Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 25

Update: Final tweaking plus surprise revision

Okay, so I definitely expected to be in the final tweaking stage for SC #3, which I am.

But I did NOT expect to suddenly realize I should cut chapter 13 in half and move half of it up and create a new chapter 6. Wait, I mean 7. Or 8? No, chapter 7.

And should I move chapters 13 and 14 above chapters 11 and 12? Let’s try that.

No, let’s move those two back.

***

Anyway, a surprising amount of shifting stuff up and down. This is occurring partly because an early reader said, “Wait, are these chapters out of order?” and the answer was, “No, but on reflection I see why you thought so.”

So I’ve added time cues for most of the chapters in the first half of the book, plus, as I say, I’ve moved half of one chapter. And I think that’s it for structure! I’m almost sure.

Wow, does a lot happen fast. A bunch of chapters are taking place within minutes of each other. There are about five chapters in a row where I refer to “dusk” or “sunset” in the first couple of paragraphs to help readers stay confident about the timing.

***

What I’m doing now, however, truly is final tweaking. I’m re-reading from the top, tweaking and trimming and tightening. I’ve added the revised character list, which is now spoilery, so I also added a warning at the top of the character list in case readers flip to the back to see who someone is while halfway through the story. It’s possible they may find out more than they wanted to know; thus, the warning. I may still decide to reduce the spoilery nature of the final character list. I have days and days to change my mind about that.

The full length, counting the character list, made it to 190,000 words. The character list is really long! It’s 5000 words! I’m trimming just a bit as I do this final read-through, so the book itself shouldn’t be a lot over 180,000 words. Maybe a bit.

***

I’m looking forward to finishing this up. Almost there! So close!

The only other thing I’d like to do in December is finish “Midwinter,” thus clearing the decks for something else in January.

I think I know what I want to do first-off next year. Maybe. I wanted to finish Tano’s next story, and that’s still a priority. But I have a great idea for an episodic story, a series of vignettes, in the Tuyo world, which would work beautifully for the newsletter and might go long enough to constitute a decent novella. I’m thinking maybe I’ll aim to write that in January, first thing. I won’t be sure till I actually do it. But it’s a great idea. I’d tell you about it, but if it doesn’t work after all, that would be disappointing, so I won’t.

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Erik Hoel: A moral stand on AI

I said no to $20,000 because writers must take a moral stand on AI

It began earlier this year, when someone I respect and like reached out to me. Their offer? Do a book club version of a Master Class (get interviewed, write some commentary) about any book I want. The payment—notably high since it required only a few filming sessions and a little writing—was a hefty $20,000. … But while I was initially excited, there was another aspect of the project: I learned that this book club would be with not me, but rather an AI version of me; one based on a bit of original commentary I created about the book (not a very long précis, in my understanding), then repackaged through a chatbot. …

Furthermore, the app possessed something else I couldn’t get onboard with: the option to use AI to translate the text into “contemporary versions” that are supposedly more easily digestible. In other words, to rewrite the classics to be more modern, which I guess means simpler. Shorter. Keep in mind: Shakespeare is an option. What, precisely, is an “easier to digest” Shakespeare version? I have little confidence that an AI-simplified version of a classic contains the same nuances, the same emphasis of style. …

So I said no to the $20,000. Meanwhile, a host of famous and successful authors, names you assuredly know, all said yes. … I had to make a choice that I could stand behind, and one way to reason about ethics is to imagine the kind of world that you’d like to exist, and the world that I want to exist has more grounded notions of authenticity and more careful use of such a powerful technology. …

Even if I’m wrong, and selling your AI-likeness is fine and dandy, and AI-rewritten classics are just par for the course in the future, I’m still shocked that 95% of the writers asked said yes. For I don’t think that this is a 95% clear issue, even if I’m personally wrong about it. Many of the yeses self-style themselves not only as writers, but important voices of morality and ethics—including about AI’s threat to human art! Yet none of that showed through.

You can click through and read the whole thing, which is well worth reading. This thing about lending yourself to some kind of fake book club discussion, I’m not actually sure how that works, even though I did read Hoel’s post all the way through. I’m trying to imagine what that is, exactly? Is this like a lecture about the book, like a classroom lecture, except it’s mostly generated by AI according to some material, notes and a brief video lecture or something, provided by a person? I’m trying to see the point, but I’m having some trouble with it.

This other part, I’m quite clear on —

In my view, it should be illegal to produce a modified version of any work by any author without explicit permission from that author; and I don’t mean the author’s estate, I mean the author. If that means you can’t do it because the author is dead, then that means you can’t do it.

And that’s how I feel about that.

I don’t want to seem unreasonable, so I’ll compromise. You can produce a modified, modernized version of whatever you like, three hundred years after the death of the author, if the author’s estate agrees. No agreement from the estate? Then it’s four hundred years.

I am just sick at the idea of so-called “helpful” “experts” screwing around with the works of dead authors who can’t defend their works against this obviously unjust misuse.

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Poetry Thursday: Theophile Gautier

I’m unfamiliar with Gautier. At the link, it says: Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic. He is most remembered today for his short stories and his poetry, which represent some of the finest examples of French Romantic literature.

Gautier’s poetry is characterized by its precise imagery, formal perfection, and evocative language. He was a master of versification and sought to achieve a sense of painterly beauty in his work. Gautier’s commitment to the “art for art’s sake” movement, which emphasized aesthetic beauty over social or moral messages, distinguished his work.

