Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 130

Progress report: by golly sometimes I can tell i’m a writer

So, as perhaps might be expected, I’ve been making rather slow progress on this and that ever since the puppies were born. As a reminder, they’re almost eight weeks old. Nearly two months! Lack of sleep was a thing, plus inevitable distractions, plus the puppies taking up a lot of mental space in my head. When I’m really writing, it’s the reverse — I’m more living in the story I’m writing, without too much mental space devoted to trivial things like real life.

Writing the above comment reminds me of and perhaps was inspired by a few lines from Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, incidentally. What a delightful story that is. Contemporary YA, which I don’t read a lot of, but whoever got me reading Rowell, thank you! I appreciate it! I re-read that story over the past few days and was particularly struck by this quote … let me find it … ah, here it is: when Cath is pouring herself into writing Carry On, she thinks to herself that real life is something happening in her peripheral vision.

What a great phrase that is. I mean, that’s just perfect. It feels exactly like that to me. I know some of you are also writers. I wonder if that strikes you as well as expressing the feeling of writing, when it’s working well and flowing downhill and all that.

Anyway, you can see this coming — this weekend I suddenly settled down and wrote 47 pages. About 9000 words. Mostly on Sunday, because I just stayed home all day and didn’t go anywhere at all, and I am just such a hermit, I really enjoyed that.

So whipping through that many words was very satisfying. Just the fact of doing it, plus enjoying it. A lot of that was due to the puppies being more ignorable. I mean, they’re still very cute. Ultimately cute, in fact. But they’re doing fine and eating well — dry kibble, yay! — and bouncing around outside, and I now frequently take them out, then bring them in and let them tumble around in the living room while I keep half an eye on them. Sure, there have been a few accidents. Not very many, and besides, that is why I have enzymatic cleaner handy on the kitchen counter. I feel it’s bad luck to put it away until the puppy is six months old. It’s going to be sitting on the counter a while.

Yes, I can ignore even this amount of cuteness

I bet it won’t surprise you that all those pages were set in the Tuyo world. Nothing else — almost nothing else — has ever moved so fast so reliably for me.

I’m sure I’ll cut a bit, but at this point it’s pretty obvious that Keraunani is going to be longer than Nikoles. Still much shorter than any book in the main trilogy. I’m guessing about 70,000 words total, something close to that. Fairly close. 75,000 maybe. It’s two interwoven narratives, one taking place concurrently with Tarashana and the other taking place eight years previously, so well before Tuyo. Esau is the pov protagonist in both. His narrative is third person, same as in Nikoles. The flashback part features Lalani, while the current part naturally involves Keraunani herself. I’m at 60,000 words as of this morning, and while there are a few chapters to go plus a fair bit of smoothing things out, I expect a couple of you will get a request to beta-read this story before we get quite to the end of summer.

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Unexpectedly busy week

I suddenly needed to drive to St Louis twice, once early Tuesday morning and again VERY VERY early Wednesday morning. This gave me a chance to listen to, oh, about a dozen lectures from The Great Courses “Secrets of Great Mystery and Suspense Fiction.”

Of course the title is silly, or perhaps meta — there aren’t any “secrets” of great fiction. I commented on that before, when I ripped into the professor’s take on cozy mysteries. And I kinda stopped listening to these lectures at that point. But I guess I was in the mood for this topic, because I just let the lectures run for about two hours each way on both days, and I did enjoy the lectures quite a bit. Many interesting topics, and every now and then the professor even managed to hit a mystery writer I’m familiar with, such as Tony Hillerman. It’s been a long time since I read Hillerman’s mysteries. I liked them quite a bit. I should revisit that series.

It’s a bit apropos given my recent reading, because somewhat to my surprise, Sharon Shinn’s recent collection includes several murder mystery stories, very outside her normal range. Except, come to think of it, for Wrapt in Crystal, which is in some ways — in a lot of ways — a murder mystery.

The three murder mysteries are “The Sorcerer’s Assassin,” “In the House of Seven Spirits,” and “Chief Executed Officers.”

The first is very tongue-in-cheek, which is signaled by every character being unpleasant in an over-the-top way, particularly the first-person protagonist. I guessed part, but not all, of the solution.

The third is almost as light in style. I didn’t actually believe in the basic premise about the nature of the alien species, but it’s an enjoyable story nevertheless. I didn’t guess the solution, though I’m not surprised in retrospect.

