Marie Brennan's Blog, page 214
January 16, 2012
It had to happen sometime
Last month, for the first time since we launched the group blog in August of 2007, I missed my post at SF Novelists.
But I'm back this month! With the first of what turned out to be a two-part thing (since otherwise my post would have been unreadably long), on how competence is hot. (With bonus links to several people trying to pose like the men and women on book covers.)
Comment over there, no login needed, etc, but if you're a first-timer please wait for me to fish your comment out of the moderation queue.
But I'm back this month! With the first of what turned out to be a two-part thing (since otherwise my post would have been unreadably long), on how competence is hot. (With bonus links to several people trying to pose like the men and women on book covers.)
Comment over there, no login needed, etc, but if you're a first-timer please wait for me to fish your comment out of the moderation queue.
January 13, 2012
Writing Fight Scenes: Point of View
[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]
So, I've blathered on at length about how to imagine a fight scene for a story: who's fighting, and why, and where, and with what, and how they're doing it, and so on.
How do you get that onto the page?
Point of view seems a useful place to begin this discussion. It's generally already been decided by the time you get to the scene; if the whole book has been in third person limited from the protagonist's perspective, you're unlikely to hop to first just for the fight. (You could do it, as some kind of avant-garde trick -- but 99.9% of the time, you won't.) So, what are you working with: first, second (unlikely), or third? Third limited or omniscient? If limited, then whose third are we in?
For a story with only one pov, again, that's probably already been decided. But if you have multiple viewpoint characters, and more than one of them is present for the fight, you have a choice to make.
Writing from inside the fight gives you immediacy. Writing from outside it gives you context.
The same thing happens on the spectrum from first person, through third limited, to third omniscient. In first person as it's usually deployed, there's very little room for context during the clash itself; short of being a superhero or some other kind of more-than-human being (or a story that's obviously tongue-in-cheek), you really can't multitask while fighting. There is no room in the prose for exposition, or even much description, beyond the immediate concerns of movement.. (First person clearly framed as a retrospective account, on the other hand, can screw with that a bit.) Third person limited opens up the focus a bit more, but should still closely track the attention of the pov character; if that person in the fight, then the fight is where their attention will be.
A lot of first and third-limited fight scenes frankly provide too much detail. They go into blow-by-blow descriptions, well beyond what the viewpoint character would actually be tracking. I once had a really good sparring day in karate, and managed to beat one of the (teenaged) black belts in the class; I could not tell you how I did it if you paid me. There were no brilliant tactical tricks, no planning. By the time I recognized an opening in his defense, my fist had already filled it. If you wait for your conscious brain to catch up, you'll be too late. (This is why you do so many drills, when you study a martial art: so that your muscles will know what to do and when to do it, without needing approval from your higher thought processes.)
Too much detail can be okay; it's a narrative convention, right up there with dialogue =/= real speech. But immediacy is one of the things a close-in pov has to offer: the sweaty, half-panicked, act-before-you-think excitement of a fight. Don't squander that without reason. Not only does it liven up the scene, it can help you skate past gaps in your technical expertise. An experienced fighter could be moving on instinct, while a larger strategy takes shape in her mind; an inexperienced one can be drowning in the emotional response of the moment. Neither approach requires you to know a stop-thrust from a hole in your head. (Or the other guy's head.)
By contrast, writing from a pov outside the fight, or an omniscient perspective (which is admittedly rare these days), lets you choose your level of technical detail rather freely, and gives you a lot more room to comment on the fight. My favorite example here is one I mentioned at the beginning of this series: a duel in Dorothy Dunnett's historical novel The Game of Kings. As I said then, the book is amazing, and this scene is one of my two favorite bits; I don't want to spoil it. But I can give the general outline.
The fight is between Lymond (the protagonist) and one other man, with a crowd observing. The pov, as I said, is omniscient; it most often comments from the perspective of the crowd en masse, but perches from time to time on the shoulder of a couple specific men watching, and in a few places gives the opinion of Lymond's opponent. (It never, at any point, gives Lymond's thoughts or feelings. This is one of the odder tricks of the story: I'd have to re-read to be sure, but I'm fairly certain the narrative doesn't move into his head until the fifth book of the series. It definitely doesn't happen anywhere in this, the first book.)
Operating at that distance allows Dunnett to exercise the full range of descriptive options for a fight. She can set the physical scene with meticulous detail, which heightens the tension before the fight begins. She can provide technical details when she wants them, because the observers are all trained swordsmen themselves; she can also show the untrained reader how amazing the duel is, because those swordsmen are all breathless at the sight. She can comment on the tactics and strategy and emotions of the combatants, because we know what one of them is thinking, and one of the observers is very alert to the rise and fall of that aspect. And by leaving Lymond out of the pov picture, she can keep the reader in suspense as to what he's about to do and why. She can, and does, deploy all these things like a conductor with a symphony, slowing down the tempo at key points, before racing onward to the thrilling conclusion. The omniscient perspective allows her, in short, to revel openly in the craft of the endeavour, both on the page and in the story itself.
