Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 108

Adapting SFF to the Screen

Here’s a post at tor.com: Please Adapt: Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard Series

[W]e’re readers, and the innate desire to see some of our favorite stories adapted successfully into a visual medium is strong. Maybe every book isn’t fit for the screen, and that’s fair. But I can think of myriad stories I’d love to see in theaters or on streaming services.

In my new “Please Adapt” column, each installment will feature a book or series deserving of a breakthrough. In some cases, I’ll focus on books that have been optioned or entered development but haven’t made it all the way to the screen yet. In others, I’ll dive deep into series that have yet to garner the attention of Hollywood’s creative forces and explain why the head honchos at filmmaking firms should take notice. I’ll examine series that I believe could be incredibly successful if adapted to the screen. I’ll even offer suggestions for the proper medium or perhaps suggest a creator whose style and flair could be a nice fit for the content and style of the original story.

This is a good idea for a column — everybody has opinions, everybody will enjoy the thought of great adaptations even though they’re unlikely ever to happen. Even I like this whole idea even though I seldom see movies or watch TV series.

I watched The City and the City over Christmas Break; did I ever mention that? I liked it well enough at the time, but was much (much) less impressed after going back and re-reading the book. There were so many important changes and most of them were for the worse. I was ticked off at giving Tyador Borlú a wife just so he could have a tragic backstory that would lead him to do stupid things. I was insulted at the ridiculous and unnecessary addition of the Huge Cavern of Wonders at the archeological dig, and at the stupid way Borlú fell off a cliff there. And I was disgusted at the ending, which was amazingly cool in the book and entirely unimpressive in the movie. A few details in the movie were neat, and the way both cities were shown as fairly awful dystopias was very neat, and I liked the movie version of Qussim Dhatt just as much as the book version. But overall, the adaptation was not great.

Still, let’s assume a superb adaptation for some story we love. What would you most like to see as a movie or minieseries? I’m sure I’ve written a post about this before, but it was probably a long time ago. So:

FIVE SFF NOVELS THAT WOULD MAKE A GREAT MOVIE (OR MINISERIES) —

1) Martha Wells’ The Death of a Necromancer.

This is the one I’m sure I’ve mentioned before in this context. This would be incredibly cool and not much more difficult than any show with a historical London setting. You might need to avoid showing extremely identifiable London-specific landmarks, but fundamentally a gaslamp London setting would work fine. Then you add the foray into the bowels of the prison and the giant undead fey monsters and so on. I’d probably trim the finding-our-way-through-various-tunnels parts. The casting would be the most important thing, and imo the most important roles aren’t Nicholas Valiarde and Madeline, but Nicholas Valiarde and Inspector Ronsarde. (Madeline is also important, yes.)

I have to admit that I would also join everyone else in creation in clamoring for a Murderbot adaptation, at least if it were true to the stories. Nevertheless, though The Death of a Necromancer isn’t my favorite of Wells’ books, it is the one I would most enjoy watching as a TV series or movie.

c) The Touchstone trilogy.

This would be so much fun! Plus it’s episodic enough to fit really well into a miniseries. I’m sure it could probably be trimmed, but the most difficult part might be handling a large cast of Setari. I realize being somewhat face-blind may make this seem like more of a concern to me than it really would be, but there are so many of them and they’re hard enough to keep straight the first time you read the story. It might be okay to let some (a lot) of them blend into the background of black-suited psychic space ninjas, but there are plenty who would need to be made distinctive. Bonus if you got Johnny Depp to play Mase.

If I were picking something else by AKH for an adaptation, it would certainly be And All the Stars. I’m a little surprised I didn’t think of that first. It would be a splendid choice. Also, I notice that I can get the audio version for $7.50 because I have the ebook. You know what, that sounds neat. I’m downloading that now.

3) Naomi Kritzer’s Freedom’s Sisters trilogy

I really liked this trilogy a lot. I mean, a lot. The link above goes to my review, so you can click through if you like. It’s a great story, complicated because it is a trilogy, so better suited to a series of movies or a long miniseries. Plenty of depth to the story. I would beg the producer not to add any unnecessary romantic relationships to the script. This could then be a great example of a long story that centers friendships rather than romances. I would greatly appreciate that.