Let’s look at a couple of shortish poems by Gautier —

Farewell to Poetry

By Théophile Gautier

Come, fallen angel, fold thy wings of rose,
    Doff thy white garment and thy golden ray !
    Piercing the ambient ether of thy way,
A star, thou couldst but hurtling fall to prose.
Upon the ground thy dove-like feet unclose —
    Walk — for thy soaring-time is not to-day.
    Within thy bosom bid thy treasure stay,
And let thy lyre a moment now repose.

O thou poor child of heaven, thy song was vain!
    Earth’s ears were deaf to thy most subtle chord,
        Nor could it guess the language of thy spell.
But ere thou leave me, O fair angel mine,
    Go seek me out my pale sweet love adored,
        And on her lips imprint a long farewell!

*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***

Last Wishby Théophile Gautier

A long time have I known you… Why,
Full eighteen years, I must confess!
All pink are you; pale, blear am I.
Winters, mine; yours, spring’s comeliness!

White cemetery lilacs sprout
Over my temples; but soon, now,
The grove entire will bloom about
My head, to shade my withered brow.

Pallid, my sun sinks low, and will
Soon fade on the horizon’s face;
And on the mournful, doleful hill
I see my final dwelling-place.

Oh! May you from your lips let fall
A kiss, too long delayed, upon
My own, so that beneath my pall
I may rest, heart at peace, anon…

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POV and long series

So, after remembering recently that Swan Tower exists, I thought, sure, I’d go over there and check it out. Marie Brennan has collected A LOT, the majority, of her essays into a series of books call New Worlds. She writes those essays over on her Patreon, and then collects and publishes them as the New Worlds books. Wow, seven, I see. I proofread one of them, but I don’t remember which. I do remember I was excited to trip over a typo in the hope I might actually be helpful. She cleans them up before collecting them, so I think I found two typos in the whole book. Maybe those were actually facts to query, actually, rather than typos.

Anyway, Marie still does have some essays at Swan Tower, including this one: Epic POV

I’ve noticed that one of the things which makes it hard for me to get into various epic-fantasy-type novels lately is the way point of view gets used. As in, there are multiple pov characters, and shifting from one to the other slows down my process of getting invested in the story.

But hang on, you say; why “lately”? Why didn’t that bother you in your epic-fantasy-reading days of yore?

Because — and this was an epiphany I had at ICFA — the epic fantasies of yore weren’t structured like that. Tolkien wasn’t writing in close third person to begin with, but he pretty much just followed Frodo until the Fellowship broke at Amon Hen; he didn’t leap back and forth between Frodo in the Shire and Aragorn meeting up with Gandalf and Boromir over in Minas Tirith and all the rest of it. 

And yes, this is a problem for me in some epic fantasy as well: the author switches pov far too often for me to get emotionally invested in the characters and therefore I don’t get interested in the story. This is why, when I have multiple pov characters, I tend to stay with one character for about 30 pages before switching, rather than five pages. There’s a tendency toward really short chapters these days, which I dislike to start with, but REALLY dislike if the author is switching back and forth among multiple characters that fast.

So here I am, finishing up a 400k + story with five pov characters. (Plus, in SC #3, some very tiny sections, not full chapters, from other points of view). Chapters through most of Silver Circle tend to be about 15 to 25 pages long. A few are shorter. While I think about this, let me see how it wound up at the end …

SC #1 — 15 chapters; SC #2 — 24 chapters; SC #3 — 29 chapters

Natividad — 5 chapters; 4 chapters, 7 chapters = 16 total

Miguel — 4 chapters; 8 chapters; 4 chapters = 16 total

Alejandro — 3 chapters; 4 chapters; 5 chapters = 12 total

Justin — 2 chapters; 3 chapters; 8 chapters = 13 total

Ethan — 1 chapter; 5 chapters; 4 chapters = 10 chapters

That’s not even, but it’s not vastly uneven. I don’t want to say too much about how and why I switched pov when because some of that constitutes spoilers. A lot of it is also just me feeling that it’s time to switch to some other pov — or that switching right then creates a fun cliffhanger at the end of a chapter.

Maybe I should warn you that more than half the chapters in SC #3 end in fairly dire cliffhangers, which I hope you will enjoy! Some of them are resolved quickly in the next chapter, some not for several chapters — it depends, but, basically, from chapter 10 onward, it’s one cliffhanger after another. I must admit that I really enjoyed that, but you might not want to start chapter 10 at bedtime.

Anyway, as a rule, when I said to myself, “Okay, this next chapter will be SHORT,” it would be over 15 pages, closer to 20; and is anyone surprised? Of course not. (Not even me, by now.) Without checking, I’d guess that the average chapter length is around 20 pages, even in the third book, where some of the chapters honestly are short, particularly toward the end. The epilogue, however, is not short. It’s about 70 pages.

This topic sort of leads into a different post at Swan Tower —

How to Write a Long Fantasy Series, and at this point I have TWO LFS, of course, Black Dog and Tuyo, which makes me wonder whether I’ve followed any of her advice about this.

My purpose here is to talk about the specific challenges of writing a long epic fantasy series — here defining “long” as “more than a trilogy, and telling one ongoing story.” 

The Tuyo-Tarashana-Tasmakat trilogy actually does count because for the rest of my life I’m going to think of that as a five-book series, as it obviously should have been. The other books in that world don’t count. I don’t exactly consider five books a “long” series, generally speaking. I think I consider a series “long” about the time it hits eight or nine or ten books.

