Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 221

Three Billy Goats Gruff

As you might instantly guess, this is a new Mari Ness post at tor.com. I always love her posts about fairy tales, so, let’s check it out:

The tale reads very well out loud if you have a proper grownup willing to do different voices for all of the goats and the troll, and a proper grownup willing to make the proper clip clop noises as the goats go over the bridge. (Yes, that’s crucial. Those noises are written into the tale!) If you don’t have a proper grownup—well, it’s still a pretty good story, really. It helps, too, that absolutely everyone, goats and the troll, has the same, immediately sympathetic motivation: they’re hungry. It’s something all three- and four-year-olds immediately understand.

I suspect this is why the story has become so popular as a picture book. After four pages of results, I stopped looking, but can confirm that Amazon currently offers multiple versions from multiple authors and illustrators. True, a few are cartoons, and a few are from the viewpoint of the very hungry troll, but the rest appear to tell retell the story in a straightforward manner—letting creativity go wild with the illustrations.

My own sympathy tends to lie with the many recent authors who have chosen to tell us the troll’s point of view. After all, even in the original tale, in some ways the troll is the most ethical character—in that he isn’t offering up his fellow trolls as fatter, tenderer foods for goats. And in many ways the most sympathetic one: not only does he die at the end of the story, making him the true victim here, but he never gets to eat anything.

Oh, are their modern authors who take the troll’s pov? I didn’t know that.

What do you think of this initial assertion — that the troll is the most sympathetic character? I don’t think I buy that. For me the troll is the monster and the goats are perfectly justified in tricking him. Of course Ness may be a writing with her tongue over toward her cheek here. She adds:

Fortunately, the goats do offer us another moral lesson—that eating a lot and getting fat is the best way to celebrate conquering a troll—something I feel we can all agree with.

Since this is Mari Ness, there is a good deal of historical context and discussion in this post. Click through and read the whole thing if you have a minute.

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Originality is overrated

Here’s a good post at Terrible Minds: Originality is Overrated.

And the worry comes that you’ve nothing to add to the canon of ideas, that whatever story you’re going to tell isn’t particularly original. Surely someone has told a story like this.

You’re right. They probably have.

In the history of storytelling, it’s very, very hard to have an entirely original take on something. When you’re pitching a book to an agent, or when your agent is pitching a book to editors, you might be asked what the “comp” titles are — meaning, what books are like it already. And in Hollywoodland, pitching a story is often you trying to feign originality by smashing up two pre-existing properties — “It’s like Terminator meets Gilmore Girls! It’s Pinnocchio, but set on the Titanic — in space!

That last bit made me laugh. Pinnocchio, but set on the Titanic — in space! Ha ha ha!

Full confession: I have never worried about this. Probably because I often get ideas by stealing them from someone else’s book, a phenomenon I am quite aware of and make no effort to resist. This is a great character! I think. But the author isn’t doing nearly enough with him. Hmmm… 

This is a great world … a great moment … a great scene, but OMG, why didn’t the author end it this great way instead of that terrible way?

I can’t believe the author did this to that character.

Why didn’t the author linger on this scene the way it so clearly deserved? It’s good but it could have been so much more.

Remember that scene in CJC’s Fortress in the Eye of Time, when Cefwin’s father dies, and right at the end rejects Cefwin one more time? Remember how crushing that was? I’m telling you, that is brutal. At least I thought so. I felt terrible for Cefwin, as I’m sure CJC intended.

That moment stuck in my head, and when I wrote The City in the Lake, I redeemed that exact moment by ending the similar scene between Neill and his father in a different way. Do you remember? You might. It is, judging by the comments from my beta readers and editor and the copy editor and various readers, a memorable couple of sentences.

To, uh, relax, after finishing my big WIP, I kind of started a different book.

This is not always how I respond to finishing a first draft. More often I turn off my laptop and don’t even look at it for a month. This time I’ve whipped through 54 pages of a new story in five days, which is incredibly fast. I figure I’ll do another little bit, maybe get it closer to 100 pages or so, and then probably send it to my agent to see what she thinks while I start editing the actual official WIP.  The new one may be too YA-ish. (YA is a tough sell right now, I hear.)

