Marie Brennan's Blog, page 99

Year Two

We made it through 2017. Now begins 2018.

Things have been harder for me lately. This is the point at which it really starts to hit home that this isn’t a short-term challenge; it goes on and on and on. Taking tikkun olam in its proper sense, repairing the world is a task that goes on more or less forever, because there are always ways to make things better. But the amount of repair it needs right now is huge, and many of our victories amount to maintaining the status quo, rather than letting it get worse.

But 2018 does offer a chance to turn things in at least a little bit of a new direction, via the midterm elections in the U.S. If I have one resolution this year, it is to make sure the Republican Party reaps what it has sowed. They’ve been given their head, and they’ve used it to screw the American middle class, benefit the wealthy, strip protections from the environment, lash out at Latinos and Muslims and women, hand the Internet over to corporations, try repeatedly to gut health insurance, and generally piss on everything I care about. They’ve made it clear that they don’t really give two shits about democracy or the will of the people.

So it’s time for us to speak all the louder.

If you are not registered to vote, then register. If you are registered, make sure that’s still valid. And then vote. Same goes for anyobody living in another country, because your politics matter, too. Don’t listen to the voices that tell you that you don’t matter. You do.

You can change the world. One bit at a time.

The election is in November, but the work begins now. Share here anything you’ve done to repair the world: donations, volunteer work, good deeds, changes in your own life to be a better citizen and friend and neighbor. No effort is too small to be worth mentioning. We’ll need every straw if we’re going to break this camel’s back.

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I need a cool two-syllable word

Okay, here’s a random one for y’all.

I’m trying to name something for a story. It needs to be named with an English word, and for reasons of rhythm, that word has to be two syllables, with the accent on the first syllable. The thing in question is mystical, but don’t feel obliged to go for obviously mystical-sounding words; in fact, it’s probably better if I stay away from that (so no “shadow” or “dragon” or what have you). But it should be something that sounds cool — no “sofa” or “laundry” here.

New Worlds: Liminality

The most recent New Worlds Patreon post is a bonus one, focusing more on the concepts in worldbuilding rather than the content — in this case, liminality, as we approach the liminal moment of turning from one year to the next.

And since I think I forgot to link to last week’s post, go back and read about residence patterns if you missed it before!

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my publications in 2017

A fairly busy year for me, all things considered. And a reminder that I need to go through my bibliography page and clean up all the things that still say “forthcoming” when they’re already out.

Novels

Within the Sanctuary of Wings

Novellas

Lightning in the Blood

Short stories

“The Şiret Mask”
“Into the Wind”

Collections

Maps to Nowhere
Ars Historica

Nonfiction

Dice Tales: Essays on Roleplaying Games and Storytelling

Gaming fiction

“The Rising Wave”
“In the Garden of Lies,” Part One and Part Two
“To the South,” Part One and Part Two

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the eighth annual Yuletide Guessing Game

As has been my wont, I participated in the Yuletide fanfic exchange this year, and has been my habit, I wrote four fics for it — my assignment, and three treats. If any of you currently reading your way through the archive would care to guess at my offerings, I will give you the following clues:

I wrote for one book, one movie, one TV show, and one play.
Only one of those is a fandom I have written in before.
My assignment is in the 4000-5000 word range.
For some inexplicable reason, all three of my treats came in between 1600 and 1700 words.

Any guesses?

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The Light Side and the Dark Side of the Force

Let’s talk about Star Wars and The Force.

Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, forever changed the way I think about the Force — in a fashion I’m still not convinced that George Lucas intended. You see, I walked out of the movie theatre convinced that this whole “light side” and “dark side” business is just Jedi propaganda. There are two sides . . . but they aren’t innately moral. There is simply the path of attachment, which gets called the dark side, and the path of detachment, which gets called the light side. And both of them can lead to good or to evil.

What persauded me of this? It’s been long enough since Episode III came out that I probably don’t need to put the answer behind a cut-tag, but just in case — and because I’m headed toward The Last Jedi spoilers, and because I’m about to get wordy again — I might as well.

It was the moment when Obi-Wan Kenobi walked away from the screaming, mutilated remnants of the man he had once called “brother.”

You cannot convince me that was the action of a good guy. Ideally the detachment of a Jedi should be Buddhist: compassionate without being ruled by your emotions. But Obi-Wan comprehensively failed the compassion test in that moment. He left Anakin in unspeakable agony. He turned his back on suffering, because he’d cut himself off too much to care. I’d already had problems with the way the prequels discussed the two sides of the force, ever since Yoda’s terrible lines about “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering” — hey, kid, did you know that being afraid, when you’re put in frightening situations, means you’re on the road to evil? But it all made sense when that moment in Revenge of the Sith reconfigured my thinking. The Jedi preach detachment; the Sith preach attachment; morality lies in what you do with it.

