Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 103

The History of Scrabble

At Book Riot: DLW, TWS, BINGO: A HISTORY OF SCRABBLE.

This caught my eye because I like Scrabble, a low-key, mildly entertaining game that is a nice way to spend some time every now and then. My brother and I often play it when he’s visiting, often without keeping score. Sometimes we play a version where every word must sound correct, but be misspelled. Many possible variants.

By the way, I now play Wordle, Quordle, and Octordle most days — and I like Octordle best, which I didn’t expect. I know someone commented here about playing these games every day and I’m now in that camp as well.

But back to Scrabble!

An edition of Scrabble is likely to be in your home or in your neighbor’s home, as one in three Americans own it. …

REALLY? What do you think, can that possibly be true? I vote: False. I bet that one in three Americans who took some specific poll or survey own a game of Scrabble, and I bet that’s not remotely one in three homes overall. Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt it.

To pass time, Butts wrote a paper in 1931 identifying the three most common types of games: board games, number games (usually with cards or dice), and letter games. The most popular games at the time were board and number games, though the game Anagrams was a popular example of a letter game. During this time, he happened to be reading a short story by Edgar Allan Poe called “The Gold Bug,” and in it, he noticed a line that showed the English letter distribution — in other words, a line that had the most common letters in the most common distribution. He realized then that a game like Anagrams would be much more fun if letters more common in the English language were also more common in the game.

Ah, a literary connection to Poe! I had no idea.

Lots more at the link — click through if you like Scrabble and are now intrigued about the history of this game.

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Puppy report (And Progress with Invictus)

Happy Monday!

The puppies are now two weeks old — 2/3 of the way to the very important three-week mark, which is where they shift from being extremely fragile to being almost safe.

Leda with Boy One

At three weeks, puppies are finally able to control their own body temperature adequately, which means they are safe from various dire infectious diseases, plus they won’t instantly get chilled if they wind up off the heating pad when mom gets out of the whelping box.

A chilled puppy is going to develop pneumonia as sure as night follows day, and while pneumonia is not always fatal, the rule is never let puppies get chilled. Obviously the little one has been much (MUCH) more prone to chilling than his bigger, fatter brothers. He still cries within one minute of Leda leaving the whelping box, letting me know I need to go move him to the warm side and surround him with his siblings until she’s ready to go back to them.

This is one reason I never leave puppies this young unsupervised. The other is that it’s quite possible for a mother dog to accidentally lie on a puppy and smother it, and yes indeed, Tiny Boy Four is also much (MUCH) more at risk from that kind of disaster. That’s the other reason I supervise so tightly during these first weeks. (My mother keeps an eye on them when I’m not at home.)

Anyway, two weeks today! Not safe yet, but less fragile every day. As of this morning, Tiny Boy Four is 11.5 oz. By tonight, he should be over 12 oz, which means roughly three times his birth weight, which is to say, he’s doing great, even though he’s still so small compared to his brothers. Two of them are over a pound, the other nearly that size. I’m going to continue tight supervision for another week or so, including overnight supervision, until Tiny Boy Four is bigger and more robust.

In keeping with the notion that every. single. litter. of puppies will find its own unique way of turning your hair white, last week these little boys all developed a problem with inappetence and diarrhea. Luckily I had kaopectate on hand, and after rapid consultation with my vet, started tube-feeding every puppy 0.5 cc kaopectate every five hours. Boom, that took care of the inappetence at once, which was a great relief. They all continued to nurse vigorously and gain weight, so this problem overall turned out to be minor. But it sure made me tense for a couple of days in there, as first the biggest puppy and then the other three all developed this problem.

As a side note of possible general interest, the stuff sold at Walgreens as “Kaopectate” isn’t actually kaopectate at all. Its active ingredient is an aspirin derivative, bismuth subsalicylate, and it is therefore not safe for baby puppies (or baby humans, I expect). REAL kaopectate is available over the counter, but not under that name. It’s safe for any dog any age, and if you want to keep some on hand, it’s labeled “Anti-Diarrhea Liquid for Dogs,” which has got to be the single least catchy name for a medication in the entire universe.

Anyway, the basic point here is that whatever was wrong, all the puppies turned out to be fine. As problems go, this was definitely not a big deal compared to … let me see …

–the puppy who aspirated milk in her sleep and gave herself pneumonia (twice!) — that was Naamah. I thought she was going to die for sure, but we kept her front end elevated for ten days to prevent further aspiration and that actually worked, giving her time to develop her swallowing reflex or whatever needed to happen to stop that problem. She’s three now.

–and the puppy who wouldn’t gain weight unless supplemented with extra formula until he was six weeks old — Milo, he was perfectly fine once he was weaned. He’s a year old;

–oh, and Morgan was allergic to her own puppies’ saliva and developed a nasty rash all over her tummy. I had to trim the puppies’ claws every couple of days and wipe down her belly three or four times a day until that problem finally disappeared. You trim the claws of tiny puppies by feel, incidentally, as it’s impossible to see what you’re doing.

–and there was the puppy who snuffled milk through his nose every time he nursed but somehow never did aspirate — Conner, he’s five;

–and the puppy who quit gaining weight on day eleven and had to be tube-fed formula every two hours like a newborn, for several days, until she was back on track — Pippa’s daughter Sarah, so that was a long time ago, but as you see this particular problem has stayed vivid in my mind. I have no idea in the world what happens to a previously vigorous puppy to cause that problem, but I’ve seen other puppies stall out that way since and now I supplement aggressively the first moment I realize a puppy has stopped gaining weight. That gets the puppy moving properly in less than a day, as a rule.

