Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 133

Oh, yeah, characters

A post at Book View Cafe: Oh, yeah, characters.

A while back I talked a bit about my writing process. I left out how I create characters. Sure enough, one of my two readers asked me about it. So, I hemmed and hawed. Turned on them ferociously. Whistled and tried to walk nonchalantly out of the room. All because I’m not sure how I do it. …

… The character might have to be articulate to explain the plot, athletic to run around while chased by evil, able to hack a computer with dark net technology, woo the romantic interest and be rooted for during necessary sunset sailing at the end of the story. Okay. That might define a role. It does not define a character. But it does suggest the shape of a character.

The author of this post, Steven Popkes, then provides a post that … I suspect … just guessing here, but he says he’s not sure how he does it and then he provides a really objective list of things the character has to be able to do and a list of questions about what kind of person would be able to do those things and would go into that career and on and on, and I have to say, I suspect that is not actually how he builds a character.

Then, we start to drill down: what did he do his thesis on? Where did he go to graduate school? Undergrad? Did he have loans to work off or did he have scholarships? You have to want to be an astrophysicist. … What drew our scientist to astrophysics and then to SETI? More interestingly, what choices were made to scale down the character’s ambition?—looking for aliens is a big, impossible ambition. What did our scientist decide to do that was possible and in the direction of that big, impossible goal? Oxygen detection on exoplanets? Radio analysis of signals?

You see? I think if you start off by saying, “I don’t know how I develop characters, I just do it,” then the above paragraph of questions with associated answers is probably not in your head at any point. Or not unless a reader asks you how you develop your characters and you have to come up with an answer.

I think that what’s really happening is, the characters steps onto the page as a gestalt. The author knows who that character is as a person and how that character views the world, and reacts to events, and positions himself in the world, without ever having to drill down like that. Objective background for the character is then filled in almost absent-mindedly, as the author happens to need it, while big things — what the character is like, who he is as a person, really big elements of his backstory — that stuff is already there.

When someone says, “I don’t really know how I come up with characters,” I think it sort of has to be something like that.

But what I really mean is, I think that’s pretty much how it works for me. If somebody asked me about this during a panel or workshop, I think my answer would have to be something like that. Maybe for Popkes, it’s quite different! I think one of the interesting things about posts like this is how they can spark a discussion that makes it clear that no, actually, a lot of authors do things VERY DIFFERENTLY. Maybe Popkes really is saying “I don’t know how I do it, but I totally outline a detailed backstory for my characters,” even though I can’t imagine how that would actually feel or how it would work.

Those of you who write, do you have a process by which you develop characters? Or do they step on stage as real people, already pretty much complete without a deliberate process? Or something in between that I’m failing to imagine?

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Narrowing down the TBR pile

I thought this Twitter thread from @Sandstone was worth sharing: So, a thread on reading, not reading, and TBR overwhelm, along with a method of narrowing things down that’s worked for me

I’ll sum this up:

Divide your TBR pile into two halves: the half that feels more appealing and the half that feels less appealing.

Divide the top half into two quarters.

Repeat, repeat, until you have a small and manageable set of books that are most appealing to you at the moment.

There’s more to it than that! But that’s the fundamental process.

Anyway, I truly sympathize with this problem of a giant TBR pile but no desire to actually read anything on it; and the associated problem of not being able to get into a new-to-me book for reasons that have little to do with the book’s quality and a lot more to do with my current mood and ability (or maybe desire) to focus attentively on a new-to-me world.

Click through and read the whole thing if you’ve had a problem getting into anything on your TBR pile. Maybe you’ll see some suggestions that might help.

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You don’t have to explain every element of the worldbuilding

Here at Book Riot, this post: BOOKS DON’T HAVE TO EXPLAIN THEMSELVES TO YOU

I was curious, and ready to be snarky, but actually I agree completely with the point the author of this post is making:

The Chosen and the Beautiful is [a retelling of The Great Gatsby] set in our world, but with the addition of magic (and demons). The magical elements are woven through the story, but they’re not the focus. It’s much more about the characters and plot of the original story with a new perspective. One of the things I enjoyed about the story was the mysterious fantastical elements. … I take issue with readers saying that not explaining the magic system in a book like this is a flaw or weakness of the storytelling. … Magical realist and fabulist stories do this particularly well: the fantastical elements are used to establish mood or to have metaphorical resonance. 

