Marie Brennan's Blog, page 89

Books read, July 2018

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert B. Cialdini. Exploration of the principles and techniques used by what Cialdini calls “compliance professionals” — anybody whose job is to get you to go along with them. Salespeople, fundraisers, advertisers, interrogators, con artists, etc. I have to admit it’s a little creepy reading this book, identifying all the knee-jerk reflexes we have and how they can be leveraged against us . . . but also very useful for a writer, because it gives me a more solid grounding for figuring out how to get one character to manipulate another. The six broad categories Cialdini identifies are reciprocity, consistency and commitment, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity; he says up front that he’s leaving out material self-interest because it’s straightforward and self-evident. Just ignore the part in his introduction where he tries to explain participant observation (a bedrock of anthropological fieldwork), because omgwtfbbq no, it isn’t “spying” or “infiltration.”

Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature Exposing the Lives, Times, and Cozening Tricks of the Elizabethan Underworld, ed. Arthur F. Kinney. Last month I read The Elizabethan Underworld, which turns out to be the Cliff Notes for this book. Depending on your background, Cliff Notes are vital; although this has some commentary from Kinney, the bulk of it is primary texts from the genre of “Elizabethan rogue literature,” i.e. pamphlets exposing the tricks and society of such people. At least he modernized the spelling for you? But oy, it’s been a while since I read this much Elizabethan prose. My favorite touch in here that I didn’t get from Salgado’s book previously was a catalogue of various people in Hell and what they were there for, including “the Citizens for their City-sins” — I thought that was an excellent play on words.

The Regency Underworld, Donald A. Low. Moving forward a couple of centuries . . . I liked this one quite a bit, but it’s fairly small. Has a particularly good discussion of the process by which London finally dragged itself to admit the necessity of having actual, y’know, police — there was quite a bit of maneuvering for several decades before the Metropolitan Police Bill of 1829. (Turns out the reason it took so long was that they thought of centralized police as being very French, and an unacceptable abridgement of the rights of free Englishmen. The quantity of crime it took before they agreed that a high risk of being robbed and raped and murdered ten feet outside your front door, or even ten feet inside it, was a more severely unacceptable abridgement of the rights of free Englishmen, is astonishing.)

The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man, David W. Maurer. If you’ve ever seen the movie The Sting, you basically know this book. It’s a discussion of con artists in the early part of the 20th century, written by someone who apparently managed to conduct what amounts to anthropological fieldwork (the real kind, not the “Cialdini thinks it’s like espionage” kind) among them. The big con is distinguished from the short con by the addition of an element where you send the mark home to get more money, which allows for much bigger scores in the end, but it also tends to feature what they called “the store” — a fake betting hall or stockbroker’s office or whatever, staffed entirely by other con artists, which allows the con mob to control every part of what the mark sees rather than leaving it up to chance. He also gets into questions of what con artists tend to be like, what sorts of marks they target, and other such related topics, not just the cons themselves.

I would love a book on the short con, though; there’s a place in here where Maurer rattles off a list of about two dozen short games and never says anything more about them.

Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse. Debut novel from an author currently up for a Hugo and the Campbell Award. I haven’t read much urban fantasy in a while because I am honestly tired of abrasive, psychologically scarred heroines whose stories careen from one crisis or disaster to another with hardly any breathing time in between. This . . . has that. But it also has a post-climate-apocalypse setting where the Navajo Nation, aka Dinétah, has established itself as an independent state, and all the supernatural aspects are drawn from Diné beliefs, and as soon as I saw that I made grabby hands. No vampires here; instead you get things like ch’įįdii* and tsé naayéé. I’m interested enough to read the next book, and hope that it works in a little more space to develop the post-apocalyptic society and the relationships of the characters.

* Not quite spelled correctly because I don’t know how to get HTML to put both an ogonek and an acute accent on that first i. Partway through reading this novel I got down my copy of Diné Bizaad: Speak, Read, Write Navajo to refresh my memory on pronunciation — I studied the language for two weeks in grad school, before the professor unfortunately had to take a leave of absence. It’s kind of a shocker for anyone accustomed to Indo-Europrean langauges, but I’m glad Roanhorse didn’t flinch from using it here.

My own work, read for editing purposes, does not count.

The Black Opera, Mary Gentle. Alternate historical fantasy. I adored the parts of this that were about the characters having to stage an opera in six weeks flat with the literal fate of the world resting on their shoulders. The challenges inherent in doing so are enough to generate plenty of tension and conflict, and it’s rare to see the creative process really put at the forefront of a whole novel like this. Unfortunately, there were also lots of things that annoyed me about the writing: there are many sequences of single-sentence paragraphs, which reads choppily; the text occasionally wanders off into present or future tense for no apparent reason; and there seems to be no pattern to which of the viewpoint character’s thoughts are rendered in italics and which (despite being direct thoughts, not indirectly reported) are in roman type, plus the occasional line of narration italicized as if it were his thoughts. Minor issues, but over the course of a 500-page book they grate — and more fatally, I simply did not give a rat’s ass about the love triangle that was supposed to carry much of the emotional weight of the book. I like how it resolved, but since I wasn’t very invested my liking was more intellectual than anything else . . . and like many other things in the story, the resolution kind of dragged out rather than being delivered as a punch. Which might be realistic, but it makes for less satisfying fiction. So if you love the idea of a novel about creative collaboration under pressure, I recommend this, but it does have its flaws.

