Marie Brennan's Blog, page 239

more problems I bring upon myself

Things I do not have the brain to deal with tonight: the continuity error I just caught during my copy-editing slog. The CE didn't flag it for me, because it's not the kind of thing she would notice; you have to know the floorplan of the Cromwell Road corner houses to know that I got something wrong. Yes, this means that shui_long would be the only person on the planet (other than me) to notice. I don't care. It still annoys me, and I have to fix it. Either Louisa's bedroom faces the street and is above her mother's boudoir, or it's directly off the servants' staircase; it can't be both. But I'm coming down with a cold and just don't want to deal with it tonight.

Really, what god of writing did I piss off to saddle myself with this kind of historical nitpickery?

I dream of writing middle-grade

Copy-edits are here, all five hundred forty pages of 'em.

Dear Self: please to be writing shorter books in the future, kthxbye.

after much delay

Dear Internets: as a reader new to the Vorkosigan books (I know, I know; I've been meaning to read them for years), which book should I start with?

Relevant factors include publishing order, internal chronology, accessibility, and quality of writing. Recommend the one you think is most likely to make sense and hook me into the series.

The [X]-page test

There's a discussion going on right now in various corners of the internet about how to begin a story: sartorias talks about it here, and then you can follow links to this and this and some other pages I seem to have misplaced.

It's timely for me because right now I'm going through another of my periodic bookshelf surveys. See, these days I go to a variety of conferences and conventions where I'm given free books, and because I still have the Starving Grad Student instinct of "free stuff is always good," I take them home. Then they sit on my shelves for months or years without being read, until I get into one of these moods. Then I go through, grab those random books, and read their beginnings to see if I will a) keep going, b) keep it on the shelf for possible later reading, or c) cull it.

In my head, it's the twenty-page test, though in truth that number fluctuates wildly. If I'm feeling determinedly fair -- or uncertain -- I'll give a book fifty pages to convince me I should keep going. If I'm feeling cynical, it's only ten pages, or five. On occasion I don't make it off the first page, though that's rare. (I have very little truck with the notion that you need a really killer opening sentence; for something the length of a novel, killer writing often requires larger units of measurement.)

What makes me keep reading, and what makes me stop? On sartorias ' LJ, I said this:

I'm coming around to the thought that what I need most in the opening paragraph isn't action or conflict or even character (which is what I need to keep going after a page or two), but very simply a sense of confidence. Some writers can string together words in a fashion that makes me believe they know what they're doing; some cannot. And I think that difference is also the difference between writers who pull me in, and those with whom I remain stubbornly aware that I'm reading black marks on a page.

I don't think I can put it any more concretely than that, except to add an addendum from elsewhere in that comment thread, which is that this only partly depends on the confidence of the author. I'm sure there are many writers out there who sleep well in the certainty that their work is brilliant, but to me it still looks shaky and weak. What I really need is for me to feel confidence in the author -- however that may be done.

Some of what I'm looking for is prose -- not necessarily Amazing Artful Prose; just prose that knows it's aiming for and hits the target -- but it's also a feeling of solidity to the setting, or a character whose personality leaps off the page. Or all of the above. (Less often conflict, because for that to be compelling, I need a sense of who and what is at stake. So that takes longer to build.) The unhelpful thing about this is that it can't be boiled down to useful instructions for the would-be writer, beyond "practice." Practice will make you certain you want this word and not another, a semicolon instead of two separate sentences, this interesting detail about the setting, a wry bit of self-deprecation from the narrator. Practice will get you to the point where those things happen semi-automatically, without you having to consciously put each one in place, and when that happens I'll stop seeing the seams between all the bits and just see the whole.

Sad to say, a lot of the books I'm surveying right now are failing that test. With some, to be fair, they're hampered by genre; the further a given book is from the center of my affections, the more aware I am of the basic machinery at work. They may be perfectly good novels, for some other reader. And, of course, the ones that pass that opening test may not turn out splendidly on the whole; last week I read one that started strong and ended up disappointing. But when I find one that has a confident opening, it truly is a pleasure.

Zorro is dead; long live Zorro

A few months ago, I told you all the basic premise of the Scion game I'm running. People seemed to find it fairly entertaining, so I thought it might be fun to provide an update on the storyline we just concluded.