And the reason it may be too YA-ish is that I stole the character and the basic situation from a book I read earlier this year, and that character was a very YA sort of character.

I liked the this book quite a bit in some ways and not so much in others. Obviously I found the basic scenario quite compelling. That’s why I wanted to pick it up and play with it myself.

To play with the same kind of situation, I made my protagonist about five years older and changed his personality, and also changed the personality of the most important secondary character and began building a different cast around the two of them. I also altered the situation quite a lot and redesigned the world (drawing on but not copying my favorite worldbuilding detail from Elizabeth Bear’s Eternal Sky trilogy: the sky that changes depending on what polity you’re in). I also changed both societies the main characters belong to to make one less grim and the other less nice.

I would say I’ve changed the plot entirely as well except heaven knows what the plot will end up being. I don’t have a plot yet. I have a faint intention of something I may possibly want to happen way later in the story, maybe.

The question of whether my story is original didn’t really occur to me at any point. It will be original enough when it’s done. It was inspired by this other book, but it is obviously not remotely a copy of that story. It was also inspired by other things, like the Eternal Sky trilogy, and probably other things I don’t remember specifically. 

In his post, Wendig goes on:

I consider there to be very few Actual Truths in writing, in storytelling, in making cool shit — but this, I think, comes as close to Actual Truth as I can muster.

Every story has one original thing about it.

And that original thing is

You.

Yep. Various stories may capture the same eternal truth, either explicitly — remember when LMB had Ekaterin say, “Adulthood is not a good conduct prize you get for being a good child” in A Civil Campaign?

I expect any number of other stories have made the same point, either just as explicitly or (more likely) implicitly. That is the sort of Actual Truth a story can capture. But everyone is going to capture it differently.

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Modern headline of the week

Sex pigs halt traffic after laser attack on Pokémon teens

I bet that made you blink.

Question: is that a great headline because it made you sit up and possibly click through?

Did you click through?

Or is that a terrible headline because you have no clue what it could possibly mean?

Here is the story:

Tiny Insjön in central Sweden isn’t known for pig mask-wearing couples shooting lasers at Pokémon hunters before having sex by a waterwheel. But that could be about to change.

So now you know.

I’m trying to remember to collect weird and funny headlines this year. Mostly I probably let them slip by me. But this one kind of stood out.

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The books most commonly left unfinished

From Book Riot: THE 15 MOST COMMON DNFED BOOKS, ACCORDING TO GOODREADS USERS

Deciding not to finish a book can be a freeing experience. Our time as readers is limited and there are SO MANY good books out there. Choosing to DNF isn’t an indictment of the book itself—usually—but a necessary aspect of the reader’s life nowadays. Some books, though, get DNFed more often than others….

Well, that’s nice to say, but pretty often hitting the DNF button is totally an indictment of the book itself. Not always, I grant you. But often. Let’s see which of the fifteen on this list seem to possibly fall into the not-for-me-but-not-bad category and which might more likely toggle the switch to it’s-not-me-it’s-you.

Also, this sensible disclaimer:

This list also skews towards very popular books, so while these books are commonly DNFed, they’re also very, very commonly read. Likely, they weren’t finished because they were so widely advertised and attracted readers who weren’t the best readers for these books to begin with.

That hypothesis sounds very plausible.

Moving on to the actual list. Without peeking, do you have any predictions? I bet Fifty Shades is on there somewhere.

So …

—————-

—————-

—————-

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (1,240 total nopes)

Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James (1,100)

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling (1,012)

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (956)

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (928)

American Gods by Neil Gaiman (907)

City of Bones by Cassandra Clare (862)

A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin (838)

Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater (805)

Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard (766)

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness (731)

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (729)

Allegiant by Veronica Roth (723)

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Mass (705)

The Magicians by Lev Grossman (701)

————————

Hah, I was right! Number two! Well, that did seem likely. Allllll the hype, but badly written porn? Plus it sold soooo many copies, one would think just statistically it would rack up lots of DNF votes along with lots (I presume) of rave reviews.

Have you personally not finished any of these books?

I started but did not finish: Outlander, The Book Thief, and Shiver.

