Marie Brennan's Blog, page 93

Death and narrative stakes

The immediate motivation for this post is John Scalzi’s response to Infinity War, and it’s going to have spoilers for that film. So if you haven’t seen it yet and wish to avoid spoilers, go no further.

Short form: I don’t often wildly disagree with Scalzi, but this is one of those times.

And the short form of “why” is: Apollo 13.

I’ve watched that movie easily a dozen times. Furthermore, it’s based on real history. So I know, every time I sit down in front of the TV, that the astronauts are going to get home safely. They won’t die in outer space. Everything will be okay.

Despite that, I’m still on the edge of my seat, every goddamned time.

This, btw, is why I’m generally not too upset by seeing spoilers. I’ll make a reasonable effort to avoid them (I didn’t open any of the Infinity War posts in my RSS reader until today, because I didn’t see the movie until last night), but I won’t go into a total social media blackout or anything like that. Because, as Marissa Lingen recently said, any story whose value is lost by knowing in advance how it ends was pretty cheap to begin with.

Apollo 13 holds up even on the twelfth watching because while I may know how it ends, the characters don’t. The story isn’t whether the astronauts get home safely; it’s the tension and fear of everyone in that tale, waiting to find out whether the astronauts get home safely. It’s them clinging to each other during the radio silence, and then dissolving into tears of joyful relief when it ends.

Which is why I don’t care that yeah, I know half the characters who went poof are already slated for sequel films, which means they’ll come back. It’s like knowing the Apollo 13 crew won’t die. Heck, if anything, I’m glad to know that: because the last thing I need right now is a film that goes, “welp, sometimes you just lose and there’s nothing you can do about it, haha, eat that, suckers.” But the characters did lose . . . and they’re going to have to live with that loss for a good long while (probably through a goodly percentage of the next movie). That moment — the hollow shock as they realize they brought to bear everything they had and more, and it wasn’t enough — that, not “will all those people stay dead?,” is where the impact lies.

Now, I will grant the impact wasn’t quite as big as I would have liked. There were so many “oh no person is dissolving!” moments that none of them individually wrung as much pathos from the loss as they could have; the one that came the closest was Peter Parker, and that’s because he had a chance to express his fear. For the rest, you mostly have to read between the lines, Okoye realizing she failed her king, Cap losing Bucky, Rocket losing Groot. Basically, the emotional work there was done in other films: you need to bring those to the table for the full effect. So it’s possible that the correct way to gloss Scalzi’s post is not “this didn’t move me becaues I know there are more films coming,” but rather “this didn’t move me enough to turn off the part of my brain that points out there are more films coming.”

For me, though, the impressive thing here is the willingness to commit to “the heroes lost” for more than a few seconds. Contrast it with, for example, the end of Doctor Strange: Strange and his allies realize they arrived too late to protect the Hong Kong Sanctum, but that lasts for, what, a couple of minutes? Strange is able to fix it almost immediately, so he never really has to live with the knowledge of his failure. The surviving heroes of Infinity War will (I presume — I could be wrong and the opening sequence of next year’s movie will make it all better, in which case I’ll be annoyed). And, if the storytelling in the sequel is good, fixing this mistake is not going to be easy or cheap.

We’ll see, next May. In the meanwhile, I’m interested in Ant-Man and the Wasp (which I think is set pre-Infinity War) and Captain Marvel, not least because both of them will help rectify the still-massive gender imbalance in the MCU. (When are we gonna get a Black Widow movie, dammit? Red Sparrow doesn’t count.)

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WITHIN THE SANCTUARY OF WINGS wins an award!

I’ve known about this for a while, but today the news went live: Within the Sanctuary of Wings has won the 2017 RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

Sadly, I won’t be able to attend the convention in Reno, as I’ll be in France at Imaginales that weekend. (“Sadly.” Gotta admit, this is one of those “upgrading to a better class of problem” situations.) But it’s an honor nonetheless!

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New Worlds: Libraries

If the word “library” makes you envision a spacious, airy, well-lit room overseen by stern ladies who will guide you to the right books and hush you when you talk too loud, your mental image is very modern. This week the New Worlds Patreon discusses how libraries have changed over time!

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AMA! (or rather, AMATOPA!)

