Marie Brennan's Blog, page 236

Yoons and others may be interested

I need a piano icon for this, not a French horn.

Bear McCreary, composer of the utterly freaking awesome Battlestar Galactica score, has put out a book of piano sheet music for the series. It includes seventeen solos (two in both simplified and advanced forms), plus one piano duet ("Kara Remembers") and one piece for piano and soprano ("Battlestar Operatica").

A lot of really good stuff is here. "Kara Remembers." "Prelude to War." "The Shape of Things to Come." Some of my favorite pieces are missing, but they're largely the ones that don't suit themselves to the medium: "The Signal" may be Totally Badass, but it is also Totally Percussive, and would make an abysmal piano solo. Probably the only thing I really want that isn't in the book is an arrangement of "Gaeta's Lament;" you might be able to make that one work without the drums. But hey, maybe he'll put out a second book later.

I haven't yet gotten to play any of the stuff, as I lack a piano. Fortunately, teleidoplex 's new place has one! So I will report back later. The report will likely document how this book handed my ass to me; it's been fifteen years and more since I played seriously, and the look of some things in here makes me want to hide under the piano bench and wibble to myself. But I have to try. I like trying to pick pieces out by ear, but it's a lot more satisfying to play a proper arrangement.

apropos of the previous post

George R. R. Martin has an announcement.

As a professional, this is fascinating to me. They have set a publication date of July -- in this year -- for a book he says he isn't done with yet. By contrast, I finished With Fate Conspire in September of last year, did copy-edits in January, and will be getting page proofs in March, for a street date at the end of August. I know the reasons for that schedule, and in no way begrudge them; a lot of factors go into determining what gets done when. But it's fascinating to see how quickly it can all go, when the publisher decides to push.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: The Path of Daggers

[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 Crossroads of Twilight, as that's the last book I read before starting this project.]

After reading A Crown of Swords, I found myself realizing that I organize the series into four generalized groupings, based on the narrative momentum. It begins with the Good Four, which are The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, and The Shadow Rising. Each has its flaws, but on the whole, they're the books in which the scope and complexity of the story manages to be a feature rather than a bug. They're followed by the Wobbly Three -- The Fires of Heaven, Lord of Chaos, and A Crown of Swords -- during which, as I've documented in past posts, the structural decisions made during the Good Four start to have destabilizing consequences for the pacing and shape of the narrative. Those three do still achieve interesting forward progress on the plot, though, despite their increasingly swampy nature.

This month, however, we start in on the Bad Three: The Path of Daggers, Winter's Heart, and (god help me) Crossroads of Twilight.

The boundary between the Wobbly Three and the Bad Three is indistinct, and may well owe its placement to the fact that I had to wait two years for The Path of Daggers to come out. I don't entirely think so, though. It seems to me that, although we've been running into increasing structural problems since TFoH, this is the first time that the shape of an individual volume has fallen like a badly-made souffle. There's no arc to this book, no feeling of growing tension or climax at the end. The most exciting stuff happens around pages 100-150 and 300-350, but the book is 591 pages long. The actual ending coasts along mildly for a time before saying without warning, "oh, by the way, some shit," and then you're left staring at the Epilogue.


The interesting question is, what has caused this problem.

It isn't inevitable based on the TDR and TSR decisions, though those definitely made it more likely. Without a projected series length to give him a timetable, and without a unifying force to bring the characters back together, Jordan was free to -- possibly doomed to -- put down stuff as it came into his head. Half the markers I would use to judge whether a particular scene or plot development belongs in a book I'm writing don't apply here, and it makes me realize how important those are for the final product.

Part of what I see going on appears to be a cousin of Showing Your Work (warning: TV Tropes link; you may not emerge for several hours). Normally that refers to a writer doing research on some real-world topic, like glassblowing or the history of the Mughal Empire. In this case, I get the impression that Jordan had reams of notes covering every random Cairhienin nobleman and Maiden of the Spear he introduced into the story, and was playing a fractally large game of chess behind the scenes, tracking who was allied with whom and where they were and what they wanted and also what they wore. Then, having worked all that stuff out . . . he felt obliged to share it with the reader.

