Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 266

If I saw this in a story, I might not believe it

The Wartime Spies Who Used Knitting as an Espionage Tool

DURING WORLD WAR I, A grandmother in Belgium knitted at her window, watching the passing trains. As one train chugged by, she made a bumpy stitch in the fabric with her two needles. Another passed, and she dropped a stitch from the fabric, making an intentional hole. Later, she would risk her life by handing the fabric to a soldier—a fellow spy in the Belgian resistance, working to defeat the occupying German force.

Whether women knitted codes into fabric or used stereotypes of knitting women as a cover, there’s a history between knitting and espionage. “Spies have been known to work code messages into knitting, embroidery, hooked rugs, etc,” according to the 1942 book A Guide to Codes and Signals. During wartime, where there were knitters, there were often spies; a pair of eyes, watching between the click of two needles.

How about that? How very resourceful people are.

This is a long article, but well worth a few minutes to read the whole thing.

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Good News Tuesday

Okay, this week, a couple pretty neat developments in medicine:

Gene Therapy Has Been Used to ‘Switch Off’ Asthma Symptoms

Scientists have used gene therapy to ‘switch off’ the immune response that causes asthma, and are hopeful that the same technique could be used to target other severe allergies to peanuts, bee venom, and shellfish, keeping them at bay for life.

The research, which has so far seen success in animal trials, works by erasing the memory of the cells responsible for causing an allergic reaction, and if replicated in humans, could offer a one-off treatment for allergy patients.

Nice! If it works in other mammals, of course it will work in humans. I hope this moves along at a brisk pace, and I hope the FDA won’t drag its feet too long before approving some techniques for zapping food allergies. I have a direly allergic little cousin-once-removed with terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE food allergies, so much so that he has to live in a virtual bubble because he doesn’t dare even visit a house where there once were peanuts. Can you imagine the constant worry the parents of children with such allergies must live with? Seriously, faster, please!

Also, check this out:

Prostate cancer trial stuns researchers: ‘It’s a once in a career feeling’

“These are the most powerful results I’ve seen from a prostate cancer trial,” said Nicholas James, the lead author of the abstract presented as the American Society of Clinical Oncology. “It’s a once in a career feeling. This is one of the biggest reductions in death I’ve seen in any clinical trial for adult cancers.”

As I’m sure you know, a huge proportion of men eventually develop prostate cancer. Right at the moment, I know two older men who are dealing with it. So, yay! Again, let’s move along with this, please.

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And now for something different . . .

None of this is at all related to writing, but all these links are worth clicking through for their visual beauty:

1. This Sudanese model, Nyakim Gatwech, One can see why she’s nicknamed the Queen of the Dark. She must present a wonderful challenge for photographers.

2. This young ventriloquist doesn’t just speak — she sings. It’s an amazing performance.

3. The photos of ‘Human Fly’ George Willig climbing the World Trade Center are beautiful and intense. Apparently this was an unauthorized stunt and Willig was arrested for causing a disturbance — but in the end charged just a penny per floor.

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Recent Reading: The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart by Stephanie Burgis

So, here’s one MG story I’ve been waiting for eagerly: The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart. Mmmmm . . . chocolate! And dragons! Two great things that just might go great together.

I can’t say I ever wondered what it felt like to be human. But then, my grandfather Grenat always said, “It’s safer not to talk to your food” – and as every dragon knows, humans are the most dangerous kind of meal there is.

Aventurine is the fiercest, bravest dragon there is. And she’s ready to prove it to her family by leaving the safety of their mountain cave and capturing the most dangerous prey of all: a human. But when the human she finds tricks her into drinking enchanted hot chocolate, Aventurine is transformed into a puny human girl with tiny blunt teeth, no fire, and not one single claw.

But she’s still the fiercest creature in the mountains — and now she’s found her true passion: chocolate! All she has to do is get herself an apprenticeship (whatever that is) in a chocolate house (which sounds delicious), and she’ll be conquering new territory in no time…won’t she?

As the description above indicates, Aventurine is a very young dragon, too young to be safe out in the wide world. Not studious by nature, she can’t reconcile herself to spending another thirty years stuck in the dragon caverns, learning languages and studying philosophy while she waits for her scales to harden. Eventually, determined to prove her capability in the outside world, she sneaks out . . . whereupon she very quickly runs into a mage who a) introduces her to chocolate to distract her from killing him, and b) turns her into a human girl to make sure she doesn’t eat him after enjoying the chocolate.