Black Dog totally counts either way. It is all one ongoing story, even though some of it is contained in shorter works.

Marie continues: I do not pretend this is in any way, shape, or form a recipe for commercial success with an epic fantasy series. After all, most of this is a checklist of errors I feel Jordan made [in the Wheel of Time series], and you could paper the walls of Tor’s offices in fifty-dollar bills with the cash he made for them. Nor am I claiming artistic failure awaits if you fail to heed this advice; you might squeak through on luck, or just really good storytelling instinct. But I do feel that bearing these points in mind can help the would-be writer of an epic series avoid falling off some of the more common and perilous cliffs.

I laughed at the idea of papering Tor’s office with $50 bills, but I’m sure Jordan could have done that with $100 bills, actually. Or $1000 bills, if such a thing exists. Google tells me that $1000 may be in circulation, but are not being made now. Anyway, then this:

On the basis of my re-read [of Wheel of Time], and comparing to other series that attempt similar tasks, I have come to believe there is a single, fundamental principle, underlying all the other points I’ll make throughout this post, which governs the author’s ability to keep the narrative from spinning wildly out of control, to the detriment of their story.

I’m dying to know. What is this principle?

PICK A STRUCTURE, AND STICK TO IT

Most of us, when we set out to write a novel, have at least a vague sense of how long it’s going to be. We can be off in that estimate — In Ashes Lie ran about thirty thousand words longer than I originally intended — but generally speaking, you know that you’re aiming for 60K or 100K or 200K, and you use that to guide a thousand decisions you make during the process. Should you introduce new subplots, or is it time to start tying things up? Does your protagonist’s next action need some complications in its path, or would it be better to just handle it offscreen and move on to more important things? Can you bring in a new character for this strand, or should you find a way to take care of things with the characters you already have? These are questions of pacing, and we’ll come back to that a bunch of times along the way. But you can’t gauge your pace when you don’t know how long the race will be: at best, you’ll end up going through the whole thing with a steady, slogging, workhorse pace that (to switch metaphors) loses all sense of dynamics.

Pick a structure, and stick to it. By “a structure” I mostly mean “a set number of books,” though I allow that there might be other ways to conceive of it.

***

I am here to tell you that I did not follow this rule at all, that I have never followed this rule, and that when I have a “vague sense of how long a story is going to be” I mean REALLY REALLY VAGUE, as in I don’t actually have that sense. I knew Suelen would be short, but I thought it would be half its final length. I thought Tasmakat would be long, but, but I thought it would be half its final length. I routinely underestimate by 40%, but for Silver Circle, I underestimated by 70%. I mean, I just picked up a calculator and did 180/440, which is roughly the number of words in K that I expected vs the total actual K., and there you go, approximately 70% longer than I thought.

I introduce new characters because I feel like it. I never think, “could I do the same thing with the characters I already have,” probably because I hardly know what I’m going to do with any of the characters anyway, so there’s no point of thinking of anything that way.

I think introducing new characters is a way of sparking my own interest in the story. Once I’ve got them, I routinely realize a new character can play an important role I didn’t see coming. Just as often, I like a new character and deliberately look for something important that character can do to justify his existence. That was especially true of Tano in the Tuyo series, and in Silver Circle, it’s true of Gris.

Sometimes — often — I set out to tie off a loose thread and the thread does not prove very easy to tie off. This expands word count too.

Here’s Marie Brennan’s next point, which she considers secondary but I consider primary:

Control your points of view.

She’s talking about pov scenes from minor villians in Wheel of Time:

But let’s pretend for a moment that the information here is actually vital. Does that justify spending time in the head of this minor villain?

No. Because here’s the thing: switching to Carridin is lazy. It’s the easiest way to tell us what the bad guys are doing — and I do mean “tell,” given that most of the scene is Carridin thinking rather than acting. Had Jordan restricted himself to a smaller set of pov characters, he would have been forced to arrange things so that his protagonists found out what Carridin was doing. In other words, they would have had to protag more. And that would have been a better story.

I don’t think anything justifies villain points of view, as a rule, because I hate them and I don’t care why the villain is doing whatever it is. Or if I do, that doesn’t mean I want to be in his head, watching him do it.

But as for the broader point, in Ryo’s trilogy, this took care of itself from front to back. One point of view. One. And the closest possible pov, too.

I like and often write with two points of view per book. Natividad and Alejandro for Black Dog, Natividad, Justin, and Alejandro for Pure Magic, Natividad, Miguel, and Alejandro for Shadow Twin. Miguel was really fun there and that’s why I kept going with him as a pov character. Natividad and Miguel for Copper Moutain.

Meanwhile, Justin picked up the pov again in a novella, plus Ethan turned into one of my favorite pov characters in the story collections, which I hadn’t expected, but there it was.

For Silver Circle, I had the broadest plot in mind, but I mean the broadest possible arc, REALLY BROAD. I felt I should start with Natividad, as she’d been the original pov protagonist for the series. I wanted to keep Alejandro as a pov protagonist, Miguel had become really important and wasn’t going to step back, Justin both deserved and needed to step back in as an important character, and I really liked Ethan. That’s why I wound up with five pov characters, and no doubt that’s why Silver Circle stretched out, and no doubt Marie Brennan would click her tongue and say, “If you had more discipline as a writer, you’d have prevented the pov from expanding so far and kept that book at 180,000 words,” and she’d be right, probably, minus the fact that I wasn’t going to ditch any of those five so why bother even thinking about it.