It's the only explanation I can find for some of the crap that fills this book. I've said before that I think it's the source of the random "evil plotters are evilly plotting" filler scenes, but it also applies to protagonist material, with increasing frequency. Rand is settling things in Illian, and we get two pages of his commanders rambling on about how the remnants of the Illian army are nothing to be worried about, they'll scatter at the sight of opposition, one good charge with the cavalry will send the peasants flying -- hi, Weiramon; why aren't you dead yet? -- all of which could be disposed of with two lines of narrative description. I feel for Elayne on her ride to the farm, dealing with Aes Sedai wanting to take Ispan off the Kinswomen's hands, and the Kin wanting the Aes Sedai to take Ispan off their hands, but do I need summaries or full dialogue from eight rounds of that debate? No, I do not. Chapters 3 and 4 of this book could be merged into one, folding most of the transit material into the opening narration for their arrival at the farm, and that's true of other parts of the book, too.

But why did Jordan do that? I don't know. All I can do is speculate, and before I get there, we have a second aspect to consider.

Recently I was critiquing a friend's first novel in manuscript, and one of the things I told her was that she spent too much time trying to hide things from the reader. It's a common novice problem (and sometimes common among more experienced writers, too); they play their cards too close to the chest, trying to save them for a dramatic reveal later on. Thing is, that doesn't work nearly as often as people like to think, because you end up with a lot of not very interesting material leading up to the reveal. Better to put the exciting stuff up front, and trust it to generate more exciting stuff later on.

It's possible Jordan had this flaw before, but this is the first book where I really noticed him withholding information, to very little good end. It starts with the very first scene of the Prologue, in which Ethenielle, the Queen of Kandor, rides to a secret meeting with the other monarchs of the Borderlands. They swear a very secret and very important oath, to "find Rand al'Thor. And do what needed to be done. Whatever the price."

. . . which would be wonderfully dramatic, except the scene ends with those words, having never told us just what these people think "needed to be done." We sat through ten pages of build-up, only to be robbed of its payoff. And we don't see them again for the rest of the book.

That isn't an isolated example, either. Narishma brings something to Rand from Tear, but Jordan waits seventy pages to say that it's Callandor -- even though Rand carries it with him throughout those seventy pages and keeps touching the bundle, thinking about it, debating whether or not to use whatever the hidden object is. (Side not: I sincerely hope there's some later, better fulfillment of the Callendor prophecy, because if not, what a freaking disappointment.) The reveal ends up being no surprise at all, and in the meantime, the narrative is essentially lying to us, tiptoeing around something that's at the forefront of the viewpoint character's thoughts. Or take Taim's letter to Rand, which says something about having "harvested" a "blackberry bush;" apparently this means something to Rand, but hell if I know what it is. And why is this information being kept from me?

There are worthwhile times to play these kinds of games. Verin's pov scene, for example, keeps her motivations murky, but in a way that doesn't feel like I'm being jerked around -- largely because Verin herself is trying quite hard to be oblique. On the whole, though, I prefer the approach taken with Cadsuane and Sorilea: they, too, have a secret meeting and swear an oath, but we actually get to hear what that's for. It makes me far more interested in their later actions than I would have been if their scene had consisted of more handwaving obfuscation.

I find myself coming around to the same theory I had when I first read this book, nearly thirteen years ago: this is Jordan's control slipping. He's juggling too many narrative balls, and doesn't entirely know what pattern he wants them to form, so he kind of keeps them moving in a basic circle while he figures out what to do next. Alas for the reader, we end up plodding through all those basic-circle throws. Rand spends twelve pages telling Illian's remaining army to go home. Elayne gets an isolated chapter in the middle of the book, mostly covering travel time, ending on the cliffhanger line of "the first explosion came," but the payoff for that cliffhanger comes a hundred and thirty pages later, and is a disappointment when it does. I feel like I'm watching the author pick his way carefully down a treacherous path, and I sympathize with the difficulty of his task -- but I really wish I didn't have to read about every single step. Because a lot of this reads like Jordan stalling for time, while he figures out where he's going.

The complexity of the narrative means that it's no easy matter to say, "here's how it should have been structured." Moving one piece has repercussions all over the place. But to give a representative sample: I think the Ebou Dar and Bowl of Winds plotline consists of perfectly fine material that would have been much improved by being condensed into a single book, rather than spread across three. I don't remember whether it's in TFoH or LoC that Elayne and Nynaeve first learn of the Bowl, but it doesn't matter; they go to Ebou Dar and begin their search in LoC. ACoS features the bulk of the search, ending with them finding the Bowl, and in TPoD they use it. If I were rearranging the story now, I would have them dispatched from Salidar at the end of LoC, and pick up at the beginning of ACoS either with their arrival, or after they've already begun the search, glossing over the unproductive parts of it. Let them find the Bowl and escape with it during that book, then show the Seanchan invading Ebou Dar -- as we get in the real ACoS -- but finish off with the Weaving of Winds, and the Seanchan attack on the farm, and the badass scene with Aviendha, Birgitte, Elayne, and the detonating gateway. It makes the end of ACoS more thrilling, and frees up TPoD to start with the weather shifting, and that strand of the plot moving on into something new.

