Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 118

Flat Character Arcs

Today at Book View Cafe, a new post: Stories that succeed with flat character arcs.

Click through for a discussion of characters that don’t have and don’t need dramatic character arcs, plus (of course) a spaniel picture.

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Be grateful in your own hearts

I saw this just now at Passive Voice and thought, How lovely.

I will post it here as well, even though it’s now a few days post-Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving has wings

November 25, 2021 by PG

Be grateful in your own hearts. That suffices. Thanksgiving has wings, and flies to its right destination.

Victor Hugo

Several other Thanksgiving quotes at Passive Voice; click through if you’d like to read them all.

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Finished! Unexpectedly

Okay, so, one of the strategies that people talk about with regard to self-publishing is the use of something called a “book funnel,” which is a fairly broad term that refers to, say, a free story or novella that readers can pick up only by subscribing to your email list. Or a free book in a series, used as an inducement to subscribe but also available for purchase. This sort of idea is described, for example, here, and this is a technique that I want to consider more carefully and maybe put in place in 2022. Everyone seems to agree that building an email list is crucial, so well, probably I ought to take steps to do that, I guess.

So to open up options for that kind of thing, I thought, I’ve got this idea for a story set in the Tuyo world, I’ll write that and then think about how best to use it.

I figured this story would run about forty pages, fifty max — okay, maaaaybe up to 60 or so — but it ought to be fairly short, so it shouldn’t take long to write, and then once I had a finished draft I could set it aside for a bit and decide how to proceed whenever I got around to it.

Well, it may not surprise you to learn that the story wasn’t that hard to write and didn’t take too long, but poof! expanded to 130 pages or so, close to 50,000 words. I finished it this morning, barring ordinary revision. It certainly seems long enough to just bring it out as a separate story. Which I guess I’ll do, sometime next year. I’ll need to revise it and get a cover for it and so on. I may still be able to use this story as a book funnel in one way or another; I’m not sure.

Regardless, this story is set directly after Tuyo. The basic idea … well, obviously you remember the battle that took place in the winter country. You probably remember that the inKera were going to care for those who were too badly injured to travel. No doubt you realize that a small handful of surviving Lau have been among those injured.Well, think how a Lau physician would feel, learning about those Lau, abandoned in the winter country, subject to who knows what barbaric medical practices, maybe to outright neglect. If that physician were brave enough, he might well insist on heading into the winter lands, with as many medical supplies as he could carry, to deal with this situation.

Surgeon Dedicat Suelen Haras Soyauta, personal physician to the king of the summer country, is that physician.

I learned quite a bit about medical practices in ancient Rome and so forth while looking up stuff for this story. As you all no doubt realize, the history of medicine in the real world is horrifically depressing for an awfully long time. You’ll be glad to know that in the world of Tuyo, surgeons may make use of many helpful techniques that weren’t available in the real world. To be sure, some of those techniques would be viewed with great suspicion by the Ugaro, who equate all magic with sorcery.

Lord Gaur warned Suelen very strictly against using any but the most subtle cantrips while in the winter lands. But, faced with actual patients in dire need of treatment — Lau OR Ugaro — I’m sure you realize that any physician worth his salt would disregard all those warnings … and there you go. That’s the basic story.

So, that’s what I did over Thanksgiving weekend — finished this story. I hope you all — those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving — enjoyed the holiday as well!

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Writing with Food

This is turning into such a theme lately! But every time I turn around, there’s another post on this topic!

This one is a post by Jacqueline Carey, author of Kushiel’s Dart and many other books, from tor.com: Writing With Food: A Culinary Journey

I loved Kushiel’s Dart, though this series goes to pretty grim places, so I’m just saying, if that’s not what you’re in the mood for right now, fair warning. The series is by no means grimdark, however, and Carey is a fantastic writer, so if you’ve never tried her work, you might look something of hers up. She has some Urban Fantasy out too, none of which I have read, though I’ve had one of those on my TBR pile for years.

But back to the topic: Writing with food!

