Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 300

Hugo voting: short story

So, there are three real entries for short stories this year, and two joke or troll entries. Here they all are, in order:

1. “Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld, January 2015). An extremely easy choice for #1; after all, I nominated it. I was really annoyed when Vox Day’s crowd knocked it off the ballot and very pleased to see it appear when a different entry was withdrawn. What a fun story: light, easy to read, with plenty of charm. I picked up one of Kritzer’s novels on the basis of this story and that food blogger story of hers.

2. “Asymmetrical Warfare” by S. R. Algernon (Nature, Mar 2015) (!). How about that, a short story in Nature. This is a very short story in epistolary form — really in the form of reports from a starfish on the ground, as it were, to its commander, during an invasion of Earth. Not a story that strikes me as the kind to turn heads, but clever.

3. “Seven Kill Tiger” by Charles Shao (There Will Be War Volume X, Castalia House). A story where China moves preemptively to wipe out the populations of sub-Saharan Africa so they can take over the continent. As a story about war, it was okay, though I personally could not get interested in it. As an SF story, well, it wasn’t really SF. You could work this plot into a political thriller set in 2016 and it would be basically as plausible as any other thriller plot — more plausible than a couple of Tom Clancy’s I can think of.

4. No Award

5. “If You Were an Award, My Love” by Juan Tabo and S. Harris (voxday.blogspot.com, Jun 2015). Sigh. This seems to be a joke that won’t die. I’m pretty tired of riffs on “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” and definitely out of patience for a parody entry in the growing subsubsubgenre of the Scalzi/Vox Day feud.

And a very, very distant 6. “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” by Chuck Tingle (Amazon Digital Services). An even less funny joke. A trivial bit of gay erotica that displays a truly shameful failure to grasp the most basic punctuation rules for dialogue.

This is by far the weakest fiction category for the Hugo this year, imo. The first three stories certainly don’t deserve to be dragged down by the bottom two. It makes me glad I can nominate for the World Fantasy Award this year. Whatever makes the short list there, it’ll certainly be a better list overall than this.

The gatekeepers of authenticity should cut it out

Here’s a good post from Anthemeria Rampant: Punctuation peeving and the gatekeepers of authenticity

Early last week, author Stephen Blackmoore said on the Tweetie, “Periods, commas, question marks. Everything else is bullshit.”

… In the long history of the printed word, we’ve already jettisoned the punctuation that no longer serves us. The pilcrow and the manicule are mostly the stuff of old manuscripts now, and niche marks like the interrobang, quasiquote, and certainty point have failed to gain a foothold. At this stage, we can be pretty sure that the punctuation in common use is there because there’s a need for it. …

What’s really going on here, I strongly suspect, is a kind of posturing, and it’s meant to police the boundaries of what’s implied when words like “bullshit” come into play. Because the opposite of bullshit is real, true – authentic. When you see a sentiment like this, you can be sure that what you’re seeing is the gatekeeping of authenticity: A real writer doesn’t use frivolities like semicolons, and if you do, you’re a poseur, a wanna-be – or at the very least, you’re Doin It Rong.

Please, fellow writers, can we not do this? Give yourself whatever constraints you like; by all means, do away with whatever isn’t useful to you. But don’t expect that doing so earns you extra points for the authenticity of your style or the purity of your craft. Your preferences are not virtues.

Ah, music to my ears. This is so true.

Do you realize, we actually have had teachers who would take points off of student papers because the student didn’t follow some personal preference non-rule, such as “never use semicolons” or whatever. Writing “take home message” instead of “takehome message” — this particular instructor was into combining words despite what spell check suggests is preferable.

It’s not part of my job description to argue about this. If the teacher wants to make up ridiculous rules and impose those on students, he or she can, within reason. But now I so want to put “Your Preferences Are Not Virtues” on a banner and send it to anybody who does this. Don’t we have enough trouble teaching students to write coherent sentences and paragraphs without adding a straitjacket of some personal preference on top of real grammar?

World Fantasy nominations

So, what else should I nominate for the World Fantasy Award? I got the nominating ballot a few days ago. So far I’m nomninating:

Life Achievement

I’m nominating CJ Cherryh. I think her chances are very good this year. People should think of her right away because she was made a SFWA Grand Master this year. I’m also nominating Martha Wells. Of course she doesn’t have nearly as many books out, but then not many writers do. I keep going back and re-reading her books, and honestly, they are so well written. I expect Wells’ chances will probably be better in 20 years.

