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For a Successful Opening, Establish Your Protagonist

Here’s a post from Jane Friedman’s blog: The Secret Ingredient of Successful Openings

It turns out that this post is about the importance of establishing your protagonist right off the bat:

There’s something it took me years as an editor to figure out: many of the most common problems novelists face with their stories appear to be issues with plot but in fact are issues with character. Openings that don’t quite work are a good example. The conventional wisdom on the opening of a novel tells us that it must have:

A clear point of viewA compelling voiceCompelling charactersSpecific detailsTension of some type

That’s all excellent advice. The only problem is, when writers think of “tension of some type,” they tend to think of external trouble—say, a car crash, or the protagonist being fired from her job. This type of conflict might compel the reader’s attention for a few pages, but what really sucks us in—and what really makes agents and acquisitions editors sit up and take notice—is internal trouble, because it’s trouble of this type that signals the beginning of a character arc. …

In other words, the author of this post feels that writers too often ignore the first three points to focus on the last couple. I will add, the post now goes into the protagonist’s “internal wound” — Some problem on the inside that, by the end of the story, they’re going to overcome—or, perhaps, tragically fail to. That makes this post seem very much oriented toward Romance. Of course if there is any kind of character arc at all, then the protagonist is going to grow and change in some way and probably, yes, overcome some kind of internal issue. (If they’re going to fail, they’re a tragic hero and I’m not interested in that story.) I do like that this post adds, The exception to this rule is mysteries and thrillers—genres in which character arc isn’t a requirement. I think that’s mainly series mysteries. Probably thrillers more often have distinct character arc, though I agree, maybe not all the time.

[A]t the beginning of the story, the protagonist herself can’t see what her internal problem is—she doesn’t even know she has one. … So how do you make sure the reader gets it, in those all-important opening pages, even if your protagonist doesn’t? Here are three effective strategies:

— Misgivings about whatever is going on in the opening scene. Things like doubts about the marriage as she walks toward the altar.

— Someone else expresses misgivings. Stars in her eyes, but her best friend is murmuring doubtfully, “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

— Self-generated trouble. And here, I have to immediately pause to say, Ugh, no, please don’t. Sounds like memoir or literary, and it definitely sounds like your protagonist is a jerk, incompetent, or both. That’s such a turnoff! You start the opening of your novel by having your protagonist do something self-defeating and I’m out of there. Watching someone screw up their life for three hundred pages? Absolutely not, even if they’re going to get it together eventually.

Okay, so, overall the idea that your protagonist might express internal tension in some manner during the opening is fine. Suggesting that you may want to hint at the character arc right from the beginning is fine. Pointing out that this can be part of making your protagonist compelling is fine. However, I feel compelled at this point to point to an example of a book that breaks all sorts of rules about how to handle openings.

Here, take a look at a tension-free opening:

“It isn’t a question of actually believing the teachings,” said Elsa, drilling two neat holes in the sand with the heels of her shoes. “It’s whether or not they believe in the authenticity of the manuscript, that’s all.”

“Gosh, you’d better hope that’s all,” said Harriet cheerfully. “It would be so tedious for you, wouldn’t it, to have your research interrupted every so often by cultists wanting to worship the thing you were studying? In my department, now, we don’t have such problems.”

“Good heavens, Harriet — you study money! All sorts of people worship that!”

“Oh, true. Have a grape while I consider a suitable riposte.” Harriet proffered the tin of green grapes that had been nestled on the blanket beside her.

They were seated in the shade of a large blue sun-umbrella — Harriet’s property, like the blanket and the grapes and the vacuum flask of iced tea and the basket it had all been packed in. They had been there since noon; they had moved the umbrella several times to adjust their pool of shade, and the tea was nearly finished. The day had become blazingly hot, the sky arcing blue-white out over the lake, the water flashing in the sun. Because it was a weekday, the beach was not crowded. A few young people in bathing costumes ran or strolled, according to their preference; a few mothers lay in beach chairs while their children squatted over sandcastles by the shoreline. Elsa and Harriet sat under their umbrella with their books.

Harriet was the golden-haired, rosy, curvaceous one, radiant in a red bathing costume. Elsa was willowy and long-legged — or depending on her mood, tall and thin. She wore her much paler hair tightly plaited and pinned up. The black bathing costume she wore was the first one she had ever owned, this trip to the beach only her second since coming to Toronto four years ago. It was late August; the academic term of 1925-1926 would not start for another two weeks. It was a period of waiting, of planning and anticipation. The hot, heavy summer air seemed to Elsa to be telling her to go slowly, not to be so eager to rush onward to the new school year. It was an irresistible suggestion, but she chafed at it.