During the summer I spent on the island of Crete, in the village where we lived there was a family-owned taverna that didn’t have a name. The father worked over an outdoor grill in one corner of the terrace. I still daydream about their grilled octopus. That simple yet exquisite dish led me to commit a rare culinary anachronism in my alternate historical writing. In Kushiel’s Mercy, Imriel arrives on the island of Cythera. Looking for a grounding detail, I thought about my favorite meals in Greece. Consequently, my oft-beleaguered young hero enjoys a rare moment of respite with a luncheon of grilled octopus accompanied by potatoes cooked in olive oil.

Potatoes, oops.

A week or two before the book was released, I woke up in the middle of the night and realized, “Ohmigod, we haven’t discovered the New World yet, potatoes couldn’t possibly exist in this scenario!” Too late. I never actually did correct that reference. By the time the opportunity to proof the paperback edition rolled around, I was kind of amused by it and decided to let it stay so I could use it as a trivia question.

Click through if you’d like to read the rest of post.

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Gingerbread bricks

While on the subject of food, which we sort of are because of the recent post on worldbuilding with food, here’s an unexpected post at tor.com: Gingerbread Bricks, Cherry-Stealing Cats, and Other Culinary Disasters

I say this post is unexpected because it’s by … … … Patricia McKillip! I bet you didn’t see that coming! Aren’t you a zillion times more interested in clicking through now? Of course you are.

But here’s an excerpt:

My most vivid cooking memory, even after so many years, is setting my brother on fire with my Cherries Jubilee.

I think I wanted to make Cherries Jubilee because of its name. Who wouldn’t? My mother made wonderful cherry pies for years. This was sort of the same thing only without a crust and with a match. A sauce for vanilla ice cream: how hard could that be? Just about all I had to do was pour a shot glass or two of brandy on some warmed cherries and light it up. As Shakespeare put it: “Strange how desire doth outrun performance.” As I ladled cherries into my youngest sibling’s bowl, my hand shook and suddenly there was a blue flame dancing along his blue jeans. I stared at it. He stared at it. The expression on his face mingled amazement that I had set him on fire with a long-suffering lack of surprise. For that one second, both of us wondered what to do. Then I decided: Better me than my brother. I brushed the flame off his knee with my hand and found that fire could be quite cool. His expression changed: for once I had managed to impress him, though it certainly wasn’t with my cooking.

Happy Thanksgiving, and enjoy the gingerbread brick story…

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Argh, Pushing Back the Black Dog Collection

Okay, so, sorry, but I’ve decided to stop stressing over getting the 4th Black Dog collection out in December. That would put too much pressure on me (to do revisions really fast) and on proofreaders (to proofread even faster). I most particularly don’t want to rush in a way that means I miss doing the revisions as well as they should be done.

There’s no deadline set in stone, so … I’m moving this release to “undefined time early in 2022.”

The good news: I DO have drafts complete for four novellas, all of which are on the longish side as these stories go. Four has been the usual number per collection. I may or may not write a fifth novella. If I don’t, then I’ll aim to release this collection in January 2022. If I do, then … I know, but … probably February. Or later.

I’m leaning (hard) toward leaving this collection at four stories, but I will take another look at the partial draft of Grayson’s story and consider a few other possibilities before I decide for sure.

Regardless, I will definitely aim to finish everything but final proofreading over Christmas Break. Among other things. Christmas Break is a major writing period for me and I certainly want to work on something else too. I mean, honestly, this collection IS pretty near completion no matter how I handle it.

But, sorry, there will definitely be a delay.

Have a black puppy as a consolation prize. This is Morgan’s son. His name is Gimli — that’s his call name. His actual name is Anara Owain Lord Of Moria At Your Service, which demonstrates an excellent feel for great show names on the part of his owners because they came up with that. I must say, that name would look really good on a championship certificate.

This picture was taken some time ago, so Gimli is older than this now, but it’s one of my favorite pictures of him. He’s a great puppy and I was happy to de-limit his registration when his owners requested that. They’ve already put him in his first baby show. (He didn’t win his class, but I’m sure that was a miscarriage of justice.)