I’m starting to think the sequel trilogy agrees with me.

A friend of mine commented that Rey is a good-aligned dark side user, and Kylo is an evil-aligned light side user. I think that’s exactly right. Rey is unabashedly, unapologetically driven by her passions, while Kylo strives constantly to eradicate all human feeling in himself. Look at the results. Now tell me again how giving in to your emotions leads to bad things, while letting go of them leads to good ones?

It’s clear that, at a minimum, the sequels are not wholeheartedly Team Yay Jedi. Luke is deeply critical of them — I know Mark Hamill disagreed with Rian Johnson’s take on the character, but I haven’t looked up details, because I don’t want to muddy my thinking on this matter so soon after seeing the movie. So looking only at what we have in the actual text, we’ve got Luke saying the time has come for the Jedi to end, saying it’s “vanity” to claim that they are necessary to the continuation of the light side of the Force, and pointing out the comprehensive failures of the Jedi as an organization. He doesn’t question the moral valence of the two sides, but he does undercut the simplistic valorization of that label. And he complicates the label itself when he tells Kylo that Rey is the continuation of the Jedi, because see above re: she is so not detached at all.

Then you’ve got the team-up between Kylo and Rey, and its aftermath. I’m very interested to see if the trilogy winds up supporting some of what he says to her . . . because if you strip away the megalomania of “we could bring a new order to the galaxy,” he might be right about needing to destroy past structures and get beyond them. The two of them are already failing to fit into the old molds. How far will the story go with that? Will it go all the way to my headcanon, or something in that vein?

(As an aside: I love the device of having Kylo and Rey able to sense and communicate with one another. Not only does it put Chekhov’s Astral Projection on the mantel so it doesn’t come out of left field when Luke uses it to buy time for the handful of surviving Resistance members to flee, but it solves the age-old problem of “how do we have a meaningful relationship between the hero and the villain when we can’t put them in a room together without problems?” Taking violence off the table opens up space for the two of them to talk and develop a bond. While still leaving room for me to go, “uhhh, I am really not sure whether this will turn out to be a good thing or a bad one.” Survey says: both, and also I came out of the movie really kind of shipping that pair.)

I also wonder what’s going to happen with the books. There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment at the very end, when Finn opens up a drawer on the Millennium Falcon and you see the sacred texts of the Jedi tucked in next to whatever he’s grabbing or stowing — which implies either that Rey stole them, or Force Ghost Yoda put them there. Either way, Yoda is such a wanker, with his line to Luke about “there is nothing in those books that Rey does not have already” — I’m pretty sure he was laughing up his sleeve when he said that, because what he really meant was that Rey had the books. And he nuked the tree to keep Luke from going in and discovering they weren’t there for him to burn. What’s going to happen with those in the long term? Will it reveal a different understanding of the Force, one that got lost as the Jedi became too entrenched in their own propaganda? Or something else? I don’t know.

But I’m very keen to find out.

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On Star Wars, Sacrifice, and Darkness

So I saw The Last Jedi, and I liked it. I have to agree with Scalzi that it’s a good thing we got Rogue One before this: not because there’s a direct narrative connection between them, but because that film established precedent both for Star Wars movies that don’t quite have the Joseph Campbell feel, and for Star Wars movies that are dark without being grimdark.

The purpose of this post is to unpack that last bit. Which I’ll mostly do behind a cut-tag, to avoid spoiling those who haven’t seen the film yet (and also because dear lord, self, wordy much?), but out here I’ll say that what I mean by “dark without being grimdark” is that there’s never a sense of cynicism about the whole thing. Trust is not folly; honor is not a lie; it is possible to win and not always regret it afterwards. What The Last Jedi does is acknowledge that war has a cost, and you can’t have a Rebellion or a Resistance without risking, and often suffering, real loss.

Ah, you say, but didn’t The Empire Strikes Back establish precedent for dark Star Wars movies, long before Rogue One came along?

Yes and no. Let’s go behind the cut-tag.

Empire is unquestionably a darker movie than its predecessor, with betrayals and imprisonment and horrible revelations and so forth. But the original trilogy was, as we all know, very Campbellian in its feel, and that includes the parts where it goes to a darker place. It’s mythic, and deliberately so.

The Last Jedi is not mythic. And deliberately so.