The ones I have not tried are Fifty Shades, Casual Vacancy, Night Circus, City of Bones, Red Queen, Discovery of Witches (I’ve never heard of that one), Allegiant, Throne of Glass, and The Magicians.

The ones I have read are American Gods (which I did not like), Song of Ice and Fire (I DNF the series, but I did read the first three or so), and Miss Peregrine’s Home. That one was just okay for me.

The ones I would like to try eventually are Night Circus and The Magicians.

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Six protagonists you should totally go camping with

Here is a post by James Davis Nicoll at tor.com: Six Characters With Whom You Should Never, Ever Go Camping

The chances that you or someone close to you will vanish into the wilderness are even greater if you are a fictional character. Particularly a secondary character (known in the SF field as a redshirt). If you are, you should definitely read the following essay, which discusses the protagonists with whom you should never, under any circumstances, go camping. They will survive. You probably won’t….

Odysseus was skillful and cunning; he survived the decade-long Trojan War and came up with that notorious horse gambit. But Odysseus was not canny enough to avoid pissing off the god Poseidon. This is why it took Odysseus ten years to find his way across the thousand or so kilometers between Troy and his home isle of Ithaca. Odysseus’ companions were seasoned warriors, too: None survived, having fallen to a variety of outlandish hazards.

Nicholl then names five other protagonists who are dangerous to hang around with, including … drumrollllll … Cordelia Naismith! Is that funny? I thought it was funny. Nicholl is referring to the situation that took place right before she met Aral Vorkosigan for the first time. It’s true that was pretty hard on everyone she was with at the time.

Nicholl also includes Rowan, the Steerswoman. I don’t know. Very important characters have survived so far. I’m sure a lot of people died, but sorry, I don’t actually remember much about them.

Hanging around with virtually any protagonist in SFF is likely to be bad for your health, isn’t it? If the story is filled with exciting violence and battles and so on, then a lot of extras are going to get killed … having said that, though I can think of plenty of examples, I believe I am now changing my mind about universally needing to avoid camping trips with protagonists. I can actually think of authors who never, or hardly ever, kill anybody important. Let me see if I can think of six protagonists you would absolutely want to go camping with.

1. Miles Vorkosigan. Hanging out with him may well get you into trouble. But if you’re his friend, he will move heaven and earth to save you. That’s worth a lot.

2. Travis Chase in The Breach and the others in that series. The phrase “he will move heaven and earth to save you” brought this series to mind, because wow, if someone can and will do that, Travis is the one. Mind you, it’s possible you’ll go through the wringer en route to the end of the story. Especially if you’re his girlfriend, because in that case there might be a teensy tendency for you to get kidnapped by bad guys.

3. Oh, hey, in honor of Murderbot winning the Hugo, how about Murderbot? Camping qua camping might not be the murderbot’s idea of a fun leisure activity, but I’m sure it would be happy to stand around watching media while you and your friends went camping. And when something went wrong and someone started trying to kill you, as long as you were nice people, it would go to a lot of trouble to save you.

4. Cassandra, in the Touchstone Trilogy. Cassandra has a pretty tough time, but most — granted, not all — of the people around her tend to come through just fine. Plus if you have been turned into a ghost and a power source for an artificial reality, she might be able to make you alive again. Plus Mauna is a lovely planet and a camping trip there would be great.

5. Any Sharon Shinn protagonist, but especially in the Elemental Blessings series. Few people get killed in those, especially not named, important friends of the protagonist. That is why they are so comfortable to read.

6. Keri, in The Keeper of the Mist. As long as you’re on her side and not trying to betray her or her country, you’ll probably be just fine. And Nimmira is a nice place to live. A camping trip there would probably be peaceful and pastoral.

Who would you gladly go camping with, if invited?

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Oh, right, the Hugos! Also, yay!

Since I wasn’t attending WorldCon, I kind of forgot that it was this past weekend. Even though I saw Martha Wells fretting about it on Twitter or Facebook or somewhere, so I meant to keep track. I totally expected her novella to win, but I must admit I did not read any of the other novellas. But still, I totally expected Murderbot to take the Hugo voters by storm.

I’m delighted to see I was right!