“Ask Me and Three Other People Anything” doesn’t quite have the same catchy ring as “Ask Me Anything,” but the concept is the same! The creative team for Born to the Blade (myself, Michael R. Underwood, Cassandra Khaw, and Malka Older) are all doing a joint AMA over on Reddit today. So far we’ve been asked everything from what it’s like working on a collaborative project to who would win in a bare-knuckles brawl, Merry & Pippin on one side and Sam & Frodo on the other. If you have anything you’d like to ask, whether it’s of me or someone else or the team as a whole, head on over and let us know!

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BORN TO THE BLADE: “Fault Lines”

This week I enter the field of combat with the second episode of BORN TO THE BLADE: “Fault Lines”!

If you haven’t already checked out the pilot episode, “Arrivals,” that’s free to read or listen to. In “Fault Lines,” Michiko deals with the fallout from the Golden Lord, someone new comes to Twaa-Fei, Penelope has some momentous news, and Bellona seeks to drive a wedge between Quloo and Rumika in advance of the Gauntlet.

Last week I discussed collaboration at Book View Cafe, because 2017 really was the year of me jumping into it feet-first, between my work for Legend of the Five Rings and Born to the Blade. I also have a piece up at All Things Urban Fantasy on “post-cynical optimism,” which was our mission statement for this series: telling a story in which people face hard choices and sometimes bad things happen, but things like honor and friendship and trust are more than traps for the guillble. Our lead writer Michael Underwood wrote about fight scenes (of which we have more than a few) at Barnes and Noble. And if you’d like to check out some reviews, Primm Life has covered “Fault Lines,” and Paul Weimer at Skiffy and Fanty has reviewed the whole serial.

You can find “Fault Lines” (as well as “Arrivals”) here!

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New Worlds: Stelae, Scrolls, and Books

This week the New Worlds Patreon is talking about books! And also about scrolls and stelae and other methods of organizing the written word.

By the way, we’re also just $1 shy of the next funding goal, which would allow me to make a print edition of the gathered volumes (Year One is out now in ebook, with more to come). So now is a great time to become a patron!

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BORN TO THE BLADE has begun to air!

I should have posted about this yesterday, but, er, I was playing hooky from work. >_> (A friend of a friend was in town and had access to a sailboat. Of course I wasn’t going to pass up that chance.)

Born to the Blade has begun to air*!

For centuries the Warders’ Circle on the neutral islands of Twaa-Fei has given the countries of the sky a way to avoid war, settling their disputes through formal, magical duels. But the Circle’s ability to maintain peace is fading: the Mertikan Empire is preparing for conquest and the trade nation of Quloo is sinking, stripped of the aerstone that keeps both ships and island a-sky. When upstart Kris Denn tries to win their island a seat in the Warder’s Circle and colonial subject Oda no Michiko discovers that her conquered nation’s past is not what she’s been told, they upset the balance of power. The storm they bring will bind all the peoples of the sky together…or tear them apart.

You can check out the pilot for free right now. Next Wednesday my first episode will debut!

* If that’s the right verb to use. Obviously this isn’t a broadcast situation, but on the other hand, Serial Box’s projects are structured enough like TV shows that I default to the language of that medium.

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Ten pounds of story in a five-pound sack

I can’t say a lot about the work I do for Legend of the Five Rings because I signed an NDA. But the most recent round of brainstorming for a fiction has me reflecting on what this job is teaching me about making sure that the material I write pulls as much weight per word as possible, and I want to discuss that a little. So let’s see what balance I can strike between specificity and deliberately vague generalities!

The context here is that I have a fairly strict word count for each of my fictions: 3000 words max if they’re going into a pack, and 3000 with some wiggle room if they’re being published on the website. That is . . . not a whole lot. And the story of L5R is so sprawling that even with a bunch of writers producing a bunch of fictions, making sure that everything gets mentioned and explored and moved forward means we can’t afford to waste words. It isn’t enough for a given fiction to do one thing; it needs to do at least two, more like three or four, as many as we can stuff in there at once. Ten pounds of story in a five-pound sack.

Take the one I’ve got on my plate right now. The original query from the person I work with Fantasy Flight Games was, “Are you willing to write a story about Character and Group? Something to flesh them out.”

