Marie Brennan's Blog, page 222

(Re)visiting the Wheel of Time: Knife of Dreams

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after this one.]

After more than eight and a half years of waiting, I finally get to find out What Happens Next.

I read this last month, but it's taken me a while to sit down and post about it. See, I'm doing two things now: analyzing the structural decisions and their effects (the general purpose of these posts), but also reacting to new developments in the story. I actually considered making two posts, one for each purpose. This is already an epic enough undertaking, though, that I decided to keep it to one, and see if I can't handle both tasks.

On the reaction side, then: was I satisfied by this book? No -- but I don't think there's any world in which this book could have satisfied me. I've been waiting for the story to move forward since January 2003, y'all. After the disappointment that was Crossroads of Twilight, this book would have had to walk on water and raise the dead for me to be entirely happy with it. Was it an improvement? Hell YES. (But then, there was pretty much nowhere to go but up.)

First scene: Congratulations, Galad! You have accomplished more of significance in thirteen pages than most of the characters did in the entirety of CoT. (Also, welcome back to the story. I don't think we've seen you since TFoH, though I might be wrong.)

I'm not going to go scene-by-scene here, of course -- this post would never end -- but the prologue, while still spending lots of time on characters and corners of the plot I don't much care about, is a lot more successful than its several immediate predecessors, because the individual scenes actually connect up. Galad killing Valda, and Ituralde doing his raiding thing, lead to Suroth's problems, which creates more of a feel of forward motion than most of these prologues manage. It flags again with the Tower part, though -- Pevara and Alviarin -- which manages to introduce some new content (the head of the Red Ajah advocating bonding Asha'man), but intermixes it with crap we've known for more than a book (oaths of fealty, etc). Then a hop to Galina getting captured by Perrin, then back to the Tower for Egwene, but not in a way that really connects with the previous two Tower scenes.

Still and all, though: better than CoT. We're off to an improved start. Let's see where the rest of it goes.

But first, a brief comment on plot, instead of structure. For all I detest Elaida and think she's a crappy Amyrlin, on analysis, I think she made the right decision regarding Egwene -- given the information she had at the time. Prior to the revelation of Egwene's Talent for Dreaming, busting her back to novice was actually a sensible choice. Elaida had every reason to think Egwene's quiet disappearance would throw the Salidar camp into chaos, with no answers as to where their puppet Amyrlin has gone. Contrariwise, executing or stilling Egwene would turn her into a martyr -- that poor girl! She was just the victim of Romanda and Lelaine. Plus, it would squander her strength as a channeler. Given that Elaida has already established a precedence for demotion (which used to be unheard of), and also given that Elaida didn't know about either Egwene's Aiel training (which helps her endure hardship) or her status as a Dreamer (which allows her to coordinate with the Salidar camp), this really is the best strategy for Elaida to pursue. It ain't her fault that Egwene manages to outmaneuver her so thoroughly later on.

Next we move to Perrin and then Faile. Minor thing that annoyed me here: in the narration (well before the dialogue makes a similar shift), Bakayar Mishima is always referred to as Mishima, but Tylee Khirgan -- who outranks him -- is always referred to as Tylee. It's really hard not to see that as a gender thing, treating a female character on more intimate, less respectful terms than a male one. As for the content . . . it falls pretty firmly into the zone where I would have been fine with it if I weren't already so freaking bored with this plot. It's probably worth showing the math in this instance, so that we see the challenges associated with pulling off the eventual resolution, but at this point I just want it to be done already.

Mat and his courtship of Tuon are similar, but mixed with the issue that (as is so often the case in this series) the material could have been presented more efficiently. Fewer pages describing the purchase of the razor for her; mention of the facedown with Seanchan soldiers at the entrance to the circus, rather than playing it out in full. Cut those down so as to keep the focus more on important things, like Bethamin channeling, and Mat figuring out what Aludra wants a bellfounder for. But it's actually kind of refreshing to have one of the relationships in this series get properly developed; I may not like their dynamic, but at least work goes into making it happen, rather than the characters falling in "love" (the quotation marks are necessary) when they barely know each other at all.

. . . which gets horribly undercut with a certain incident at the end of Chapter 9, but we'll come back to that later.

And HOLY SHIT WE'RE FINALLY MOVING FORWARD ON THE MOIRAINE THING. You know, the plot everybody's been waiting for since the end of TFoH. I can't help but view the letter she wrote to Thom with a cynical eye; it feels to me like Jordan realized that oops, it's been six freaking books since she "died," and we really need some kind of justification for why that plot has been stalled all this time. Hence the line about "you must not show [Mat] this letter until he asks about it." I also feel like Mat's concerns about the *finn spying on him via their interference in his head is way belated, given how easily his mind runs to paranoia. At the very least, he should have been speculating as to their motives a lot sooner.