Because, as I said at the beginning of this post, the structure of this book is a mess. The aforementioned scenes finish up around page 150, and we get another satisfyingly badass confrontation around 300-350, which is Egwene tricking the Hall into declaring martial law. (And oh, do I cheer when that happens.) Other than that? We're pretty much done with really exciting stuff for the book. Elayne's arrival in Caemlyn comes as an anticlimax, because Dyelin supports her; we've known that for a while, and frankly I like the fact that Dyelin isn't a grasping bitch, but it means Elayne's restoration -- which we've been awaiting for about three books -- isn't very thrilling. (We don't even get to see her tearing down Rand's banners and making it clear the Dragon Reborn isn't welcome in Caemlyn; that all comes second-hand, through one of Rand's late scenes.) Rand spends eighty pages playing whack-a-mole with the Seanchan, with easily half a dozen new random pov characters wandering through to let us know what's going on across the southern half of the continent, but even with the Callandor disaster, it's a real letdown after Dumai's Wells and all the Forsaken smackdowns. It isn't even the end of the book, either! That consists of Dashiva et al. turning on Rand (what a surprise; seriously, Rand's a goddamned idiot for letting Taim run wild with the Black Tower) and Faile getting nabbed by the Shaido. A thrilling ending this is not. (Hint: if the last chapter of the eighth novel in the series is titled "Beginnings," that might be a sign you've taken a wrong turn.)

Perrin's either an example of the whole stalling-for-time thing, or else I'm right in my growing suspicion that Jordan didn't find him very interesting. By my calculations, Perrin has done precisely one interesting thing since The Shadow Rising, and that's Dumai's Wells. He was absent from TFoH, nearly absent from LoC, mostly observed Rand during ACoS, and doesn't accomplish much here, either. His three big claims to fame in TPoD are: 1) he manages to find but not identify Morgase; 2) he receives Alliandre's oath of fealty; and 3) he tells Masema that Rand wants to see him. None of it amounts to much, except Morgase and Faile (and others) ending up as Shaido prisoners. Whatever happened to the whole Slayer thing? Couldn't we be having some interesting development on that? No, because presumably it's being saved for later. (No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.)

On the topic of Perrin not doing anything, and since this is the Book of No Mat, I want to take a moment to discuss the notion of putting protagonists on sabbatical, whether for an entire volume or just a long chunk of pages.

I said before, and stand by it, that the approach of staying with one character for a long stretch of time (fifty or a hundred pages) and then shifting to another is not necessarily a bad idea, given how separated their narrative strands are. Martin mostly pulls off the trick of switching every chapter, but since his rate of publication is far, far worse than Jordan's -- 3.75 years (and counting) per book, as opposed to 1.36 for the Wheel of Time -- the "block strategy" might be the wiser one in the long run. It does raise the question, though, of how to arrange the blocks. Clearly you're not running everything on the same clock; there will be some amount of jumping back and forth in time. To minimize that, however, it's often a wise move -- where possible -- to cut away when the characters aren't doing anything interesting, and come back when their plot livens up again.

This is more or less how he handled Perrin's sabbatical (and to a lesser extent Rand's, during the run to Tear). Perrin's part of TSR ends with him winning a great victory over both the Trollocs and the Whitecloaks in the Two Rivers, and settling, however reluctantly, into the position of being a local lord. He returned home, he got married, he was in a position to just coast for a while. And when we return to him during LoC, we find that indeed, that's just what he's been doing: coasting, dealing with a lot of minor things that don't really deserve stepping away from the main narrative just to remind us he's there. TFoH would not have been improved by a random chapter or two of "so here's Perrin deciding what to do with the new immigrants" scenes.

You can argue, and I won't disagree, that the better solution is to give Perrin something interesting to do. The Lord Luc issue, maybe. Or move up the timeline on other plots so that fewer pages pass before you have a use for him again. But if you're going to drop him for an entire book, that's definitely the time to do it.

Mat, on the other hand . . . .

