Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 203

AI generated poetry

Fascinating post by Scott Alexander: Gwern’s AI-Generated Poetry

GPT-2  is the language processing system that OpenAI announced a few weeks ago. They are keeping the full version secret, but have released a smaller prototype version. Gwern retrained it on the  Gutenberg Poetry Corpus , a 117 MB collection of pre-1923 English poetry, to create a specialized poetry AI.

Extensive samples provided, with commentary:

This is all perfect iambic pentameter. I know AP English students who can’t write iambic pentameter as competently as this….It has more trouble with rhymes – my guess is a lot of the poetry it was trained on was blank verse. But when it decides it should be rhyming, it can keep it up for a little while. From its Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard fanfic …

Scott chose interesting examples to show how the AI can start off rhyming perfectly and then gradually the rhyming deteriorates; or how it can start off well and then deteriorate into complete gibberish.

Would you spot this as fake robot-generated poetry if no one tipped you off?

My heart, why come you here alone?
The wild thing of my heart is grown
To be a thing,
Fairy, and wild, and fair, and whole

Scott really, really liked this tidbit, and says:

That last line, with its ABAB structure, is actually brilliant even by the standards of human poets. “Fairy and wild and fair and whole”. I could say that all day. This has to be a coincidence. It’s not that good anywhere else. But even having something generally okay enough that it can occasionally blunder into something that good is great.

I have to admit, several bits of poetry worked out really well. I am now predicting that someone is soon going to start using this type of AI thing to generate lines and poems. I can see that working much better than using this sort of word-generator to write prose. Would it be cheating, to present poems as though you wrote them yourself, if whole quatrains or longer stanzas were generated in this way?

Click through if you have time. There’s a trick buried in the post, so do read the entire thing if you’ve got a minute.

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Five Books About Running Away to Join the Space-Pirates

Hah, what a great idea for a column. Here it is at tor.com: Five books about running away to join the space-pirates.

Here they are:

1) Jack Crow of Armor by John Steakley, running away from prison and various self-inflicted misfortunes to join a crew planning a research colony heist. I met him as he was plotting to kill somebody who didn’t need to die, and I was worried about the main character at the time, so I was not happy to see him in the book, at first. His alternative courses of action are all terrible, though, and he barely tolerates the legend that humanity has constructed around him. Because he’s an unlikable fellow, it’s fun to watch him suffer through everybody treating him as “Jack Crow, ferocious pirate.” 

Well, I don’t like watching unlikable fellows, suffering or otherwise, so I’ll probably give this one a miss.

2) Miles Vorkosigan gets his start at being a pirate in The Warrior’s Apprentice

Of course! Though he did not join the space pirates so much as re-create the space pirates in his own image, which is perhaps not quite the same thing.

3) Jos Musey of Warchild by Karin Lowachee his chance to do [run away and join the pirates] comes long before he’s ready for it. And after the pirates raid his family’s merchant vessel, there’s no home to go back to and the adventure doesn’t end. Jos has a hard life aboard his new home, the Gengis Khan, but eventually he accepts to become what is basically a tattooed space pirate assassin-priest. 

Yeah, I wound up not being crazy about this duology. Among other things, it was soooooo obvious who the overall bad guy was, and the good guys spend soooooo long dithering rather than dealing. I really thought the bad guy must be a red herring, he was SO OBVIOUS. Nope.

Other things also bugged me about this story, but that’s the one that stands out in my memory.

4) This is a line in the 2016 installment of the series, Babylon’s Ashes : “James Holden has just declared piracy legal.” That’s it. That’s the series. Holden and his crew are always sailing from one disaster to the next, and this is no exception. There’s been a radical change to the galactic political landscape, and Holden has backed the losing side because he has history with them. 

Kind of an Oops moment right there. I liked the first book of this series pretty well, but I didn’t go on with it.

5) I first heard of Neptune’s Brood  (2013) as Charles Stross’s blog post titled “ Books I will not write #4: Space Pirates of KPMG .” I am so glad he wrote it anyway. Aside from the economics, which are very interesting, the protagonist, Krina Alizond-114, is venturing forth to find her missing sister when one Count Rudi and his crew attack her ship. Rudi obviously recognizes skeletons in closets because he’s running from several in his own, despite his claims to being an “honest privateer.” I mean, he is a space pirate bat accountant, and  have you read about bats ?