As I said, I agree.

One interesting tidbit I’ve gleaned over time from reading reviews is that some readers do want everything explained, with the rules of magic laid out and an appendix describing the history of the world. In other words, they literally do want infodumping, where the author pauses to explain things and then goes on with the plot.

This is fine, I guess, although I don’t really understand it. But the place it’s least fine is in magic, because there are fundamentally two kinds of magic:

a) Scientific magic, with rules that are clearly defined, and

b) Fairy-tale magic, with rules that are sometimes understood, but definitely not defined.

That is, in Patricia McKillip’s Song for the Basilisk, everyone knows that if you go to the magical land to get, for example, a dragon-bone pipe, then the rules are very different. Time and space are strange, and the people you meet may not be what they seem, and so on.

We all know that in fairy tales, if an animal stops you in the woods and asks for help, you should probably help it. But we also know this could be dangerous. We don’t need these rules spelled out; reading fairy tales as children makes these sorts of rules clear.

Also, the author of the Book Riot post is right again: unexplained magical elements that intrude into the “real world” are intrinsic to magical realism, and those elements give magical realism a lot of its charm.

This post tackles this subject from a couple different directions. It’s worth a look if you’ve got a minute.

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Progress Report

Okay, so, on Saturday, I thought, “You know, I bet I can finish this revision of No Foreign Sky today!”

Honestly, I don’t know why I ever have thoughts like that. I should know better. Even the back of my brain, optimist as it apparently is, ought to know better.

Maybe by this time next week. I’m tempted to say “Definitely,” but let’s not have another iteration of over-optimism. I have three basic elements I’m focusing on. They are the hardest three elements, which is why I left them for last. Not intrinsically hard, but picky and detailed. I guess the good news, such as it is, is that I’ll mostly be skimming across half the chapters and making minimal changes to the other half. It’s just that minimal changes still take maximum minutes, or so it sometimes seems.

Meanwhile:

I can’t resist a puppy lying on … hmm … her back. That’s one of the tricolor girls. You see how very, very heavily all three tricolors are marked. The one on her back has a big white bar across her hips. That’s how I tell her apart.

She was one of the two smallest puppies at birth — six ounces. She’s now the second biggest puppy. About twenty-six ounces. So she’s gone up about twenty ounces in nineteen days: wow. Well, the girls have been no trouble at all.

The b/t boy is now gaining just fine on his own with no help from me. I don’t think he’s going to be a problem again (knocking on wood!). The tri boy is still a bit of a problem, but not much. I gave him twelve cc’s of formula last night, all at one time, to kick him along a bit. If he were an orphan, he’d be getting about 120 cc’s of formula per day, or more, so you see that this wasn’t a lot. He then gained properly overnight and this morning, so we’ll see how he does for the rest of the day. I’m going to try him on just a bit of formula off my fingertip tonight as a precursor to trying him on formula-soaked puppy kibble in a few days.

Meanwhile! They are all actually developing really fast. All but the ruby girl wobbled up to their feet around two weeks — very early for Cavalier puppies. She is up now too, she is just really fat and it slowed her down. They are all showing a little bit of play behavior now, mouthing each other and my finger with their tiny toothless mouths. They stay awake for a full minute or so after nursing, playing a little and wobbling around, and then collapse and sleep till time to nurse. Impossible to see anything about their individual personalities yet, but you sure see species-specific play behavior. They grab each other’s ears and do that sideways jerk that will someday kill a rabbit if they catch one.

Morgan would like to be done with nursing. She would absolutely wean them today if she could. But, of course, I can’t let her, not quite yet. I did trim their invisible but sharp claws — you have to do it by feel because heaven knows you can’t see a thing; the claws are so very tiny. But they were scratching her up, I’m pretty sure that’s why she’s decided she doesn’t want to nurse them even though they don’t yet have teeth. She’s also nursing sitting up so that they mostly have to keep their feet on the bedding. Well, it won’t be long, and she do the fun part of being a mother — playing with them. She nudges them now, but of course they just fall over.

Just about two weeks till we hit Ultimate Cuteness. IMO, Ultimate Cavalier Puppy Cuteness hits at five weeks and lasts till around ten weeks.