I liked “In the House of Seven Spirits” best. It’s also a light story, but not quite as feather-weighted as the other two. Plus I just liked it. I like the protagonist to be a nice person. It’s a shame she lost the ghosts, though no doubt it’s just as well they all moved on. And as she says, she can get a cat. In this one, I didn’t guess the solution at all. I really thought, well, never mind.

I will add, I’m having trouble which story in this collection I actually like the best, but it’s not one of the mysteries. It might be “The Unrhymed Couplets of the Universe.” Not sure, but I liked that one a lot.

But back to mysteries! As it happens, there’s a relevant post at Book Riot today: DOES SOLVING THE MYSTERY MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

When I was younger, I was a mystery writer’s dream reader because I never solved a mystery before the big reveal. I would get completely absorbed in the set up, the crime, the clues and misdirections, and I never looked ahead or took the time to puzzle it out on my own. I might have made the occasional guess, but I was usually wrong, and I was almost always delightfully surprised by the big reveal. And I would have stayed so happily oblivious if I hadn’t decided that I wanted to write a mystery myself and therefore had to start looking at mystery novels with a critical eye. Writing a mystery is no small undertaking, and there are many considerations that go into plot, but the biggest question I found myself asking was, Does it matter if the reader can solve the mystery before the protagonist?

What do you think?

I don’t generally care whether I solve the mystery before the protagonist. That’s not important to me at all. I’m like the author of the linked post, only more so. I get absorbed by the characters and the details of the setting and don’t even particularly care about the clues or the misdirections. I may make a casual attempt to figure out whodunit, but it’s a very casual attempt because I don’t actually care.

There’s an exception to this rule:

I hate, hate, hate if the protagonist is stupidly missing ultra-obvious clues and therefore I figure out the mystery first.

I remember one Anne Perry mystery, don’t remember which one, where all the way from the murder onward I was thinking, “Or, you know what, maybe the murderer is THE ONLY PERSON TO WHOM THE PHYSICAL EVIDENCE POINTS.” I should add, I like Anne Perry’s mysteries as a rule. I was just baffled at how dense the police detective was in this one.

Or in Margaret Maron’s Winter’s Child, that’s another example. I reviewed it here. I don’t think I have ever in my life read a mystery where the solution was so blindingly, blazingly clear, and where the protagonist had to be more dense in order to not see this extraordinarily obvious solution.

However! All that aside, generally, I don’t care whether I solve the mystery before the protagonist or not. It’s fine either way. For example, I thought the mysteries were not super mysterious in Barbara Hambly’s historical mysteries with Abigail Adams as the protagonist, written under the name Barbara Hamilton, but that was fine, because the historical setting was so well evoked and the characters so well drawn.

Now, this Book Riot post is pretty good. The author of the post, let me see, Tirzah Price, makes what seems to me a good distinction between mysteries and thrillers, which is also relevant to the series of lectures I’m listening to, which is concerned with both mysteries and suspense novels. I’m listening to the lecture on spy novels right now.

Anyway, then Price discusses two mysteries, one where she figured out whodunit and the other where she didn’t. Let me take a look — oh, this is funny! The first book she discusses is The Searcher by Tana French, and you all know how I felt about In the Woods. So, hah, no, I’m not likely to read The Searcher. Sorry, but when I dislike a book that much, I’m not likely ever to read anything else by the author. Now if a regular commenter here pointed to one of French’s books and said, Oh, but you should try this one, I probably would, but otherwise no.

However, Price’s discussion of this book is good.

The other book she discusses is The Forest of Stolen Girls by June Hur. Well, that is certainly a most evocative title. It sounds like a pretty good book, too.

Price sums up her post this way:

These days, now that I’ve written a few mysteries of my own and read with a much more critical eye, I want enough information that I can start putting the elements together myself, but I don’t necessarily want to guess the whole who, how, and why of a mystery before the big reveal. I would not be satisfied if I was totally off-base about the mystery during reading (and I’d argue that a book that completely misleads its readers probably isn’t a successful mystery) but I read mysteries for the intrigue and the questions, so of course I want to be surprised in some way.

I don’t read mysteries for the intrigue and the puzzle; I read them for setting and character and essentially story. But, although I don’t (generally) care if I get all or most of the whodunit elements right before the big reveal, I do agree that if the novel completely misleads the reader, that’s not a great mystery. I can’t offhand think of a mystery that does that.