His disappearance and return always remind me of the scene from Grosse Pointe Blank, when the protagonist comes back for his ten-year high school reunion, after having vanished without warning before graduation. He gives a very unsatisfactory accounting of the intervening time to his former girlfriend, to which she responds, "That's it? That's ten years? I would have hoped for a great abduction story." Man, when I read TPoD and Mat was nowhere to be found, I thought it was a great abduction story: maybe he'd been shipped off to Seanchan, there to meet the Daughter of Nine Moons (who, in my optimistic imagination, wasn't going to suck). Returning to him in Winter's Heart only to find he'd been twiddling his thumbs in Ebou Dar was a complete let-down -- and, I think, a narrative failure.

The thing is, we didn't leave Mat at a nice point of equilibrium. We left him under a freaking wall, in a city the Seanchan were busy invading. TPoD tells early on in Rand's chapters that it's been a week since that happened, and more time passes after . . . but still no Mat. Even more tantalizingly, we get the thing about how Egwene's dreams of him are fuzzy or washed out, as if he's not quite real. What are we supposed to think? There are exciting events going on around Mat, but something's odd with him; clearly, if we aren't getting his pov, there must be a cool reason for it.

Only there wasn't. And I don't remember his part in the next two books well enough to speculate as to structural reasons that might have required dropping him for an entire novel, but ultimately, I don't think there are any such reasons. Not good ones. This is pacing gone wrong, pure and simple. It's the structure falling down, and taking the content with it.

As I was reading this book, a realization came to me, in simple and disappointing terms: the series has lost what mythic edge it once had.

Think about it. Think what the early books are like. TEotW is so very, very Epic! Fantasy! Very earnest and in love with its progenitors, and it ends up in the Blight, with the Green Man and the Eye of the World and Rand thinking he's killed the Dark Ones. TGH ends with the Horn of Valere calling dead heroes back from the grave to fight off the Seanchan invaders. TDR has the first really blatant, public fulfillment of prophecy, and the end (sort of, at last) of Ba'alzamon. TSR has more prophecy, and the history of the Aiel, and the red-stone doorways. But once you get into TFoH, politics and army operations start to take over: Rand chasing the Shaido, conquering Cairhien, etc, and okay there's the throwdown with Rahvin, but by then we've had enough villain pov that the Forsaken don't feel very mythic anymore. LoC's big throwdown is the result of political machinations. ACoS tries, with the return to Shadar Logoth, but Sammael isn't resonant; he's just Yet Another Forsaken, and he whiffs out without much style. Of the things I deemed thrilling events in TPoD, only one -- the Bowl of Winds arc -- feels very magical at all. What's left feels . . . mundane.

Mundane doesn't necessarily mean bad. There's a whole lot of epic fantasy on the market right now that's more about the gritty politics than the numinous moments, and there's something to be said for its focus on more ordinary events. But I had this epiphany because it echoed something in my own life right now, namely, the Scion game I'm running. Planning the last session, I realized I was tramping through tedious logistics, and reminded myself that the player-characters are (quite literally) moderately powerful demigods. If we got bogged down in logistics, we were doing it wrong. So I told them to cook up some cockeyed scheme for how they were going to sneak into the bad guys' stronghold -- the more cockeyed, the better! -- and a grand time was had by all.

I think the piecemeal acquisition and pacification of Tear, Cairhien, Andor, and Illian caused this series to bog down in logistics. And the more that happens, the less genuinely epic it feels to me. Big, yes. Complicated, yes. But less cool. It's Risk instead of The Aeneid.

And in the end, that may be the root cause of the problems I detailed above. The bad pacing, the filler material, the characters going entire books without doing much that's interesting. It may be more realistic, but I'm not sure I'd consider that a virtue -- not in this case. I want the epic back.

One closing note, before we go back outside the cut: I was right about Faile. TPoD says it outright, in the person of Elyas Machera: "Swallow your tongue with a Saldaean, though, and to her, you're saying she isn't strong enough to stand up to you." And Faile's pov later on confirms it. Possibly my epiphany while reading ACoS was a faint, delayed recollection of having read those lines before, but I doubt it; it's been thirteen years since I cracked this book. So I feel justified in patting myself on the back for wrapping my brain around her way of thinking. I actually find Faile a lot easier to tolerate inside her own pov, as the text makes it explicitly clear that she doesn't (for example) blame Perrin for Berelain's behavior. Her gender politics are still a bit sketchy, but in a way that's endemic to the series, rather than a hateful quirk of her own; as I said back in the post for TEotW, there's the running notion that what a strong-minded woman values is an even stronger-minded man telling her what to do, at least some of the time. I have a vague sense that I liked the way she conducts herself while captive with the Shaido, though, so that's something to look forward to.
Aaaaand we're done for now, until May or June, whenever I get around to Winter's Heart. It's the second of the Bad Three, but I have a more positive recollection of it than of either book that brackets it; hopefully that won't prove to be false. (I need something to give me hope before I tackle Crossroads of Twilight. Otherwise, I can only reassure myself with the knowledge that it gets better after that.)

a better use for this icon

You know that poll I did before, on what kind of waiting is best?