Okay, that one sounds really fun! Space pirate / accountant, with bats! OTOH, Charles Stross’ work does not always appeal to me. Has anybody read this? What did you think?

Okay, we can definitely expand this list, because it’s not that hard to think of a handful more that belong:

6) In Corsair, James Cambias gives us a guy who ran off to join the space pirates some time ago. Now he might be involved in something he needs to get out of, if he can:

In the early 2020s, two young, genius computer hackers, Elizabeth Santiago and David Schwartz, meet at MIT and have a brief affair. David is amoral, out for himself, and soon disappears. Elizabeth dreams of technology and space travel and takes a military job after graduating. Ten years later, David works in the shadows for international thieves, and Elizabeth prevents international space piracy.

I liked this book quite a bit, which is saying something, because near-future SF is a pretty hard sell for me.

Incidentally, looks like Cambias has a new one out this year: Arkad’s World, which doesn’t look to me like exactly something I’d ordinary jump on, but what with A Darkling Sea and Corsair, sure.

7) Becky Chambers hands us a very definite space-pirate element in A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and especially in the sequel, A Closed and Common Orbit.

In the latter, Pepper’s story is so compelling I was not quite as engaged by Lovelace. But I did like both subplots, and one day soon I must go on to the third book. Anyway, very definitely space piracy going on in A Closed and Common Orbit. Also a definite element of running away. This is probably my favorite book on this list so far.

Not sure I can get to ten … okay, here’s one more, which may be a bit of a stretch:

8) I haven’t read this one, but it’s on my radar: Artemis by Andy Weir. I hear it’s not as good as The Martian, but still, I do want to try it one of these days.

Here’s part of the description:

Jazz Bashara is a criminal.

Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you’re not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you’ve got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.

Does smuggling count as piracy? Not sure about the running away to join the pirates, that may be a stretch.

That’s eight. Anybody have a candidate for this running-away-to-join-the-pirates theme?

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Things I Love: Really Smart Characters

So, I have no comments yet about the 2nd Wings of Fire arc, except that so far I do like it as much as the first arc, but I’m stuck for a couple of days waiting for the third and fourth books to arrive. At least it’s giving me a chance to go back to the first five-book arc and re-read those. I’ve forgotten plenty of details, so that’s fine.

But I did jump ahead to see who the pov protagonists are for the remaining books because I really, really wanted one of those protagonists to be Qibli. Yay! He is the pov character for the last book of this arc.

Now, why I like Qibli — from the title of this post, you know why. Because he’s really smart and perceptive and Tui Sutherland does a fantastic job making this clear in the first book of the arc, Wings of Fire 6, Moon Rising.

Really brilliant characters, I love them, and they’re fairly hard to write, so probably for that reason among others, we don’t see that many of them in fiction. I don’t mean geniuses like Archimedes in Bradshaw’s Sand Reckoner; I mean smart in a more general or tactical sense. I was trying to think of a top ten list and how the authors pulled off the trick of writing them. Not sure I can get to ten, but this has been a really good year for very intelligent characters, so let’s see:

1) Qibli from the Wings of Fire series — I’ll start with him because he made me think of this list. Sutherland does it by having him think of more things more quickly than any other character, and by having his thoughts chain together into rapid and coherent conclusions and perceptions. Very nice job! I loved him from Moon’s perspective and I expect I’ll love him when he gets center stage in his own book.

2) Jarrit from the Magic’s Poison series. Gillian Bradshaw does it by having him always be ten steps ahead of everyone else, even when he is in terrible physical shape and half-conscious; by giving him cutthroat political instincts; and by having his most important weakness be an inability to predict what really stupid antagonists might do.

3) Ben Ryder from the Extraction trilogy. Haywood does this by having him murmur a series of stream-of-consciousness thoughts at important moments as he figures something out, and by the way other characters react to him and he reacts to them. He just cannot believe Emily hasn’t figured out various important things; he is the only one Mimi more or less treats as an equal, and so on.

4) Bren Cameron from the Foreigner series. (Hey, where’s the next Foreigner book?) A great contrast to Jarrit, because it’s hard to imagine Bren ever doing anything to anyone that’s as vicious as the kinds of things Jarrit, when properly motivated, can do. Bren is so much quieter and less ostentatious, but his political instincts are also top-notch, obviously.