If you read mysteries, do you personally generally solve the mystery before you get to the end and have it handed to you in the big reveal? And do you care?

And, if you’ve read a mystery lately that stood out to you in some way, what was it? For me, it would be Wrapt in Crystal. But this lecture series has made me scribble down some names — including, to my considerable surprise, KIM by Rudyard Kipling, as an example of a spy novel, did not see that coming — anyway, I may be trying a good handful of new-to-me mystery and/or suspense authors in the near-ish future.

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Are fictional characters copyrighted?

This question, posed and answered at Jane Friedman’s blog, surprised me. I thought the answer was obviously yes. Nobody can lift Harry Potter out of Hogwarts and drop him into their own fictional world and write a story with him as a character. If they do, that’s fanfic and technically illegal, though I know a lot of authors are fine with fanfic and I don’t see a problem with it myself.

But that being so, why is there a question?

Here are some highlights from the post:

Courts have held, in certain circumstances, that fictional characters are protectable in their own right.

So I guess in other circumstances, they aren’t. That still surprises me.

A character must be well delineated to be protected.

This apparently means that Gandalf the Grey might be protected, but The Old Man Who is a Wizard definitely is not. That makes sense. I can certainly see that broad categories of characters can’t and shouldn’t be protected under copyright law, any more than “school for young wizards in training” can be protected under copyright law.

A character is protected under the “story being told” test when he dominates the story in a way that there would be no story without him. 

And this is probably why fanfic is technically breaking copyright law: because most of the time, the fanfic story utterly depends on use of a well-delineated, well-known fictional character.

While on the subject of fanfic, I think this is the beginning of the excellent fanfic starring Byerly Vorrutyer and Rish. If you haven’t read it, you might want to take a look.

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How important is this character?

Here’s a post at Book View Cafe: Characters, Their Care and Feeding

There are vital, primary characters (the protagonist, the antagonist), secondary characters (companions, love interests, foils), and (to use film terminology) bit players, walk-ons, and extras.

One way we signal the reader about a character’s relative importance is by whether or not we give them names. The professor is less important in the reader’s mind than Professor Denning and Professor Denning is less important than Professor Joseph Denning or Joe.

All true, and it’s a difficult point. Sometimes it seems unnatural for one character not to refer to another by name, and then there you are, kinda stuck. Or sometimes you have a good handful of extras in a scene and you feel that the reader is likely to mix them up or lose track of them if they don’t have names.

This post — it’s by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff — offers some good tips about how to manage that:

Let’s say you’ve got a technician who appears in a scene or two in your book. You can identify him by giving him a visual trait—carroty red hair. This visual trait allows the reader to identify him as an individual through unique tags—”the carrot topped tech” or “the red head” or through other characters reacting in some way to the brightness of the guy’s hair.

Yes! This is a good way to handle this problem, and no doubt results in many minor walk-on characters being, say, bald, or having a scar on the face, or as above, having red hair.

You can even provide no identifying characteristics except “the thug on the right” and that’s enough to keep a fight scene clear, even if your super-competent protagonist demolishes three or four or more bad guys in one brief scene.

More at the linked post, of course.

I tend to name characters if they might be somewhat important later. Or if this is a walk-on character, but his backstory just unfolded to me and I think he might become a more important character, but I’m not sure.

This sort of thing sometimes results in an named character, maybe even one you personally like, who doesn’t turn out to have anything important to do after all. The best way to handle that is most likely to meld that character into another character or remove him entirely. This is often a tedious job, but there you go. I will just add — no need to inquire too closely as to how I found this out — that it may be wise to do a global search for his name, to make absolutely certain you have cleared every single mention of this character out of your manuscript.

I’ll add, as a related issue, that there are definitely times when a situation would logically call for more people. For example, when Aras goes into the winter country in Tarashana — oh, that’s up to 43 ratings on Amazon, nice to see — anyway, I think it would have been reasonable and sensible for him to take more soldiers with him. I mean, not sixty or anything like that. But four, five, eight maybe. But good lord above, I had so many important secondary characters already going along. Did you ever count them? Aras, Ryo, Rakasa, Bara, Geras, Suyet, Lalani. And then Tano. Eight people! And I had to handle them in such a way that the reader never forgot anyone was there and they all seemed to actually be there all the way through. The entire reason Aras took only two soldiers with him was to keep the numbers down for that journey for my sake, not for his. Hopefully I made that sound plausible, but everything else was just an excuse.