It's a very different kind of scene than the one you would get from a first-person perspective. That's okay, though; there's room in fiction for many flavors of awesome. The question is how best to work within the frame you've set for yourself. If you're writing in an immediate kind of first person, now isn't the time to digress on the bigger picture. If you're writing in a more distant third, be aware that you'll have a hard time really conveying the heart-in-mouth experience of being in a fight. Play to the strengths of your frame, and make the best use of them that you can.
As always, feel free to bring up other examples in the comments, including your own work. I like seeing these tricks in action.
So, I've blathered on at length about how to imagine a fight scene for a story: who's fighting, and why, and where, and with what, and how they're doing it, and so on.
How do you get that onto the page?
Point of view seems a useful place to begin this discussion. It's generally already been decided by the time you get to the scene; if the whole book has been in third person limited from the protagonist's perspective, you're unlikely to hop to first just for the fight. (You could do it, as some kind of avant-garde trick -- but 99.9% of the time, you won't.) So, what are you working with: first, second (unlikely), or third? Third limited or omniscient? If limited, then whose third are we in?
For a story with only one pov, again, that's probably already been decided. But if you have multiple viewpoint characters, and more than one of them is present for the fight, you have a choice to make.
Writing from inside the fight gives you immediacy. Writing from outside it gives you context.
The same thing happens on the spectrum from first person, through third limited, to third omniscient. In first person as it's usually deployed, there's very little room for context during the clash itself; short of being a superhero or some other kind of more-than-human being (or a story that's obviously tongue-in-cheek), you really can't multitask while fighting. There is no room in the prose for exposition, or even much description, beyond the immediate concerns of movement.. (First person clearly framed as a retrospective account, on the other hand, can screw with that a bit.) Third person limited opens up the focus a bit more, but should still closely track the attention of the pov character; if that person in the fight, then the fight is where their attention will be.
A lot of first and third-limited fight scenes frankly provide too much detail. They go into blow-by-blow descriptions, well beyond what the viewpoint character would actually be tracking. I once had a really good sparring day in karate, and managed to beat one of the (teenaged) black belts in the class; I could not tell you how I did it if you paid me. There were no brilliant tactical tricks, no planning. By the time I recognized an opening in his defense, my fist had already filled it. If you wait for your conscious brain to catch up, you'll be too late. (This is why you do so many drills, when you study a martial art: so that your muscles will know what to do and when to do it, without needing approval from your higher thought processes.)
Too much detail can be okay; it's a narrative convention, right up there with dialogue =/= real speech. But immediacy is one of the things a close-in pov has to offer: the sweaty, half-panicked, act-before-you-think excitement of a fight. Don't squander that without reason. Not only does it liven up the scene, it can help you skate past gaps in your technical expertise. An experienced fighter could be moving on instinct, while a larger strategy takes shape in her mind; an inexperienced one can be drowning in the emotional response of the moment. Neither approach requires you to know a stop-thrust from a hole in your head. (Or the other guy's head.)
By contrast, writing from a pov outside the fight, or an omniscient perspective (which is admittedly rare these days), lets you choose your level of technical detail rather freely, and gives you a lot more room to comment on the fight. My favorite example here is one I mentioned at the beginning of this series: a duel in Dorothy Dunnett's historical novel The Game of Kings. As I said then, the book is amazing, and this scene is one of my two favorite bits; I don't want to spoil it. But I can give the general outline.
The fight is between Lymond (the protagonist) and one other man, with a crowd observing. The pov, as I said, is omniscient; it most often comments from the perspective of the crowd en masse, but perches from time to time on the shoulder of a couple specific men watching, and in a few places gives the opinion of Lymond's opponent. (It never, at any point, gives Lymond's thoughts or feelings. This is one of the odder tricks of the story: I'd have to re-read to be sure, but I'm fairly certain the narrative doesn't move into his head until the fifth book of the series. It definitely doesn't happen anywhere in this, the first book.)
Operating at that distance allows Dunnett to exercise the full range of descriptive options for a fight. She can set the physical scene with meticulous detail, which heightens the tension before the fight begins. She can provide technical details when she wants them, because the observers are all trained swordsmen themselves; she can also show the untrained reader how amazing the duel is, because those swordsmen are all breathless at the sight. She can comment on the tactics and strategy and emotions of the combatants, because we know what one of them is thinking, and one of the observers is very alert to the rise and fall of that aspect. And by leaving Lymond out of the pov picture, she can keep the reader in suspense as to what he's about to do and why. She can, and does, deploy all these things like a conductor with a symphony, slowing down the tempo at key points, before racing onward to the thrilling conclusion. The omniscient perspective allows her, in short, to revel openly in the craft of the endeavour, both on the page and in the story itself.
