Marie Brennan's Blog, page 202

my first gaming credit

It's no secret that I'm a gamer. RPGS, both tabletop and LARP, are one of my main hobbies; they're also what I studied in graduate school. I've written academic papers on the subject, and grew a novel series out of one of the games I've run. From time to time I come up with system hacks for running games in particular settings; when I was playing Changeling, I wrote an entire splatbook's worth of material for Mesoamerican fae.

Some of you may recall that a while ago, I started messing around with an alternate history for the game Legend of the Five Rings . I stopped posting about that because shortly after I began, the guys at AEG announced that they would be taking submissions for Imperial Histories 2 -- that is, proposals for chapters on various eras of Rokugan's past.

Including alternate histories.

Last night, I got an e-mail telling me that my proposal for "The Togashi Dynasty" has been accepted, and will be included in the volume.

This pleases me greatly not only because, hey, sale, but because I love the chance to broaden my horizons and publish something in a new field. And L5R is a great game, with a rich setting and a devoted player base -- as evidenced by the dozens of submissions they got for IH2. I think writing this chapter is going to be a lot of fun, and I look forward to seeing what's in the rest of the book.

last call for Clockwork Phoenix 4; also, a short story

There's just under a day left on the Clockwork Phoenix 4 Kickstarter. If you wanted to pre-order a copy, this is a way to do it. :-)

Also, the latest issue of Apex Magazine is live, containing my (very) short story "Waiting for Beauty." (This is one of my darker fairy tale retellings, though less Lovecraftian than most in that set.) I haven't yet had a chance to read the rest of the issue, but it looks absolutely smashing, with stories from Genevieve Valentine, Kat Howard, and Nir Yaniv, as well as nonfiction from Lynne M. Thomas and jimhines , and an interview with Genevieve.

Books read, July 2012

The shortness of this list makes it look like I didn't read much last month. It's true that I didn't read a lot, but what the list doesn't show are all the books I started and didn't finish. Some of them were novels I put down because I wasn't enjoying them enough, some were research books of which I only needed to read part, and some I will finish -- just haven't done it yet.

But as for the stuff I did get all the way through:

Mastiff, Tamora Pierce. Discussed in more detail elsewhere, but that was as part of a conversation on writing theory. General summation is that I found this one disappointing. The individual bits were well enough, but as a follow-up to Bloodhound and a conclusion to the series, it just didn't pack enough of a punch. I had been hoping for better.

Glamour in Glass, Mary Robinette Kowal. This, on the other hand, I enjoyed more than its predecessor, Shades of Milk and Honey . I wanted more oomph in that book, and the sequel delivered. But that inspires thinky thoughts in me, since I was on a panel with Kowal at Fourth Street in which we talked about "domestic" fantasy and novels that don't resort to violent confrontation as a source of conflict, and well, this book is a lot less domestic than the previous one. Indeed, that's why I enjoyed it more. Espionage! Napoleon on the march! Military applications of glamour! Fun stuff, but now I have to go chew on the issues we were discussing, and think about the changes Kowal made.

The Phantom Tollbooth, Normal Juster. Would you believe I'd never read this? I thought I had -- assumed it, really, since it's one of those childhood classics everybody seems to have read -- but my brother (who hadn't read it) had the book lying around, and when I picked it up I discovered that, nope, had never touched the thing in my life. Anyway, it was enjoyable, though (as when I read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland</i>, which is very much in the same genre) I had to read it in short bursts. I just can't do large doses of whimsy at a time, you know? But Juster does the good thing, which is to have interesting points squirreled away inside the whimsy, so I'm glad I finally got around to reading this one.

since I linked to the bad part

An update on the Readercon debacle. It is pretty much everything I was hoping for.

The Best of BCS, Year Three

Scott Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies is running a poll to choose the final story for the third-year "Best of" anthology. I'm in the running, with "Two Pretenders" (which is peripherally an Onyx Court story); I am, however, up against some stiff competition. BCS publishes good stuff!

You can vote in the poll until midnight Friday, Pacific time -- I'm not sure if that means eleven and a half hours from now, or thirty-five and a half. Vote now, vote often! Wait, no. Vote once. In this round, anyway. Then vote again in the run-off. (I'll post a heads-up when that happens.)

In other short-story related news, Clockwork Phoenix 4 will be paying pro rates! Many thanks to everyone who contributed. There's still time to get in on the game, too, and one more stretch goal to aim for.