Back to Perrin, back to me not caring. The thing is, I am just left completely cold by the whole "my wife is the only thing in the world that matters" attitude. It isn't romantic, though I feel like I'm supposed to read it that way. It's obsessive. It's selfish: he doesn't care about all the other Shaido prisoners, just that one. Just the one that matters to him. I mostly want Perrin to rescue Faile simply so that he'll start thinking about something else at last. Unfortunately, that involves something else that bothered me a lot -- which we will again come back to in a little while.

Elayne next. I'm sorry to see Aviendha go; it feels like more splitting of the party (as if, at this stage, there's still a party to split), but it's good to see Elayne successfully politicking the Sea Folk, and making progress against Mellar, rather than being oblivious to the viper in her bosom <cough cough HALIMA>. The real satisfaction with her, though, will come later in the book -- which is generally true of all the characters. There's a sense here of forward momentum, that was almost completely lacking in CoT, but it won't pay off until the second half of the novel. (Fortunately, it does actually pay off.)

On page 384, we finally get to Rand, who is ostensibly still our main character. It's funny -- in a not-very-amusing way -- the extent to which he's been sidelined in this story. Thinking back, I honestly don't feel like Rand's been the center of the tale, even in a diffuse way, since Lord of Chaos, except for the brief excitement when he cleansed saidin at the end of Winter's Heart. He's done stuff, sure -- but a lot of it has felt like makework or more of what we've seen before, while the actual progress (when we have it) has come in the plotlines of other characters.

This would be fascinating if I thought it was deliberate, a deconstruction of the role of the hero in epic fantasy, eschewing one Chosen Hero for the collective action of many. Unfortunately, it feels instead like a consequence of the kudzu growth of the plot: as Jordan gave more development to Mat and Perrin and Egwene and Elayne and Nynaeve -- and Siuan and Pevara and Ituralde and their second cousins' ex-roommates, not to mention a whole host of villains -- he needed to finish that stuff up before he could get to Rand's big finale, with the result that Rand's exciting plot moments keep getting pushed back and back and back. Since we can't have him vanish from the story entirely, his scenes end up going in a slow downward spiral of madness, injury, politics, and unproductive war. I was trying to tell kurayami_hime what happens with Rand in this book, and all I could remember was "Trollocs attack, and then he captures Semirhage and gets his hand burned off." He does a few other things, like sorting out Tear, but compared to the other major characters, it isn't very much.

But hey, Loial gets pov! I noticed a while ago what a high proportion of the random tertiary viewpoints are women. Partly this is because of the prominence of Aes Sedai/Black Ajah in the story, but there are various male characters who could get pov and don't, like Thom, Lan, and Loial. (New Spring notwithstanding, plus the Sanderson books, which I haven't yet read.) It's nice to see Loial get, if not a Crowning Moment of Awesome, at least a Moment, with his speechifying. And Nynaeve also gets a pretty awesome Moment; as tired as I am of the manipulative tone that predominates between men and women in this series, the trick she pulls on Lan is awfully well-done. Have fun riding to Tarwin's Gap, Lan!

(I wonder if that bit is why Jordan chose to step back for New Spring before putting this book out -- to set up the issues with Malkier and the Golden Crane more clearly in the reader's mind. If so, it makes me wonder about his plans for the other two prequels, and how they might have played into the remaining books. Would the long-delayed revelation to Tam that Rand's the Dragon Reborn have been less of a thundering disappointment if he'd gotten his prequel? We'll never know.)

The Sea Folk chapter seems as good a time as any to bring up one of the running threads in this book, which is that Jordan is delivering to a surprising degree on the promise of apocalypse. Credit where it is due: although I expected all the warfare and such, things like the mass suicide of the Amayar are more of a surprise. And the ripples seen in Faile's chapter, and the changes in the layout of the palace in Caemlyn, speak to a cosmic breakdown rather than just a social and political one -- which is far more alarming. I'll be interested to see how that plays out over the last three books. It's the sort of thing that's hard to sustain over such a length, especially when it should be growing worse with time. Hopefully this won't turn out to be like the "bubbles of evil" that appeared at the beginning of The Shadow Rising, and were basically never seen again.

