Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 116

Solving aging? Piece of Cake!

This is actually a book review of a book called Lifespan by a biologist named David Sinclair. The review is by Scott Alexander, which is why I saw it.

Scott starts his review this way:

David Sinclair – Harvard professor, celebrity biologist, and author of Lifespan – thinks solving aging will be easy. “Aging is going to be remarkably easy to tackle. Easier than cancer” are his exact words, which is maybe less encouraging than he thinks.

Which made me chuckle. I’d certainly like to believe that aging will turn out to be an easy problem to solve; ideally I’d like that to turn out to be true in, say, the next five years. Or, if aging turns out to be easy to roll back so that we can provide renewed youth to the old, then any time in the next thirty to forty years would probably do. Nevertheless, I’m having enough trouble right now that I’m all for solving the problem of aging right now, this minute, rather than waiting to see how decrepit I can possibly get in the next forty years.

However, I don’t mean to be cynical, but “celebrity biologist” is not the credential that makes me feel optimistic about this person’s judgment on this topic.

Okay, so, Sinclair is reaching for epigenetics to explain his cool ideas about how to beat aging. There’s a remarkable field! We know almost nothing about how epigenetics actually works, which again, isn’t to say that we haven’t learned a lot about it in the past 20 years. It’s just there’s so much more we don’t know. I do suspect that all sorts of people invoke epigenetics as a magic black box, which does make it handy as a potential solution for all kinds of things. Here’s how Sinclair invokes this black box:

So Sinclair thinks aging is epigenetic damage. As time goes on, cells lose or garble the epigenetic markers telling them what cells to be. Kidney cells go from definitely-kidney-cells to mostly kidney cells but also a little lung cell and maybe some heart cell in there too. It’s hard to run a kidney off of cells that aren’t entirely sure whether they’re supposed to be kidney cells or something else, and so your kidneys (and all your other organs) break down as you age. He doesn’t come out and say this is literally 100% of aging. But everyone else thinks aging is probably a combination of many complicated processes, and I think Sinclair thinks it’s mostly epigenetic damage and then a few other odds and ends that matter much less.

I will add here the observation that aging honestly does have to be something that can be basically turned off for some animals, because quite a lot of animals do not age in the way we do. Carp and turtles are perhaps not ideal models because they aren’t mammals, so I’ll just comment instead that bowhead whales definitely live a lot longer than we do, with reasonable estimates that they may live at least 200 years, probably substantially longer. So … I’m not saying it seems too unlikely that we might find a way to flip off aging. Maybe.

Ah, this is funny. Sinclair thinks deprivation is a fine idea for convincing your body that times are tough and it needs to hunker down and not age. He’s thinking of starvation, but other forms of deprivation as well. The idea that deprivation may improve things via epigenetics has been around for awhile, as I’ve seen arguments that obesity is substantially more likely for people whose grandparents never experienced a period of starvation. So there’s that. Scott quite reasonably poses this question:

Suppose you’re not a mouse, can’t get genetically engineered, and you have a normal aversion to diet and exercise. Is there a pill you can take? 

And look, yes, there is! But it looks like Rapamycin has substantial side-effects. But there’s also this:

The other pill is nicotinamide riboside aka NR (and its close cousin nicotanimide mononucleotide aka NMN). The reactions catalyzed by sirtuins involve nicotinamides, and the more nicotinamides you have, the more effective sirtuins are. NR and NMN are cheap, simple chemicals you can buy at any supplement store for $20, and Sinclair is pretty convinced they’re a fountain of youth. He says that when his own father started becoming decrepit, he convinced him to take NMN, and over the space of a few months he started becoming energetic and spry again, and is now traveling the world despite being well into his 70s.

Hmm. Amazon suggests to me that $20 is a wild understatement of the cost. Though of course Scott doesn’t say $20 per what number of pills. But it looks like the cheapest Amazon offers is NR at $40 for a thirty day supply of pills. (And yes, that’s definitely the cheap version.)