Spoiler Alert! (Watch this make people not read the post.)

The Boston Globe has an interesting piece from January about spoilers and how we respond to them. Short form: for many people, spoilers actually enhance, rather than detract from, their enjoyment of the full story. And this is true even for people who are convinced that they prefer not to have any spoilers at all.

I would put myself in the camp of not wanting spoilers, but when I read through the reasoning presented in the article, it was exactly what I would have predicted. By knowing where the story is going, we allay our subconscious anxiety. Knowing that Character A lives means we don't have to be as afraid for her; knowing that Character B dies means we're prepared for it when it comes. As brilliantly cathartic as it can be to go through those experiences without the psychological safety net, that works best when we really, really trust the storyteller not to disappoint or betray us. And how often is that true?

A story can work even when we know the ending -- even when we can quote the entire thing line for line. Usually people say this is because you can still appreciate the craft, the process by which that ending comes about, and there's a lot of truth to that. But it isn't the whole story (no pun intended). A good enough narrative can still pack its emotional punch as well as an intellectual one, even on a revisit. My favorite example of this is Apollo 13, a movie I adore and have watched quite a few times. Not only is it familiar to me, it's based on freaking history. You would think that by now, there would be zero suspense for me in the question of whether they'll get home safely or not.

And yet, every time I watch that movie, I'm on the edge of my seat during those minutes of radio silence.

There's a secret ingredient that makes it work: empathy. Sure, I know that the astronauts will be safe. I knew that even before I sat down to watch the movie. But the characters don't know. And because my heart is with them, because I am imagining myself in their shoes rather than sitting comfortably in my own, I am petrified and tearful, just like they are. And when it all turns out okay, I get the same cathartic release.

I find myself thinking that when people say spoilers ruin the story for them, I am the most inclined to believe the ones who also never re-read books, never re-watch movies. But I have plenty of books and movies I revisit, and enjoy just as much (or more) the second time around. So it makes me think that, for me at least, what spoilers ruin are bad stories. Weak ones, that don't do the work of making me empathize with the characters, and don't provide the intellectual pleasure of examining how the dominoes got lined up. They have to rely on the element of surprise to engage me, and once that's gone, they've blown their wad. Good stories survive the spoiler process just fine, and maybe even turn out better for it. I can relax into the experience, knowing I'm in skilled hands.

Possibly this explains why I love movie trailers as much as I do. I still get annoyed when I think the trailer gave the whole story away (and feel pleasant surprise when it turns out I'm wrong -- that's happened in the oddest places, sometimes), but I like the preview of what I'll be getting. I read the cover copy of books, I read friends' reviews (though I sometimes -- not always -- avoid the ones that say they contain major spoilers) . . . but I don't go as far as some do and read the last five pages. I'm sort of tempted to try that now, and see how it goes. After all, the good books should, in theory, be unharmed.

But I'll still put spoiler alerts on things I write. It's expected courtesy these days, and I might get lynched if I didn't. So I'll just say: it's okay. You're allowed to highlight the hidden text, to click through and see what's behind the cut. I won't judge you for it if you do.

link dump

Two more on gun control:

American gun owners are under siege

The Second Amendment and the fantasy of revolution

Several on gender:

Kickstarter project for another Gamers movie (which is going into this category because of this update)

Rundown on the Readercon debacle

Finding That a "Dynamic" Pose is Defined by Gender (comic books, and not surprising, but the redraws really help hammer the point home)

Victoria's Secret vs. Dove (a very striking contrast)

Just Another Princess Movie (an interesting analysis of Brave, that says it is not just another princess movie)

Awesome photos:

Imgur set

National Geographic set

Music humour:

"Early one day, a C, an E-flat, and a G go into a bar . . ."

The truth about oboes


And now my browser can stop weeping for mercy.

we can't all be the goddamned Batman

There's a moment in The Dark Knight Rises -- don't worry; no spoilers -- where Bruce Wayne gets from one part of the world to the other, in a very short span of time, without access to his usual resources.

How does he manage that? As kniedzw said when I brought this up to him, "He's the goddamned Batman, that's how."

And you know, I'm fine with that as an answer. It fits the genre, and the place that scene occupies in the story; nobody wants to pause there for an extended dissertation on the logistics of international travel. Or even a short one, really. If it isn't an interesting and relevant part of the story, we should skip over it and get to the parts that are.

