Marie Brennan's Blog, page 41

Rook and Rose Book 3, Chapter 13

We are mean in this chapter, yo. In several directions at once, because while some of it is just us trying to make the reader think an awful thing has happened, that’s amidst a bunch of awful things actually happening.

Writers are professional sadists sometimes. ^_^

This chapter makes me realize that in addition to posting the comments we leave for each other on the draft, I should post the tag lines we put on each chapter. Those began as a practical necessity: Google Docs provides you with a handy-dandy auto-generated sidebar outline, but in order to get it to recognize the header for the first scene in each chapter, we had to put a line of ordinary text between that and the chapter header. Naturally, being smartasses, we began getting very snarky and ridiculous in some of the lines we wrote. This one alludes to a particular bit of real-world history, which is being ever so vaguely paralleled in our plot — like, not really, but I realized that X thing in the story sort of resembles Y thing in history, so naturally when a conflict occurs, I’m going to nickname it after the relevant war.

Also, this chapter features the bane of all writers: that thing you put into the story that seemed like a good idea at the time — that in fact was a good idea at the time — but is now threatening to shoot your plot in the foot. We had to figure out how a certain character could block something from happening, without knowing it was a thing they needed to block. This was what we technically refer to as “a pain in the ass.” I suspect it will still need some finessing in revisions, because there are a whole lot of factors we need to interfere with, ideally without it seeming too (in)convenient that the interference is happening. But we got enough of the way toward a solution that we were able to move on.

Word count: ~95,000
Authorial sadism: I’m blaming 90% of it on Alyc, because 90% of it is that final scene, which they wrote on their own.
Authorial amusement: Look, you don’t have to torture somebody for information if they’re eager to sell it to you.
BLR quotient: Sometimes the blood is metaphorical. Sometimes it is very, very literal.

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New Worlds: Political Factions

This week in the New Worlds Patreon, we basically can’t do politics without organizing ourselves into groups — but how factionalism plays out is a little different depending on your form of government. Comment over there!

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Rook and Rose Book 3, Chapter 12

To make up for last chapter having no Ren pov, this one is nothing but Ren pov. As with the previous one, that isn’t so much a conscious decision as the result of how the Great Rearrangement of Part Two ended up going. But it’s good to have, since while we’ve got multiple viewpoint characters in this series, Ren is undoubtedly the most central of the lot.

This chapter features a scene which . . . well, look. We knew we wanted to have X happen, so, cool, that’s the point of this scene. Let’s come up with some context to embed it in. Aaaaaand by the time we were done with the context, that had become the point of the scene, with the original mission being a side note that gets dealt with along the way. Not coincidentally, a scene I thought would be less than 2K wound up 3400 words long. (This was part of what prompted the Great Rearrangement.) It’s all good stuff; we came up with a bit of worldbuilding that lets us tie several things together in a way the book very much benefits from. But it was quite unexpected, as a simple “we need to set up this later meeting” conversation turned into a contest with deep political and theological implications.

And that’s only the first half of the chapter! The second half winds up pulling the curtain back on one or two of the few major elements of the long-term plot that we actually didn’t plan from the start. In general, if you’re reading this series and wonder “omg, did the authors have this planned all along?,” the answer is yes. We had a much clearer roadmap for this trilogy than either of us normally does, so there’s a lot of stuff — not just major but minor — that we always knew we were going to do, and seeded hints of along the way. But there were two significant decisions we made while drafting The Liar’s Knot that weren’t in the original game plan, one of which comes to the forefront here and sets up a bit with the other. (If you’ve read the Doppelganger books, it’s a bit like the moment where Satomi says “Wrong” to Miryo: I didn’t see that coming until I typed it, and it wound up being so pivotal to the end of the first book, I honestly don’t know how things would have played out without it.)

Word count: 87,000
Authorial sadism: Yanking a certain character out of the story, with nobody — the other characters included — being sure what’s happened to him.
Authorial amusement: Speaking of things we didn’t plan for, one side character who was a complete non-entity until he abruptly spoke up at the end of book two has a pleasingly excellent moment here.
BLR quotient: More politicking and the aforementioned worldbuilding addition, so rhetoric pulls ahead.

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New Worlds: Parliaments and Presidents

Continuing its survey of democratic government, the New Worlds Patreon turns its attention to who’s being elected — a president? A prime minister? A legislature? What kind? Turns out the answers to that are often very messy. Comment over there!

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Spark of Life: David B. Coe on RADIANTS

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts! I got too busy to keep up with coordinating them, I’m afraid. But my friend David Coe has a new book out, so I’m delighted to introduce you all to Radiants, a supernatural thriller with a queer, teenaged protagonist. Sparking this story to life required him to unfollow some earlier, well-meant advice — but I’ll let him tell you that tale himself . . .

