Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 117

Literary Conspiracies

From Book Riot: THE WEIRDEST LITERARY CONSPIRACY THEORIES PEOPLE REALLY BELIEVE

So, this is kind of fun.

I’m going to discuss [conspiracy theories] that revolve around the authors of famous books and ones that happen in books themselves. So put your tin foil hat on, we’re diving in.

LEWIS CARROLL WAS JACK THE RIPPER

Yep, I had never heard of this one either, and I read From Hell many times. Is it mentioned in that? It damn well should be, because this is a great conspiracy theory. The idea is that Lewis Carroll (a pen name for Charles Dodgson) sprinkled anagrams throughout his works that admitted his guilt. …

So, I mean, IS this a real, no kidding conspiracy theory that anyone actually, for real, believes? Because wow. Let me google this …

Okay, here. And here. Also here. Lots of posts about this, it turns out. From that last post:

Wallace published his theory in 1996, in his book ‘Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend’. It was, in brief that Dodgson and his Oxford colleague Thomas Vere Bayne, were both responsible for the Whitechapel murders. He based his belief on anagrams he constructed out of Dodgson’s work, which he claimed were hidden confessions of the author’s life of crime in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888….

The anagrams he presents in his book are not very good, in that they tend to make limited grammatical sense, and Wallace tends to cheat rather by simply leaving out or changing any letters he can’t fit in.

For example he takes this passage from Dodgson’s ‘Nursery Alice’:

‘So she wondered away, through the wood, carrying the ugly little thing with her. And a great job it was to keep hold of it, it wriggled about so. But at last she found out that the proper way was to keep tight hold of itself foot and its right ear’.

and turns it into:

‘She wriggled about so! But at last Dodgson and Bayne found a way to keep hold of the fat little whore. I got a tight hold of her and slit her throat, left ear to right. It was tough, wet, disgusting, too. So weary of it, they threw up – jack the Ripper.’

For anyone who knows Dodgson’s work, and his mastery of all word-games, the idea that he could perpetrate a word-trick as messy as this is almost more unbelievable than the image of him hanging round Whitechapel with a big knife. The structure is barely literate, and Wallace has to substitute three letters (including a very important ‘o’ to ‘i’ in order to construct the word ‘ripper’) in order to make his ‘anagram’ work at all.

Yeah, so that’s what we might consider an awful lot of effort to produce a strained theory. I don’t know that I’d call this a “conspiracy” theory. I mean, I don’t see a postulated conspiracy to conceal this secret truth. This is more just a crazy theory.

More exciting and possibly even crazier theories at the linked post!

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How’s Kindle Vella Working Out?

This post at Passive Voice caught my eye because I’m mildly curious — only mildly — in how the serialized-story platform Kindle Vella will turn out.

You may remember my post about Kindle Vella from some time ago. I’m not at all interested in this platform myself — I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole, UNLESS I had a complete, finished novel that I thought was perfectly suited to this sort of presentation. I mean, I suppose a novel would be “perfectly suited” to presentation as a serialized story if, for example, every chapter ended on a mild cliffhanger. And the chapters were pretty short and episodic. And, as I said, the overall book is totally finished so that I’ve already smoothed out all the foreshadowing and so forth.

I don’t really expect to write anything like that, is what I’m implying.

Also, as a reader, I hate serialized stories. I hate having to wait for the next installment of anything. I almost never read teaser chapters of anything.

My basic expectation is that some reasonable fraction of early adopters of Kindle Vella will experience considerable success through this platform. I wouldn’t bother deciding whether this modality is “successful,” whatever that means, until the platform has been around for a couple of years. By then any author jumping into it will probably find it much more difficult to get any traction. That’s an assumption, but I bet I’m right. Then in ten years it’ll either be gone or will have established itself for the time being with a reasonable niche of the market or, who knows, will have been supplanted by some other new platform.

Anyway, this article is one that’s focusing on the “early adopters experiencing success” part of this predicted curve. If you would like to click through, the article has links to a handful of top ongoing serials.

And here is a post from Jane Friedman’s blog, by Audry Kalman, in which an early adopter of Kindle Vella describes her experience so far. Her experience has been largely positive, and enhanced by going in cautiously and without great expectations. Kalman also recommends not trying this with a book that isn’t finished, so that does answer my personal greatest worry if I were interested in this platform as a reader. She doesn’t indicate whether the platform identifies books that have been entirely finished with all chapters uploaded, but if Vella doesn’t do this, I think it should.

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Humans are actually Fae

So, you may have heard one or more of these interesting (and uplifting) stories about animals who come to humans for help. I don’t mean pets because that’s completely normal and expected. I mean wild animals.

