Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 2

Update: Still working on Sekaran, but it’s not my fault

Last week I said, somewhat seriously, that I might go ahead and send Sekaran to the next few early readers and proofreaders now, with scattered notes in the file such as

This Chapter Still In Progress

And the fact is, I am almost certainly going to do that today or maybe tomorrow, because every time someone makes a suggestion, such as, “I would love to see more about Gedasares and his decision to keep Kelleos and renounce his right to the throne,” or “You remember when Aras said he was once seriously ill and the Golden Invocation didn’t work on him? I’d like to see that,” all those suggestions strike me as irresistible. Thus I keep adding to this book, which is at 140,000 words now and still going.

And this is fine! It’s no problem! It’s the opposite of a problem! Except I’ve set the preorder date for November 2 at Amazon, which means no later than Oct 15 at my Patreon, which means I better get cracking with tweaking and proofreading even though this will overlap more than usual with actually writing bits of the draft. At least it’s easy to write chapters out of order, since each chapter is distinct.

FAQ: What happens if you miss the preorder date?

I doubt that is actually a frequently asked question BY READERS, but I would bet that most authors who are self-publishing have occasional reason to nervously look into this, so I’ll tell you: Officially, KDP zaps your ability to set any preorders for a year. Unofficially, I hear you can ask them pretty please to restore your ability to set preorders and they will probably say okay and cancel the penalty. However, this is obviously not something to experiment with for no good reason.

Should this turn out to be a problem at all, then there’s a way to finesse the situation: release the book at Patreon and Amazon at the same time, BUT uncheck the KU box so the book does not go live in KU right away. As long as it isn’t live in KU, there’s no need for the ebook to be exclusive.

However, the idea is to keep to the early-release-at-Patreon thing, and that will happen UNLESS PEOPLE KEEP SUGGESTING NEW CHAPTERS and then, while this remains great, I’m not sure about the early part of this plan.

As a side note, I also said last week that if, after this book is published, people ask for other missing scenes, then if those scenes strike me as fun to write, I’ll write them and drop them in my newsletter. This goes for basically any notion that strikes a reader about any book. I don’t promise to write whatever scene / chapter / story gets suggested because who knows, I might not be able to write it for whatever reason. But everyone is welcome to suggest ideas. Marag came from that kind of suggestion, after all, and This Hour appeared because, much as with Sekaran, I meant to write something short for my newsletter, and on we go.

MEANWHILE

I finished Hemlock and Silver, so a post about that is scheduled for later this week. Fun novel, I really enjoyed it, and thanks to commenter Robert who urged me to read it in terms that made me actually, you know, read it.

I’m now in the middle of this Pride and Prejudice fanfic novel that was self-published some time ago, Unequal Affections, by Lara Ormiston. This is the one where Elizabeth accepts Darcy’s initial proposal and then the story moves on from there. Someone here mentioned it a while ago and I picked up a sample and found myself in the mood for that this past weekend. It’s excellent, very true to the style, characters, and world of the original. Major kudos to the author.

What are you all reading right now? (I really shouldn’t ask because I bet you’ll tell me and then I’ll be adding yet more books and samples to my tottering TBR piles, but even so, I hope you’re all reading something good!)

MEANWHILE

OMG this drought. All the trees are either being forced into dormancy or dying outright – we’ll find out which fall into which category next spring – and not only does this force me to spend time watering (the lucky young trees and shrubs that are within four hose-lengths of my house; all the others are on their own), but also this means the dead leaves are falling off the trees and the dogs are bringing them into the house by the bushel. And it’s only going to get worse, arrgh. I’m not posting a picture of any trees or other plants because it’s just too horrifying. Just picture them all withering, with the deer desperately nipping the heads off any flowers you’re watering because they don’t have a lot of other stuff to eat right now.

I got a second robot vacuum cleaner, so I can I set one to run in the morning and then turn the other loose two hours later when leaf debris is once again everywhere. I could in theory run one about every four hours all day, as long as I was home to put one on the charger and bring the other one upstairs. Or I can set one to run upstairs and one downstairs. Or I can turn them both loose at once upstairs. I’m tempted to get a third purely to enhance the appearance of a swarm of robot vacuum cleaners all buzzing around like little bees, because I think it would be funny.

I’m renewing my request for someone to invent a little drone that flies around and dusts all horizontal surfaces and random dusty objects in the house. Some clever person really needs to get on that. I’m not kidding.