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Influences: Narnia

Here’s an interesting post at tor.com: The Story King: How The Chronicles of Narnia Shapes the Worlds We Create

Some of the things I loved about Narnia that I wanted in my books:

I love that Lewis’s kids are largely committed to each other, no matter what happens. Your brother might betray you, but he’s still your brother. Your cousin might be a pill, but you’re not going to abandon him on some desert island. I was tired of reading books where the conflicts centered on kids who aren’t allowed to get along. I wanted to read (and write) kids who loved each other, who had friendships you would cheer for and maybe wish you had something a little more like it. There aren’t angst-ridden teens making dour faces at each other in my books. They love each other. Yes, there are occasional misunderstandings, hard conversations, disagreements about what’s to be done…but at the end of the day they have each other’s back.…

This post is by Matt Mikalatos, who, when he began a YA series, found that Narnia was on his mind when it came to shaping the story he wanted to tell.

Certainly the above paragraph about friendship makes me a lot more inclined to check out Mikalatos’ series!

Click through and read the whole post if you’ve got a minute. It’s an interesting look at one author’s perception of how a particular work influenced the deeper themes that became important in his own writing later.

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Recent Reading: Wrapt in Crystal by Sharon Shinn

Okay, so, as you probably know, I’ve been a fan of Sharon Shinn’s books for a long time. Wrapt in Crystal is the last of her new-to-me books. I only realized it existed when I wrote this post a year or two ago and therefore looked up her complete oeuvre. Of course I picked up a copy at once, but I only just read it last week. I haven’t been reading a lot of new-to-me fiction lately, but this past week or ten days I’ve finally made some (minimal) progress in reading paper books off my TBR pile. Wow, do I ever prefer to read on my phone or Kindle. Nevertheless, I do have a lot of books on the physical TBR pile and I would like to see that number decline this year, and since I’m (almost) guaranteed to like anything by Sharon Shinn, I brought Wrapt in Crystal upstairs and finally read it.

Well, let me say, this story was a surprise in several ways.

You may have noticed that there’s a smallish number of authors with such a broad writing range that you can hardly believe they wrote [this book] as well as [that book]. Like, if you read Hunting Party by Elizabeth Moon – really good space opera novel, you should certainly read it – and then you read The Speed of Dark – absolutely stunning near-future SF novel that you MUST READ, GO GET IT NOW – then it’s just astonishing that Moon wrote them both. Or if you read the Newsflesh series by Myra Grant and then the InCryptid series by Seanan McGuire, it’s really hard to believe they’re actually by the same person.

I already knew Sharon Shinn has a broad range. But I would never have guessed she wrote Wrapt in Crystal if her name wasn’t on the cover. This is true even though certain elements do echo broad tendencies often seen in her other work.

What makes this novel different:

a) It’s not a romance novel. There is a romance, but it’s sort of … not unimportant, that’s not the right term … it’s sort of tucked behind everything else. If someone asked you for recommendations for fantasy romances, then a lot of Shinn’s novels would probably leap to mind, but you wouldn’t think of this novel. This is maybe the second book of Shinn’s where the romance is tucked completely back behind the main story.

b) It’s an SF murder mystery. It is very specifically a murder mystery. It follows mystery beats, not romance beats. It is also, by the way, a successful mystery in the sense that I had no idea who the murderer was until the protagonist figured it out.

The one way in which this story falls down as a murder mystery is that the reader doesn’t meet the murderer until right at the end, which is unusual in a mystery. The murderer does tie back to a character we meet earlier, but that isn’t as common a way of handling a mystery. For some time, after figuring out an important plot point, I was a bit concerned that a certain person might be the murderer because we met this person early and I could see that the story might move in that direction, but I didn’t want it to. I’m not entirely sure whether that was a deliberate red herring or not, but anyway, it wasn’t the kind of thing I thought Shinn would do, so I wasn’t very concerned. Except this story is rather different from her usual books, so … anyway, the story didn’t go that way and I’m glad.

c) It’s slow-paced. Without pausing to re-read everything else of Shinn’s and double-check this perception, Wrapt in Crystal seems very slow-paced in comparison to most of her other novels. This is true even though I would say that many of her other novels unfold at a leisurely pace. This one is slower.

d) It’s far, far more overtly philosophical. The world features one religion divided into two sects that seem very different on the surface, and we have a lot of conversations and discussions about religion as the story unfolds. This is the heart of the novel. Everything else is secondary. The romantic elements grow out of this religious element. So does the plot. So does the protagonist’s character arc, as he moves from being closed-off and cold to being much more emotionally open.