***

David says:

A couple of decades ago, while working on my debut fantasy series, the LonTobyn Chronicle, a first-contact story about two societies, one pastoral, one highly technological, I mentioned to my editor an idea I had to market the series as “an ecological fantasy.” He told me, in no uncertain terms, that this was a terrible idea.

“No one,” he said (I’m paraphrasing a little), “wants to read an ecological fantasy. Keep politics and social issues out of your work. Just write your story.”

Over the years I have defied that advice again and again, though I have tried to do so with subtlety and nuance. I didn’t take the ecological themes out of that first trilogy — and, to be fair to my editor, one reviewer writing for a prominent publication strongly objected to the presence of those themes. In several subsequent series, I have dealt with issues ranging from race to mental illness and addiction, but always I have done my best to keep my social content in the background, visible to those who care to look for it, but unobtrusive.

Fast forward to my newest work, Radiants, a supernatural thriller to be released October 15 from Belle Books. When I showed my initial draft of the novel to my agent a couple of years ago, before we began to shop it to publishers, she came back to me with surprising feedback. She told me the book felt a little flat to her. This was not the part that surprised me; I sensed the lack of energy as well, but was at a bit of a loss as to how to fix it.

What I hadn’t expected was her advice. “Publishers these days want books with some social relevance,” she said. “You’re so political, so passionate in your opinions. Let that guide you in your revisions.”

How far we’ve come.

As soon as she said this, my mind began to whir.

Radiants tells the story of a teenaged girl, DeDe Mercer, who has the ability to control the thoughts of others. She can step into someone’s mind, make a decision for them, and then jump back out, leaving her will imprinted on their thoughts. She and other Radiants (who have a variety of abilities) access their talents by drawing upon planetary energy systems — the rotational and orbital energies of the earth and moon. And though DeDe has been warned by her mother not to use her power at all, she is confronted by a situation that leaves her with little choice. DeDe’s abilities come to the attention of government agencies, several of which send operatives after her, all hoping to turn her into a tool. Or a weapon. I loved the set-up from the start, but armed with my agent’s advice, I saw new possibilities.

Those who seek to use her, who seek to create an army of Radiants, don’t care about the consequences of their ambitions. But DeDe soon realizes that her deceased father, who was also a Radiant, saw the danger. Too many Radiants drawing upon those planetary energy systems threaten to destabilize earth’s orbit and rotation, imperiling the very survival of the planet.

DeDe’s decision to use her ability despite her mother’s objections is prompted by an injustice against her closest friend (and crush), Kyle, who is genderqueer. Kyle is bullied for what feels like the hundredth time, and rather than just taking it, they fight back, bloodying the nose of a much larger student. Though they were defending themself, the principal of the high school decides to suspend them and not the instigator. DeDe refuses to let this decision stand and uses her power to change his mind, setting in motion the events of the novel.

The government agencies pursuing DeDe and her family stop at nothing to have their way, and think nothing of kidnapping DeDe’s mother, splitting the family. DeDe and her brother, Miles, who is about to come into his power, fight back to win their mother’s freedom, a conflict that forms the narrative core of Radiants.

An allegory for global warming. A story about gender identity and bigotry. An indictment of governments using their power to separate children from their parents.

Once I recast the plot in these terms, my passion for the book grew exponentially. I still loved my characters and narrative, but now I also cared deeply about my themes, my underlying message. I didn’t feel the need to disguise these elements of my storytelling. Instead, I reveled in them.

Don’t get me wrong: Radiants is first and foremost a thriller. It might well be the most tightly paced, action-packed book I’ve written. I don’t bludgeon my reader with politics. But neither do I shy from issues that matter to me.

And once I allowed myself to write this way, my novel came to life.

Many thanks to Marie for hosting me on her site!

***

From the cover copy:

DeDe Mercer is a Radiant who can control other people’s thoughts, make them do what she wants. For years she’s controlled her power, keeping her secret, never using it on anyone—until the day she had no choice.

Now the government is after her, after her brother, too, because he’ll come into his power before long. The Department of Energy, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Homeland Security — they all want her, and they’re willing to do anything, hurt anyone, kill if necessary, to make her their weapon.

But DeDe has had enough. They think she’s a weapon? Fine. They’re about to find out how right they are.

Amazon U.S.Barnes & NobleApple BooksKoboGoogle BooksAbe’s Books

David B. Coe is the award-winning author of more than two dozen novels and as many short stories. He has written epic fantasy — including the Crawford Award-winning LonTobyn Chronicle — urban fantasy, and media tie-ins, and is now expanding into supernatural thrillers with Radiants and its sequels. In addition, he has co-edited several anthologies for the Zombies Need Brains imprint.

As D.B. Jackson, he is the author of the Thieftaker Chronicles, a historical urban fantasy set in pre-Revolutionary Boston. He has also written the Islevale Cycle, a time travel epic fantasy series that includes Time’s Children, Time’s Demon, and Time’s Assassin.

