Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 16

Invictus Duology Sale Today

This is just a reminder: Today is the day the sale officially begins for the Invictus duology! Though the price did drop earlier this week, yes, and believe me I checked because every now and then something goes wrong, which is dire. But the price is right down in the basement. It will never be this low again unless I run another BookBub featured deal for this edition someday in the future. I won’t apply for another featured deal for this duology this year, so that’ll be a while, if ever.

The sale will be ongoing until April 1 or so, and If I remember to do this, I’ll raise the price gradually rather than all at once. If you recommend this duology to a friend, the price should be inviting until at least mid-April.

And thanks again to anyone who took the time to move a review from an individual book to this omnibus!

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New Title: Hedesa

You all persuaded me that “Hedesaveriel” was too long for the title, which was not a huge astonishing surprise because I was leaning that way. I tried out different things in my head and finally went with —

This is the name of Veriel Kiolakarian’s star, unless I change my mind about how Tarashana names work (which is not impossible, by the way).

The cover artist changed the title and sent me the new versions in less than 24 hours, which was nice. Not that this isn’t trivial for the artist, but still. I did order another cover at the same time just to be sure the artist wouldn’t be too annoyed at this request.

I will now do the very minor revision necessary to clarify the names much earlier in the story, plus point more emphatically to Hedesa much earlier in the story, so that the title will begin to make sense long before the reader gets to the starlit country. Though the great importance of this star won’t be obvious until much later. Spoiler, I realize, but a vague and unimportant spoiler.

You know what, I’ll give you another spoiler, this one (I hope) enticing: Hedesa is the name of this star in the starlit country. You know what this star is called in the winter country? The Eagle Star.

I thought of that amazingly late in this story, but it makes sense for a zillion reasons AND — you may not remember this — but we have seen references to the Owl Star and the Heron Star, so this is perfectly reasonable and consistent with the way Ugaro name stars. In this new story, we’re also seeing references to the Raven Stars. Plural, because ravens come in flocks. The Raven Stars aren’t important … yet. Who knows what may happen?

I feel like I have about three chapters to go with the newly renamed Hedesa. Probably that means more like four or five. Nevertheless, I’m obviously nearly at the end. Let me see, where am I? Okay, I’m just about to finish up chapter 23. Chapters 24 and maybe 25 will constitute the climactic scenes (I think). Then a short denouement. We will be decidedly in the middle of this story, but we will have come to a reasonable conclusion. That’s the plan.

However, I’m also pausing to go back and, sigh, remove a character. Two, in fact. I just have not been able to build these characters into important, real characters, and it’s clear I’m not going to be able to do that here. Maybe later. They remain in chapter 1 and a little in chapter 3, then that’s it. Keeping them in the last part of the story was annoying me because I was pretty sure I was going to remove them, so I made a decision about that and I’m moving forward with that decision now so I can quit thinking about it.

FAQ: What if I change my mind? I ask myself this at these moment even if no one else does, so this really is a frequently asked question. Because taking characters out of a story is a lot of trouble, and, as I bet you can imagine, putting them back in is absolutely infuriating.

This is therefore the sort of moment when I rename the working file. The old file will sit there on five or six flash drives while I move forward with this tedious element of revision. Just in case.

However, the major plus of doing this kind of revision right now is that I’m reading and/or skimming through the story again, which is helpful for getting the whole back third clearly into my mind, which will be helpful in finishing the story.

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Poetry Thursday: Flowers

I’ve been looking at Open Access images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There are sooooo many. Honestly, I should post a few now and just purely so we can all admire them. Here are a few today.

Pear Blossoms Unidentified
After Qian Xuan ChineseFlower Study Yun Bing 
17th century

Hibiscus Mutabilis and Jay Utagawa Hiroshige Japanese
ca. 1840

***

Here’s a flower-themed poem to go with these images:

The Wild Honeysuckle by Philip Freneau

Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,
Hid in this silent, dull retreat,
Untouch’d thy honey’d blossoms blow,
Unseen thy little branches greet:
   No roving foot shall crush thee here,
   No busy hand provoke a tear.

By Nature’s self in white array’d,
She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,
And planted here the guardian shade,
And sent soft waters murmuring by;
   Thus quietly thy summer goes,
   Thy days declining to repose.

Smit with those charms, that must decay,
I grieve to see thy future doom;
They died—nor were those flowers more gay,
(The flowers that did in Eden bloom)
   Unpitying frosts and Autumn’s power
   Shall leave no vestige of this flower.

From morning suns and evening dews
At first thy little being came:
If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are the same;
   The space between is but an hour,
   The mere idea of a flower.