4) The Goblin Emperor.

This would be simpler, since it focuses so much on Maia and a relatively small cast. Big scenery, impressive decor, but fundamentally a much more straightforward story. It might even fit into a single movie (I guess), although I always feel more scope is better and would prefer a miniseries.

I have to say that I have not been nearly as interested in Thara as a main character. The second book of his series, The Grief of Stones, is due out in July, I see. Well, I would sort of like to read it, but only sort of. Reviews at Goodreads indicates that once again it does not feel especially self-contained.

5) I want to pick something of mine and I’m torn. I mean, I want to pick Tuyo because of course I do. But I also sort of want to pick The Floating Islands because the visuals would be so much fun. Or … I don’t know. The Keeper of the Mist also has nice visuals, especially at the end. I’m torn.

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The Strong and Silent Type

One of my most re-read books over the past few years has been the Touchstone Trilogy. I reread from about the point Cassandra is found to have an enhancing talent rather than quite from the beginning, but I skip relatively little from then on. I’ve also listened to the audiobooks twice. There’s just a lot that appeals to me in this series, including the extremely slow-burn romance subplot, in which Cassandra literally barely notices Kaoren at first. It’s a wonderful contrast to the sort of ridiculous story where the female lead first meets the male lead while fighting for her life and is immediately, in the midst of all this wild struggle, distracted by how hot and sexy he is. Not to get distracted from the subject, but I absolutely detest that trope, which constitutes an instant DNF for me.

What I’m actually thinking about is Kaoren Ruuel as a character, and why Cass isn’t instantly struck by him, and why and how he grows on both Cass and the reader. A lot of that has to do with his competence, and a lot of the rest is how that competence is expressed — almost entirely through actions and almost not at all through dialogue. Kaoren is practically the exact opposite of the romance lead who catches the reader via witty banter. I can enjoy that too, and often do, but Kaoren is totally different and the way he interacts with Cassandra has nothing to do with witty banter. Instead, he says just a few words now and then that happen to be perfectly suited to the moment. My favorite was when he told Cassandra that her lab rat design was “not inapposite.” He’s just so understated! I don’t know if any of you particularly enjoyed that, but I sure did.

I don’t know how many protagonists or important secondary characters are that taciturn. Kaoren basically never says ten words when one will do. Who else is like that? Or falls into the broader category of hardly speaking?

A) Sicarius, the assassin and male lead in The Emperor’s Edge series by Lindsay Buroker. The difference here is that the female lead, Amaranthe, is all about the witty banter. Sicarius does not reciprocate in that department. At all. It’s another very slow-burn romance, and I guess I will add that certain plot elements do not make a lick of sense. Nevertheless, I enjoyed a lot of things about this series, including Amaranthe’s witty banter. And I do like Sicarius. He’s not believable, but he’s fun to read about.

B) The mute scullery maid in The Book of Atrix Wolfe. I’m not sure I’d call her the protagonist. I guess I wouldn’t. I’m not sure what I would call her. The central plot element? Sort of? But she never says a word until right at the end, which makes those words remarkably powerful.

C) While we’re on Patricia McKillip, I think Peri in The Changeling Sea might fit. She certainly keeps her own counsel very thoroughly for a tremendous amount of the book.

While on the subject, it’s a crying shame the publisher ever published this book with a cover other than the original by Michael Whelan, one of the all-time best fantasy covers in the history of fantasy art:

D) This reminds me of another book with a speechless (or nearly) protagonist, and a cover that is much (much) worse now than the original: Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls. Here the protagonist, Sarah, can talk only by directly quoting something, such as lines of poetry. That’s just as original and peculiar as it sounds. Also, the story is excellent in many ways, so if you’ve never read it, you absolutely should.

Here is the cover on my copy:

Here is the current cover:

And, ugh, that is not in any way an improvement. I hate practically everything about it. I would never in a zillion years have picked this book off the shelf and looked at it if this grim monochromatic cover had been on the book at that time. It doesn’t fit the feel of the story at all. I mean, at all.