I could list the bad-outcome stories too, because I’ve had some of those as well, but I’ll refrain.

Anyway, Leda’s little boys all kept gaining weight right along, so yay for kaopectate, which made this into a minor problem when it could have been a disaster.

Meanwhile, the puppies are juuuust about to get cute. All the books and websites will tell you that puppies open their eyes from ten to fourteen days. Not in my experience! Most of my puppies open their eyes from twelve to eighteen days, and if they’re preemies, they can open their eyes even later than that. Two of these little boys opened their eyes yesterday, and boom! They look like little puppies now instead of an odd kind of rodent. From now on, cuteness will increase exponentially.

Meanwhile! Invictus! Progress is being made, though slowly. I finished the current chapter yesterday; it’s the first chapter of the actual climax, from the secondary protagonist’s pov. I’m switching to the primary protagonist’s pov for the remaining part of the climax, so although in a sense it’s just one scene, the climax is divided in this perhaps unusual way. I hope and expect to get through the second half of the climax this week. That will leave two denouement scenes, which may take place in two short chapters or one longer chapter. And then — unless I’m missing something — I’ll finally have a complete draft.

I should go back to the original file and see if I can figure out when I started this novel. I bet it’s been four years or so, working on and off. Maybe more. Two years since I figured out everybody’s secret plans and became able to move forward. Five weeks since I picked up the current draft and started moving toward actually getting the thing finished. I will be SO GLAD to finish a draft, even though some of these recent chapters are fairly messy, with a lot of bolded text that in this case means check for continuity. I won’t be able to send this draft to beta readers for a little while as I will need to set the draft aside for a bit and then read through the back, oh, third, and smooth things out and fix continuity issues. Add some exposition toward the beginning. Subtly, of course, but I need to add the right details so that stuff toward the end doesn’t seem to come out of nowhere. This doesn’t even mean foreshadowing — this will be just a sprinkle of names to establish that certain people and places exist.

The question is: after getting a draft of Invictus completed, what shall I do next? The answer is: I may pick up Tano’s story and see where that goes because I know how it begins and ends and surely I can figure out the middle when I get there. The point is, this should be short — shortish — and that might be the right kind of project to work on so that I can take a break from Invictus, but not too long a break before I come back to it, smooth it out, and get it ready to send to first readers.

That would mean pushing back Tasmakat a bit. But once I really start working on that, I may well not want to stop, and it’s a much bigger project, so … yeah, it may make more sense to see if I can get Tano’s story to work and then deal with Invictus and THEN Tasmakat.

But the first necessary step: finishing this draft of Invictus! Finally!

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Final Version Loaded to Amazon

Okay, here we go — I just loaded the final version of Shines Now to KDP. All ready to go, comfortably before the due date. I’ll load the finished version to Draft to Digital for distribution via other venders shortly and have that ready to go as well. The big difference is, if one forgets to strip out all Amazon links, the book will be kicked back out of several other platforms. Which makes perfect sense; it’s just I have to remember to clear out the hyperlinks because ouch, not a great thing to forget.

Linda S — the final proofreader for this one — noted that this is her favorite Death’s Lady story. I hope you all enjoy it too!

A long time ago, Kuomat walked into the woods, abandoning his place in the world of men. For years he’s lived as an outlaw, with little to do with ordinary townsfolk. But when Jenna asked him for help in the name of Death’s Lady and of the king of Talasayan, Kuomat chose to involve himself in the affairs of the great.

That did not go unnoticed.

Now Kuomat has one last chance to step out of the forest and return to the world … if he can bring himself to take it.

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No More Evil Superman Stories

A post at Book Riot: NO MORE EVIL SUPERMAN STORIES, PLEASE, to which I say, Got that right. Is Evil Superman as offensive as Captain-America-the-Secret-Nazi? Probably not. It’s hard to get more offensive than the latter. But it’s stupid and offensive — or at least that’s my instant reaction. Let me see what this Book Riot post has to say …

Superman, the Man of Steel, has long been one of the paragons of comic books. His moral compass pointing to true north at all times is one of the things that sets him apart, makes him popular, and has made him so difficult to translate to film. Over the last couple decades, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend: evil Superman stories. Some of these are from DC Comics and their imprints while other are pastiches of Krypton’s favorite son. I have a gentle but firm request: No more evil Superman stories, please. …

… The real world is a dark, beautiful, turbulent place that can fill us with hope and dread at any given moment. Comic books are a form of escapism at times, commentary at other times, and require conflict as a genre. These things seem contradictory and yet are true at the same time. This paradox is part of what makes Superman difficult to write AND it’s why we need Superman as a paragon on the page.

Superman has a Messiah Complex. Imagine being able to hear every scream for help on the entire planet at any given time. Despite his incredible power and speed, he cannot help everyone. Think of some complicated conflict that happen around the world (real and DC), those with no clear good or evil. People are dying, but whom should Superman help? How does he save lives while also not escalating a situation or giving assistance to a force motivated by greed? There are always limits to his power, and these limits put on display just how human Clark really is, how helpless he can feel just like the rest of us. 

Hear hear! I don’t have anything to add to this post. Click through and read the whole thing if you have a moment.