I think the big thing, the place where I just operate orthogonally to Marie Brennan in this regard, is that I don’t think you need to have the overall structure or length in mind from the beginning. I mean, I really don’t. I think it’s your job to tighten up the structure as you go, or after the fact, or once you see where you’re heading; and in any case, I think you don’t need to pick a structure and still to it as long as you can tighten it up as you go. In order for that to be true, it probably helps to be fine with letting the length expand; and it’s definitely nice to be able to write fairly fast, so that when the story turns out to be 440,000 words, like Silver Circle, and OMG, seriously, but the point is, the total time invested in the whole thing, from start to finish, including proofing time, will be just about exactly ten months. And that’s a long time, but it’s not the end of the world to spend 10 months on a single project, as long as that turns out to be three books, not one.

Nevertheless, this is probably a good idea:

Every time you go to add a new point of view character, ask yourself whether it’s necessary, and then ask yourself again. Do we need to get this information directly, or see these events happen first-hand? Can you arrange for your existing protagonists to be there, or to find out about it by other means? Are you sure?

I think that’s true because so often the author shows villain pov even though the story would genuinely be better in every possible way if the author did not do that. It spoils the tension because now the reader knows what’s coming, and there was NO NEED for the reader to be told ANYTHING about what’s coming. I don’t mean that’s always a consequence of showing villain points of view. I mean I’m thinking of more than one specific book where it happened just that way, and I was baffled why the author felt she should show the villain point of view. Of course non-villain points of view can also be unnecessary or harmful or distracting too.

And this is funny:

Given what I said above about sticking to your structure, there may indeed be times where it’s more word-efficient to jump to a new pov, rather than constructing a path by which your existing viewpoints can pick up the necessary threads. But be careful, because taking the lazy way out appears to be a slippery slope for authors. This page lists no less than sixty characters [in Wheel of Time] who get only a single pov scene each during the entirety of the Wheel of Time. Nineteen more get two apiece. Eleven get three, seven get four, and then the numbers start ticking upward faster, until our six primary characters have between fifty-seven and two hundred — just to give you an idea of scale.

And OKAY, YES, I do think it’s hilarious to introduce sixty pov characters who each get just one scene. Wow. Probably it would be better to avoid that. But you know what, I don’t think Jordan’s problem was a failure to conceptualize the length and structure ahead of time; I think it was solely a problem with letting the pov characters multiply beyond all reason. (I could be wrong! I haven’t read Wheel of Time, so it’s not like I have strong opinions about where Jordan went wrong!)

Meanwhile, Marie Brennan goes on:

Control your subplots.

Centralize.

The further you go, the less you have to show your math.

This is a puzzling phrase, so what does she mean? She means you should control the verbiage by not continually re-explaining things every single reader in creation should already know. The further you go into your series, the more exciting the story should be. Tensions mount! We’re building toward the climax! Now is not the time to stop and do the simple math all over again. Think of it like a geometry proof: once you’ve proved the basic theorems, you’re allowed to just cite them and move on, rather than having to go through every step every time.

Yes, lack of tension is not a problem in either Tasmakat or Silver Circle. I’m once again chortling about the number of chapters in SC #3 that end on cliffhangers. I DO HOPE YOU ENJOY THAT, but I expect to be costing some readers a certain amount of sleep. Chortling, I tell you.

Here is how Brennan winds up:

A story’s quality depends heavily on its shape, on the timing of various twists and revelations, the pacing of its arcs and the rate at which the characters grow; and good shape rarely happens by accident, especially on a large scale. Ergo, I firmly believe that you need some fixed points by which to navigate during your journey. Know how many books you’re going to write, hammer in a couple of pegs to say that certain events will happen at certain points, and then hold to your course. If you stray from the path, you may never find your way out of the woods.

And I would just like to note that “intuitively” and “by accident” are not synonymous and I’m filing this whole post under “useful for outliners, probably,” and then ignoring it. On the other hand, I also note that she’s not wrong about most people being able to write trilogies and stick to the three-book length, or about no one being able to invest time in writing a twelve-book series to learn how, then start over to write another twelve-book series now that they’ve learned how to do it right.

Also, one nice thing about Marie Brennan’s essays is: they are not SHORT. I mean facile. She gives you something to think about, something with some heft, and good for her. You really ought to click through and read the whole thing, including the part where she ties this in with comments from Patricia Wrede.

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Pastoral fantasy

So, a little while ago, someone asked me a question (not here) about pastoral fantasy. Hmm, I said, I really do not know quite what I think about this term. Sherwood Smith used the term years ago in a BVC post, no longer available; and for that matter, this is the sort of thing that Marie Brennan might write an essay about, though I don’t know if she has.

So, what is pastoral fantasy?

Well, Wikipedia says this about pastoral SF:

Pastoral science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction which uses bucolic, rural settings, like other forms of pastoral literature. Since it is a subgenre of science fiction, authors may set stories either on Earth or another habitable planet or moon, sometimes including a terraformed planet or moon. Unlike most genres of science fiction, pastoral science fiction works downplay the role of futuristic technologies. The pioneer is author Clifford Simak (1904–1988), a science fiction Grand Master whose output included stories written in the 1950s and 1960s about rural people who have contact with extraterrestrial beings who hide their alien identity. … Pastoral science fiction stories typically show a reverence for the land, its life-giving food harvests, the cycle of the seasons, and the role of the community. While fertile agrarian environments on Earth or Earth-like planets are common settings, some works may be set in ocean or desert planets or habitable moons. The rural dwellers, such as farmers and small-townspeople, are depicted sympathetically, albeit with the tendency to portray them as conservative and suspicious of change. 