But moving on:

E) A different sort of uncommunicative character: Colonel Janus bet Vhalnich in The Thousand Names series. I will remind you all that the first book is excellent and self-contained. It is not exactly a low-tension book, and do you know why? Right, because Janus never tells anybody anything, that’s why. He certainly does chat, but his plans for evading a terrible disaster? Yeah, he doesn’t share that sort of thing. Occasionally with fairly serious consequences.

F) Although I have a handful of characters who are fairly taciturn (Neill) or who decline to explain what’s going on (Beguchrin), you know who best fits the category of “taciturn protagonist?”

Kuomat, that’s who. Not only does he steadfastly refuse to say a word about his past — until he has absolutely no choice whatsoever — he is also just not at all chatty. I’m imagining the look he’d give someone if they tried to prod him into witty banter. I mean, there’s no way. It’s funny to even think about it. He’s set apart in a lot of different ways and for a lot of different reasons, but I can’t imagine that he was ever casually chatty, even as a young man.

I’m starting proofreading this one too, by the way, even though I may have some (hopefully minor) revision to do still. Oh, and I should probably add: this book is up for preorder now.

I feel like I’m forgetting any number of taciturn protagonists and important secondary protagonists. If you’ve got a favorite strong-but-silent type in mind, definitely drop that in the comments!

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Sale: House of Shadows

I don’t know how long this will last because I have nothing to do with pricing traditionally published books.

House of Shadows is just $1.99 right now for the Kindle ebook.

And, while we’re on the subject, the second book of this duology is half price today only at Book View Cafe.

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BVC Is Back In Business

Today, March 9, is the official re-opening of Book View Cafe’s new website.

All the bugs have been worked out, all the links ought to go where they’re supposed to go, all the book descriptions and author descriptions should be accurate — mine was funny but almost completely false for a while — and basically this is a great day to click over and check out the website.

ESPECIALLY since there’s a BIG SALE today only, with a WHOLE LOT of books set to half off. Click through to the site here and check out the sale. I not only checked each link for my own books, but I bought them myself to make very, very sure that the purchasing process is smooth. It does seem to be.

This is definitely the day to check out the updated site if you haven’t yet done so.

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Suelen: Making decisions

Okay, first, you all have persuaded me that it’s better to call this Tuyo: Book 5 than to make it just associated content in the series. I think you’re all surely correct that this will make it easier for people to realize this book exists. The clincher was when I was thinking about that and realized that at the end of one book in a series, a Kindle ought to offer the reader a chance to click to the next book in the series. That can only happen if the book is actually IN the series, so there we go.

That does mean that the symmetry of BOOK ONE — short prequel novel — BOOK TWO — shortish concurrent novel — BOOK THREE will be ruined. Nevertheless.

I think at this point I’m might need to go through and make sure the description of all the books except the first makes it crystal clear where each book belongs. “A Prequel Novel” or something like that. It remains true, and always will, that Tuyo should be the first book one actually reads, because otherwise there’s that significant spoiler regarding Lord Aras.

Lord Aras remains the single character who appears in every single Tuyo-series story, by the way. Not sure that will always be the case, but Aras appears in two flashback chapters in Suelen. He’s the one who warns Suelen that the Ugaro are bound to regard any sort of magic used by Lau physicians as a kind of sorcery and therefore forbids Suelen to use anything but what is called the “ordinary practice” while he’s in the winter country. Ryo also makes an appearance, but in the actual story, not in a flashback.

I learned a lot about Lau medical practices (as well as real-world medical practices) while writing this book. Coming up with terms for Lau medicine and the practitioners of medicine was a fun challenge. It turns out to work like this:

There are surgeons and physicians, the distinction much as it is in English, but both can be lumped together as “mediciners.” That’s not a term Ryo has ever used, but that’s fine; he just defaults to “physician” because he hasn’t ever had reason to sort out the differences, exactly as he used to consider “sorcery” and “magic” basically synonyms.