The first Star Wars movie had characters dying all over the place. Obi-Wan dies fighting Vader; a whole bunch of Rebellion pilots die in the assault on the Death Star; storm troopers drop right, left, and center. But Obi-Wan’s death is literally bloodless — he doesn’t even leave a corpse — and it’s archetypal, the master struck down by his traitorous student, clearing the way for the young hero to come out from under that sheltering wing. (I’m not knocking this approach. I love archetypes as much as the next folklorically-trained author.) The Rebellion pilots are mostly non-entities, appearing on screen for a few seconds to yell about the TIE fighters on their tail before they vanish in a shower of sparks. Their purpose in the story is to heighten the odds by their deaths, winnowing the field until everything rests on Luke, until he’s the only one who can possibly save the day.

It’s very different in The Last Jedi. When Kylo and Rey team up in Snoke’s throne room, they leave behind bodies, and some of those bodies are in pieces. When Finn takes down Phasma, we see her eye through the gap in her broken helmet, reminding us that just as with Finn himself, there’s an actual person underneath the armor. Luke’s death is mythic — but before he goes, we see the exhaustion, the genuinely lethal strain he subjected himself to in order to save the others. And the Resistance pilots . . . that, more than anything else, is where I feel the difference.

And I felt it right from the start, with Rose’s sister Paige — not that we know her name at the time. Instead of keeping our focus on the hotshot Poe, the strike against the dreadnought shows us the painful process of the bombers being destroyed — first one at a time, and then, because they’re in a stupidly tight formation, falling like dominoes. We see Paige watching everyone around her going down in literal flames, realizing she’s the only one left . . . the only one, because the other guy on her bomber is dead and it’s all down to her. But this isn’t like the first film and it all being down to Luke. We have absolutely no certainty that she will succeed, because she isn’t the main character. And we stay with her as she tries, fails, tries again, and then succeeds at the last, pyrrhic second, giving her life so that the assault won’t be a complete and total debacle.

That alone would have gotten me right in the gut (and did). But then we follow up, with Paige’s sister Rose, whereupon Paige gets a name and a history and people who mourn her. The cause and effect matter here: Paige isn’t developed in the story because she was a special heroic snowflake. She’s heroic, and the script takes the time to develop her so you can see that. All of those people in those bombers and X-Wings had names and histories and people who mourn them; this is just the one we’re using as an example.

This movie is really determined to undercut the idea that you can and should solve everything with a hotshot assault on the Death Star where’s it’s all okay as long as that one person succeeds. Poe’s plan at the beginning of the film is a waste, once the evacuation is complete; the benefits of taking out a dreadnought are not remotely counterbalanced by what the Resistance lost along the way. No less a person than Leia herself stuns his reckless ass when Poe continues to fail to see that. (Should Holdo have told Poe the rest of the plan? Maybe. But given his track record, I can see why she didn’t.) And just in case you felt disappointed when Poe called off the run on the ram cannon, the script says, nope: Finn, you are not allowed to make a screaming suicide charge down its throat. Rose is going to save you. Because we’re not going to win by fighting what we hate; we’re going to win by saving what we love.

Dark, but not grimdark. Anti-grimdark, in fact.

I’m pretty sure all the events of the movie take place over the course of just a few days, and only a few days at most after Starkiller Base has been destroyed. In an eyeblink, the Resistance drops from hundreds of people down to a handful. There were multiple points in this movie where Writer Brain kicked in and went, shit, man — how are they going to survive this? It was a real question in a way it’s never been for me before in a Star Wars movie, because the main films never made me wonder, and Rogue One made it clear that the answer was, “they aren’t going to.” But here we still have Episode IX to go. My subconscious kept tallying the resources on the board and going, uh, it has to be one of these, but it is not super-obvious how that is going to work. And yet they do pull through: Finn doesn’t go out in a blaze of suicidal glory, Rose doesn’t die saving him, Leia survives BEING BLOWN INTO MOTHERFUCKING VACUUM AND FORCE-FLIES HER WAY OUT OF IT I DON’T CARE THAT IT’S RIDICULOUS I LOVE IT WITHOUT RESERVATION. And yet those survivals don’t feel facile to me, because all the other deaths have shown the cost, and the script has made me care about those other deaths; they’re not just a cheap way of Upping the Stakes.

This is only one of the things I want to say about The Last Jedi, but it’s enough for now (especially since this post is already 1200 words and counting). Expect more probably tomorrow, when I start talking about the Force and my hope that my headcanon is going to become canon.

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New Worlds: Fictive Kinship

The dust is settling at Patreon, with the planned changes to their fees taken off the table (hallelujah!). And so I continue with the New Worlds series, with the latest post covering fictive kinship — the ways someone can be family without being related by blood. Comment over there!

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New Worlds: Third Cousin Twice Removed + some news about Patreon

The most recent Patreon post is “Third Cousin Twice Removed”, about kinship terminology and which categories we differentiate or don’t.