I really like how Shinn handled this central worldbuilding element. In fact, the way she handles this is one of the few obvious similarities between this book and some of her others. For example, in Heart of Gold, two very different societies are presented to the reader, each with very different gender values, but both societies are presented as good, or at least worthy – neither is presented as intrinsically morally inferior. Basically all the characters, of both societies, are trying to do good things even though they may be in conflict.

Wrapt in Crystal presents these two religious sects the same way, only even more so – both sects are good and worthy; they are not opposed to one another; each considers the other fundamentally a force for good in the world; the leaders of the two sects probably aren’t friends, but they are allies. If you want to read a story about religious fanatics preaching hatred against an opposed sect, this is not that story at all. Since I absolutely do not want to read a story about religious fanatics preaching hatred etc, this was excellent.

There are, as we all know, a handful of SF/Fantasy novels that present fictional religions in a way that feels real. Just a handful. Well, this is another in that small number. Religion is important in a lot of Shinn’s novels, but I think this is my favorite presentation of religion that she’s ever given us, and the one that feels most like a real religion.

Other comments:

Whatever else it may be, this story is also a novel about grief and recovery. I don’t want to end without providing what may be my favorite quote from the novel:

“You think that pain is a vacuum,” he said, taking her arm and making her face him again. “You think it sucks you dry and leaves you hollow and empty. You think it will take so much more time, so much more effort, to fill up that empty place again. You don’t think you can do it. But I tell you, pain is a vise. It clamps down on you. Everything you once were, everything you once had, is still inside you, small and squeezed and crushed flat. If you can break that vise, if you can move and stretch and open up again, all those things inside you will expand, will come back to life. You will feel everything again, once you give yourself room to feel.”

He is speaking to her, of course, but this is so clearly a moment when the protagonist is also speaking to himself. Except he’s been opening up again all through this novel, and she hasn’t yet moved toward that kind of recovery herself – or not very far – not enough to recognize it in herself.

Overall, Wrapt in Crystal isn’t going to be a comfort novel for me the way Shinn’s Elemental Blessings books are. I’m not sure how often I’ll re-read it. I wouldn’t reach for it if I had the flu, for example. But I admire this one more. It’s a more complex, less sweet, less easy story. I liked it a lot and I hereby recommend you all pick it up and give it a try if you’ve never happened to read it before.

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Fantasy set in the old west

So, I just re-read the latter two books in Patricia Wrede’s Thirteenth Daughter trilogy – Across the Great Barrier and The Far West – which as you may recall is set in an alternate-history world around the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In this world, that expedition took place a few years ago, but Lewis and Clark disappeared somewhere out west, presumably killed by natural or magical wildlife, or possibly by weather or other misfortune.

This is a fascinating world, with plenty of echoes of our world and many correspondences with our own history and with real historical figures, but at the same time a very different history. For one thing, if prehistoric humans ever crossed the Baring Land Bridge, they must have all been killed by the wildlife, because there obviously weren’t any indigenous people when Columbia (the Americas) were discovered by Avropeans (Europeans). For another, wow, wildlife. A lot of Ice Age animals are still around, such as mammoths and giant beavers and dire wolves. There are also plenty of magical animals: Not just dragons, but “swarming weasels” and “jeweled mink,” which are almost like normal animals; and giant invisible foxes and basilisk-like giant lizards that turn animals (and people) to stone, and so on. You can see why it might’ve been quite difficult for humans to get established on this continent. Eighty years ago, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin set up a massive, massive magic spell along the Mississippi (the Mammoth River), the Great Barrier, to keep dangerous wildlife away from established towns and cities. Almost everyone lives to the east of the river. The west is still almost entirely unknown.

This world provides a great backdrop to the story, which is a slow-paced YA coming-of-age story featuring Eff as the first-person protagonist. Eff is the thirteenth child in a family with fourteen children, twin to Lan, who is seventh son of a seventh son and therefore possesses a lot of potential for magical power. Eff, as the thirteenth child, is considered by some to be unlucky and that belief sets up her basic character arc for the first book. In the second and third books, she is largely past that uncertainty and growing into herself.