I think I read that story of Simak’s. That was a while ago.

Wikipedia then goes on to say:

Pastoral is a mode of literature in which the author employs various techniques to place the complex life into a simple one. Paul Alpers distinguishes pastoral as a mode rather than a genre, and he bases this distinction on the recurring attitude of power; that is to say that pastoral literature holds a humble perspective toward nature. …Terry Gifford, a prominent literary theorist, defines pastoral in three ways … The first way emphasizes the historical literary perspective of the pastoral in which authors recognize and discuss life in the country and in particular the life of a shepherd. This is summed up by Leo Marx with the phrase “No shepherd, no pastoral.” The second type of the pastoral is literature that “describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban”. The third type of pastoral depicts the country life with derogative classifications.

And that first sentence is seriously opaque. The author “employs techniques to place the complex life into the simple one,” eh? Would you care to rephrase that into plain English? Also, the idea that if there’s no shepherd, the work isn’t pastoral, renders the term so limited as to be basically useless. I’m basically just unimpressed with that whole Wikipedia page.

I bet we can do a lot better for Pastoral Fantasy. I don’t even think it will be hard. Let’s start here, with my first rapid guess at what might characterize Pastoral Fantasy — which is to say, where it belongs when considering Fantasy subgenres. Therefore:

This, I think, is basically where I think Pastoral Fantasy appears — although I kind of left something out, actually — but I think the term “pastoral” implies:

a) A rural setting, because hello, that’s the actual meaning of “pastoral.” I’m not sure you have to have pastures, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t argue against it. Suppose the whole thing is set in a town, like The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart; can that be called “Pastoral” at that point? What do you think? How about if nearly the whole thing is set in an enchanted forest?

IMPORTANT NOTE: at the time I write this post, Wrede’s Enchanted Forest quadrilogy is just $2.99 for the whole set, so you should definitely click through and if the price is still that low, pick this up immediately. That goes triple if you haven’t read it and don’t have it. These are such delightful stories!

But are they Pastoral? I vote no, so I guess I’m leaning toward Includes Country Setting, Not Just Enchanted Forest as a thing for Pastoral.

I don’t have “rural” or “pastures” in the Venn diagram, and I kind of think at least “country setting” needs to be there. However, before I get to that, how about the other circles I threw into that diagram?

b) A cozy tone, and to me, cozy also implies some degree of emphasis on slice-of-life; that is, small-scall, intimate, family focused. But I’m not sure the whole thing needs to be slice-of-life, and that’s what I’m thinking here, that the stories that include more of an emphasis on adventure can still be cozy. Though actually, I think Troubled Waters is almost slice-of-life, except that the whole thing is kicked off by tragedy and then there’s the adventurous bit at the end.

c) And I’m not sure about this, but I also sort of wonder whether I actually do feel that Pastoral ought to have something of a fairy-tale tone as well as a cozy tone? Because maybe I don’t think so, even though that was something I thought of at first.

Overall, my vote for Single Work That Most Typifies Pastoral Fantasy is Chalice.

Wait, there’s no ebook edition? What the heck? Jumping through hoops, I see there WAS a kindle edition at one time, because it’s listed at Goodreads. But it’s not there now. This is super annoying, even though I have a paper copy anyway. I hope what this means is that the rights have been reverted to Wrede and she will shortly bring out a new ebook edition. There is no information about that on her website, so who knows.

I linked the version with the cover I like best, which is the cover on my edition. I think the audio cover is just silly.

This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING of the feel of the story. I think whoever made this cover had the basic image sitting around, meant for a cozy romance, threw some bees on it, and called it good. It’s pretty, but it looks cold and it looks like its set on a beach somewhere and it doesn’t have the faintest fantasy vibe.

Here’s the cover on my book:

The golden yellow evokes honey, AS IT SHOULD. The cottage looks more appropriate as well, far less like a real cottage on the beach and much more like a possible fantasy cottage. I realize you can’t see them in this small size, but bees are present in this cover, including four stylized bees at the compass points of the circle. But it doesn’t really matter; the overall warmer town is what makes this cover so much better.

How about this idea that Pastoral Literature should include pastures? Well, how strictly do you want to take that? Did you know that you can refer to a field of clover as “bee pasture?” Or any other flowers, lavender, doesn’t matter, if you planted it for bees, then it’s bee pasture. So if you define “pasture” fairly broadly, then Chalice does include pasturage, as well as a fairy-tale tone, a slice-of-life emphasis, and the warm fuzzy feeling that’s so intrinsic to Cozy. In fact, if you consider bees the equivalent of sheep, then the beekeeper is the equivalent of the shepherd and boom, even Leo Marx might reluctantly concede that Chalice is a Pastoral Fantasy.

So this is kind of where I’m winding up:

And I included both The Long Earth and The Magic of Recluse without having read either, so I might be off base with those! The former is $1.99 as of the time I write this post, so I’m a lot more likely to read it now because I went ahead and picked it up. The latter is not at a forbidding price, but not a well-sure price either, so it remains on my radar, but not on my actual TBR pile.