Back to Salidar, where we get a bit of balancing: there is a way for women to sense a man's channeling. (It's been bugging me for quite a while that men could sense women, but not vice versa. This one requires a weave, but it's better than nothing.) Also, I note that Pevara's scene back in the prologue mentioned men Healing stilled women; it seems that brought them back up to full strength, as Nynaeve did with Logain, but not with Siuan and Leane. I can't remember if that had been mentioned earlier, but I don't think so, and it fits in with my guess that full recovery requires the assistance of the opposite sex. (Could a male channeler bring Siuan and Leane up to full strength now? Dunno.) Continuing the trend of "things finally get sorted out so the plot can move forward," the Salidar Aes Sedai finally learn about the cleansing of saidin, and Halima's cover is also blown. At long. Bloody. Last.

Egwene's chapter is actually pretty cool. Very little of what's in it is flashy -- although her schooling Bennae about the secret Tower records is pretty sweet -- but she does a splendid job of not-quite-passive resistance, choosing which battles to fight and which to concede, and embracing her ongoing punishment as a sign of victory.

(Another random side-note: I will be curious to see whether Sanderson, given his views, quietly bypasses the clear indications that lesbianism is practiced in the Tower and other places. Also, can anybody tell me whether there are any unambiguous references to male homosexuality in the series? I can't think of any, but they may be there.)

Now we start intercutting more rapidly between characters: Tarna (for whom I have sympathy, trying to deal with Elaida), Mat, Tuon, Perrin, Faile, back to Rand. I think this is a necessary shift as we get closer to the resolution of various plots; it's harder to wrangle than the several-chapter-chunks of previous books, but helps avoid the problems we saw in The Path of Daggers, where the points of high tension were scattered all over the book, and the end felt like a letdown.

Which doesn't mean we avoid letdowns entirely: Semirhage is, I think, the new holder of the Forsaken Who Went Down Like a Punk title. Seriously, Asmodean may have gone out with a whimper in the end, but he got a significant battle with Rand before his fangs were pulled, and even Be'lal had more of a throwdown with Moiraine. Semirhage goes from "holy shit it's her!" to "problem solved" in literally a single page. Even her burning off Rand's hand doesn't feel like much of an achievement -- more a sop to make up for her otherwise disappointing performance. I find myself sort of wishing Jordan had approached Tuon the way Martin did Daenerys; if we'd been following her on the Seanchan end of things since early on, the story could maybe have been structured in a fashion to make Semirhage's slaughter of the entire imperial family carry some impact, rather than coming across like a newspaper headline from the other side of the world.

Faile's escape/rescue feels like a slightly awkward compromise between "she's enough of a pov character now that she should have some agency in resolving this" and "it's going to feel lame if Perrin's efforts end up being unnecessary." At least that plot has finally wound up, though (which is basically the refrain for this entire book). Also, is it bad that I was happy to see Aram go? He's just felt like this annoying dog yapping at the edges of various scenes for ages now. But add Faile to the list of Things To Discuss Later -- they're all interrelated, so we'll leave them for the end.

Elayne's conclusion here is pretty exciting, to a degree we haven't seen for a while: there's real cost (people die), and real negative turns for Elayne (her capture could have gone very badly), and real bits of cleverness by various characters (Birgitte strong-arming the Windfinders into helping). And then she's Queen! For realz! Hallelujah!

And Mat gets married! I have to admit I was entertained by the way it played out. As they said, uh, maybe two books ago, all it takes is saying the thing three times before witnesses. So instead of a stereotypical wedding ceremony, we get "Matrim Cauthon is my husband. [...] Matrim Cauthon is my husband. [...] Bloody Matrim Cauthon is my husband. That is the wording you used, is it not?" I frankly appreciate the lack of sentimentality, both before and after; Mat may be in love, but Tuon's priorities are still on the bigger picture, as well they should be. For all my issues with the two of them, they're probably just behind Nynaeve and Lan for relationships I like -- ahead of Rand and all his ladies, and WAY ahead of Perrin and Faile.

And finally, two nearly-random epilogue scenes: Suroth's downfall, and Pevara's arrival at the Black Tower, raising hopes of that plotline seeing resolution in the near future (by which I mean the next book).

This book achieved a decent bit, though. Major plots wrapped up in Knife of Dreams: Perrin rescues Faile, Mat marries Tuon, and Elayne become Queen. All three of those have been dragging on since the end of TPoD or earlier. Two major villains get knocked out (Suroth and Semirhage), and other things make satisfying forward progress (Egwene in the Tower). It is, without a doubt, a vast improvement.