For example, here’s this fascinating story from Intisar Khanani:

Crows are incredibly intelligent and have amazing memories. I know this from personal experience of the best kind.

Gather around, all ye little children, for it is story time. https://t.co/ZYA1OLVM2J

— Intisar is on a writing hiatus (@BooksByIntisar) December 11, 2021

And you should click through and read that, because it starts off with, well, someone rescued a baby crow, that’s nice, but it gets a lot more interesting (and uplifting) from there.

But there are lots of stories like this, featuring lots of different wild animals, and plenty of those stories are believable. For example:

Raven asks for help with porcupine quills.

In Nova Scotia in Canada, a common raven displays a truly impressive amount of intelligence. Perching on a residential fence, it squawked for over an hour to acquire the nearby humans’ attention. When the residents finally took notice, they went outside to investigate and discovered the raven had three porcupine quills embedded in the side of its face and one embedded in its wing. The woman went forward to touch the raven and surprisingly the bird stayed put on the fence post. It patiently sits on the fence while the women removes three quills from its face, squawking in pain each time a quill is removed.

Tangled swans ask a human for help.

Footage from the remarkable rescue shows the hapless pair of birds swimming in circles, evidently unable to extricate themselves from one another on their own. As two passersby approach, the swans shift direction, awkwardly paddling toward them on the riverbank. … And the guy untangled them and they swam away.

Here’s a story about elephants wounded by poisoned arrows who walked quite a distance to a wildlife rehab center. Apparently, this is pretty routine for elephants in the area.

“We are sure that Mwende’s father knew that if they returned to the stockades they would get the help and treatment they needed because this continuously happens with the injured bulls in the north; they all come to Ithumba when in need, understanding that there they can be helped,” DWST wrote.

Here’s a dolphin that needed help with fishing line. This is a video.

And so on. This phenomenon gave rise to a brief Tumblr thread that I think you will enjoy:

To wild animals, humans are fae.

[D]oes it ever strike you how weird it is that we’ve got a whole collection of prey species whose basic problem-solving script ends with the step “if all else fails, go bother one of the local apex predators and maybe they’ll fix the problem for no reason”?

Like yeah, technically [humans are] predators, and they get pretty screamy, especially if you try to take any of their stuff… but given the chance it seems like they’d rather help us out and sometimes they’ll just randomly give you food, so???

I mean, I guess in fairytales and myths we’ve got our fair share of stories about dangerous people/creatures who might well kill you or otherwise ruin your life, but to whom people nonetheless turn for help in desperate circumstances. So it’s not like the perspective is exactly a foreign thing to our own mindset, really… It’s just that, y’know, we can’t actually go make a deal with the faeries when there’s something we can’t figure out.

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The Worst Michelin-Starred Restaurant?

Here is a hilarious review of a restaurant in Lecce, Italy, called Bros.

Bros., Lecce: We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever

There is something to be said about a truly disastrous meal, a meal forever indelible in your memory because it’s so uniquely bad, it can only be deemed an achievement. The sort of meal where everyone involved was definitely trying to do something; it’s just not entirely clear what.

I’m not talking about a meal that’s poorly cooked, or a server who might be planning your murder—that sort of thing happens in the fat lump of the bell curve of bad. Instead, I’m talking about the long tail stuff – the sort of meals that make you feel as though the fabric of reality is unraveling. …

At some point, the only way to regard that sort of experience—without going mad—is as some sort of community improv theater. You sit in the audience, shouting suggestions like, “A restaurant!” and “Eating something that resembles food” and “The exchange of money for goods, and in this instance the goods are a goddamn meal!” All of these suggestion go completely ignored.

You should most definitely click through and read the whole thing.

Keeping in mind that this experience lasted 4.5 hours and cost hundreds of dollars per person, what is the point where you would have stood up and walked out without paying? I know when that moment would have come for me — I mean, if I hadn’t walked out long before, the moment that would unquestionably have been the last straw.

You may have fun reading this post with that in mind so you can pick that moment for you. I’m guessing we’ll all pick the same exact moment, and I’m curious to see if that’s true.

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FYI, Marie Brennan is also MA Carrick

I just thought I’d mention this in case any of you like Marie Brennan’s work and didn’t realize she, and co-author Alyx Helms, are also writing under the name AC Carrick. Here’s the first book of a planned trilogy for which the second just came out.

Here’s the description:

FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD. MAGIC FAVORS THE LIARS.