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Planetary Diversity

A post by James Davis Nichol at tor.com / Reactor: No Two Worlds are the Same

Consider the Galilean moons of Jupiter. At a first glance, they do seem pretty similar. They range from about 3100 km to 5300 km diameter, large enough to be considered planets if they didn’t orbit another world. Three of them are icy worlds, and all of them have surface conditions that would kill an unprotected human.

On a closer look, the Galilean moons have as many differences as they do similarities. Io is the most striking example. Because of the tidal flexing to which it has been subjected, Io has many active volcanos. If it had ever had as much ice as Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede, Io would have been rendered down to a silicate moon. However, the other three moons also display great disparities. In fact, it is trivial to tell them apart with a glance:

Did anybody pause to look up the Earth’s diameter? I did. It’s 12,000 km and change, so while I guess it’s true that 3000 km diameter means big enough to be a planet, it would be a pretty tiny planet. Fine, let me just estimate the difference in volume … Google, hand me a radius to volume calculator. Okay: Earth, roughly 905 billion km3, one of these moons roughly 14 billion km3. The small sphere has 1.5% the volume of the big sphere. How about surface area? The small one has 28 million km2 surface area; the big one 452 million km2. This means the smaller sphere has 6.2 the surface area of the bigger sphere.

Are you sure you want to call these moons “big enough to be planets”? They are pretty teensy compared to Earth, and Earth isn’t even a very big planet. Google, what proportion of the land surface area of the Earth do humans live on? About half, says Google. I’m not doing a real search, so I don’t know if this is true, but let’s say it is. That means humans right now live on eight times as much space as the entire surface area of a “planet” that has a diameter of 3000 km. If the small planet has any appreciable amount of water, then the inhabitants will be even more crowded. And if it doesn’t, then that’s a different limitation.

Wow, that was a real tangent! I didn’t mean to get that distracted! What is Nicholl actually saying in this post?

Each star has its own unique parameters (mass, age, original composition, orbital path through the galaxy and so on). Each world orbiting those stars will likewise. Like snowflakes, all of the worlds are subjected to the same essential forces, but the outcomes vary wildly.

And why should all of that matter to a hard-working SF author whose only desire is to sell stories for money? To begin with, because taking into account that every planet is a wonderfully varied body with its own unique history might well suggest interesting story ideas. Moreover, diverse worlds provide a more textured reading experience than planets that might as well be a series of Paramount backlots. Finally, as Poul Anderson and Hal Clement’s careers made clear, detailed worldbuilding can be very fun, at least for a certain kind of author

The Hal Clement novel Nicholl has in mind is undoubtedly Mission of Gravity

Mesklin is a vast, inhospitable, disc-shaped planet, so cold that its oceans are liquid methane and its snows are frozen ammonia. It is a world spinning dizzyingly, a world where gravity can be a crushing 700 times greater than Earth’s, a world too hostile for human explorers. But the planet holds secrets of inestimable value, and an unmanned probe that has crashed close to one of its poles must be recovered. Only the Mesklinites, the small creatures so bizarrely adapted to their harsh environment, can help.

I would guess that the one by Paul Anderson might be Firetime, which might be because I personally liked that one.

Firetime is coming to Ishtar. This once-in-a-millennium event occurs when one of the planet’s three suns encroaches on Ishtar’s surface, to disastrous effect. The nightmare rapidly approaching, barbaric tribes have declared war on their more civilized brethren in hopes of avoiding a natural extermination. Standing between the opposing forces are the colonists who settled on Ishtar after abandoning their home planet, Earth.

I’ve got the version with this cover:

Which I like very much because centaurs and cat-centaurs are just neat. That’s why I liked this specific book of Anderson’s — good aliens. I don’t actually remember the plot very well; I do remember the aliens.

There’s always Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg:

In a moving story of sacrifice and triumph, human scientists establish a relationship with intelligent lifeforms—the cheela—living on Dragon’s Egg, a neutron star where one Earth hour is equivalent to hundreds of their years. The cheela culturally evolve from savagery to the discovery of science, and for a brief time, men are their diligent teachers.

Or Cold as Ice, second book Dark as Day by Charles Sheffield, and only the second book is available as an ebook, which is one of those strange things that really makes you wonder.

Twenty-five years ago there was a great interplanetary war in the Solar System. It was a suicidal spasm in which terrible weapons were created and used; in which nine billion people were killed. The rivalries that led to the war are not gone. And a few of those deadly weapons remain–some still orbiting the sun in the debris of destroyed ships,s some deliberately placed in storage. Now Cyrus Mobarak, the man who perfected the fusion engine, is determined to bring human settlement to the protected seas of Europa. 