****

Here’s another:

The Rhodora by R alph Waldo Emerson

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.

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FYI: Mary Stewart’s Merlin quadrilogy

Just letting you know that at this moment, Mary Stewart’s complete Merlin quadrilogy, starting with The Crystal Cave, is on sale in audiobook form from Chirp. Each book is $1.99. This is pretty amazing, and I did buy all four books.

This is my favorite Arthurian series. Even the last book (Mordred) is tolerable, which is unique for me when it comes to King Arthur stories. Also, the language is so lovely. Also, I just love this series, I’ve loved it for decades, and since (I’ve realized) I prefer audiobooks for books I’ve already read and love, I picked up the whole series without hesitation.

Chirp offers a lot of audiobooks for $0.99 to $1.99, and … I mean … this is hard to beat. I picked up a Georgette Heyer book too — The Black Moth — even if it’s not my favorite-ever Heyer novel, I have really liked others of her books in audio format.

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Lost in Translation

A post at Writer Unboxed: On Getting Lost in Translations

Turns out the Tao Te Ching is an ancient Chinese text that many believe was written by a hermit named Lao Tzu, and is one of the most translated texts in all of literature. In most editions, it is made up of 81 chapters or sections – although each chapter is VERY short, often no more than a page or two in length, making it an easily digestible read. More Googling revealed scores of English translations of the Tao Te Ching, so I previewed a number of them, and started out with Stephen Mitchell’s version, which is one of the most popular English editions.

Much of this short, sometimes paradoxical and often metaphorical book really resonated with me, and Mitchell has a gift for smoothly flowing, poetic language. But I stumbled badly over some of his hyper-modern translations, and as I studied the footnotes in the book, I became aware that this was not so much a translation as an interpretation. Mitchell does not speak Chinese; he simply read a bunch of English versions of the TTC (which I’ve arbitrarily decided is the cool kids’ abbreviation for the Tao Te Ching), and then interpreted it into his own language, which was heavily informed by his training in Zen Buddhism. 

This is very interesting to me. I would never have thought of reading a lot of translated versions and then writing a version of my own without reading the original. Although … I’m not sure … it seems to me that maybe that could work? If the translated version were good? But then adding a lot of personal interpretation … you know what, I think this would be a lot more reasonable and legitimate if the resultant book were titled Stephen Miller’s Guide to the Tao Te Ching. With annotations about different versions from different translations. Extensive annotations. I don’t really think it sounds right to present this as the actual Tao Te Ching.

Here’s an example of Miller vs a more direct translation:

Gia-fu Feng and Jane English:
When the Tao is present in the universe,
the horses haul manure.
When the Tao is absent from the universe,
war horses are bred outside the city.

Stephen Mitchell:
When a country is in harmony with the Tao,
the factories make trucks and tractors.
When a country goes counter to the Tao,
warheads are stockpiled outside the cities.

And okay, offhand I would say the meaning is pretty close, actually. I prefer the horses, however.

Anyway, the linked post goes on to broaden the topic to translation in general — I mean translations that become very popular, that then create the ruling idea about the work in question about what it’s about, what it means. One of the works this post mentions in The Count of Monte Cristo, and this is interesting because I IMMEADIATELY thought of how vehemently I dislike the movie versions, and why? Because I think they get the heart of the story completely wrong, they totally ignore the real story and present some other story, and then people who love a movie version think THAT is The Count of Monte Cristo, which it is NOT. The linked version is the paperback Penguin classic, which has a good reputation. And why does it have a good reputation? Because Robin Buss’ translation is supposed to be the most true to the original.

This post adds, If the nuances of that example seem minor, consider flipping the script, and look at an English example: Imagine if a translator changed “Call me Ishmael” to “My name’s Ishmael.” Or even “I am Ishmael.”

I like this example because it’s so obvious how different the tone can be with changes that are honestly tiny, in a sense, but nevertheless make a giant difference.

Here’s the poetry post where I posted four versions of the same poem. There, too, the translation made a big difference.

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Sagacious Blade

Just got the notice that this book has been officially released. Here it is at BVC. Here it is at Amazon.

Here are my comments about the draft I read, and I’ll be very curious to read the final version now.

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Plot Twists That Cheat the Reader

Here’s a post at Jane Friedman’s blog: No Twists for Twists’ Sake: Earn Your Ending

Imagine you’ve just picked up the latest buzzy thriller, the one that has everyone on social media raving about the “shocking twist.” You start reading, and you’re really into it. It’s a murder mystery with no shortage of suspects—the victim Jane’s cheating husband Hugo, her jealous best friend, her unstable coworker, an obsessive delivery person—and you’re having fun guessing which one is the culprit. You turn to the final page, full of anticipation … only to discover the murderer was the victim’s long-lost twin sister, a character who was never once mentioned in the preceding 300+ pages. What?