One of the PCs is a Mexican-American Scion of Tezcatlipoca. As a boy, he and his (mortal) family were servants in the household of an Anglo rancher in southern California -- a rancher who treated them quite well, providing education to the children, etc. One day, however, (almost) the entire household was slaughtered by a group of bandits. For some reason, the leader of the bandits chose to spare the boy's life, at least for the immediate moment; instead, he cut the boy's eyes out and left him to die in the desert.

The boy didn't die, of course, because he was the son of a god; this led to his first Visitation, in Scion terms. He grew up to be a tracker and guide called El Ciego, "the blind one," who is (of course) about as blind as Daredevil. The loss of his eyes gave him the gifts of mystery and prophecy, but there is one target against whom they do not work: the bandit who killed his family.

So El Ciego has spent years trying to find the man and get revenge. That's his backstory. During the course of the game, he found out the man in question was the legendary bandit Zorro. Not only that, but as El Ciego is a Scion of Tezcatlipoca, Zorro was a Scion of Huitzilopochtli -- two gods that have long been enemies. Furthermore, as part of the game plot, it transpired that Zorro had taken, and was trying to use, a very powerful Relic: an obsidian sacrificial knife that could be used not just to kill Scions and gods, but to take their power for the wielder's own. The PCs were told Zorro intended to use it against Anglo businessman types in California. El Ciego swore an oath that if he got the knife away from Zorro, he would return it to Tamoanchan, which in game terms is a terra incognita belonging to the Aztec pantheon. There it would be protected against Columbia and Uncle Sam finding it and using it for their own ends.

Skipping over the details of how they hunted Zorro down (it involved scaring the crap out of Pacheco one night, burning down San Quentin, and recruiting help from Paul Bunyan, among other random things), they eventually made their way to Death Valley, where they discovered that Zorro -- who was by this point a demigod, as were the PCs -- had a small group of cultists in the town of Furnace Creek. The confrontation that ensued there alternated between high drama (El Ciego and Zorro dueling all around Death Valley, the latter running at superhuman speeds, the former teleporting through shadows to follow him) and high comedy (the other two PCs in Furnace Creek, where for a while it seemed like everybody's tactic was going to be "find the most dangerous enemy and use a power to make her fall in love with me"). On the latter end of things, there were three interesting people in addition to the cultists: a Scion named Tiburcio Vásquez, a guy who looked a lot like El Ciego, and a beautiful woman with an obsidian knife she pulled out from somewhere inside her own ribcage -- who, they realized, was some kind of personification of the Relic they were trying to get back from Zorro.

Well, Zorro eventually died (of course), under a totally unscheduled solar eclipse (because Tezcatlipoca is associated with the moon and Huitzilopochtli with the sun). When El Ciego returned to Furnace Creek with his enemy's body, he got two unpleasant surprises: first, that the guy I mentioned before was his brother, taken away during that slaughter and raised by Zorro, and second, that the woman with the knife was what remained of his sister.

The brother (whom Vásquez and others had called Paynal) had been Zorro's Fatebound mortal companion, and pretty much snapped at the moment Zorro died. It was left to Vásquez to explain that the knife was too powerful for Zorro to reliably force it to his will; he had instead given it human incarnation as Itzpapalotl, so he could persuade her to work with him. El Ciego's sister, loyal to Zorro, had volunteered to sacrifice herself in this fashion.

Vásquez also filled in the backstory of Zorro, explaining the legend's longevity: he had begun as Joaquin Murrieta, Scion of the only Aztec god I could find with any fox associations. ("Zorro," for those unaware, is Spanish for "fox.") When he died, though -- partly due to efforts by the aforementioned Anglo rancher -- his sister got hold of his head and flayed the skin off his face to make a Relic, which she then passed onto Joaquin's nephew Procopio, who was already a Scion of Huitzilopochtli. When Procopio put on the mask, he was possessed by his uncle's spirit, and determined to carry on Zorro's mission -- with rather more ruthless tactics.

In talking about this, Vásquez managed to convince El Ciego that the idea of Zorro was an important one, worth preserving. So he hatched a plan.