The story rolls out from there. Aventurine knows almost nothing at all about human society, other than a few rules of thumb her elders taught her (“Humans always lie” is the primary rule). She also has to keep reminding herself that she isn’t the most ferocious, powerful, dangerous creature in the entire city. But she does have one thing going for her: a passion for learning to make the very, very best chocolate confections in the world . . .

As an apprentice chocolatier, Aventurine has some ups and downs. But she quickly makes friends — Silke is my favorite character in the story – and of course she does know quite a bit more about dragons than the average human, useful when the city finds itself threatened by a bunch of riled-up dragons . . .

Totally charming, anybody who is a fan of both dragons and chocolate needs to give this one a try. Aventurine’s ferocity is delightful. So is Silke’s unorthodox approach to marketing. The human political situation is just realistic enough to make you stamp your feet in outrage – I particularly enjoyed the sly crown princess; good thing clever Silke was there to advise Aventurine – but the pace is fast enough that the reader doesn’t get stuck being outraged for too long. An adult reader is likely to find the story pretty predictable, but thoroughly enjoy it anyway. I’m betting a younger reader is likely to be enthralled from start to finish. And both are going to crave hot chocolate while reading the story – or, if it’s hot outside, maybe chocolate mousse. Or quite possibly both.

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Are you comfortable doing a reading?

Here is a post by Madeleine E. Robins at Book View Cafe: Practice, Practice, Practice: The Art of Reading to an Audience

It caught my eye because I almost never do readings. When I’m filling out a convention survey and checking the little boxes for panels I’m interested in and so on, I firmly check NO under “Are you interested in doing a reading.”

For me it’s not performance anxiety exactly. I am fine with being on a panel or something like that. It is specifically reading out loud that bothers me. I suspect this is not the case for most people because so often people practice reading aloud for years and years as they read to their kids, or maybe to younger siblings. I never had children and my brothers are my age, so yeah, never had that practice.

Anyway, this looks like pretty good practical advice. Also, I will add, when I was up for a reading one time I told Sharon Shinn how uncomfortable I was with it and she gave me very good advice: Go through the selection you plan to read. Read that selection aloud and cross lines out or readjust word choices if it will make the pages sound better when read out loud. I did exactly that, and was surprised how much difference it made.

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How not to start your novel

Here’s a post from Anne R Allen: How Not to Start Your Novel: 6 First Page No-Nos

And here’s the comment thread at The Passive Voice blog.

Here are the nine, not six, openings Allen targets:

1. It was all a dream. I must admit that I would not generally be super-keen on opening with a dream, though that strikes me as far less of a cheat than closing with a dream. And like virtually all other openings, I’m sure a dream can work just fine. But I gather bad opening dream sequences are such a cliche that they turn a lot of agents and editors off.

I wonder if it counts as a dream sequence to start, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again.” I mean, the narrator goes on to describe the dream. I wonder if today agents would wince from an opening like this? It still seems to work just fine for me.

Can anybody think of a more current-day novel that opens with a dream sequence or a reasonable facsimile thereof?

2. The beginning where the story opens and then jumps forward a hundred years or so. Hmm. That is basically a lot of prologues. I mean, that’s one major thing a prologue is for: to open with a scene that takes place before the main story. Label your beginning “Prologue” and there can hardly be any confusion about the timing when you suddenly move forward.

I expect Allen might as well be saying “Don’t open with a prologue,” and of course lots of agents and editors and readers hate prologues on principle, but it depends. A prologue can be perfectly fine. Even one that is set well before the main story. Winter of Ice and Iron opens with a short chapter (three pages, I think) that sets the scene twenty years before the second chapter, and then the third chapter jumps forward another seven years. I fiddled around with the order of the chapters a good deal, and the timing of events, and whether to start with that very short prologue type of chapter, and that’s how it came out. I’ll be interested in seeing if any readers comment. If I did a good job, it should read pretty seamlessly despite the jumps in time.