BEST NOVELLA

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker

Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor

The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

Congratulations to Martha Wells! I believe that is her first Hugo, though Death of the Necromancer was a nominee, I think.

Here are the other winners — click through for the full list with all the categories.

BEST NOVEL

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Provenance by Ann Leckie

Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty

Well, you know I did not exactly get into this particular Jemisin trilogy. Still, I didn’t really pay much attention to the novels because I haven’t read any of them. I haven’t even read Provenance, which I totally intended to, and will, eventually. First year I have ever been much more interested in a shorter-form category than in the novel category. I doubt that happens again.

Here’s the other category I was interested in:

BEST SERIES

World of the Five Gods, by Lois McMaster Bujold

The Books of the Raksura, by Martha Wells

The Divine Cities, by Robert Jackson Bennett

InCryptid, by Seanan McGuire

The Memoirs of Lady Trent, by Marie Brennan

The Stormlight Archive, by Brandon Sanderson

Some very, very strong contenders among these nominees. I would not have known how to vote. I swear, I would have pinned three of them (Bujold, Wells, Brennan) up on a tree and thrown darts at them. Blindfolded.

Personally I think Martha Wells should write a nice Raksura novella and see if she can get into the Best Series category again. Also, that would give us another Raksura novella, and that would be a fine thing right there.

Whether or not she does that, however, once again, big congrats for Murderbot!

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Finished! For values of finished.

So, Friday I finished the first draft of my current WIP. YAY. CONFETTI.

This is a manuscript I wrote on spec, so no guarantees about it, but I am hopeful. It’s a non-European secondary world setting, with an incredibly complicated world and metaphysics, but the plot is kind of more straightforward, I think? Not sure really, because I didn’t exactly work out the plot ahead of time. I will see how it looks when I actually read through it again from the beginning, when I start to revise (in a week or so, probably).

I would say offhand, just off the top of my head, that this may the very roughest draft I have ever written! I have a million notes to myself in boldfaced text, scattered liberally through the final quarter of the manuscript. Granted, I normally accumulate notes to myself in a separate file, so this is probably not as different as it feels. But there are lots of moments where I skip a few lines and add [Does he know about this yet?] when a character thinks about something and I’m not sure he actually was told about it earlier.

I wrote the chapters out of order, that’s why I have a lot of continuity notes like that. No, I’ve never done that before. Well, once. But that wasn’t as back-and-forth as this one was. Toward the end, I think I wrote chapter 18, 23, 22, 19, 21 … like that. Yes, this made it hard to keep the flow of events straight in my head. Don’t ask me, I don’t know why I wrote it that way. It seemed easier at the time.

I have two scenes I left out, but now I feel like I will probably re-write the relevant section entirely, so that won’t matter.

I worked out the fundamental metaphysics of the world really, really late. Also the identity and motivation of the main antagonist. Like I figured that out about 120,000 words in. One minor antagonist will probably disappear and the relationships between the others will have to be revised to fit my new understanding of who those people are and what they’re about.

At the last minute, I changed my mind about the “feel” of the relationship between the two protagonists. To be perfectly fair, I should add that Caitlin, my agent, suggested the relationship long ago. I thought she was wrong about what would work best. Now I think she was probably right. Oh my God, I am going to have to go change that relationship and how those people feel about each other all the way through the story.

There are two romances. No doubt I will have to develop those romances a whole lot more, otherwise readers will be like, Do they care about each other at all or what?

Plus I should cut about 100 pages. (I wish I could stop over-writing a manuscript by about 100 pages. Sigh.) The manuscript is 463 pages, 143,000 words. I can tell some things don’t need to be there because those plot elements, introduced early, never actually went anywhere. Some scenes are too slow and nothing really important happens in them (I just wrote them to get to something more interesting. Yes, I knew at the time those scenes were just filler and would probably come out.)

Overall, I pretty much feel like this:

However! The beginning scene is okay. For me, the beginning scenes are always okay. I thought you might like to see a tidbit, so here:

—————

Vích made a small, terrible mistake late one summer evening, while she was trading gossip with Mama Guè in the remedies section of the open market. Everything that came later came from that one mistake, exactly as one raindrop falling at the right moment may turn a man’s step from the left to the right and so lead him to encounter the woman he will love rather than the man who is his enemy, and thus change his entire fate.