It's a very different kind of scene than the one you would get from a first-person perspective. That's okay, though; there's room in fiction for many flavors of awesome. The question is how best to work within the frame you've set for yourself. If you're writing in an immediate kind of first person, now isn't the time to digress on the bigger picture. If you're writing in a more distant third, be aware that you'll have a hard time really conveying the heart-in-mouth experience of being in a fight. Play to the strengths of your frame, and make the best use of them that you can.
As always, feel free to bring up other examples in the comments, including your own work. I like seeing these tricks in action.
a better (or rather, worse) metric
Remember how I mentioned before that I wanted to improve my story production this year? Well, I haven't really made progress on that; I haven't written anything new (yet). But I have sent something new out, that's been sitting around waiting to be revised for a year or more.
When I went to add it to my submissions log, I noticed something . . . poor-ish.
Yes, the point (as I said in my previous post) is to sell things, not to submit them. But while the last three pieces I finished and sent out sold to the first place I submitted them -- yay! -- that isn't the whole story. All three of those were basically written to order, under conditions where I more or less knew they were sold before I started working on them. The last time I sent out a story that wasn't solicited and pre-sold?
Was April of 2010.
And it isn't because editors have been beating down my door with invitations. Three such situations in nearly two years is nice, but not exactly the sort of thing the leads to some authors of my acquaintance saying "I'm going to have to start turning editors down; I'm already overcommitted." More like, the only times I've been able to prod myself into actual short story productivity is when I know the only thing standing between me and an almost-guaranteed sale is my own lack of effort.
This isn't a self-esteem thing. Obviously I know I can sell stories, if I bother to write them. And it isn't a lack of inspiration thing, either; one look at my (growing) list of unwritten story ideas would cure any notion of that. I'm not sure what kind of thing it is, really. It may be part and parcel of the fatigue issue I think I've mentioned in passing here; writing novels has been harder, too, for at least as long as I've been such a short-story slacker, and while I can't prove that has anything to do with the way I faceplant for a nap almost every day (which is a more recent development), I'm hoping that fixing the latter will lead to miraculous improvements in the former.
Anyway. Mostly I want to pat myself on the back for finally sending out "Mad Maudlin," after way too much time spent sitting on it. I have another story in similar circumstances (which probably would have been revised and sent out yonks ago, if I could just come up with a title for the damn thing), and I'm going to push myself to get some new things written. This, at least, is a start.
When I went to add it to my submissions log, I noticed something . . . poor-ish.
Yes, the point (as I said in my previous post) is to sell things, not to submit them. But while the last three pieces I finished and sent out sold to the first place I submitted them -- yay! -- that isn't the whole story. All three of those were basically written to order, under conditions where I more or less knew they were sold before I started working on them. The last time I sent out a story that wasn't solicited and pre-sold?
Was April of 2010.
And it isn't because editors have been beating down my door with invitations. Three such situations in nearly two years is nice, but not exactly the sort of thing the leads to some authors of my acquaintance saying "I'm going to have to start turning editors down; I'm already overcommitted." More like, the only times I've been able to prod myself into actual short story productivity is when I know the only thing standing between me and an almost-guaranteed sale is my own lack of effort.
This isn't a self-esteem thing. Obviously I know I can sell stories, if I bother to write them. And it isn't a lack of inspiration thing, either; one look at my (growing) list of unwritten story ideas would cure any notion of that. I'm not sure what kind of thing it is, really. It may be part and parcel of the fatigue issue I think I've mentioned in passing here; writing novels has been harder, too, for at least as long as I've been such a short-story slacker, and while I can't prove that has anything to do with the way I faceplant for a nap almost every day (which is a more recent development), I'm hoping that fixing the latter will lead to miraculous improvements in the former.
Anyway. Mostly I want to pat myself on the back for finally sending out "Mad Maudlin," after way too much time spent sitting on it. I have another story in similar circumstances (which probably would have been revised and sent out yonks ago, if I could just come up with a title for the damn thing), and I'm going to push myself to get some new things written. This, at least, is a start.
January 12, 2012
The DWJ Project: Minor Arcana
There's only one story in this collection I haven't read already, but I still feel justified in counting it as a book read, because the story in question is The True State of Affairs, which eats up about half of the pages. I don't have a word count for it, but it is probably squarely in novella territory, if not edging toward short novel. Either way, it's certainly longer than some of the DWJ stories that have been published independently (like Wild Robert).
It's fortuitous timing that I chose to read it now. I started it months ago, but kept not getting into it; now, reading it through, I realize it is apparently a verrrrrrry peripheral Dalemark story. (As in, it had sort of a Dalemark-ish feel early on, and then there's one place where it uses that name directly.) It's hard to tell where it's supposed to fit into Dalemark chronology, though. They have steam engines, though not for practical use, which suggests it can't be too long before the "present" day of that series (i.e. Mitt and Moril's time), because that's when Alk is about to set off an industrial revolution. Also, there is no king, which means it has to be before Amil the Great, because Dalemark is a monarchy from his time up through Maewen's, where everything is modern. But I don't recall hearing any of these people referenced in the novels -- or even the places, though there I may just be overlooking things -- so it's hard to slot into position.