3. Dead Man Walking. Allen means the kind of opening where the story opens with its focus on one pov character who is then killed and the pov changes over to the real protagonist. I will add that unless I am reading a murder mystery, I hate this kind of opening, especially if I have quickly become emotionally attached to the initial pov character. The SF novel Defenders by Will McIntosh, had this exact kind of opening. We open with a small military unit trying to heroically achieve some kind of objective and then they all get killed and I don’t know what happened next because I DNF at that point. So when I say I really dislike this kind of opening, I mean it.

However, in a murder mystery this kind of beginning is so typical that I don’t even notice it. Mysteries have totally different conventions when it comes to stuff like that. It’s all about not provoking the reader into feeling betrayed, so when genre conventions are different, openings can be different.

4. Nature walks. By this Allen means thorough detailed sensory-loaded scene setting. Which I generally really appreciate.

I hate white-room openings. It’s quite possible to infuse a description-heavy opening with character development. But even if the author doesn’t do this, I am pretty likely to appreciate a descriptive opening. I’m thinking here of Hild by Nicola Griffith. There’s a very description-heavy beginning. Totally works, at least for me. That was my favorite novel of all the ones I read that year.

5. Robinson Crusoes. Here’s what Allen says about this: “Your protagonist is sitting on a plane, or driving a car or lying in bed on Disney Princess sheets…and musing about stuff. She’s thinking about the dragon she just killed, or who she’s going to meet at the mall, or recapping the catastrophe she’s escaping from. But nothing happens on the page. There is no interaction with other characters, so nothing happens.”

That is all very well, but the novel I always think of first when I hear this “rule” is The Breach by Patrick Lee. It opens with a guy driving and thinking and then, whoa, nonstop ride from there. But the opening is slow, thoughtful, and extremely well done.

6. History lessons. Okay, here I pretty much agree. I personally really dislike prologues that are history lessons, the kind that dump all the worldbuilding on top of the reader in one solid brick. Really awful — for me, at least. Anne Bishop did this in her “Others” series and I hated it there and pretty much skipped over it so I could start the story. Peter Jackson did this with the opening of the LotR movies and I actually hated it there, too, and would gladly fast-forward through all the history-lesson part if other viewers didn’t object too vociferously.

Pretty sure no one is going to think of an example of this kind of opening that works for me. But how about you, does this kind of opening work for you?

8. Crowd scenes. Allen says “Lots of new writers are led astray by the rule that you should start a book “in media res” (literally, “in the middle of things”.) So they start the story in the middle of the battle between the Trolls and the Orcs and we see four different hand-to hand combats going on and gallons of spurting blood and we have no idea who to root for because all these people are so frenzied, and awful things are happening to every one of them and…who is this story about, anyway? As I said above, every story needs ONE protagonist. Yes, books can be about groups, but one of them has to be the hero.”

This is an interesting comment because (a) I kind of keep thinking I prefer novels where there is just one main hero, but (b) there are so many counter examples that I can’t honestly say that is even a vague rule, and (c) I generally put two or more equally important protagonists in each of my books, which only goes to show.

Honestly, I think Allen should have stopped after her (quite accurate imo) comment about opening with a complicated battle scene.

9. As-You-Know-Bob openings. Allen is maintaining here that opening with dialogue is tricky because of a tendency to try to work in too much clumsy workbuilding via that dialogue. I wouldn’t know. I actually can’t think of any examples of this kind of opening. If you can, feel free to drop an example in the comments.

I must admit I like the comment thread at the Passive Voice better than the original post, which is why I linked to it above. Here is the most on-point comment:

#2 is pretty much the norm in most popular novels I read; even Lee Childs typically spends 500-1000 words establishing the setting before Jack Reacher beats someone up. But it has to be description that’s relevant to the character and situation, not just the writer typing every detail they think up.

If anything, I’m more likely to drop a book because it throws me straight into characters I know nothing about in a setting I know nothing about.

#4 is basically the summary opening, where you start with the world and zoom in to the character. Which works fine so long as you keep it interesting and short.

So I think the point is not that those are bad ways to start a story, but that they’re easy for new writers to do badly.

And of course that is true. Several commenters pointed out that instead of prescriptive and proscriptive rules, what works better is providing good and bad examples of various types of openings. I agree, so that is what I tried to do above, though I couldn’t think of examples for just everything.