. . . I talk a good talk there, but the truth is that I have a damn hard time doing this in my own work. Skipping over routine things, sure. I don't do a blow-by-blow of every last action my characters take. But when something less than 100% routine happens, I have a hard time saying "my character is the goddamned Batman" and moving on. If I'd been writing The Dark Knight Rises, I would have had to figure out -- for my own edification, if nobody else's -- just how Bruce Wayne got from A to B under those circumstances. And, if it were a novel, probably looked for a place to toss in a line of narration or dialogue nodding in the direction of whatever explanation I worked out. Because however willing I am to grant other people's stories the benefit of the doubt in these cases, I have a hard time believing anybody else will do the same for me.

Obviously there are places where the benefit of the doubt falls down. If the thing being glossed over is too outrageous, I can't bridge that gap, and the stumble distracts me from the story. Or if you make too frequent a habit of doing it, I begin to feel like you're lazy, dodging all the hard stuff because you only want to have fun (and your fun gets flimsier as a result). Or if you're trying to be all realistic and crunchy about how things get done, and then you handwave past something major, I suspect you did that because you couldn't find a way to get it done, and your only answer was to cheat. I also think it's easier for movies to get away with this trick than novels. They move at their own pace, rather than the reader's, leaving less time for spotting holes; they also aren't expected to go into as much detail, lest their run time be nine hours. And some genres accommodate this trick better than others.

But we do it in novels, too, whether the extent is lesser or greater. Dorothy Dunnett spends all of a couple of sentences on telling us how half a dozen guys made their way across sixteenth-century Europe to Russia. Those sentences nod to them having a lot of trouble doing it, but it's only a nod, with no explanation; we are invited to understand that they are each the goddamned Batman, and that's how they managed it.

Sometimes it's a benefit for me to work through those things, to answer all the logistical questions for myself, if not for the reader. Sometimes, though . . . it's easy to get hung up on this, to stall forward progress because I have to nail down every last detail in my head. And sometimes I catch myself subsequently putting those details into the story, because if I don't show my math I don't trust that the reader will trust me.

It isn't just a plot issue; sometimes it's a worldbuilding one, too. For Isabella's memoirs, I'm working through a myriad of details on climate, geology, and other such details of the natural world, because my hindbrain is convinced that I can't be allowed to gloss over a single thing there. We aren't talking Tolkien's suspiciously rectangular mountain ranges here, either: I mean that if I don't set up the elevation and surrounding topography of the swamps of Mouleen precisely right for the amount of rainfall they receive, everybody will notice.

And the truth is, only some readers will. The climatologists among you. If they're paying close attention. And maybe not even then, since it isn't like I'm providing information on the exact latitude of Mouleen, or the direction of ocean currents along its shore. (Though believe you me, my brain would try to work the ocean currents out, if I didn't keep it on a leash.)

I have to do some of this for the series because it's about a scientist, and that means I need to be able to talk about the science without the whole thing falling down. But it is also supposed to be an adventure. The adventure tone is not served by me anxiously showing my math on every last detail of plot and setting. And yet I still struggle to believe that I can get away with anything, even as I let other people do it all the time.

I'd be interested in examples of authors you think have done this badly or well. What factors determine how willing you are to leap over those gaps?

another Clockwork Phoenix update

The Clockwork Phoenix 4 Kickstarter project has hit the first of its stretch goals. It's less than $1400 away from the second stretch goal, with nine days to reach that target.

I can't say anything in encouragement without it being kind of self-serving. The purpose of the stretch goals is to let Mike Allen ( time_shark ) pay the authors more money for their stories; if the project brings in $8000, he can pay five cents a word, which is the baseline professional rate. Since I intend to send him a story, I have a vested interest in seeing the project hit that target. But it's broader than that, I promise you: the CP anthologies have been really good, and are the sort of thing for which authors in general deserve to be paid professional rates.

Mike has added a variety of new reward packages, so even if you've already pledged, you might want to check it out and see if there's anything else you want. And if you haven't, now is a dandy time to start.

Reasons I Have Quit Reading Your Book This Afternoon

I really wanted to like your book, because it's so very much up my alley in terms of subject matter. But the writing just didn't work for me, on a fundamental level: too much dialogue that didn't sound like things people would say, too many places where one paragraph didn't lead into the next, too many one-line paragraphs chopping the whole thing up into kindling.

Man, my batting average is not very good right now.