Ren is a liar and a thief, a pattern-reader and a daughter of no clan. Raised in the slums of Nadežra, she fled that world to save her sister. Now, she has returned with one goal: to trick her way into a noble house, securing her fortune and her sister’s future.

But in the city of dreams, her masquerade is just one of many. Enigmatic crime lord Derossi Vargo, stony captain of the guard Grey Serrado, dashing heir Leato Traementis, and the legendary vigilante known as the Rook all have secrets that could unravel her own.

And as corrupt nightmare magic begins to weave its way through the city of dreams, the poisonous feuds of its aristocrats and the shadowy dangers of its impoverished underbelly become tangled—with Ren at their heart.

Marie Brennan has been an uneven author for me. This is on me, not on her, as I think all her books are very well written; I just don’t like all of them. I didn’t care for Midnight Never Come or the sequels. I don’t know why. I had at least a couple of books of this series and wound up giving them away and not finishing the series. On the other hand, I greatly enjoyed the Lady Trent series, with its emphasis on natural history. Her nonfiction book Writing Fight Scenes is helpful in conceptualizing how to, you know, write fight scenes.

I’m going to try this one largely because the description hands me so many character types I like — the enigmatic crime lord, the stony captain of the guard, the legendary vigilante, and of course the thief protagonist. I like all those descriptions, though The Dashing Heir is not a character type that particularly appeals to me, as a rule.

If any of you have by chance already read this book, what did you think?

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Ten Novel Openings

It’s been a while, and I’ve accumulated ten or so more samples and full books, so let’s take a look at the way these novels open. There’s a wide range here; these are all genre fiction, but the genres range from cozy mystery through a lot of other genres right to literary.

1.  Silent Night by Donna Ball

Ashleigh had just finished hanging the string of Christmas lights over the front door when she saw the flash of lights around the corner of Willow Land, and Dusty Harper’s red pickup truck pulled up in front of the trailer. Her daddy had lost his license a year ago and sometimes Dusty would run into him at the Last Chance Bar and Grille and give him a ride home. Ashleigh’s stomach always knotted up when she heard Dusty’s pickup truck chugging around the corner because she knew that meant they’d both been drinking. Nothing good ever happened when the two of them went out drinking.

This is a Christmas cozy. I sort of like a Christmas cozy mystery or a Christmas Regency or something along those lines at this time of year, so I picked this one up because there are dogs and the reviews were pretty good and, well, why not.

I find this opening … hmm … forgettable. Uninteresting. There’s nothing here that immediately appeals to me. This thing about Ashleigh’s dad drinking is a little bit off-putting. I don’t much care for drinking problems or alcoholism as a plot element, particularly not in mysteries. It often signals not a comfortable cozy but a gritty detective novel featuring a retired cop who screwed his life up and hit rock bottom and so on, you know the basic type of protagonist I mean because this is a total cliché. This can’t be that type of story because it’s being sold as a Christmas cozy, but I’m hearing this echo of the bitter washed-up alcoholic protagonist nevertheless. Ashleigh also seems a bit ineffectual right off the bat. Her dad has this problem and apparently she hasn’t done anything effective about it.

I would, however, turn the page, because after all dogs plus decent reviews. So we’ll see.

2. Finders Keepers by Linnea Sinclair

The Careless Venture’s intruder alarm erupted through the cavern with a harsh wail. Trilby Elliot shot to her feet, knocking over the makeshift repair table. Sonic welder and integrator cables clattered to the cavern floor.

She bolted for her freighter’s rampway. Overhead, a nest of sleeping blood-bats burst out of the rocky crevices like small, leathery missiles. The panicked bats spiraled in front of her. Screeching, they fled through the wide mouth of the cavern into the lavender twilight.

She reached her rampway just as a silver object flashed across the sky behind them

“Damn. Double damn.” Another ship here meant big trouble. And even a little trouble was more than she could handle right now.

This is an SF romance. I’ve had it on my Kindle for ages and ages, but recently got reminded that I want to try something by this author. I’m kind of in the mood for a light SF romance, so I pulled this one up to the front.

This is a much more active opening. I’m not especially interested, but certainly nothing pushes me away from this opening. I would certainly turn the page, no question.

3. Owl Dance by David Lee Summers

“Sheriff, I hate to spread rumors …”

Ramon Morales tipped his hat back on his head. The blurred form of a small, hunched-over woman silhouetted by the light of the setting sun was in the door of his office. “Rumors? What …”

The woman inclined her head and planted her hands on her hips. “I’m talking about the curandera who rode into town last month in her fancy wagon.” She looked from one side to the other, then stepped close to the desk. Mrs. Chavez’s face became clear then. “I think she may be practicing black magic,” she said in hushed tones. “She might be a bruja.”