There we go: zero tension and, for a special bonus, plenty of telling-not-showing. Who recognizes this? This is From All False Doctrine by Alice Degan, which was one of my very favorite books from 2020. Here is my review. You may recall that I described it this way: “From All False Doctrine is sort of like a cross between a Wodehouse novel and In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden. But with demonology.” The author pulls off this story — including the opening — by throwing away all sorts of advice. Opening with low tension, opening with dialogue, opening with tons of telling-not-showing, but it’s all fine! It works great! I was hooked from the first pages of this quiet opening and, as I say, loved it and placed it as one of my top reads for the year.

What this opening does do is establish the protagonist(s). There are four in this story, with Elsa being primary, as is implied by giving her the first line. The opening chapter lays groundwork — subtly — for the central problem of the story, but basically this opening is all about establishing Elsa and the other three protagonists.

From this I will tentatively conclude that the fundamental necessity for the opening of a novel is to establish the protagonist and place the protagonist in the setting. Everything else — even tension, both internal and external — is distinctly secondary. This may be true even if the heart of the novel is the character arc of the protagonist, which is the case for From All False Doctrine. The beginning of Elsa’s character arc is in fact signaled in the first chapter, even in the first line, but it’s subtle. I don’t think the reader can see it until much later.

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Accidental Info-Dumping

Here’s an interesting post at Writer Unboxed: Are You an Accidental Info-Dumper?

I’m not quite sure what that could mean. That is, I definitely do not accidentally info-dump. If I put in two or three paragraphs of backstory or exposition, I’m excruciatingly aware aware of that. I may spend a truly inordinate amount of time trying to trim those paragraphs or take some of that information and trickled it into the story somewhere else. Sometimes I can’t find a better solution than just providing two or three paragraphs like that — I can think of specific examples — but when I leave several consecutive paragraphs of backstory in the novel, you can bet I knew I was doing it. Not in the least accidental, and I’m having trouble conceptualizing how a writer might info-dump without noticing.

Let’s take a look at the post:

When authors infodump, they interrupt the flow of their story to drop a chunk of exposition onto readers’ laps. You’re happily reading along, following, say, the protagonist as she goes to board an abandoned spaceship, when—bam!—you smack your head against two full pages of how exactly this class of spaceship creates artificial gravity. (Probably because some nerd complained about how their immersion was ruined if the author didn’t explain how artificial gravity worked.)

I’m laughing because (a) everyone has read a novel like this, with starship specs provided in great and exhaustive detail; and (b) yes indeed, some readers DO want detailed explanations about starship specs (or whatever), as becomes clear if you read a lot of reviews.

The post continues:

The opposite of infodumping is “incluing,” a word attributed to author Jo Walton. Incluing is the process of scattering information seamlessly throughout the text. The author who is adept at incluing provides just enough information to situate the reader in the story without interrupting the flow of the narrative. But like everything writing-related, this is easier said than done. … it’s not always obvious where or how to include background information in a story. As a result, in attempting to avoid infodumps, writers seem to have created a few new troublesome habits. Like Hydra’s heads, as soon as we think we have solved one problem, more crop up in its place.

I’ve never encountered the term “incluing” before. I read it as “including” several times before realizing it’s a different word. “Including” seems like it would work, actually. “Including details about background and worldbuilding in the story, without pausing the flow of the action.” But “incluing” isn’t a bad coinage. “Cluing the reader in” — I assume that’s the idea, and that’s a good way to think of it. Let me see … all right, here is the post in which Jo Walton introduces this term. Walton says:

There are lots of forms of what I call incluing, scattering pieces of information seamlessly through the text to add up to a big picture. The reader has to remember them and connect them together. This is one of the things some people complain about as “too much hard work” and which I think is a high form of fun. SF is like a mystery where the world and the history of the world is what’s mysterious, and putting that all together in your mind is as interesting as the characters and the plot, if not more interesting. We talk about worldbuilding as something the writer does, but it’s also something the reader does, building the world from the clues.

Okay, so I agree with that! Worldbuilding IS something the reader does. It’s one of the things I’m not in the mood for right now — that’s what I meant when I said that one of the qualities I want in the books I’m reading right now is “familiar-ish settings.” I often enjoy fantastic worldbuilding, but right now that IS too much hard work.