So what complaint have I been delaying throughout this post? Basically, the fact that several of the characters make moral decisions that I find frankly reprehensible, and nothing in the narrative says boo about it.

With Mat and Tuon, it's the moment where she puts an a'dam on Joline. For my money, that gets dismissed way too casually. It's interesting that she freely acknowledges her own ability to learn to channel, and has an answer for why it doesn't matter; you can argue with her reasoning -- if channeling is so very bad, why is it justifiable to use other people's ability on your own behalf? -- but at least she comes across as smart enough to think that one through. Her willingness to depersonalize Aes Sedai and other channelers, though, really eats away at my sympathy for her, and Mat's willingness to ignore it as soon as the collar comes off makes me pissed at him, too. What the story needed was a scene, or rather more than one, that actually addressed Tuon's Seanchan prejudices, and worked past them to a moment of character growth; what we get instead is a token nod to the problem, after which it gets swept under the rug so we can get on with the Politically-Ever-After of their romance plot.

That pales next to the two incidents on the Perrin/Faile end of things, though. Faile's is the death of Rolan, or more precisely, the way she responds to it. Now, I will freely grant that the entire situation there is complicated, and Rolan is not a straight-up good guy. He's the one who captured Faile in the first place and handed her off into slavery gai'shain white; he's also trying to make use of his leverage over her to get nookie, which is coercive no matter how friendly he is in presenting it. But he was also trying to help her escape, and I'm really bothered by the fact that Faile doesn't bother to mention that to Perrin after he cuts Rolan down. I mean, the general trend of the story right now has been toward compromising with morally dubious allies for the greater good; it's not as if Our Heroes are so pure that Rolan's attempted aid should be dismissed out of hand.

The real horror -- to the point where I may have to consider it a Moral Event Horizon -- is with Perrin. Remember how I said I didn't find his "the only thing that matters is Faile" attitude very sympathetic? Well, he lost my sympathy for good in his deal with the Seanchan.

True, Rand is also dealing with the Seanchan. I can accept his decision, though, as I don't accept Perrin's, for a variety of reasons. For one, Rand proposes alliance so as to halt the war that now stretches across the entire continent, and to prepare for Tarmon Gai'don. For another, my impression of what he's offering -- which could be wrong -- is a "live and let live" policy, at least for now. This is rather different from Perrin's deal, which goes much further than turning a blind eye to Seanchan practices: he literally sells four hundred women into slavery in exchange for military help. That would be like Rand saying "in exchange for peace, I'll let you collar the whole White Tower." And why does Perrin do this? Not for Tarmon Gai'don. Not to save the surrounding land from the depradations of the Shaido. Not even to free all the other prisoners they hold; Faile's the one who shows concern for that. No, Perrin sells out four hundred women to a fate possibly worse than death just so he can get his wife back.

Good-bye, Perrin. I'm done with you. I will read your future chapters in the faint hope that somebody will point out what you did, and that maybe you'll realize your error -- but I doubt it. And even if you do, I have a hard time imagining how you could redeem yourself. You've never been a character much interested in the bigger picture; even during your war in the Two Rivers, you were motivated more by tribal concerns (I have to protect My People) and vengeance (my family is dead) than by concern for the world. Since then, your selfishness has pretty much eclipsed all else, to the point where there's no better man for you to return to being. This is who you are, and I don't like you anymore.

(Yeah. I'm angry.)

Final takeaway: I think Winter's Heart, Crossroads of Twilight, and Knife of Dreams could and should have been two books instead of three. As discussed in previous posts, you could have offloaded some of the CoT material into WH; then take what remains, jettison 2/3 of it, tighten up what remains and the flabbier parts of KoD, and walk away with two volumes of much leaner, meaner plot.

It's easy to say that in retrospect, of course. I have sympathy for the difficulty of wrangling so many strands over such a long series. But this is an argument for keeping better control of those strands in the first place, so you don't end up with such a pacing mess that it takes a herculean effort to drag yourself out of it again.

. . . and now I'm in the home stretch. All that remains are the three Sanderson books. If I stick to the original schedule, I'll be reading The Gathering Storm in November/December, The Towers of Midnight in January/February, and then A Memory of Light in March, which is (last I checked) the planned pub date. Sanderson is 70% of the way through the first draft, according to his site, and given how fast Tor can push the book out to shelves when they have to, he may yet make it. Or not. I'll keep an eye on things, and adjust the schedule as needed.

Three reviews and two anthologies

Three recent reviews of With Fate Conspire:

Chris at The King of Elfland's Second Cousin has some very interesting things to say about the structure of the book.