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Recent Reading: Phoenix Feather series by Sherwood Smith

Okay, I agree you were all perfectly right to push me toward this series when I was not initially all that inclined to pick it up. Great sibling relationships, you said. Positive! Upbeat! Good guys win! I don’t remember exactly what you all said, but that was the general impression I got from your various comments. I enjoyed it very much and whipped through all four books in quick succession. I don’t exactly remember where one leaves off and then next starts, so just take this as comments on the whole series.

Some of you mentioned that the first book, Fledglings, reads like a MG story.

I can see that, but in fact for me it didn’t really feel MG. I think this may be due to the deep, complex, non-European setting, in which the attitudes of a child are quite unusual by current standards. All that filial devotion! Ari is at that point so willing to subordinate her future to her older brother’s glorious destiny. And she works so hard, and accepts that as normal, and basically the story sidesteps easy categorization as MG/YA/adult. Though the series as a whole would be shelved in YA, if you had to put it somewhere, because Ari and the others start off as children but step inexorably into adult roles as the series continues. That’s YA structure, not MG.

So, let me see …

a) The characters

We have four main protagonists, but this isn’t evident at once. In the first book, Mouse – Ryu/Ari/Firebolt – is by far the primary protagonist. By far. This is true even though we do get little snippets from many other points of view. In the second book, we start to get extensive sections from Second Brother’s (Yskanda’s) pov. From then on, he and Mouse … Ryu … not sure what to call her, actually … okay, her name at the end is Ari, so I’ll go with that. So, from the second book onward, Yskanda and Ari take the lion’s share of the narrative, with First Brother, Muinkanda, and particularly First Imperial Prince Jiun also acting as secondary protagonists, plus a good number of other minor points of view from other characters. POV is actually omniscient, but it still makes sense to talk about primary, secondary, and so on because the narrative certainly does focus much more on Ari, Yskanda, Jiun, and Muinkanda, in pretty much that order. We just get glimpses into everyone else’s thoughts and feelings.

How does it work, starting with the focus narrow, centering Ari like that, and then gradually broadening as the story progresses?

It works great! Sticking to one primary pov protagonist in the first book is a great idea! That works so much better for character readers like me than trying to spread the pov out from the beginning, at least if the reader enjoys the character. I liked Ari. She’s interesting and believable – for certain values of “believable” that edge into “maybe a little too good to be true.” She’s believable in context, let’s say.

Yskanda works just as well. I was not as interested in him at first. In fact, I think I was repelled by his claustrophobic circumstances, because he’s a prisoner. And by his distractibility, as early on when he’s handed a remarkable chance at escape, he basically gets distracted by butterflies and doesn’t even try to escape. (Not butterflies, but something pretty and trivial that you should not stop to admire during an escape attempt.). I was rolling my eyes pretty hard during that scene. He grew on me, though. Also, fortunately, as the story progresses, Yskanda’s cage becomes thoroughly gilded and as soon as he finds his feet, I think the reader can see that there’s no need to worry about him, even though he’s got plenty to be worried about in story terms.

Anyway, my disinterest in Yskanda quickly wore off and I got quite involved with his story. I liked Muin too, though he’s a minor character comparatively; and I sort of think possibly Imperial Prince Jiun might have been my favorite character, which I did not quite see coming. I liked his complex relationship with his father the Emperor and the conflict that set up. Really, Jiun, not Arikanda, Yskanda, or Muinkanda, is the character placed in the most conflicted position, both because of his relationship with his father and his relationship with one of his sisters, whom Jiun wants to love, but sheesh, she is not at all a nice person.

While I’m thinking of the Emperor, I will add, this is a story where the good guys are mostly very good and the bad guys are mostly really bad, and I grant that is simplistic, sure, though also satisfying.

On the other hand, I put the word “mostly” in there for a reason. The Emperor is complex and becomes a lot more sympathetic as the story progresses. I think this is pretty believable? Although if you read all four books in quick succession, I also could see a reader feeling that some of the early scenes featuring the Emperor do not necessarily quite match up with his character the way he develops later. Also, the way his whole family and all his intimate servants and everyone are so focused on his moods, on not making him mad, implies the Emperor is a fearsome tyrant, yet he really doesn’t act that way toward all these people. I mean, “benevolent” might be going a little far, but he doesn’t go around shouting Off with their heads either. Anyway, I liked him. Fei Anbai,head of the Emperor’s spies and interrogators, also becomes both more complex and more sympathetic as the reader sees more of him. That was unexpected. I liked that a lot.

b) The world

You know this story is inspired by xuanhuan literature, probably. I’m not familiar with that literary tradition, or I wasn’t. I guess I’m more familiar with it now. Anyway, Asian-inspired, but this is an alternate Asia. The Empire of the Thousand Islands. Great setting, just tremendous worldbuilding, ranging from details of daily life through important rituals to metaphysics. This is very much a world that feels deep and real, that you feel you could visit if only the right portal appeared.

c) The plotting

The pacing worked for me, though the long periods spent on training and daily life probably wouldn’t appeal to some readers. The story feels like it’s about daily life, growing up, and interpersonal relationships more than about defeating evil. Or, let’s say, the decision to defeat evil is a lot more important than actually defeating evil. There are several serious villains, but when the good guys encounter them, the villains are defeated in short order. I think it’s fair to say that this could make many plot elements feel rather like afterthoughts compared to worldbuilding, daily life, and particularly the development of relationships. This worked great for me because to me the defeat-the-villain parts can be satisfying, but are rarely the parts that draw my attention the most.

Anyway, the plotting worked fine for me, though I can imagine that some aspects wouldn’t necessarily suit some readers.