I’ve seen this, this exact thing, at least twice. I can’t quite remember where, just what. I mean, in one case, there was a lot of blood at the murder scene, great pools of blood, enough to establish the victim must have died even though there was no body. Then it turned out the identical twin sister … maybe there were actually three identical triplets? … not sure I remember for sure, but I do remember the blood was donated by multiple identical twins in order to fake the murder of one of them.

What book WAS that? Does that sound familiar to anybody? It’s on the tip of my tongue, I swear.

Anyway, I didn’t mind all that much. I knew something was up. Maybe the author signaled the identical twin, though … I think not. But I’m not sure, because obviously my memory is vague about the details.

ANYWAY, is there a word for this — I mean, an unfair twist? Because I think there is, or at least sort of. I think this is adjacent to a false miracle — I mean to deus ex machina / diabolus ex machina. It’s really close to the same thing! Because a deus ex ending comes out of nowhere, and this is a plot twist out of nowhere. The difference is a deus ex ending is a false miracle, while this … what is this? It’s a real plot twist, but it’s unfair. Okay, it’s an unjustified plot twist, and deus ex is an unjustified miracle. That’s why they’re sort of the same thing: they both come at the end of a story (or important scene) and they’re both unjustified.

And they’re both added to the story because the author lacks the judgment to realize the solution is unjustified, or else because the author lacks the creativity to either justify the solution or find a different way to handle the ending.

Anyway, a plot twist that isn’t justified is indeed a problem, sometimes a big problem. The linked post offers ten solutions if an author is struggling to justify the twist at the end, starting with the extremely obvious (scatter relevant details throughout the story so the source of the twist doesn’t come out of nowhere).

A clever suggestion is the addition of what the post calls “interstitial elements,” meaning newspaper clippings or social media posts or other such elements, which might be used to set up the twist. I like that sort of thing, so I think that’s a neat idea.

Other suggestions at the linked post, which is slanted toward mysteries and thrillers, but of course plot twists are a thing for lots of stories in basically every genre.

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Update: Whoops, Suddenly Sales

Okay, so I can’t remember why I suddenly decided to run a Tuyo-series sale … oh, yes I do remember. It’s because my royalties are falling off this month, that’s why, a very straightforward and practical reason. Royalties were good in December, January, and February, much better than any prior year, because I released Silver Circle 1, 2, and 3 in the fall and then ran a December sale on everything. So that make a big difference, as it sure should, and therefore the first bit of 2025 worked well without my having to do anything.

But, as I say, royalties are now starting to fall. So, to goose Amazon’s algorithms and kick KU reads back up, time for a sale!

Thus, I looked at available promo dates for various types of promos, so here we are.

Tuyo will be free March 22 – March 26, everywhere. Other Tuyo-series novels will be reduced price March 22 – March 26, in the US and UK.

I realize you probably mostly have all the books in this series, but nevertheless, I thought I should mention this. Also, I will mention now, but mention with a lot more emphasis next month, that the Tuyo audiobook was approved for a Chirp promotion in April and May, which is great, and I will be super interested to see how that works. Chirp is BookBub’s audio promotion wing. I’ve been turned down by them before, this is the first time Tuyo has been approved, I’m very excited, but again, that’s next month, not yet.

***

AND, when it comes to Bookbub, remember how I said I was going to take a stab at getting some BookBub featured deals and so would people please move reviews from the individual Invictus books to the Invictus duology? Well, if you took a minute to do that, thank you! And if anybody else wouldn’t mind doing the same, this would be a great time. Because lo! As soon as I applied for a featured deal for the duology, I got one, which I did not expect! It took 14 tries to get a BookBub featured deal last year and now I’ve had books approved by both Chirp and BookBub at the same time!

Therefore, the Invictus duology will be reduced to $0.99 everywhere, or the equivalent wherever you happen to live, AT LEAST from March 27 — April 1, but possibly as early as this afternoon. That’s because I had no choice but to lower the prices by hand, which means doing it several days in advance to make sure the price is in fact down on the day of the promotion.

This will be interesting because BookBub offered me a non-US featured deal, which sometimes they do. This kind of promo (a) has a lot less oomph, but (b) is a lot less expensive. Some people apparently think that BookBub might use a non-US featured deal to decide whether to approve the same book (or boxed set) for a US promo later. Therefore, it’s somewhat risky to run this kind of deal, because if your book doesn’t do well, then that may be the kiss of death for future featured deals. However, after thinking about it overnight, I went ahead and accepted this featured deal, which is inconvenient in several ways:

A) I didn’t have the boxed set in KU. Now I do. However, I can’t use the countdown deal for the first 30 days after putting the thing in KU, which I did not realize, sigh. Always more to learn, apparently.

