unpleasant aspects of life. And the third is: supposing that we grant that the historical prevalence of misogyny and rape requires that they be addressed in realistic fiction, are there ways of portraying them that do no themselves reinforce misogyny and rape culture?

I love things like this, because they simultaneously clear up a bunch of confusion in my head, and make it possible to see things I couldn't before. Let's take her questions one at a time.

Is "realism" grounds for granting a work a higher degree of artistic merit?

As soon as we put it like that, I know my answer: no. Because if the answer were yes, then mimetic fiction would automatically become superior to fantasy of any stripe -- and while that may be the attitude pushed by modernism and the literary establishment, it isn't one I have ever agreed with. We use non-realism all the time to make artistic/moral/thematic/etc points. The same is true of the sorts of "realism" this debate is concerned with. So, moving on.

To what extent does realism actually require focusing on the darker and more unpleasant aspects of life?

I myself committed the error of conflating realism with "darker and more unpleasant," so I want to walk that back. I think that in this context, when we use that word, what we mean is "pragmatism." Or "practicality." If your hero can leap on a horse and gallop all day to deliver a message, you're ignoring the practical reality of what horses can and cannot do. But not all practical matters are necessary dark and unpleasant: it is very pragmatic to bear in mind that a person in a medieval-type-society can't break their word at every turn, or they will become a social pariah that nobody wants to deal with. Yes, sometimes people turn traitor -- but making a consistent pattern of people doing so is both dark and unrealistic.

(Which means this touches on my personal definition of hard fantasy. Social issues aren't as clear-cut and predictable as natural laws, but there is a logic there, which you may choose to follow or not in your stories. I tend to like the stories that do, and disconnect from the ones that don't, whether they go in a Pollyanna or dis-Pollyanna direction -- hat tip to matociquala and John Gardner for the latter term.)

rachelmanija brought up a corollary issue to this: is "realism" selectively defined by sexist (and other biased) criteria? As she points out, the average woman in medieval society might have been pretty powerless, but then again, so was the average man. Certain kinds of readers will rush to point out the "unrealism" of having a peasant woman become a warrior or whatever when in truth she would have been stuck at home raising kids . . . but they ignore the fact that a peasant man was going to be stuck at home plowing the fields and milking the cows and so on. Men didn't live unrestricted lives, in those kinds of societies; they lived under different restrictions. We do, as a genre, asymmetrically apply our obedience to those truths, allowing exceptional men more easily than exceptional women.

Under my new definition, the "realistic" thing to do would be to look at what obstacles lie in the way of both men and women, and what conditions would need to be met/what obstacles they would have to overcome in order for the story to happen. And I don't mean the obstacles we all assume should be there because that's what we've seen in other fantasy novels; I mean the ones that genuinely occurred at similar points in history. Then, once you have those, you think through whether they should apply to your invented society, or whether the changed circumstances mean you should rethink this matter, too. (We call it "hard fantasy" because writing it is haaaaaaaaaaaard.)

Supposing that we grant that the historical prevalence of misogyny and rape requires that they be addressed in realistic fiction, are there ways of portraying them that do not themselves reinforce misogyny and rape culture?

Yes -- but again, it takes work. Taking rape as the specific example: you have to pay attention to the countervailing factors against that danger, and the strategies used to defend against it. I don't just mean strategies on the part of the victim, either; societies push back against this kind of thing, too. While it is true that the opportunity provided by chaos means some men will whip it out and try to stick it in anything that can't run away fast enough, that isn't true of every man. The offender's peers may disapprove; authority figures may enact prohibitions, and punish those who break them. Military discipline is not an invention of the modern West.

Also -- returning to the point above -- you can't let your assumptions dictate your framing. One of the attitudes provided by rape culture is that men are animals who can't be expected to control themselves in the face of temptation; well, that simply isn't true. Not unless you choose to write a society in which men are socialized to behave that way. It therefore isn't "unrealistic" or even especially heroic to have your male characters resist the temptation to sexually assault women, or never feel that temptation in the first place. (It's been too long since I read the book for me to form my own opinion, but one of the criticisms I've seen of Martin is that the narrative expects us to give Tyrion a good-guy cookie for not raping Sansa when he has the chance.) Another rape-culture assumption is that only women's bodies are the targets of sexual violence, never men's, so including such threats against men helps counter the standard narrative. (Even if you don't go to the point of violence, remember that the taboo against homosexuality is far from universal, and there have been times and places where the pimpin' lifestyle for a man was to have male lovers/visit male whores as well as female ones.) And then there's the whole matter of nuance, which so often gets left out of these stories: if you're going to put the rape of women into your book, then pay attention to the reality of how women actually deal with that, rather than pulling out Stock Trope #3 (She Gets Revenge!).