The single plotting element I most appreciated was the way the phoenix feather was not meant for any one person, but was passed from hand to hand at the end. That was lovely.

d) The writing

Omniscient pov will never be my favorite. I like close third best. But this story did feel much like close third, with omniscient snippets around the edges. That worked quite well for me. Everything Sherwood Smith writes where the focus is mainly on one or a few characters is likely to work better for me than anything where the focus is more diffuse. Well, I can think of exceptions; but basically that’s likely to be the case. This is one reason I love Stranger to Command far more than some of her other books. I enjoyed this series almost as much as that one, and in some ways more.

If you do like omniscient pov, then here you go, an excellent example. I should write a post pointing out good examples of omniscient pov fantasy because it’s hard to pull off. I can think of one more author who writes outstanding omniscient pov right off. I’ll have to see if I can come up with a few more examples.

There are a surprising number of typos. I wish I’d had a chance to proof these books myself. Not that I would have caught everything, obviously, you know how that goes. But I’d have caught what I did catch; eg, about a dozen typos per book. In other ways, of course the writing is excellent. Many beautiful descriptive passages contribute to the immersive feeling that this is a real world.

e) Flaws

Okay, I must admit I sort of felt Yaso was over the top. I mean, really?

Next, a mild spoiler. Really, this should be only mildly spoiling, but just so you know.

Mild spoiler okay?

Then fine, look, I understand why Jiun was so slow to suspect his sister of real treachery. I realize that his memory of her when they were children got in the way. I see that his revulsion at the thought of being emperor made him want quite desperately to believe she would be an excellent empress. I know the reader understands her much better than Jiun does because we see snippets of her thoughts and feelings in a way he can’t. I guess it seemed believable that it took so very, very long for him, or anybody, to figure this out.

On the other hand … my goodness, it was totally obvious. I’m not sure how the author could have hidden this better from the reader while still playing fair, but yep, the second a specific plot element is mentioned in passing, it’s really obvious. There’s a good red herring because her actions are buried in with other nefarious goings on, but still.

The best thing about the sister is that she makes a really good villain, much better than the flashier villains we find in this story. Not sure whether this constitutes a flaw or not, but after a heck of a lot of slice-of-life story and a considerable amount of buildup, the Big Bad Guy – White Dragon – seems a bit of an afterthought. He makes his move, he’s defeated, and the reader may be left thinking, Wow, that was fast.

Or maybe not. The story really isn’t about defeating flashy bad guys. It’s about growing up and growing into yourself. If the villain seems an afterthought, well, yes, compared to the rest of life, all the things that really matter, sure, why not? Get him defeated and move on. There are several villains and they all come across a bit like that: Master Night? Ooh, scary – boom, dead. Cobra Sage? Yep, same thing. This feature, with flashy villains who are defeated almost as soon as the good guys actually encounter them, also makes Jiun’s sister seem truly awful by comparison. She’s drawn in such a realistic way compared to the flashy villains. That means that her intense focus on herself and indifference toward others feels much more personal to the reader as well as to her brother. Plus we know her better since we see snippets from her pov – thankfully brief and scattered snippets.

What else? Let me see … All right, I will add that certain aspects of the denouement seemed overly pat, particularly the way the author clears the Emperor out of Jiun’s way. That had a certain Deus ex feel to it, more so in some ways than when the gods actually do intervene. Worse, handling the Emperor in that way interfered with the scene I wanted to see between Danno and the Emperor. This is similar to wanting to write a sequel to a book I love — I want to write certain scenes that didn’t occur at the end of this series.

I wanted a scene between Jion and Fei Anbai because, uh, let’s just say there would reasonably be a certain amount of tension there, plus the who-watches-the-watchman question is raised but not answered. I think this is an important question and I would like to write a scene in which it is addressed.

But, more than that, as I say, I REALLY wanted a scene involving Danno and the Emperor. I wanted that in order to bring the Emperor himself to a better place with regard to that long-ago betrayal, and I wanted it because, given the prologue, that encounter would have bookended the story. I’d have ended the story with that scene and then made almost everything in the last chapter into an epilogue.

So, well, whatever, not like these missing scenes ruined the ending for me, it’s just that I know so clearly what they would look like that I wrote different versions in my head long before I got to the last chapter. I’m still doing that now, in fact, though I’ve moved on to the Gold Seer trilogy now, which yes, I still like a lot.

Anyway, overall … hmm. Overall, I guess I’d rate this series as about, oh, 4.75 stars, something around there. I enjoyed it a lot, I read it fast, and I’ll certainly read it again. I still love A Stranger to Command best, but yes, I think this series is now my second-favorite.

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How books work

Here’s an old post from The Intern’s long-defunct post: How Books Work: The Hunger Games.

Someone asked a question on Quora that reminded me of this post, so I went and found it. I’m glad it’s still available. It’s a great post. The Intern’s blog used to be an entertaining and informative resource and I’m sorry it’s no longer active, but glad the posts are still available. Here’s how this post starts:

If you’ve read The Hunger Games (or been in the mute and intensely focused presence of someone in the process of reading it), you know that it’s practically impossible to put down. Stephen King compared the book to an arcade game that keeps you helplessly plugging in quarters round after round, and after reading it herself INTERN can say that that’s a fair approximation.

What exactly is Suzanne Collins doing, on a sentence-to-sentence, paragraph-to-paragraph level, that makes this book such a terrifyingly addictive read?