Jo Walton’s post is about how worldbuilding can be an obstacle for readers new to SF and a little about how certain books may get a reader over that obstacle, but let’s go back to the post at Writer Unboxed. What are these new troublesome habits? — I’m expecting that “habits” isn’t the right term here. I think this is more likely to be “pitfalls when trying to avoid infodumps.” Let’s see … yes. Three pitfalls:

1) Uber-minimalists provide zero information or context clues to help situate the reader. 

2) The mirror glance, [as in] “She stood in front of her bedroom mirror and ran a hairbrush through her shoulder-length brown hair, noticing the slope of her too-pointed nose and sharp cheekbones in the morning light.”

3) The side quest is less of a sentence-level problem and more of a structural issue … Writers are so worried about infodumping that rather than take a moment to just explain something in exposition, they create new plot threads, scenes, or other narrative tools to “show” some important aspect of their worldbuilding.

Okay, these are good things to point out.

I would say that uber-minimalism is related to the white-room opening: Both constitute a type of opening that fails to provide context and fails to place the character in an understandable setting. This is a common failing in workshop entries. However, I’m remembering something Nicole Kornher-Stace said on Twitter, that she writes as though the reader is about as familiar with her world as with, say, the Shire and doesn’t need more explanation than would be necessary for a book in that setting. That’s not exactly what she said, but it’s in the ballpark. She’s right. That’s just about exactly the level of explanation and backstory that I generally like in a SFF novel. I hereby recommend her books for a look at sliding information into the story without infodumping — incluing, if we want to use that term.

All of these are explicitly problems that I suspect are more likely to turn up in, or perhaps be created by, workshops and critique groups. The mirror thing is easy to avoid: just don’t do that. But the thing with side quests, I can see how that might be a problem. I can certainly imagine how a writer could be told, “Hey, this is an infodump, and you need to show, not tell,” and go way, way too far in the opposite direction.

The post moves into a discussion of how to recognize an infodump if you’ve put one into your novel, and I have to say, all this is good advice, but honestly, any time you have more than two consecutive paragraphs (short paragraphs) of backstory or exposition, probably you should pause and think really hard about whether all the information in those paragraphs is necessary and whether, if it has to be there, some of that information might be tucked into a different paragraph on the next page. Sometimes the answer is Yes, It’s Necessary, and No, It Can’t Go Anywhere Else, and then fine. That may be the moment when you just sigh and put in three paragraphs or (wincing) even four paragraphs of exposition. That’s happened to me. It’s not ideal, and I know that and try to avoid it, but I’ve done it.

The post then goes into deep third person and how that can make exposition difficult — this is true; it’s hard to have the protagonists think about things they know perfectly well and would never think about. Ah, here’s something I like: a pointer to a good example:

Rebecca Roanhorse does this well in her novel  Trail of Lightning, which is set in a future North America where all but Navajo land has been destroyed by a worldwide flood known as the Big Water. The novel is told in first-person, with similar principles to deep POV. Several chapters in—once the readers have a solid sense of the narrator and her world already—Roanhorse spends about a page simply explaining what happened during the Big Water. While it might be exposition recounted for the benefit of the reader, not the narrator, this passage does not feel like an infodump. Sure, Roanhorse could have worked in some history lesson about the Big Water somewhere, or figured out some convoluted way of hinting at the flood and allowing the reader to put together the pieces. … But that’s not Roanhorse’s book: the book is about a monster hunter who is on a mission, a fast-paced and gritty story in a violent post-apocalyptic future. Working in a meandering reference here and there to the flood would have slowed down the action by making the reader stop to try to make sense of the details.

A good observation about the sort of situation where several paragraphs of explanation may be the way to go. (Also, really? The whole world except for Navajo land? Like … how about the Andes, for example? How could that work? Even in North America, almost all the highest mountains are in Alaska, which I don’t think was ever Navajo land. I’m baffled and therefore interested in this page of explanation.)

Good, thought-provoking post; click through and read the whole thing if you have a minute. Meanwhile, quick comments about infodumps:

1) NEVER IN A PROLOGUE. I realize that I snarl all the time about proscriptive writing advice, so sure, if you really think it works for your book, fine. But if you start your SFF novel with a history lesson, a whoooole lot of readers, including me, will almost certainly delete the sample and move on.

2) Probably not on the first page. In general, it may be best to avoid more than, oh, two to four sentences of backstory or exposition in the first couple of pages. You need to place the character in the world; that’s crucial. You have to provide context for the opening scene; that’s also crucial. But it’s generally better to move mostly forward in the first pages, adding context through judicious description while putting in backstory and exposition with a light hand.

3) If at some point in your novel, you actually need two or four paragraphs of exposition, put it in. You can always pull it out again. Personally, I find that I may figure out something useful about the world by writing those paragraphs, even if I then pull them out later and drop them in my Notes file for that book. I may add back in specific sentences from those cut paragraphs later.