B) That means that I’m going to have to lower the prices by hand in each region, several days in advance. THAT means, I’ve done that as of right now, so the price should fall shortly, probably today, but possibly sometime in the next day or two.

C) Did you know that if you can’t use the countdown deal tool, you have to accept the 35% royalty level when you reduce prices below $2.99? I knew that, though I didn’t realize I couldn’t use the countdown tool for 30 days after adding a book to KU. This is too bad, but not as important as it might be, because you can never use the countdown tool to lower prices in Canada or Australia no matter what, so I was going to have to take the royalty hit anyway. But I’ll remember that for the future.

I went ahead and arranged a series of promos in the US as well, though I doubt that will be cost effective. But I did it anyway. We’ll see what happens to KU pages read, which is where I’m more likely to make back the cost of the promotion, I suspect. That’s why I put the thing into KU at all. Maybe I haven’t mentioned this, but the BookBub promo last year for the Death’s Lady boxed set did bump that boxed set up to a higher level of sales, apparently permanently, or at least ongoing as of now. I should have put that in KU, but I didn’t. We’ll see what happens with this one. I did do some fast editing of the Invictus boxed set: Now it includes excerpts from both Tuyo and No Foreign Sky, plus an updated Works By section.

So that’s the sale news! AND, because I’ve got these sales coming up, I went ahead and scheduled another newsletter to release, which I expect will go out tomorrow, at a time when the Tuyo series sale is still going on and the Invictus sale is about to start.

And I guess I should move ahead and make another boxed set. Or two. Or three. Argh. It’s not like it’s hard, or even especially time consuming — it’s just another thing to do, that’s all.

***

I’m now sitting at 200,000 words for the Tano book. Yes, it’s going to overshoot my guess of 210,000 words, but not by a lot, I’m pretty sure. Still on track to finish the draft this month.

Is “Hedesaveriel” too long for the title? I wouldn’t have named him that if I’d realized I might use his name for a title! For a change, he is just as important as he should be, given that his name is the title. His name, by the way, is Veriel, which we don’t find out for a good long time. Hedesa is the name of his star. As you can see, I now know what all the different parts of a Tarashana person’s name actually mean.

Hedesaveriel Kiolakarian seha-Toratarion

Hedesa = the name of his star

Veriel = his personal name

Kiolakarian = his “association upon the earth,” which means, basically extended family plus others.

seha- is a prefix that indicates he is a member of the Sehariel, the Thousand, a deliberative body.

Toratarion = his “constellation,” which is associated with his “affiliation below the heavens.”

And all this is partly because it’s a complicated-looking name that ought to mean something, but it’s also partly because the Tarashana we’ve met so far have often been a bit opaque and hard to understand, so the way their society is organized ought to be somewhat opaque and unfamiliar — that’s what I decided, anyway. But, I could ask the author to change the title to, say, Veriel — but he’s not called that very often. Or Sehariel — but the importance of the Sehariel doesn’t become apparent until fairly late in the story. There’s a different word I could use, but it would constitute a spoiler, so that’s out. So … I’ve been leaning toward just leaving it as Hedesaveriel. Which I’m now good at typing fast and accurately, by the way.

By the way, remember when I said the Tarashana looked too peaceful and nice and I was going to have to drop a few snakes in that garden? Well, I totally did. Lots of gentle breezes and glimmering flowers and, tucked amid the flowers, many venomous serpents.

Trimeresurus viper, image from Pixabay

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Writing Analysis: John Scalzi

Long ago, I wrote this post: Dialogue Tags: The Bad, the Visible, the Audible, and the Absent

In one part of this post, I said:

Look at this tiny sample of dialogue, from Scalzi’s REDSHIRTS, which I just listened to. And it was really good, btw – an excellent choice for audio format. But look at this:

“I was promised a long story,” Duvall said, after they had gotten their food and drinks.
“I made no such promise,” Dahl said.
“The promise was implied,” Duvall protested. “And besides, I bought you a drink. I own you. Entertain me, Ensign Dahl.”
“All right, fine,” Dahl said. “I entered the Academy late because for three years I was a seminary student.”
“Okay, that’s moderately interesting,” Duvall said.
“On Forshan,” Dahl said.
“Okay, that’s intensely interesting,” Duvall said.