This reminds me of yet another related phenomenon: killing off the parents of younger protagonists in the backstory. Sometimes there’s an important reason that’s connected to the plot, such as, oh, actually quite a few of mine. In The Floating Islands and The Keeper of the Mist and Black Dog, the death of the parents in the backstory is crucial to setting up the story. Some others too, probably. But sometimes the sole reason to kill off one or both parents in the backstory is to clear out the cast of characters and thus make the story easier to write. This was the case for Kehera’s mother in Winter of Ice and Iron, for example. In fact, some of these dead parents are never even named. It’s enough trouble coming up with names for characters that are alive and doing stuff during the story! Every name you don’t have to invent spares you that little bit of attention to put toward doing something else.

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Should authors review books?

I do find this sort of question, as seen here at Writers Unboxed, a little odd.

Of course you have a right to write reviews—we’re all readers! Readers get to have opinions!—but you should give some thought to what you want those reviews to accomplish. Do you want to boost other authors and recommend the books you loved? You can do that by writing positive reviews of the books you loved and just not writing about books that don’t fit into that category. If, on the other hand, you want the internet to reflect the complete record of everything you read and what you thought about it—positive or negative—go for it. But remember that some authors can’t help reading their reviews, and your name is going to be associated with that negative review. 

The bolding is mine.

I think this is largely a no-brainer. There is absolutely no reason not to write positive reviews of books you love, whether or not you are an author. So why ask the question: Should authors review books? Yes. yes, if you are an author, you absolutely should review the books other people write.

You should write glowingly positive reviews that are also honest and perhaps mention something that might not work for just every possible reader. The author of the book will love that, or at least it’s hard to imagine otherwise. There’s no reason to hesitate. Onward!

So the actual question is: should authors write negative reviews of other people’s books? That’s a much harder question. I’ve only written negative reviews about three times.

Once, I utterly panned a book. I put that review only here on this blog. I did not feel it was necessary right to put a truly negative review on Goodreads or Amazon.

Wow, was that a terrible book. Looking back on it, just … wow.

I’ve put one fairly negative review on Goodreads and Amazon for one specific book, Control Point by Myke Cole, and I’ve left it there. I had very specific reactions to certain implausible plot points and I think those were fair. I did think the actual writing was fine and said so.

For Tana French’s In the Woods, I posted a review of the “Wow, this did not work for me at all, even though it is beautifully written” type.

I kind of think those may be the only negative reviews I’ve ever posted.

I think it’s not only tactically wise for an author to generally post positive reviews, but in general, I truly prefer writing reviews of books I love and posting those here and hopefully seeing you all comment about the same book.

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Public service message

Invisible fences will not keep your dog safe.

This message brought to you by the elderly Labrador mix I picked up this morning.

The dog with two collars, one meant for an invisible fence plus another collar, but no tags.

The dog with a cataract in one eye, so I guess that would make it even harder for her to see hazards such as the cars on the nearby highway. Not that any dog is competent to navigate a highway.

She was sweet as pie, a well-cared-for pet, who immediately jumped in my car when I raised the back, sat quietly during the trip to my vet, and trotted into the clinic wagging her tail.

Is she chipped? Beats me; they’ll check when they’ve got time. Either way, this dog is probably heading for a stay at whatever facility animal control takes stray dogs. Hopefully her owners will find her. Someone plainly has cared for this dog, so I imagine they’ll be looking for her. Regardless, almost anything is better than her dying in agony with a crushed pelvis on the highway.

An invisible fence —

–won’t stop someone from coming onto your property and stealing or hurting your dog.

–won’t stop a stray dog from coming onto your property and killing your dog.

–most of all, if your dog goes through the fence for any reason, she will not be able to get back to your house because the fence will shock her if she tries to return. She may well get lost. She will quite possibly wind up miles from your home.

If you have an invisible fence and you are trusting that fence to keep your dog safe, you are primarily trusting to luck. If that luck runs out, your dog can very easily wind up in a terrible situation.

I will let my Leda sum this up, because her head tilt is so expressive.

Update: I hear the Lab mix I found this morning has been reclaimed by her owner. I hope after this, they take care to keep her safely off the roads and out of the woods and at home! And put a tag on her collar!

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Progress Report: They grow up so fast

Very pleased to find that every puppy has cheerfully transitioned to eating softened kibble. They have no idea what I mean when I point out that they could have done this two weeks ago and saved me a lot of hair-tearing as I tried to find something they would eat.