I see I also accidentally left the intersection of Farm Setting and Cozy empty, oops. I’d have tried to think of something to put there if I’d noticed, but I don’t think I’ll do it now.

SO — what think you all think defines Pastoral Fantasy? And what do you think belongs in there besides Chalice? Or, as far as that goes, do you disagree about Chalice? Let me know in the comments! Slice-of-life Cozy is always an intersection I’m interested in anyway, always happy to hear about other stories in either circle or the intersection! I’m slowly making my way through the fanfic Cultivating the Slow Life, which is both. No pastures; more an enchanted mountain including enchanted forest, and I’m leaning toward saying it’s not Pastoral Fantasy. I’m about at the 20% mark, so lots more to go in this enormously long fic.

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Update: Everything is Moving Along

Truly, it is! I’m now going to confidently put Silver Circle #3 up for preorder, with the date as Dec 31, although actually I think that’s generous. I’m guessing — strong guess — that I’ll be dropping it at Patreon two weeks before that, though in a pinch, it might be up to a week later. Or it could be earlier! Honestly, it’s in fine shape!

What I’m still doing:

a) Integrating the last sets of comments from early readers. I’m so tempted to take off the day tomorrow and get through it, boom! But probably I wouldn’t quite get through everything in one evening plus one day, and anyway, I see I do have a few students on my schedule for tomorrow, so no. However, if I don’t get SC #3 out to final proofreaders by Wednesday — which is my mom’s birthday, by the way; she’ll be 89 — anyway, I expect to send this to final proofreaders on Friday or Saturday. I’d be surprised if I can’t manage that.

b) I think I’d better snip off the epilogue and send just that to every early reader who hasn’t seen it. It’s about 70 pages at this point, and though I don’t think I missed anything that needs to be tied off, I’d like to make sure no one else sees a dangling thread.

c) As soon as I send it off, I’ll be reading it from the top myself one more time, trying to tighten it up JUST A HAIR. I cut 9000 words earlier, but added 1100 words, and now it’s standing at 180,800 words. I would like to get it under 180,000. HOWEVER, I’m not going to obsess about that.

d) I’ll make the paper edition this weekend and get a proofing copy for my mother to read. My guess, and hope, is that correcting the remaining typos in two files won’t be too insanely tedious. My best guess, based on SC #2, is that the final proofreaders will catch, collectively, about 60 typos. This may seem like a lot — it seems like a lot to me — but that is what I expect. My hope is that this time, readers who grab it on Patreon and read that version will catch no more than half a dozen, collectively. PREFERABLY NONE. But that may be unrealistic.

Meanwhile!

My somewhat spontaneous Thanksgiving Weekend Sale — WHICH IS STILL GOING THROUGH TODAY, by the way — has resulted, so far, in 7400 copies of books downloaded or sold. I haven’t looked that carefully at everything, but Black Dog was downloaded the most, by a lot, which is certainly the first time it has ever outperformed Tuyo. I think this resulted from three major and one minor factors. The first is that I haven’t run a free book promo for Black Dog for about year. The second is that Black Dog was mentioned in the Tuyo promo. The third is that I was running a five-day promo for Black Dog; an intensive but one-day promotion for Tuyo. The third is the new cover, which probably made a pretty big difference. I mean, no way to tell, but that’s what I’m guessing.

The free book that was downloaded least was The Year’s Midnight, and I think there were three reasons for that; again, one major and two minor. The first — it took me a while to remember this — this book was not specifically mentioned in the promotion for Tuyo, while Black Dog and The Lord of the Changing Winds both were. The second is that it looks almost Contemporary. The third is that Amazon seems to have dropped it into a Horror category, which is really not appropriate. They do sometimes change a book’s categories, they don’t tell you when they do it, and though their algorithms are pretty good, I don’t think this was helpful in this case. I’ll ask them to change the category back to whatever I chose later, after the sale is over.

My feeling, without looking, is that probably the overall promotion has not quite broken even yet, but that it will probably do so today or tomorrow and then will pay off in better sales (minor) and significantly higher pages read (major) for the next couple of months. We’ll see!

I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving (or weekend). Welcome to December! I’ll leave you with this morning’s spaniel cuteness:

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Happy Thanksgiving! — Everything Is On Sale

Do you realize that I began 2024 by writing Marag? That seems like it was a long time ago! But it was only this year! And then Rihasi, of course, and then the stupidly long Silver Circle that has just gone on and on and on, but is thankfully winding up now, finally. I’ve written a bit over 500,000 words this year, by the way.

AND

The Tuyo series is on sale now through this weekend.

The Black Dog series is on sale now through this weekend.

The Griffin Mage trilogy is on sale now through this weekend.

The Death’s Lady series is on sale now through this weekend.

No Foreign Sky is on sale now through this weekend.

The Invictus duology is on sale now through this weekend.

It’s largely a coincidence that almost everything of mine is on sale this Thanksgiving weekend. I decided rather late to run a WWM Limelight sale for Tuyo, November 28th was the first available date for that promotion, and I quite hastily scheduled everything else around that. But I do hope this turns out to be an excellent weekend to run sales.

The first books of all the series are free, everywhere. The other books in each series are reduced in price in the US and UK, and sorry, but this is a complicated sale with a whole lot of moving parts and I did not dare attempt to lower prices by hand … you never quite know when the prices will go down when you do that, you see … so I used the KDP countdown deal tool for all of that and therefore the reduced prices may not appear in Canada or Australia. Next year, I promise I will run at least one sale where I reduce prices by hand.