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Worldbuilding with food

After the previous post about “easy-ish” worldbuilding, this post by Joe M. McDermott about Worldbuilding and the Labor of Food certainly seems relevant! Also, food! Who doesn’t like that as a topic, right? Plus, I already specifically use details about food in worldbuilding anyway.

The labor of food! What crops are grown and who grows them, that’s part of the labor of food. So is cooking, from the day-in-day-out grinding of grain — did you know the skeletons of ancient Egyptian women show a very typical pathology linked to the continual labor to grind grain? That’s what leaped to mind for me when I saw the title of this post. I don’t know yet what direction McDermott will take here. I’ll look in a minute.

Of course, besides the labor of agriculture, there’s also the labor involved in cooking; who does the work and where, and with what variety and artistry? Remember the fun DWJ had with “stew” in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland?

Daily cooking is important, of course, but sometimes I prefer to focus on the beauty of special dishes rather than the labor involved in making, say, stew. Not just in The Floating Islands, where food is so central, but also in House of Shadows — remember the banquet scene? That was fun to write. Oh, hey, look at that, House of Shadows actually has a rating on Amazon of 4.7. I didn’t realize that until I pulled it up to get the link. I believe that must be my highest-rated book — certainly my highest rated traditionally published book. Let me just see … actually, quite a few 4.6 ratings, that’s nice to see … oh, look at this, The Sphere of the Winds actually has a star rating of 5.0!

Wow, now I’m especially happy I self-published this book … was that just this past spring? How time flies! Thank you, everyone who has left a review.

Anyway, back to the topic — worldbuilding and the labor of food. Let’s see where McDermott goes with this …

I have a lot of fruit trees on my little, suburban lot. It’s a postage stamp lot, and packed in as tight as can be are six citrus trees, two pomegranates, two pears, two plums, two peaches, a jujube, three grapevines, a barbados cherry, two olive trees, a loquat, an elderberry, passionfruit vines, blackberries, raspberry…

Wow, I’m envious! I’m down to five apple trees, having given up on the stonefruits. We had tremendous trouble with brown rot starting the year when hail came in and whapped the poor peaches just as they were ripening. All the peaches rotted on the trees and brown rot sank its claws in deep and we couldn’t get rid of it no matter what we did. Huge problems every year until, as I say, we gave up and removed the trees.

We do still have elderberries and raspberries. How neat to have olive trees! Though it’s a lot easier to buy olives of whatever types appeal to you. If I could grow any fruit tree, it wouldn’t be olives. It would be a Haas avocado. If I could pick another, it’d be a mango.

McDermott has a bit more to say about the food plants at his own home. Then he segues into the actual topic:

I think about how many fantasy novels are written and read by people who don’t take even a moment to think about what the weather and landscape mean to available food. In some ways, the conspicuous absence when I read fantasy is found in the way food is grown, harvested, prepared.

This is not quite the same, but I’m thinking now about this YA series … let me see … oh, right, the series that starts with Life as We Knew It. I liked this book a lot, it was quick and fun to read — I mean, fun for a post-apocalyptic story — but I was shocked how none of the characters ever thought, “Here I am looking at imminent starvation, so maybe I should go shoot a deer before they all starve. Or I bet there are fish in that pond. Or maybe we should collect acorns; I know those are edible if you treat them somehow, might be time to try to figure that out.” It was exactly like these (rural, or rural-ish) people had no notion food could ever come from anything but a grocery store. My take: Wow, every single editor and copy editor who ever at this has got to live smack dab in the middle of NYC.

And yes, I once did gather a lot of acorns and make acorn flour. I mean, why not? I wanted to see what that was like, and there were SO MANY acorns just lying there on the deck and in the yard. I had to do something with them because some of the dogs kept wanting to eat them. To this day, Dora will drop an acorn if I point at her sternly. They are in fact somewhat toxic and I really do not want the dogs to eat them. They’re quite bitter without treatment, so I’m baffled why they want to. (I’m just letting this post ramble, as you’ve gathered.)