Now, your mileage may vary, but personally, I think it’s quite risky to open a novel with dialogue. I think it’s hard to pull that off. For me, this opening doesn’t manage it. Maybe if the woman were more sympathetic. But “I hate to spread rumors” means “I love to badmouth people.” Ugh. Also, the writing doesn’t seem all that strong in other ways. The transition from “woman” to “Mrs. Chavez” doesn’t seem smooth enough to me.

I don’t remember why I picked up this sample, but here’s the description from Amazon:

The year is 1876, Sheriff Ramon Morales of Socorro, New Mexico meets a beguiling woman named Fatemeh Karimi, who is looking to make a new start after escaping oppression in her homeland. When an ancient lifeform called Legion comes to Earth, they are pulled into a series of events that will change the history of the world as we know it. In their journeys, Ramon and Fatemeh encounter mad inventors, dangerous outlaws and pirates. Their resources are Ramon’s fast draw and Fatemeh’s uncanny ability to communicate with owls. The question is, will that be enough to save them when a fleet of airships from Czarist Russia invades the United States?

Sounds like a wildly weird Western, but I find the description more appealing than the actual opening.

4. The Shadow Prince by David Anthony Durham

I saw Merk and his friends before they saw me.

My first instinct was to jump behind something and hide, but I was out in the open now on a flat expanse beside the village, with nothing but sunbaked ground and a few tiny shrubs around me.

My second thought was to drop to the ground and play dead. Not the best plan, though. If they saw me, it would be way too embarrassing. I probably could have leaped back down into the canal next to me, but I’d just been in the canal for ages cleaning out debris.

It was one of my jobs – an important one as my mentor, Yazen, liked to remind me. The village depended on the crops for food and the crops depended on water to grow. Since we lived in the desert, water wasn’t easy to come by. It took a system of canals powered by sunmills to bring it in.

This is a MG story. I sort of like the first couple sentences, but the worldbuilding seems less than smooth. “Since we lived in the desert,” really? This is a version of “As you know, Bob.” The protagonist knows all this. Presumably everyone in the village is aware of the fact that they live in a village in a desert and the canals are powered by sunmills and so on. This is the kind of thing that makes people say, “Can’t you show rather than tell?” It’s an example of telling that is not smooth. You’ve already got sunbaked ground and tiny scattered shrubs and canals. Go on with that and build the image and feel of the desert without saying, “Here we are in a desert.”

I’d go on a bit because I like interesting settings and this one sound interesting — it’s described as an alternate Egyptian steampunk setting — but I’m not very taken by this opening.

5. Changer of Days by Alma Alexander

Prologue

There were still echoes of sporadic fighting, but night was drawing in fast. Fodrun, finding himself suddenly alone in the middle of what had until less than an hour ago been a fierce battlefield, paused and looked around, taking stock. There was blood on him, none of it his own, but fatigue ached like a wound and his wrists throbbed with the pain of simply holding his sword. He remembered very little after the incandescent moment when he had seen Red Dynan, the king, stagger and slide off his horse with a cursed Rashin arrow in his eye. Fodrun had succumbed to pure battle frenzy, leading his small knot of men directly into the Tath army’s flank, exposing all to certain death for an instant of revenge. All were now dead. All except him. And he seemed only now to have woken from a nightmare.

The price was good and I thought sure, this sounds like it might be good, why not, and picked up the full book. There’s a long prologue. It’s not a dreadful history textbook prologue or a context-free battle prologue, but it’s sort of close to the latter, since here we are, in the immediate aftermath of a context-free battle. Also, my goodness, I sure hope Fodrun isn’t the protagonist of the book or, in fact, a point of view character, because I despise him. He lost his head and senselessly led his men into a slaughter.  That is … I don’t have words. That is the exact opposite of a sympathetic character. Sure, he could be worse – he could be an outright villain instead of an impulsive idiot – but wow, this is not an appealing moment in his life.

I realize readers all have their individual likes and dislikes. It just so happens that Alma Alexander could hardly have opened a novel in a way more carefully calculated to make me recoil in disgust with the pov character.

6. Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie

Sophie Dempsey didn’t like Temptation even before the Garveys smashed into her ’86 Civic, broke her sister’s sunglasses, and confirmed all her worst suspicions about people from small towns who drove beige Cadillacs.