First, though, they had to get to Tamoanchan. Rather than send the party haring off into Mexico, I decided they should be able to create a doorway to the terra incognita, by replicating the glyph that represents it: "a cleft tree, flowering and emitting blood," with each half of the tree twisting in opposite directions. None of the PCs have any power over trees, though, so they had to go request help from John Muir, who owed them a favor from before. Muir, being not powerful enough to do it himself, referred them to his father: Johnny Appleseed, who the Scion books suggested would be a god of the American pantheon. Since I'm handling that setup differently, in my world he's an ascended Scion of Danu.

Once things had been explained to him, Johnny Appleseed was willing to help -- until he discovered that creating the gateway would require sacrificing a human being. Not just any human being, either, but El Ciego's own brother. Even though the sacrifice was willing, this profoundly disturbed Appleseed, until they hit upon a bargain: he would try to use his power to keep El Ciego's brother from actually dying (despite having his heart cut out). With this agreed upon, they made the gateway -- El Ciego slipping an apple's seed into his brother's body once the heart was gone -- and stepped through into Tamoanchan.

There, at the temple of Itzpapalotl, El Ciego laid the not-quite-dead, not-quite-alive body of his brother on the sacrificial altar and placed the mask of Zorro over his face.

As I said in the post's title: Zorro is dead; long live Zorro.

The hope is that this third incarnation will carry on the laudable mission (protect Mexican-Americans against gringo violence) with less murderating of innocents than Zorro II indulged in. (Since the PCs didn't hunt him down immediately on hearing of his plans, I had to say he managed to kill somebody important; my apologies to George Hearst for bumping him off early. Along with most of his family and household.) The fact that he owes his life to a very gentle gringo god may help with that. And now both of El Ciego's surviving siblings are, erm, not quite surviving anymore, but are also semi-divine: one is Itzpapalotl, and the other is Zorro, with a minor cult at his back. It seems an appropriately mythic end to what otherwise would have been a fairly simple revenge story.
Next up: Promontory Summit, and the John Henry thing I mentioned in that original post. I have some fun ideas for this one.

not directly about Writing Fight Scenes: knife fights?

xahra99 asked this in comments to the last "writing fight scenes" post, and I couldn't remember very well, so I put it to you all here:

What films and/or online videos would you say show relatively accurate knife fights?

I know I've seen some that looked good, but none of them are coming to mind right now. I figured it was more efficient to ask the Great Internet Overmind, rather than staring at the wall trying to prod my own memory into working. (It always makes me think of that line from Hamlet: "Cudgel thy brain no more, for your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating.")

more (sort of) Onyx Court to tide you over

I screwed up my neck and shoulder on Sunday, so I've mostly been staying away from the computer. But I'll have another fight post soon -- possibly tomorrow* -- and in the meantime, you can entertain yourselves with "Two Pretenders," my latest offering over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

This is, by the way, the product of one of my charity auctions, where the winner was allowed to choose one event or person in English history and I would tell them what the fae of the Onyx Court had to do with it. In the case of "Two Pretenders," because the event chosen actually predates the Court itself, the link is more tenuous; but the short story grew out of the summary I gave the winner. So if I do another such auction in the future, remember, you may get an entire short story out of it. :-)

And remember, after you've read the story, you're always welcome to leave a comment on the forums.




*By which I mean Friday for everybody who isn't in Asia. I'm actually posting this before midnight my time, but in social terms I don't believe it's the next day until the sun has risen or I've slept, so even if it were three a.m. Friday morning for me right now (and six a.m. or later for some of you), "tomorrow" would still mean Friday. Confused yet? :-)

Things I Have and You Don't . . .

. . . a preliminary cover sketch for With Fate Conspire.

I'm all the more chuffed because the design in question is one I suggested. Authors are only sometimes asked for such input, and far more rarely heeded, because let's face it: we're authors, not art directors or cover designers or marketing wonks, and we generally know very little about what sells and what doesn't. But for once I had a winning idea, and I can't wait to see (and share) a finalized version.

Writing Fight Scenes: What?

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

Enough with the touchy-feely stuff about character and purpose; you want to know about weapons.

I said at the start of this series that you mostly don't need technical expertise to be able to write good fight scenes. Weapons are the one place where that's less true. You don't have to be trained in everything you put into your characters' hands, but it does help to have a grasp of general principles, and to look up details once you've decided what to use. What I'll aim to do here is give you a sense of those general principles, and a few examples of what I mean by detail.