Europa makes me think of A Darkling Sea by Cambias, which is set on a similar icy planet.

In the eternal darkness of the ice moon Ilmatar’s ocean, a team of human scientists study the lobster-like intelligent natives. They must remain hidden from the Ilmatarans, a condition imposed by the Sholen, a powerful interstellar civilization with strict rules against contacting “primitive” species. 

I’m sure there’s lots of others. Any leap to mind for any of you?

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Recent Reading: Shifter and Shadow by Sharon Shinn

This wasn’t all that recent, actually. I read this long novella in draft, earlier this year.. But it’s just come out, so this seems like the time to mention it.

Here’s the Fairwood Press link (paperback). Here’s the Amazon link (ebook). Here’s the description:

Part of the Twelve Houses series, Shifter and Shadow takes place between the end of The Thirteenth House and the beginning of Dark Moon Defender.

What really happened on Dorrin Isle?

Kirra Danalustrous is the daughter of a marlord, a celebrated beauty—and a shapeshifter with magic in her veins. After a disastrous affair with a married man, she has fled to the edge of the kingdom, to a small fishing village that has become a refuge for children dying from the invariably fatal red-horse fever. Yet Kirra has discovered a radical cure. She can transform the patients into animals who can take a medicine that’s poisonous to humans. But so many people in Gillengaria fear and distrust magic. How many parents will allow Kirra to save their children? And if Kirra saves enough of them, will she be able to heal her own broken heart?

Donnal is a peasant’s son who has been Kirra’s protector and companion for years. Although he’s always loved her, he’s always known she was destined to marry some titled lord and take her place in society. After watching her fall in love with another man, he has tried—and failed—to leave her. A shapeshifter himself, he has accompanied her to Dorrin Isle, determined not to take his human form again because he finds it too painful to be around the woman he knows he cannot have.

But Kirra needs him. So do the dying patients. And if he’s going to help any of them, he has to have the shape—and the heart—of a man.

***

Things I hate: I will die without you. You’re my life and my breath. I will follow at your heels forever.

Things Sharon Shinn can make me like even though I normally detest them: I will die without you. You’re my life and my breath. I will follow at your heels forever.

Over the top devotion strikes me as somewhere between pathetic and creepy. I’m like, GET A GRIP. And yet this plot element works for me in this particular story? How does Sharon do that?

I’m not sure. Part of it is the poetry:

It was as if he had blundered through some hidden door to find himself in another setting altogether, staring at vistas he had never even imagined, all soaring heights and limitless horizons and coruscating stars. He was breathing air dusted with crushed diamonds, scented with starlight and wonder.

If you’re going to go over the top, that’s how to do it. Another part of it is, I think, that both Kirra and Donnal are equally stuck, but in different ways. Another part is that this story includes a subplot that emphasizes an aspect of Kirra’s personality that is absolutely crucial and that has nothing to do with Donnal, though it’s Donnal who makes this clear to … uh … to a certain character, perhaps to himself, and certainly to the reader. And I loved this very much. I think for me this element was central, even though Kirra and Donnal finally working out their relationship is the more obvious heart of the story.

Anyway! This is a fine standalone novella, which also happens to fill in a hole in the Twelve Houses series.

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Poetry Thursday: Startling concept poem

From Twitter / X — look at this. The letters are the same, in the same order. Arranging the letters differently and changing the punctuation creates radically different poems, both of which (mostly) make sense.

THE YETI SPEAKS by Anthony Etherin (@anthony_etherin)—who writes two poems, using the same sequence of letters, respaced: pic.twitter.com/xycjlLFJVw

— Christian Bok (@christianbok) May 21, 2024

How about that? I got the link from Astral Codex Ten, which makes three links in one month, but it was a surprisingly literature-adjacent set of links this month.

Here’s what Poetry.org says about concept poetry.

Oh, here’s a fun and perhaps accurate post:

Charmless and Interesting: What Conceptual Poetry Lacks and What It’s Got

Conceptual poetry is charmless.  Immediately upon making this statement, I want to offer two qualifications: firstly, this is true only of a certain kind of conceptual poetry, the kind Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman refer to as “pure conceptualism”; secondly, this is not a criticism, but as an observation.  It is no more a criticism to say that this conceptual poetry of a certain kind lacks charm than it would be to say that paintings lack sound.  The attraction of the art comes elsewhere.

And a response here.

Here’s something interesting:

Many more examples at the link. I think this swan one is actually kind of charming.