Half an hour earlier, Sophie’s sister Amy had been happily driving too fast down highway 32, her bright hair ruffling in the wind as she sang “In the Middle of the Nowhere” with Dusty Springfield on the tape deck. Maple trees had waved cheerfully in the warm breeze, cotton clouds had bounced across the blue, blue sky, and the late-August sun had blasted everything in sight.

And Sophie had felt a chill, courtesy, she was sure, of the sixth sense that had kept generations of Dempseys out of jail most of the time.

Now, this is delightful. This is a contemporary romance recommended by Anna Paradox at Paradox World. I liked the first paragraph, I liked the second paragraph, and this third paragraph cinched the deal.  I read this little snippet and just like that, I’m confident this story is going to be light and fun and well-written. I’ve never heard of Crusie before, but I’m pretty sure I’ll like her style.

7. Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff

It’s a room an uninspired play-wright might conjure while staring at a blank page: White walls. White ceiling. White floor. Not featureless, but close enough to raise suspicion that its few contents are all crucial to the upcoming drama.

A woman sits in one of two chairs drawn up to a rectangular white table. Her hands are cuffed in front of her; she is dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit whose bright hue seems dull in the whiteness. A photograph of a smiling politician hangs on the wall above the table. Occasionally the woman glances up at the photo, or at the door that is the room’s only exit, but mostly she stares at her hands, and waits.

I got this because I liked another book of Ruff’s and this one sounded intriguing. It’s fairly far over on the literary side of SFF, which I think is probably where it falls, but I’m not completely sure. Here’s the description:

Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder. She tells police that she is a member of a secret organization devoted to fighting evil; her division is called the Department for the Final Disposition of irredeemable Persons – “Bad Monkeys.” …

It goes on from there. This sounds potentially really interesting and I might well love it, but, I will add, I am a lot more likely to read contemporary romances and Christmas cozies right at the moment.

8. Lanny by Max Porter                                         

Dead Papa Toothwort wakes from his standing nap an acre wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter. He lies down to hear hymns in the earth (there are none, so he hums), then he shrinks, cuts himself a mouth with a rusted ring pull and sucks up a wet skin of acid-rich mulch and fruity detritivores. He splits and wobbles, divides and reassembles, coughs up a plastic pot and a petrified condom, briefly pauses as a smashed fiberglass bath, stumbles and rips off the mask, feels his face and finds it made of long-buried tannic acid bottles. Victorian rubbish.

Tetchy Papa Toothwort should never sleep in the afternoon; he doesn’t know who he is.

He wants to kill things, so he sings. It sounds slow-nothing like tarmac bubbles popping in a heatwave. His grin takes a sticky hour. Cheering up, he chatters in the voice of a cultured fool to the dry papery wings and under-bark underlings, to the marks he left here last year, to the mice and larks, voles and deer, to the quaint memory of himself as cyclically reliable, as part of the country curriculum.

Evocative, poetic, intriguing, but not remotely anything I want to read right now. Very literary. From Amazon, this: “LANNY is a ringing defense of creativity, spirit, and the generative forces that often seem under assault in the contemporary world, and it solidifies Porter’s reputation as one of the most daring and sensitive writers of his generation.”

Well, this is the sort of novel that’s going to require more attention than I may want to give it. It’s very short; actually a novella. 157 pp, it says. Typical time to read, three hours. That means I’m pretty likely to read it eventually … but not this month.

9. The Q by Beth Brower

Every time the door into the front office of The Q opened, the sounds of Gainsford Street, business hub of Rhysdon, would come tumbling in on the heels of whoever entered. Clicking, turning, marking time, the rush and flow of the patrons was like the working gears of humanity’s clock. These sounds all transformed neatly into the mechanics of The Q. And, perched on a stool behind the front counter, conducting her business – waiting upon customers, efficiently taking questions for the next edition, tidying figures and markets and profits down to each percentage and comma and dot – sat Miss Quincy St. Claire, chief officer of operations, self-appointed auditor of all accounts, final editor overseeing the team of typesetters, proffers, and printers, and, in general, the central gear in the workings of her great-uncle’s business.

I like this a lot! Honestly, the writing, different as it may be, might be as good as the one above – the rush and flow of the patrons was like the working gears of humanity’s clock – but this is just infinitely more approachable. There’s a lightness to this, not comic, but lively and appealing. Of this batch of novels, this is the opening that appeals to me most, though I’m actually likely to read either the Christmas cozy or the contemporary romance first. Something witty and familiar, with a setting that I don’t have to think about.

10. The Walking Drum by Louis L’Amour

Nothing moved but the wind and only a few last, lingering drops of rain, only a blowing of water off the ruined wall. Listening, I heard no other sound. My imagination was creating foes where none existed.