This is Scott Alexander, so this is a very long book review. I’m going to now jump much closer to the end, which is where Sinclair says some stuff that … actually does seem pretty persuasive:

Sinclair thinks curing aging is easier than curing cancer. For one thing, aging might be just one thing, whereas cancer has lots of different types that need different strategies. For another, total cancer research spending approaches the hundreds of billions of dollars, whereas total anti-aging spending is maybe 0.1% of that. There’s a lot more low-hanging fruit!

But also, even if we succeed at curing cancer, it will barely matter on a population level. If we came up with a 100% perfect cure for cancer, average US life expectancy would increase two years – from 80 to 82. Add in a 100% perfect cure for heart disease, and you get 83. People mostly get these diseases when they are old, and old people are always going to die of something. Cure aging, and the whole concept of life expectancy goes out the window.

And then Scott comes out with many cogent arguments why curing aging would be a dandy thing to do if we could.

I feel that, given this is primarily a blog about SFF and writing, I would be remiss not to pull the subject in that direction. Fortunately, this is easy!

The Serrano Legacy books by Elizabeth Moon are space operas set at a time when longevity treatments are just beginning to have a big effect on society. Now, in my opinion, the first three books — Hunting Party, Sporting Chance, and Winning Colors — are the best books in the series, and the topic is just being developed in those. Nevertheless, this series is fundamentally concerned with the topic of longevity and the social consequences that sudden increases in longevity may cause.

Kim Stanley Robinson also does a lot with increasing longevity in the Mars trilogy. Remember the big deal with memory and longevity? And then people start living basically forever, so that only accidental death is a real thing. Huge effects on personal psychology and on society.

Heinlein did longevity a different way, via selective breeding, which almost certainly would fail, by the way. Humans do (far) too much breeding outside of marriage and, even worse, longevity is most likely really complicated genetically. That is, if you have someone whose family tends to be long-lived because they have genes that say “don’t get cancer,” and someone else whose family tends to be long-lived because they have genes that say “extended vigor,” those genes aren’t the same and you would most likely not reliably produce extended lifespans in offspring of those families. Unless you practiced extensive inbreeding with your tightly controlled slave population and then sure, but that is quite a different backstory.

I’m sure there are lots of others. If a particular title occurs to you, by all means drop it in the comments. Individual immortals are not what I’m thinking of here; only population- or society-wide changes.

Here’s a post that declares that as a rule, SF that handles this topic tends toward the dystopian end of the spectrum and that in general people tend to think that dramatic increases in longevity would be bad. I totally disagree, and that’s not just because I’m getting older. Scott Alexander frames my opinion perfectly, so I’ll end with another tidbit pulled out of his post:

And finally, what’s the worst that could happen? An overly literal friend has a habit of always answering that question with “everyone in the world dies horribly”. But in this case, that’s what happens if we don’t do it. Seems like we have nowhere to go but up!

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Vorkosigan Fanfic you may Enjoy

Captain Vorpatril’s Plotbunnies

Miles flew down, quite suddenly one day, and practically kidnapped the poor woman out of her semi-retirement. (Ch. 10)

Yevgeniya D’Aubade considered the conjunction of deep brown oxide and invasive cowbane dispassionately. It was serendipity that her garden abutted an area of sulphides and oxides whose dull but determined colours she found pleasing, and chance that a cowbane spore could blow so far west and take root just where its lustrous ochre should so compliment the oxide. But it was also beautiful, a conjunction only South Continent could produce, and both the speckled texture of the oxide and the wartiness of cowbane would lend themselves well—very well, in fact—to micromosaic figuration. She used her wristcom to record the image, but in doing so was obliged to notice the blinking message light. Resignedly she keyed the accept.

“What is it, Mila?”

“Inbound aircar, Yeva. Big and shiny, with stingships.”

Till Death Do Us Part

Gregor said, “All right, now you can look,” and Laisa opened her eyes and instantly began to laugh.

Treatment for Shock

Mark couldn’t take his eyes off Miles’s blank face–colorless, expressionless. He remembered another blank face just like it, and couldn’t stop remembering; it was bad enough in those first minutes to call up his old early thought-redirecting instructions from his very first therapist. Pay attention to your present surroundings. Identify the trigger.

Not so much a trigger as a bomb-blast. His father was dead. Fifteen years later, time had done what Galen could not.