But then besides that distinction, there are three types of practice: ordinary, magical, and dedicated. The titles for a, say, a surgeon are: surgeon ordinaire, surgeon magicora, or surgeon dedicat. The same for physicians, or you can say that someone is a mediciner magicora, for example. I haven’t sorted out exactly how magic intersects with religion, but I can tell you for sure that a surgeon magicora is quite distinct from a surgeon dedicat; the later is a kind of priest as well as a kind of surgeon.

I don’t know what other professions might have a kind of dedicated practice, but probably some besides medicine do. I’m thinking that perhaps astronomers might have ordinary and magical practices, but perhaps astrologers have a dedicated practice.

Anyway, Suelen is actually both a surgeon magicora dedicat and a physician magicora dedicat, plus he holds high prelacies within each profession. He’s a top-notch mediciner, right at the top. He is nearly ninety years old; you can’t reach those heights without plenty of experience. Of course that’s not as old for a Lau as it would be in the real world.

I think I have this book in fine shape at this point except for proofreading, so I’m starting that now — I just ordered a proof copy with a fake cover. That does mean that I took a stab at writing back cover copy. Here it is:

This short novel is set directly after the events of Tuyo.

Following the final battle in the winter country, a handful of surviving Lau, too badly wounded to travel, were left to the care of the inKera tribe.

Surgeon Dedicat Suelen Haras Soyauta, personal physician to the king of the summer country, can’t bear the thought that injured Lau soldiers have been abandoned in the winter country, subject to who knows what barbaric medical practices, perhaps even to neglect or outright abuse. He’s determined to cross the river to care for those soldiers, no matter the risk. Even if the Ugaro may condemn even magic dedicated to the healing arts as forbidden sorcery.

His act of courage and mercy may change the world.

Your comments always help me tweak this kind of description, so what do you think? Do you think it’s a good idea to lead off with a statement that places the story in the series this way?

I didn’t want to mention specifics about that battle because I don’t think it’s right to put spoilers for anything in the actual description if that can be avoided. But I’m not sure about the word “final” here either. That’s almost the only battle in the whole book, for one thing.

Does the rest of the description sound appealing, given that the prospective reader has read Tuyo? I thought of possibly mentioning Aras and/or Ryo in the description, though I don’t know, maybe that wouldn’t make a difference to how appealing readers find the idea of this story.

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“Mr Global” in National Dress

I found this link at Astral Codex Ten:

Mister Global Contestants Dress In Their National Costumes And Look Like Video Game Bosses

First, this is just fun to scroll through. Wow. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but I do like Sri Lanka, which is the first one. And Chile, which is down pretty far. It really is hard to pick, though.

I recommend you scroll all the way down to the end. What do you think of the guy for the USA? Made me laugh. I really do not have any notion what would have been better.

Definitely something to look at when considering clothing for a fantasy novel. Lots of ideas here.

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I’m sure You’re Not At All Bored With Wordle

It took me a surprisingly long time to get interested in what the little gray and yellow and green squares were all about, poke at the internet, and discover Wordle. While not exactly obsessed, I have played it a fair number of times since then, enough to select specific words to start with (arise, youth, and cling). I realize that some people consider it better to reserve vowels for later so as not to waste vowels on the fourth guess. I don’t know, maybe that’s better. I don’t think I’m interested enough to find the all-time best strategy and words and so on. But I do sort of like it.

So a coworker pointed me to Quordle:

Daily Quordle #42
8⃣6⃣
4⃣7⃣
quordle.com

You see what this is, of course: four Wordle games played simultaneously. If you start with “arise,” then that’s the first word you start with in all four games; you can’t enter one word in one game and a different word at the same time in a different game. Thus the challenge. That’s also why you get eight tries; not that likely you could do all four correctly in six tries.

Anyway, I’ve only played Quordle a few times, but this is the first time I won all four games, so that makes me want to share it. I can’t share the grids on Twitter — too many characters — which means Quordle will probably never take off the way Wordle did. But here it is, and any of you who want to click to Quordle and try it, here you go.

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Long novella or short novel?

So, Suelen.