Novel

I’m nominating only fantasy novels, not SF. Not everyone limits themselves that way, but I feel the World FANTASY Award should be for fantasy. I can nominate up to five books and right now those are, in no particular order:

Archivist Wasp by Korner-Stace

Bone Gap by Ruby

Carry On by Rowell

Silver on the Road by Gilman

And I’m thinking of adding Bryony and Roses by Vernon.

Am I forgetting anything you think is an obvious choice to nominate?

Novella

I suppose I will go ahead and nominate Penric’s Demon. I expect everybody will, so it probably isn’t important that I do.

Short Fiction

World Fantasy lumps together everything under Novella as short fiction. Right now I’m definitely nominating:

Wooden Feathers by Vernon

Things You Can Buy With a Penny by Kaufman

And maybe Pecosin, also by Vernon. I just got the Apex issue that has that story in it, and I will read it tonight and decide.

I am very likely forgetting about something really good in the short fiction category. But again, I’m only thinking of fantasy stories here, not SF. And if anything is horror … like “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers”, say … then that isn’t likely to appeal to me. It’s hard for me to believe I would like any story better than those two, though.

Collection

I read so few Collections or Anthologies. But I am nominating Stories of the Raksura II by Martha Wells. That is such a great universe, and the stories in this collection are all good.

How do you know if you’re a good writer?

Here’s a post by Janet Reid that gets at a question that’s both very difficult and very important.

A colleague’s recent blog post about a fellow who objected to her not reading the whole book to make a “fair assessment” drew the ire of the writer, who wrote a comment on the post that showed me in no uncertain terms that his writing was, in fact, very weak.

People who write well in novels also write well in the comment section. And in Facebook posts. And Tweet streams. And they write good queries. …. they know how to string sentences together in a way that leaves me thinking “there’s a writer.” It may not be a book I want to read, but the writing is good . . . how do you know if this applies to you.

It’s really really hard.

(Sorry)

And then Janet gives the same advice I always offer (vehemently) when the question comes up:

The only way I know to have confidence in your writing is to learn to recognize good writing. And you learn to recognize it by reading it.

Yes, totally.

This actually goes straight back to the time when I loaned a Sword of Shannara sequel to a friend and thus was led to realize that my friend couldn’t, or at least didn’t, distinguish between writing that was good, bad, or indifferent; that she would read, apparently with equal enthusiasm, any book with fantasy trappings.

Whatever you like to read, the ability to distinguish excellent writing from good and good from mediocre and mediocre from execrable is, it seems to me, the very first skill a writer needs to develop. Then you can aim toward good writing, even if you can’t hit the target initially. Janet Reid also comments that your aim may fall short at first, as she adds that actually practicing writing is also important.

Ira Glass also got at this issue in his oft-quoted comments about good taste paving the way for good writing:

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

But you see how Ira Glass is starting with the assumption that you have good taste, and I don’t think that’s true, or not necessarily. I loved The Sword of Shannara when I first read it. I was, what, eight or ten or something, and I thought it was great. A more discriminating taste came later, and writing came much later. So, yeah, the most important advice I give when, for example, I’m talking to kids at a school is: if you want to be a writer, pay attention to the quality of what you read and think about what makes a great book stand out from the herd. Then aim to write at that level.

Addendum: I’ve never read anything by Dan Brown, but he does come in for his share of comments when people are talking about good vs bad writing, doesn’t he? Janet Reid’s comments — referring glancingly to Dan Brown — made me think of this delightful article by Michael Deacon in the Telegraph: Don’t Make Fun of Renowned Author Dan Brown. If you’ve never happened across it, then if you have a minute, you really should click through and enjoy it now.

Good news!

I’ve just had it confirmed that the rights to Black Dog have reverted to me!

Yay!

And if you noticed that Pure Magic is available but Black Dog isn’t, well, that was the signal that the company that owned the rights was in the process of reverting them. Now they have, so here we go! I will immediately get started on a new cover and pick up the various promotional things I’ve had in mind, such as a newsletter and so forth, which I have been putting off.

I guess this means a busy June ahead of me! But in a good way!

Recommending books

Here’s an interesting post from Sherwood Smith at Book View Café about recommending books and the difficulties thereof.

“So what do you do,” this guy said, “when you discover someone you like—you really respected—loves terrible books?”

This was a gathering for university faculty, where some were friends, some colleagues, but a lot of us plus ones didn’t know anyone.

No one spoke, until his wife cracked, “I’ll bet he’s at home right now saying the same thing about you.”

After the laughter broke the uncomfortable moment, the guy said, “No really. Who can get through a page of Dan Brown’s leaden prose? His crap sense of history?”