For those who haven’t heard, Patreon is planning to institute some changes in how they handle the processing fees for pledges. Unfortunately, their plan for doing this involves charging the fees to patrons — which is especially bad for people who have made a lot of small pledges, since (for example) each $1 pledge will actually cost $1.38. Patreon creators are pretty united in saying this is a bad idea, since it’s already causing people to reduce their pledges or cancel them entirely; if you want to speak out against it, there’s a petition you can sign, or you can send a comment to Patreon directly via Zendesk (note that you’ll need to register at the end of the process for your message to go through). I encourage you to do this; the messages I’ve gotten from Patreon indicate that public pressure may already be having an effect, so let’s keep it up.

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The world’s most scattershot progress

I haven’t said much here about my work on the current novel — the one that’s a followup to the Memoirs — in part because it is so unlike the process of writing any other novel so far, I’m too busy figuring out what I’m doing to spare much attention for reporting in.

But hey, it’s useful to talk about what happens when you write a Totally Different Kind of Book. So here goes.

What makes this one Totally Different is structural, not content-based. This book still has nerdy explorations of how scholarship gets done, and absurd hijinks of the pulp adventure variety, and various dragony things. But as I said when I announced this book, it’s kind of a mosaic thing.

See, I knew that I wanted a good portion of the novel to be the actual text of the epic the characters are translating, delivered in sections as they work their way through it. And I knew that I liked the idea of doing something like the memoir approach — except not a memoir again, because we’ve done that already. I could go for a diary, i.e. a first-person account not meant to be published for general consumption, and in fact that’s part of what I’m doing; the largest single category after “segments of the epic” will be “excerpts from Audrey’s diary.” But there are also newspaper articles and telegrams and letters Audrey sends and letters she receives and letters between characters who aren’t her, and before I’m done there will be a catalogue of clay tablets that’s surprisingly load-bearing and probably other types of document I haven’t yet thought of.

And that’s where things get complicated. Because to start with, I don’t actually know what percentage of the novel will be the text of the epic. I also don’t know how long its total wordcount will be. And then I keep coming up with ideas for bits and pieces that could maybe go into the frame story, but I don’t know for sure if they will, much less where in the story they’ll go. Like that catalogue, which I just thought up last night on my way to karate: I know why I want to put it in, and I know what will happen afterward, but timing? Who knows. Or the idea I had a couple of days ago, of having Alan go out to the Qajr to look for other stuff near where the tablets were found. How do I communicate that? Letters to Simeon, most likely. How many? Uh, well, definitely one — no idea about timing — maybe two? One to set things up and then one to say what happened? How long does he need to be out there, and how much other stuff will happen before he reports in?

I don’t know. But I’ve found a solution — and its name is Scrivener.

I’ve used Scrivener before, but mostly for nonfiction: my Patreon posts, the Dice Tales essays before them, various other projects. I’ve only used it for a novel (its ostensible purpose) once, while writing Chains and Memory; after that I went back to my usual habits, in part because I find Scrivener horribly clunky when it comes to formatting.

But here? It’s a godsend. Because I can make each bit of the mosaic its own item in Scrivener, with bits of the epic labeled IN ALL CAPS so I can spot them at a glance . . . and then I can make a folder of bits that will maybe go in somewhere but I don’t know where or when, and write them as they come to me. They still count toward the total wordcount of the draft, so I can tell I’m making good daily progress even if the actual continuous text of the novel stalled out several days ago on a half-written Hadamist bulletin; I’ve accumulated three finished “scenes” there and notes or partial drafts for four more. When I decide where to put them, I can simply drag and drop, instead of having to page back and forth through the manuscript.

Yes, this means I’m writing nonlinearly. Yes, this is MASSIVELY WEIRD FOR ME. I basically haven’t done this since I was, uh, seventeen? Occasionally I’ll let myself skip ahead and write a later bit if it’s clear in my head and I’m stuck on what goes before, but on the whole, making myself take the story in order was vital to me finishing my first novel, and I’ve worked that way ever since. But I’ve finally accepted that this novel just is. not. going to work that way. Tomorrow I might go back to working on that Hadamist bulletin . . . or I might write up that catalogue and what happens after it, even though that probably won’t take place until at least halfway through the novel. I have a complete letter from Isabella to her granddaughter; I don’t know what will spark it, just that I want it to be sparked, and since I knew what I wanted it to say, I went ahead and wrote it.

Of course I’ll have to revise it later, once I know exactly what the context is. But better to nail down its general shape now and polish the specifics later, than to stall out tens of thousands of words earlier because I’m not yet sure how to get from E to Q.

So if you need me, I’ll be over here with a pile of mosaic pieces and a half-finished picture on the floor, trying to decide exactly where each tile should go.

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