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Now available for preorder: SEKARAN

Okay, here’s the preorder link!

And here is the current description:

A crown forged piece by piece, moment by moment.

Prince Sekaran is nine years old when he meets his cousin Aras for the first time.

Twenty when Aras is given a scepter.

Thirty-five when he becomes heir and discovers the truth about his cousin …

A novel-length series of linked stories and vignettes, each revealing the moments that define Sekaran’s life: first encounters, unexpected revelations, and the ties of blood, friendship, and loyalty that bind him to his cousin, his broader family, and the summer country itself.

***

This is still something I can fiddle with, so comments are welcome, but I think it’s okay as it is.

I didn’t want to use “mosaic,” Elaine T, because though the word is great, it strongly implies a nonlinear structure. I wanted to use “sequence” or “series” or some other term that would indicate that this is a linear series of scenes in chronological order. I’m darned if I know how to define “story” in this context, and rather than trying, I went for the “stories and vignettes” because that way no one is likely to complain that the chapters aren’t necessarily exactly stories. I think some of them might be, but I also think some of them probably aren’t.

AND

Yes, I’m adding yet another chapter now. I hope this one will turn out to be BRIEF. They keep going to 20 pages or more. So far, every single early reader has caused me to add a chapter (though two of these suggestions kind of got combined in one chapter). If this trend continues, that Nov 2 release date is going to be tricky after all. I need to remember to add a note at the end saying something like:

“If you’re disappointed that a particular scene you would have loved to see is not included in this book, let me know, because I might be thrilled to write that scene and drop it in my newsletter.”

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Anthropic Settled — A Victory for Authors and Copyright (?)

Right before Labor Day weekend, I (and undoubtedly lots and lots of other authors) got a sudden email from an agent or editor saying, “Quick, immediately click here and join this class action lawsuit against Anthropic; add your books (published before 2022) to the list using this form.”

The email was from my agent, and I immediately clicked through and tossed a lot of my books onto the list.

And sure enough, the day after the Labor Day weekend, I saw posts here and there saying that Anthropic has settled out of court. They really had to, because if the judgment had gone against them, whoa. And they obviously, plainly used lots of pirated material and broke copyright law, so unless the judge decided to let them get away with it, they were going to lose.

Here’s an article about this:

Three authors – Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson – filed a lawsuit against the firm in August 2024, alleging that Anthropic had used pirated versions of their books to train its AI model.

The authors also claimed that Anthropic made its business work by “largescale theft of copyrighted works” and alleged the firm “has taken multiple steps to hide the full extent of its copyright theft”. They presented evidence in their claim that the firm had downloaded seven million books from the websites LibGen and PiLiMi, which host pirated versions of published works.“

The linked article adds:

“This is a strong signal that the many, many lawsuits brought by rights holders against AI companies will find the law is on their side,” he adds. “The dam is bursting, and I suspect we will see more settlements or outright victories for rights holders soon enough.” … Lee believes that it could set the tone for other suits. “The Anthropic settlement could have a domino effect for sure, especially other cases involving the same allegation that the defendant downloaded copies from shadow libraries,” he says.

Also, the day after the settlement, Anthropic issued the following statement on their blog:

We’re now giving users the choice to allow their data to be used to improve Claude and strengthen our safeguards against harmful usage like scams and abuse. Adjusting your preferences is easy and can be done at any time. … You’re always in control of this setting and whether we use your data in this way. 

And that could be pure chance, I suppose, but I sort of wonder whether Anthropic is trying to take quick action to ward off a different possible lawsuit based on stealing everything users type into Claude.

Also, authors can only join this class-action suit if their books’ copyrights were registered, AND it turns out a lot of publishers, including Big Five publishers, routinely failed to register copyrights for lots of books even though they were contractually obligated to do so. Here’s a post at Writer Beware about that, including a link to the copyright office so you can check. All three of my Big Five publishers did register copyrights for my books, so that’s good. If you’re a traditionally publishing author, I suggest you check for yourself from now on — and I think agents should have been checking all along, but if they weren’t, they should start doing so now.

Here’s what I, a total nonexpert, suspect might happen, related to all this:

A) A reasonable payout to at least some of the authors whose books were pirated and used illegally. And actually, this would be pretty nice, if it happens. It looks like Anthropic has agreed to pay authors $3000 per stolen book — which means copyright registered prior to 2022, which means about a dozen for me.

B) The satisfaction of knowing that Anthropic had to pay at least something, hopefully enough to be painful.