To shed light on this question, INTERN repaired to her secret basement Book Lab, where she soaked a randomly-selected chapter of The Hunger Games in a bath of chemicals designed to reveal the exact function of each sentence.

Oh, and what an exciting experiment it was! Within seconds, the words themselves melted away, leaving only bright colors representing the following things:

This is a great thing to try. I particularly like the way internal and external conflict are broken apart and the way that action resulting from conflict is broken out of general action. Also, what a great choice of books to try this with! The Hunger Games is indeed a highly compelling novel. The Intern goes on to show images of a few pages after color coding every line. This is fascinating to look at just to see the high proportion of action and external conflict and the way the internal narrative is slipped into the story in tiny bits. But even better are the Intern’s overall observations based on the selection:

New discoveries prompt internal conflict. Pale blue sections (in which Katniss is seeing, hearing, tasting things) are often followed by dark blue sections (internal conflict).

(Almost) every internal or external conflict results in a decision. Red and dark blue sections (external/internal conflict) are almost always followed by dark green sections (action/decision).

Some decisions result in further conflict. See the alternating red and green patches on the second page? 

Internal narrative is slipped in with the action. Notice how those little grey patches tend to appear in the middle of light blue ones?

The chapter ends on an unresolved conflict. See how the last two sentences are highlighted in red? 

This is a fantastic post; click through to read the whole thing. Don’t you immediately want to get a (cheap, used) copy of a handful of especially compelling books and mark them up with highlighters? I have never done this, but I certainly think it would be fascinating. Maybe compare them to a handful of novels that you found boring and did not finish.

I need to go back and re-visit other posts from the Intern’s blog. I now recall how much I appreciated her analytical way of looking at storytelling.

The Intern blogged anonymously for several years. Finally, when her first novel was published, she revealed that her name is Hilary T. Smith. that book is Wild Awake, a literary YA novel. I picked it up on the basis of her blog, but never read it because it really does not sound like the sort of story that I like. Here’s the description from Amazon:

In Wild Awake, Hilary T. Smith’s exhilarating and heart-wrenching YA debut novel, seventeen-year-old Kiri Byrd has big plans for her summer without her parents. She intends to devote herself to her music and win Battle of the Bands with her bandmate and best friend, Lukas. Perhaps then, in the excitement of victory, he will finally realize she’s the girl of his dreams.

But a phone call from a stranger shatters Kiri’s plans. He says he has her sister’s stuff—her sister, Sukey, who died five years ago. This call throws Kiri into a spiral of chaos that opens old wounds and new mysteries.

That final paragraph of the description puts me off. Spirals of chaos that open old wounds are not something I’m all that keen on generally. Nevertheless, revisiting Hilary’s blog makes me want to at least open it up and read the first bit and just see how it goes. I’m pretty confident the writing will be excellent; it’s just the type of story I’m not sure of.

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25 Reasons I hate Your Protagonist

This is actually a post from Chuck Wendig at Terrible Minds, so it’s 25 reasons he hates the protagonist. There’s probably some overlap with reasons I personally detest a protagonist, though I’m not sure I could come up with 25 reasons myself. Maybe four or five major reasons. You know what, I’ll try that at the end of this post. Regardless, let’s take a look at Chuck’s list:

— Lack of agency. Yes, fine. This won’t make me hate the protagonist; it will make me not care about the protagonist and quite possibly DNF the book. Chuck points at a couple of different types of problems in this same basic ballpark.

— No redemptive qualities. I’m on board with this one. Actually, for me, the protagonist needs to have plenty of redemptive qualities, not just one nice quality in a mass of awfulness.

I’m not sure the best term is “redemptive.” I’m not sure what the best term is. Certainly not “nice.” The protagonist definitely does not need to be nice. Nicholas Valiarde is one of my all-time favorite characters in fantasy, and his daughter Tremaine is even better. I could probably name a dozen great characters who are favorites of mine but aren’t particularly nice. Kaoren Ruuel, say. While thinking of AKH, also Aristide Couerveur, especially in The Bones of the Fair.

But moving on, let’s see what else is in this extensive list of reasons to hate the protagonist.

—Steps across the wrong line. Oh, yes, that’s for sure. No killing a pet dog. Don’t care why. Even killing a dog like Cujo isn’t something I tolerate very easily.

–Eye-rolling stupidity. I seem to have mentioned this fairly often recently. It’s not a deal-breaker for me necessarily, depending on my mood. But I don’t think a book can rate above mediocre if the plot is mainly driven by the hopelessly dense protagonist failing to see the obvious.

Various other things, but I think Chuck is starting to reach well before the end — hitting problems with plotting or whatever rather than specifically with the protagonist. Like here:

These Angles Don’t Add Up — I don’t want a boring character, obviously, and yet I do demand some degree of internal consistency. The things she does need to add up. They need to come from a place inspired by her fears, her motivations, her past. If we know all along she’s got a lady-boner for revenge, then it’s a hard pill to swallow when she continues to perform actions against that revenge. But it falls to little things, too — she got shot in the leg but doesn’t limp, she’s from Philadelphia but doesn’t know what a cheesesteak is, she’s got black hair one minute and the next minute she’s a sentient recliner named “Dave.” You know. Little things.

That’s a lack of continuity problem, not specifically a problem with the protagonist. This isn’t the sort of thing that makes you hate the character, it’s the sort of thing that makes you roll your eyes at the author.

And some of the things he mentions — characters who are too perfect — that’s not necessarily a problem for me. If the author handles the perfect character properly, that can be something I really enjoy. I enjoy uber-competence, but the linked book offers a protagonist who is just centered in a golden glow of perfection. Somehow this works.