Above all, give those women a voice. Or the minorities, or the disabled, or whoever. Having one or more female protagonists isn't proof against misogyny in the story, but it helps; it puts you in a position to counter the misogynistic pattern of women only being objects, never actors. I find Martin less problematic on this matter than some other authors because he has an abundance of women in his story, in a variety of different roles, many of them with point of view. He falls down in places -- oh, does he ever -- but if he had all that rapeyness and our only important female character was Arya the Tomboy? That would be worse. I have bounced off any number of recent fantasies because I am quite simply tired of stories in which there are virtually no women, and when those stories are also grimdark . . . yeah, I'm outta there.

And then we can bring this back around by saying, if your portrayal of rape is biased, and you're defending it as realistic, and implying (or outright claiming) that it's better on account of its realism . . . then you're compounding the starting problem, and making the misogyny factor much more prominent than it would otherwise have been.

So my take on these multiple conversations would be to toss the "realism = superior" thing out the window, to decouple realism/grittiness/etc from grimdarkness (as per my last post), and then to have a more focused discussion about the specific portrayal of negative issues, and where the line is between depicting those things to critique them and depicting them out of habit, or for the shock value. Which is a situation where you're mostly going to benefit from analyzing specific texts, before you try to make statements about trends -- and that, I will admit, is where I probably have to step out, because I don't have the data to argue my point. I haven't read Martin since A Feast for Crows was released, got only halfway through Abercrombie's first book, and so on with the rest of the key names in this debate. I know I don't agree with every criticism I've seen of Martin (nor every defense), but I also know I should re-familiarize myself with the text before I try to debate it.

I doubt we'll be able to get the debate to focus on that third question, because this is the internet. The conversation is going on in two dozen places, not all of which are aware of one another, and it's sliding in new directions with each post. But I do think it helps to bear in mind that the question exists, and isn't coterminous with the other things we're talking about.

gritty vs. grimdark

Yeah, I'm still thinking about this topic. Partly because of Cora Buhlert's recent roundup. The digression onto Deathstalker mostly went over my head, since I haven't read it, but she brings up a number of good points and also links to several posts I hadn't seen. (Though I use the term "post" generously. I have to say, when the only response you make to this debate is "meh" followed by links to people who already agree with you, you might as well not bother. All you're doing is patting yourself on the back in public.)

So I'm thinking about our terminology -- "gritty" and "grimdark" and so on. What do we mean by "grit," anyway? The abrasive parts of life, I guess; the stuff that's hard and unpleasant. Logistics and consequences and that sort of thing, the little stony details that other books might gloss over. It's adjacent to, or maybe our new replacement for, "low fantasy" -- the stories in which magic is relatively rare, and characters have to do things the hard way, just like us. Hence laying claim to the term "realism": those kinds of details that can ground a story in reality.

But that isn't the same thing as "grimdark," is it? That describes a mood, and you can just as easily tell a story in which everything is horrible and doomed without those little details as with. (As indeed some authors do.) Hence, of course, the counter-arguments that grimdark fantasy is just as selective in its "realism" as lighter fare: if you're writing about a war and all the women are threatened with sexual violence but none of the men are, then you're cherry-picking your grit.

What interests me, though, are the books which I might call gritty, but not grimdark. I mentioned this a while ago, when I read Tamora Pierce's second Beka Cooper book, Bloodhound. The central conflict in that book is counterfeiting, and Pierce is very realistic about what fake coinage can do to a kingdom. She also delves into the nuts and bolts of early police work, including police corruption . . . I'd call that grit. Of course it's mitigated by the fact that her story is set in Tortall, which began in a decidedly less gritty manner; one of the things I noticed in the Beka Cooper books was how Pierce worked to deconstruct some of her earlier, more romantic notions, like the Court of the Rogue. But still: counterfeiting, a collapse in monetary policy, police corruption of a realistic sort, etc. Those are the kinds of details a lot of books would gloss over.