Julia at All Things Urban Fantasy liked it enough to run out and buy the rest of the series, which is always encouraging. :-)

And a snippet from Faren Miller at Locus: "For more tales of a London based on history as well as sheer invention, try With Fate Conspire and its predecessors. Instead of the old-style fantasy of quests through green fields and dark domains, Brennan makes the most of one extraordinary city."

Also, BCS has released The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Year Two , which includes my Driftwood story "Remembering Light." You can download it in your choice of ebook format, from a whole variety of sources.

And it isn't available yet, but you can preorder the Intergalactic Awards Anthology, Vol. 1, which includes another Driftwood story, "A Heretic by Degrees." That one's print, and will ship in mid-December.

Amazon is not the good guy

I've piled up four links in short order that detail some of the problems with Amazon, and why, despite an increasing insistence in their PR that they're your ally, they're on the side of the consumer, they're your friend against those meanie-face businesses like publishers . . . they are not the good guy. At best, they are a guy, who will sometimes help you and sometimes screw you over. (The problem is, a lot of the "help" is of the sort that evaporates as soon as they're in a position to screw you over.)

So, the links:

Cat Valente first, on the notion of book subscriptions, and how Amazon keeps muscling their way toward monopoly.

Next Borderlands Books (San Francisco indie bookstore), on their sketchy business behavior. (Scroll down to "From the Office" to find the relevant part.)

And then, Anand Giridharadas in the NYT, on the fraying of decency, and what Amazon does to achieve such low prices and fast shipping.

Finally, just as a chaser, the privacy issues with the new Kindle Fire.

I won't deny that Amazon is useful. I still order things from them occasionally. But I've taken my book business elsewhere whenever possible -- Powell's, IndieBound, and local stores -- and I am not looking forward to the Brave New World in which everything is published through Amazon, for reading on an Amazon device, so that Amazon knows everything I do, with Amazon deciding how much I pay for that material or get paid when people buy what I wrote, because they've ground all their competitors out of existence.

It's like a hybrid of 1984 and Snow Crash. Stephenson was almost right about corporations ruling the future; his error was in using the plural.

The DWJ Project: Black Maria (aka Aunt Maria)

Like Witch's Business/Wilkin's Tooth, I'm not sure why this book got retitled. My guess is they wanted something that might at least vaguely signal fantasy, as Aunt Maria could be any kind of book at all, but it doesn't work very well; the book makes only one use of the phrase, in the first paragraph of the book (comparing their family situation to the card game Hearts, aka Black Maria), and to a U.S. eye it otherwise calls up weird, semi-racial connotations. Or at least it does for me, because fantasy so often uses "black" to signal "evil."

Anyway, the book. It falls into the "somebody is utterly horrible under the guise of being perfectly reasonable; long-suffering protagonists put up with it for too long" sub-genre of Diana Wynne Jones' books, but as I've said in previous posts, it works better here than it does in the short stories. Telling that story at book-length means other aspects come in, diluting the horrible behavior and making it less unrelentingly awful. (Though it's still plenty awful. Aunt Maria, so far as I'm qualified to tell, is a master of the Manipulation Handbook.)

The general setup for the plot is that Mig and her family (mother and brother) get suckered into spending their Easter holiday visiting -- read, waiting hand and foot on -- Aunt Maria, who is actually the aunt of Mig and Chris's recently-deceased father. When they get to Cranbury-on-Sea, they find the town is deeply weird, with zombie-like men, weird clone-like orphan children, and a bevy of old ladies who seem to form some kind of ruling cabal. They rapidly figure out that the surface niceness covers some stuff that isn't nice at all.

Moving on to more spoiler-ish details -- the gender thing in here is odd, and made me decide to read A Sudden Wild Magic next, as that was published right after this one, and (if I remember correctly) has similar weird gender stuff in it. Since my other current book-blogging project is the Wheel of Time, I appreciated the fact that the core premise in this book was "hey, maybe enforcing a division between men's magic and women's magic is a bad idea," but the way it played out . . . I dunno. I think part of my issue is that, Nathaniel Phelps notwithstanding, it comes across like the women are the problem, and the men are, generally speaking, the good guys. But I don't think that's what DWJ intended -- Chris explicitly questions that interpretation, at one point -- so it feels like she didn't quite succeed at what she meant to do.