*

London’s Underworld: Three Centuries of Vice and Crime, Fergus Linnane. Normally I don’t report on books I don’t finish, but in this case the DNF wasn’t because of the book’s quality as such. It’s a little disorganized, with some information repeated unnecessarily and other things tossed off in passing without explanation, but the reason I stopped reading is that it would better be subtitled “A Little Bit About the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries But Mostly the Twentieth Century of Vice and Crime.” Since what I was interested in was the older history, I stopped reading when it got past that.

The post Books read, July 2018 appeared first on Swan Tower.

The Spy Who Dumped Me

Short form: this would make an excellent double-feature with Spy (whose trailers did it a horrible disservice: contrary to what they’d have you believe, that movie is not about Melissa McCarthy’s character being incompetent. Quite the opposite, in fact.)

Longer form: I found this hugely entertaining. At a few points it veered toward humor a little too crude for my taste, but not too often and not too badly; it isn’t the type of film I’ve noticed more often lately, which seem to be out to prove that women can be as crass and awful as men. (There is a broad swath of modern comedy I do not like at all, regardless of the genders involved.) And there were multiple points along the way where I think you can tell the script was written at least partially by a woman; it isn’t impossible that a man could have thought up the joke about toxic shock syndrome, for example, but the odds that it would occur to him are much lower.

And holy god is this a movie about friendship and sisterhood. There’s romance, but much like Frozen, the emphasis is on the main female characters, who are sisters in all but blood. It’s about having someone who will go to Vienna with you on no notice at all because you need to deliver a macguffin left for you by your dead boyfriend who apparently worked for the CIA. It’s about having someone who will high-five you for your ability to apply your video game shooting skills to the spies who are trying to get that macguffin for themselves. It’s about having someone who knows all kinds of random and embarrassing things about you, and who will offer them up in a desperate bid to keep a psychotic ex-gymnast turned model turned assassin from torturing you.

It is very violent, and often on the crude side, and do not go watch this one for the plot. The macguffin is really just an excuse for people to run around in different European cities, and although the story nods vaguely in the direction of there being some kind of power struggle over it, you never learn the first bloody thing about the bad guys’ organization and the thing the magcuffin does gets mentioned precisely once. It is as cheesy as you would expect and I think the script is a little embarrassed by it. The actual point is the two main characters figuring out who to trust, and never having to question that the other one is at the top of that list.

If that sounds good to you, go watch it.

The post The Spy Who Dumped Me appeared first on Swan Tower.

New Worlds: Religious Sites

This week the New Worlds Patreon doesn’t just have an essay for you — though there’s that, too, on religious sites — but some news as well!

As those of you who follow this blog know, I’m working on a collaborative novel with Alyc Helms. Since it’s a secondary-world fantasy and we’re both anthropologists, we are eyeball-deep in worldbuilding and swimming ever deeper . . . and with Alyc’s permission, I’m going to be reporting on that process to my New Worlds patrons. Everyone at the $10 level and above receives a bonus essay each month, and for a while to come those are going to be focused on different aspects of the setting we’re creating for Sekrit Projekt R&R. So if you’d like a front-row seat to how I do this stuff — not after-the-fact musings but a look right down into the guts of how we’re creating the clothing and religion and geography and monetary systems of our world — this is your chance. Become a patron, and get a behind-the-scenes peek at what I’m cryptically alluding to in the progress reports!

The post New Worlds: Religious Sites appeared first on Swan Tower.

Sekrit Projekt R&R: Chapter 7

This was a fiddly chapter. Since the previous one was a bit of a pivot point, here we’re dealing with the fallout from the events there, and setting things up to lead toward the middle of the book. There’s a lot of information-wrangling going on, and a lot of us trying not to trip over our own feet in our cleverness, because of course we need to drop clues without letting the reader know they’re clues, and make sure certain scenes can be read in (intentionally) erroneous ways — which means continually going, “wait, what do the characters in this scene actually know, and how can we get them to behave in the ways we want while still having it be logical and in-character.”

This is also the point at which — at least for me — it starts to sink in that we’re writing a book. Noveling, I have often said, is an endurance sport: you work your butt off for weeks on end, and you’re nowhere near the end. That’s especially true here, since this bidding fair to be the longest thing I’ve ever written (though Alyc has written longer). I’m mentally cinching the straps on my backpack tighter and tugging my socks straight, because we’ve got miles to go before we’re done.

Word count: ~56000

Authorial sadism: Twisting the knife in a wound of grief. Also making a character who is terrible at lying fish for information — and the lie she gets in response is going to come back and bite the other character on the ass later.

Authorial amusement: New category! But with the number of things Alyc and I toss into the story for our own entertainment, it really deserves its own call-out. Sadly we had to cut an excellent line of Alyc’s because it would, for the right kind of reader, have been a giant neon arrow pointing at what we’re really up to — but that scene in general is far too much fun, with lots of social dancing and awkwardness and our protagonist R— trying to figure out just how many things she needs to be worried about right now. (Answer: more than even her paranoia realizes.)