I suggest that if you’re interested in what works and what doesn’t work and what agents consider cliched in story openings and all that, you check out Kristen Nelson’s series on story openings to avoid. Here is part six with links to parts 1-5.

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Recent Reading: Freedom’s Gate, Freedom’s Apprentice, Freedom’s Sisters by Naomi Kritzer

I picked up Freedom’s Gate by Kritzer after reading some short piece of hers that was up for a Hugo a year or so ago — was that just last year? — so we see that every now and then it does make a difference to an author to have something of theirs nominated.

Then it took a little while for me to try the book because I knew it was the first book of a trilogy and I needed to have time for that; also it’s harder to whittle down the TBR pile if you read one book and buy two more. Sigh.

But! This is a really good trilogy, so I’m glad I tackled it. Naomi Kritzer is firmly on my radar now, that’s for sure.

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Here’s more or less what Goodreads says about it:

Twenty-year-old Lauria is the favorite aide to Kyros, a powerful military officer. On his authority, she is messenger, observer, and spy. But now she is entrusted with a mission more dangerous than any that have come before Freedom’s Gate. . . . After years of relative peace, word has come to Kyros that the bandit tribe known as the Alashi is planning an offensive. It is up to Lauria to infiltrate the Alashi by posing as an escaped slave . . . [while] her own views are gradually changing, calling everything she believes about her world into question.

I don’t know, I probably wouldn’t have picked this one up for either the cover or the general description. But I’m glad I tried it because it’s right up there as one of my favorites for the year so far.

Reasons You Should Try This Trilogy:

1) Well-drawn complicated characters. Lauria is the main protagonist; she’s a free woman who serves the Greek Kyros, who is a member of the ruling class. Then she infiltrates the Alashi as a spy. Then she genuinely switches sides. Then she gets caught up in various personal concerns and political complications and winds up striving to change the world. During the course of all this, she changes and grows a good bit, quickly becoming a much better person while never becoming unbelievably nice.

Tamar is a slave who escapes to the Alashi with Lauria; she becomes a more and more important character as the story unwinds and takes an important pov role in the third book. The relationship between Lauria and Tamar changes and develops, with Tamar starting off in a more sidekick kind of role but then becoming Lauria’s equal. I think Kritzer made Tamar a pov protagonist because she had no choice; the story had started to sprawl and she needed to show more of it than just Lauria’s part. But it worked fine to bring Tamar into a pov role.

Then there are a lot – a LOT – of secondary characters, many of whom are important and most of whom are nuanced and complicated. I particularly liked Lauria’s mother, whom we only see a little bit in the first book but who takes a more important role in the third. Mother-daughter relationships are important in this story, though secondary to sister relationships. Most of the important characters are female, but there are good, strong secondary male characters as well. Characterization is a real strength in this trilogy

2) No romance! Or almost none. For a bit, just briefly, it looked like Lauria and Tamar might shift from a sworn-sister relationship to a more romantic relationship. This didn’t happen, and I’m glad. Modern American society is so sexualized that sometimes it seems impossible to find a novel where friendship doesn’t turn sexy. There are all kinds of romantic relationships in this trilogy, but all of the romance stays thoroughly in the background and there is no implication that sexual and romantic relationships are the only truly important relationships.

3) Worldbuilding and Mythology. My goodness, what a wonderful take on Greek mythology. Alexander lived a long, long time and eventually became a god, casting down Zeus, whom he imprisoned under a mountain. Prometheus and Arachne are important mythological figures as well. It’s not clear how much of this mythology is literally true, but it’s great background. The dominant Greeks, the subjugated people they conquered, the djinni enslaved by the Weavers, the imprisoned rivers . . . it all makes for a wonderful backdrop for this story, not to mention furnishing the overarching quest.

4) Nuanced ethics. Is it right to demand that slaves seize their own freedom before welcoming them, as the Alashi do? What about freeing slaves who don’t want to be free? How do you define freedom anyway? What about killing a lot of people in order to free slaves, is that okay? Is it all right to use an enslaved djinn for a good cause? What if you decide it’s not; do you have to try to stop everyone else from using enslaved djinni too – even for a good cause?

Can you earn forgiveness for past evil by current good works? Can you demand forgiveness? What if someone keeps hating you for something you did a long time ago, how do you deal with that? What if you love someone but can’t get her to agree with you about important things, how do you deal with that?