Or an example closer to home: With Fate Conspire. I was discussing it over e-mail recently, and it occurred to me that I put a lot of unpleasantness into that book. Off the cuff, it includes betrayal, slavery, slavery of children, imprisonment, torture, horrible disease, poverty, racism, terrorism, massive amounts of class privilege and the lack thereof, rape (alluded to), pollution, fecal matter, and an abundance of swearing. All of which is the kind of stuff grimdark fantasy revels in . . . yet I have not seen a single person attach that label to the novel. Nor "gritty," for that matter, but I would argue that word, at least, should indeed apply. A great deal of that story grinds its way through the hard, unpleasant details of being lower-class in Victorian London. Realistic details, at that.

Of course, the book has a happy ending (albeit one with various price tags attached). Which makes it not grimdark -- and also not gritty? Or maybe it's that I was writing historical fiction, not the secondary-world fantasy that seems to be the locus of the term. Or, y'know, it might be that I'm a woman. One of the posts Buhlert links to is from matociquala , who -- unusually for this debate -- names some female authors as having produced gritty work, and Buhlert takes that point further. This is a highly gendered debate, not just where the sexual abuse of characters is concerned, and if we don't acknowledge that, we're only looking at a fraction of the issue.

I'm sort of wandering at this point, because there's no tidy conclusion to draw. You can have grit without being grimdark, and you can be grimdark without grit, but doing either while being female is rare? Not very tidy, but something to keep in mind. I think I'd be interested in reading more gritty-but-not-grimdark fantasy, from either gender. Recommendations welcome.

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Chickens and eggs

mrissa has posted her Minicon schedule, with a panel on which comes first: the story or the setting. To quote the description,

Which Came First

The chicken or the egg? The story or the world? Does the story you want to tell determine the setting, or does your chosen setting demand a certain kind of story to be told in it? Are there some types of stories that simply cannot be told in a particular setting? How do creators balance these seemingly opposing forces in imagining their tales?

Which has gotten me reflecting on that question and how I would answer it. Off the cuff, I thought I probably start more with the setting -- hi, anthropology, yeah. But does that hold up when I actually look at the data?

(For simplicity's sake, I'm going to keep this to novels, but I will include unpublished novels in the list. It's probably a different ballgame if I look at short stories; that, however, would require more time than I want to devote to this right now, and a refresher course as to what the heck I've written.)


Doppelganger/Warrior -- started with "doppelgangers" and "witches." From that, I came up with the idea of the latter needing to kill the former. Somewhere in there, my nascent interest in Japan attached itself to the project; I'd just read The Book of the Five Rings, etc. So: story first.

The Kestori Hawks -- Don't recognize this one? That's because you've never read it, and never will. It grew out of Robin Hood + Lawrence of Arabia and a couple of other things I've forgotten; basically, I wanted to write a Robin Hood story with a protagonist deeply messed up by war. One of the several failures of this book was that I stuck with too many default assumptions, so: setting and story together, because I took the whole Robin Hood package as a unit.

Sunlight and Storm -- Also unpublished; needs a white-page rewrite to go anywhere. Came from that phrase, describing the Great Plains, and my love of the Western U.S., which suggested a frontier tale. That gave rise to a character who would flee "civilization" for the frontier. Clearly setting first.

The Vengeance of Trees -- This one will get out there someday. Origin was my experience on the fringes of theatre + the book Shakespeare of London, which looks at him in the context of the London theatre scene; ergo it became a story about a playwright in a sort of Renaissance Italian culture. Again, setting first.

The Waking of Angantyr -- Also may be published someday. Viking revenge epic, born from my disappointment that the saga which contains the poem of the same title was not as cool as the poem itself. Setting and story together, because it's kind of a fix-it retelling.

Warrior and Witch/Witch -- we'll call this one story first, because it was the first sequel I ever wrote. While it takes place in the same setting, its foundation was the consequences of the plot in the first book, rather than a desire to explore more in the world.

Midnight Never Come -- Really game first, but that isn't an option here, so we'll say story first. While the connection between Invidiana and Elizabeth was cool and setting-linked, what stuck in my brain like a fish-hook and made me decide to turn this into a book was the entire Suspiria/Francis Merriman tale.

My So-Called Perfect Life -- working title for an unpublished YA that needs a major rewrite. It comes close to being "story first," but I'm really going to say it's character first, because the heart of it is a popular teenager who doesn't realize her popularity is due to an unrecognized telepathic gift. The actual plot she gets embroiled in was stapled onto that character, and the book doesn't quite work because the stapling isn't very secure.

In Ashes Lie -- I don't how I should class this one. It started with the Great Fire and then grew backward from there, with me trying to find a good starting point in that historical period. I guess that's story first?