I’m curious about how Roanhorse handled this, so I’m getting a sample now. Have any of you read her Trail of Lightning? I’ve heard a good many positive comments about it.

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Real horses or Fantasy Horses?

Here’s a post by Judith Tarr at tor.com: Why Do Writers Abandon the Ordinary Horse for the Extraordinary Fantasy Animal?

I actually like real horses very much! I’ve got real horses all over the place in my books, though of course often enough just as a mode of transportation, not as animals with personalities. There’s only so much room to develop characters in a novel and sometimes it’s just not convenient to develop any of the horses. That’s true even though I certainly enjoy the horses in other authors’ novels, such as, oh, Tsornin in The Blue Sword or Copperhead in the Sharing Knife series.

In the Tuyo world, a few of the horses have more personality. I’m sure you’ve noticed that horses are also used to show something about the Ugaro vs Lau cultures: the former always apply gendered pronouns to animals and the Lau seldom do, though every now and then they will. That’s for both domesticated and wild animals. Did you ever notice that neither tends to give animals actual names? I’m sure the cultural reasons for that are different for Ugaro vs Lau, but no one has discussed this, so it hasn’t come up.

Anyway, of course my one true fantasy horse is the fire horse in The White Road of the Moon. What a creature he is! Both when he’s alive and later, when he’s a ghost and becomes a real character. He was a lot of fun to write. I don’t think there was a real reason I put a fantasy horse in this novel. I threw the term “fire horse” on the page pretty much at random and then came up with what fire horses were actually like as I went along, then brought one in as a minor character because it was convenient to the plot. No matter what reasons Judith Tarr may mention in her post, there really wasn’t a big reason for deciding to put a fantasy horse in the story. The dog, now, he was crucial.

So what does Judith have to say? Let’s take a look …

Ah! She’s talking about the attraction of the intelligent, verbal magical horse-like companion — and she’s not pleased with how regular animals are devalued when magical ones appear:

I start to have a problem when the fantasy animal is compared with a non-fantasy animal, and the non-fantasy animal suffers in the comparison. Oh, says the author through their characters, we love our regular animals, but they’re …so dull and plain and ordinary …. They can’t talk to us the way our fantasy animals can. And then our fantasy characters dump their poor stupid boring animals. Or use them and exploit them … the way the pony is treated in The Key of the Keplian. For all his good and loyal service, he gets a life of hard labor. Then he’s dropped by the wayside when the human he’s served so loyally is permitted to ride the Keplians. I will give McConchie one thing. She takes to heart her mentor and collaborator Norton’s fascination with alien intelligence, and tries to show us how alien the Keplian mind is and how much of a stretch it is to communicate with it. That’s nice worldbuilding. But for all her visible knowledge of and affection for horses, she doesn’t make the same effort with the horse.

That may well be a justifiable protest. Ordinary horses are indeed very cool. Now I sort of want to write a story where there are both magic fantasy horses and ordinary horses and both are valued by the same character.

A real horse, one presumes, but nice enough to be a fantasy horse.

You know who did something like this? Dean Koontz. What was the story with the Golden Retriever? Ah, right, Watchers. I wonder if anyone else specifically noticed that scene at the end where the people settle down with the special super-smart verbal Einstein and also a perfectly ordinary female Golden? Someone asks Einstein if it bothers him that the female Golden is an ordinary dog, not super-smart, and he says, essentially, No, no, intelligence isn’t everything! and dashes off to play with her. I liked that moment a lot, and in that scene Koontz is doing exactly what Judith Tarr wants authors to do when they include a magic horse in their stories.

Koontz always does a good job with his dogs.

In fact, Koontz includes dogs as important characters a lot, including a ghost dog in the Odd Thomas series. I don’t think I specifically had that dog in mind when I put a ghost dog in The White Road of the Moon — no, I’m sure I didn’t. The metaphysics is so different and ghosts are everywhere. Very different. But I certainly did like Koontz’s ghost dog.

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Recent Reading: For Days When You Can’t Even

So, since I was busy, distracted, tired, and upset over the past week, I read several books, which I specifically selected for the following qualities:

New to meNot too demanding

I specifically wanted novels that would be somewhat distracting, but wouldn’t require a lot of attention or be too emotionally engaging. I have other stuff in my life that is taking up plenty of emotional energy; I don’t have attention to spare for a really great novel. Therefore, I was looking for familiar-ish settings, straightforward writing, straightforward plotting, happy endings — stuff like that. I don’t know whether any of you ever specifically pick up a book in the hope that it will be okay but not actually great, but yep, that’s sometimes a thing for me.