Anybody know anything about Foreigner 20? Because usually CJ Cherryh has brought a new one out about this time every year and this year, no sign of one.

5) Janos in He’s terrifying because we never see inside his head, and it’s really hard to tell whether he’s actually a good guy, and of course things get really complicated with him at the end. By refusing to let the reader see inside Janos’ head, Wexler emphasizes his brilliance. The reader never has a clue what rabbit Janos will pull out of a hat till it’s right out in view.

6) Lymond from Dunnett’s series. Again with the killer political instincts. Also with never seeing anything from Lymond’s point of view. Very intense series. The first book can be read as a standalone; the second book is not the strong point, so if you go on with this series, don’t stall out on that one and quit. I don’t feel Dunnett really knew where the series was going until after that.

7) Miles, obviously, from the Vorkosigan series.

8) Vlad Taltos, from the Taltos series

In both of the above series, the authors pull off tactical brilliance and we have no idea how hard they had to wham their heads against a wall as they figured out how to get their characters out of the corners they painted them into. I would never be able to do that, or at least I hope I could, but wow, I wish it were easier to come up with brilliant tactical solutions to intractable problems after your protagonist is stuck.

And … that is not ten.

Who has someone to add to this list? Recommendations are very welcome, especially if the brilliant protagonist is also an admirable person.

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Inability to go back to a book

Here’s a post by Diana Pharaoh Francisat Book View Cafe: Reading and Hoarding:

My problem is that I can’t seem to finish a book. I find that am delighted with the story, but after I set it down for whatever reason, I can’t make myself pick it up. I have two really good books I’m reading now that I can’t seem to make myself go back to.

I have no idea why I’m having trouble. … I sure wish I had an answer, though. And a way to change it.

I don’t have an answer, but I do have an observation.

When this happens to me, it is almost always because:

a) The situation in the book is tense, I put it down because I was nervous about where it was going, and now I’m having trouble picking it back up because of that nervousness. I don’t really want to see the characters suffer through what I can see is probably coming up.

b) The plot looks like it might be heading in a really annoying direction, one that will involve an important personal pet peeve. I am worried about that and I don’t want to go on with the book because I liked the first part and I’m reluctant to see it ruined with a trope I hate.

c) A character in the book is petty, stupid, selfish, and completely unpleasant to read about. That character has walked on stage and I put the book down because I just don’t want to read about him or her. Even watching other characters have to deal with this character is just too unpleasant. If I could be sure this character would walk offstage again in short order, it would be easier to go on with the book, but as it is, I’m delaying.

In all three cases, the only real antidote is trust in the author, so all of these problems hit much harder with a new-to-me author. I do not experience any of this with a new book by Martha Wells or Andrea K Höst or, for that matter, Gillian Bradshaw.

Given a new-to-me author, it can take a possibly surprising amount of willpower to go back to a book once I set it down for any of the above reasons.

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Tips for writing a novel

Via the Passive Voice blog , Tips for Writing a Novel:

In order to finish your novel in a timely manner, you should set a goal of writing a thousand words per day. But these can’t just be any random words you think of, typed up in a list. I learned that the hard way….

Readers will often make a snap judgment about whether to read your book based on the first sentence. That’s a lot of pressure on the first sentence, which is why my novels always begin with the sentence “Oh, no, something went wrong at the book printers,’ and the first sentence of this book was erased—ah, well, here comes the rest of the novel, I guess.” That way, readers can’t know whether the first sentence would have been good or not, so they’re just forced to read the whole book!

The whole thing is hilarious, but the above paragraph is especially relevant since I just posted ten novel openings. I guess none of the authors of those novels had read the above advice.

What makes that paragraph, imo, is the “I guess” at the end of the fake first sentence.

Definitely click through and read the whole thing.

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Recentish Additions to the TBR Pile

First, let me mention that it’s spring break, so I’m at home, which is good, but the weather has been so bad lately that it was impossible to connect to the internet until today. Too overcast. However, I did manage it today, so here is a post I actually wrote two days ago:

Along with Gillian Bradshaw’s fantasy quadrilogy, I seem to have picked up a handful of sample and quite a few full books recently. Let’s take a look!