Regardless, obviously many funny bits in the linked post; by all means click through if you have a moment.

Okay, Four Reasons I Hate Your Protagonist:

1) The protagonist is an awful person. I don’t much care if there are redemptive qualities or not. If the protagonist is basically awful, no thanks.

2) The protagonist is not just dense, but eye-rollingly impulsive. Probably angsty as well. Highly emotional stupid characters who leap into self-defeating action are a definitely DNF for me, even if they manage to somehow come out all right afterward.

3) The protagonist is ineffectual. While the world falls apart, the protagonist stands aside wringing her hands. Occasionally she timidly tries something, but it fails and she retreats into worry and hand-wringing once more. I can’t stand her. I’m thinking of a particular book here, and although I may be exaggerating this quality in the protagonist, this is the feeling I had most of the way through the book.

4) The protagonist is self-destructive and makes terrible choices that anybody could see are terrible and therefore destroys his life. Wow, I see the book I’m thinking of here is book 1 of a six-book series. I can’t imagine going on to book 2 after what happens in book 1. Here is my post after I first read this book. I said this:

I also mean the sort of books in which the good guy loses. I mean really loses, so that his life is thoroughly screwed up at the end. Worse: the sort of story where the good guy does it to himself, so that you, as the reader, can see everything going wrong while the protagonist’s mistakes pile up and then come crashing down on him and everyone around him with all the power and inevitability of a tsunami.

Yeah, if that is happening to the protagonist in a novel, I really do not want to go along for the ride. At all. If I finish the book, it will be because I can’t believe the author is really doing this to their protagonist. If it winds up that no, the protagonist really does destroy his life, I’m never touching another book by that author, ever.

I’m not sure there is anything else that makes me loathe a protagonist to the point I will drop the book in revulsion and back away. Those are the big four.

How about you all? What will make you loathe the protagonist so much you can’t stand to read the book?

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Puppy Update: One Week Old

So, as you may know, Leda’s puppies were delivered by C-section a week ago today.

That last week was extremely tense. Now that I’m a week past all that and also at a keyboard, I’ll tell you about it.

Every litter is very stressful, each in its own unique way, but this one was MUCH more stressful than most.

Leda experienced a catastrophic drop in progesterone two weeks before she was due – from 12.5 to 0.5 in 48 hours – which meant she had come very, very close to miscarrying. I caught that drop by pure luck. Lab #1 should have returned results overnight, but they were late; I was going to St L anyway for a different reason and took Leda with me and did another ultrasound up there, where Lab #2 could get same-day results. Wow, am I glad I did that! Both results came in almost at the same time. As soon as my reproductive vet called to say, Yikes, it’s just 0.5, I immediately gave Leda a shot of progesterone to bring the level back up. Even so, although an ultrasound two days later showed at least three hearts still beating, I became increasingly pessimistic that the puppies would live long enough to be delivered. For one thing, whatever had caused that precipitous drop might still be going on. Leda’s white cell count was elevated, indicating an infection somewhere. She was plainly very uncomfortable and her appetite was terrible. I started her on antibiotics, hand-fed her chicken and various kinds of treats and biscuits, and scheduled the earliest C-section my reproductive vet thought plausible, April 25. But I was not at all confident they would make it to that date.

Thankfully, as you saw in the earlier post, four of the puppies, all boys, survived.

I’m sorry to have lost the one girl, but very, very thankful to have four living puppies. From the appearance of the dead puppy, she died about the time the progesterone dropped. Whether her death was the cause or an effect of that drop is not clear, but the timing sure makes it look related.

Three of the puppies were practically identical in size and condition; they all weighed about 6.5 to 7.0 oz at birth. This is a normal weight for full-term Cavalier puppies in a larger litter. The 4th little boy was almost as long in the body, but very thin. He weighed just 4.25 oz. He’s the dark puppy on the left of the image above. I’m not sure you can see how much smaller he is than his brothers. He is the only puppy who looked premature at delivery, with stick-thin legs and a much less complete coat. He was right next to the dead puppy, so he suffered a terrible uterine environment for the last two weeks of development. I’m pretty sure that if I’d done the C-section one day earlier, he would have been too small to survive. I’m also pretty sure that if I’d done the C-section one day later, he would have been too badly compromised to survive. Luckily I picked the right day. His lungs were fine and he seems normal and vigorous. He was the first puppy to nurse – he started about four hours before his three big brothers. Starving in utero may have something to do with that, but he’s a determined little thing, that’s for sure.

Puppies are terrifyingly fragile until they hit the three-week mark and then increasingly less fragile. When they’re well started on weaning, I quit worrying, but at this point, a mere week after birth, lots of things can still go wrong. You don’t want a list, believe me. I made one once, a bulleted list of things that can go wrong and the ages at which the puppy is safe from each thing. I had to destroy that list because it made me too tense to look at it. These days I just keep an eye on the puppies and the bitch, with references close at hand, plus of course I have memorized the symptoms of a handful of the most dire problems.