Look away if you don't want spoilers.
I find this a very frustrating story. Some of that is clearly deliberate, and done for good reason; Emily is a prisoner, in very confined circumstances, and so telling the story in such confined fashion helps me, the reader, feel what she's going through. On the other hand, what she's going through is kind of unpleasant, so spending tens of thousands of words under that kind of constraint doesn't make for joyous reading.
What bugs me more, though, is the total lack of explanation for Emily herself. If there's supposed to be a key in here somewhere, I missed it. She's from our world -- but how did she get to Dalemark? Certain lines in the first few pages seem to promise us an explanation for that, but we never get it. Emily mostly only references our world as a means of describing the one she's found herself in. We don't know how she crossed over, or why; she never even seems surprised to find herself in another world, just angry about having been caught up in its politics like that. It reminds me a little bit of my frustration with the movie Stranger Than Fiction, which was so uninterested in asking, let alone answering, the questions my fantasy-reader brain latched onto.
That lack ends up making me really unhappy with the ending here. I totally understand, and even sympathize with, Emily's disorientation once she's no longer a prisoner; the touch about how she has to psych herself up to even go explore the rest of the castle rings very true. And I'm okay with her disillusionment about Asgrim. I don't condemn him, or her, for the little game they played, because we all know that long-term captivity does weird things to one's psyche. And we do get the suggestion that Emily's notes to him may (or may not) have influenced what he did after he escaped. But because we never get any kind of explanation for Emily, any interest in fleshing out her story as something other than a prisoner, the ending winds up only giving us resolution for Asgrim, not for her. He escaped, he took over the country, he married Hilda, yadda yadda yadda. He forgot about Emily. And Emily seems to have more or less forgotten about herself. Does she want to go home to England? Is that even a possibility? She never seems to have considered it, even at the beginning of her captivity, before we could blame circumstances for having ground it out of her. I end up feeling like she doesn't have a story, here.
There's some really well-done writing here; Jones turns her knack for character observation to rather bleaker ends than usual, giving us really well-painted portraits of Edwin and Hobby and Wolfram and so on. (And I liked the inclusion of homosexuality as a thing in the world; this is one of I think three books where I can remember Jones touching on the subject, the other two being A Sudden Wild Magic and Hexwood.) But my inability to either connect it solidly to Dalemark, or to get any kind of satisfaction, even of a bleak sort, out of Emily's story, means I end up finding the whole thing very perplexing.
It's fortuitous timing that I chose to read it now. I started it months ago, but kept not getting into it; now, reading it through, I realize it is apparently a verrrrrrry peripheral Dalemark story. (As in, it had sort of a Dalemark-ish feel early on, and then there's one place where it uses that name directly.) It's hard to tell where it's supposed to fit into Dalemark chronology, though. They have steam engines, though not for practical use, which suggests it can't be too long before the "present" day of that series (i.e. Mitt and Moril's time), because that's when Alk is about to set off an industrial revolution. Also, there is no king, which means it has to be before Amil the Great, because Dalemark is a monarchy from his time up through Maewen's, where everything is modern. But I don't recall hearing any of these people referenced in the novels -- or even the places, though there I may just be overlooking things -- so it's hard to slot into position.
Look away if you don't want spoilers.
I find this a very frustrating story. Some of that is clearly deliberate, and done for good reason; Emily is a prisoner, in very confined circumstances, and so telling the story in such confined fashion helps me, the reader, feel what she's going through. On the other hand, what she's going through is kind of unpleasant, so spending tens of thousands of words under that kind of constraint doesn't make for joyous reading.
What bugs me more, though, is the total lack of explanation for Emily herself. If there's supposed to be a key in here somewhere, I missed it. She's from our world -- but how did she get to Dalemark? Certain lines in the first few pages seem to promise us an explanation for that, but we never get it. Emily mostly only references our world as a means of describing the one she's found herself in. We don't know how she crossed over, or why; she never even seems surprised to find herself in another world, just angry about having been caught up in its politics like that. It reminds me a little bit of my frustration with the movie Stranger Than Fiction, which was so uninterested in asking, let alone answering, the questions my fantasy-reader brain latched onto.
That lack ends up making me really unhappy with the ending here. I totally understand, and even sympathize with, Emily's disorientation once she's no longer a prisoner; the touch about how she has to psych herself up to even go explore the rest of the castle rings very true. And I'm okay with her disillusionment about Asgrim. I don't condemn him, or her, for the little game they played, because we all know that long-term captivity does weird things to one's psyche. And we do get the suggestion that Emily's notes to him may (or may not) have influenced what he did after he escaped. But because we never get any kind of explanation for Emily, any interest in fleshing out her story as something other than a prisoner, the ending winds up only giving us resolution for Asgrim, not for her. He escaped, he took over the country, he married Hilda, yadda yadda yadda. He forgot about Emily. And Emily seems to have more or less forgotten about herself. Does she want to go home to England? Is that even a possibility? She never seems to have considered it, even at the beginning of her captivity, before we could blame circumstances for having ground it out of her. I end up feeling like she doesn't have a story, here.