C) A hope that other giant AI companies will get slapped hard enough they feel it and that AI companies will now be a trifle more cautious about massive theft.

D) And … I think … it seems possible … that due to this ruling, and especially if some other dominos begin to fall … Amazon might finally use the “Did you use AI tools to create this book?” checkbox to take a flamethrower to everything marked Yes, while nuking from orbit any author who lied about this by checking No when they totally did use AI to generate whatever books they loaded to Amazon.

Because the most obvious reason to make that button a prominent item on the details page, and make authors click “Still No” every single time they update the book, is to allow Amazon to step hastily away from any prospect of a giant lawsuit that might be heading their way.

Should Amazon ever use that Yes/No button to zap generated books, I bet a lot of non-generated books will get caught. It’s worth reiterating that:

a) If your KDP account gets terminated or suspended, you need to respond immediately. You have just days to respond and it’s best to directly address the issue as quickly as possible, while in contact with a human person at KDP. As long as you respond in some way that shows you’re trying to resolve the problem, the clock resets, I hear, so you can get a few more days each time you get in contact with someone at KDP.

b) If your cover artist used AI tools and KDP can tell, you might get hit in this way. I’ve tried pretty hard to make sure no cover artist I work with uses anything generated. I’m not sure a printed statement that they didn’t will get an author off the hook, but I do think authors had better have such a statement in their files.

c) Personally, I joined the Author’s Guild and paid the dues necessary almost solely so I can ask them for legal help if anything like that ever happens to me, and I hope I never do have to ask them for help, but in my opinion it’s well worth the dues.

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KU Exclusivity Recently Became Slightly Less Exclusive

Okay, this happened a week or two ago, but I felt I’d better check very, very carefully before believing it.

But KDP recently eased up on the KU exclusivity requirement, thus: Ebooks can now be in KU and ALSO they can be distributed to libraries. And I don’t know how exactly libraries handle this because I’ve never borrowed and ebook from a library, but I do know it’s definitely a thing because there are a bunch of library ebook services. Here are the ones Draft to Digital distributes to:

OverDrive

Odilo

cloudLibrary

Baker and Taylor

Hoopla

BorrowBox

Palace Marketplace

And therefore what I am doing this week is enabling all those library services for all the Tuyo-series ebooks. And it may take days or even weeks for the ebooks to go live, depending on this and that, but shortly this will be an alternate means of reading those books in ebook form for anyone who wants to avoid Amazon.

I’ve been slow to do the Draft to Digital paper editions for the more recent Tuyo-series novels, but I should and will do that as well (soon! really!) and therefore if anyone wants to buy paper copies, but not from Amazon, that too should shortly be possible.

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Recent Reading: Short, Easy novels

Brute by Kim Fielding

Okay, as covers for self-published books go, this isn’t bad imo. It looks like a DIY self-published book cover, but on the other hand, the light in this image is extremely attractive to me and, I presume, probably to a reasonable number of other readers. I think I wouldn’t have included the silhouette of the man, but whatever, it’s not a huge turnoff for me.

There are several things I dislike about the formatting and wouldn’t personally recommend, all having to do with the frontmatter. There’s too much. The author repeats the blurb as the first page after the cover. There’s no need to do that. The acknowledgments are in the front. There’s a totally unnecessary forward, and by “totally unnecessary,” I mean, I skimmed it and kind of rolled my eyes at it. I’ve never read anything else by Kim Fielding. I don’t care what she has to say about this story. I just want to read the story. Also, she starts by defending her choice to make the protagonist unattractive physically. This doesn’t need defending! Just do it and move on! The reader can decide if they think that worked or not; probably some will and a few won’t, but in neither case does the author need to defend her decision to do this. Also, Fielding says, “Everyone is entitled to love,” as part of this unnecessary defense, and come on! I bet anybody who thinks for about fifteen seconds can think of someone who is not entitled to love, and not only that, but nobody other than a dog or other pet is entitled to love, are you serious?

But none of that is really a problem. The problem is: when a reader downloads a sample, they generally want to try the story and see if they like it. The sample is 10% of the book. If you put the ToC, the blurb, the acknowledgments, and a forward in front of the story, then the reader has to wade through all that before getting to the actual story, and they run out of the sample faster, and this is not a sensible design for an ebook. Put all that stuff in the back! If you feel compelled to put in a forward, all you have to do is stick it in an afterward instead!

How about the story?

