Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 132

Every now and then i look to see if sequels are in progress

So, I’ve mentioned Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman several times recently as a series that is (a) fantastic, but (b) unfinished. Of course this is not the only example of this unfortunate phenomenon. Every now and then, one hears good news about something like this. On occasion, I go looking for good news. Or any news. So:

1) Steerswoman. No news. I haven’t given up hope. A few years ago, I met Kirstein at a convention and asked directly about this series. She still planned, or at least hoped, to finish it at that time. I’m not exactly optimistic that we will ever see the rest of this series, but I’m not deeply pessimistic either.

2) I save deep pessimism for the second half of Robin McKinley’s Pegasus. I’m morally certain we will never see the sequel. I have grave doubts that we’ll ever see another book of any kind from McKinley. From time to time, there are fragments of news that McKinley is working on something — a sequel to Sunshine called Albion (she said she was working on that in 2008). Or a new book featuring a Deinonychus. Unfortunately, I doubt we’ll ever see any of these books. I believe McKinley is suffering from a chronic illness and also has had trouble working on anything since her husband became ill and passed away. If anyone has seen anything about McKinley in the last year or so, it would be nice to know if she is okay, whether or not she is working on anything.

Meanwhile, I am very optimistic about —

3) The second installment of Hild by Nicola Griffith. Griffith has been pretty good about providing updates about what’s going on with her life and what she’s working on. You probably recall Griffith has MS and paused to write an autobiographical novel about that, interrupting work on the Hild series. However, this past November, this post came out declaring that the sequel to Hild, Menewood, is finished. If this book is being traditionally published, I expect it will probably come out in 2022 or 2023, depending on how fast revisions go and where there’s space in the publisher’s calendar. That will give us a pause of roughly ten years between the first book and the second. And the series won’t be finished, even though each book is a monster. I won’t wait for this series to be completed. Hild was probably my favorite book of the year when I read it. It is just an amazing work. Griffith is stunning as a stylist and equally stunning as a historical author. One of these days I should do a top ten list of my all-time, absolute favorite books ever. Hild will be on that list.

In the meantime, I see that Griffith has a new short novel, an Arthurian story, coming out next spring. Anything by Griffith is always good news, so that’s nice to see. I bet it was a nice, easy story compared to the Hild series, as anything would be.

What’s a sequel you would particularly like to see? With a bonus gold star if you also have any kind of news about when and if that sequel might appear.

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Friendship in storytelling

A post at Writer Unboxed: The Value of Friendship in Storytelling

This is a long post. For those of us who value friendship relationships in novels, it’s well worth a look. And that’s all of us, I’m pretty sure.

Gwynne’s storytelling [John Gwynne’s epic fantasy series, The Faithful and the Fallen] features familial duty, mentorship, a bit of religious fervor, and a smattering of romantic love. But when it comes to character relationships, this series is built on the rock-solid foundation of friendship. …

…As with most things in life, friendships are made stronger and are better appreciated when they’re well-earned. That’s true of the friends themselves as well as for those experiencing their story. …

… Because friendship is fundamental to our human nature, in story we long for friendship to form, to deepen, to be repaired or restored. We root for unlikely friendships, and crave uncommon loyalty. 

We do.

I’ve never read of this particular series, but I’m sure we can all think of stories that centered friendship, even if they also included romantic relationships. I’m not just thinking of the Tenai trilogy here, or Tuyo — by the way, I see Tuyo is up to 116 ratings on Amazon. That’s my first book to go over 100, I believe. I do think traditional publishers fall down amazingly on the job of getting readers to review books — for heaven’s sake, it’s not hard. Put the Amazon link in the back with a request that readers leave a brief review. How hard IS that? Well, traditional publishers don’t bother, so here we are, with traditionally published books that have a paltry handful of reviews and self-published books that get several times the number of reviews in a fraction of the time. Not that I’m bitter. Except that Winter of Ice and Iron, for example, only has 24 reviews, so actually I am bitter about that. It takes two seconds to put a link at the end of a book and publishers just do not bother and it ticks me off.