There's some really well-done writing here; Jones turns her knack for character observation to rather bleaker ends than usual, giving us really well-painted portraits of Edwin and Hobby and Wolfram and so on. (And I liked the inclusion of homosexuality as a thing in the world; this is one of I think three books where I can remember Jones touching on the subject, the other two being A Sudden Wild Magic and Hexwood.) But my inability to either connect it solidly to Dalemark, or to get any kind of satisfaction, even of a bleak sort, out of Emily's story, means I end up finding the whole thing very perplexing.
January 7, 2012
intersectionality in action
Tonight, I realized something I'm not very happy about.
There was a guy outside the grocery store, panhandling. I had to pass him both entering and leaving. And both times, I looked away and walked right past him without saying anything or slowing down.
And then I realized, If I were a man, I wouldn't have done that.
I don't like ignoring panhandlers and other people on the street. It erases them, and I'm sure they get that far too often. But at the same time, I know that if I had made eye contact, smiled, said anything . . . my odds of being sexually harassed would have shot up like a rocket.
It isn't inevitable, of course. Not every panhandler would take that as an invitation to more. It's happened to me often enough, however, that my reflex is to avoid interacting with strange men on the street, just out of self-defense. And I say that as someone who's never been raped, or even harassed to an extent I would call traumatic; the worst was enough to put me off my stride for half an hour or so, but in the grand scheme of things, I know that's not nearly as bad as it gets. But there's always the little voice in my head reminding me that I'm female, and it could get worse, and so it's safer to not engage.
(I do more often make eye contact, etc. with female panhandlers. They don't set off the defensive reflexes in the same way.)
This bothers me a lot, now that I've noticed it so directly. If I were my husband -- a six-foot-three man -- I'd be a lot more likely to acknowledge those people, even if I didn't give them a handout on the spot. And yet, I don't think it's a good idea for me to chuck this pattern of behavior, either. There is no good solution, I fear, except to live in a utopian society where a) women don't have to fear harassment, b) people don't have to beg on the streets, or c) better yet, both.
I may try engaging more, anyway. I can withstand sketchy, unwanted compliments, for the sake of the people who don't respond that way. I live in a pretty safe area, so I don't think I'm likely to get assaulted just because I decided not to ignore somebody. But that isn't always going to be true, and so this defensive habit is likely to stay -- and I really wish that weren't the case.
There was a guy outside the grocery store, panhandling. I had to pass him both entering and leaving. And both times, I looked away and walked right past him without saying anything or slowing down.
And then I realized, If I were a man, I wouldn't have done that.
I don't like ignoring panhandlers and other people on the street. It erases them, and I'm sure they get that far too often. But at the same time, I know that if I had made eye contact, smiled, said anything . . . my odds of being sexually harassed would have shot up like a rocket.
It isn't inevitable, of course. Not every panhandler would take that as an invitation to more. It's happened to me often enough, however, that my reflex is to avoid interacting with strange men on the street, just out of self-defense. And I say that as someone who's never been raped, or even harassed to an extent I would call traumatic; the worst was enough to put me off my stride for half an hour or so, but in the grand scheme of things, I know that's not nearly as bad as it gets. But there's always the little voice in my head reminding me that I'm female, and it could get worse, and so it's safer to not engage.
(I do more often make eye contact, etc. with female panhandlers. They don't set off the defensive reflexes in the same way.)
This bothers me a lot, now that I've noticed it so directly. If I were my husband -- a six-foot-three man -- I'd be a lot more likely to acknowledge those people, even if I didn't give them a handout on the spot. And yet, I don't think it's a good idea for me to chuck this pattern of behavior, either. There is no good solution, I fear, except to live in a utopian society where a) women don't have to fear harassment, b) people don't have to beg on the streets, or c) better yet, both.
I may try engaging more, anyway. I can withstand sketchy, unwanted compliments, for the sake of the people who don't respond that way. I live in a pretty safe area, so I don't think I'm likely to get assaulted just because I decided not to ignore somebody. But that isn't always going to be true, and so this defensive habit is likely to stay -- and I really wish that weren't the case.
January 4, 2012
Things I want to improve: production in the new year
I didn't publish a whole lot last year, in comparison with the previous five or so. With Fate Conspire, Dancing the Warrior (the doppelganger novella), and three short stories ("Two Pretenders," "Love, Cayce," and "Coyotaje"). The forecast isn't good for this year, either, because I didn't write a whole lot, either: A Natural History of Dragons, Dancing the Warrior, "Coyotaje," and a novelette I can't tell you about yet, but which has already been sold. In other words, everything I wrote vanished from the pipeline pretty much as soon as I finished it.
I've posted about that latter bit before, reminding myself that selling stories is the goal, not submitting them. Still, I have only four things in the submission queue right now, and one or more of those probably ought to be retired. Even if I sold all four of them right now, and all four saw print this year -- both of which are unlikely -- that's not a lot of new publications compared to some past years, and it leaves me with nothing for next year.