Part of it is also that, while I find the under-layer interesting (using that as a general term for DWJ's habit of having there be a hidden backstory in her books), it isn't fleshed out quite as well as I'd like. The situation with Mig's father is oddly like a side-note to the more important story involving Antony Green; I expected it to be more relevant and emotionally fraught. Antony Green, on the other hand, is fascinating, but toward the end of the novel I feel like the focus shifts too heavily onto him, sidelining Mig and Chris and her mother, so that they become spectators to the end of the story. It's something that happens in other DWJ books, too -- The Homeward Bounders comes to mind -- but I was more dissatisfied by it here.

I did, however, very much like Mig's mother, and the sense of humour the entire family had. (E.g. "I agree with [how good a girl I am], for the sake of peace, though it always makes me want to say, 'Well, really, I'm just off to burn the church down on my way to the nudist colony.") It's easy in this kind of story to relegate the mother to an irrelevant or adverserial role, but even when the spell was making her dig her heels in over Chris' disappearance, I really liked her as a character. Also, retrospective-narration-in-progress technique, where Migs is writing the story down episodically in her diary, works better here than it did in the Magid books, likely because it doesn't have to shift between two characters doing the same thing.
I'd only read this book once before, and didn't have much memory of it; I enjoyed it well enough on this trip through, but don't think I'm terribly likely to revisit it. Some of that, though, in this case and others, may just be an artifact of when I read the books; I'm pretty sure I encountered this one in college, after the years when I was really forming my bond with her books. You rarely love the later ones quite as much, y'know?

A Sudden Wild Magic will likely be next.

Reminders: chat and giveaway

#TorChat on Twitter starts in an hour or so; I'm @swan_tower there, and will be fielding questions about steampunk and With Fate Conspire.

Also, you've got about twelve hours to enter the giveaway for A Star Shall Fall over on GoodReads.

Writing Fight Scenes: Basic Principles of Fighting

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

After (another) hiatus, I'm ready to dive back into the "writing fight scenes" project.

When we last left this discussion, I said I was about to get into the craft issues of how you put a fight scene on the page, but on reflection, there's one more practical thing I want to cover first, for people without a background in any kind of combat, and that's the basic principles of fighting. These are things you want to keep in mind when you imagine how your characters are moving, so you don't end up describing what a more experienced reader will instantly recognize as bad technique.

It's hard to generalize about every style of fighting out there, but I feel relatively safe in saying they all share one core principle: maximize your ability to hit the other guy, while minimizing his ability to hit you.


So how do you pursue this goal, of protecting yourself while getting the other guy?

One of the most common methods involves stance. If you look at martial artists, fencers, boxers, etc, you'll notice they're almost always standing semi-sideways, with one foot and shoulder closer to their opponent, one foot and shoulder back. It presents a narrower profile, makes it easier to advance and retreat, and lets you throw your weight behind a strike if necessary. Standing square on presents your whole body as a potential target, and means that if a blow comes at your sternum, you're not going to be able to get out of the way very quickly.

Another technique is to hide behind your weapon. Now, this may sound nonsensical: sure, that works for a giant shield, maybe, but if your weapon is a skinny little rapier, or your own fist, how can you hide behind it? The trick is that you don't need to hide entirely -- just enough to screw with your opponent. In fencing, I was taught to angle my blade so that it was in a straight line to my opponent's gaze: all he would see, really, is the point and the hilt, with the length of the blade, my hand, and my forearm essentially invisible. In karate, I keep my back fist semi-concealed behind my front one. What this does is make it harder for your opponent to see the incoming movement, allowing you to better surprise him with an attack. (Also, if you keep your weapon -- blade, fist, whatever -- between you and the other guy, he has to get past that to get to you.)

And don't forget, of course, the advantage of reach. A lot of what we practice in karate is how to cover as much distance as possible, without sacrificing balance and force and so on. If you can come in fast and get back fast -- faster than your opponent -- you have the advantage.

Movies would have you believe that spinning slashes, high kicks, and other such tricks are a good idea. They are wrong. Those kinds of tricks are slow. While you've got your back turned, your enemy will take the opportunity to stab you in it. In a kick, your weapon is your foot; to hit somebody in the face, you have to move your weapon all the way from the floor to a target five or six feet away. That takes time, and reduces your range, and all the while you're standing on one foot: not a very stable position. During a real fight, you're better off kicking at knee-level or below, waist-height at the most (which has the best range). It isn't necessary to do a huge motion to get a lot of force behind it -- not if you know what you're doing.