A Star Shall Fall -- Story first. I knew what I wanted to do with the Dragon (since it's another piece pulled from that game), and had to educate myself about the time period to make that go.

With Fate Conspire -- Also story first, though in this case the two are less extricable from one another. The genesis of it was thinking about what the construction of the Underground would do to the Onyx Hall, which is specific to a time period. But it was driven more by that plot idea than by the period itself.

A Natural History of Dragons -- As I have said ad nauseam in interviews, the starting idea was a natural historian studying dragons. And while you could call that story first (with setting following closely on its heels), given that the whole Vystrana plot, not to mention the metaplot of the series, came well after, I think I have to tag this one as character first again.

Bonus unfinished ideas:

One project born out of the creepiest dream I've had in my entire life. Setting first, because the place I was trapped in is the core of the story.

One about the lead-up to the end of the world. Story first, because the setting is built around that concept.

One about holy female knights in a medieval-type period. Setting first, because the knights dictated I use the period when they were at their height.

One deconstructing the whole Chosen One epic fantasy thing. Very very much story first -- the setting has barely even been developed -- though really, I should just be honest and admit it's "thematic argument first."

One urban fantasy set in Japan, that can't be separated very easily. I guess it's setting first, since the core idea was a type of Japanese magic.

One that's the Flying Dutchman + Pirates of the Caribbean + the Dread Pirate Roberts. Very much setting first; I've barely written anything of this because I haven't yet figured out quite what I'm doing with the setting.

Final tally: seven for setting, seven-ish for story, two for character, and three that don't classify easily (two that were both setting and story as a package, and one that was a thematic argument). It's noteworthy that four of the seven counted as story-first are later books in a series. In one sense you would think sequels would be setting first, since the milieu is already fixed; but I'd argue they're more likely to be story first, since the books I counted that way are born not from their world, but from me having another plot I wanted to explore. For contrast, I can offer up one I forgot to include in the list, namely the second of Isabella's memoirs: that one came about via "okay, now I want her to go to a West African kind of place," with the plot built around it. It's a distinctly different trajectory for me than when the setting is just lying there, and I think up a plot.

Unsurprisingly, the prime failure mode for my projects appears to be when there's a big lag time between those two components -- one shows up without the other close behind. The end-of-the-world thing has a plot, but only vague sketches of a setting; ditto the epic fantasy one. The dream piece and the pirate one have cool settings, but I'm not quite sure where the story is going. All of those have been sitting around for years, going nowhere. Of the other unfinished projects -- the lady knights and the Japanese one -- both of those are just waiting for their moment, i.e. me to get a contract. I could write either in a heartbeat.

As for the novels that got written, but not well, I don't think there's a clear pattern, except that their disparate elements never came together like they should. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with their starting points.

<looks at the last two questions in the panel description> Nah, not gonna touch those. The answer to the first is "yes," and the latter presupposes one agrees that setting and story are "opposing forces." Ah, panel blurbs -- you say the silliest things, even for good topics.

Batman had it easy

Only just now remembering to link to it, but this months' SF Novelists post is "Welcome to the Desert of the Real," in which I challenge the notion that so-called "gritty" fantasy is a) realistic and b) superior on account of its realism.

(Both that post and the rest of this one discuss sexual violence -- quelle surprise, given the obsession gritty fantasy has with that topic -- so if you don't want to read about them, click away now.)

This is part of a much larger discussion floating around the internet right now, which I keep encountering in unexpected corners. The most recent of those is "The Rape of James Bond," which makes a lot of good points; toward the end, McDougall talks about her own decision-making process where fictional sexual violence is concerned, and whether you agree with her decisions or not, her questions are good ones.

But the part I found the most striking was where she talked about reactions to Skyfall and the first encounter between Silva and Bond.


It never even occurred to me that Bruce Wayne should have been in danger of sexual abuse. (Spoilers now for The Dark Knight Rises.) As McDougall points out, he's physically helpless, in a prison full of violent criminals who have no path to sexual release except their hands and one another. We know how that kind of thing turns out in reality; we make jokes about it, because the subject is so uncomfortable. Yet put Bruce Wayne in prison, in a scene that is supposed to represent him reaching absolute rock bottom, and nobody touches him for any reason other than to help him.