The obvious answers came from all around, basically saying why argue with the millions Brown has earned in book and film revenues? No, but really, the public does have terrible taste, look at Love Story when we were young, made Dan Brown look like Shakespeare—what is bad prose—why can’t everyone see it—different kinds of readers looking for different kinds of things.

Pretty much everyone there was a reader, so the conversation waxed enthusiastic, no one completely agreeing with anyone else (except about Dan Brown’s prose) until it broke up into a bunch of separate conversations, but it got me thinking about how we recommend books to others.

So, recommending books to specific people is quite different, I think, from writing general comments about your own response to a book — in other words, a recommendation is not the same thing as a review.

You know what is the same thing as an individual recommendation, though? Buying a book as a gift for someone.

In my family, we joke that all presents are book-shaped. It’s undeniable that the vast majority of gifts given in my family are books. True, these days, Amazon wishlists make this easy even if you have trouble guessing what your brother or friend or mother might like, but of course not everyone has an Amazon wishlist and anyway that disconnects gift buying from recommending.

My record for recommending specific books for specific people is spotty, and sometimes, as Sherwood says in her post and as the discussion in the comments agrees, it’s really difficult to figure out why a particular book did not appeal to someone as much as you hoped it would.

One year recently I got my mother four murder mysteries, each by a different author, that were all first published ages and ages ago, in the 1930s to the 1950s. I searched for “books you might like if you love Rex Stout.” My mother so dislikes most modern mysteries — she doesn’t like the coarsening of the language, or more than that, the lack of sheer elegance in the writing. I was hoping to discover a new-to-hear mystery author she would really enjoy. She liked one of the authors pretty well, thus opening up gift-giving potential for the immediate future.

And this past winter, I was right in sending my brother a copy of James Hetley’s (Burton’s) POWERS. He really enjoyed that one and read the sequel way before I got to it.

A year or so ago, when I read a recent YA and didn’t care for it at all, I gave it to an acquaintance with a fifteen-year-old daughter. She loved it, but that’s not quite the same thing as an individual recommendation. I was just like, Oh, she’s fifteen, maybe this will appeal to her.

I gave a copy of UPROOTED to a friend and that turned out to be a good choice for her.

Anyway, except for buying gifts, I really don’t make a lot of specific, individual recommendations. I just write comments about particular books I like and let people decide for themselves whether that sounds like it would work for them — the same way I read reviews for myself.

Oh, and not quite the same, but regarding the opening lines of Sherwood’s post — I once gave some sequel to The Sword of Shannara to a friend and was astonished when she liked it just fine. I’d gotten it as a free book for joining some book club or other and I made it through about two paragraphs before deciding it was just horribly written, and later, after talking to this friend more about the books she liked, I decided that honestly, she enjoyed anything at all with fantasy trappings and made no distinction at all between bad, good, indifferent, or excellent. This was a revelation to me. I hadn’t realized such indiscriminate reading was possible.

What is your spirit animal?

Here is a beautifully put together Buzzfeed quiz: What is your spirit animal?

This quiz was written by Emma Green, author of a new novel: The Many Selves of Katherine North, which I’m hearing good things about.

Interesting cover, yes? Do you see the woman as well as the fox? The first line of the teaser for this book: When we first meet Kit, she’s a fox.

Anyway: the Buzzfeed quiz! I like it because you don’t have to keep clicking to the next screen to get from one question to the next (yay!); because it’s written so that one question flows neatly into the next, in an unusual chatty style; and because I got Tiger, which is obviously flattering.

Click through if you have a minute and want to see how a really good Buzzfeed quiz can be structured. And, of course, if you want to see what your spirit animal is.

Bugs: still weird

Here’s an entertaining post about arthropods: Romanian cave sealed for 5.5 million years is full of strange creatures.

Why, yes, I bet it is. This is not the best article ever — I would have liked a much more complete survey of what kinds of critters were found in the cave and how they function metabolically — but we do get an idea of just how peculiar this little ecosystem is. I mean, it’s about as different from the normal ecosystem as deep sea vents.

The ecosystem relies entirely upon chemosynthetic bacteria that extract carbon from the air without the aid of light. The most numerous bacteria use carbon dioxide, and others get their carbon from methane. The bacterial film on the water and walls is where all the nutrients enter this ecosystem, and it’s the only known example of such a system. Small animals eat the slime, and larger animals eat them.

The atmosphere is poisonous, with only half the normal concentration of oxygen and very high levels of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. And of course because this was a completely sealed-off cave and is still basically sealed off, everything is blind and operates by touch (and, I would guess, probably scent).