BLR quotient: Well, we did dislocate a character’s shoulder. But I’d say mostly love, as there’s lots of creation of and leaning on social bonds. Don’t worry — we’ll have some blood for you next chapter.

The post Sekrit Projekt R&R: Chapter 7 appeared first on Swan Tower.

Sekrit Projekt R&R: Chapter 6

Alyc and I have been writing one chapter a week because we don’t want to outrun our ability to plan the scenes ahead. After finishing Chapter 5 we had only one more mapped out, so we got together Wednesday night . . . and proceeded to outline the entire second quarter of the book.

You have no idea how weird this is for me. I don’t do outlines. Except when forced to.

It wasn’t forced here — just a matter of us knowing what’s going to happen at the midpoint of the book, then retracing our steps from there to figure out how to organize the things we want to have happen into coherent chapters, then filling in the gaps, and next thing we knew we’d accidentally committed outline. And then we looked at each other and said, “well, is there any reason not to . . . ?”

There was no reason not to. Thursday and Friday we wrote Chapter 6, and this post is only delayed because I mostly don’t blog on the weekends.

New Worlds: Modesty

From ostentation the New Worlds Patreon goes to the opposite (sort of): modesty in clothing. What you’re required to cover, and how, and how the answers to those questions have varied to an absurd degree across time and space.

Comment over there!

The post New Worlds: Modesty appeared first on Swan Tower.

Sekrit Projekt R&R: Chapter Five

Last weekend Alyc and I wound up talking about how — despite the fact that our main characters all have traumatic pasts, will be more traumatized by the events of the story, and live in a city where horrible things happen on a routine basis — this story is anti-grimdark.

I don’t just mean that it doesn’t belong to that subgenre. I mean that its arc goes in exactly the opposite direction. I think of grimdark as being “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Characters surrender their ideals; those who don’t often die for clinging to them. They lose what is most precious to them. Many of them don’t survive events, and those that do come out scarred, their victories pyrrhic at best. Pragmatism rules the day.

This is the opposite of that. Our characters start off not trusting anybody except themselves and maybe one or two other chosen people; by the end they will have learned to build alliances and be stronger together. Half of them can’t sneeze without telling a lie; they will slowly let go of their deceptions and allow the world to see their true faces. They’re used to putting their own survival above everything else, but over time they will find things they’re willing to risk their lives for.

It isn’t quite the same thing as a redemption story. We agreed that our characters aren’t trying to atone for the harm they’ve done, making restitution and earning forgiveness. They’re just going to become better, happier people: more open, more relaxed, more trusting and more trustworthy. Their trauma, both backstory and in-story, will heal enough for them to not think about it every day.

The path there won’t be all unicorns and sunshine, but the place it winds up will be bright.

Word count: ~41000

Authorial sadism: You would think that “this beloved person is not actually dead” would be be a wonderful thing. But when the near-death was your fault, apologizing for that gets awkward. (Bonus sadism, Tables Turned Edition: Alyc and I are now far enough into the story that we’re having trouble keeping track of all the layers of deception and misdirection. Somewhere our characters are saying, “You brought this on yourselves.”)

LBR quotient: Love, hands down. Because in the end, “this beloved person is not actually dead” is a wonderful thing, even if apologizing is awkward.

*

PROGRESS-BLOGGING, RETRO VERSION

At the request of Alyc and others, here is what I probably would have posted for the first two chapters if I’d been progress-blogging then.

New Worlds: Clothing and Status

I never quite understand Tv shows and books that purport to tell stories of aristocratic politics . . . in which nobody ever seems to think about what they’re wearing. In history, showing off one’s wealth and style through clothing has always been a major part of social maneuvering. So this week the New Worlds Patreon delves into how clothing communicates status.

Comment over there!

The post New Worlds: Clothing and Status appeared first on Swan Tower.

Sekrit Projekt R&R: Chapter 4

It’s interesting to see how different the workload feels when collaborating like this with someone else. I imagine that varies widely depending on how you approach it; Alyc and I are trading off as we go through the scene, usually with one of us writing the viewpoint character and the other handling the NVPs (non-viewpoint characters; it’s our new term), and some amount of swapping about on the narration. The result is that momentum carries me surprisingly far: not only are we producing more each week than I generally aim for in a week of working solo — which makes sense when you figure that each of us is writing roughly half of it — but we’re doing it in about three days instead of seven, and it doesn’t even feel that hard. The only reason we’re not going even faster is that we need to stop and work out details of worldbuilding and plot structure before we charge ahead. It is possible that our pace will become terrifying when we have more of that in place.

Interview on Comics, Clerics, and Controllers

If you’d like to hear me natter on about not just writing but also role-playing games and what I think of various superhero movies and TV shows, you’re in luck! I sat down recently with Cameron Day of Comics, Clerics, and Controllers to discuss all of those things and more.

The post Interview on Comics, Clerics, and Controllers appeared first on Swan Tower.