Wow, off topic there.

By the way, I’ll be setting The Year’s Midnight to free on June 30-July 4. We’ll see how it does, and thank you to everyone who’s already read it and reviewed it; I waited for the first handful of reviews before setting it up for a sale. I’m very, very pleased that the star rating is 4.6. That’s higher than I expected for such an odd little story. I don’t know if the rating will stay that high, but it means a lot to me that some of you really loved this trilogy.

Back to books that center friendship. Most of mine. I’d have to think about them to figure out if there are any that don’t really center friendship. I suppose The Mountain of Kept Memory. That one centers the sibling relationship and then the slow romance is secondary and friendships are tertiary.

Books other than mine that center friendship:

Of course the SFF novels by Nicole Kornher-Stace. I still haven’t read Firebreak. To be fair, I haven’t read anything much lately.

Friendship is absolutely central in The Gentleman Bastards series by Scott Lynch. This is a series that’s almost too gritty for me, but not quite. I believe I might like the third book the best. The second is the weakest, imo, so if you read that one and didn’t care for it, you might consider trying the third despite that.

Oh, the Steerswoman series! Which I just mentioned and yes, I sympathize if you just can’t make yourself read a series that is not finished and may never be finished, but it’s just so wonderful I can’t help but keep pointing to it.

Naomi Kritzer’s Freedom‘s Gate trilogy, which is (a) finished, and (b) absolutely fabulous, a real must-read epic fantasy series.

The Sorcery and Cecelia books, which are a good example of stories that center both romance and friendship at the same time.

The Queen of the Dead trilogy by Michelle Sagara. There’s some romance, but very secondary to the solid friendships.

Obviously The Hands of the Emperor and also obviously From All False Doctrine, my two (very different) favorites from last year. The former centers friendship and has essentially no romance; the latter handles both with amazing skill.

Oh, I can’t stop without mentioning the non-SFF, extraordinary WWII novels by Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire. Wow. Those are just remarkable stories. Moving, powerful historical novels.

Okay, so, surely you all are now thinking of some of your favorite friendships in SFF (or other genres). Toss ’em in the comments, by all means. Any new-to-you novels that might also be new to the rest of us would be especially welcome.

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Kindle Vella

I keep getting emails from Amazon or KDP or whatever, telling me about the New! Shiny! Kindle Vella method of telling a story. It’s a way of publishing a chapter at a time. The idea is so actively repulsive to me that I practically recoil physically.

Here’s a post about this at Indies Unlimited: Kindle Vella: Return of the Serial

Amazon, never content to rest on its laurels, has announced a new avenue for storytelling: Kindle Vella. Many writers have already discovered the lure of publishing a serial, a short episode or a chapter at a time. Hugh Howey’s Wool, if you remember, started as a short story, then he expanded on the series little by little. It was already wildly popular before he accepted a six-figure deal with Simon & Schuster.

We’ve all seen how some series, either books or movies or both, can garner a large following. If we’ve got a captivating story line with complex characters interacting in interesting and surprising ways, our readers want to know what happens next. And while some of us might go months, even years between books — possibly losing readers during the hiatus — a series of short chapters released relatively quickly can keep those readers engaged and wanting more.

It’s sort of complicated — there will be a Kindle Vella store of some kind, with tokens readers buy and then exchange for episodes of books, or something like that. I’m not interested enough to actually pay attention to the details. I know the first few episodes will be free — that’s certainly essential — and other than that I don’t know.

I guess it’s like a giant Amazon version of what I think some authors are already doing via Patreon, except that Amazon takes a cut of 50% of the royalties. Which is no doubt fair enough, since they’ll be collecting readers’ attention and providing a marketplace for this sort of serialized work.

I think this is actually a neat idea! For someone else.