This kind is -- the kind where I'm waiting to share interesting news with you guys. Because really, then I'm making you wait, with my cryptic posts and all. Offloading the irritation, as it were. Much better than hanging in limbo myself, don't you agree?

What? Why are you glaring at me like that?

^_^

Books read, February 2011

Continuing my quest to read all the fiction!

Seriously, I have read more fiction in the first two months of this year than in the entirety of last year -- possibly the last two years. (Presuming we don't count all the Victorian lit I speed-read while hunting for a title, and really, we shouldn't count it, because that stuff was going in one eyeball and out the other.) Eventually these posts will include some nonfiction, but for now, I am wallowing in made-up stories, and it is glorious.

Ethan of Athos, Lois McMaster Bujold. I don't mind this being a non-Miles book, but Ethan didn't really hold me as a protagonist. Partly this is because of the thing Bujold introduced and then flaked on, namely, the religion and culture of Athos. I admit I held my breath at the "omg I've never even seen a picture of a woman ahhhh they are the Source of All Sin" thing, because it's the sort of idea that could go really, really wrong -- but it didn't so much go wrong as go away. Aside from Ethan being vaguely reluctant to talk to women when the plot needed it (he failed to have a useful conversation with the security guard, but accepted Quinn awfully fast), he didn't seem to have much trouble adjusting. And dude, he didn't even flip out when that security guard flirted with him. It makes me wonder what Athos' theology says is wrong with women: usually sex is high on that list. You can argue that they've been isolated long enough that the religion has faded down into vague uselessness -- but if so, that makes it a pretty disappointing bit of world-building.

A Crown of Swords, Robert Jordan. Analytical re-read, discussed at greater length here.

Clouds of Witness, Dorothy Sayers. I read Whose Body? and Strong Poison a while ago, and liked the latter enough that I decided I should back up and take the series in order. This one was moderately fun, and boy howdy can I tell where Sayers influenced Dunnett; some of Lord Peter's dialogue could have come out of Lymond's mouth (allowing for anachronistic literary allusions). I also liked that this one involved the rest of the Wimsey family. The class commentary was interesting; the communists came off looking none too good, but then the same could be said of Gerald, with his whole "I won't tell them where I was; they should just accept my word as a gentleman that I didn't murder that man" notion of legal defense. The ultimate solution, however, ended up a bit on the convoluted side.

Equal Rites, Terry Pratchett. Pratchett, like Bujold and Sayers, has been on my list of "I should read more/any of their work" for ages now. I've read scattered Discworld books before, including the first two or three, and last year I made a brief attempt to start at the beginning again, before deciding the early books are too much on the flimsy-humorous-fantasy side for me to want to re-read them, so I started back in with this one instead. And it was fun, though I think I would have liked it to either focus more on Esk and Simon, or to be long enough to develop them while also spending time on Granny Weatherwax. (Don't get me wrong: I love Granny Weatherwax. But I didn't get quite enough of her or the others for this book to work the way I wanted it to.)

Labyrinth, Lois McMaster Bujold. Novella, and not nearly as satisfying as The Mountains of Mourning. It's less personal, and Miles' dealings with Taura bother me quite a bit. I'm all in favor of him showing that he thinks of her as human, but given her age and the circumstances, that was not a method I could approve of. But overall, it didn't make for bad reading.

Borders of Infinity, Lois McMaster Bujold. Another novella, and again not as satisfying. I'll be interested to see if later vintage Bujold does better with religious stuff, because here again, as in Ethan of Athos, she introduces something potentially cool (the religious frame of Miles' takeover) and then drops it as soon as the plot gets underway. I would have liked to see that, not the logistics of controlling the camp, fill up the body of the story, though I understand that the logistics ended up being the important part in the end.