Okay. So I need to write more short fiction. I've vowed this before, and met with moderate success; let's try that again. Simple to say, not so simple to do, but putting it here where the internets can see it should help.
I've posted about that latter bit before, reminding myself that selling stories is the goal, not submitting them. Still, I have only four things in the submission queue right now, and one or more of those probably ought to be retired. Even if I sold all four of them right now, and all four saw print this year -- both of which are unlikely -- that's not a lot of new publications compared to some past years, and it leaves me with nothing for next year.
Okay. So I need to write more short fiction. I've vowed this before, and met with moderate success; let's try that again. Simple to say, not so simple to do, but putting it here where the internets can see it should help.
Halley's Comet returns!
The one in my book, not the one in the sky.
Just got confirmation today that A Star Shall Fall will be getting a mass-market release in October of this year. So if you prefer your novels in smaller and/or cheaper format, mark the date on your calendar!
(This is actually the first time a book of mine has gotten proper release in a new physical format. There are ebooks of all of them, and the Onyx Court novels got picked up by the Science Fiction Book Club, which does hardcover copies, but this is shiny and new.)
Just got confirmation today that A Star Shall Fall will be getting a mass-market release in October of this year. So if you prefer your novels in smaller and/or cheaper format, mark the date on your calendar!
(This is actually the first time a book of mine has gotten proper release in a new physical format. There are ebooks of all of them, and the Onyx Court novels got picked up by the Science Fiction Book Club, which does hardcover copies, but this is shiny and new.)
In which your humble mods realize their miscalculation
January 8th seemed a long time after Yuletide when we were looking at it from late November, but now that it's nearly upon us, it isn't very long at all. So
![[info]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1380916456i/3231018.gif)
starlady38
and I are officially extending the deadline on The Aurors challenge to January 22nd, two weeks later. If the lack of sufficient time was your reason for not getting in on the fun, please do reconsider!
starlady38
and I are officially extending the deadline on The Aurors challenge to January 22nd, two weeks later. If the lack of sufficient time was your reason for not getting in on the fun, please do reconsider!
January 3, 2012
Books read, December 2011; also some statistics
We'll do the December part first, because it's going to be quite quick.
The Gathering Storm, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. I haven't gotten around to doing the analysis post for this one yet, but I'll try to do that soon. In the meantime, suffice to say that I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this, although it did still have its flaws.
Bloody Jack: Being an Account of the Curious Adventures of Mary "Jacky" Faber, Ship's Boy, L.A. Meyer. First book of a YA-ish (MG? not sure what age range this is published for) series about a girl on the streets of Regency London who pretends to be a boy in order to get a berth and regular meals on board a naval warship. The early section was a bit of a chore to read, because it's first-person narration and Meyer presents a pretty accurate cockney dialect and grammar, but later on Mary/Jacky cleans up her language and becomes easier to read. I found the book as a whole enjoyable; it hits the usual "girl disguised as boy" notes, but does so in relatively practical fashion. And certain episodes (like the bit with the kite) entertained me quite a lot. I may well keep reading in the series.
Mystery on the Isle of Skye, Phyllis A. Whitney. An old favorite of my mother's childhood, which my brother picked up because he and his wife were going on vacation to Scotland, including the Isle of Skye. Sadly, I don't have their first-hand experience of the locations mentioned here, but the book was still pleasant reading. The two things that particularly struck me were the contemporary notes (like the extensive description of plane travel, which back in 1955 would not have been familiar to most readers), and my own knee-jerk expectations of genre. The title made me expect an actual mystery, of the Nancy Drew sort, and the inclusion of Scottish fairy beliefs made me expect actual fairies. Okay, not so much on the latter -- more that my fantasy-reader brain kept hoping for it -- but I did anticipate more mystery, and that really isn't what this book is about.
Cart and Cwidder, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
Drowned Ammet, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
The Spellcoats, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
The Crown of Dalemark, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
. . . and also a crap-ton of fic from Yuletide. :-)
To this I might add A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, by Isabella Bird, and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Judaism. Neither of them belongs to this month, nor did I finish either one, but I made it through enough that I think they belong in this year's list of books. (They were both for research. The former is one of several books written by a nineteenth-century traveler, and the latter was to give me a basic, 101-level resource about Judaism.)
I said at the beginning of 2011 that I hadn't been reading much fiction (owing to the burdens of research), and that I was determined to change that. So, how did I do?
Well, my log lists a total of 125 books read (and 14 abandoned), of which only eleven are nonfiction. So I have successfully raised both the total number, and the proportion. :-) We might further break it down:
Four were novellas, independently published.
Sixteen were manga, graphic novels, or very short illustrated books.
Four were my own books, read for editing purposes. (I only counted straight read-throughs.)
Forty or so were YA or children's books, depending on where you choose to draw that particular line.