And one more, much (much) longer:

Forward Momentum

I won’t quote this one. I’ll just give you the teaser, which you may consider very promising, as I did:

LMB famously has a rule-of-thumb in writing, especially where poor old Miles is concerned — when in doubt, have the worst possible thing happen. But suppose that were turned around, and instead the best thing happened? or best things, unstoppably, in Milesian droves, and for pretty much everyone?

Honestly, could anything be better to start off 2022 than a story where best things happen in Milesian droves to pretty much everyone?

I will add that the writing is okay, but not as excellent as in the By and Rish fanfiction.

If you haven’t got that one, by the way, it is here: A Bit Too Much Good Work.

If you hit “entire work” and “download,” you can download a mobi file and send it to your Kindle (or a different format and send it to any device you like). You may have already known that, but I didn’t, and thanks to Craig, who pointed me to these stories and also told me to look for the download button.

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The reader may be puzzled, but Should not Be confused

Here’s a post at Nathan Bransford’s blog: Build mysteries around whether characters will succeed or fail

This is a fine post, but it’s not really about building mysteries; it’s about avoiding confusion.

Here’s a bit of the post:

You’ll often see novels start off with something that nominally feels high stakes, like a character running through a dark forest as fast as they can… only the author doesn’t tell us why they’re running. The author wants us to wonder: why is this character running as fast as they can through the forest? Mysterious, right? But it’s downright confusing to not be given more information that that …

Yes, I think that’s true. This sort of beginning often has the effect of opening in a “white room” — a setting that lacks all description. This is true even if the author spends many sentences describing the dark forest, because without context provided by the protagonist, the dark forest might almost as well not exist.

I will grant, a skilled enough author can make a dark forest so evocative that it might draw in the reader even without context for the protagonist’s flight. But it’s a challenge to make that work and most writers would probably be better off not trying. Establish the character along with the setting; that’ll work better, generally speaking.

Nathan isn’t saying that a flight through a dark forest can’t work; his point is that vagueness is a flaw.

Vague mysteries are missed opportunities to build suspense and anticipation. What’s the better mystery: Why is this character running through the forest? or, Is this character going to avoid getting ripped to pieces by a nasty moon demon? … When we only find out what was really happening after the fact, it invariably feels like a letdown. The reader’s reaction is more like: “Yeah… had I known the situation was life or death, I might have been worried. Instead I was just confused.”

That’s a good point to make!

I suppose the broader point here is that it’s hard to tell what “in media res” means and how to start your novel when a lot of advice basically goes “Start by setting something on fire.” A good rule of thumb, it seems to me, is that no matter what you set on fire, you’d better establish your protagonist too. And, I think, Nathan Bransford would add, also the basic idea about what’s going on.

That’s certainly a lot to do in the first paragraphs of a novel! But, yes, just setting something on fire, or sending someone racing through a dark forest, probably isn’t enough.

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Aliens!

Inexplicable Phenomena Spur Pentagon to Launch New UFO Investigation Force

The Pentagon is creating a new office to investigate unidentified flying objects (UFOs) amid concerns that after broad probes it cannot explain mysterious sightings near highly sensitive military areas. … The US military is worried some of the unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) spotted by military pilots in the past may represent technologies of strategic rivals unknown to US scientists.

Image from Pixabey

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Writing Cinematically

Here is the post that was meant to appear at BVC a few days ago …

This recent post at Paradox World about the first sentence of one of my recent books, Tuyo, focuses on the visual aspect of writing prose — about writing prose that has a cinematic quality, prose that carries the reader into the visual scene, as though watching a movie. Here is Anna’s analysis of this sentence:

The first sentence of Rachel Neumeier’s novel, Tuyo, widens the view before narrowing it again: “Beside the coals of the dying fire, within the trampled borders of our abandoned camp, surrounded by the great forest of the winter country, I waited for a terrible death.” 

This is a sentence almost like a camera trick. First, we have a narrow focus: “Beside the coals of a dying fire.” Then, we back out to a slightly wider view: “within the trampled borders of our abandoned camp.” A campfire is a small circle. The borders of a camp is a larger one. Next, we zoom to a very high altitude view: “surrounded by the great forest of the winter country.” We’d need to move to a mountain top or a bird’s eye to see an entire forest or an entire country. Suddenly, the focus is very tight again: “I” – one person, one face. And last, “waited for a terrible death,” prepares us for a final fade to black. Neumeier has written a truly cinematic sentence. 