However, natural pessimism aside, I have to cautiously admit that these puppies are looking good. They were slow to start gaining, but that is often the case after a section, especially an early section. I didn’t let them loose much weight – I tube-fed each puppy about 2 cc of formula every four hours for the first 24 hours. But you also don’t want to give puppies too much formula in the first days. They need to nurse to get the colostrum, and to help bring their mother’s milk down, and to stimulate the production of oxytocin in the mother so that her maternal instincts will flick on. As long as they’re not losing too much weight, it’s better to let them be hungry. Even so, these puppies lost a bit to begin and then were quite slow to begin gaining. We say that “a good puppy doubles its weight in seven to ten days.” I don’t think that’s at all likely – maaaaybe by ten days for some of them – but in fact it’s fine if a puppy takes a bit longer as long as it starts gaining properly at some point. At this point, all of these are, and with very little support from me.

When you do an early C-section, you expect certain issues. Because the cascade of hormonal events associated with whelping doesn’t take place, the bitch may not show any maternal instinct to begin with, and her milk will be slow to come in. Both problems occurred here. Leda’s maternal instincts flicked on around ten in the morning on Wednesday, almost exactly 48 hours after the section, which is about what you expect. It really is practically like flipping a switch, by the way; very interesting thing to watch happen. That probably signals proper milk production as well. That’s when the puppies, including Tiny, started gaining weight at last.

As of this Monday, a week from the section, Tiny is up to 6.7 oz. That’s still tiny – he’s still 50 grams, more than two oz, behind his smallest brother, three oz behind the biggest. In fact, he weighs now just about what the others did at birth. He’s the smallest puppy I’ve ever had at seven days — the smallest that lived, anyway.

Low birth weights generally have nothing to do with eventual adult size, btw. I guess that’s true of humans as well, though I’ve never cared enough to look it up. Unless something goes wrong, I’d expect him to catch up to them eventually – let’s say by ten weeks or so, earlier if he’s willing to wean earlier than they are.

I don’t plan to keep any of these puppies, probably. I don’t need another boy. But if all continues to go as well as it has so far, they should make four families very happy. And you never know. If one of the boys is totally spectacular … well, we’ll see.

So, how has this affected my writing?

Yeah, I quit writing for the whole week. That wasn’t just because of the puppies. The lack of sleep and resultant headaches are predictable, but ought to be easing off after the first two days or so. Two other dog-related things added stress and made it tougher to pick up the laptop:

One day before the C-section, Keya started having breakthrough seizures. Phenobarb only controlled her seizures for five weeks! That was certainly disappointing. Luckily … actually, that wasn’t luck, it was foresight … anyway, I had levetiracetam and clorazepate on hand, four doses each, which was enough to get through Sunday so I could pick up more on Monday, while my vet was doing the section. (I got a text while waiting at the pharmacy: four alive, all boys! and texted back yay! all boys? one-sixteenth chance!) Anyway, Keya was kinda out of it and needing to be carried up and down stairs again, though fortunately she wasn’t drugged all the way into a coma this time.

And then

One day after the C-section, Conner quit eating. He also showed lethargy and just looked plenty sick, poor little dude. I asked my mother to come sit with the babies and keep an eye on them and took him to the vet and boom, mysterious fever of 104.8. That sure is plenty sick all right. Normal temp for a dog is 101 or thereabouts. Hmm, said my vet. Virus, bacteria, tick disease, autoimmune disease, who knows? Well, none of that sounded good, especially not a virus – what if the puppies caught it???? – or autoimmune disease – those are never good. We started him on lots of stuff, very broad treatment to nail anything bacterial or anything tick-carried. And so far, thank heaven no one else is sick plus Conner was back to his normal cuddly-yet-bratty self by Friday. But wow, I sure did not have the emotional energy left over to care about writing.

And this, I will add, is why advice such as Real writers must write every day is always silly and sometimes harmful. It’s perfectly fine not to write every day if something legitimately interferes, and there’s no reason to feel guilty about it either.

So, Invictus curse?

Actually, I don’t think I’d say so. It’s too much of a relief to have four living puppies to call them part of a curse. It’s a mild delay, that’s all. I actually did open the file on Sunday and look at my notes and write about two paragraphs (plus this blog post and a couple others).

Besides, the delay isn’t even exactly the fault of all these dogs. No. The delay is actually at least as much Sherwood Smith’s fault. That IS why I resist reading other authors’ books while working on one of my own, you know. That was a thoroughly distracting story. So, upcoming: a post on the Phoenix Feather series.

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What One Sequel Would You Like to Write?

So, I was just thinking about the way I sometimes finish a series and start writing a scene in my head that’s set in that world. Mental fanfic, I guess. The point is, a scene that I would have liked a lot isn’t in the series, or I’d like an extended epilogue, or maybe I have a clear idea where I’d like the story to go following the end of the book. I don’t know how many people do that, but since fanfiction undoubtedly grows out of the same urge, obviously quite a few.

If you were going to actually sit down and do that — if you could do that with relative ease, let’s say — your life didn’t have too many distractions and the words were going to flow and you were pretty confident that you could capture the tone and voice of the original — what would you find most tempting?

For me it would be The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison.

Here’s why:

–I have in my head, right now, a detailed plot arc involving Maia and his nephew Prince Idra.

–I also have in my head a basic plot arc involving Maia and his soon-to-be empress, Csethiro Ceredin.

–I want to deal with the problem of the military installation built on top of that holy site up in the north. That’s terrible. I want to build a metaphorical bridge to those people and get that problem sorted out.

–The actual real bridge sounds very cool. I would like to build it.

–I’m not particularly interested in Thara Celehar. His passivity and willingness to let people bully him turned me off in Witness for the Dead. I want Addison to go back and write the story I actually want to read. Or, if not that, then I want to write the story I want to read.

So, for me, this is a pretty easy choice.