I’d read the first book a couple of times, but the latter two only once when each came out, and, a bit to my surprise, I turned out to have forgotten nearly everything about them. Reading them again now was almost like reading them for the first time. Since they’re by Patricia Wrede, you’d expect them to be beautifully written, and they are. This trilogy is something of a departure for Wrede, as it is very much world-focused. Wrede provides just enough development of the characters to provide human context to the world, and barely enough plot to justify calling this a story rather than a travelogue through a fictional world. As it happens, I quite like travelogues, as long as they’re well-written and the world is neat and the characters are even reasonably well-drawn. This is a delightful world to explore and I was very happy to accompany Eff and Lan and everyone else on their journeys into the far west and back again.

So, all this puts me in mind of a fantasy subgenre that is very small, but that I like a lot: fantasy novels where the point is to show off the world, generally by means of a long journey through the world. In stories of this type, the world takes center stage and the journey through the world is distinctly more important than the action or quest or whatever the plot involves. I do like the characters to be appealing enough and well-developed enough to carry a story, so that the book doesn’t exactly like reading a travelogue, but in stories of this type, the plot is almost not important to me at all.

This subgenre includes, oh, let me see … Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, for example. Also the Lady Trent series by Marie Brennan. Also, arguably, stories such as The Clan of the Cave Bear, where a little bit of plot is wrapped around a whole lot of Pleistocene travelogue. But today I’d like to focus on a subgenre of the subgenre: fantasy novels set in an alternate Old West. Two such stories spring to mind:

Gold Seer trilogy by Rae Carson. There’s something of a plot, and the characterization is good, but this is another novel where the journey itself is a lot of the story. There’s a reason for the journey, and once in California we spend some time with the characters as they establish a settlement and handle various problems. But we spend a lot of time on the journey itself. Again, the focus here is on an alternate Old West. In this case, very different from Wrede’s story, there is almost no magic at all. You could practically read this as a real story about traveling west during the Goldrush era. It has a tremendous flavor of real history.

I loved this trilogy, but have only read it once. It’s another one I should read again.

The Devil’s West trilogy by Laura Anne Gilman. Very similar in some ways to the above, this is yet another series where the world features an alternate Old West. In this case, the map of North America echoes real history, with a small number of states in the east and the Spanish colonies in the west, but with this big, big region in the middle section of the continent belongs to the “Devil” – a powerful magical entity who is not actually the Christian Devil. Lots of puzzling, often obscure, dangerous magic all through this region.

The worldbuilding is fantastic, complicated, and sort of in between the other two trilogies in how far removed from our real history it is. I loved the first book, liked the second, but did feel the third sort of fell down on the job of ending the series.

How about you all, any stories you’ve read and enjoyed that place fantasy in a setting derived from the Old West?

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If you could only read one book for the rest of your life …

Here’s a post at Book Bub: 15 Authors Tell Us Which Book They’d Choose to Read for the Rest of Their Lives

One of the best things about reading is that it offers an infinite source of entertainment. But what if you had to choose one book to read for the rest of your life? We asked authors that same difficult question: If they could only read one book for the rest of their lives, which one would they choose?

That’s a fun question! I’m really quite interested. I would be even more interested if these were all SFF authors, but sure, I’m interested anyway.

Oh! The first author on their list picked A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah Maas. That’s unexpected! I was not very impressed by the first paragraphs of a book by Sarah Maas when I tried it. Not sure which book that might have been. Something popular. Was it this series? I’m not sure. Let me check. It was!

My problem was that Maas used one word (parameter) when she meant a different word (perimeter) and I instantly distrusted the author’s craft and sense of the language. I am really so surprised to see this series appear in a post like this! Maybe the books are much better than this error in word choice made it seem.

War and Peace. That’s much more what I would have expected.

One Hundred Years of Solitude. I have that on my TBR shelves. I’ve heard both good things about this book (about the writing and style) and negative things (about the tone and essentially tragic story). If any of you have read it, what did you think?

Madame Bovary! Wow, my all-time number-one most-hated book! I would literally rather have zero books on a desert island than this one.

The complete works of Shakespeare is cheating. I’m okay with a series, but not with this. You can consider a series one fundamental story, but not the complete works of an author.