I did not, of course, have any of that in mind when I wrote the sentence. I just wrote it. I’m not at all analytical when I write; I write by feel, as I suppose most writers probably do. But this is a fascinating topic — writing prose cinematically. It’s something I notice and enjoy.

There are a bunch of ways — endless ways, no doubt — to write prose in a way that is evokes the view for the reader. One way is to do it the way I did in the sentence above, by providing a string of introductory clauses in front of the actual sentence. Close view, midrange, wide focus, and here is the subject-verb-object right at the end.

Another is to do it with a lot of vivid adjectives and verbs, like this:

The alpine valley ended as sharply as though sheared away, leaving in its place a chasm falling in shattered steps into blackness before the land leaped up again in the distance, and up further to the head of a massive peak to the northwest. Flat sunlight struck the shoulders of the peak, flaring from snow and ice fields; it seemed in that moment that another world had opened before Kieve, one so new that the colors had not yet been added.

The verbs in particular create a sense of drama here. This is from Marta Randall’s novel Mapping Winter, which is on the magic-free end of the spectrum for secondary world fantasy and therefore feels a lot like a historical novel. This is also a particularly interesting novel as Randall, left unsatisfied by the version of the book that was traditionally published in 1983, revised it heavily and brought it out again with the new title in 2019. I liked the first version, but the new version is truly excellent and I highly recommend it. One of the reasons I love this book is the author’s gift for cinematic description. (Amazon’s page for the book contains a “from the author” note from Marta Randall, describing why she wasn’t satisfied by the first version of this book and why she decided to revise it, which is also interesting to read, if not relevant to the topic here.)

Again, the scenery is presented long before the character steps into the paragraph: valley, chasm, land that leaps up, sunlight flaring, and here at last is Kieve, stunned by the view. Not that there’s any particular magic to presenting the scenery before anyone steps into the paragraph to view that scenery, but scenery-scenery-scenery-character can help pause the scene for the reader even though the verbs are active.

To achieve a perfect stop-action effect, there’s a different technique. Let’s pause for a look at one specific scene from Dickens’ Great Expectations:

…”Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”

A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied around his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

“Oh, don’t cut my throat, sir.”

Look at that! From threat to response would be, what, a microsecond? But rather than going straight from threat directly to response, Dickens stops the action to show us Abel Magwitch through Pip’s eyes. That whole paragraph is free of action verbs until right at the end when Magwitch seizes Pip by the chin and the action suddenly starts up again.

This is one great function of sentence fragments in fiction: Fragments stop the action and produce a moment when nothing is happening except perception. This is an extraordinarily visual technique. Again, it’s visual, visual, and then at the end of the paragraph, character, action, and back into the story.

Here’s another example. This is the opening paragraph from The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith:

An April night in Atlanta between thunderstorms: dark and warm and wet, sidewalks shiny with rain and slick with torn leaves and fallen azaliea blossoms. Nearly midnight. I had been walking for over an hour, covering four or five miles. I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t sleepy.

You would think that my bad dreams would be of the first man I had killed, thirteen years ago. Or if not him, then maybe the teenager who had burned to death in front of me because I was too slow to get the man with the match. But no, when I turn out the lights at ten o’clock and can’t keep still, can’t even bear to sit down in my Lake Claire house, it’s because I see again the first body I hadn’t killed.

Visual. Visual. Finally, here is the subject and her action, walking. The second paragraph sets the hook with indications of past action, not with current action, which would be risky for a less-skilled writer. Griffith pulls it off, or at least she hooked me.

This was, I think, the first book of Griffith’s I read. I still remember the immediate feeling of satisfaction when I started this book. I read those very first lines and knew, not that I would love the book, but that I would love the writing. I did love the book, and the whole series, and highly recommend them. They aren’t SFF; they’re thrillers. Well, they’re actually a character study disguised as thrillers. Aud Torvingen, the protagonist, is a wonderful example, maybe the best example I’ve ever seen, of a character who is a sensualist. I don’t mean specifically in a sexual sense. I mean a voluptuary — a hedonist — I mean that Aud is focused on sensory experience and perceives the world through her senses to a remarkable degree. This is therefore a novel, or series of novels, where the focus is very much on writing that evokes the sensual world.