(The focus here will be on melee weapons, because they're what I know; bows, firearms, throwing weapons, and the like are beyond my knowledge. There's an abundance of resources out there about guns, though, so if that's what you need, you can certainly find it.)

The first category is piercing weapons. These are designed to poke holes in your opponent; as such, they tend to be slender, and often only sharp near the tip. Rapiers -- my personal weapon of choice -- are a familiar example; spears are another. The advantage of these weapons is that they tend to be quick and relatively easy to manipulate in small motions, and they're good for either seeking out small gaps in armor or (if they're stiff and strong enough) punching through it, so long as the armor isn't plate. Also, piercing weapons need relatively little space in which to work, as their major motion is generally going to be forward. Defending a hallway or a narrow staircase? These are your friend. However, the damage done by piercing weapons is not often immediately lethal, unless you get a shot to the heart or perforate a lung. The death they bring comes later, from infection, unless the society has antibiotics or magical healing.

The second category is cutting weapons. These are designed to open big slashes in your opponent, or take pieces off him entirely: think sabres, scimitars, katana, etc. Cavalry weapons were frequently designed for slashing, so the horseman could threaten large areas around himself. The advantage of these weapons is that they can do a lot of damage; the downside is that they need more room to move. (The longer the weapon, the more room necessary. Cutlasses came into wide use on ships because of their shorter length.) Metal armor tends to stop them very effectively, though leather and the like can be cut through; I'm told, but don't know for sure, that kevlar is also not so useful against slashing attacks. In the absence of armor, though, the injuries they can inflict are pretty dramatic: lots of gushing blood and subsequent shock, or even loss of limb. If you want to decapitate the bad guy at the end of the fight, you want one of these.

The third category is bashing weapons. These are designed to inflict blunt-force trauma, and are your hammers, clubs, quarterstaves, and so on. They tend to be more simple in design, and therefore are more easily available to non-elites; some of them are everyday items repurposed as weapons. (Swords, by contrast, are 'spensive; they require specialized skills to make, and aren't really useful for any purpose other than killing, so tend to be the province of the upper classes.) These require more strength to be effective than the other categories, or at least a better awareness of how to use one's strength; they also need more room in which to work, because of how they depend on momentum. The damage they do is crushing: broken bones, cranial trauma, etc. Plate armor protects against that, but anything less is not so good; with enough force behind the blow, you end up picking broken chain-mail links out of the pulped flesh.

These, of course, are broad generalizations, designed to give the non-specialist a foothold for understanding weapons. Individual instances may blur the categories: axes, for example, both cut and crush, and morningstars had spikes designed to punch through armor and pierce whatever's below. Your basic European longsword might, depending on period, be sharp along both edges and tip, so as to be suitable for both cutting and thrusting. But thinking about what the weapon does will give you a starting place for thinking about how it should be used, and therefore what its role will be in the scene.

Once you start digging into an individual weapon, knowing its history, shape, etc will give you more hints for use. The classic rapier, for example, was often used as a dueling and personal defense weapon, the kind of thing a gentleman could wear around town and pull out if the Capulets jumped him in the street. It's suitable for use in close quarters; on horseback, though, or any situation where enemies can come at you from all sides, it's much less effective. You're unlikely to find these on the open battlefield. Rapiers favor precision and speed, not brute strength. Hilt design evolved over time to protect the hand, because a useful trick was to stab your opponent there; if he can't hold the sword, he can't fight you anymore, now can he? Armor, on the other hand, was almost never involved (beyond maybe a sturdy leather glove), because gentlemen didn't wear that walking down the street, and it would slow them down during the fight anyway.

For contrast, take the katana. It's a slashing weapon, like a sabre, but it has its own particular quirk: the cutting edge is quite a fat wedge. As a result, katana are not very good at chopping, i.e. a strike whose direction of motion is straight into the target. That wedge won't penetrate as deep as a narrower one would. What you really want to do with a katana is slice: sometimes a push-cut (motion away from the swordsman), but most often a pull-cut, drawing the blade along the target's body. Done right, this can cut (not chop) right through the body. Even if you don't know much about kenjutsu, your choice of verb can make the scene seem more real, or undermine it for anybody who does know the subject.