Back to McDermott’s post:

The amount of work that goes into a single grain of wheat, a single loaf of bread, has been lost to us. We have divided up that labor across different industries such that we see a farmhouse table in our minds populated with edible things, and we think nothing of the farm from which everything rose up to create that picturesque scene. We don’t see all the manual labor required to get the raw material of soil into seed into a form that we can eat and put on that table. …

You know who does a great job with this? LMB in the Sharing Knife series.

Because of the way Bujold focuses on normal people living normal lives (I mean, plus the occasional giant bats), we do see a lot of day-to-day life on farms and small villages. Plenty about planting and harvesting and the work involved in getting food on the table. I love the small-scale focus on daily life in this series. That’s one of the factors that makes this series so comfortable to re-read.

McDermott writes:

I have grown a bit of corn from seed and dried it and ground it up into corn flour, and saved the seeds for another year’s cornbread. I have reached into the past to try and figure out how the people who lived here for a thousand years and more managed to survive on acorns and roots and pumpkins and peppers. We talk about world-building all the time, as writers, but we do it in our heads, where we can invent whatever suits us. When I build a world in my little yard, and it is an act of world-building, of managing forces and distances, constructing ecosystems and figuring out solutions to problems I unintentionally create, I am forced to face the hard truth of building a world.

That’s nicely put.

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Business Phrasebook

From the Economist via The Passive Voice blog: The business phrasebook

This is bit that caught my eye:

“I hear you”

Ostensible meaning: You’re making a legitimate point
Actual meaning: Be quiet

I laughed. That seems just about exactly right.

They go on like that. Here’s my favorite:

“I’m just curious…”

Ostensible meaning: I’d like to know why you think that…
Actual meaning: …because it makes no sense to anyone else

Click through and see which ones strike you as most true-to-life.

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Easy-ish worldbuilding

I like the title of this post: The Easy-ish Way to Create Believable, Unforgettable Fictional Worlds

Liking the title doesn’t mean I think I’ll agree with anything in the post. I will just bet up front that when it comes to worldbuilding, I do absolutely nothing this post recommends. I bet it’s all about sitting down and thinking through a million details before you start writing, in the same way that various posts recommend sitting down and interviewing your protagonist about his childhood, or whatever.

But I could be wrong about what this post is going to suggest, and hey, I do like the title! So sure, I’ll read the post.

Before I do that, though, I’ll suggest my own easy-ish way to create believable worlds:

My own personal easy-ish method of worldbuilding: Read a lot of fantasy novels, historical novels, and nonfiction. Do that for thirty or forty years and then just sit down and write novels. I bet the worldbuilding will take care of itself at that point and there you go, wasn’t that easy?

So that’s my method. Now, let’s see what this post suggests …

You don’t need to know where every mountain range is in your world unless your characters intend to cross them. What follows are a set of exercises that are geared mainly toward writers of fantasy who are creating secondary worlds, but hopefully applicable to all writers. The goal of these exercises to help you build a believable world that will add depth and color to the story you want to tell—without making you spend hours writing out the dominant flora on a continent your story will never visit.

Ah! This is at least close to reasonable. I see we are going to be given exercises. As a rule, I’m not a big fan of exercises or prompts or whatever, but let’s just see …

Exercise #1: Write down everything you already know about your story’s world.

Set a timer for five, 10, or 30 minutes—however much time you think you need—and write out everything you already know about the world in which your story takes place, stream-of-consciousness style. Focus on the parts of your story you’ve either written or can picture clearly in your head. For example, if you know a critical scene in the climax involves an escape from a desert prison, write, “There’s a prison in the desert.” Do not consult Wikipedia’s list of desert flora and fauna.

Now, I don’t think this is a terrible idea. I like the recommendation to avoid research and let the world be “a blurry mess,” as this post also suggests. On the other hand, I would never do the above exercise. In fact, I’m thinking now, retroactively, about doing this, and it’s not working.

Things I found out about the world of Tuyo when I got to them, not ahead of time:

–The fengol, which I created for that early scene, long, long before I knew it might be important.

–The way daylength is different on each side of the river

–That the land of the shades is literally under the earth, beneath the land of the living, and that the Sun and Moon literally do go down past the edge of the world when they set.

–In fact, everything about the metaphysics of this world.