Brothers in Arms, Lois McMaster Bujold. This book laid to rest a complaint I almost made in last month's post, which was that nobody ever seemed to connect Miles' two personas. I mean, it isn't hard; okay, I can remind myself that Barrayar is not the center of the galaxy, and Aral Vorkosigan's son is not (yet) such an important person that people would have heard of him -- but Admiral Naismith is a Betan persona, and there's a Naismith in Betan history who would probably pop up the moment you searched for that name, given that she bailed on her home planet to marry the Butcher of Komarr. Put that together with Miles using his real first name, and the fact that he's rather, shall we say, physically distinctive, and it was starting to really annoy me that nobody had figured out who Naismith was.

But then I read this book, and I compared the narrative chronology against the order of publication, and it fell into place. Bujold wrote this novel early on, establishing that this is the point at which that house of cards first threatens to fall down; therefore, anything she wrote later that takes place earlier (like The Vor Game, or Cetaganda) can't make a big issue of it. This is a salutary lesson for me, in case I ever decide to write a series of this kind, hopping back and forth in a single character's life (or other confined timeline).

What did I think of the book itself? It was okay. Not half as emotionally wrenching as I wanted it to be, given the subject matter, but intellectually interesting.

Unnatural Death, Dorothy Sayers. More Sayers, this time with a less convoluted solution (and yes, I say that even given the whole thing with whatsherface the woman in London). I liked the fact that Lord Peter's scheme with the newspaper advertisement blew up in his face, though (as per above) I would have liked it to be more upsetting to him; in this case, however, I think it's more that the style of narrative simply doesn't go digging into his emotional reactions. I do believe they're there -- I just have to fill them in for myself.

Mirror Dance, Lois McMaster Bujold. This? Is more like the kind of thing I was hoping for, when I started reading this series.

I now have enough data points to say with confidence that Bujold leveled up as a writer in the course of writing Barrayar; the difference between the prior and subsequent works is palpable. Better worldbuilding, better character development -- just better all around. It helps that this is the first book where we really get an external perspective on Miles, and moreover one that doesn't have much reason to like him; it helps dispel the whiff of Gary Stu that starts to gather around his more extraordinary hijinks. And I do . . . I was about to say, I do like Mark, but maybe it would be more accurate to say I like reading about him. Definitely he may grow into somebody I like. (I can see why Cetaganda felt like a letdown, if you read these in publication order.)

My primary gripe is what I think I'll call the Bothari Gripe: I'm not sure I buy the psychological stuff at the end. If somebody who knows the subject says it's realistic, I'll believe them, but it felt too plot-convenient for me to really buy it. Which is a pity, because if I'd been sold on it, the end of the book could have really gutted me.

The Bone Key, Sarah Monette. H.P. Lovecraft, now with 100% less sexism and 300% less purple prose! This is a collection of truepenny 's Kyle Murchison Booth short stories, and I quite enjoyed them. I vaguely wished for them to deal more closely with the rare books and manuscripts that are Booth's area of specialty, but then again, I'm not sure how you would write more than maybe one story of that kind without it getting boring, so it's probably better that I didn't get my wish.

(Also, it is not her fault that she re-awakened my intermittent burning desire to read some really good fantasy about archaeology. I keep coming across short stories -- in this case, "The Venebretti Necklace" -- that give me just enough archaeology to whet my appetite, not enough to satisfy. I don't mean Indiana Jones, either; I mean actual excavation, not pulp adventure with a cameo appearance by a trowel. If this story or book exists, please tell me!)

The Sandbaggers, Ian Mackintosh. On loan from yhlee . This is, quite literally, the episodes "Always Glad to Help" and "A Feasible Solution" (S1.5-6) stitched together into a novel. Most of the dialogue is verbatim from the show -- to the point where I could hear the actors' voices in my head -- and the few bits that weren't, probably got filmed and then left on the cutting-room floor. Its primary merit lies in the stuff that doesn't come through in dialogue, namely the occasional detail about the operation of SIS or the interior states of the characters. As a novelist, Mackintosh makes a damn good screenwriter -- but I'd be curious to read some of his other fiction, now that I know he wrote some, to see how it goes when he isn't transcribing another form of media.

Mort, Terry Pratchett. Continuing the Discworld binge, only it isn't really a binge, because I know that if I read this series in too concentrated a dose I'll burn out on it. Very much liked this one, though, especially because I've got a big ol' soft spot for the bumbling newbie who levels up to Badass over the course of a story.