But it wasn’t any of that which hooked me first. It was the visual impact of those fragments in the first paragraph.

So, by leaving out verbs, particularly action verbs, fragments provide a stop-action shot and a strong visual moment in prose. This is interesting to notice partly because of common advice to emphasize action verbs, so let me take a moment to look at a beautiful paragraph that uses plenty of verbs, but almost no action verbs. This is from Annie Dillard’s eclipse essay in Teaching a Stone to Talk:

I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on Earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a 19th-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day.

Annie Dillard’s writing is just lovely. It’s like reading poetry disguised as prose. If you would like to read that whole essay, it’s online here. But let’s pause and look at her use of “be” verbs in the above paragraph:

It was going. The sun was going. The world was wrong. The grasses were wrong. They were platinum. The hues were metallic. Their finish was matte. The hillside was a faded photograph. The people are dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. The grasses were metal. I was watching. I was standing. I was standing.

“Be” verbs can feel weak. Repetitive sentence structure can grate like fingernails on a blackboard. But in this case, the repetitive sentence structure, this was that, falls into a cadence, like a litany. Dillard emphasizes that even more by repeating going and wrong and standing and platinum and metal — all this repetition also serves to make this paragraph read like a litany. This serves not only to pause the action, but to ratchet up tension in the scene as the reader waits for the resolution. It comes in the last sentence, as Dillard provides the emotional climax of the sentence, the feeling of removal from everything normal and the real light of day.

While we’re thinking of photographs and unreal hues and so on, let me just share a photo of one of my dogs. I placed this beautiful, sweet dog of mine in a pet home this summer because I couldn’t breed her without risk to her health and wanted her to be in a home where she could be the center of attention. She’s very happy, the people are delighted with her, and the husband of the couple happens to be a photographer. Here’s Kimmie:

This is why photographers continue to work with monochromatic photos; because sometimes those pictures capture something that can be missing from true-to-life color. In this case, I think the monochromatic image lends this photo a timeless feeling — a bit like the feeling evoked by Annie Dillard’s description of the eclipse.

Visual images are inherently powerful. It’s a lot more of a trick to evoke visual images in prose. If you’ve found yourself thinking of an author or a work particularly skilled at cinematic writing, by all means drop suggestions in the comments!

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Merry Christmas —

Let’s have a Christmas post that’s a bit out of the ordinary. I will cheat and use this one by Sue Coletta from Kill Zone Blog: Reindeer Fun, which is basically a list of reindeer trivia with a little bit of a Christmas emphasis.

1. A Reindeer By Any Other Name is Still a Reindeer

In some regions of the world, Reindeer are called caribou. In North America reindeer refers to Eurasian populations and caribou refers to wild populations. …

4. Santa’s Reindeer Must be Female

Since males grow antlers in February and females in May, they both finish growing antlers at the same time. But male and female reindeer shed antlers at different times of the year. Males drop antlers in November, leaving them antler-less till the spring. Female reindeer keep antlers through the winter months. They’re shed when calves are born in May.

Thus, since Santa’s reindeer all have antlers, he must have an all-female team.

Actually, that’s tricky. Female reindeer DO have antlers, but their antlers are nowhere near as big as the antlers of males. Most pictures of Santa’s sleigh with reindeer show male reindeer. Probably some images do show female reindeer though; the world is wide and probably some artist somewhere used female reindeer as the model.

To be sure, a lot of pictures of Santa’s sleigh with reindeer don’t show reindeer at all; they show whitetail deer, or possibly elk (I mean wapiti, the American elk), or some other random deer species, because artists often play fast and loose with the Cervidae family, alas.

Sue Coletta missed one neat thing about reindeer, which I will add:

11. Reindeer click when they walk

Tendons snap over sesamoid bones in the foot of reindeer, producing a clicking sound with every step they take. This may be a contact signal that helps herds stay together, especially in poor visibility, such as during a snow storm.