Only hours ago death had visited this place. This heap of charred ruins had been my home, and a night ago I had lain staring into the darkness of the ceiling, dreaming as always of lands beyond the sea. Now my mother lay in a shallow grave, dug by my own hands, and my home was a ruin where rainwater gathered in the hollows of the ancient stone floor, a floor put down by my ancestors before memory began.

Already dawn was suggesting itself to the sky. Waiting an instant longer, my knife held low in my fist, I told myself, “I will have that gold or kill any who comes between it and me.”

You remember, I read that book about books by Louis L’Amour recently and wanted to pick up a book of his. This is one of the ones I thought I might try. Honestly, although the writing isn’t bad, the narrator isn’t very appealing. He’s just buried his mother, and what he’s thinking about is the gold? Practical, to be sure, but not particularly sympathetic.

I was going to stop at ten, but let me look at the other Louis L’Amour sample I picked up at the same time:

11. Hondo by Louis L’Amour

He rolled the cigarette in his lips, liking the taste of the tobacco, squinting his eyes against the sun glare. His buckskin shirt, seasoned by sun, rain, and sweat, smelled stale and old. His jeans had long since faded to a neutral color that lost itself against the desert.

He was a big man, wide-shouldered, with the lean, hard-boned face of the desert rider. There was no softness in him. His toughness was ingrained and deep, without cruelty, yet quick, hard, and dangerous. Whatever wells of gentleness might lie within him were guarded and deep.

An hour passed and there was no more dust, so he knew he was in trouble.

I think this is an interesting opening. I mean, this is the purest example of opening a novel by telling rather than showing that I can remember seeing in a long time. It’s not off-putting particularly; just unusual compared to more modern novels. Ah, first published in 1953. Nearly seventy years ago. This makes me kind of want to go open The Count of Monte Christo or something and compare this stylistic element.

Anyway, I actually like this better than the opening of The Walking Drum. I don’t dislike this protagonist. Maybe I might like him. He sure sounds like a quintessential Western hero. Also, the last line quoted above is good. There’s no dust, so he knows he’s in trouble. That’s intriguing and promises action is coming soon. A classic Western is as good as a contemporary romance for providing familiarity, though perhaps not lighthearted wit. This is another one I might read while also working on my own stuff.

In terms of what I actually like best here – Yes, The Q is the one I’d put at the top. That’s my favorite, even if I’m not likely to actually read it right away. Lanny is the one with the best writing, I do agree with the critic I quoted that this is an amazing opening, but it’s hardly the one I like best. After The Q, I like Welcome to Temptation the best.

For me, Changer of Days is the least appealing because I really do not like the pov we see in that prologue. When I eventually try that book, I’ll probably re-read that opening, say Oh, yeah, this one, and skip the prologue. Maybe I’ll like whatever pov opens the actual story better. It would be hard to like that pov less. I doubt the prologue is all that necessary, and if I get puzzled I can always go back and skim the prologue to see what was in there.

Owl Dance and The Shadow Prince seem to have less smooth writing than the others here, but Silent Night is the opening that seems least interesting. That makes it more likely, not less likely, that I’ll try it soon – but that’s a mixed blessing, because if an opening doesn’t appeal to me, I’ll be reading the sample with an eye to hitting delete rather than see in store.

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A fun post from Ilona Andrews

Full disclosure: this post is about a dog, not a book. It is, however, a funny post that you should read. Also, I’ll add a note that Ilona Andrews often include great details about dogs in their books and when they do, those details are accurate. These are authors who make me happy by getting dog stuff right! And mentioning breeds that seldom appear in genre fiction!

Also, truly, it’s a funny story.

Plus, this is yet another moment in my life where I appreciate my SMALL dogs. I may have more blow-drying to do when I bathe a dog, but even so, it’s a zillion times easier to bathe a Cavalier in the kitchen sink than bathing an Olde English Bulldogge (yes, that’s the breed name) in the shower.

Oh, also I see that Ilona Andrews have released a new book in a new series! I didn’t know that.

At first glance, the planet Rada seems like a lush paradise. But the ruling families, all boasting genetically enhanced abilities, are in constant competition for power—and none more so than the Adlers and the Baenas. For generations, the powerful families have pushed and pulled each other in a dance for dominance. Until a catastrophic betrayal from within changes everything.

Now, deadly, disciplined, and solitary leaders Ramona Adler and Matias Baena must put aside their enmity and work together in secret to prevent sinister forces from exploiting universe-altering technology.…

It’s a novella, not a full novel. A bit over 200 pages. Just came out in late November — looks like right before Thanksgiving. Well, next time I’m in a reading slump, I expect I’ll probably reach for this.