Happy Thanksgiving! Let’s have a Thanksgiving poem to finish off this post —

My Triumph by John Greenleaf WhittierThe autumn-time has come;
On woods that dream of bloom,
And over purpling vines,
The low sun fainter shines.

The aster-flower is failing,
The hazel's gold is paling;
Yet overhead more near
The eternal stars appear!

And present gratitude
Insures the future's good,
And for the things I see
I trust the things to be;

That in the paths untrod,
And the long days of God,
My feet shall still be led,
My heart be comforted.

O living friends who love me!
O dear ones gone above me!
Careless of other fame,
I leave to you my name.

Hide it from idle praises,
Save it from evil phrases
Why, when dear lips that spake it
Are dumb, should strangers wake it?

Let the thick curtain fall;
I better know than all
How little I have gained,
How vast the unattained.

Not by the page word-painted
Let life be banned or sainted
Deeper than written scroll
The colors of the soul.

Sweeter than any sung
My songs that found no tongue;
Nobler than any fact
My wish that failed of act.

Others shall sing the song,
Others shall right the wrong,
Finish what I begin,
And all I fail of win.

What matter, I or they?
Mine or another's day,
So the right word be said
And life the sweeter made?

Hail to the coming singers
Hail to the brave light-bringers!
Forward I reach and share
All that they sing and dare.

The airs of heaven blow o’er me;
A glory shines before me
Of what mankind shall be,
Pure, generous, brave, and free.

A dream of man and woman
Diviner but still human,
Solving the riddle old,
Shaping the Age of Gold.

The love of God and neighbor;
An equal-handed labor;
The richer life, where beauty
Walks hand in hand with duty.

Ring, bells in unreared steeples,
The joy of unborn peoples!
Sound, trumpets far off blown,
Your triumph is my own!

Parcel and part of all,
I keep the festival,
Fore-reach the good to be,
And share the victory.

I feel the earth move sunward,
I join the great march onward,
And take, by faith, while living,
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Writing past discouragement

An important post, I think, from James Scott Bell at Kill Zone Blog: Writing Past Discouragement

Got an email the other day from a young writer, thanking me for my craft books, which she says helped her finish a 100k MS that was pubbed by a small publisher. She goes on:

But now the spark has left my writing, and I don’t know what to do. My book barely sold any copies. Everything since then feels like a slog. My writing’s gotten worse, not better. I tried to be more “literary” in an attempt to be better, and turned out convoluted garbage instead of good stories. I don’t know what to do. I don’t believe in quitting, but I haven’t finished a novel-length manuscript since my book failed. That’s abnormal for me—I’d usually have another done by now. I have ideas, but there’s no joy left. No spark.

I’ve been half-heartedly querying a manuscript but I don’t even know if I want to roll with trad publishing. It seems more and more like a rigged system that churns out pandering, poorly-written garbage instead of actual stories. I’ve been trying to self-publish, but that’s failing, too.

I’m at my wit’s end, and I don’t know what to do. I just want to get the joy back into my writing. I’m only 25, and I already feel like a washed-up failure. What do I do?

Any of us who’ve written professionally for any length of time know this feeling. So the first thing I’ll say is, You’re not alone. Indeed, I have many multi-published, bestselling friends who have all been there at one time or another. I sent a group email to this wise company and got some great responses, some of which I’ve cobbled together (those are the passages in quotes).

***

The rest of the post is advice, ending with something that’s probably been around for a while but I’ve never seen before:

Carpe Typem. Seize the Keyboard.

I laughed.

Also … I really sympathize with everything in this post. I had sort of almost forgotten, until this post reminded me, that from about, I guess, 2016 to maybe halfway through 2019, I wrote very little and liked basically nothing I wrote. I have just realized, typing the prior sentence, that I must by now have been writing for about 20 years, by the way. Not sure exactly, but it must be about that. So this blank period came after a fair number of years.

Therefore, for whatever it may be worth, I do have specific advice that emerges from my personal experience:

If you don’t want to write at all, then maybe it’s time to not write. Instead of writing, read four hundred novels, and when you suddenly get an idea for something you’d actually like to write, then start that — not with any particular aim, ideally. Just for fun, the way you did it for the first thing you ever wrote.

And of course this is perhaps just me. It’s only that I had those fairly blank years where nothing seemed like fun, and then I suddenly wrote TUYO, and I don’t have to explain what happened after that. I just want to say, I couldn’t and didn’t see that coming and then boom! There it was. I guess now I sort of see that as an important dividing line:

Writing Life Before TUYO

Blank Period

TUYO

Writing Life After TUYO

And this is perhaps sort of peculiar and probably not very generalizable, but nevertheless, there it is.

Also, Like James Scott Bell, I’ve talked with other authors who seem to have had some kind of blank period. I do think that’s a pretty common experience, that at some point a lot of authors hit a period like that. If it’s clinical depression, then of course it’s crucial to deal with that, but it wasn’t for me and I don’t think that’s necessarily all that probable. I just think it’s a period of lowered enthusiasm, maybe connected to a disappointment as reported by the writer JSB quotes above, and I don’t know that I think trying to force yourself to write through that period is necessarily the solution.

Maybe the solution is to close the laptop for a year and do other things. Or if you don’t want to ignore your laptop completely, maybe you should quit worrying about writing novels and write sonnets instead for a while, just for fun. Or fanfic, or something else that doesn’t make you feel like it has to be serious.