You know what book this would have worked great for? The Martian. Or the Touchstone Trilogy. Stories which are by their nature rather episodic. Think of the scene where Cassandra leaps into the water to get away from the Cruzach, when she accidentally winds up in Kalasa and has her swimming marathon and all that? End the chapter with the splash as she hits the water and everyone would be DYING to see what happened next.

But for works that don’t naturally break into episodes, this modality would be more difficult.

Also — I was talking about the writing process with Sharon Shinn not that long ago, and we happened to discuss how awful it would be to publish a work a chapter at a time, because we both do so much smoothing out between the first draft and the second. We both go back and add foreshadowing and remove unnecessary characters and tweak the timeline and so on and so forth. All this is absolutely crucial.

So, I would say, for an author who is a real outliner — who writes a tight outline and sticks to it — the something like Kindle Vella might work well. But for an author who has a ton of work to do in smoothing out the first draft, there’s no way.

Well, there’s one way, obviously. Write the whole thing, polish it up, and then publish it one episode at a time via Kindle Vella. Of course the Amazon people are encouraging that. You can unpublish a current book and put it out in Vella, for example, and no doubt some people will try that out. It may well be worth it, especially at first, when Vella doesn’t have that many works and therefore there’s less competition for eyes.

However, if the Kindle Vella people are smart, they will add this statement to relevant works as a marketing tool:

“This work is finished. Every chapter of this work has already been loaded to Kindle Vella and is guaranteed to be released on schedule.”

Because, as a reader, I can’t think of anything in the wide world that would turn me off more than repeatedly starting a serialized work that did not reach a conclusion in a timely fashion. You know where you can get finished works that reach a conclusion? The regular bookstore, that’s where.

As a related side note: raise your hand if you generally refuse to start a series unless the series is already finished.

As a general rule, I’d raise my hand there. Not absolutely all the time, of course. Any series I started reading decades ago and the thing is still going, well, that’s not covered by the rule. And I deliberately chose to read the available Steerswoman books even though I knew perfectly well the series was incomplete. (Which I definitely do not regret, this is among my all-time favorites and absolutely #1 for series I would most love to see completed before I die. Everyone should read it.) But as a RULE, I strongly, strongly prefer that a trilogy or longer series is complete before I start it. Either that, or it’s all right as long as each novel in the series stands alone.

I will just add — I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but not lately — for a traditionally published book, it’s absolutely deadly for readers not to pick up the second books because they’re waiting for the third to be published. The odds are rather good that the publisher will see poor sales for the second book and pull the third. If you want a trilogy or series to be finished, then you’d better buy the books and put them on your real or virtual shelves. THEN you are okay to wait until the series is finished before starting Book #1.

As yet another addendum on that topic, I have to admit, I have four or five complete series on my physical TBR shelves that I’ve never read. I read and liked Book #1, picked up the other books as they were published, but have never read them. Honestly, this is terrible. One day I will make it a project to read all those series.

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Can you tell one puppy from the next?

I’m pretty sure these pictures are each showing a different tricolor puppy! But I have to admit, from the front, they look very (very) similar. Do you know how I make sure I’m giving extra formula to the tricolor boy? By peeking underneath. One of the tri girls looks A LOT like him. The other girl has a big white band across her hips and is much easier to distinguish.

This is, from top to bottom, Tri Girl One, Tri Girl Two, and Tri Boy … I think.

The two tri girls, who were the smallest puppies at birth (six ounces) are now neck and neck for biggest puppy (1050 grams, more or less, or 37 ounces). The tri boy no longer has problems sputtering milk, but did slow down a lot for a while there and is just 915 g or so as of this morning, or 32 ounces. None of them are remotely interested in real food, alas. The little monsters persist in thinking only mother’s milk will do. Well, I’m telling myself (and Morgan), they all will definitely get weaned eventually …

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“Introverted” does not mean “shy.”

I just have a slight objection to posts like this, at Anne R Allen’s blog — a blog I like quite a bit, generally — Introverted Authors in Public: 4 Tips For Overcoming Your Fear of Being Seen

I strongly prefer the definition of introversion which includes:

— Interacting with people, especially with large groups of people you don’t know very well, is tiring.