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This is amazing

Here is a twitter thread I am very certain you will enjoy:

In January of this year, photos started bouncing round the internet of this deeply weird thing happening in the sky above Glasgow. Photoshop trickery?

The bizarre truth:
– yes, everyone really saw these
– no, they're not faked or manmade
– they absolutely don't exist.



1/ pic.twitter.com/EMVFsTaplz

— Mike Sowden (@Mikeachim) December 3, 2021

You must certainly click through and read the whole thing. Although some of the photos are more dramatic than this one I’ve linked here, I have to say, this somewhat more subtle phenomenon strikes me as especially beautiful.

What would this be in an SFF world? Aliens, obviously; that’s one possibility. But in fantasy? I’m considering creating a fantasy phenomenon that would look like this because it’s just so amazingly cool to look at.

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Back Cover Copy for Keraunani

I threw brief, casual back cover copy onto my fake cover for Keraunani just so I could move on and get a review copy to help me proofread the book. I mean, really brief! Like this:

When Esau Karuma volunteered to marry a girl real quick to get her out of trouble, he didn’t anticipate any particular difficulty.

He may have been a little too optimistic about that …

Now, I don’t know that the back cover description is super important for this book. People are going to read Tarashana and think, Sure, why not see how Esau’s mission goes, sounds like fun. Or possibly, Well, what I want is Tasmakat, but in the meantime, fine, how is Esau’s mission going? Honestly, the above description might be enough to remind readers that oh, right, Esau had this side mission, and that’s probably enough.

Perhaps a little more detail might be advisable, though. Something like this:

Esau never expected to marry any woman. Not permanently, as a jewel wife. He’s really not the type to give a girl a jewel.

But when Keraunani needs to get married right away to get out from under a whole lot of trouble, Esau doesn’t hesitate to volunteer. After all, there’s no reason there should be any particular difficulty about it. As long as the girl has a thimbleful of common sense, no reason either of them should be too much of a nuisance to the other. He’ll just marry her quick, get her settled someplace she’ll be comfortable, and that will be that.

He might have been a little too optimistic …

What do you all think? How does that sound?

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2021 In Review

No, not that kind of review. I’m not looking at the world. (Scared to, frankly.) Now that it’s December and we’re getting close to the end of the year, I’m looking closer to home: at what writing projects I worked on this year, what I didn’t quite manage to complete this year, and what I want to work on next year.

What I did this year:

–Brought out The Sphere of the Winds in February. I’m pausing to appreciate that because it’s hard to believe that happened this year. It seems much longer ago.

–Brought out Tarashana in March. Oddly, that does not seem as long ago.

–Revised and brought out the Death’s Lady trilogy in May. Now, that seems like practically yesterday. How strange our perception of time can be. I suspect this is because I did so much more fiddling with this one for what seemed a quite extended period, whereas I barely touched Sphere.

–Revised (again) an SF novel called No Foreign Sky and handed it (again) to my agent for her perusal.

–Wrote Keraunani from start to finish and have it completely ready to release early next year (whenever the cover is ready). This is what I’m happiest about, so I’m mentally plastering this item with many gold stars and adding little smiley faces.

–Wrote complete drafts of three Black Dog novellas (to join the one I wrote a year or two ago). They’re each about 70 to 90 pages, whatever that is in words. I’m reasonably happy with this too, although I didn’t get them all finished and revised as quickly as I’d hoped.

–Figured out how to (probably) (I’m pretty sure) finish the SF novel, Invictus, that has given me enormous trouble for several years, and began revising the manuscript in light of that new understanding. This project is not connected in any way to the SF novel mentioned above.

–Wrote about 100 pages of Tasmakat, though at this point it’s impossible to know how much of that will actually appear in the final draft. Or even the complete first draft.

–Wrote a long, roughly 130-pp, novella set in the Tuyo world, which takes place directly after Tuyo. I’ll call this Suelen for now, as that’s the name of the protagonist.

–Wrote 20 pp or so, plus brief notes, for a possible story from Tano’s pov, which takes place directly after Tarashana.

–Came up with an idea for another story in the Tuyo world, which would take place during the events of Tarashana and Tasmakat. I may not write that, but thanks to Kim Aippersbach for the suggestion that led to this idea (“Maybe you can take that neat character you just cut from Tasmakat and write a separate story about him.”) (Yes, could be!).