This is the long novella / short novel, set directly after Tuyo, that involves a Lau surgeon going into the winter country to care for the soldiers too badly wounded in that final battle to immediately travel back to the summer country. But, well, which is it? Calling this a novella versus a novel is essentially an aesthetic choice because it matters only with regard to how I define it on KDP. Here are the choices:

A) Call it Tuyo: Book 5 and consider it part of the series

B) Call it an “associated novella” or other related work.

If Suelen were under, say, 150 pp, I’d say fine, it’s a novella. But it has (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn this) gotten a bit longer over time, not shorter. It’s going to be about 220 pp (68,000 words). That’s in novel territory. Any number of older novels (and recent novels if you look at romances) are about this length, even though my personal novels average about twice this length.

It’s shorter than Nikoles, but not a lot shorter. That one was about 75,000 words. If I called Nikoles part of the series, well, how about Suelen? The former was set before Tuyo; the latter is set immediately after Tuyo; there’s no obvious guidance from in-world continuity.

I’m about done with revisions, by the way, and just about to begin proofing.

I decided it probably wasn’t necessary to put an animal on the cover. The element that seems like it ought to be emphasized is the Sun. I sent the artist various photos like this one from Pixabay and suggested some variation on this theme. I did consider animals, but nothing came to mind that seemed as suitable.

I will add, Suelen’s actions in the winter lands are undoubtedly going to cause significant ripples in Ugaro society, and arguably in Lau society as well. I hadn’t realized that before I started writing the story, but it certainly became obvious before I reached the end. I think it’s fine that those ripples aren’t showing up yet in Tarashana — there are excellent reasons for a lag — but I’m going to have to remember this for the future.

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The SF Canon Does Not Exist

Here’s an interesting post: Why the SF Canon Doesn’t Exist

This post begins:

As is periodically the case in the SFF community, we’re once more in the midst of a conversation about “the classics.” If you’re reading this now, it doesn’t actually matter that I wrote this in 2022; this conversation happens so often that the context above could apply in any given year going back decades, albeit more frequently today than before social media. The conversation typically features the following claims:

You DON’T need to read “the classics” for reasons (there are many)You DO need to read “the classics” for reasons (there are many)There are no “classics” for reasons (there are many)

I’m not going to list the various reasons offered for all of these. Instead, I’ll note that we usually see two common claims for the first two: 1) that you don’t need to read them because they do not represent where genre is now; and 2) that you do need to read them because they’re necessary to understand how we got where we are now. These are incredibly reductive versions of those common arguments, and both are technically correct but typically uttered in the wrong context.

Which is evocative, don’t you think? Evocative in the sense of immediately prompting me to read on in order to see if I agree or disagree with the author of this post. I can say at once that I like this author for going on, “In my view …” which is a lot less dogmatic than beginning the next sentence with, “The truth is …”

Okay, this is a long, interesting post — about the concept of a “canon” in mainstream literature versus SFF and what a canon actually is and how the books included are picked out of the greater mass of published works. It’s definitely worth reading; a good antidote to the plethora of quick and facile posts about everything in creation. That makes it hard to pull out tidbits, but here’s a paragraph from near the end that shows you the basic argument this post is making:

Whether we should have a canon is an important question to ask, and one that the SFF community hasn’t seriously engaged with in decades (in my view), but the fact remains: SF does not have a literary canon. It has many varying lists of important works with an expected high degree of similarity among certain cliques, but it has no actual, defined, argued-for canon. It probably never will because the institutions that would create that canon have not taken up the project and the people who might actually take it up don’t appear to have much interest in picking up the slack. Without that activity, an SF canon is probably a doomed prospect.

That instantly makes me want to define a central canon. It’s hopeless, of course; I would quickly be distracted into Rachel’s Favorite SFF Novels Everyone Should Read, and anyway, I don’t have a clear enough grasp of the history of the genres. I never much cared for Golden Age SF and didn’t even read that much fantasy until the eighties.