I’ve read two books in the past week that fit the bill, and here they are:

Basic conclusions: This book was just about right for what I wanted: straightforward military SF. One side lost a war because of their opponent’s unexpected strike against their FTL communications. The titular admiral, James Tecumseh, is determined to cope with the terrible resulting situation without allowing himself to turn into, or be drafted into the position of, military dictator. It’s interesting to me that his society, the Confederation, was absolutely in the bad guy role in the war. They intended to conquer a much smaller polity for no reason other than a sense of, essentially, manifest destiny. Totally serves them right to get whapped for that. But Tecumseh himself is definitely a good guy. He’s a competent admiral who defeats various opponents who think it would be great to make themselves emperors. The book is not really self-contained. The ending serves to set up the second book, which isn’t out yet. But there’s no question about the fundamental direction the next book will take. This story is indeed utilizing very straightforward plotting.

Things that might ordinarily have lead to a DNF for this story:

This is very much a plot-centered story. That was fine with me — sometimes it is, and this was one of those times. The characters are basically pretty flat. Good guys, bad guys, not much in between; this basically worked for me at the moment.

Biggest flaw: writing quality: On a scale where 1 = unreadably bad, 5 = adequate, and 10 = superlative, I’d rate this book at about a four. There are lots of somewhat awkward sentences. For example, this:

“Active scanner beams should have picked up the cruisers at at least five million kilometers instead of the three million the thermal passives detected them at.” He shrugged.

“at at,” really? How much trouble would it have been to re-phrase that? Especially since the whole sentence ends with yet another “at.” This is an author who really does not seem to have much of a feel for the language he uses.

Also, “warned” and other such words are sometimes used to directly replace “said,” even though comma usage should not be the same. Paragraphing is sometimes odd, with multiple paragraph breaks for no reason even when the same person is speaking. Sometimes every sentence gets its own paragraph, with no reason to do that, resulting not in confusion, but in an unnecessary choppy feel.

Overall, I found the writing quality distractingly poor at times. I mean, I sure noticed the at at sentence. If you pause to roll your eyes at various sentences, that’s not great for the reading experience.

On the other hand, I read the whole book, I did enjoy the story, and I would have read the next book in the series if it was already out. I like the setup for the next book and I’m definitely in the mood for good guys who handle every possible challenge. This series is clearly going to continue on as it’s started, only with a tougher would-be emperor who will need to be defeated. I’m on board for that.

Second:

I haven’t read a lot of UF or paranormals over the past couple of years. I guess I read too many and got tired of them. But I suspected this would be just about what I wanted — light, not too emotionally engaging, fairly familiar setting and background, fairly predictable plotting. All of that turned out to be true, with the plus that the romance is not as centered as I expected. The reader can see the romance coming, but it’s slow-burn enough that it’s not actually on the page even by the end of the first book.

Again, the writing is not fantastic. I guess I’d rate it at about a 4.5 on my scale above. Sometimes sentences are noticeably awkward, but not as often as in the book above. The style is livelier and more fun. The dialogue is not as witty as you’ll see in, I don’t know, Ilona Andrews’ books. That may not be a fair comparison. It’s good enough most of the time.

I really like the emphasis on the fae animals; that plot element is handled really well.

Leila is quite smart in a lot of other ways. She’s politically astute enough to manage in the fae court and I enjoyed watching her outmaneuver her enemies. On the other hand, Leila is also eye-rollingly stupid about certain plot elements and various characters. As stupid as Jared in the Black Jewels novel? you may ask. Yes, nearly! That isn’t the case for Admiral Tecumseh, so that’s a plus there.

On the other hand, despite the flaws in this paranormal series, the second and third books are out now, and yes, I picked them up. In fact, I’m halfway through the second book. Obviously I’m finding it readable.

If I were rating these books out of five stars — hmm. I’d say two and a half for The Admiral’s Oath; three for Crown of Shadows. I’m not sure if any of you are ever interested in reading books that are just readable rather than really good, but if so, here you go, one SF and one paranormal fantasy. Personally, with books like these, I’m inclined to go on with the series I’ve started, but I’m not inclined to take a look at anything else by the (prolific) authors. That, I guess, is the difference between “readable” and “really good” for me. I do like both these books enough to read them, but it’s very different from, say, Martha Wells or Andrea K Host. For both of those authors, I read one book, then another book, and then bought everything in their respective backlists and gave them each an individual folder on my Kindle. No such impulse here.