The people of Daì told a hundred such stories: about one drop of rain or one note in a bird’s song or one chance-heard word that changed the course of nations. Vích’s whole ambition for almost the entire span of her very long life had been to avoid stepping into any story of that kind. Also, to prevent her brother from ever stumbling into such a tale.

It was harder for Lahn because he didn’t remember their distant childhood as well as Vích did; also because his gift was not as terrible as her curse. For those reasons he was less afraid. Vích had tried to teach her brother to live quietly, scattering no raindrops and disturbing no birds and most of all speaking no incautious words. But restraint was not in her brother’s nature. Even after so many years, her brother liked to play the role of a man as young as he seemed. As a young man will, he liked to play with risk. Infuriating, but Vích understood: her brother toyed with small dangers in order to forget his age and his heritage and the memory of disaster; most of all in order to forget the peril that still stalked them both. She had never been able to rule her brother, and always feared that Lahn might give himself – and worse, her – away through carelessness and the joy he found in dancing along the edge of catastrophe.

But that evening Vích herself made exactly the wrong small mistake, and found no way to take it back.

Mama Guè had been telling Vích about the trouble her cousin’s daughter’s son had gotten into and why, a story that led off in so many interesting and unexpected directions that for just a moment Vích forgot who she was and where she was and that she and her brother were always in danger. She never forgot. But at that moment she did forget. So when Prince Qính and his retinue passed through the remedies section of the market, Vích glanced up and saw them and did not pretend to be overawed.

Prince Qính’s huge gilded palanquin, so big it required two bearers for each corner, cleared the way through the crowded market without any effort from his escort of red-sashed soldiers. The soldiers, in their light armor of horn or bone or bamboo disks stitched into linen, strode ahead of and behind the palanquin without looking to the left or to the right, spears upright over their shoulders and knives at their hips and small crossbows at their backs.

Prince Qính had the curtains of his palanquin looped back so that he might see the streets of the city and the clutter of the market; probably also so that he could enjoy the way common people pressed out of his way and bowed as he passed. He was that sort: conceited and feckless, carelessly generous and then carelessly cruel. Such princes frequently afflicted the common folk. Sent away from the king’s city of Nuè Gatah to learn governorship in the lesser cities of Daì, the sons of queens and royal concubines seemed more often to learn license and self-indulgence until their father called them home to school them for some more important post. Sometimes they could learn better once given true responsibility; more often, they did not seem to.

None of that was unusual or unexpected; Vích and her brother had seen such young princes come and go a hundred times, here in Duón Vu and elsewhere. Vích no more regarded such a prince than she regarded one mosquito amid the swarms or one raindrop in a downpour. But she should have remembered to pretend.

This evening another young man shared the prince’s palanquin. Judging by the prince’s flushed face and ready laughter, he had spent the afternoon drinking palm wine and was not now entirely sober. Judging from the way he looked eagerly toward one girl and another, he thought a night of debauchery would perfectly finish his evening. But the prince’s companion was a different sort. He caught and held Vích’s eye, and she did not remember to look away.

This was a young man, but not so young as the prince. If he had indulged in palm wine, the indulgence did not show. He looked like the sort of young man who would enjoy watching others get drunk so that he could despise them for it. He possessed a wide chest and heavy shoulders and thick neck – not the sort of physique Vích admired, but not unhandsome for the type, except for the unpleasant set of his mouth and the obvious disdain with which he regarded everything he saw. Including Vích.

He should have seen nothing but a pretty girl, no different from a thousand other pretty girls. But he saw something beyond the mask Vích showed the world. She saw this in his eyes, in his face, in the way his lips parted as he leaned forward. He couldn’t have realized who she was, what she was. But he saw something. He glimpsed – perhaps – the dark shadow of her kuay soul.

Surely the bull-shouldered young man did not understand what he saw. A young man like that could not possibly see the long years hidden behind Vích’s young face; he could not possibly name her immutable quù soul or her terrible kuay soul. But he saw something. A murmured word from that one to Prince Qính, a word and a languid gesture from the prince to his soldiers, and the red-sashed soldiers stopped looking straight ahead and looked at Vích.