I mean, I capitalized Sun and Moon and gave them gendered pronouns BEFORE, not after, developing the metaphysics. I didn’t know when I first did that how important that choice would be for the overall metaphysics of the world, even though it’s utterly crucial. I chose gendered pronouns just to nudge the world into a less familiar shape. That was an impulsive choice, not something I thought about beforehand.

After the metaphysics of the world developed — which it did during the process of writing the story, not before — that metaphysics then powerfully affected the societies of the Ugaro and the Lau. If I’d tried to write out a quick list of Things I Know About This World, NONE of the important metaphysics would have been in that list. Only the river with the different climates on either side. That’s it.

Almost everything about the role of women in Ugaro society would have been completely missing from a list of “stuff I know,” or worse, the role of women would be completely different, based much more on real-world societies. Thinking too much beforehand would very likely have prevented me from empowering women in the unique way they are empowered within Ugaro society, because their role is based on metaphysics that developed as, not before, I wrote the story.

This post goes on to suggest other exercises. Like this:

Exercise #3: Now pick ONE thing that you know about the world of your story, something that affects the characters and plot. Then change it.  Is it basically impossible to change one thing without changing everything else? Good—That means your world is probably pretty cohesive already.

Interesting! Again, I’m not likely to do it, because I’m not likely to know enough about the world to even know what elements exist, much less which are important, until I’m way into the story. But this does circle back to the metaphysics of the Tuyo world. If I tried to de-gender the Moon and the Sun, everything would indeed change, boom! The whole Ugaro conception of femininity totally depends on the metaphysics. I suppose the Lau conception of masculinity also depends on the metaphysics, but that is so much more consistent with real-world societies that it’s hard to tell.

Also from the linked post:

How to Add Depth to Your World’s History

I do think this is very important. I do it with details of food and architecture drawn from real historical cultures; with attitudes also drawn from real historical cultures; and, increasingly, by trying to create and use plenty of world-specific idioms, metaphors, axioms, and so on. Adding all sorts of figures of speech is a deliberate effort I make, and something I think I’m better at now than I used to be.

Let’s see what this post suggests:

There are a lot of things that make for an unforgettable world, but one of those things is that, sociologically, it makes sense. …

I agree, although a skilled enough author can get away with changing human nature to a surprising degree. Here I’m thinking of Sherwood Smith in her Inda series. Absolutely fabulous series, which I love very much, but certain elements of her societies are, shall we say, not entirely plausible. She is good enough to pull that off.

And … yeah, the linked post is now getting into Let’s Create A World Bible! territory.

List all the races, ethnicities, nationalities, religions, species, and other “groupings” of beings in your world. …Now pick a group from your world, and describe in a couple of words (or longer) their historic relationship with some of the other groups on your list. … Write a history of these relationships from the perspective of the participants. …

Oh, come on! You might as well also pause to look up the ecology of desert regions, and while you’re at it why not draw maps that show all your mountain ranges, complete with hidden citadels and the ruins of past civilizations. You could also delineate current and historical political borders and hey! why not develop a complete language (two!) because that’ll certainly add depth …

To me, this sort of exercise seems like it could be a fun hobby, but a hobby that is almost entirely orthogonal to actually writing a novel. Worse, and I realize this is just me, but it looks like the sort of exercise that is slamming doors as it goes. If you design too much ahead, how is the world going to actually develop? Yep, obviously that’s a protest that comes from an organic writer, not the sort of writer who works from detailed outlines. I’m willing to bet at this point that the author of the linked post … Kelsey Allagood … is probably an outliner. Maybe the tendency to create a world bible is independent of the tendency to be an outliner, but it seems offhand like the two should go together.

Anyway, I do think my method — read a lot of books for thirty years and then just sit down and write books — is in fact easier. For me.

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Predictions for 2050

Via a link from Scott Alexander: Futurists have their heads in the clouds

The problem with futurists is they trend toward being sci-fi writers without the plot. Consider the recent The Age of Em, by Robin Hanson, in which he predicts that “roughly within a century” human civilization will be composed mostly of uploaded digital minds. Robin Hanson is a very smart person, but this is a terribly bad prediction. …

If you want to predict the future accurately, you should be an incrementalist and accept that human nature doesn’t change along most axes. Meaning that the future will look a lot like the past. …

To see what I mean more specifically: 2050, that super futuristic year, is only 29 years out, so it is exactly the same as predicting what the world would look like today back in 1992.