Lots of complicated ethical situations and choices add depth to this trilogy. Plus, it’s all worked in smoothly enough that nothing ever seems preachy.

5) Presentation of bipolar syndrome. The Weavers – sorcereresses who gain power by enslaving djinni – almost inevitably suffer from bipolar syndrome, which gets worse the more djinni they bind. It’s not explained why; this is one bit of the worldbuilding that you just have to accept because there’s no particular reason for it. But the presentation seems to ring true to me. For part of the trilogy, after attempting to bind a djinn, Lauria herself suffers from alternating melancholia and “cold fever” – the one with a slowing and sluggishness of will and thought, the other with a grandiose conviction that she is the chosen one who cannot fail in her quest to free the rivers and change the world. Which incidentally adds a nice twist on the Chosen One trope to the story.

6) Quality of the writing: Top notch. Not ornate or flowery or lyrical, but smooth and unnoticeable. Pacing is good, neither too much nor too little description for my taste. Relationships are important and complex but not angst-ridden or despairing.

Things That Didn’t Work Quite So Well:

Um . . . not much is coming to mind here. The plotting is complicated, as you might expect in a single story that has room to stretch out in a trilogy. But every aspect of the plot comes together well in the end, despite several surprising twists that I didn’t see coming. I mean, I didn’t scream in shock as can happen with Andrea K Höst or Elizabeth Wein, but I certainly was startled into laughing out loud several times, in sheer surprise. If Kritzer had been less deft, I might have found some of those twists unbelievable. However, she made everything work. Every single twist fit neatly and believably into the story.

Overall Rating:

Definitely a keeper, this is a series I’ll enjoy re-reading in a couple of years. Despite the overflowing TBR pile, I’ll certainly be picking up more of Kritzer’s books in the near future.

If You Liked …

This trilogy reminds me pretty strongly of Sherwood Smith’s Inda series. Of course the worldbuilding is very different, but if you liked that, I bet you’ll enjoy this.

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Good News Tuesday

This is promising:

Cannabidiol slashes seizures in kids with rare epilepsy, study finds

Among children taking cannabidiol, the decrease in the frequency of convulsive seizures — which involve a loss of consciousness, stiffened muscles and jerking movements — was 23 percentage points greater than the decrease in seizures among children taking a placebo. The study was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled human trial.

They were looking specifically at children with Dravet Syndrome, which is described as “a severe childhood-onset epilepsy that causes multiple kinds of seizures, developmental delays, speech and language problems, behavioral issues and movement and balance problems.” Sounds pretty awful. If nearly a quarter of those children respond well to cannabidiol, wow. Especially since other treatments are apparently not super useful for this syndrome.

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Stuck in Research Hell

Here’s a fun post by Abria Mattina at Writerology: Seven Signs You’re Stuck in Research Hell

I used to be the absolute worst at research. It wasn’t the research process I couldn’t handle—just that my research never ended. I didn’t know when I had enough information to reinforce my outline. I never called my research “done” and turned my attention to writing. . . . I was stuck in a cycle of pseudo-productivity, doing research that made me feel like I was progressing while simultaneously doing nothing to advance me toward my goals. It didn’t help that I love to write genre fiction. I’m editing a science fiction at the moment, and gearing up for another stab at my historical fiction manuscript.

This has never happened to me! Partly because I don’t care that much about perfect authenticity and partly because I’m too lazy to go get yet another book off the shelves downstairs and partly because I lack a great internet connection, but mostly because I generally find myself satisfied with the first reputable-seeming website that tells me how many crossbow bolts can be fired per minute or whatever.

Also I can just call my brother and ask how big a typical medieval army is and how far a guy can travel on horseback in a day and stuff like that, and he’ll just know. So that’s handy.

But you do run into people who seem to get lost in the research part of writing. Sometimes I think that’s because their hobby is actually worldbuilding, not writing, which is perfectly fine as long as they’re happy with that. But if they want to go on with the writing, of course it would be better to get out of research hell and start writing. Here are Mattina’s seven signs:

1. Your story sounds like a textbook.

Actually I think this is exactly what the Silmarillion sounds like. A history textbook. I skimmed it rather than actually reading it. Of course worldbuilding certainly was Tolkien’s primary focus, so there you go.