She might have darted away into the narrow alleys of the market, hiding herself among the crowds there. But her kuay soul rose up, awakened by her sudden awareness of danger, by her anger with herself and with useless young princes and their unpleasant companions. It leaned hard against her quù soul and her will. It was eager to be let out, eager to be born into living nightmare, and since Vích possessed no human kuay soul, only this one born of the nightmare beast, she was hard put to prevent its rising. For the first crucial seconds Vích fought to prevent that calamity. For those seconds, she could not move; she could not even see, and so she lost the chance to run away.

A soldier’s hard grip on her wrist nearly startled her into letting the darkness free.

He was a young man; a most ordinary young man: a little proud and thoughtless, but not wicked; at once sorry for Vích and envious of the prince’s ability to command pretty girls. Vích could practically list every thought that passed through his mind, for she had known a thousand young men just like him. She could have torn him apart in half a heartbeat.

But if she let the nightmare out into the evening, it would bring death not only for this young soldier but also for Mama Guè and her sons, for Prince Qính and his companion, for the soldiers and for everyone in the market and beyond. It would be utter catastrophe, soon enough for Vích and her brother as well as for the people of Duón Vu. She made the sharp, hard effort required to subdue the nightmare; but even after her kuay soul reluctantly slouched back behind her quù soul, the soldier still had hold of her wrist. She glared at him, unable to restrain her anger even though she knew giving way to it was dangerous.

Then the soldier’s captain caught his shoulder and pulled him away. “Step back,” the captain commanded the young man. “Do not lay a hand to her. Didn’t you hear Lord Nehùn tell our prince that this woman is cursed? She is a tióc thu: a jealous ghost clings to her. Step back or it may go to you instead.”

———————-

There you go: the merest sliver of the beginning. Not enough to judge the character or the world, probably, but perhaps enough to give you a sense of the flavor of the story. Vích is in a pretty interesting situation: she has absolutely no reason to fear any of the normal dangers an ordinary woman (or anyone) might fear, except that her terrifying kuay soul is not under her control.

I’ll tell you something no one in the story knows yet: she is not actually a tióc thu. She is something a lot more unusual and much, much worse.

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Not a problem I generally experience

At Book Riot: MY SECRET SHAME: I CAN’T FINISH SERIES

I can count on one hand the number of series I’ve actually finished, and it was either because I binge-read them all, or they were so compelling that I bought them as they were released instead of waiting for the entire series to hit shelves.

Every time I start a new series, I do so with eagerness: I’ll finish this one, I tell myself, this one is different. This one is awesome.

But they’re all awesome (if they’re not, it’s a good bet they’ve been DNFed and given away within a 48-hour time span). This time, it’s me, not them.

Does that strike you all as a weird phenomenon?

I am so not this way. I am the person who will start a murder mystery series with book two because I found a used copy, back up and read book one, and then go on and read sixteen more books in the series one after the other without a break.

It’s the same as with an author’s backlist. If I fall in love with a new-to-me author, I will quite cheerfully read everything they ever wrote, one after another, until I’m out. (Then I will weep desolately and hope they write fast.)

I find it enormously difficult to stop in the middle of a series, which is why I often wait till a series is complete before reading it. Like with, where I read the first one and then collected the remaining four as they came out, and read them all this spring when the series was finally completed. That’s how it works for me.

If I stop partway through a series, then I will give the first book or so away, because for whatever reason that series just isn’t working for me.

So, yep, can’t really quite wrap my mind around this can’t-finish-series problem.

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Friday Grammar Quibble: That vs Which

This is not really a quibble, because it’s okay with me no matter how writers treat this. Care about the difference? Fine. Ignore it completely and use “which” instead of “that”? Also fine with me.

Someone asked me about this on Quora, so I did explain the difference. Luckily I have been pestered into learning this by various copy editors over the years, plus I have figured out an easier way to tell whether to use “that” or “which” so I don’t have to think about this much anymore. I use “that” if there’s no comma before the word and “which” if there is. I don’t think at all about restriction, just about commas, because that is quicker and easier to notice on the fly when you aren’t thinking about grammar, just about getting words in a row.