Blocking and dodging another large part of defending yourself and endangering your enemy. Both should ideally be small movements: you don't fling yourself out of the way, you just put yourself where his weapon isn't. Also ideally, your defense should serve an offensive purpose as well: don't just go where his weapon isn't, go where you're in a position to retaliate. One way to defend against a roundhouse kick is to step into it, rather than away. The real force is in the foot, not the knee, so by closing the distance you move yourself out of danger, and put yourself in a good place to strike or knock the attacker off-balance. A block can be an attack, especially bare-handed -- I speak from experience, and that's with Shihan not hitting full-force. Armed, you want to move your enemy's weapon out of line without doing the same to yourself: keep the point of your blade toward the other guy, so you can move swiftly from the block to a thrust. Etc.

There's a lot more to it than this, of course. There are scores of combat styles out there, differentiating themselves from each other on subtle points of tactics and techniques, and to really grok them you need the physical experience of trying to enact them yourself. But the basics are relatively easy, and visualizing them will help make your scene feel more grounded and realistic.
From here, we get into craft -- I mean it this time. POV, sentence structure, all that great stuff. (And hopefully on a more reliable schedule.)

Me at 140 characters or less

So my publicist finally found a way to prod me into getting off my butt and joining Twitter: from 4-5 p.m. EST tomorrow, I'll be participating in the #torchat discussion of steampunk, alongside Lev A.C. Rosen (@LevACRosen) and George Mann (@George_Mann), with Ay-leen the Peacemaker (@writersyndrome) running the show.

But ignore the bit where that post says my username is @marie_brennan; I inconvenienced my publicist by changing it after making my account. It's @swan_tower instead, for consistency with my LJ and website names.

I've been on Twitter for a little less than a week now, dabbling my toes in the water and getting a feel for what I can say in the space allotted. (Answer: not much.) This is going to be a particular challenge tomorrow, I think; if people ask interesting questions, my impulse is going to be to respond with a paragraph. Wish me luck!

Series Writing: A Conversation with Jim Hines (part two)

The first half, if you overlooked it or need a refresher, is here. The second half is on Jim's LJ here, or if you prefer a Wordpress version, you can have that instead.

Turning off comments on this post just to keep things vaguely centralized.

Series Writing: A Conversation with Jim Hines (part one)

Jim Hines (jimhines) and I have been friends for a while, and so when he and I both wrapped up four-book series this summer, I suggested to him that we might have a conversation about the challenges of writing -- and most particularly ending -- a story that stretches across multiple books. We'll be sharing the results of that conversation with you today and tomorrow, the first half here, the second half over on Jim's site.

Who are we? Well, Jim is the author of seven fantasy novels and more than 40 published short stories. He's written about underdog goblin runts, ass-kicking fairy tale princesses, and is currently writing about a modern-day librarian who pulls ray guns out of SF books. He's also a moderately popular blogger, and caretaker of various fuzzy beasts. As for me -- if you're not already aware -- I'm the author of six fantasy novels and more than 30 published short stories, which puts me just a little behind him. I've written about people split in half (mystically, not with an axe) and faeries hiding out underneath London, and I'm currently writing about a nineteenth-century gentlewoman who travels around the world to study dragons and get into trouble, not necessarily in that order. I am a mildly popular blogger, and alas, have no fuzzy beasts to take care of -- unless you count my husband.

Our most recent books are, respectively, The Snow Queen's Shadow and With Fate Conspire.

Without further ado . . . .

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Marie: There are a million books out there that will tell you how to write a novel, but I've never seen one that tells you how to write a series. Nobody tells you how to do that; it's something you figure out the hard way, after you've got a contract -- no pressure! And it's hard enough figuring out what to do in the middle, but sticking the landing . . . that's the real killer.

With Fate Conspire was really my first experience with ending a series. You had the goblin trilogy, so at least you'd done this once before; but me, all I had under my belt was the doppelganger duology. Those weren't even conceived of as a series, not originally; I wrote the first book to be a stand-alone, ending on something major happening, and then built the second around how people reacted to that event. It was a before-and-after model, which is relatively simple -- kind of like one long book. The Onyx Court series, on the other hand, was very different. Each plot stands more or less alone, but there's a certain amount of thematic and character arc across the four, which I felt needed to pay off in a satisfying fashion -- but without making the book something that would only make sense to people who had read the whole series.

How about you? What was it like writing Goblin War, versus Snow Queen's Shadow?

Jim: Don't you love writing a sequel to a book you never planned to write a sequel for? Goblin Quest was similar, very much written to be a complete, standalone book. I like to joke that of course I planned it all out and knew exactly what I was doing for all three books, but that would be total dung.