In this particular set, I specifically noticed the use of pronouns vs names in the opening. In my very strong opinion, it is almost (but not quite) impossible to pull off a really good opening sentence or paragraph while concealing the identity of the pov character and just saying “the man” or “he.” This nearly always a clumsy device for artificially inserting mystery into the opening scene, which would generally profit from clarity instead. This set of openings provides plenty of examples that illustrate this opinion, including one counterexample that I think works just fine with “he.” Now that I’ve drawn your attention to this feature of openings, see what you think.

I will add that many workshop entries use a “the man” or “the girl” type of opening, that this never works, and that my experience reading those entries may have made me both more sensitive to this kind of unnecessary mystery and less tolerant of it. But see what you think!

1. Mrs Brodie’s
Academy, “The Way to a Gentleman’s Heart” by Theresa Romain.

“Scale of dragon,
tooth of wolf,” chanted Marianne Redfern as she kneaded dough for the next
day’s bread. “Witch’s mummy, maw and gulf of the ravined salt-sea shark…” She
trailed off when she noticed her assistant, Sally White, looking at her with
some alarm. “Did you … are you making a new kind of bread, Mrs Redfern?”

Okay, that’s kind of amusing. I can’t say that I ever
kneaded bread to the rhythms of Shakespeare, but why not?

2. Green Rider,
by Kristen Britain

The granite was cold
and rough against the gray-cloaked man’s palms. It was good, solid granite,
from the bones of the earth itself. He traced barely perceptible seams between
the huge blocks of the wall. It was the seams, he believed, that held the key.
The key to the wall’s destruction.

Okay, well, that’s fine. My first response was positive: I
like the way this sounds. My second response was less positive: I thought, good
solid granite as opposed to what other kind? Possibly it isn’t useful to type
opening sentences of a novel; it slows you down and permits you to ask that
kind of question, rather than just turning the page to see what kind of wall
this is and why the unnamed person wants to destroy it.

3. A Thousand Perfect
Notes by CG Drews

What he wants most in
the world is to cut off his own hands.

Wow. I’ll just stop there. I mean … wow. That is one potent
first sentence. It’s going to be hard for any other novel opening on this list
to top that one. Something might be catchier or more appealing, but I doubt any
other book I’ve picked up recently is going to start with a more powerful
sentence.

And thus we see that if a sentence has enough impact, I’m
okay with “he” rather than a name in the first sentence.

4. A Week to be
Wicked by Tessa Dare

When a girl trudged
through the rain at midnight to knock at the Devil’s door the Devil should at
least have the depravity – if not he decency – to answer.

Minerva gathered the
edges of her cloak with one hand, weathering another cold, stinging blast of
wind. She stared in desperation at the closed door, then pounded on it with the
flat of her fist.

Catchy. I’ll add a sentence from the next page because it is so startling in context:

Of the three Highwood
sisters, she was the only dark-haired one, the only bespectacled one, the only
one who preferred sturdy lace-up boots to silk slippers, and the only one who
cared one whit about the difference between sedimentary and metamorphic rocks.

Hah! Well, that reminds me why I decided to try this
particular novel by Tessa Dare.

5. From Unseen Fire
by Cass Morris

Lucius Quinctilius was
not, by nature, a reflective man, so perhaps it was just as well that the
Dictator’s men gave him little time to contemplate his fate.

The morning of his
execution dawned cool and fair, and no one in the household but Quinctilius
himself had the slightest inclination that anything was amiss. Even Quinctilius
suffered only a mild prick of unease, no more troubling than a splinter. His
tongue had overrun him during his last public speech, but as a few days passed
and retribution did not fall on his head, he convinced himself that his lapse
had been overlooked.

This is a prologue, and sure enough in another page or two,
Lucius is dead, so don’t get too attached to him. His wife’s sister is going to
show her magical gifts in saving the wife and daughter, in another few pages,
and then we’ll see where the story goes from there.

6. Honor Among
Thieves by Rachel Caine and Ann Aguirre

I feel the stars.

Energy pulses against
my skin, murmuring secrets about this small galaxy, about orbits and alignments
and asteroids streaming in space. Impulse makes me want to dive and cruise
those currents, but I control those urges. I shift my attention to the flutters
of life within my skin.