2. Your story sounds like a catalog of facts.

Not sure I can think of any examples . . . not good examples . . . I remember one passage held out as a bad example which really did read like a catalog of facts.

3. You’ve forgotten what your story is actually about.

This is funny: “Maybe when you started it was a retelling of Beauty and the Beast set at the height of the Mongolian empire—and now there’s all kinds of stuff in there about bow mechanics, religious rituals, horses, a side plot about tattooing, and what was the climax supposed to be again?”

Can’t you just see that happening? Of course I might enjoy all those details about tatooing and maybe your book doesn’t have to hew so close to the original, but one can see what Mattina means here.

4. You’ve lost your passion for the book.

Yep, that would be a problem. Though certainly getting lost in research is not necessarily going to cause you to lose passion for your story. All kinds of things can do that, including tightening deadlines and getting stuck in the plot. I think there you might be trying to regain lost passion by doing research. That might even work.

5. You can’t tell the difference between useful information and trivial factoids.

I don’t know. Some of those trivial factoids could probably be worked in gracefully to delight your readers. Look at Elizabeth Bear’s Eternal Sky trilogy to see how she works in tons of wonderful details that add depth rather than tedium.

6. Your huge collection of material on some topic starts to look too small.

Probably Mattina is right. Just write the book already.

7. You don’t feel ready to write even though you have 1500 pages of research notes on hand.

Hah. At that point you need an index for your notes just to make them usable. Again, just write the book already. You can look up details as you need them.

I have never, ever taken more than a couple pages of notes about stuff before tackling a book. Of course it helps to be writing mostly secondary world fantasy that is supposed to have the flavor of a particular region, not a historical novel that is supposed to accurately represent a specific period and place.

For a while there I could tell you all about the eight kinds of granite found in Vermont, btw. Somehow it never seemed necessary to insert quite that level of detail into the Black Dog world …

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Beginnings: Recent Samples

My Kindle is sure filling up with samples – and, yes, full novels – but certainly lots of samples. Sixty-eight samples at the moment. Let’s take a look at the ten titles most recently added to my Samples folder and see if any look particularly promising from the very beginning – or the reverse: if any look like they ought to just be gently discarded without any further investment of time.

1. Buffalo Soldier, Maurice Broaddus

Desmond Coke pinched a clump of chiba leaves from his pouch and rolled it into the fine pressed paper. He was down to his last few leaves, perhaps enough for one or two more sacraments before he’d be down to stems and seeds. He sat alone underneath a cotton tree, lit his spliff, and dreamt of home. Exhaling a thin cloud of smoke, he leaned against its gray trunk. The dried brown vines draping it crunched beneath his movement. Under the strange western sky, the dark and loathsome trees crowded the hillside. Before bedtime, his mother used to tell him stories of how duppies danced among their branches or hid among the caves. If he’d been particularly troublesome that day, she’d tell him of the powerful spirit, Old Higue, and how the creature would hang her skin along the branch of a cotton tree before she went about her grim business. The tree reminded him of home, but he was far from the shores of Jamaica. They both were.

Grim-ish. But evocative. I don’t know if I’ll wind up liking it, but I will certainly go on with it.

2. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome

Roger, aged seven, and no longer the youngest of the family, ran in wide zigzags, to and fro, across the steep field that sloped up from the lake to Holly Howe, the farm where they were staying for part of the summer holidays. He ran until he nearly reached the hedge by the footpath, then turned and ran until he nearly reached the hedge on the other side of the field. Then he turned and crossed the field again. Each crossing of the field brought him nearer to the farm. The wind was against him, and he was tacking up against it to the farm, where at the gate his patient mother was awaiting him. He could not run straight against the wind because he was a sailing vessel, a tea-clipper, the Cutty Sark. His elder brother John had said only that morning that steamships were just engines in tin boxes. Sail was the thing, and so, though it took rather longer, Roger made his way up the field in broad tacks.

Well, now, that’s horoughly charming. I’m very pleased Pete kept mentioning this one in the comments until I finally picked up a sample.