Thirty-four were written by Diana Wynne Jones -- more than a quarter of the total. I'm not sure what the effect of that has been on the overall list. On the one hand, her books are generally short, so that may be inflating the number above what it will be in a year when I'm not spending so much time on a complete reading. On the other hand, the obligation to make progress on that undertaking sometimes means I don't pick up other books when my eye falls on them, because I feel like I ought to be reading the next thing on my to-do list. So we'll see what happens when I'm done with the project.
Any way you slice it, I'm pleased with the list. I really hadn't been reading as much as I wanted to these last few years; it's very satisfying to get back to it.
The Gathering Storm, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. I haven't gotten around to doing the analysis post for this one yet, but I'll try to do that soon. In the meantime, suffice to say that I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this, although it did still have its flaws.
Bloody Jack: Being an Account of the Curious Adventures of Mary "Jacky" Faber, Ship's Boy, L.A. Meyer. First book of a YA-ish (MG? not sure what age range this is published for) series about a girl on the streets of Regency London who pretends to be a boy in order to get a berth and regular meals on board a naval warship. The early section was a bit of a chore to read, because it's first-person narration and Meyer presents a pretty accurate cockney dialect and grammar, but later on Mary/Jacky cleans up her language and becomes easier to read. I found the book as a whole enjoyable; it hits the usual "girl disguised as boy" notes, but does so in relatively practical fashion. And certain episodes (like the bit with the kite) entertained me quite a lot. I may well keep reading in the series.
Mystery on the Isle of Skye, Phyllis A. Whitney. An old favorite of my mother's childhood, which my brother picked up because he and his wife were going on vacation to Scotland, including the Isle of Skye. Sadly, I don't have their first-hand experience of the locations mentioned here, but the book was still pleasant reading. The two things that particularly struck me were the contemporary notes (like the extensive description of plane travel, which back in 1955 would not have been familiar to most readers), and my own knee-jerk expectations of genre. The title made me expect an actual mystery, of the Nancy Drew sort, and the inclusion of Scottish fairy beliefs made me expect actual fairies. Okay, not so much on the latter -- more that my fantasy-reader brain kept hoping for it -- but I did anticipate more mystery, and that really isn't what this book is about.
Cart and Cwidder, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
Drowned Ammet, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
The Spellcoats, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
The Crown of Dalemark, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
. . . and also a crap-ton of fic from Yuletide. :-)
To this I might add A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, by Isabella Bird, and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Judaism. Neither of them belongs to this month, nor did I finish either one, but I made it through enough that I think they belong in this year's list of books. (They were both for research. The former is one of several books written by a nineteenth-century traveler, and the latter was to give me a basic, 101-level resource about Judaism.)
I said at the beginning of 2011 that I hadn't been reading much fiction (owing to the burdens of research), and that I was determined to change that. So, how did I do?
Well, my log lists a total of 125 books read (and 14 abandoned), of which only eleven are nonfiction. So I have successfully raised both the total number, and the proportion. :-) We might further break it down:
Four were novellas, independently published.
Sixteen were manga, graphic novels, or very short illustrated books.
Four were my own books, read for editing purposes. (I only counted straight read-throughs.)
Forty or so were YA or children's books, depending on where you choose to draw that particular line.
Thirty-four were written by Diana Wynne Jones -- more than a quarter of the total. I'm not sure what the effect of that has been on the overall list. On the one hand, her books are generally short, so that may be inflating the number above what it will be in a year when I'm not spending so much time on a complete reading. On the other hand, the obligation to make progress on that undertaking sometimes means I don't pick up other books when my eye falls on them, because I feel like I ought to be reading the next thing on my to-do list. So we'll see what happens when I'm done with the project.
Any way you slice it, I'm pleased with the list. I really hadn't been reading as much as I wanted to these last few years; it's very satisfying to get back to it.
January 2, 2012
Holmes and Watson need new punctuation
Saw Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows tonight, and had much great fun. Is it just me, or have we seen a tendency in the last 5-10 years for sequels to actually be better than the first movie of a series? If so, I attribute it to these being planned as series from the start, rather than the sequel being tacked on after the first one does well, and also on the way a second movie doesn't have to spend all that tedious time setting up the characters and situation, but can just jump right into the story.
Anyway. That actually isn't what I want to talk about here. Instead, I want to talk about slash, and how utterly inadequate I find that word for describing the situation with Holmes and Watson in this movie.
(I'll try to keep this relatively spoiler-free, but I can't promise about the comments.)
See, here's the thing. To me -- and I know people use the term in different ways, so this is just my own usage -- slash is the process of taking the homoerotic subtext of a story and treating it as text. And one of the reasons I can't call AGoS slashy is because it isn't subtext. You simply cannot look at the interactions between Holmes and Watson in that film and think the story is not deliberately presenting you with two men who love each other very deeply, even if they can't quite unbend enough to express that affection in direct terms.