Okay! Lots more choices at the link, so click through if you wish.

For me, it would most likely be The Lord of the Rings. Someone did pick that, and I agree. I doubt I would think very hard about other works. I mean, I MIGHT pick CJC’s Foreigner series on the grounds that I really like it and it is thousands of pages long. But TLotR is most likely the one work I would choose.

How about you? One book for a lifetime. What would you choose?

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Another look at high fantasy

This is a guest post from Elaine T, a frequent commenter, who sent me this in an email. I liked it and asked if I could turn it into a post. Here it is:

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At the core of the question of high fantasy is the sense of wonder.

What makes the fantasty, fantastic?  When Jules Verne published Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas a submarine was a fantastic idea, but now it is within our everyday world; and so the book reads as fiction, science fiction, no longer a fantastic and unbelievable voyage.  Our fantasies now are magic and starships and, on occasion, magic starships.  It doesn’t have to have an understandable magic system because it may have no magic at all.  It seems to me that before we define “high fantasy,” we must first define fantasy itself.  So then, what is the root of fantasy- not just in fiction, but in the word itself? Once you know what fantasy is, start defining ‘high’ or ‘low.’

Fantasy. That which is fantastic. Fancy, fanciful. In fiction, what is the fantastic and wonderous?  Dracula, for one is no fantasy, though it is a fantastic tale.  It is terrific and horrorific, evoking terror and horror.  Tarzan is no fantasy, though it is fiction. 

And so we have some science, but it is also fantasy, in that it is fantastic.

The Wizard of Oz is fantasy; but I would hesitate to call it “high fantasy”.  Likewise for Lewis’ Narnia.  They are books that are written on a single underlying concept, an idea and that concept is one that may have made a high fantasy such as LOTR.

Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island is in the same ballpark as LOTR, high concept.  Then, does it stop being fantasy, simply when it  has become real? Twenty Thousand Leagues was a fantasy.  Of these I would cast Verne’s TMI as high fantasy despite its lack of magic.  And raise the question of Frankestein.  These, these trailblazers, for lack of a better word- these books around which entire genres are built; all of them were fantasy when they were written.  Frankenstein, at the least, still is both fiction and fantasy, impossible, implausible, and inconceivable!

A novel may be built around a single underlying fantastic concept; and then we may call it fantasy. And yet, that is not all it takes to make high fantasy.  I turn my attention now to Riordan’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians and P.C. Hodgell’s The Chronicles of the Kencyrath.  Settings so wildly removed they have next to nothing in common with each other. (they’re both fiction.)  But both might be described such that they could sound like high fantasy.  And yet I am hard put to it to call PJ ‘fantasy’ at all.  And  still have yet to understand why.  And the same goes for the Kencyrath:  Gods, monsters and foundations of reality trembling, ancient wars and sleeping evils, and prophecy (can’t forget the prophecy) but the lens through which our narrator views it keeps it solidly in the realm of fiction; that down-to–earth tale .  Our protagonist doesn’t think “the fate of the world” she thinks ‘not dying today’ no map no compass no guide. I have the Book, a thing of power, I can A: carry it safely to somewhere no one can use it, B: try to use it rarely because the last man who tried to copy it died one page in, or C:  reluctantly haul it around while ignoring it.

She picks C.

And so it is a fantasy on an epic scale through a down–to-earth lens, but it is not High Fantasy.  High fantasy is thinking ahead, making choice D, think about what might be done with it either for good or evil and take appropriate steps.

And then there’s Giftwish by Grahamn Dustan Martin ( a juvenile fantasy from either the 70s or 80s), which has all the markers of high fantasy including prophecies.  Giftwish is closer to being high fantasy than either Hodgell or Riordan, but lacks a key element:  the feel… that nebulous conceptual thread to which all things always return.  (though it is a very good book and has been verbed in this family. To Giftwish something is to try to manipulate the prophecy fulfillment but get the results promised in spite of the manipulation. and to the manipulator’s dismay, usually.)  LOTR has the threat of Sauron and the desire to return to and preserve home twined together, for example. 

And so I fail to define high fantasy in a few words, but have I think a few of the pieces by which High Fantasy may be recognized.