3. Lonen’s War, Jeffe Kennedy

Oria squinted into the heat shimmer rising in the distance beyond the high walls of the city. Maybe if she looked long and hard enough, the weapons of the clashing armies would give off a telltale glitter or the shouts of the men would echo back. But even though her high tower gave her one of the longest views in Bára, she remained blind and deaf, stuck in her chambers, remote from the battle underway. Just as she’d lived most of her life isolated from the rest of the world.

Despite the lack of other evidence of war, the hot wind seemed to carry an unfamiliar smell to her rooftop garden. Layered among the scents of sand, the brackish bay, and distant ocean came something new. Something like roasting meat, redolent of rage, despair, and determination. An unsettling combination unlike anything she’d ever experienced. But until this, no one had attempted to Bára in her lifetime. Not for a long time before that either, according to the histories.

This one really doesn’t stand out for me. Part of the reason is that metaphors are iffy when you just start a SFF novel. Is the protagonist actually blind and deaf? The emphasis on scents almost makes it seem like she might be. I am mildly peeved at this confusion. Also, nothing about the smell of roasting meat suggests rage, despair, or determination to me and I don’t really see how it could suggest such things to anyone. I’m mildly peeved at this description as well. Offhand I would kind of expect to delete this sample, maybe without even finishing the full sample (depending on how long the sample turns out to be).

4. Mirrors, Lazette Gifford

I tried to block what I felt from the world – from both worlds – while my fingers brushed across the ancient harp’s strings.

Bright music filled the small room as I played “Carolan’s Ramble to Cashel.” Plants trailed flowers at my shoulders, half-masking the front window of the upstairs apartment. The semi-opaque curtains formed a veil between me and the troubles in the world beyond my sanctuary.

I’m not a good musician, but playing helps when I’m troubled. Today I sensed subtle changes in the air and tried to ignore the growing apprehension those changes created. I listened only to each bell-like note in the near silence of my home.

Somewhere else a car honked and people argued, but not here in this plae. I created a sphere of peace and tranquility and played, content for at least a few minutes more.

No one else sensed the trouble in the air.

Not particularly drawn in, but I would go on with this and see how the story develops.

5. Dancer, Lazette Gifford

Devlin stood beneath the high woode benches and tried not to wince every tme she heard a creak or groan from the wood. The last set of bleachers had collapsed ten years ago, killing more than fifty people and maiming others. Safer now people assured her, but she didn’t believe them. Devlin didn’t trust low-tech work on backwater worlds.

And she didn’t think much of Forest anyway.

Devlin’s plans hadn’t included coming to see the show today. She’d watched one bear dance and found the show a disgusting display of brutality. Pitting a human against a local animal was barbaric and she didn’t know how these people could watch.

Devlin couldn’t decide whether anyone would send someone of her rank and tech abilities to such a low tech world. Someone from the office could have filed these reports. She’d enjoyed working on Caliente better than her and she’d despised that world. Forest might be a lovely planet, but she hated the people. Hated them all and knew she’d lost her objectivity.

Same as the other one by Gifford; not especially catchy but I’d go on with it.

6. Song of the Summer King, Jess E Owen

Fresh morning air lifted clouds and gulls above the glimmering sea, and drew one young gryfon early from his den. Too early, just before sunrise when forbidden darkness still blanketed the islands.

The sun rose unhurriedly from the sea, and Shard strained against the steep sky, breathing deep, challenging himself to the highest possible dive. The sea spun below him. His mind flickered lighting in the thin air and he shoved down panic. Some would call it too high.

His wings drew in and flapped out sluggishly, feeling separate from his body. He had to bank, to get lower, breath the deeper air.

Night sparked at the edge of his mind. His dreams flocked up from the night before. Nightmares of the impending initiation hunt.

Ah, a young, impulsive, possibly idiotic protagonist. Redeemed, however, by being a gryfon. I’d go on with this because hey, gryfons.

7. Thieftaker, DB Jackson

Ethan Kaille eased his knife from the leather sheath on his belt as he approached Griffin’s Wharf, the words of a warding spell on his lips. He had sweated through his linen shirt and nearly through his waistcoat as well. His leg ached and he was breathing hard, gasping greedily at the warm, heavy air hanging over Boston on this August eve. But he had chased Daniel Folter this far – from the Town Dock to Purchase Street, over cobblestone and dirt, past storefronts and homes and pastures empty save for crows and grazing cows – and he wasn’t about to let the pup escape him now.