Therefore, if you not only hear hoofbeats on your rooftop, but a sharp clicking noise at the same time, that’s definitely Santa’s team.

I hope you’ll have a delightful Christmas, with or without the clicking of reindeer on your rooftop!

Image by Darkmoon_Art from Pixabay

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Cinematic Writing

A post of mine, up at Book View Café today.

Writing with visual drama … writing a stop-action scene … writing with “be” verbs to create a specific effect … and a bonus art photo of my beautiful Kimmie.

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Detection dogs

From Crime Reads: EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT DETECTION DOGS

Excellent topic! Bring it on!

Let me see …

Search and Rescue … I once knew someone who owned two Bloodhounds and trained them for search and rescue. Those are certainly not dogs to just have as casual pets. Very much dogs that need a job. There’s a good mystery series by Virginia Lanier featuring Bloodhounds; the series starts with Death in Bloodhound Red. Wow, is the publisher falling down on the job! Looks like an imprint of Harper Collins? There are five books in this series, but they’re not linked together in either paper or Kindle editions. The fifth one in the series actually says it’s “Book 5 of 1,” which is quite a trick. There are actually six books in the series:

Death in Bloodhound Red  (1995)The House on Bloodhound Lane (1996)A Brace of Bloodhounds (1997)Blind Bloodhound Justice (1998)Ten Little Bloodhounds (1998)A Bloodhound to Die For (2003)

There, how hard was that? The link goes to the Wikipedia entry, where someone had no trouble listing all the titles in order. I highly recommend this series to anyone who finds mysteries engaging and likes Bloodhounds.

Back to the Crime Reads post …

Cadaver dogs … Explosives and narcotics detection … oh, here’s a category I didn’t expect to see: disease detection.

That’s very cool, of course, but not generally something that comes up in crime fiction. A friend of mine has Standard Schnauzers, so I’m aware that the concept of cancer detection with dogs was first proven with a fabulous Standard Schnauzer with the prosaic name of George.

Let me see, what else is here at the Crime Reads post …

Apprehending suspects. That’s not Bloodhounds, of course; Bloodhounds aren’t at all aggressive as a rule and the handler has to keep them safe if they’re tracking a potentially dangerous person. That would be Malinois and other similar breeds.

Well, let me see, we’re coming up on Christmas, so let me end this post with this book:

It’s Christmas time, and for Raine Stockton and her Search and Rescue dog, Cisco, Hansonville, North Carolina is just like a Norman Rockwell painting– except for the rash of thefts of baby Jesus figurines from nativity scenes, an abandoned box of golden retriever puppies that someone leaves beside her mailbox, and a mysterious gift from one of Cisco’s a grateful admirers. Raine already has her hands full with her own misbehaving pooches, unexpected house guests, and a complicated new relationship. But when a newborn is abandoned in the manger of the town’s living nativity and Raine walks in on what appears to be the scene of a murder, she has more to worry about than keeping the Christmas spirit alive. …

Christmas cozies — and Christmas Regencies too — have become microgenres of their own, haven’t they? I actually like this trend and often keep an eye out for a nice Christmas-themed mystery or romance that might suit me. This one sounds good! You know what, I think I’ll give it a try.

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It’s Always the Story

So, I haven’t actually started reading Welcome to Temptation yet, but one of these days, one of these days. In the meantime, I’ve been glancing in on Jennifer Crusie’s blog, and thanks again to Hanneke for the link.

Here’s a post from earlier this year that I like a lot: 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 and to be hoped for, 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. (I learn a lot from BookBub samples.)

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.

This reminds me of my recent reaction to the prologue from Changer of Days. I was strongly repelled by the pov character, but secondarily displeased by starting in the aftermath of a terrible but context-free battle. Context-free battles are my second-least-favorite type of prologue (the first is a history lesson prologue). This post by Crusie reminded me of that because of the contrast to the prologue in The Mask of Mirrors by MA Carrick (Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms).