Havemercy, Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennet. Nearly gave up on this one at half a dozen points during the course of this book, and I probably should have. It isn't terrible, but I never really got into it. For one thing it has what I think of as the epic POV problem: the narrative is split among four protagonists, and the early scenes did very little to build my investment in any of them. The central concept seemed cool, though -- mechanical dragons as weapons in an ongoing war -- so I gave it a longer chance than usual, and before that ran out I'd developed some interest in the Rook/Thom side of the plot, so I kept going. Alas for Royston and Hal, I had zero interest in them until about page 300, when the trouble with the magicians kicked in. Prior to that point, the main tension in their story seemed to be "they have the hots for each other but people in the countryside frown on that kind of thing," and as I recently described, that doesn't do much for me. I would have much preferred the novel to be entirely about Thom and Rook, especially because the extra page time might have let their conflict mature into something more satisfying.

Also? Near-total lack of significant female characters isn't solely a failing of male authors. This book doesn't even get the A Companion to Wolves defense, as Havemercy is a) female only in the way a ship is female and b) in a whopping four scenes.

Clockwork Phoenix 3, ed. Mike Allen. Started reading this last summer, before With Fate Conspire ate my head, but I read the bulk of it this month. I may be partisan, since I'm in it and all, but I think it's a very good anthology; lots of cool ideas paired with beautiful writing, which is pretty much the mission statement for the series. The more science fictional stories worked less well for me, but that's probably a taste thing, and John C. Wright's "Murder in Metachronopolis" should be a must-read for all of my friends who like well-thought-out time travel. My personal favorite, though, was Shweta Narayan's "Eyes of Carven Emerald," which mixes the life of Alexander the Great with an Armenian folktale. The prose is gorgeous, the ideas are haunting, and she did a lovely, lovely job of putting all the names in something like their local spellings, rather than the more familiar Anglicizations.

Boneshaker, Cherie Priest. So it turns out that if you put zombies (which I don't much care for) into steampunk (which I'm okay with) and the nineteenth-century Western frontier (which I quite like) . . . nope, I still don't care for the zombies. Don't get me wrong; this is a perfectly good book. It just isn't my cup of tea. I give Priest full credit for really thinking through her post-apocalyptic nineteenth-century Seattle, all the physical and social details that make it feel real, and the steampunk tech feels like more than window dressing, which is a good thing. But god, zombie stories are so depressing. I found myself skimming past the obligatory Chased By The Undead scene, and the obligatory Oh No Your Companion Is Contaminated scene, and so on, because I just didn't care. Not her fault. But I did care about the characters, and the history between Briar and Maynard Wilkes and Leviticus Blue; moreover, I cared about those things enough to keep reading past the zombies. So if the rotting undead are your kind of thing, you may consider this book recommended.

Books started and abandoned this month: four.
Next month's list will probably be noticeably shorter. Dragon Age 2 comes out on the 8th, and as Bioware has a solid track record of delivering stories fully as engaging as a good novel, I expect that will eat quite a lot of my time.

DIE YOU STUPID THING DIE

HAH. I have ridden from Stamford Bridge to Hastings in six days written 6,410 words today and KILLED THE NOVELLA DEAD.

Apparently February is my month for writing novellas. Deeds of Men was written two years ago. I kind of hope it's another two years before -- or longer -- before I try to write another one.

today's dose of gaming geekery

Courtesy of lunch with my husband, I give you The Lion in Winter (preferentially the Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn version), with the characters re-cast as Changeling sidhe of various Houses:


Henry -- Gwydion. The rage says it all.
Eleanor -- Fiona, most likely; one of them has to be, to explain their screwed-up marriage.
Richard -- also Fiona. Philip, plus "When the fall is all there is, it matters."
Geoffrey -- Ailil. Naturally. He's a cold-blooded scheming bastard.
John -- this one is hard. Tongue-in-cheek, he's a Dougal; he made that little headsman toy, and clearly his physical defect is his brain. As kniedzw said, though, "I respect the Dougal too much for that." Problem is, we respect all the Houses and kiths too much for that.
Alais -- Liam, maybe. On account of being stepped on by everybody around her.
Philip -- Eiluned. Mostly because I can't tell when he's lying and when he's telling the truth in the bedroom scene, and neither, I think, can Henry.

this icon is good for both celebration and frustration

OH MY GOD THIS STORY WON'T BLOODY DIE

(How much won't it die? I wrote more than 4300 words on it today. Which were added to the rather sizeable amount I had already. And I am nowhere near done.)

(Novellas. Man. I am here to tell you, they suck.)

I do love a good title

Congratulations to my friend Von Carr, whose short story "Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain" placed second in the Intergalactic Medicine Show readers' awards. You can read the whole thing at that link; it's a humorous post-apocalypses* tale featuring a heavily armed nun as the main character. What more need be said?