Also, the puppies all get to spend half an hour or so playing in the living room after they’ve been outside. They are faking being housetrained. Very few accidents. It’s all a matter of timing and supervision and getting them outside or back in the puppy room at strategic intervals, which I’ve failed at … twice, I think. Two accidents so far in two weeks with five puppies is pretty good!

Ruby girl looks JUST like a teddy bear.

The ruby girl is not merely very teddy-bear-esque, she is also very person-oriented. She likes to be fed by hand, one piece at a time. She’s willing to eat out of a bowl, but sitting on someone’s lap is just better. I think she is going to be a very affectionate little girl.

Committed to destroying the world

The black-and-tan boy is happy to try to destroy shoes or dog beds or the couch, but fortunately does find dog toys an adequate substitute. Such a charmer.

Tri Boy and Tri Girl Two

I think these two are going to be steady and affectionate. Tri Boy is another lap puppy. Tri Girl Two is a lot like him. They certainly are a lot alike. I still have to look two or three times sometimes to be sure which one I’m looking at, even though as you see their face markings are somewhat different.

Really, the standout from this litter is —

Tri Girl One attempts to destroy my slipper

So, my brother visited this past weekend, and I don’t know who started it, but by the end of the visit, we were calling this puppy Devil Woman. Now, that won’t be her registered name — which needs to start with an O — and I can’t quite see saying, “Devil Woman, Sit!” But obviously this suggests a lot of possible call names. Saffron, Bridget, and Yolanda all leap to mind. Of the three, I prefer Saffron. I can very easily see calling this puppy by that name. I think she will be witty and beautiful and (for a Cavalier) very independent — though I trust not duplicitous and backstabbing.

As a side note, my friend Deb tells me she’s now having exactly the same problem with a puppy that I had with Tri Boy and before him with Leda and her sister — a thrifty puppy that grows properly for the first week, but at some point in the second week suddenly needs extra formula every day in order to continue gaining, even though he looks perfectly healthy. It’s a mystery. At least I could say that in my experience, these puppies do just fine if you provide the support they need. Once weaned, they’re perfectly normal and gain just like any other puppy. It’s nice (in a way) to know that someone else is seeing this exact same phenomenon.

She nearly lost two of hers to a freak accident when they were born. Wow, puppies are so stressful. I’m sure glad my babies are out of the risky period and into the madly cute stage. I’ve imposed a 1000-word minimum for the present. That is such a trivial number of words. It would be ridiculous not to be able to hit that minimum every single day, even with Puppy Cuteness interfering. I haven’t (yet) declared that this word count has to apply to one specific project. But we’re halfway through July, nearly, and by gum I’m going to make some real progress on something this month.

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Scene Orientation

From Writer Unboxed, this: The Three W’s of Scene Orientation

That’s a very intriguing title for a post. I think this is a place where workshop entries tend to fail — they begin the book and at once the reader is seriously confused, because of a lack of orientation to the scene.

I think that’s probably what this article has in mind. Let me see …

I suspect we all know people who will walk in a room and say something like, “I still can’t believe she’d quit on me.” … It’s obvious there is conflict, so this might end up being a good story, but right now the comment is floating in space. I’ll need more words to understand it. Who is this woman? Where did he see her? When did this happen—ten minutes ago? Is he still chewing on something from his youth? Or is this a future action that worries him? …

…. But judging from the manuscripts I see, it can also be what happens when you are on your umpteenth draft of a novel and can no longer remember which version of which facts are on the page. 

OH YES. THAT.

That is so true! I’m laughing here, because this isn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it absolutely happens and it’s difficult to spot. If you’ve done a beta read for me, you may well have spotted this exact problem. Wow, it is just so easy to delete one line of dialogue or one paragraph of backstory and suddenly some thread is left dangling somewhere else.

Anyway, it’s a fine article, with good development of this problem of lacking or losing context from scenes and how to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Here’s another topic of this post:

If you’re relying upon tags at the top of the chapter to do this work for you, I can vouch for the fact that this alone can backfire.

Let’s say Chapter Five is tagged “November, 1985.” Thus begins a parlor game that I rarely win. What month/year was it in the last chapter, and why didn’t I memorize it? 