David has a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Stanford University. His books have been translated into a dozen languages. He and his family live on the Cumberland Plateau. When he’s not writing he likes to hike, play guitar, and stalk the perfect image with his camera.

***

Like me, he has multiple professional identities! You can find him as David B. Coe on his website, Facebook, and Twitter, or as D.B. Jackson on another site, Facebook, and Twitter.

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Rook and Rose Book 3, Chapter 11

Augh, I keep forgetting to update. At this rate you’ll get the last five posts all on the same day, because there’s no way I’ll be able to hold back from crowing that we’ve finished the book on the day it happens. But that’s a long way off.

Chapter 11: in which there is no Ren pov! (She’s the one character I feel I can name outright, without worrying about it being a spoiler. I don’t think anybody out there believes we’re going to whack her before the end of the story. Uhhhh, not that I have a trunked novel where I did exactly that and the protagonist finishes out the book as a ghost or anything. ) There’s no dramatic reason for why we don’t get Ren’s viewpoint in this chapter; that’s simply how things fell out after the Great Rearrangement of Part Two. She’s present in two of the scenes, but those are both more interesting when seen through someone else’s eyes.

This chapter is mostly still fallout, but not entirely, and even the stuff that is fallout is starting to point in new directions. Someone in here gets 95% of the way to a correct idea, but draws the wrong conclusion from it, for justifiable reasons. One of the things Alyc and I will be writing soon (because we’re multiple chapters ahead of where I am in posting) is going to be about talking that character down off the murder ledge. And the other night we figured out what the ultimate consequences of that bit will be, and they are glorious.

Word count: ~78,000
Authorial sadism: Those two things aren’t connected in the way those characters fear . . . but they aren’t not connected, either. In various ways, including one that’s going to liquefy their brains before the end of this novel.
Authorial amusement: Yes, that is indeed his way of being a smartass.
BLR quotient: For all that we have a duel in this chapter, rhetoric has the upper hand. Lots of politicking in here — and oh, we have found a way to make one moment of it bite somebody on the ass hard later on . . .

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New Worlds: The Right to Vote

This week, the New Worlds Patreon looks at something that is still far too much of a hot-button issue today: the right to vote, and who does and does not get to have it. Comment over there!

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New Worlds: Approaches to Democracy

The patrons of New Worlds have cast their votes! Which makes this month’s topic especially apropos, as we’re turning our attention to democracy as a form of government, beginning with the different forms that takes. Comment over there!

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Rook and Rose Book 3, Chapter 10

this book

THIS $#*@! BOOK

Chapter 10 was fine. Fine, I tell you. But it’s now playing host to an additional scene, displaced from Chapter 11. Why? Because we had to make room in Chapter 11 for two scenes that used to be in Chapter 12. Why did those move? Because there was a very large scene in Chapter 13 that needed another place to go. And why did that happen? Because Alyc and I looked at what we had planned for the end of Chapter 14, realized it was significantly larger than we had room for, and faced a choice. We could either have several slightly oversized chapters, or one ginormous one. And while I liked the original plan of sort of having an enjambment of a certain plot (borrowing the term from poetry; the run of that plot was set up to cross over a chapter boundary), playing musical chairs with scenes in the earlier chapters meant we could fit that whole thing into Chapter 13, which ended up feeling like the better move.

So, uh. Chapter 10: fallout from Chapter 9. Fairly extensive fallout, but we like taking our time on things like that — letting the characters really feel the effects of something, rather than skipping along the top and moving on. I won’t name which TV show it is, because I don’t want to spoil the effect for anybody who hasn’t seen it, but there’s a superhero show where the protagonist’s best friend finds out that the protagonist has secretly been doing the superhero thing . . . and I love the fact that the show spends an entire episode on that. Intercutting to other plots, but continually going back to the aftershocks of the big revelation. Too few stories seem to take the time for those aftershocks; they’d rather get on with the next exciting thing. But to me, and to Alyc, that’s the bit that makes the other stuff exciting: the sense that these things really matter to the characters.

After all, they need a moment to appreciate the first earthquake before the next one hits them.

Word count: ~69,000
Authorial sadism: Honestly, the deepest cut is one the reader doesn’t see — an offstage comment made by one character to another, and you only see the effect. But I asked Alyc (who wrote that bit) what the comment was, and . . . we’ll have to share it when we post the annotations for the third book. Since that’s a very buried thing, though, I’ll give the prize to the conversation that just grinds to a halt because some things can’t be fixed with words.
Authorial amusement: Arguments over “morning dessert.” And asking whether a certain character has paper — a bit like asking whether water is wet.
BLR quotient: Love is applying bandages to the wounds from last chapter, but the bleeding has yet to be stanched.

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New Worlds: Higher Education

For the last essay of the month, the New Worlds Patreon turns its eye upon higher education. Comment over there!

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