(All of the winning stories are available until April, I think, if you want to see what else won.)



*Yes, I meant that to be plural. To quote the story: "In the old days people had -- maybe -- worried about one apocalypse. At most, two. Global Warming and an ice age. Vampires and zombies. Nobody had expected all of the apocalypses to happen at once."

I should have posted this on Valentine's Day. (Or not.)

So in my SF Novelists post, I made a mention of how a lot of romance novels don't work for me because they're often too focused on the hero and heroine, to the exclusion (or at least sidelining) of other characters. And that reminded me that I had some thoughts I'd meant to post, about why, despite giving it a good shot, I don't think I'll ever be a romance reader.

Before I get into those thoughts, however, let me say up front: the tl;dr version of this is not "romance novels suck." Anyone using the comment thread to bash the genre wholesale will be invited to do their bashing elsewhere. This is about why I'm the wrong reader for the genre.

The reason, in short form, is this: I don't find them all that romantic.


So what do I find romantic? Shared interests and goals. Characters who have something in common (besides lust), something really important to them both. Then their relationship becomes a partnership, working together for something outside themselves. To put it in visual terms, I don't want them to be standing face-to-face, looking only at each other; I want them standing side-by-side, looking at something else. I used to say that I like romance when it's the B plot of a novel, rather than the A plot, but lately I've come to realize that's a symptom of my personal inclinations, not the cause. The truth is that when the romance is the B plot, I find it more romantic.

The A plot, you see, gives me context and meaning for the romance. It shows me different sides of the characters, so that when they come together I have a better sense of who they are and why they matter to each other. This is why Phèdre and Joscelin work for me, and Imriel and Sidonie don't; the foundation of that first partnership goes down to bedrock. When they dislike each other, it's for well-grounded cultural reasons. When Joscelin hates Phèdre, it's because he has reason to think she's a traitor. When they begin working together, it's for survival, and to strike back at their enemies, and their trust and inter-reliance grows out of that. As a result, when the really dramatic moments roll around -- the moments where they decide to put each other ahead of something else -- those moments hit harder because that something else? Really matters. To them both. And I therefore care about it a lot more.

I've read romances where one or both protagonists have the attitude of "you are the only thing in the world that matters to me." That? Is not a button that works for me. I like characters who care about multiple things, and those things intertwine. It doesn't always have to be fate-of-the-world level, either (though admittedly, as a fantasy reader I'm accustomed to plots with fairly high stakes). I very much like the Lydia/Wickham byplot in Pride and Prejudice, for example, and would love it even more if it was resolved by joint action between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy. (Which, if I recall correctly, is the case in the Bride and Prejudice adaptation.) The higher the percentage of that kind of thing in the story, the more I'm likely to get invested in the romance -- at least until you tip over the edge of "this is actually just about the A plot, and we've shoved a romance in there because we feel obligated to do so."

I know romance novels do include that kind of thing. But it's been a running dissatisfaction of mine, with virtually all the ones I've read, that I want more plot-plot to ground the romance-plot. I picked up Butterfly Swords because it was set in Tang Dynasty China, which, you know, awesome! But then it was all about the hornypants, and I'm sitting there going, "MOAR TANG CHINA NAO PLZ." If the political side had been the plot, rather than a very neglected subplot, and the hero had been somebody invested in that plot rather than a random European outsider shoehorned into the setting (seriously, wtf), then, well, it would have been the book I was hoping to read. As it was, though, it was not for me.
I'm posting this because it's been very enlightening for me to think through my expectations and the conventions of the genre (as seen through friends' reviews, the Smart Bitches website, and the twenty or so romance novels I've read). The more I understand what I'm looking for in a story, the better I'm able to find stories I will like.

But I am definitely willing to take recommendations from those of you who are romance readers, of books you think are likely to supply what I'm looking for. Short form is, more plot = more good (though I will roll my eyes right out of my head if the characters are running for their lives from the bad guys and then stop in a stairwell or broom closet for random nookie). Also, I like stories where the protagonists have known each other for a while, rather than just having met; this, to me, is one of the big romantic selling points in pameladean 's Tam Lin. My ideal of romance grows out of friendship and partnership, which both fare better when they're given lots of context. Finally, because of my interests, I tend to gravitate more towards historicals or things with speculative elements, rather than contemporary realistic romance. But they'd better do their history or speculation well, or I'll be kicked right out of the story.

Yeah, I know. I'm not asking for much at all. <g>