Yes, yes! And it’s not just time tags! If you title the chapter with the name of the pov protagonist, for some reason I have trouble noticing that, and three paragraphs down I’m thinking, Wait, who is this and flipping back to see what pov we’re supposed to be in. I know, that’s just me. Except it’s probably not JUST me. It’s really handy to do something to clarify the pov in the first paragraph of each chapter, EVEN IF you tag the chapter in a heading.

Good article overall, well worth a look.

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Progress report: Lots of progress, Whew, it’s about time.

The puppies are slowing the writing down, admittedly, partly because of the work involved with raising a litter, but also partly because they are intrinsically cute and distracting. But! They are also progressing by leaps and bounds, so that’s excellent. Every single puppy is now eating real food out of a dish. Not the kind of food I actually want them to eat, not a long-term food, but it’s food and it’s good for them and getting them to this point was such a struggle that I don’t care about anything beyond that.

They’re eating Royal Canin Starter, by the way. All of them. One hundred percent of puppies surveyed insist that soaked kibble will not do, whether or not you add chicken baby food. I now have five jars of chicken baby food that I guess I will find a use for someday, but evidently this is not that day. They are actually interested in dry kibble, but even broken up, they can’t eat that yet. Their jaw strength is inadequate, I guess, as they certainly have teeth. Sharp teeth.

Anyway: last night for the very first time I did not have to get up at 1:00 AM to make Morgan nurse them, so she and I are both relieved about that. Especially me.

I have also introduced the puppies to the outdoor world!

Tri Boy, Dora in the background. Tri Girl Two, Tri Girl One in the backgroundB/T boy, pouncing at meRuby girl, pretending to be pensive, but actually about to join in the pouncing.

Going outside means three trips down the steps for me, not to mention three trips back up. Four or five times a day, as I am now actively engaged in the very earliest stages of housetraining; eg, taking them out at strategic moments so that they will develop a preference for doing their business outside. Which they do prefer. Puppies always prefer that if they are allowed to develop their instinct to be clean.

Anyway, they most certainly can’t be out unsupervised. Way too many dangers out there, including hawks. I actually know of a local incident where a hawk picked up a Yorkie and carried it up into a tree before dropping it. The dog survived, but was badly injured — I got this story from my vet, who treated the dog, so I know it really happened. These puppies are all around three pounds — 2 lbs 13.75 oz to 3 lbs 3.5 oz as of this morning — which is smaller than most Yorkies and in fact smaller than a lot of rabbits.

Luckily, I have a reliable babysitter:

That is Naamah, who will not leave puppies alone outside. That’s Tri Girl One climbing on her and … um … I think … yes, Tri Girl Two in the foreground. Anyway, I have an x-pen, so I carry the puppies down and put them in the x-pen with Naamah until they’re all down in the yard. Then I open the x-pen and let them wander about, with Naamah as a major playmate and the other dogs ambling about.

All the puppies are brave about exploring and all of them toddle right to a person and climb in their lap. If I were going to hazard a guess, I’d say Tri Girl One is going to be Little Miss Independent, while Tri Boy is likely to be a lap dog and very affectionate. B/T Boy is spunky. Tri Girl Two and Ruby Girl might turn out to be calm and sweet, but on the other hand, maybe not that calm! All of them will benefit from having more visitors this week and then gently going places next week.

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Recent Reading: The Book of Firsts by “Karan K Anders”

Okay, just to make sure we’re all caught up, “Karan K Anders” is actually Andrea K Höst. I know a lot of you already know that, but just to make sure.

So. The Book of Firsts is a departure for Höst. It’s a contemporary … romance. Almost romance. Sort-of romance. Near romance. Anyway, a contemporary novel that is at least romance-adjacent, with a lot of sex scenes. You can see why she might have decided to go with a pen name for a book that’s so different from her other works … although as far as that goes, she does have a rather wide range, doesn’t she? And All the Stars isn’t much like the Medair duology, for example. Except in terms of certain themes and some ways of developing the characters and pulling off occasional shocking plot twists.

Anyway! The Book of Firsts.

Here’s the description from Amazon:

Three boys, the ‘kings’ of the school. One cynical newcomer. An outrageous competition.
When Mika Niles overhears the details of “The Book of Firsts” she’s at first bemused, then scornful, then intrigued. Judging which of three very handsome young men is best at kissing, and…?
With no time in her final year for serious attachments, a series of lunchtime trysts is more than tempting – and an opportunity like this might never come her way again. But this light-hearted game is also a scandalous secret, and few can play with fire and walk away unscathed.

