Marie Brennan's Blog, page 71

New Worlds: Finding Your Way

Navigating your way to the latest New Worlds Patreon post is easy: just click on this link right here. After I’ll give you guidance on how to find your way to other places, whether it’s by landmarks, astronomical measurement, the observation of the natural world, or some other clue.

Comment over there!

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Penny wise, megaton destructive

Our household of three people has at present ballooned to six people and four cats, courtesy of Pacific Gas and Electric.

I don’t know how this is being reported elsewhere in the country (or elsewhere in the world), so I want to be clear about what’s going on. There are multiple causes for California’s wildfire problem, ranging from climate change to flawed forest management policy in past decades to the expansion of settlement into at-risk terrain. But part of it, especially here in northern California, is the direct fault of our electrical companies.

PG&E has, for years, prioritized making massive payouts to their shareholders over investing in basic maintenance and safety. The equipment that started last year’s devastating Camp Fire — the most destructive in the state’s history, the fire that destroyed the town of Paradise — was built in the early 1900s. It was over a hundred years old. PG&E knew damn well their equipment was out of date and in need of refurbishment or outright replacement. But doing that cuts into the quarterly profits, so it got put off, and put off, and put off — until there was nothing left to replace, because it had all been destroyed by the fire.

This is true all over the areas they serve. It’s why this year PG&E is aggressively cutting power to areas considered to be at risk when we have conditions of dry weather and strong winds — a common occurrence these days, thanks to climate change. Initially all of our house guests (call them what they are; refugees) were here because power was cut to their homes. But then two of them made a run up to Vallejo to rescue their four cats, because while there hadn’t yet been a mandatory evacuation order issued for their area, there was a “precautionary” evacuation underway. This was why. Fires bracketed Vallejo on three sides. We don’t know yet whether any of them were started by PG&E’s power lines, but the Kincade Fire burning up in Sonoma almost certainly was. Because PG&E may be cutting power to areas . . . but they aren’t necessarily shutting down their main transmission lines. And if your immediate thought is “they should do that!,” be aware that part of the problem in Vallejo yesterday was that PG&E shut off the power to the water-pumping stations. Which makes fighting a fire rather more difficult.

I don’t want anybody to walk away from this thinking PG&E is the sole cause of the fires. If we didn’t have such dry conditions and such high winds, coupled with sporadic wet winters that encourage the growth of new brush which then turns into tinder a few months later, the fires wouldn’t burn as hot and as far; that’s thanks to climate change, and humanity is collectively responsible for that one. And it’s true that for a long time forestry officials thought it was best to prevent all forest fires, whereas now we know it’s actually better for the environment to let (smaller) blazes sweep through periodically to clear things out. We could change our urban planning to put fewer homes and people at risk.

But PG&E unquestionably shoulders some of the blame. And so does the overall corporate culture that encourages short-term thinking, boosting quarterly profits at all costs, deferring expenses again and again so you can look “fiscally responsible” (while someone else pays a heartbreaking bill down the road).

That’s finally, maybe, a little bit, beginning to change. Corporations are starting to admit that maybe shareholder dividends should not be their first, last, and only priority. The new Long-Term Stock Exchange was founded to encourage companies to think on time scales longer than three months. We might — we can hope — eventually see a world where we once again know how to plan for the future, investing in infrastructure and building a world future generations will want to live in.

The road there, however, is currently leading through a burned-out hellscape.

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Next collection: The Nine Lands!

For some time now, as I assemble sufficient quantities around relatively focused themes, I’ve been collecting my short fiction into ebooks: Maps to Nowhere for secondary world fantasy and Ars Historica for historical fiction, and then the much smaller Never After and Monstrous Beauty for two different twisted approaches to fairy tales, the latter taking a darker tone than the former.

Now I can add The Nine Lands to that list! This is also secondary world fantasy, but unlike Maps to Nowhere, all of the stories take place within the same world: the eponymous Nine Lands, the first properly fleshed-out setting I ever created. Many of the pieces in this collection are “firsts” of one kind or another for me: first good short story I ever wrote (that form did not come naturally to me), first story to earn me money, first story I ever sold. Because of that, I decided to commission my friend Avery Liell-Kok to take my ugly scribble map and turn it into the beautiful thing you see here:

The book will come out on November 19th, but you can pre-order it now at Barnes and Noble, Google Play, iTunes, Kobo, or Amazon US or UK — or wait until the 19th and buy it directly from the publisher, Book View Cafe.

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New Worlds: Demons

The New Worlds Patreon rounds out the month of October with a discussion of demons! As usual, comment over there.

And remember, if you’d like weekly photos and other benefits such as ebooks, the chance to vote on topic polls, and more, you can always become a patron! It’s through their loyal support that I’m able to continue this series, bit by bit creating what is probably on its way toward becoming the world’s most comprehensive discussion of SF/F worldbuilding.

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Where to find me at World Fantasy!

Next weekend I’ll be down in L.A. for the World Fantasy Convention. If you’re going to be there as well, here’s where you can find me:

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Combat!

Friday, 1 Nov, 17:00 – 17:55, Marquis 4-6

Experts in fighting hand-to-hand and sword fighting debunk myths and set the record straight as they talk about what authors get right, what authors get wrong, and why it matters.

Participants: Christopher Husberg (M), Troy Carrol Bucher, Scott Drakeford, Elizabeth Crowens, Marie Brennan

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Magic Systems 101

Saturday, 2 Nov, 10:00 – 10:55, Marquis 1-3

What makes a magic system work? What do you need to do to make it believable for the readers? And what makes it so unique and compelling that readers can’t put down the book?