For a final example, let's look at polearms -- weapons whose business end is attached to a long stick. Wikipedia puts it well: "The purpose of using pole weapons is either to extend reach or to increase angular momentum—and thus striking power—when the weapon is swung." Going back to Japan for a moment, we see that samurai women in the Edo Period were often trained with naginata, for the very practical reason that the weapon helps negate a lot of the male-skewed advantages I listed in the last post. If you're smaller and weaker than your opponent, keeping him at a distance is a very handy tactic. (This is also why pikes were used against cavalry in Europe: spit the horse before he can land on you.)

Along with the general type of weapon, you also want to consider its size, because that will again determine a lot of the tactics. Not just for environmental reasons -- we'll be covering the setting of the fight in the next post -- but because of something fencers call measure or distance, which is the range within which a swordsman can strike. A rapier, being a long blade, can be (and frequently is) used to parry, so fencers may spend a fair bit of their time within measure. Knives? Not so much. Close enough to strike with a knife is also close enough to be grappled -- or punched or kicked or foot-swept or whatever -- which is a really bad idea if you're weaker than the other guy. Knife-fighters, so far as I'm aware, are more likely to retreat outside measure in between passes.
I'm going to make something of a controversial recommendation here, which is: watch movies. There are definite flaws to this method, of course, the chiefest of which is that most movie fight scenes bear very little resemblance to actual fights. What they can do, though, that simply reading a book can't, is give you a sense of how a fight with a given weapon moves. A favorite example of weapon geeks is the rapier-versus-claymore duel in Rob Roy, which very clearly illustrates the tactical scenario posed by that matchup: the rapier guy is much faster and can poke lots of little not-immediately-lethal holes in his opponent, but god help him if he gets hit once by that claymore. To pick a more arcane example, I know precisely nothing about spear-and-shield fighting, but I do know that the fight between Hector and Achilles in Troy doesn't move like a sword fight would; if I had to write a similar scene for a book, I would watch that fight a few times and think about how the combatants position themselves, the angles from which they attack, how the shields play into the equation, to see if I can poach any of the principles for my own use. (I did this the one time I had to choreograph a quarterstaff fight for a play. You might be interested to know the first six moves of the fight between Little John and Robin of Locksley in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves are actually two moves, repeated three times from different camera angles.) It can even apply to unarmed combat: want to write a really brutal, hard-hitting fistfight? Watch Ong Bak and take notes on Muay Thai. What you really need is the ability to think about movement, on a level of basic concepts, so that when it comes time to imagining it for your characters, what you come up with makes sense. Having a visual resource can help with that, and we're not all in a position to go to a Muay Thai class for observation.

Next post, we take the characters out of the empty white space and put them somewhere for their fight!

why I have this icon

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .

. . . it was the time between contracts.

That's right, folks, I am at present the writerly equivalent of unemployed. Aside from the copy-edits and page proofs for With Fate Conspire, I have no contractual obligation to a publisher. Which means it's time to go rooting through the brain and figure out what I'm going to try and sell.

It's a fun time because, dude! New ideas! Shiny! Four years of Onyx Court means four years' worth of creative backlog, all kinds of characters and concepts that have been stewing away in my subconscious. Some that used to look all sparkly and keen have now faded, but others have arisen to take their place. Just off the top of my head, I can think of twenty-two books in six series that I would be willing and able to do next, plus some stand-alones. So I am living in a time of wondrous possibility, where anything could happen . . .

. . . or nothing. This is also the time where I chew off my fingernails, wondering if my sales figures are good enough, whether the ideas are commercial enough, second-guessing what would be the best thing to do next from a career point of view. Self-doubt creeps in, because right now I have no safety net, and the publishing industry is not exactly in good health. I don't think I'm likely to find myself sans new contract, but it's taken writers by surprise before, and what if I'm one of them?

And, of course, the worst part is that it's slow. I have to polish up a proposal, send it to my agent, get her feedback, maybe polish it some more, then wait for her to submit it. After that, it might take weeks or even months to achieve resolution. Hence this icon.

You may be seeing more of it in the days to come.