I wouldn’t have been interested if this book had been written by someone else, but first, AKH, and second, reviews suggested that some things about the story would probably appeal to me. That impression turned out to be a little misleading. Practically everything about the story appealed to me. Let me count the ways:

1. First, just to get this out of the way, the sex scenes aren’t too detailed, and in fact become less and less explicit as the story progresses. If a reader is really into the hot, steamy erotica of modern romances, they’d probably be disappointed. For me, lowering the steam quotient of the story was of course a plus. I didn’t skip or skim even a single scene. Good thing too, as the setup required a LOT of sex scenes throughout the story.

2. Second, although reviews and AKH herself refer to this books a “lighthearted” and “fluffy,” it’s not really all that light. The setup is intrinsically unlikely, sure, but Höst makes it (reasonably) believable. More important, there’s actually considerable emotional heft to the story. But this doesn’t come from the romance elements. Mika, the female lead and the sole pov protagonist, is a very (very) emotionally self-contained person and not at all given to any kind of angst. The relationship between Mika and the male leads is not the heart of the story, even though Mika drives a lot of the plot.

3. The above is probably one reason I’m having trouble categorizing this book as a romance, straight up. I’ve gone back and forth in whether I would call this book a romance. The story does follow some romance tropes. But the relationship at the heart of the story is definitely not the romance, it’s the friendship between the three male leads – Rin, Kyou, and Bran – who are indeed, as all the reviews indicate, complicated and well-developed characters. This friendship, incidentally, never once falters. This is not that kind of story.

Also, imo, the growing friendship between the three male leads and Mika is much more emotionally important than any romantic connection between them. In fact, you could plausibly define their relationship as friends with benefits and not actually romance. Any way you look at it, this is a friendship-centered story, not a romance-centered story. So I think I finally come down on the side of not-quite-a-romance.

I know some of you have read this story. Agree/disagree on this point?

Anyway:

4. There is not the slightest doubt that everything will work out. The good guys will be fine. The bad guys will get slapped down. In fact, this is a story that proceeds in rhyming couplets: AB AB AB:

A) A problem occurs.

B) The problem is quickly solved in a satisfactory way.

A) Another problem occurs.

B) This problem is also solved satisfactorily in short order.

A) A third problem occurs …

And so on. There is one problem that extends through a large portion of the book – who has it in for the male leads and why? – but as a rule, specific problems are solved in a brisk fashion rather than pushing the reader into extended tension. This is great! I mean, sure, it depends on your mood and what you want in a story. But I read this book when I was somewhat stressed and trying to pull out of an ongoing bad mood, and I can’t tell you how much The Book of Firsts improved my day. It was just so satisfying watching things work out over and over. Granted, Mika is likely to seem overly competent and emotionally controlled to some readers, but she was just what I wanted. So were the three male leads, for that matter. I get what people mean about the lack of edges or the overmaturity of the characters. I did think of them as young men and women, not boys and girls. They do think and act in very mature ways. But this totally worked for me.

5) Also, this goes without saying, probably, but Höst is just such a good writer in almost every way. Smooth, witty, with an occasional unexpected emotional punch. Probably a decade ago I said firmly that I was dead tired of male leads who were gorgeous AND rich AND brilliant, and yet here we are, because this story worked fine for me even though it has THREE male leads fitting this description.

I’m really glad this is book one of a series. That gives AKH three ongoing series, and I hardly know which sequel I’d like to see most. Also, I’d always take yet another story set in the Touchstone universe. In fact, out of curiosity, please vote:

1. The sequel to Pyramids of London.

2. The sequel to Starfighter Invitation.

3. The sequel to The Book of Firsts.

4. Something in the Touchstone world, maybe going on from “Snow Day.”

I think … I think, if I could pick one to come out tomorrow, it might be (2). But maybe not! I’m really looking forward to the epic family meltdown that is no doubt scheduled for the sequel to The Book of Firsts. I wouldn’t like that it if turned into an angst-fest, but seen through Mika’s eyes, with Rin and Kyou prepared to coolly face down the drama, I will love it. As for “Snow Day,” I dislike Kaoren’s brother Arlen. But maybe AKH can change my mind, and anyway, I like the new characters from the short story and would enjoy seeing more of them. In contrast to the above, I have no idea what the sequel to Pyramids will involve, so it’s hard to anticipate it in the same way.

Okay! I have the Shinn story collection here, but before I look at that, I think I’ll re-read The Book of Firsts.

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