Me: “Sure! What do you think of Scenario?”

FFG: “Sounds good. Maybe you could work in how Character feels about Key Theme, and also expand a bit on Group’s Main Focus.”

Me: “I lean toward having Character feel this way about Key Theme, because that lets me make a contrast with Previously Mentioned Backstory Character. And for Group, maybe Side Character says XYZ — that adds depth to their personality because of Probable Reader Interpretation. Heck, I could even put in Callback to Other Plot A, in a way that layers in some ambiguity.”

FFG: “Great!”

Me: “OOOH. And — just spitballing here — but given the timing, what if we say that Side Character also has Information about Other Plot B, which of course they interpret in Particular Way?”

FFG: “Go for it. But maybe spin it a bit more to the left to emphasize Aspect.”

Me: “Awesome. I’ll have an outline for you shortly.”

It could have just been a story about Character and Group. It probably would have been a perfectly fine story. But the more we can build up these elements, expanding on some things and contrasting with others, making callbacks to previous material and introducing points of linkage in all directions, the richer the fiction becomes.

Not all of this will stand out, of course. Sometimes the work the fiction is doing is fairly subterranean, and only somebody who’s digging into the craft of it will notice that, for example, we’re spinning that last bit to heighten a particular flavor. The overall effect is there, though, and in the long run it pays off: you can poll the readership and they’ll agree that Character Q would never do a particular thing, without you ever saying that outright, because you’ve put enough data points on the table that they can extrapolate as needed. Things become three-dimensional; they feel interconnected. The world feels real.

In my novels I have a lot more room to work with, but it’s still a good lesson to bear in mind. Why just have two characters converse with each other, when their conversation could also be making metaphorical allusions to something from earlier and enriching the reader’s understanding of someone else not present for that scene? Why solve conflicts one at a time, when the solution could be taking out two problems, creating a third, and sending a fourth in an unexpected new direction? This is pretty standard advice for writing, but I feel like the level to which I’m doing it here is higher than usual, and rewardingly so.

Sustaining that over the long run is tough, of course. On the other hand, this is like a muscle: the more you use it, the stronger it will get. So I’ll keep pumping narrative iron.

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Spark of Life: Bryan Camp on THE CITY OF LOST FORTUNES

Gods are hard to write about in a convincing manner. Too often they seem like plot devices, or else like ordinary characters who happen to have a lot of power. But some authors manage to strike the right balance of personality and numina . . . and sometimes the route to that balance goes off the expected map. Here’s Bryan Camp’s account of how Baron Samedi came to life for him in The City of Lost Fortunes — and hey, maybe if we make pleading puppy-dog eyes, he’ll tell us the rest of the story!

***

Bryan says:

Even though I wrote and rewrote this novel for a decade, I didn’t truly know what I was trying to write, or how I should go about doing it, for years. To learn those two details, I had to travel to a sleepy little town in central Mexico. It was there that Baron Samedi, one of the loa of the voodoo faith, sparked to life for me, and through him, the whole novel.

It might seem strange that I came to understand the voodoo guardian of the cemetery by leaving New Orleans, a city filled with cemeteries and a place where voodoo looms large in both the popular imagination and in actual practice. It’s certainly not why I went there. I was just trying to get a degree. At the time, I was earning an MFA from the University of New Orleans, through their Low Residency program. It was a pretty sweet deal: Spring and Fall semesters, all my classes were online (which meant I could keep my job as a high school teacher) and for a month during the Summer semester, I fulfilled all of my residency requirements abroad. That summer, I was taking a New Orleans Literature class with Dr. Nancy Dixon (who literally wrote the book on Nola Lit) and a Fantasy and Science Fiction workshop led by the brilliant Jim Grimsley. It was in that workshop where I met Rachel E. Pollock, a good friend of mine who is one of those people who just unfairly brim over with creativity and talent. She’s not just an amazing writer, but she’s also an artist and an artisan who sews costumes for plays and . . . look, she’s awesome, all right?

Anyway, we were talking about what we were writing, and I told her that I had this novel I wanted to rewrite for my thesis, full of deities from all kinds of myths and faiths, among them Papa Legba and Baron Samedi. Rachel, being as awesome as she is, had a friend who practiced voodoo. When I named the different gods I wanted to write about, I saw a flicker of something sly move across my friend’s face. “Oh,” she said, with a fierce, conspiratorial grin, “I’ve got a story about Samedi.”