I’m curious how much it would slow each author down to get someone to do a critical read and/or just smooth out the awkward prose. I am entirely aware that publishing books very fast is an excellent strategy for self-publishing authors and I believe both these authors are following that strategy. Also, looking at the Amazon rankings for their books, that’s clearly working for them both. Even so, I wonder how much better these books could be if the authors went to the trouble of just a little extra editing.

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The Most Perfect SFF Novels Ever Published

I commented recently that The Changeling Sea by Patricia McKillip was one of the most perfect fantasy novels ever published. As far as I’m concerned, this is absolutely true. This is a novel that definitely belongs on any top ten list of best fantasy novels. By the way, it’s only 140 pp, according to Amazon, so it also falls into the different category of really excellent SFF novels that are under 200 pages. I should do a different top ten list about that later. Actually, being short can help lift a book into the perfect category because a short novel that really works is probably beautifully structured. That’s why it can work at that length.

But I want to add, I don’t exactly mean “perfect.” I think I mean something more like “perfectly beautiful.” Each of these stories is a lovely, polished gem. The plotting is tight, the language is lovely, and the themes are, for lack of a better word, uplifting. Some of these stories are sad. But, no matter how well-written or tightly structured a story might be, if it is grim or grimdark, it’s not on this list.

These are in no particular order. I mean, how can you order stories that are all practically perfect? I just put them on the list in the order they occurred to me. Also, I’m noting the page numbers because I realized partway through that all of these are relatively short; some are very short. Page count is of course an imperfect proxy for wordcount, but it’s what book descriptions offer, so that’s what I’m using.

So, onward:

Top Ten Most Perfectly Beautiful SFF Novels Ever Published

1) The Changeling Sea by Patricia McKillip. 142 pp. I don’t even know what to say about this beautifully crafted, elegantly told story. McKillip at her best. This isn’t her most poetic title — that might be Moonflash. Or, wait, no, Fool’s Run. And I don’t know whether this is my favorite of her novels; it’s near the top, but it’s hard for me to pick a favorite. But it’s tightly plotted and lovely and overall possibly the most perfect.

2) The Book of Atrix Wolfe, also by Patricia McKillip. 254 pp. This one isn’t as tightly plotted, but somehow it works just as well. It’s more powerful and perhaps more poignant. The silence of the central character — not really the protagonist — anyway, her silence is the still point around which the entire story turns.

3) The Truth-Teller’s Tale by Sharon Shinn. 308 pp.

4) The Shape-Changer’s Wife, also by Sharon Shinn. 226 pp.

5) The Last Unicorn by, of course, Peter S Beagle. For some reason, this book is not listed in any form on Amazon. This link goes to Barnes and Noble, where one can find the book without any difficulty. But only in paper. 304 pp. Ah, here’s the same paper edition on Amazon, so it does exist, it was just very difficult to find. Okay, Google informs me that Beagle reclaimed the rights to various of his books in 2021. I bet those books are all in limbo at the moment. One would think it would be super, super easy for him to simply re-publish everything, but I guess there is some sort of holdup.

All right, moving on, and I trust no other book on this list will be so difficult to acquire …

6) The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen. I’m torn because my personal favorite is The Girl Who Chased the Moon, and I have a deep soft spot for my first of Allen’s books, which was The Peach Keeper. But to pick out one as perfect is difficult. I finally settled on this one. 290 pp.

By the way, I see that Sarah Addison Allen has a new book scheduled for release this fall: Other Birds. I have not been as impressed by her most recent titles, but I will certainly want to take a look at this one.

7) Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart. 288 pp. This one is different, because it is perfect, but it is also one of the rare stories that offers no significant character arc for either Number Ten Ox or Master Li. It’s like a perfect puzzle with elegant writing, but it’s not … what’s the word I’m looking for … it’s not intense. This is probably a good choice if you’d like a very low-tension story. I can’t imagine a reader being in any doubt about the eventual triumph of the good guys.

8) The Tombs of Atuan. For whatever reason, although LeGuin’s writing is amazing, I don’t personally like most of her books very much. However, I do love this one. It’s 196 pp.

9) Cuckoo’s Egg by CJC. I found myself running out of fantasy, thought of SF, and immediately this title leaped to mind. It’s one of my favorites of CJC’s novels. 320 pp, but that’s still extremely short compared to doorstoppers like Downbelow Station. This is a tightly plotted little masterpiece of a novel. This one and The Book of Atrix Wolfe have two of my very favorite ending lines in all of SFF. Very highly recommended.