— The desire to join in large-group activities is minimal to nonexistent.

— You have a general preference for privacy and a tendency to prefer activities that are done alone.

This doesn’t include shyness. I think there is a big, actually quite huge difference between shyness and introversion. I say that as someone who was both quite shy and very introverted, and later became much less shy while remaining very introverted.

I’m not worried about public speaking. I enjoy it. I’m fine with being on a panel at a convention. I’m fine being up front alone in front of a crowd. Obviously it depends on the topic, but I’m very confident of my ability to deliver a lecture about the process of photosynthesis at the undergrad level, explain basic genetics, demonstrate tube-feeding a neonatal puppy, or discuss the concept of a “character-driven” novel and the idea of being a “character-first” author. Nothing about that is at all alarming to me.

I don’t like going to a party with a lot of people I don’t know. That’s not particularly stressful, but it’s tiring and not very pleasant. If I get into a nice conversation with one specific person at the party, whether I know them or not, that’s much more enjoyable and also a lot less tiring. I guess I would say I can rest during that conversation and feel much more able to handle the large party setting later. But it’s easy for me to go to a convention, while it’s hard for me to attend a party at that convention.

I think this is introversion rather than shyness. It’s not fear-based. Therefore, headings like: How introverted authors can overcome their fears” seem wrongheaded to me.

Also, equating introversion with shyness and fear incorrectly treats introversion as a type of pathology. It is not. It is a perfectly valid personality style, despite the modern assumption that Extroverts Are Better.

Anyway, if someone is SHY and wants to overcome that problem to some reasonable degree, then sure, the linked post may offer useful tips. I guess.

None of those suggested tips has anything to do with how I personally got a lot less shy, by the way. If someone out there has a kid who is struggling with shyness AND likes pets, well, getting a puppy is what worked for me. I went from “too shy to speak to strangers” to “offended if that stranger doesn’t tell me how cute my dog is and asks can he pet my dog” in nothing flat. Interacting with people around dogs was much easier than in any other context I’d ever encountered, and joining a dog training club and volunteering at the local shelter and so on rapidly followed. If I’d known how getting a puppy would change the feel of personal interactions, I’d have gotten one earlier in my life — though it’s a lot easier to deal with a puppy as an adult than as a child, so there’s that.

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Start with character

From Jane Friedman’s blog: Starting Your Novel With Character: 3 Strengths and 3 Challenges, by  Susan DeFreitas 

Okay, I feel like I start with the characters — well, with the characters and the scene and situation — certainly not with the plot, anyway. So I’ll bite. Tell me all about the pluses and minuses of starting with the character.

In my work as a book coach, I’ve found that writers of fiction generally fall into three camps: those who start with character, those who start with plot or story concept, and those who start with theme...

Oh, the theme! I hadn’t thought of that as an option. That’s an interesting idea — starting with the theme. I feel like most of the time I don’t know what the theme is until a reviewer says, “Neumeier’s strong theme of whatever,” and then I’m like, Oh, right, that was definitely the theme.

I’m exaggerating, but not that much. I’d be interested in DeFreitas’ ideas about how it works to start with the theme, but for now, back to starting with the character(s):

Strength: Characters make us care. A twisty plot, compelling themes, and fascinating setting are all great assets for a novel, but character is what makes us really care about the story.…

I agree completely! At least for me. I’m a character reader most of the time. If I don’t immediately engage emotionally with the protagonist, I’m probably going to DNF the book. The engagement has to be very nearly immediate these days, too, as I will seldom read more than ten pages or so before deciding not to finish a book. I realize this is not entirely fair and I’m probably missing some books I would have liked a lot if I’d only stuck with them for a few chapters. But. The TBR pile, so enormous; time, so limited … have I mentioned that I’m trying to whittle down my paper TBR pile this summer? I’ve DNFed and discarded, hmm, must be about a dozen books this month. I don’t believe I’ve finished any.