Can you imagine how audiences would have reacted if Bruce had to fight off a rapist? Even if the rape weren't completed. A lot of people were put off just by Silva unbuttoning Bond's shirt and putting a hand on his thigh, by a few lines of suggestive dialogue. They would have blown a gasket permanently to see Batman treated like, oh, name just about any superheroine you care to. Batman, like Bond, is a Man's Man, the ultimate in unimpeachable masculinity. You can't damage that by having somebody try to rape him, whether they succeed or not. You can't, apparently, keep the threat to Blomqvist. You can't have rape in the Night's Watch. No matter how realistic it is.

That scene with Silva made me a little uncomfortable, because of the history of the "evil gay man" trope. But the more I think about it, the more I'm glad that scene was there, because it puts a crack in the wall protecting male heroes from reality. Rape has been used to demean and break women, yes, but it's also been used that way against men, precisely because of the gender boundaries: it puts a woman "in her place," and it puts a man in a woman's place. But in our fiction we've mostly kept it in this little corral, letting it out only when we need to show that a villain is Even Worse Than You Thought. Raping a woman, that's standard-issue villainy, but raping a man . . . only someone truly depraved would do that.

You can guess what I think of such reasoning.

Like McDougall, I'm not saying "rape all the heroes!" It shouldn't be treated lightly (which is why all those prison-rape jokes are a problem). But it should be treated, and if it seems like a really fraught thing when a male character is subjected to it, a plot element you can't just sweep away once the voyeurism is done, then it should be the same when a female character is at risk. We do nobody any favors when all the men are inviolable and all the women are violated.
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last chance for the Ides of March Book Giveaway

Just a reminder that this is your last chance to enter the Ides of March Book Giveaway, with seventeen books from seventeen fantastic authors, including people like Kate Elliott and Mary Robinette Kowal (I know I have fans of both among my readership). And, y'know, a copy of A Natural History of Dragons, too. Go forth and enter! You have until midnight EST, which is seven hours from this posting.

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Random House and Hydra/Alibi/Flirt/Loveswept

John Scalzi has been doing a splendid job of chronicling the problems with Random House's new e-book only imprints and the evolution of same: index post here, with updates here and here.

He's already covered most of what I might want to say on those matters, but I do want to pull out one particular thread and swipe it a few times with highlighter:

Random House is referring to this model as "profit-sharing."

Which isn't false: it does involve sharing profits. But so does the standard model. That's what royalties are; they're a share in the profits earned from sales of the book. I've been sharing in my publisher's profits since the first royalty accounting period for Doppelganger, because that book earned out its advance in a couple of months. And the advance, let us note, is an advance on royalties -- meaning that the publisher shared with me some of their profits before they even earned any. The math for how an advance gets calculated is complicated, and not every book earns out, but the point is that we've always been splitting the proceeds, in one fashion or another.

Calling this "profit-sharing" is a bit of marketing speak, designed to make the author feel like the publisher is offering something that you don't get under the advance-first model. Which may be true in degree (the royalty percentage), but not kind (the existence of royalties in the first place). As for the degree, it depends on the extent to which Random House hammers out the egregious flaws in the initial contract, such as charging production costs against the author's share of net (not even gross). As many people have pointed out, that's called "Hollywood accounting," and it's why no reputable Hollywood agent will ever recommend accepting net points as your compensation. The studios' accountants will make sure that translates to nothing whatsoever. Not to mention that charging the author for production is what vanity presses do . . . but I digress.

One more time with the highlighter: don't get suckered in by the terminology. All (non-scam) publishers share profits with their authors, one way or another. Random House's way started out as insanely bad, is somewhat better now, and needs watching in the future. But whatever language they dress it up in, it is not some brave and generous new world.

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more thoughts on the epic fantasy thing

My post on writing a long epic fantasy has been generating some interesting discussion in a variety of places: the comment thread, Twitter, etc. I wanted to come back to it long enough to highlight a few lengthier responses that I think make very good points.

The first comes from C.E. Petit at Scrivener's Error; scroll down to the third bit to find his thoughts. I tend not to talk about "theme" because the word has been so badly treated by high school English classes, but his point is a sound one, and can provide guidance as to how the author might gauge whether their story has begun to grow out of control. Are you diluting your thematic message by adding in all these other subplots? Or, conversely, are you hammering your reader too energetically with that message, by playing through sixteen variations on the motif? (Which is not, of course, to say that the work will have only one thematic message, especially if it stretches to four books or more. But a central line is still vital.)