Here is the actual rule:

For American writing: you are supposed to use “that” when introducing restrictive relative clauses and “which” when introducing nonrestrictive relative clauses.

Thus:

My cousin has a dog that is bigger than she is. The information about the dog is essential. The clause is restrictive.

My cousin has a dog, which caught a mouse yesterday and brought it into the dining room while her family was having dinner. The information about the dog is not essential. The clause is nonrestrictive.

Restrictive vs nonrestrictive is in many cases an aesthetic judgment, rather than really cut-and-dried. That is why I prefer to consider commas rather than restriction. It’s much easier to decide by feel whether to use a comma, and then decide on that basis whether you should use “that” or “which.” (Obviously you do need a feel for commas first.)

In British writing, you can use “which” in either case. Because I think the concept of restriction is a touch artificial and that many clauses could be viewed either way, I actually prefer the British attitude here, but my copy editors don’t.

You remember those eight historical novels from the previous post? Well, let me point out something from several of them.

This is from White Eagles Over Serbia:

This afternoon in June was something of an exception – and he surprised himself when he found that he was crossing the marble staircase by the porter’s lodge, to push open the swing doors which opened on the private lounge.

Look, no comma before the “which.” Is that clause restrictive or nonrestrictive? I would say this clause is restrictive, so in American writing, the author should have used “that.” But did you, as the reader, notice this use of “which” in that paragraph when I posed all those novel beginnigns? Were you momentarily concerned about whether the upcoming clause was restrictive or nonrestrictive? Any moment of confusion? I would bet not.

Here are a couple of sentences from The Moonstone:

My object is to explain the motive which has induced me to refuse the right hand of friendship to my cousin, John Herncastle. The reserve which I have hitherto maintained in this matter has been misinterpreted by members of my family whose good opinion I cannot consent to forfeit.

Here is a fragment from Mansfield Park Revisited

without its head, his household hardly knew how to go on, or how to resolve the innumerable difficulties and perplexities which his loss had occasioned

I just thought I would point out that all these uses of “which” in both restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, are absolutely okay, as unnoticeable for American readers as for British readers; also that the distinction between “restrictive” and “nonrestrictive” is honestly sometimes a touch less clear than English grammar books imply. Is the clause restrictive or nonrestrictive in “The reserve which I have hitherto maintained in this matter has been misinterpreted by members of my family”? I think you could argue it either way, largely depending on whether you thought the sentence would be improved by commas around that clause or not. (I agree with Wilkie Collins; that sentence does not need extra commas.)

For those writing for American copy editors, I would not call this a hill to die on, so as far as I’m concerned, you can just let the copy editors change “which” to “that” if they feel so inclined. And learn to do it their way just to be nice and make less work for them. But I do think following the British example would make life easier for us all, without causing any problems with the clarity of writing.

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Oh, I remember this book …

At tor.com, Judith Tarr has a post about a book I read ages ago. I didn’t actually like it all that well, but I loved the cover:

Anybody remember that one? I remember the cover very well and the story not at all:

The Heavenly Horse from the Outermost West, by Mary Stanton.

Ever wondered where the fire horses of The White Road of the Moon came from? I bet it was from this cover (which I had forgotten about until I saw this post a minute ago.)

[White Road only has eight reviews at Amazon, I notice. That’s pathetic. If any of you liked it and haven’t reviewed it, a few lines would be appreciated.]

However, back to the main topic: I see that like me, Judith Tarr bounced off this book:

That was where I first began to realize why the book wasn’t working for me. The focus on stallions as the superior gender, and on mares as subject to their will and whim, made me go Nope. Nopenope…. I found myself pulling back from the human-essentialism of the worldbuilding. The horses are not horses, they’re humans in horse suits. They subscribe to human (modern Western) cultural assumptions, including the dominance of the male. Even physically, they keep showing human traits

Yep, that would have been my problem with this book. No question. I have always hated furry-humans-in-animal-suits.

Tarr says she’s going to do Dun Lady’s Jess next. Good. I completely agree that the horses in that one are much, much more realistic.

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