The other reason I don't want to call the film slashy is because, although you can find abundant bait there for imagining Holmes and Watson in a sexual relationship, I don't read them that way. Partly this is because I get frustrated sometimes at how the slash lens tends to filter out all other possibilities for male emotional intimacy; we can't let guys be friends or enemies even brothers without also sexualizing the relationship. That actually frustrates me sometimes, on par with my frustration over TV shows that like to use slashy subtext to engage the fans, but will never actually deliver on those wink-wink-nudge-nudge promises. (We can have slash, but almost never The Actual Gay.) Anyway, getting back to Holmes and Watson -- sure, there's certainly space there for reading it in that light. But I'm more interested in the story of two friends, because it's a kind of friendship I feel I don't see very often these days, where it isn't all macho fellow-soldier camaraderie, but something with real vulnerability on both sides.
I don't have a good term for what I see between them, in the first movie and especially the second. The closest I can come is a term my friends and I have used sometimes, "hetero lifemates," for two straight people of the same sex whose friendship is of the lifelong kind. But it doesn't quite hit the target I'm aiming at, maybe just because it's unwieldy. Neither Holmes nor Watson would ever say it openly -- let's face it; they're both late nineteenth-century men, and one of them is a rampaging narcissist -- but they care as deeply about each other as either of them (okay, Watson) is capable of caring about anyone of the opposite sex. I feel like I need to resort to Greek here, except I don't actually know which word I want. Agape? Philia? Eros? (Wikipedia claims that one doesn't have to be sexual. Actual Hellenists, please weigh in.)
Whatever you call it, I'm fascinated by the way the movie embraces it, and does so without totally sidelining Mary Morstan. She doesn't play a terribly prominent role, but they do make it clear that Watson isn't marrying her just because it's the sort of thing he's expected to do. She and Watson have their thing, and he and Holmes have their thing, and it's my sincere hope for all three characters that they manage to settle down into a dynamic that doesn't force Watson to choose between them. Mary's willingness to roll with various events suggests it may be possible.
I can't refer to the guys as Holmes/Watson, though. They need new punctuation, something other than a slash. Any suggestions? :-) And, more to the point -- what should we call this kind of thing, if it isn't slash?
Anyway. That actually isn't what I want to talk about here. Instead, I want to talk about slash, and how utterly inadequate I find that word for describing the situation with Holmes and Watson in this movie.
(I'll try to keep this relatively spoiler-free, but I can't promise about the comments.)
See, here's the thing. To me -- and I know people use the term in different ways, so this is just my own usage -- slash is the process of taking the homoerotic subtext of a story and treating it as text. And one of the reasons I can't call AGoS slashy is because it isn't subtext. You simply cannot look at the interactions between Holmes and Watson in that film and think the story is not deliberately presenting you with two men who love each other very deeply, even if they can't quite unbend enough to express that affection in direct terms.
The other reason I don't want to call the film slashy is because, although you can find abundant bait there for imagining Holmes and Watson in a sexual relationship, I don't read them that way. Partly this is because I get frustrated sometimes at how the slash lens tends to filter out all other possibilities for male emotional intimacy; we can't let guys be friends or enemies even brothers without also sexualizing the relationship. That actually frustrates me sometimes, on par with my frustration over TV shows that like to use slashy subtext to engage the fans, but will never actually deliver on those wink-wink-nudge-nudge promises. (We can have slash, but almost never The Actual Gay.) Anyway, getting back to Holmes and Watson -- sure, there's certainly space there for reading it in that light. But I'm more interested in the story of two friends, because it's a kind of friendship I feel I don't see very often these days, where it isn't all macho fellow-soldier camaraderie, but something with real vulnerability on both sides.
I don't have a good term for what I see between them, in the first movie and especially the second. The closest I can come is a term my friends and I have used sometimes, "hetero lifemates," for two straight people of the same sex whose friendship is of the lifelong kind. But it doesn't quite hit the target I'm aiming at, maybe just because it's unwieldy. Neither Holmes nor Watson would ever say it openly -- let's face it; they're both late nineteenth-century men, and one of them is a rampaging narcissist -- but they care as deeply about each other as either of them (okay, Watson) is capable of caring about anyone of the opposite sex. I feel like I need to resort to Greek here, except I don't actually know which word I want. Agape? Philia? Eros? (Wikipedia claims that one doesn't have to be sexual. Actual Hellenists, please weigh in.)
Whatever you call it, I'm fascinated by the way the movie embraces it, and does so without totally sidelining Mary Morstan. She doesn't play a terribly prominent role, but they do make it clear that Watson isn't marrying her just because it's the sort of thing he's expected to do. She and Watson have their thing, and he and Holmes have their thing, and it's my sincere hope for all three characters that they manage to settle down into a dynamic that doesn't force Watson to choose between them. Mary's willingness to roll with various events suggests it may be possible.
I can't refer to the guys as Holmes/Watson, though. They need new punctuation, something other than a slash. Any suggestions? :-) And, more to the point -- what should we call this kind of thing, if it isn't slash?