Okay, I don’t think this actually counts as a fairy tale. It doesn’t have the tone and it doesn’t really use fairy tale tropes either. It’s a fast, easy-to-read, casual, short fantasy novel with almost no magic … okay, fine, the magic is fairly central to the setup and the plot, but nevertheless, there’s not a lot of magic in day-to-day life. I don’t remember any. So the setting is basically medieval European standard, the beats are standard romance beats, the characters are pretty one-dimensional – which suits the story; it’s not a complex story. Big, strong, ugly Brute rescues a prince and is given a job at the palace: keep a casual eye on this one prisoner and if the prisoner wakes screaming, record anything he says and report his words to the authorities.

This is a great setup! I liked this story quite a bit. The romance beats are front and center, the happy ending is not remotely in doubt, the whole thing is relaxing. Brute isn’t a story to linger over, like Soul & Body. It’s easy to get into, easy to enjoy, undemanding; a story with characters who are easy to like, various villains who are somewhat trivially villainous, another more important villain who is never actually on stage at any point and relents at the end so that’s not terribly villainous, lots of people who are nice to each other embedded in a fairly callous society, and a guy who needs rescuing. Because of the general niceness of a lot of secondary characters, it’s a little hard to believe how badly that guy is being treated, but he sure does need rescuing. He is rescued with very few if any complications, so easily that this doesn’t count as a prison break novel. His life is then fixed up fairly briskly and easily, all is forgiven (basically, all right?), and everyone is set to live happily ever after. The end.

And as I say, I liked this story, but it’s what one might call slight. There’s not a lot to it. It’s not complex. This actually is a lot like this next short novel / long novella, by a much more famous author(s).

2. The Inheritance (Book One) by Ilona Andrews

Once again a lot of frontmatter. This time it doesn’t bother me, because I’m not as irritated by a forward written by an author I’m familiar with, and of course anything Ilona Andrews writes is going to sell no matter what, so there’s no concern about potentially pushing readers away. But the forward could have gone at the end.

This cover screams MG fantasy. My first feeling was that this was a strange choice for this story, which is not MG, although … as I thought more about it … there’s plenty of violence and a fair number of people die, but I now, after reading it, think it actually is MG after all. I certainly suspect a lot of MG readers would probably really love this story.

So once I started thinking about it, at once the cover became perfectly appropriate. Now I wonder if Ilona Andrews also thinks of this as MG fantasy? Or if it’s coincidence the cover is so extremely MG-ish? That didn’t occur to me for a while because modern convention declares that any novel with an adult protagonist is definitely not MG. But that’s artificial in the extreme; look at Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. This story is so short and so simple … and simplistic, in several ways … and low stress despite the mayhem … that it honestly does read like a MG adventure to me.

It is, like the prior book, fast, easy-to-read, casual, simple, guaranteed happy ending. Once we’re past the mayhem at the beginning and we’ve got the heroine and her dog trekking through this bubble of an alien ecosystem, there’s zero doubt they’ll both be fine and therefore this is a relatively low-stress story despite continuing violence. It’s pretty cartoonish violence, kind of over the top, not especially grotesque, or that’s my impression. Plus we keep rescuing people and lo! They become friends and/or loyal sidekicks! It’s honestly very middle-grade in basically every way.

AND

To my surprise, if I had to rank these two short novels for quality, I’d put Kim Fielding’s story in front of Ilona Andrews’ story. They’re quite different, of course. Perhaps I should pause and add here that Fielding’s novel is definitely for sure not MG at all, so that’s a difference. But for one thing, in Andrews’ book, the authors constantly use the simple past tense when past perfect would be more appropriate, and yay, now I have a story where I can go to get examples of this annoying grammatical quirk that I happen to dislike intensely. There’s a lot less snappy dialogue in this novel than in most of their previous novels, reducing the story’s charm. And here I am, declaring that Kim Fielding’s prose is better, less obtrusive, than super-popular bestseller Ilona Andrews’ prose, at least in this particular pair of stories. That’s what I think. You can read them both and make up your mind about whether you agree.

But, besides that, there are two other reasons I feel like this is a MG story: two important worldbuilding elements.

The first is an element that simply makes no sense whatsoever, and I feel like this is the kind of thing that is allowed in MG novels under the assumption that MG readers aren’t likely to notice or care. Which could be true, not sure. I think it might bug some MG readers.

Here it is: the protagonist, Adaline, and everyone else in the world, apparently, thinks of the Breach occurrences explicitly as an attack, an invasion. This is one hundred percent the way everybody thinks of these weird intrusions of pockets of alien worlds into Earth’s cities. And this understanding of the situation is true, but there are two problems with it, both serious:

1. It is magic knowledge. There is no possible way that anything about the phenomenon of Breach intrusions can possibly be assumed to be intentional. Or if there is, this background knowledge is never, ever mentioned.