Marko glows orange
with crimson streaks. He is warm, always the easiest to find. Just now, he
stands and stares at the blue-green orb swirling below us.

A space leviathan. Not my favorite. This is another long prologue, so I don’t know where the real story might pick up. Probably not in the belly of the whale, but who knows?

First person narratives are of course immune to the “pronoun problem” in the opening. But it helps if the pov is immediately engaging. As it happens, space whales are a hard sell for me.

7. This Savage Song
by Victoria Schwab

The night Kate Harker
decided to burn down the school chapel, she wasn’t angry or drunk. She was
desperate.

Oh, yeah, this is a good opening. Out of these ten novels, if it weren’t for the one with the hands, this would be the opening with the most impact.

8. The Sword Smith
by Eleanor Arnason

A little after sunset
he came in sight of the town. He reined his horse. Ahead of him the road went
down into a wide valley, surrounded by low wooded hills. The town was at the
valley’s center: a little cluster of dimly glowing lights. A short distance
from the town was a second, smaller cluster of lights, probably a caravan’s
camp fires. Nargri, who’d been sleeping curled up in the big saddle bag, raised
her head and said, “What’re you doing, Limper?”

A page later, we have an implication that Nargri is a
dragon. I was certainly wondering.

Now, as a separate issue, I seem to be more sensitive to stupid-sounding names than some readers, so that, for example, I always had to make an effort of will to tolerate the stupid names in Pratchett’s books.  My response to this opening is: Ah, pronoun. Followed by, Limper? ?re you kidding me?

9. Emergency Contact
by Mary H K Choi

“Tell me something,
Penny . . .”

Penny knew that
whatever Madison Chandler was going to say, she wasn’t going to enjoy it.
Madison leaned in close, mouth smiling, beady eyes narrowed. Penny held her
breath.

“Why is your mom such
a slut?”

These first sentences are not the least bit appealing to me. Ugh. However, I will say that when Penny lists her options for responses, that list is not without charm. Here is a truncated version of the list so you can judge for yourself:

a) punch her in the
face

b) punch her pervert
father in the face

c) rage-cry later

d) unleash the
pyrokinetic abilities bequeathed to you upon birth, scorching the shopping mall
with the fire of a trillion suns.

Okay, fine, I presume option (d) is not actually on the
table, and it would of course be a trifle over the top, but including it in
this list is the one thing that will make me turn the page.

10. Skinwalker by
Faith Hunter

I wheeled my bike down
Decatur Street and eased deeper into the French Quarter, the bike’s engine
purring. My shotgun, a Benelli M4 Super 90, was slung over my back and loaded
for vamp with hand-paced silver fléchette rounds. I carried a selection of
silver crosses in my belt, hidden under my leather jacket, and stakes, secured
in loops on my jeans-clad thighs. The saddlebags on my bike were filled with my
meager travel belongings – clothes in one side, tools of the trade in the
other. As a vamp killer for hire, I travel light.

Well, fairly generic UF opening there. When I happen to be
in the mood for a new-to-me UF, I will be glad to try this, but who knows when
that might be. I do remember who recommended Faith Hunter to me, though, so I
am disposed to like the series.

Okay, so that is, let me see:

1 kind-of-Regency

1 actual Regency

2 ordinary fantasies

1 interestingly Roman-inspired fantasy

1 Urban Fantasy

1 SF

2 contemporary YA

1 YA dystopia.

Not bad for variety. The one I’m most likely to try soon: The Sword Smith, because I suspect I may
not like it, which might mean I could take a quick look and then discard it.
Same goes for Honor Among Thieves.
I’m always happy to be wrong about that suspicion and sometimes I am, so we’ll
see. The one I’m least likely to try soon: A
Thousand Perfect Notes. It takes me longer to try a book if it looks powerful.

The book I am
actually reading right now:

The sixth Wings of Fire book by Tui Sutherland – the first in the second  five-book arc. I hit something of a nothing-sounds-appealing period, so I thought picking up this series would get me over the hurdle. So far so good! Still looking like my favorite MG series. Enormous charm.

Actual current
writing of my own:

I am essentially wasting spring break by getting stalled out on my WIP. It’s the SF thing – Invictus is the working title. I doubt I’ve written even 10,000 words in the past five days, not a great writing pace when I’m home all day and the weather is bad; particularly disappointing when the earlier part of the draft went so fast and smoothly.