Writers who start with character don’t struggle to create characters who seem alive on the page, whose struggles touch upon universal themes, and who exhibit the sort of complexity that makes us as readers really feel what it is to be human. …

Those of us who said, with regard to a previous post, “I don’t know how I create characters, I just do it,” are probably this kind of writer.

Strength: There’s a solid market for character-driven fiction. The vast majority of novels that fall into the genres known as contemporary fiction, women’s fiction, and literary fiction are character-driven… Writers who start with character generally don’t struggle to determine if there’s a market for the sort of thing they do, because that market is broad and well defined.

Well, that’s nice, but better still, a whole lot of fantasy and some SF is also character driven. Good thing too, as I read very little in any of the genres mentioned above.

Seeing a statement like this makes me feel at once that the author of this post thinks of SFF as inherently plot driven. I may not be quite fair in assuming that. But the idea that character-driven fiction is well defined strongly suggests that assumption. The category of “character-driven fiction” is not either “well defined.” Lots of SFF novels are character driven while some are not. Some murder mysteries are character driven while lots are not. Lots of romances are character driven. Lots of historicals too.

However, I grant, there is still a solid market for character-driven SFF, because a whole bunch of readers seek out this kind of SFF and do not want plot-driven SFF. This is one of the features that makes fantasy more popular than science fiction, probably, but that is probably a topic for a different post.

Okay, third strength:

Strength: There’s no question whose story it is. Other types of writers may spend some time in the planning stages of a novel wrestling with the question of who their protagonist should be. But for writers who start with character, this generally isn’t an issue (unless there are so many compelling characters in their head that it’s just hard to choose among them).

Oh, I at once thought of Elizabeth Bear’s Eternal Sky trilogy. My biggest problem with that trilogy was that all the characters could have been THE central protagonist for a novel. It was almost painful to switch from one to another. I could not possibly pick out the pov protagonist I liked the best from this wide field.

Now for the problems inherent with starting with the character(s):

Challenge: Too many POVs. … generally speaking, these other POVs are compelling and well written. But that doesn’t mean that including them serves the story; sometimes these other POVs are no more than game trails that lead the story off on tangents without contributing anything in particular to the main story line, and, as such, should be avoided.

I think that’s funny because it instantly points to the problem I had with Bear’s trilogy. Except in her case all those POVs supported her story, because she’s a fine writer and wouldn’t just accidentally scatter her attention through side tangents. But this way of defining a challenge for a character-centered author is making me think of … hmm, I think it was Marie Brennan who wrote a long review of The Wheel of Time and counted up the pov characters. There were something like 140 pov characters in that series — way, way too may inserted for no special reason. (Most of that review has disappeared into the aether, as far as I know, but part of it is here.)

I personally do try to keep down the number of pov characters. But they do tend to multiply. I think of it as something of a triumph when I write a whole novel with exactly one pov character. That’s only happened in books I wrote later, so I guess it was a challenge for me, since I never used to do it. Still, other than the Black Dog series, I’m pretty sure I never got above four important main pov characters. Or so.

Next:

Challenge: Lack of arc. Sometimes writers have so much love and sympathy for their protagonists that they have a hard time imagining a real flaw for that character, or some real issue in the way that person sees the world.

Is this a somewhat more polite way of declaring that character-centered authors may be more prone to creating Mary Sue characters?

Actually, I sort of think this is true. I also think the easiest way around it is to start with a young protagonist and have the character grow up. But you can also do it by just not having the protagonist be right about everything and acknowledging that.

One of the protagonists I’m most personally fond of is Oressa, and one reason I particularly like her is that the relationship between Oressa and Gulien is so simple, but the relationship each of them has with their father is so complex and different. In other words, including the protagonist in a complicated web of relationships is perhaps one way in which to give the protagonist some pressure to change.