I still have the urge to take a stab at defining a canon. I bet you do too. It’s just kind of fun to kick around the notion of a central core of influential works that ought to stand as canonical. Dune for sure. But you see I just picked that out of the air. When was that first published? Oh, 1965, really? Can it have been that long?

I suppose it might be more sensible to try to list out a central canon of early SF and Fantasy, then a second canon of influential works published since, oh, 1980 or thereabouts, but before 2000 — long enough ago that we can see whether the work in question has in fact become influential or not. And then we could argue about what works published since 2000 ought to be canonical — endless fun there!

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Sale results: Black Dog Series

Okay, first, I’m glad to say that KU reads are not only still up for every book in the Tuyo series, but still rising at this point rather than falling. My best KENP pages read per single day may have come two days ago. If not, it was certainly close to the top. KENP pages read is statistically noisy, but for some reason, there tends to be a new peak every five days or so. Not seven, so this is not a phenomenon based on days of the week.

My best KENP pages read per month ever was February, which was about 50,000 pages read above any other month so far. Let me see … yes, February was also my best month so far in terms of direct sales. Obviously a lot of those were sales at $0.99, but they still add up. Roughly a quarter as many people bought the more expensive titles compared to the $0.99 titles.

Meanwhile, the Black Dog sale added a dramatic bounce to that series in terms of sales and a sharp increase in pages read. Hopefully the pages read will continue to increase for the next month for the books in this series, as has been the case for the Tuyo series. The bounce should only be starting now for the Black Dog books.

Now, results of the specific promotion services:

2/26, Freebooksy, Fussy Librarian, and Book Lover’s Haven. Because Freebooksy allows series promos, I dropped the prices for everything in the series, especially early books — in order, prices were Free, Free, $0.99, $0.99, $2.99, $1.99, $3.99, $3.99. Results: slightly over 1400 downloads, with 2/3 of the downloads being Black Dog and the remainder the first story collection. That ratio remained constant throughout the sale. This was the day on which the greatest proportion of people went ahead and bought some or all of non-free books. This was twice the proportion as on any other day, which I think shows the benefit of the series promo from Freebooksy.

2/27, Robin Reads — just over 1000 downloads, a very impressive response considering only one promo service was scheduled at this time. I didn’t use this service for the Tuyo sale because they were booked up for those dates. Very obviously worthwhile and the next time I schedule a Tuyo sale, I’ll try hard to use them.

2/28, Book Rebel, Book Runes, Book Sends, Book Cave — 1600 downloads, so these services all put together had the best performance. By this time Black Dog was #1 in all its categories and way up in the Top 100 Free Kindle Ebooks — I think it got to about #38 or so for a little while. Direct sales were better here than for Robin Reads.

3/1, Author Ad Network, Awesome Gang — a mere 350 or so downloads. Awesome Gang is free and does not have a big effect, which I knew, but it’s an easy promo service to line up. I think this result says a lot more about Author Ad Network. They are expensive and I don’t think I’ll be inclined to use them again, certainly not for this series. I think it would be more practical to move Book Cave to a day by itself next time to see how that works.

3/2, I piled everything on earlier days and did not schedule anything here, and wow, was that obvious. Just under 150 downloads and a commensurate drop in direct sales. Next time I will just schedule a sale for four days unless I put a decent promo service on every single day of a sale. Black Dog did remain at #1 in its categories through the day, but fell out of the Top 100 Free Kindle Ebooks early in the day.

All together, counting KU pages read, the 5-day sale basically paid for itself, but did not result in any profit to speak of. Therefore I’ll be watching KU reads very closely for the next month to see how that compares. Direct sales too, but mainly KU pages read. I expect a significant rise to continue all month. That will be where the sale becomes worthwhile — or doesn’t — but it should. So we’ll see!

Next up: a minor sale on the Death’s Lady trilogy. Because these books are not in KU, I can’t set anything free and will have to reduce prices by hand and take a whopping cut in royalties. I’m going to try reducing the prices of the first two books across all platforms to see what happens. That will be scheduled right before Shines Now comes out, in late May. That will let the effects of these earlier sales fade, giving me a clear look at how the Death’s Lady sale works out.

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