–Came up with a pretty clear notion that could supply the central plotline of a novel or series of novels from Tano’s point of view, and thanks to Craig for the suggestion that led to that idea. It would constitute a spoiler to say anything about that idea. I will just point out that, given the thing with the eagle, it would be strange if Tano didn’t have an exciting life.

–Came up with a rough outline for a third book in The Floating Islands series, and I’m grateful to the various people who prompted me to do that by writing me long letters about Sphere.

–Took casual notes about the 5th Black Dog novel, Silver Circle.

I think that’s it? Pretty sure that’s it.

What I did not do this year (that I actually hoped to do):

–Release the Black Dog stories for the 4th collection.

–Write anything at all for Silver Circle.

–Finish the draft of Invictus.

–Finish the Death’s Lady novella that’s been sitting here practically forever. I mean, I wrote the pages I have right after I wrote the main story, so that was a long time ago. Several of you have asked about this story and I have picked it up several times fairly recently and added a little to it. I know the next few scenes; I’ve known those scenes from the beginning. I just need to find time to write them. Also, more difficult, I need to decide exactly where to end this novella, because it could continue straight into a new book in the series, and I’m not sure whether to wave the dangling thread with a dramatic flourish or not. I will add, this story is from Kuomat’s point of view and the dangling thread has to do with who he used to be.

Overall, I’m happy with how much I did this year and pretty much satisfied with where things wound up and how my time and attention was allocated. Obviously I would have liked to do the four items above, but I’m not exactly surprised that I didn’t get to them. I did two fairly major revisions (Death’s Lady and No Foreign Sky), plus wrote, hmm, my rough calculation suggests that I wrote about 850 pages or so, what with this and that. Fiction, not counting things like blog posts. Yep, I think that’s satisfactory!

What I plan (or anyway hope) to do in 2022:

–Finish the 4th Black Dog collection and bring that out.

–Bring out Keraunani.

–Finish Invictus and almost certainly bring that out myself. This is a book I’m pretty excited about, but I’m not at all sure editors would feel the same way. It’s not exactly space opera. I’m not sure what it is. I started with a core concept that’s sort of similar to the central relationship in Tuyo, but also significantly different. And playing out against a totally different background and situation. Still, there is this essential similarity, except that this time both protagonists do get to carry the pov and the older one is a woman. Anyway, I love this story and I really, really, really want to prioritize it for 2022.

–By the end of the year, either see progress toward traditional publication for No Foreign Sky or else prepare to bring that out myself. This is sociological SF with a space opera sort of plot. My first truly alien species! I’d like to see this story out in the world.

–Bring out Suelen in one form or another.

–Finish the Death’s Lady novella — you know what, let’s just call that Kuomat for now — and bring that out in one form or another.

–Possibly finish that story from Tano’s pov, since if I write it at all, it ought really to be released before Tasmakat. If I write it, bring it out in one form or another.

–Write Tasmakat, and here I’m not just saying “finish” because it barely counts as started. I’m sure it will go long, so the 100 pages or so I have now are a small fraction of the finished draft.

–Possibly write that other story in the Tuyo world, the one Kim suggested.

–Make substantial progress on Silver Circle, even if (as seems fairly likely) I don’t complete a full draft. This depends primarily on how fast Tasmakat goes. If that one turns into a completely obsessive project and I write the whole draft in two months or whatever, then obviously Silver Circle is a lot more likely to also get completed in 2022. If I DO finish a full draft of this final Black Dog novel, I’ll be super happy about that. I will add, if I hit the 80,000 word mark, I’m pretty likely to get it finished in fairly short order. That’s the point at which, first, I really feel like with just a little more of a push, I could be there; and second, I usually have a clear idea of the ending scenes and the whole feel of the draft goes from “uphill” to “downhill.”

–Frame out an extended Epilogue type of story for the Black Dog world, possibly something that might appear in a 5th collection.

–Work just a little on the Complicated Epic Fantasy that I have barely started. I’d like to have that actually in progress by the end of 2022, with, ideally (I know, this is probably crazy), some reasonable notion where that story is going. That way I may be able to really work on it in 2023.

–Start a third Floating Islands novel, and I’m sorry that this hopeful statement doesn’t constitute a guarantee because I know quite a few people would like me to do this. I’m adding it here because the odds are fairly good I will indeed move forward on this project. I have this absolutely great scene in mind that would be amazing fun to write and that may make all the difference. I might write the beginning of this book or maybe jump all the way ahead and write that scene; either would constitute “starting” this book, and if I do start it, then I am much more likely to finish it.

And that … is a baker’s dozen items for 2022. That is probably enough to keep me usefully occupied next year.

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