The second, or rather the second and third, is Patricia C. Wrede's two-part response to my own argument, which digs further into the question of why authors fall into these traps, and what they can do about them. I want to say that she is 100% right about the arbitrariness of your opening structural decision: even if you base it around some kind of pattern (as she suggests in the second post), ultimately that's a framework you then try to pour your story into, rather than a natural outgrowth of the story itself. You don't set out to write seven books because that's precisely how much character and plot and so on you have to tell; you write seven books because you decided to build each one thematically around the seven deadly sins or chronologically around the years Harry will be in school, and then you try to scale everything else to match.

Note that we do this all the time in fantasy: it's called a trilogy. You sign a contract for three books, okay, and so you plan your story based around that arbitrary decision. I'd venture to say that the vast majority of series that are planned as trilogies end up as exactly that. There are exceptions (Terry Goodkind, as discussed in Zeno's Mountains; George R.R. Martin; the Hitchhiker's series), but it seems that most of us are capable of sticking to three books when that's what we said we'd do. It's only when we go beyond three that our control seems so liable to slip -- because we have so few models for how to do it right, and because one more book is much less expansion when it's ten instead of nine than when it's four instead of three. And, maybe, because if you're selling well enough for your publisher to support nine books, they're eager for you to make it ten instead.

But we manage it with trilogies, and TV writers manage it almost without fail when they write shows with season-long arc plots. Absent the network jerking them around, they finish their story in twenty-two episodes of X minutes each, period, the end, no "please just one more ep" or "sorry, this one ran twelve minutes long."

Is that kind of discipline detrimental to the story? Sure, sometimes. But so, manifestly, is allowing one's discipline to falter. And I say -- with the spotless virtue of an author who has never yet had a publisher throw stacks of money at her, begging for a bestselling series to continue -- that I would rather make myself find a way to tell my story more efficiently, with fewer digressions and wasted words, and end it while people are still in love with the tale, than risk losing sight of the original vision in a swamp of less productive byways.

("You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain." Speaking of tales planned as trilogies, and delivered that way, and in my opinion all the better for it.)

It isn't easy. As Wrede points out, it requires frequent check-ins with your plan, however you may have built said plan. It may require you to murder some very beloved darlings. But just as a sonnet's structure can force you to make really good use of your fourteen allotted lines, so can a fixed length to your series.

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Books read, February 2013

The Devil in the Dust, Chaz Brenchley (desperance). On one of the flights for my book tour, the woman in the seat next to me apologized for not alerting me that the drink cart had come by. "You looked so wrapped up in your book," she said. And I was. Sometimes in a disturbed fashion, since Brenchley really gets the pathological, Stockholm Syndrome extremes of medieval Christianity, but sometimes in a good way. I was fascinated by the not!Christianity of the setting and the utter weirdness (only partially explained thus far) of Surayon, and I want to know more about the djinn. Clearly the solution is to obtain the next book.

The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison. Advance uncorrected manuscript, read for blurbing purposes. Intrictate political fantasy about the half-goblin son of an elven emperor, who inherits the throne when everybody ahead of him gets killed. Maia does not have an easy time of it, but watching him learn the hard way how to run a country was satisfying.

Spirit’s Princess, Esther Friesner. Part of Friesner's "Princesses of Myth" series; this one follows Himiko, a figure in prehistoric Japan. I sort of wanted this either to be shorter, or to be combined with the sequel to make one fat book, because so much of its length is spent on "Himiko can't have the life she wants." Obstacles are good, but you don't actually get the results of Himiko overcoming/bypassing them in this volume.

Kat, Incorrigible, Stephanie Burgis. AKA A Most Improper Magick. A fun fantasy-Regency YA. I think my favorite thing in this was the sisters: the first couple of pages primed me to see them as Evil (Not-Step-)Sisters, but they're nothing of the sort. Kat's relationship with them is complicated, with them getting along on some matters and not at all on others -- which is entirely realistic. And I'm a sucker for good sibling relationships. The second book of this series is about to come out in paperback (in the US, I think? Already published in the UK?), with the third in hardcover next month, so I'll probably zoom through the rest of these soon.

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Deborah Blum. Read for a book club. Basically about the invention of toxicology as an investigative art during the early twentieth century, in the face of opposition from New York's massively corrupt city government. Full of grotty details about "wet chemistry," so if you're squeamish, consider yourself warned. But also very interesting, and horrifying -- as much or more for all the ways you could accidentally get poisoned by everything around you back then as for the actual deliberate murders.

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