Writing the second goblin book was difficult. Ending the series was even harder. Even if each book could stand completely on its own, I was still ending a series. Expectations were higher. I wanted something big, something that brought a sense of closure.

I think closure was my biggest concern. I love that people e-mail me and try to convince me to do another goblin book, but generally it's because they love the characters, not because they feel like they've been left hanging. There needs to be a payoff, like you said. And before I could figure out how to write that payoff, I needed to figure out what the underlying themes and questions of the series were.

Unfortunately, I generally don't figure out my themes until after the fact ... if ever. With the princess books, I was halfway through book four when it clicked that I'd spent the whole series deconstructing and challenging "Happily ever after." So in addition to wrapping up some plot threads (will T get together with S or won't she?), I needed something that brought closure to the various ever-after storylines. For the goblins, it was more about survival -- so I needed to address how Jig and his fellow goblins were going to survive in the long run.

Your turn! What themes did you find yourself struggling to resolve in book four? And I'm curious, was there a point where it just felt too big? Writing one book is overwhelming enough, but when you're talking about four books worth of story and characters and setting and details...

Marie: Closure is exactly the kicker, isn't it? I got the same thing in response to the doppelganger books, people wanting me to write a third one. I won't be surprised at all if I get the same thing after With Fate Conspire. (In fact, I hope so. Otherwise it might mean I've ticked my readers off so thoroughly they've given up on me . . . .)

In my case, it's complicated by the fact that I may actually continue the Onyx Court series someday. Each book takes place in a different century, the sixteenth through the nineteenth; it would be cool to add the twentieth and twenty-first to that sequence. But right now that's just a possibility, and not one that will be happening any time soon. So I had to approach Fate with the mentality of, this is it. This is the end. How do I make it satisfying?

It helped a bit that when I decided to write sequels to the first book, I knew right away what some of the series' over-arching structure would be. There's actually three layers to it, which sounds very fancy when I think about it. Midnight Never Come (#1) and A Star Shall Fall (#3) share the characteristic of being more interpersonal, while In Ashes Lie (#2) and With Fate Conspire (#4) are driven by larger-scale conflicts: ABAB. It's also AABB, in that the first two books take place pre-Enlightenment (an important sea-change in society) and have Lune as one of the major protagonists, whereas the later books are more "modern" in feel and focus on other characters. And finally, it's ABBA: Ashes and Star form a pair around the Great Fire of London, whereas Midnight and Fate are about the creation and dissolution of the Onyx Hall. I also knew, as soon as I sketched out the progression of the series, that its focus would gradually slide down from the royal court of Midnight Never Come to the lower classes of With Fate Conspire.

But all of that didn't help me very much when it came time to plot out what was actually going to happen in the fourth book. Before I started writing, I sat down and did something I should have done from the start, namely, made a list of all the characters and locations and so on that had appeared in the story so far. Then I had to decide which ones were going to return in book four. My reflex, as you might be able to sympathize with, was to include ALL of them. There are two problems with that: first, it leaves no room for new stuff to be added, and second . . . this is supposed to be a book about the final days of the Onyx Hall. Lots of people are dead or fled, bits of the palace have disintegrated out of existence, etc. If everybody's still there, it isn't very convincing, is it?

Honestly, though, I think the biggest squid to wrestle came from history itself, rather than my own narrative canon. You want to talk "too big"? Try Victorian London on for size! They called it "the monster city" for a good reason. And I wanted to include a variety of stuff, not just the usual upper-class tea parties: Fenian bombings and the construction of the Underground and photography and dockworkers and evolution and all the rest of it. For everything I managed to work into the story, though, there's four more that just didn't fit, no matter how cool they were.

Did you feel the same impulse to go back to people and places we've seen before? Or did you have a lot of new things you wanted to incorporate? And whichever route you went, how did you try to ensure that you don't (as you said) leave people hanging? Wanting to see more of the characters you love is one thing, but quitting while there are still unanswered questions or unresolved conflicts is another.

Jim: See, that's exactly why I don't write books set in Victorian England...

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Speaking of "unresolved," we'll break there, and you can pick up part two on Jim's site tomorrow. (I'll advertise the link once it's up.) Feel free to post questions either here or there!

Review and giveaway

The Library Journal's opinion of With Fate Conspire:

Brennan's characters breathe life into a landscape rich in detail and vibrant with imagination. This title should please fans of Mercedes Lackey's "Elemental Masters" series and Elizabeth Bear's "Promethean Age" series.

And if you're a Goodreads user, you can enter a giveaway there to win one of ten copies of A Star Shall Fall. It ends on the 22nd, so don't forget!