Because THAT prologue is a story, not a history lesson, not context-free anything. A story. And it’s fine. I don’t mind a bit that it’s a prologue. This is why I’m not in favor of advice such as “don’t write prologues.” I dislike all proscriptive writing advice anyway because all of it is garbage and the thing about never writing a prologue is just as garbagy as the rest. What a prologue has to do in order to work is tell the reader a story rather than provide setup.

I’m not really reading Mask of Mirrors just yet, btw. I like the part I’ve read, but I’m mostly reading Finders Keepers by Linnea Sinclair, which I don’t like particularly, which makes it useful right now because I’m mostly focusing on my own work and don’t really want to get enthralled by someone else’s novel.

Oh, while on the subject of my own work, I finished smoothing out the draft of the final Black Dog novella this morning as well as I can without substantive feedback. So I’ve finally sent that off to be critiqued. If I don’t get it back for a bit, that’s fine, as I will now hit revisions for the other three Black Dog novellas. I would like to have those ready to start the proofreading process by January 1, so we’ll see.

Also, the long novella featuring physician dedicat Suelen Haras Soyauta is now closer to 150 pp than 130 pp. And not quite finished. But nearly. I’m setting that aside until I’ve got the Black Dog novellas in shape to start proofreading.

My new proofreading process, by the way:

Get a paper copy and proofread it myself.Get a new paper copy and let my mother proofread it.Get a new paper copy and proofread it myself again.Send it out to the two of you who have the most amazing knack for proofreading.

Keraunani is now on step 4, so we’ll see how that works. My actual, real goal is for the final proofreaders to find nothing whatsoever to query except maybe the occasional comma.

Back to the idea that it’s always the story: Yes.

Jennifer Crusie goes on:

But, the author says, I need that stuff in there or the story won’t make sense. Well, maybe.

First of all, is it really needed? I don’t need to know why somebody feels the way they do going back to their childhood days; I just need to know that she feels it in the now. I don’t need to know to why the protagonist and antagonist are being lousy to each other, I just need to see it in the now of the story...

Eventually, of course, some of that stuff is going to be necessary. So you keep the explanation in the now; that is, somebody in the story needs to know that information, so they ask. The key here is “needs to know.” As in, there’s a pressing reason to ask. Maybe they’re being attacked, so one character turns to another and says, “What the hell? Who are these people?” Maybe one character has a complete meltdown, and the other character hands her a Kleenex and says, “What the hell? Explain what triggered this so it doesn’t happen again.” The “what the hell?” part of this is what pushes the question: I need to know this now.

I have in fact seen reviews that make it clear that some readers do want infodumps. However, basically, I’m with Crusie here. I hate infodumps and I suspect the majority of readers feel the same way. I’m uncomfortable putting more than a couple of paragraphs (short paragraphs, preferably) of backstory anywhere in a novel. One of the things I specifically asked when I sent off the last Black Dog novella just a few minutes ago was, Is there way too much introspection at the beginning? We’ll see, but I feel like there is and I will be thinking of how to cut that down without losing the necessary foreshadowing.

Meanwhile, good post, and by all means click through and read the whole thing.

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Families

Here’s a post by Liz Bourke at tor.com: Two Books About Family Situations

The two books are these:

This caught my eye because I quite liked Dragonhaven, a book I haven’t read for a while. Opinions are, I believe, mixed. I’ve always liked Liz Bourke’s book reviews, so I was quite curious to see whether she enjoyed this one.

Also, I have two books by Zen Cho on my TBR pile, and of course I KEEP hearing about her books ALL THE TIME, and someday, someday. No guesses about when, but if any of you have read Black Water Sister, by all means tell me what you thought. In fact, if you’ve read Dragonhaven, what did you think of that one? I wouldn’t say it’s one of McKinley’s best, but that sets the bar fairly high. As I say, I liked it.

Liz gives both books a thumbs up:

Black Water Sister: “[I]t’s a striking, appealing narrative of family, displacement, “home”-coming, coming-of-age… and ghosts.”

Dragonhaven: [T]the teenaged protagonist is constantly exhausted from parenting a newborn marsupial dragon (definitely endangered, also grows up to breathe fire) and spends most of the book in a dazed parental fugue. You may be surprised (or not) to hear that Dragonhaven is nonetheless a compelling read.”

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