10) The Scapegoat by CJC. Once I thought of Cherryh, I couldn’t help but include this powerful novella. It’s just about 70 pp long, so tiny in comparison with everything else here. Very much worth picking up, though you’ll have to get a collection of stories in order to get this one.

There you go, there’s my current list for perfect SFF novels. They’re all short. I know page numbers are an imperfect measure of wordcount, but nothing here is much over 300 pp, many are much shorter, and I do think that’s an asset. One could argue — no doubt various people have argued — that for example Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel is perfect. It’s certainly impressive. It’s also very, very, very slow-paced, which one might expect as it’s 850 pp long. That sure gives the author room to stretch out and take her time, which she does. I will add, when everything (finally!) comes together at the end, it’s with the effect of crashing cymbals at the end of a beautiful piece of music. Stunning. But there’s almost no chance I’ll ever read or listen to this again.

If you were picking out one SFF novel as perfect, what would it be? And is it short, or have you gone for length in your choices?

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The Invictus Curse

I swear, this book. Honestly.

I started writing Invictus, I don’t know, three or four years ago, something like that. As you may know from previous posts, I got stuck, so I now have about 7 earlier versions sitting here, plus the optimistically named InvictusFinal draft.

For versions 1 through 5, I got stuck because I didn’t know enough about everyone’s secret plans and therefore kept running into roadblocks of one kind or another.

For versions 6 and 7, I finally knew enough to move forward and therefore just accumulated new versions as I revised heavily and decided it was time to save a new version. I didn’t get stuck, exactly, but I had to pause to work on other things.

Last week I thought, great, here’s spring break, 9 days in which I can whip through the remaining revision and finally start moving forward! Yay!

Well, no.

This time I got derailed by dog stuff, some happy, but alas, some much less happy.

Here’s Fox — Closeburn Red Fox to the Front — a stunning young ruby boy owned by another breeder, who happened to mention him to me when I commented that I was keeping an eye out for a nice ruby boy for my Morgan. He’s just gorgeous. He looks nice enough in pictures, but whoa, see him in person and he’s an absolute knockout. I swear, this is a dude who would be competitive in any show ring anywhere, no matter what other dogs are present. He hasn’t been shown — like Morgan, he’s a Covid puppy, who was just beginning to show in puppy classes when Covid shut down showing. But his head is lovely, his body is great, wonderful structure, beautiful movement, seriously, this is a really, really nice dog.

Fox flirting with Morgan

Fox lives with his breeder, Linda, in Paducah, almost three hours away from my house. Morgan quite unexpectedly came into season two months before I thought she would. Because Linda and I both had complicated schedules last week, and because Morgan’s progesterone numbers pegged the right days to breed as truly inconvenient, I wound up driving to Paducah, picking up Fox, bringing him home with me, picking up Morgan, and taking them both to St Louis — another hour and a half each way — for an artificial insemination. Most non-breeders would consider details to fall into the category of TMI, so I’ll stop there.

Anyway, I kept Fox for several days, during which I did two artificial inseminations, took four dogs to St. L on a different day for eye clearances, then drove back to Paducah to return him. That was Friday. In the process, I racked up 22 hours of driving in four days. I highly recommend AKH’s And All the Stars as an audiobook, by the way.

Fine, I thought, I still have two days, this is easily enough to finish revising the last forty pages of this manuscript and then at least I will be in position to start moving forward with Invictus.

No.

On Saturday morning, my now-oldest dog, Keya, who is a little over twelve years old, had a classic grand mal seizure.

Keya as a svelte youngster

She had eight seizures in the next 30 hours, finally moving into a predictable seizure every three hours. It turned out that Phenobarb didn’t stop the seizures, so I took her to VSS in St. Louis — again, an hour and a half each way — where they wanted to keep her for 48 hours. No, I said. Plan B, as an outpatient, would be what? So they gave me two more medications and I took her home and she is now practically in a coma from the various meds. But she hasn’t had a seizure since yesterday at 5:00 PM. I think. If she did, it was really quiet because I slept through it.

So … she’s only twelve, and I’m pretty upset. She was supposed to be young for another two years or so! She wasn’t showing any signs of age at all! And now, boom, here we are. I expect it’s a brain tumor — again — same as for Pippa, although the presentation is so different. That’s by far the most common cause of sudden onset geriatric seizures, especially as it’s very (very) unlikely she’s been poisoned and I don’t see how she can have a serious inflammatory disease when she shows no other symptoms at all. Brain tumor, almost for sure.

So, this is having a serious impact on how much emotional energy I have for other things. I’ll get back to Invictus … pretty soon, I guess … but maybe not this week.