Yesterday I just poked at it and didn’t get anywhere. Today I am backing up and writing a new Chapter 17. If that doesn’t work, I think I’m going to have to set it aside until I can figure out whether I might be in the wrong pov or maybe figure out how it ends. Or both, obviously. Preferably, I will come up with wonderful, compelling scenes that get me from where I am now to the end. It’s at 86,000 words, so I did get pretty far before it stalled, but it’s annoying because if I knew where it was going and was on a proper roll, I could probably have finished the draft this week. As it is, there’s no chance.

If Invictus won’t get moving, I may pick up Copper Mountain, which stalled earlier this year, and see if it would care to de-stall at this point.

I did finish tweaking a novella, though, and sent that back to Caitlin just now, so that’s something.

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Recent Reading: The Magic’s Poison series by Gillian Bradshaw

Magic’s Poison

The Enchanted Archive

The Duke’s Murder

The Iron Cage

Okay, I realize that my enthusiasm for the first book in this series was somewhat muted. But now I want to more strongly recommend the whole series, for three reasons:

a) The third and fourth books are much more compelling than the first two, and

b) Bradshaw does something really interesting and unusual with this series, and

c) You need to read the whole series in order so that you can appreciate the above two points.

The first two books take place three years apart and feature
the same characters. Marin is the pov character in both. The third book takes
place six years after that; it features a different pov character, Jaketta,
whom I, at least, found much more interesting than Marin. The fourth takes
place about fifteen years after that and also features a different pov
character, Indareh, whom I also found more engaging than Marin.

But it’s not just that the latter two books have more
engaging pov characters. What really makes the difference is that there’s more
action and higher stakes in both of those books; and also, it becomes
increasingly clear that the pov characters in this series are not the protagonists. It took me an
absurdly long time to realize this; it suddenly leaped out at me when I began
the fourth book. It should have been obvious long before that. I mention it up
front because I bet many readers would enjoy the first two books more if they
knew this going in.

This is the cool and unusual thing that Bradshaw is doing
with this series: separating the roles of the pov characters and the
protagonist. I personally know of only two other authors who have done this (no
doubt there are others): Dorothy Dunnett does this in her Game of Thrones
series, her Niccolo series, and her Dolly mysteries. In all three cases, we
never see the pov of the actual protagonist; the protagonist is viewed only
from the outside. The pov characters change around, but the protagonist is
constant through each series.

Inspired by Dunnett’s work, I did the same thing in a long unpublished fantasy novel that I wrote ages ago. You’ll all probably get a chance to read this eventually, one way or another. It’s such an interesting technique. Preventing the reader from looking through the eyes of the protagonist means that the author can legitimately decline to show the reader what is really going on. This does strange things with tension. It’s similar to watching Terminator II without knowing up front that the Terminator is on the good-guy side, or The Hunt for Red October without knowing that Ramius is defecting to the US rather than planning an attack.

In Bradshaw’s case, I think this is one reason why I found Marin less than compelling. Bradshaw knew all along where the real focus of the story lay, and I felt, correctly, that Marin was not that focus. Because it’s impossible for the reader to correctly identify the true protagonist for some time, the story seems to drag. Then, as the true protagonist begins to take his rightful place at the center of both the story and the reader’s attention, the book picks up. By the beginning of the third book, I was much more focused on the real protagonist even though I hadn’t yet said to myself: Hey, this character right here is obviously the real protagonist! By the fourth book, it was super clear not just who was driving the action, but how cool it was that the reader is never allowed to look through his eyes. This is indeed a case where the protagonist works best when viewed from the outside.

I will admit that both Jaketta and Indareh are also perhaps just more interesting, but I don’t think that alone explains why the first two books dragged and the third and fourth were so much more compelling.

I should also add, just so this doesn’t take you by surprise, that one problem with the second book is that a rather huge proportion of the story is taken up with static scenes where characters argue with each other, often about the same thing they argued about in the previous chapter. This doesn’t make for a really compelling novel. It’s the sort of thing a good editor ought to have helped Bradshaw tighten up if the series had been traditionally published. But the book is perfectly readable, and I hereby suggest you all read it so as to move on to the third and fourth books.