When a hurricane hits, this is destructive and it can be deadly. When an earthquake occurs, this can be highly destructive and extremely deadly. To a very near approximation, zero people refer to these natural phenomena as “invasions” or assume that an enemy is deliberately causing them to happen. Why, why, why assume as a matter of course, why treat as a given, that obviously the breach phenomenon is deliberately caused by an enemy?

And this would be easy to fix! Just declare that breach occurrences happen near military installations in a highly nonrandom way and there you go! But this solution is impossible because —>

2) The government is explicitly hiding the fact that they know the breach occurrences are directed by alien enemies. They are not happy if you find this out.

But … how can this POSSIBLY make sense? If everyone knows or assumes that the Breach phenomenon is an invasion, then what is there to hide? The mere fact that alien enemies are doing this deliberately, that this is enemy action, is something everyone already knows. The assumption that everyone thinks this is an invasion is so extremely clear, and the government is so clearly stated to be hiding the fact that this is an invasion, that I just do not see any way to square this circle.

The other worldbuilding element that seems both MG and also annoying is this: It suffers from Extra Super Power Syndrome, which we might also call “Hey, Turns Out I Can Also Breathe Underwater, Isn’t That Lucky!” syndrome. This is a rare (as far as I know?) phenomenon in which the protagonist keeps getting handy new superpowers as required. The author rains blessings upon the protagonist as the plot unrolls in order to make sure she makes it to the end of the story in good shape. This is a sort of ongoing deus ex machina because the hand of the author is so visible in conferring whatever shiny new superpower current circumstances require.

I can think of three examples off the top of my head: Sherwood Smith does this in Lhind the Thief, James Patterson does this in Maximum Ride, and now Ilona Andrews has done it here. The superpowers are of course not all the same, and in this case, the protagonist cannot breathe underwater (yet). But in all three cases, the repeated deus ex gifts of magic powers gets pretty extreme.

This is different from what we might call Touchstone Syndrome, and the difference is that (a) in the Touchstone Trilogy, Andrea Höst has everyone including Cassandra be baffled by all the emerging superpowers, and much more important (b) seeing blurry is not a superpower, but a weird thing that happens basically involuntarily. Then that develops later into a superpower, but a superpower that comes with major downsides. A LOT of what Cassandra does is not voluntary, not good for her, dangerous for those around her, and then also turns out to be useful, while still imposing very significant costs on her.

In “Turns Out I Can Also Breathe Underwater” Syndrome, each superpower is great and turns up out of the blue when the protagonist needs it, in complete form so that catastrophe is averted. The protagonist falls into the ocean, but it’s fine because she can breathe underwater! She falls off a mountain, but it’s okay because she can fly! She can’t manage alone, but no problem because apparently she can also talk to animals (who obviously are happy, even eager, to go to a lot of trouble and put themselves in danger for the protagonist, whom they have just met)! These aren’t exaggerations; these things are exactly what happens in Lhind the Thief and/or Maximum Ride.

So here’s Adaline in The Inheritance, who is forty years old and not a combatant. But she gains a handy magic sword and an even more handy magic … item … and now she —–>

–Has superspeed, superstrength, and super regeneration

–Can understand stuff she looks at; eg, whether it’s toxic and how to evade or counter the toxin

–Has acquired magic translation of alien languages

–Has acquired magic memories by which to understand alien technology and alien societies

–Also, her dog becomes a dire wolf (figuratively), except still devoted and obedient like a German Shepherd, while also becoming smarter than a normal dog.

And what I’m saying is, it’s a little much.

This is why this seems so MG to me. Not just the cover and the interior illustrations (there are illustrations, btw), and not just the relatively cartoonish type of violence that I think most MG readers could handle without trouble, but also this superpower thing. Who can possibly worry that the protagonist might not make it? No one. If she gets into a new kind of danger, she’ll just pull a new kind of superpower out of her pocket. If she falls in a lake, she’ll not only be able to kill the dragon lurking below the surface, I fully expect she’d turn out to be able to breathe underwater, because why not? All that and then we throw in a cute but deadly raccoon-alien sidekick, and sure, just go ahead and visualize the raccoon from Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s a lot like that. AND IT’S A LITTLE MUCH.