Challenge: Slow plot. Yes, readers in general find deep character work compelling. But that doesn’t mean a novel can just rely on character to keep the reader turning the pages. For that to happen, there needs to be a causally linked series of events, with emotional stakes, that escalates over the course of a story to a distinct breaking point—in other words, a real plot.

A good observation, with the limitation that sometimes — as I think many of us agree — a low-stakes novel about characters and relationships is just the ticket. I’m sure we all just thought of The Hands of the Emperor here, among others. Lowell’s The Wizard’s Butler. And so forth and so on. Many of us preferred this kind of book last year, I know. I sure did.

Okay! So, a post that makes some good points. By all means click through and read the whole thing if you’re interested. If you’re a character-first author, how much does all this resonate for you? I think I agree with a lot of it.

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Adorableness quotient is on the rise

It’s not like the b/t boy is the cutest … although at the moment he’s my favorite … it’s just that I managed to get several quite good pictures of him this past weekend, so I thought I’d focus on him in one post. If I manage to get several good pictures of each puppy over the next week, that’d be nice, but (a) the camera in my new phone is inferior to the camera in my old phone; and (b) puppies are wiggly little monsters and produce a whole lot of blurry pictures for every good one.

Anyway: the b/t boy:

I know, very dark, but still, I think this is a cute picture. It shows how domed the skull looks at three weeks compared to later! Sleepy puppyAll together now: Awwwwww!

Sometimes a puppy suggests a puppy name to my subconscious. Usually this occurs when they’re about five weeks old and scampering around. This time, I started calling this puppy “Gremlin” a week ago. I’m definitely not keeping him — I do not want a boy from this litter — but he seems to stand out for me. He’s the only one who’s got a puppy name at this point.

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Interesting variety of covers

I saw this series of book covers at Sarah Higbee’s blog. These are different editions of a book by Clare Fuller called Our Endless Numbered Days. Take a look at these covers and guess what sort of story this might be:

An American editionAnansi InternationalThe Czech editionThe Italian editionPenguin

Sarah is offended by these covers because they don’t, to her, suggest the darkness of the story. Kidnapping, says Sarah, and coercion, and mental, physical and sexual abuse. A child “having to cope with losing everyone she knows and loves, other than her father. And spend large tracts of time foraging just to survive in freezing conditions with an increasingly delusional man.”

That does sound pretty dark.

Let me comment in order.

The first cover doesn’t suggest anything like that. The shadowy dot figure could imply horror. Does it? It makes me think of the shadow of the past or something like that. I wouldn’t have thought the story was particularly grim.

The second does look grim, or potentially grim, to me. The figure trudging through the snow looks beaten down — depressed. I have no idea what genre that looks like to me. The title does scream Literary, though. I would not pick this book up and look at the back cover. Nothing about this cover appeals to me at all.

The Czech cover is entirely boring and doesn’t suggest anything. This may be in the Top Ten All Time Most Boring Covers, Any Genre.

The Italian cover, with the girl running in the snow, looks like a murder mystery. Or even more like suspense. The girl looks like Red Riding Hood and I expect her to meet a wolf. I would open the book thinking that she was probably killed in the first chapter. Or more likely, she disappeared, and the story is about looking for her. Probably a tragic ending. It doesn’t look light-hearted to me at all. Maybe that’s because I read Sarah’s post.

That last cover does, to me, suggest dark literary. I think that one is fine. It suggests isolation, probably mental or emotional isolation as well as physical isolation. It looks claustrophobic. I think someone is trapped somehow and probably the story involves an emotional breakdown. I would never even look at the back cover description.

It’s interesting how very, very different these covers are. Would you find any of them appealing? Do any of them look to you like they imply a grim literary story such as Sarah describes?

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Progress report, plus puppies slow everything down

Finished! Maybe.

I think I might be finished revising No Foreign Sky. Not completely sure. This is the stage where it’s actually quite difficult to be sure. Stuff got cut. Stuff got added (not as much stuff). A lot of items in my bulleted “things to do” list have been crossed off. A smaller bulleted list got created and items in that have also been crossed off.