How about it? Any of you wish you could drop other projects and write a sequel for someone else?

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It’s Always the Story

Here’s a post from romance author Jennifer Crusie: It’s Always the Story.

I think every reader picks up a book of fiction and thinks, “Tell me a story.”

Not “give me beautiful writing” or “give me the psychological profile of a character” or “describe a setting vividly” or “dazzle me with a theme.” All of those things are good … but the overarching need of most readers who deliberately choose fiction is “Give me a story.”

I came to this conclusion while reading the opening page of a BookBub offering. …

The page in question was beautifully written in the first person, but it was losing me in the first paragraphs. They were set-up/introduction and again beautifully written but skim-able. And then she told me a story, just a short memory, and I read every word, it was riveting. Then the narrative went back to set-up, and I closed the sample.

Later I thought back on that and wondered why I’d ditched it so fast. Okay, I’m an impatient reader, but still, that memory scene was beautifully done. And I realized I just wasn’t in the mood for the kind of book where I had to skim authorial intrusion to get to the good stuff. Give me a story.

And here’s a post from Marie Brennan: Epic Point of View:

I’ve noticed that one of the things which makes it hard for me to get into various epic-fantasy-type novels lately is the way point of view gets used. As in, there are multiple pov characters, and shifting from one to the other slows down my process of getting invested in the story.

But hang on, you say; why “lately”? Why didn’t that bother you in your epic-fantasy-reading days of yore?

Because — and this was an epiphany I had at ICFA — the epic fantasies of yore weren’t structured like that. Tolkien wasn’t writing in close third person to begin with, but he pretty much just followed Frodo until the Fellowship broke at Amon Hen; he didn’t leap back and forth between Frodo in the Shire and Aragorn meeting up with Gandalf and Boromir over in Minas Tirith and all the rest of it. …

…character is my major doorway into story, and if I’m presented with three or four or five of them right at the start, I don’t have a chance to build investment in anybody. 

Marie is talking about switching pov, but what she’s also talking about is story. When she points out that Tolkien followed Frodo until the Fellowship broke up, what she’s saying is that Tolkien was telling Frodo’s story until he had a very good reason to switch to someone else’s story.

I agree, incidentally. It’s hard for me to stay engaged with a novel if the author switches pov too often or too quickly. Like most character readers, I’m drawn into the story with the pov character, and I want to stay with that character until there’s a reason to shift the point of view to someone else. Then I want to stay with the new viewpoint character for long enough to get involved with that character’s story. Shifting viewpoints too often was the reason that the Eternal Sky trilogy by Elizabeth Bear was not a big favorite of mine. I liked it a lot, but had a real problem staying emotionally engaged after the pov started shifting multiple times per chapter. Ditto for the later books in the Paksennarion world by Elizabeth Moon: too many viewpoint characters, and unlike Bear’s series, in some cases they didn’t catch my interest in the first place. Fewer pov characters chosen more judiciously would have worked much better for me because I would have had a chance to follow each protagonist’s individual story.

Personally, I often write with multiple points of view, but in general I stay with one pov for thirty pages or more before switching — especially for the first time in the novel.

Here’s a post by Patricia Wrede: The Problem with Prologues:

The first and biggest mistake a lot of writers make, especially in science fiction and fantasy, is to assume that there is no way to get the reader up to speed on the story background except to provide a three-page infodump of all the presumably-critical material right at the start of the story. So the writer starts off with a history lesson or a summary of cultures, and half the people who open the book close it and put it back on the shelf …

… prologues are not a clever way to dump all the background information, so that the author can start the real book with a slam-bang action scene. If a book has a prologue, the prologue IS the start of the book. It doesn’t have to be full of action, any more than any other opening of a story does, but it does have to pique the reader’s interest so that they’ll keep reading. 

What Patricia Wrede is saying here, not quite in so many words, is that in order to work, the prologue has to be a story. That’s what piques a reader’s interest. If the prologue is anything but a story, if it’s a context-free battle scene or a history lesson, it’s not going to work for the majority of readers (especially character readers). I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I generally skip all prologues unless they are telling a story that draws me in. I say that as someone who has written two novels that include prologues. Both prologues are stories.

If you’re providing a flashback, that flashback will probably work best for readers if it is a self-contained story. Making that happen can be a trick if what you really want to do is provide backstory. On the other hand, if you want to make the backstory compelling, it probably needs to be presented as a story, not a digression that sounds like a history lesson. In the first part of the Death’s Lady trilogy, I present several vignettes from Tenai’s backstory as flashbacks, transitioning into each one as a story that’s being told in the past perfect, but quickly shifting to a story that’s happening in story-present before cutting back to the main present-day narrative. I sure learned a lot about technique by working through those transitions into and out of the flashbacks, but at least I already knew that story is always central.

Which it is even for those of us who aren’t character readers. Every experience wants to be a story, as discussed in this post about the science behind storytelling:

Human beings have been telling stories as long as there’s been a language to tell them in. We think in stories, remember in stories, and turn just about everything we experience into a story, sometimes adjusting or omitting facts to make it fit. … Just think of the variety of stories in the world. We’ve been telling them for millennia, and we’re not going to run out any time soon. 

It’s always the story. Even for readers who love beautiful language and care about style. Even for readers who enjoy worldbuilding and love constructing a world bible. Even for readers who love clever puzzles and plot twists. If you’re writing fiction, it’s always the story that has to come first.

Agree / disagree? Drop your responses in the comments!

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