Wow, I paused at that point. It’s really strange to think that 2050 is fewer than 30 years away. Once again, I remember figuring out as a kid how old I’d be in the year 2000 and thinking that was so far away. 2050 doesn’t seem far away at all when I think about it now.

I’m not into predictions. I mean, I’m not into trying to make my own predictions! I’m perfectly happy to read other people’s serious predictions. I like this post because I agree that human nature doesn’t change (obviously) and that this is important.

So this is a guy named Erik Hoel, whom I don’t know anything about except that some of his predictions make me feel a little better about the near future, some make me feel significantly worse, and most of them seem fairly plausible.

Not sure about his first prediction, though. Here it is:

1. There will be a Martian colony.
This might seem to contradict my point to be conservative, but I think we can make this judgement precisely by extrapolating the incredible progress in the private space sector over the last decade. By 2050 there will be an established and growing civilian presence on Mars—a city on the Red Planet. Founded by a joint-company consortium in terms of the actual ships and structures, it will also have NASA and other national space programs’ support. The whole world will watch in excitement and its development will be covered closely by Earth press, though there is already early controversy over the privatized nature of it. Jobs on Mars will be mainly either science, construction, or tourism. But the first city will experience surprisingly explosive economic growth, adding population in a way no Earth city is at the time. It’s very possible someone you know right now will be living on Mars by 2050. …

That seems wildly optimistic to me. On the other hand, who knows? Hoel is probably following this stuff far more closely than I am, since I’m not following it at all.

Here’s another. I’ll just pull out the part that would matter the most to me:

3. AI will be the most futuristic impactful change in day-to-day life. … The worst hit will be artists like writers, painters, poets, and musicians, who will have to deal with a total saturation of artistic content by AI. By 2050 much of the words you read and content you consume will be generated by an AI

So, that wouldn’t be good. The link goes to a post examining the output of an AI when it’s “trained” to write a novel. That post is also worth a look.

Here is the final prediction in its entirety:

17. People and culture will become boring.
Ultimately, this soft totalitarianism will be more like contemporary China’s and less like Stalinist Russian. There will not be obvious gulags or firing squads in the streets, although eventually there may be disappearances or jail time. The “gestapo” will mostly just ban you, cancel you, fire you, and lower your social credit score; essentially it will be a caste system. Being boring will become a survival trait. And look around. It already has. All socially risky behavior is on the decline, and has been in the decade since social media and the introduction of the smart phone. People in 2050 will have less sex, do less drugs, have less affairs, smoke less, and conform more in their opinions. Creativity will decline in correlation. The panopticon of social media and state control will lead to cultural stagnation. We already see early hints of this. Consider the remakes of older movies: 2050 will be a stew of remakes of remakes, and familiar and boring intellectual property (like Star Wars) will be king. Creativity vivacity will suffer, especially in the arts and humanities. The coming half-century will be a great one for innovations in finance, engineering, space travel, and artificial intelligence. It will be a terrible one for the arts and basic scientific advancements (like a new physics), for such advancements require iconoclastic and creative lone individuals. This prediction is already augured by judging the 2000-2020 creative period overall in areas like art, music, literature, film, and scientific discoveries, and finding it severely lacking compared to, say, 1950-1970.

I find this prediction … hmm. I guess I have to say I find this particular prediction disturbingly believable.

Click through, if you wish, and see what prediction you find most believable, if any; and which least believable. Taken as a whole, do you think this is generally optimistic view of where we’ll be in thirty years, or a generally pessimistic view, or both, or neither? I would say both.

I’m also pausing here to remind myself that thirty years is nothing. Whatever is going on in a hundred years will take place in a very different world compared to whatever we see in 2050. On the other hand, I’m not likely to see that world, and barring catastrophe, I’m very likely to see 2050.

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