Notice something? Every single line is tagged and in all but one case, the tag is “said.” Besides that … the sentence pattern is nearly always the same. Of course I selected this tidbit on purpose to illustrate a point, but I promise you that the overall feeling you get, given Scalzi’s writing style in this book, is that every single line is tagged with “said.”

I wonder how many readers actually start to notice all those “he said, she said” tags? When you’re reading, I wonder if you don’t just skim over this dialogue so fast you really don’t notice the tags? But I can tell you, when you’re listening to this in audio format, those tags sure catch your ear. They don’t sound exactly silly, but they start to pick up a fingernails-on-a-chalkboard quality.

I’ve read, I don’t know, a few books, three or four or five, by John Scalzi, and I’ve found them okay. When I read his version of Little Fuzzy, Fuzzy Nation, I thought this version had prose that was more facile than H Beam Piper’s original, but had less heart (for lack of a better term). I don’t remember whether I really identified why I got this impression. Maybe I couldn’t tell at the time. Maybe I was just mildly annoyed because Scalzi made the Fuzzies have three sexes, which was all him, that’s not in the original, and the reason this annoyed me is that there are evolutionary reasons you get two sexes, not three. This goes back to the fundamental division between “individuals that make big gametes with extra stuff in them” versus “individuals that make little gametes with just the DNA in them,” and this is why plants AND fungi AND animals all have two fundamental sexes, not three. This is not random chance. It’s true you can then do stuff on top of this division, eg, workers vs reproductives in bees, but this was not how Scalzi did it, so it was mildly annoying. But not nearly as annoying as the way he handled dialogue tags in Redshirts. Which I got used to and so I did enjoy the story, but still.

So, the other day, Lise Andreasen sent me an email with a heads up to this recent post of hers: Oh, Scalzi, and I immediately thought of the above and was very curious about this post.

Lise says: Recently I’ve been reading my way through one of those bundles. In this case so, so many books by John Scalzi. A lot of reasons for that. The bundle was cheap. And I liked Redshirts, and Fuzzy Nation, and some other stuff here and there. Oh yeah, Old Man’s War. It would be nice to read the rest of the series. But the language is increasingly rubbing me the wrong way. So many words could be deleted. A lot of sentences could be shortened. And in some cases, a sentence is simply constructed wrong or represents a falsehood.

Those are the ones I’ve definitely read, so that’s good — though I don’t remember Old Man’s War very well. Wow, there are seven books in the series, I didn’t know that. Anyway, what are some examples of phrases that bother Lise? There are quite a few listed in her post, but here is my favorite:

… Ghreni’s brain decided…

(A quirk with this writer, where a person and their brain isn’t the same thing.)

I laughed. I haven’t read enough by Scalzi to notice this; it isn’t something that caught my eye when I’ve read books of his. But it is funny! I’m not sure I remember seeing this in anyone else’s books. I’m wondering why you would ever type that, instead of “Ghreni decided.” Oh, you might, if you were saying, “Ghreni’s brain pulled him toward option A, but his heart urged him toward option B.” Other than that sort of construction, it does seem odd! But you know what else strikes me is that “Ghreni” is pronounced almost like “Grinny” when I read it, which is a strange and offputting name. I sort of wonder, seeing this, if Scalzi is an author who does not subvocalize — I mean, who is not an auditory writer — and who therefore isn’t bothered by things like the sound of he said … he said … he said … at the end of every single line, or by names that sound a little strange.

Anyway! One major takeaway here is that (A) Scalzi is a very popular author, and (B) but his writing doesn’t appeal to me particularly or to various other readers. It’s not a new and stunning revelation to point out that readers have diverse tastes, I know that. I just wonder if the readers who particularly enjoy Scalzi’s work tend to be less auditory when they read than, say, I am? That seems possible.

I’ve also known authors who said that they could hardly read most books because, as they became more experienced as authors and therefore more sensitive to sentences and paragraphs, any sort of bad writing bothered them more and more. I’m kind of relieved that this has happened to me only to a moderate degree, because I can enjoy books that aren’t that well written, as long as SOMETHING about the book appeals to me enough. There are limits, sure. But within those limits, which are fairly broad, a lot of writing styles can work for me well enough.

But I don’t have anything of Scalzi’s on my immense TBR pile, and perhaps this is part of why.

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Many Magnolias

This is the first year I can remember when ALL the magnolias have bloomed and NONE have been zapped by bad weather at the wrong moment.

Yulan

Yulan

Loebneri hybrid

Ordinary and very beautiful saucer magnolia

Ann

Angelica

Also, these

Hellebore

Naamah, helping me take pictures of the hellebores. And Haydee, in the background.

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