On that note, here, have a post about familiar pop songs re-envisioned as sonnets.

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The AI Art Test, Results

I know some of you clicked through to the art experiment over at Astral Codex Ten, where you were asked to see if you could identify human vs AI art. I did the test, in a casual “clicking rapidly through it, not trying especially hard to get it right.” I found it interesting and also was genuinely surprised by some of the AI pieces. I should say that I fall solidly into the cliche “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.”

Here are the results of the test, if you’d like to see how well or badly respondents did overall. Apparently there were 11,000 respondents, give or take, which is a pretty amazing sample size, honestly.

There’s a general discussion, including an interesting and detailed discussion about this image:

Which I liked a lot, but now like less after reading a long description of the many things that are wrong with it. Those things don’t bother me that much, but fine, I admit my opinion has been influenced nevertheless and as I say, now I like it less. I’m glad the giant ship was human and that nobody spent any time explaining what was wrong with it, because I really liked that too, and for a lot of the same reasons: I like monumental architecture (and, apparently, monumental ships) with lots of detail. You can click over to Astral Codex Ten and look at the ship; I’m not posting that image here because it is, after all, by a real person and therefore copyrighted.

A lot of people apparently shared my view that anything impressionistic was probably human, or ought to be human, and therefore had trouble with that category. One image that I liked a lot turned out to be AI generated and also was the single most-liked piece in the whole test. It was this one:

I still like it and I still find it hard to believe it’s AI generated. Some of you (Hi, Elaine’s Teen!) were much better at this than I was. If you see this post, then did you recognize this one as AI generated? And if so, how? There was another one, “Leafy Lane,” that to me seems similar to the one above and which I also liked and also thought was human-generated. Here it is:

Another favorite of mine was this one:

Which I felt was bright and cheerful and I just liked it. I still do.

Here’s one I thought was by a real person:

I don’t like it; to me, the figure of the woman looks like she’s been plonked down on top of a landscape painting without any attempt to make her look like she’s really there. BUT, I could swear I’ve seen plenty of paintings where the human figures looked unreal or misplaced to me in exactly the same way, so I guessed human. (Remember, I took about five seconds to guess one way or the other. But I really did have this exact reaction: she looks wrong, but in a human way. Nope, turns out she’s wrong in an AI way.)

Scott says he tried not to include any with hands that were obviously wrong. I think he missed one. The left hand of “Muscular Man” looks very strange to me.

How can Scott have thought the left hand passed muster? Everything starting partway down the forearm looks just strange.

Everyone, including me, guessed correctly that this next one was AI.

I like this one a lot — something I apparently like is intricate detail — so I’ll end with it.

To see the human artworks and the discussion, click through.

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Update: ongoing secondary revision

I did not exactly intend to write SC #3 and then set it aside for a month, but that’s what happened, because I needed to do secondary revision and proofing for SC #2, of course. Then when I came back to SC #3 and started to read it from the top, a LOT OF THINGS LEAPED OUT AT ME, which I had not seen coming, and therefore primary revision turned into a real bear.

Possibly as a consequence of seeing a lot of things that should change, and changing those things, the upcoming secondary revision looks … not too terrible. Actually pretty much okay! It’s not like there’s nothing to do — there’s a lot to do — but mostly I don’t think it’s going to be too time-consuming. Lots of tweaking, but nothing big-scale. I got a lot d9ne this past weekend, and I’m hoping to get through all or most secondary revision over the Thanksgiving weekend. I’m really thankful to have a four-day weekend!

I’m still dithering over setting up the actual preorder, meaning committing to a date for the Amazon release, because if I’m wrong and I’m not ready by the date, which actually means at least three or four days in advance, that would be bad. I’m not sure what KDP does if you say Oops, I can’t make the preorder date I picked, but I bet they aren’t at all happy with you. Let me actually check. Okay, here:

Your pre-order will be canceled and you won’t be able to set up a pre-order for any eBook for one year. 

My, highlighted and everything. Yep, KDP definitely does not want you to cancel or delay the release date after you set up a preorder. Which is perfectly fair, but it means I don’t want to push the preorder date too hard.

Also! There’s one other factor here, thus: Ordinarily, on the series page, there’s a button that says, “Buy the series.” A reader who thinks your first book looks good and feels like taking a chance on the whole series can hit that button and buy the whole series at once and this is nice, of course, BUT, when you set up a preorder for a new book in that series, the “Buy the series” button disappears.

As it happens, I am, somewhat to my surprise, running a big, complicated sale over the Thanksgiving weekend, and therefore I don’t really want to set up a preorder for SC #3 in advance of the sale. I want the “Buy the series” button to be sitting right there for the entire sale. Therefore, I’ll probably set up the preorder sometime during the first week of December. That way, I have another week or two before I have to decide for sure.

Coming up later this week: Info about the Big, Complicated Thanksgiving Sale. However, as a basic heads up, I will just say that almost everything of mine is going to be on sale over the Thanksgiving weekend. I didn’t precisely plan this out in advance; various things all came together and suddenly made this seem like a good idea. So, info about that coming up later this week.

AND that will all go into a newsletter as well, AND the 4th chapter of “Midwinter” will be in that newsletter because that’s another thing I did over this past weekend.

So that’s what’s going on! Busy week, coming up! For which I am thankful!

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