I think I will set this manuscript aside for today and tomorrow, look it over, maybe do a little detail work on Sunday, and send it back (again) to my agent on Monday. Having said that, I hope I don’t realize on Sunday that I missed something big I meant to change or add or delete or whatever.

I’ll be glad to put a period on this manuscript, again, for a while. It’s the sort of manuscript I can fiddle with endlessly. I want to send it off and put it out of my mind and work on something else. Of course I’m not sure exactly what I should work on next.

a) Write another Black Dog novella. Or two. Or three. Do you realize there are only four and a half months before Halloween? I need to write the other novellas for the upcoming collection in time for some of you to read them and comment. Luckily, as I mentioned early this year, I have about, what, seven decent ideas for stories. None of those have helpfully suggested full scenes, but I haven’t been thinking about them either. If I start to write one of them, it should hopefully unfold pretty easily.

b) Write another scene or two for TASMAKAT.

c) Finish KERAUNANI.

d) Finish the SF novel that is still sitting here at 80,000 words.

Well, I will take the rest of the day off, probably. Maybe read something off my TBR pile.

Meanwhile:

Grandmother Kimmie with three-week-old puppies

Morgan never goes in with her puppies unless I tell her to. She is not a fond mother. This is probably partly because she developed a rash on her underside. I started trimming all the puppies’ claws every three days and rinsing Morgan’s tummy after she nurses, and the rash has mostly cleared up and she no longer objects to nursing, but still — not fond. I get up in the middle of the night and tell her to go nurse her puppies and supervise to make sure she stays with them long enough for them to get full.

Meanwhile, Kimmie has been begging to go see the puppies since they were born. She’s actually seen them briefly several times — I trust her completely to be gentle and maternal — but this is the first time she had a change to settle down with them. Which she did at once. If she could nurse them, I’d let Morgan retire from motherhood.

The b/t boy is no longer a concern. (Knock on wood.) He’s gaining properly now without any support and is no longer the smallest puppy (quite). He has surpassed the tricolor boy (barely). The tri boy was one of the biggest and is now the smallest. I’m giving him eight to ten cc’s of formula, very slowly and carefully, by syringe, about three times a day. That helps him nurse vigorously and gain. This is a lot like Leda and her sister, his full aunts; they had very much the same kind of minor problem. I fully expect that, like them, he will be perfectly fine as soon as he starts eating real food. I suggest food to the puppies every day, but so far they are unimpressed.

Puppies develop A LOT every week from this point on. They are all up on their feet — in another week, they’ll be sorta kinda steady. They are all playing a little — in another week, they’ll be playing a lot. They are all licking formula off my fingertip — in another week, I HOPE they will all be willing to eat very small, very mushy bits of kibble.

They are also just about cute enough to be distracting. In two weeks, they will be ULTIMATELY cute.

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Novels about interplanetary trade

At tor.com, this post by James Davis Nicholl: Risky Business: Five Books About Interplanetary Trade

The book I instantly thought of is on this list: Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon. That’s part of the Ky Vatta series, which is quite good space opera.

So is Merchanter’s Luck by CJC. That’s a story I like quite a bit, even though the whole plot turns on emotional angst. CJ Cherryh can make that work for me, unlike practically any other author on the planet.

I’ve got two obvious contenders for a list like this:

1) Quarter Share and associated titles by Nathan Lowell. These are self-published and there are a few rough edges which Lowell sanded off in other titles he wrote later. On the other hand, I like this series quite a bit and have read it several times. And it’s most definitely ALL ABOUT interplanetary trade.

2) Balance of Trade and the other Liaden novels by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. Some focus more on trade than others, but that’s an important element in this series.

I’ll bet there are plenty of others. Mostly they probably feature peaceful traders who Get Into Dire Trouble, but there’s something to be said for stories like Lowell’s, where as a rule Dire Trouble does not happen and trade is actually front and center for the entire story.

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