Participants: Barbara Hambly (M), Margo Lanagan, Susan Forest, Marie Brennan, TA Moore, Marshall Ryan Maresca

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The World of Fairy Tales

Saturday, 2 Nov, 13:00 – 13:55, Marquis 1-3

Tales of events which occur outside of reality exist in most every culture throughout the world. What are the recurring themes that cross cultures? Are these expressions of societal norms or propagations of religious myths? Or are they just stories to scare kids into “behaving properly”?

Participants: Marie Brennan (M), Sheila Finch, Jack Zipes, Kathleen Jennings, Ann Chamberlin, Emma Törzs, David Drake

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Reading

Saturday, 2 Nov, 15:30 – 15:55, Pac Coast 3

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The pieces come together for DRIFTWOOD!

From the Department of News I’ve Been Sitting on for Ages . . .

Ever since I published the first Driftwood short story, I’ve had people asking me whether I would ever write a novel set there. To which I’ve always said no, because a novel is the antithesis of what Driftwood is about. In a setting about fragments, a large, coherent story seems entirely out of place.

A fix-up, on the other hand — that’s a different matter.

New Worlds: Angels

This week on the New Worlds Patreon, the conversation takes a theological turn with a discussion of angels. Comment over there!

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New Worlds: Shapechangers

This week the New Worlds Patreon continues its exploration of monsters with shapechangers — of both the human-to-animal and animal-to-human variety. Comment over there!

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The weight of tiny details

A sentence I revised tonight got me reflecting on one of the tiny, subtle things about writing that’s really difficult to teach — mostly because it requires spending a disproportionate amount of time talking about something microscopic, and unpacking it with twenty or a hundred times the number of words involved. I almost never delve into this when I teach creative writing, just because it burns out my energy so fast.

Consider this line:

“I wouldn’t have invited you if all I wanted was a distraction.”

This is a completely ordinary sentence. Not super-memorable, but it’s doing what it needs to, and that’s fine. What I revised it to was this:

“If all I wanted was a distraction, I wouldn’t have invited you.”

Essentially the same sentence; I just swapped the order of the clauses.

Why? Because the important thing in that sentence is the implication that the invitation was issued for more than one reason. Putting the hypothetical after that dilutes the effect. So I rearranged the sentence to make the punch arrive at the end of the sentence.

Now, in reality a person might well choose the first phrasing. We often talk that way. But the job of dialogue is to create an effect, and while sometimes the desired effect is “the casual structures that mimic real speech,” in this case, that wasn’t the goal. There isn’t a clear-cut rule, though, that says “always put the most important thing at the end of the sentence” — sometimes you want it at the front instead. The actual rule is “pay attention to the rhythm of what you write, not just in aural terms, but in terms of where you’re placing the key elements, and make sure the arrangement directs the reader’s attention toward them, without less-critical elements getting in the way.”

Which is a lot more complicated and subjective. In fact, some of you may question the superiority of my second example over my first. Because it’s not just about the one sentence; it’s about the flow of the overall text. (Unfortunately, I can’t quote the surrounding material to you because SPOILERS AHOY.) And even when the whole is available, there can be disagreements over what works best. But when I read a story that’s competent but never quite comes to life, the problem is often (at least in part) at this level: the material is all there, but the sequencing undercuts its effect. Teaching that to someone, however, requires breaking out the red pen and rewriting sentence after sentence, with explanations for why. It’s a huge investment of time and effort, and in the end, the writer needs to develop their own instinct for how these rhythms work.

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Rook and Rose Book 2, Chapter 7

I am really, really glad we are getting some distance into Book Two before Book One goes in the can.

We went into this series with a (for me) remarkably detailed idea of where the story was going in the long term. But even with that . . . stuff keeps cropping up. Bits and pieces where we say, hmmm, we have to figure that out — and then what we figure out really ought to be reflected in the previous volume. Or we change our minds on a thing because it will serve our later purposes better to do it this way instead of that way, and isn’t it a good thing we still have the option of revising?

That happened in two places this chapter, one a matter of organizational structure for a group in the story, the other a matter of metaphysics. Sadly, we won’t be able to write the entire second book before we have to ship the first one off into the maw of production, but the further we get, the better. We can still make changes even into the copy-edit phase, though it gets more annoying at that point.

As for the chapter itself . . . we’ve been so busy juggling various balls of plot and such (not to mention the interruptions of day jobs and travel) that our rough draft has been feeling rougher than normal. But we had a marathon day of writing yesterday, and I think that had really good results for us packing in something more like our usual density of description, characterization, banter, and interweaving of plots. Everything this chapter was focused on V in one way or another, which gives it a nice feeling of coherence — that’s something we try to aim for, though obviously not every chapter can have that kind of through-line. (Not without feeling totally artificial in its structure, anyway.)

Poor characters, though. Starting next chapter, we’ll be heading into the moments where all the problems between them bare their fangs and bite down. It’s still going to be interleaved with fun things — capers, trickery, dancing, naptime, small fuzzy animals — but shit’s gonna get worse for a while before it gets better.

Word count: ~50,000

Authorial sadism: The whole chapter? It’s basically “let’s dump problems on this character’s head, whee!” But the “I didn’t know” moment in particular is gonna come back to bite him later.

Authorial amusement: “Will you stop that?” (Brought to you by us noticing we’d done a certain thing, like, three times — so R— might as well notice it, too.) Also, the line about justice being revenge in formal dress.

BLR quotient: I guess when the chapter is a survey of various conflicts, I gotta call it for blood.

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