Now, you recall that in the post about Magic’s Poison, I went on to rank Bradshaw’s novels, and I set Magic’s Poison toward the bottom, between The Sun’s Bride and Alchemy of Fire. It’s only fair to rank the other three books in the same way, so:

The Enchanted Archive
is probably below Dark North, so
right at the bottom of the Bradshaw books I like, though of course still way
above the Bradshaw books I actually dislike.

The Duke’s Murder and The Iron Cage stand much, much higher. I’m actually inclined to drop them into the first group of my favorite Bradshaw novels, perhaps right above Render Unto Caesar. I didn’t expect that going in, but yeah, somewhere right up at the top. So if you have previously read Magic’s Poison and thought meh, then I hereby encourage you very strongly to go on and read the full series. If you do, let me know what you think! I’m very interested to know if other readers experience this series differently if they know up front that the pov characters are not the protagonist.

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Remarkable variance in visual imagination

Not remotely scientific, this twitter poll nevertheless is really interesting:

When told to visualize a red star, what do you see?

Apparently, when told to visualize a red star, a rather sizable proportion of respondents don’t see a red star.

That’s so interesting. Stumbling across evidence that many people don’t live in the same sensory world you do is always so jarring.

Now I am literally unable to decide whether I’m really visualizing a red star, or maybe something that is actually not red or not a shape or whatever. I feel like I might have the idea of a red star in my mind, without a clear visual image. Yet I think I must have a pretty adequate ability to visualize scenery. I mean, I kind of do that all the time. Or something that I think of as “visualizing scenery.”

It’s all very odd. So I have a follow-up question for you all:

Look away from the screen and visualize a blue half-circle. Are you sure you can visualize a blue half-circle? Or are you possibly doing something else and calling it visualization?

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Gentleperson’s Guide to Correct Querying

I got a kick out of Janet Reid’s recent response to a potential query mistake.

I inadvertently submitted queries for the same manuscript to two different agents at the same agency. The first one was last October to an agent I read about via a pitch party. (No response yet.) The second one was to an agent I read about a couple of days ago in a publishing newsletter I subscribe to. She’s relatively new in the field and is trying to build her clientele. …

And Janet’s response:

Look at the timeline: you queried Agent A in October.
That’s more than 30 days ago.

Thus, Agent A has passed by default.
You’re well within the parameters laid down in the Gentleperson’s Guide to Correct Querying if you query the same agency some months later. PARTICULARLY someone new and building  her list.

Plus advice about what to do if you queried the first agent a mere 29.75 days before the second: Still nothing.

Honestly, Janet Reid’s blog is the single resource I always point out when someone asks me for advice about traditional publishing, or especially about querying. Fun to read, down to earth, and useful all at once.

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Cover that is not black

Saw this on tor.com:

What do you think? This cover has a soft, impressionistic style that lends itself well to the misty appearance of the evergreen trees and the palace. I like the palace a lot, very nice backdrop for the title. Interesting how the sharp lettering contrasts with the impressionistic artwork. Those red flowers in the foreground are important to pick up the color of the title and tie the cover together.

Tagline … eh. I don’t particularly like heroes that fall, though I do like men who rise. Here’s the description:

Mathias has always been the star. He’s the handsome one, the popular one, the one on the fast track to become mayor of his small town. Naturally, nobody is surprised when it’s revealed that Mathias is prophesied to be the one who’ll save the world. And when he rides off with his grumpy, slightly unstable best friend Aaslo in tow, no one has any reason to suspect their journey will end in anything but Mathias’s stunning success.

Until it all goes horribly wrong.

Now Aaslo must find a way forward on his own, as his fellow citizens start to believe that submitting to the forces of evil might be their best chance at survival. As hope dims, Aaslo and his anti-fellowship of miscreants must try to save the world — or at least survive until tomorrow.

Now, this description gives me a little push away from the book. Watching Mathias crash and burn would probably be painful. Watching the fellow citizens submit to the forces of evil — also painful. Possibly following Aaslo and his friends — anti-friends? — as they succeed in the face of evil would be fine. Depending on what constitutes success.

I note in passing that the ebook is currently priced at $14 on Amazon. As a price to encourage readers to try a new-to-them reader, that is a total failure.

But at least the cover is good.

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