The western horizon still glowed with the last golden light of day, but the sky over Boston Harbor and the South End shoreline had darkened to a deep indigo. Hulking wooden warehouses, shrouded n a faint mist, cast deep elongated shadows across the wharves. Clouds of midges danced around Ethan’s head, scattering when he waved a hand at them only to swarm again as soon as he turned his attention back to his quarry.

Possibly too gritty for my taste, though it might work for me – I’d have to go on with it to see. Also, I recall a commenter’s warning about the protagonist killing a dog. I’m willing to go on with it, but rather cautiously and if the rest of the sample doesn’t really grab me, I’d let it go.

8. Enchanted, Inc, Shanna Swendson

I’d always heard that New York City was weird, but I had no idea just how weird until I got here. Before I left Texas to move here, my family tried to talk me out of it, telling me all sorts of urban legends about the strange and horrible things that happened in the big bad city. Even my college friends who’d been living in New York for a while told me stories about the weird and wonderful things they’d seen that didn’t cause the natives to so much as blink. My friends joked that an alien from outer space could walk down Broadway without anyone looking twice. I used to think they were exaggerating.

But now, after having survived a year in the city, I still saw things every day that shocked and amazed me but didn’t cause anyone else to so much as raise an eyebrow. Nearly naked street performers, people doing tap-dance routines on the sidewalk, full-scale film productions – complete with celebrities – weren’t worth a second glance to the locals, while I couldn’t help but gawk. It made me feel like such a hick, no matter how hard I tried to act sophisticated.

Take this morning, for instance.

And then she describes a girl with butterfly wings. Well, the style is not all that appealing, but it’s not bad either. If I were in the mood for a light UF kind of story, I’d try this.

9. Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee

At Kell Academy, and instructor had explained to Cheris’s class that the threshold winnower was a weapon of last resort, and not just for its notorious connotations. Said instructor had once witnessed a winnower in use. The detail that stuck in Charis’s head wasn’t the part where every door in the besieged city exhaled radiation that baked the inhabitants dead. It wasn’t the weapon’s governing equations or even the instructor’s left eye, damaged during the attack, from which ghostlight glimmered.

What Cheris remembered most was the instructor’s aside: that returning to corpses that were only corpses, rather than radiation gates contorted against black-blasted walls and glassy rubble, eyes ruptured open, was one of the best moments of his life.

Five years, five months, and sixteen days later, surrounded by smashed tanks and smoking pits on the heretic Eels’ outpost world of Dredge, Captain Kel Cheris of Heron Company, 109-229th Battalion, had come to the conclusion that her instructor was full of shit. There was no comfort to be extracted from the dead, from flesh evaporated from bones. Nothing but numbers snipped short.

Grim, grim, grim. But this one has certainly gotten all the buzz this year. I’d certainly go on with it on that basis.

10. Strange the Dreamer, Laini Taylor

On the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.

Her skin was blue, her blood was red.

She broke over an iron gate, crimping it on impact, and there she hung, impossibly arched, graceful as a temple dancer swooning on a lover’s arm. One slick finial anchored her in place. Its point, protruding from her sternum, glittered like a brooch. She fluttered briefly as her ghost shook loose, and torch ginger buds rained out of her long hair.

Later, they would say these had been hummingbird hearts and not blossoms at all.

They would say she hadn’t shed blood, but wept it. That she was lewd, tonging her teeth at them, upside down and dying, that she vomited a serpent that turned to smoke when it hit the ground. They would say a flock of moths came, frantic, and tried to lift her away.

That was true. Only that.

Grim also, but this time in a surreal kind of way. As it happens, I prefer poetic-surreal-grim to gritty-ugly-realism-grim. I like the moths. I think I like the moths. Not even quite sure. I’ll have to be in the right mood for this one, that’s for sure

***

Okay vote for your favorite! Mine is easy:

#2, Swallows and Amazons. That delightful opening paragraph makes me smile. After reading just this bit, I pulled it out of my “Samples” folder into the general clutter of unread ebooks, where it is now resting right at the top of my electronic TBR pile.

As it happens, I’m making an effort to whittle down the physical TBR pile right now. But yep, I’ll definitely be getting to this one sometime relatively soon.

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