I have to pause here and tell you something about voodoo that you may not know. The loa don’t manifest physically in our world; they come here as spirits and inhabit the bodies of their devotees. If you are ridden by one of the loa, they aren’t merely inspiring you in a way that you translate and interpret. They’re not along for the ride; they’re in the driver’s seat. They don’t, in short, communicate through you. If they’ve got something to say, they speak with your mouth.

So when Rachel said she had a story about Samedi, she didn’t mean it was something she’d come across in a book. This was not a matter of folklore scholarship. She knew someone who, within the boundaries of her faith, had spoken to Samedi. This was more of a “friend of a friend” situation. Just three degrees of separation between me and the spirit world. For want of time and space I won’t go into the whole narrative, but suffice it to say that the punchline was Samedi promising that he “had the biggest Spock of all the loa.” He uh, he used a word other than the name of a beloved sci-fi character, but I’m trying to keep this PG here.

What made this line equally hilarious and illuminating was that the body he was inhabiting when he said it was female. That told me a whole lot about Samedi. It told me that he was 100 percent, grade A bro, with all the self-aggrandizing, genital-obsessed swagger that went with it. It told me he had a pretty high opinion of himself. It told me that his own reality was more significant to him than the circumstantial factors of his presence in ours. More crucial than just giving me all these insights into his personality, though, was the fact that this line made it explicitly clear to me that he had a distinct personality to begin with.

I’d been thinking about the figures in myth as archetypes, as symbols, perfect abstractions that merely represented some universal fear or yearning or blessing shared by all humanity. That made it difficult to write about them in ways that weren’t stilted or insincere. It’s hard to get Fear of Death to have a meaningful conversation; hard to predict what Filial Piety’s favorite movie might be. To be clear, myths are archetypes and symbols, but that’s not all they are. They’re also characters, with their own flaws and hungers and strengths. Their own friends and foes. Their own voices.

Once I had that voice in my ear (in a manner of speaking) I was able to see the whole character, how he would act and react. Not just how he would dress and the kind of alcohol he would drink, which I knew from the literature that recorded oral traditions, but why he always wore a suit and preferred rum. And that, for me, was the moment when this figure of myth made the shift from an idea into a character. Through these kinds of thoughts, I was able to really imagine the rest of my immortal beings as people, and thus, The City of Lost Fortunes really started to open up and breathe.

All because Baron Samedi couldn’t stop talking about his eggplant emoji.

***

From the cover copy:

In 2011, Post-Katrina New Orleans is a place haunted by its history and by the hurricane’s destruction, a place that is hoping to survive the rebuilding of its present long enough to ensure that it has a future. Street magician Jude Dubuisson is likewise burdened by his past and by the consequences of the storm, because he has a secret: the magical ability to find lost things, a gift passed down to him by the father he has never known—a father who just happens to be a god. When the debt Jude owes to a fortune deity gets called in, he finds himself sitting in on a poker game with the gods of New Orleans, who are playing for the heart and soul of the city itself.

Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Powell’s

Bryan Camp is a graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop and the University of New Orleans’ Low-Residency MFA program. He started his first novel, The City of Lost Fortunes, in the backseat of his parents’ car as they evacuated for Hurricane Katrina. He has been, at various points in his life: a security guard at a stockcar race track, a printer in a flag factory, an office worker in an oil refinery, and a high school English teacher. He lives in New Orleans with his wife and their three cats, one of whom is named after a superhero. You can find him on Twitter (@bryancamp), Facebook (@BryanCampNovelist), or Instagram (@bryanlcamp81).

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New Worlds: The Tools of Writing

Normally when authors talk about “writing tools,” they mean things like software for word processing or blocking out distractions. But in this case I mean the physical paraphernalia of recording words: paper and clay, pen and brush and stylus, all the different media we’ve put words on and the devices we’ve used to do it. That’s right, folks, it’s Friday, which means it’s time for another installment of the New Worlds Patreon! Comment over at Book View Cafe . . .

(And don’t forget that the book is on sale now!)

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