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“Words You’re Probably Using Wrong”

That’s the title of this post at Writers Unboxed: Words You’re Probably Using Wrong

My first thought was: That’s a lousy title for this post. Who do you even think you are?

My second thought: That’s a great title for this post, because I’m absolutely going to click through and sneer at the list of words I am absolutely not using wrong.

So I did. Here’s my conclusion: I’m not using those words wrong, and it’s a bad idea to stick “you” in this kind of title unless the post is intended to be at least mildly offensive.

Lay vs Lie, really? First, I don’t make mistakes with those words, and second, why are you mentioning those and not Set vs Sit, which is just as commonly a source of confusion in exactly the same way?

Whom vs Who. I almost never make mistakes with those, but I grant, occasionally I do. This post does point at the most likely source of errors here, which is nested clauses where “whoever” is taking the subject role even though the whole clause is the object. I mean, like this:

“[You] should give this sealed envelope to [whoever knocks three times and says Joe sent him.]”

And yes, occasionally I’ll put “whomever” in a construction like that, though I generally catch it before proofreaders do.

The question for me is more: Would this character say “who” even though it should be “whom?” Usually that’s clear, but sometimes it isn’t. Lord Aras would never make who/whom errors. Neither would Ryo. They both speak formally, though in such different styles. But Esau? When this came up in Keraunani, I used the correct “whom” form, even though I’m not sure whether Esau would have said “who” in that sentence. That’s because I default to more correct when there is any doubt, on the grounds that if there is doubt, then correctness is usually more invisible than anything incorrect.

Anyway, you can click through to the post in question, but I doubt very much that any of my commenters mistakes phase for faze, or any of the rest of this random list of confusable words.

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Solicitation scams

Victoria Strauss has a post up on Writers Unboxed about solicitation scams: Out of the Blue, Too Good to Be True: Beware Soliciation Scams

I skimmed it because I was curious whether she’d mention a type of possible scam I’ve personally seen a lot recently.

After releasing a new book, OR running a promotion with Freebooksy and other promotion services, it’s typical for me to receive a good handful of emails that say something like this:

Would you like us to help you promote Black Dog Short Stories IV? We’ve got this many newsletter subscribers, we do targeted daily tweets, your book will be prominently displayed on our website for two years, all this can be yours for the low low price of ... they don’t name a price, actually, but the implication is that it wouldn’t be very expensive.

Obviously it would be stupid to promote the eighth book in a series. Who would do that? Who would seriously offer to do that? I just hit delete for all these.

Sure enough, here is what Victoria Strauss — whose name you may know from Writer Beware — includes this exact type of solicitation:

And yes, as expected, this is a scam, or so useless that it might as well be a scam.

I also receive offers for paid book reviews to appear on someone’s personal blog. The one that actually offends me is one in which the person offering the service greatly inflates the comments on her reviews by responding over and over to any comment, so that it looks like her reviews on her websites get lots of attention and a hundred comments each, when they really don’t. That’s offensive because it’s so obvious if you go to her website and look at the comments for any review, and of course because it’s just inherently dishonest and devalues the many excellent book bloggers who write honest reviews.

Lots of other types of scams. If you want to keep an eye on what scammers are up to these days, click through and take a look.

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good for Martha Wells!

From her blog:

So Fugitive Telemetry did have a Nebula finalist spot for Best Novella, which after a phone conversation and email with Jeffe Kennedy, the president of SFWA, I decided to decline. Basically because The Murderbot Diaries has had three Nebula finalist spots and two Nebula wins (for Best Novella and Best Novel) in the past four years. (Plus the four Hugos.) So it just seemed like someone else could use this nomination better than I could.

Jeffe had to check and see what would happen if I declined (it’s not like the Hugo longlist where if someone drops out everybody just moves up one). If it just meant there was going to be four novellas on the ballot instead of five, I would have kept the nomination. So when she told me there was a three way tie for sixth place so if I dropped out, three more novellas would be on the ballot, that seemed like a really good deal. :)

Good for Martha Wells! A gracious gesture, and particularly appropriate given the situation with the three-way tie.

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A New Word

Maybe the rest of you already knew this one?

Ultracrepidarianism: the act of believing that your (real) expertise in one area makes you an expert in other (unrelated) fields.

also

Ultracrepidarian: a person committing this blunder.

How is it possible that I didn’t know that word until now? Talk about a useful word and concept!

We should have a shorter, easier-to-pronounce word for this, the better to point at someone and say, “You’re stumbling into ultracrepidarianism right now, Bob. Cut it out.”

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