So … I mean … I liked this story. It was fun; it was short, easy to read, low stress despite the mayhem going on all over the place, and basically sure, whatever. But it is by no means up to the standard of their best. If I’d read this book first of any of Ilona Andrews’ books, this would be the last of their books I ever tried, exactly as Maximum Ride was the first and only James Patterson novel I’ve ever read and for exactly the same reasons.

The nicest touch, which the reader can see coming far, far in advance, is that Adaline steps out of the gate juuuust exactly as a team is heading in to rescue her. This is funny and that whole rescue team subplot serves to set up the next book, where plainly the main romance plot will commence. Will I bother reading the next book? I mean, probably? But I would just as soon they moved on to a different universe.

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Update: Mostly SEKARAN

Okay, I made the mistake — this is the third time at least — of thinking that when some early reader says, “It’s great! Just a few minor comments!” that the minor comments will be trivial and the time necessary to deal with them likewise trivial. This is never actually the case! Instead, the minor comments are less time-consuming to deal with than huge rewrites, but not trivial.

And thus I am still knee-deep in revisions for SEKARAN. Last week, I unexpectedly added another chapter. And who knows, that might happen again. A few more scenes will get tucked into existing chapters for sure.

However, I would be startled if I’m not through with that and handing this book on to the next round of readers by NEXT week, with or possibly still without a complete epilogue. But I doubt I’ll get there until next week. That will be the middle of September! Where does the time go?

AND

I will be putting SEKARAN up for preorder at Amazon as soon as I have some sort of halfway reasonable description prepared. This is, of course, something of a challenge.

Prince Sekaran is nine years old when he meets his cousin Aras for the first time.

Twenty when Aras is given a scepter.

Thirty-five when he becomes heir and discovers the truth about his cousin …

SEKARAN presents a series of long vignettes that follow Sekaran through his life, and through his complicated relationships with Aras and with his broader family, as he grows into the man he is meant to be and the king the summer country needs.

***

I need to get “This book is a series of vignettes” into the description. I think that’s crucial. Rather less obvious is what else to do. What do you think of the extremely simple presentation above? I don’t like that last sentence much, but how about this basic idea for the description?

How about adding “novel-length” to the description? That’s obvious if anybody scrolls down to look at the number of pages. I mean, I don’t know how long this book will actually turn out to be, but it’s at 125,000 words and if anything, it’ll go up, not down. But maybe I better put “novel length” in the description as well so readers understand that when I say Book 11, I mean it’s book-length even if it’s not exactly a novel. Should I specify that it’s 18 vignettes? It sort of is. Or at least, it’s 18 chapters, though the chapters are sometimes — usually — broken up into scenes, so depending on how you define the term, it might be more like 50 vignettes.

Comments welcome, and regardless, I’ll figure out something reasonable and put the preorder up sometime this week.

MEANWHILE

I’m actually sort of trying to take it easy this month, so I’m also reading Hemlock and Silver

Which so far I like very much, but WHAT IS UP WITH SNOW? Don’t tell me! I don’t actually want spoilers! I’m just baffled. I sort of expect the queen is not dead? Or something? But that’s largely because of the plot of the ordinary fairy tale of Snow White; I’m predisposed to feel like the queen is not dead, that she is evil and behind everything. On the other hand, no dwarves so far, among many other things that are not tracking the original fairy tale, so who knows. But the queen’s actions need to be explained somehow.

Anyway, I’ll finish this book in the next day or two and then I’ll write a review.

MEANWHILE

If you’ve left a review for Eight Doors, THANK YOU because I would like to run a promo in a month in order to bounce its visibility, and a handful of reviews are CRUCIAL.

MEANWHILE

A lot of Honeycrisp apples and a few pears.

A shocking number of bees discover a fallen pear in the orchard. I think these are miner bees, which we have in abundance.

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Black Dog Series Sale

I mentioned this in my newsletter, but came THIS close to forgetting to post about it here — but I’m running a sale on the Black Dog series right now.

On second thought, I might have waited and run this sale in October, leading up to Halloween. I didn’t think of that, so here the sale is, right now. It’ll continue till the 7th, I believe.

I used the Countdown tools rather than dropping prices by hand, so the free ones should be free everywhere, while the others will have dropped only in the US and UK. Sorry! It’s a lot of trouble to drop prices for an eleven-book series by hand; especially since you can’t tell when the price drop will go live, which can be deadly when you’re running a promotion and count on prices being down on a specific day.

I should start keeping track, though, and drop prices by hand every other time I run a sale for a series, or something like that. Once a year, maybe.

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