Elaine T

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So, there we go. This is getting at something else, related to what I called tone, but perhaps different. I believe I agree that high fantasy has to evoke a sense of wonder in order to succeed, and that quite a bit of fantasy tries to do this but doesn’t quite make it. One that succeeds:

One that (mostly) fails: The Belgariad, which pulls off this kind of sense of wonder in a few scenes, but mostly reaches for that sense but doesn’t quite make it.

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Progress Report: about four steps forward, one step back

Okay, so, first, everything is (probably) just fine!

However, not entirely to my surprise — there’s usually something — the smallest puppy, the black and tan boy, stopped gaining weight and then started losing weight, very slowly, last Thursday. Eight days old. Well, I’ve seen that before. All kinds of things can make a puppy suddenly stall out. Left alone, I suppose such a puppy would likely fade and die. I can’t imagine letting that happen, so I personally prefer to intervene aggressively as soon as I see there might possibly be a problem. I tube-fed him six or so ccs of formula four or five times a day for two days and yep, that looks like it’s about got it. He’s mostly gaining fine on his own again now, with just very minor intervention from me — I tube-fed him once yesterday just because he might have started slipping again. Maybe not, but I’m the hands-on type. He gained overnight all by himself. He’s the smallest, though, a full hundred grams smaller than the biggest puppy — twelve ounces to her eighteen-plus. Weights at this age are meaningless and don’t translate in any way to adult weights, by the way.

Anyway, then the big tricolor boy started sputtering milk through his nose while nursing. Yep, I’ve seen that before too. This is a time when it’s a bad idea to google around because everything sounds dire. Cleft palate! Aspiration pneumonia! Actually, neither is likely. The puppy doesn’t have a cleft palate; as if my vet wouldn’t have checked, plus a cleft palate doesn’t wait ten days before causing problems. Could cause aspiration pneumonia, but as I say, I’ve seen this before and know it probably won’t. Greedy, powerful puppies sometimes have this trouble at this age. The swallowing reflex hasn’t quite matured — that happens around two weeks of age — so this problem is likely to solve itself shortly. If it’s still happening at two weeks, well, when he’s weaned, that’ll solve the problem. In the meantime, milk through the nose is fine. Milk in the lungs is very not fine; that’s when you get pneumonia. When the puppy starts sputtering, I pull him off the nipple, swab off his face with a tissue, hold his body angled down for a minute until his breathing sounds normal, hold him to my ear to be sure his lungs sound normal — they do — and then put him back. I’m restricting him to anterior breasts because those are less productive. Usually this only happens once per nursing session because when he’s less hungry, he suckles less aggressively and doesn’t tend to have this trouble.

However, this does mean I tend to be awake for ten to twenty minutes every two hours all through the night. Luckily I have no trouble cat-napping during the day. Just remember that parents of newborn humans have a heck of a lot longer before they get a full night’s sleep!

You have to look very, very closely, but you can actually see the black-and-tan puppy’s face. He has a tiny bit of white on his chin, if that helps orient you.

Meanwhile, moving ahead nicely with the revision of No Foreign Sky.

Plus I took one day to finish a scene in Tasmakat, because I figured out how to finish that scene and figured it’d be just as easy to write those pages as take notes on how to do it.

This is the opening scene, at least right now. I can tell you, the first sentence — some version of the first sentence — is almost certainly going to appear in the finished draft. It’s a fine sentence and I’m proud of it. It was tough because, though one is long and the other short, the first sentences of Tuyo and Tarashana are tense, grabby sentences and so I needed another sentence like that. I think I have one.

Everything else about these early scenes is subject to change. A lot depends on how long the draft turns out to be and how much of the journey back from the high north I choose to show. I think I have to show enough to develop the relationship between Ryo and Darra, and Ryo and Elaro, and Darra and Elaro. But that doesn’t mean I need to show every step along the way. So, not sure whether this early scene will appear in the draft or not.

I’m also reading more right now than I have before this year. I’m re-reading books plus reading books off my paper TBR shelves. It’s not necessarily really fair to the book, but these days, if a book doesn’t grab me right out of the gate, I probably won’t press forward past ten pages or so — and it’s nice to see the TBR pile shrinking a little for a change. I ditched three books last night. For one, I didn’t like the dystopian backdrop; for another, I didn’t care for the highly emotional present-tense style; for the third, I don’t know, it just didn’t grab me.

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