Well, if you’re going to develop a lot of weirdness in a short time, arthropods will do it for you. I’m sure when the cave first got sealed off, die-off was considerable. But plenty of starting diversity, short generation times and tagmetization lead to a great ability for the species in a community of arthropods to evolve in weird directions quickly.

Beyoncé and LIGO: Stochastic Awareness of Science Is Probably Okay

Here’s an entertainingly titled post by a physicist Chad Orzel at a blog called Uncertain Principles: Beyoncé and LIGO: Stochastic Awareness of Science Is Probably Okay

This post argues that although most of us know practically nothing about science, this is kind of okay.

Beyoncé is just the most positive example of a general category of people I don’t have any particular reason to care about who I am nonetheless vaguely informed about. I think of this general phenomenon as “stochastic awareness of pop culture.” I don’t have any systematic knowledge of Beyoncé or the various Kardashians, but I know who they are and a bit about them because that information randomly shows up in front of me. Which is more or less inevitable, because there are a lot of people out there who care very deeply about the activities of these individuals, and pump an enormous amount of effort into generating stories about them. And the end result is that even though her music is not my thing, I have a hazy sense of her place in the pop-culture firmament, and a generally positive impression.

Yeah, that basically sums up my awareness of most (really, all) celebrities. I don’t know anything much about any of them, but I have a faint awareness of kind of their place in pop culture, plus a positive or negative impression. Mostly negative, I grant you, because, you know, celebrities.

And hand-wringing blog posts aside, I think science communication could do a lot worse than operating on this same basic model. That is, we generate a lot of content about science that is primarily consumed by people who already care about the subject, in the same way that legions of reporters generate endless stories and thinkpieces about Beyoncé and other celebrities. And some fraction of that content will, from time to time, randomly end up impinging on the awareness of people who aren’t actively seeking information about science, leaving them with the same kind of stochastic awareness of science news that I have about celebrity culture. …

…the work people who write about science (or make videos, etc.) are doing mostly ends up in front of an audience who already care about that subject. In the same way that most of what celebrity-culture reporters write about Beyoncé ends up in front of people who already care deeply about pop music. But I think those posts, and a lot of other writing about this, sort of underplay the effect of the occasions when, for random reasons, science news ends up in front of pop-music fans.

And that’s an interesting argument. It’s probably true that a) we are all mostly ignorant about mostly everything; and b) we all tend to feel that whatever we’re interested in isn’t getting nearly the attention it ought to; and c) we also all tend to feel that Something Ought To Be Done to raise awareness about . . . well, whatever we think is important.

And it’s not that this feeling is wrong; I’m sure practically nothing important ever gets the attention it deserves. But it’s refreshing to run across a post that suggests that perhaps it’s kind of okay (as well as inevitable) to mostly operate on fuzzy impressions about a lot of the stuff that’s going on.

The whole post is worth reading, so click through if you’re at all interested in the way information disseminates through society.

Sorting out Children’s, MG, and YA

Here is an interesting post that takes a stab at sorting out the various age levels your novel might fall into.

I have no intention of offering a definitive answer to the question. I think anyone who attempts to do so is at best deluded, and at worst being deliberately deceptive or oversimplifying the case. It simply is a fuzzy issue. What I can do is offer you a very practical way of discerning juvenile from middle grade and middle grade from young adult fiction.

That seems like a promising beginning! Indeed, it *is* hard to sort out, though in fact your agent or editor may indeed help you with that. And we see that the author of this post — Austin Hackney — asserts that there is no such thing as “a book a ten-year-old would like to read,” which is true, as that sort of thing depends entirely on the ten-year-old in question.

Here, then, is the practical distinction offered in this post:

Children’s books: The purpose of the story in terms of the protagonist is to reassure the reader that “all is well with the world . . . Adventures may be had, risks may be run, threats and dangers may be faced – but in the end, all is well.

MG: The purpose of the story for the protagonist … is to find where she belongs, to locate herself, to understand her place in the family, in school, in the village, on the street, in the world. It is the quest for belonging. . . . Many protagonists in middle grade fiction begin their stories feeling anxious and lonely, and end their stories feeling at home, feeling loved, surrounded by a supportive network of friends and family.

YA: The purpose of a young adult story in terms of the protagonist is that she should discover her individuality; that she should come into her own personal power, self-realization, and autonomy within the world. Furthermore, having become fully individuated, she should then employ her power to cause dramatic and lasting changes to occur in the world around her; to make her mark.

How about that? Kristen Nelson of Pub Rants defined the difference between MG and YA thus: in MG, the protagonist may have adventures, but at the end, he or she is still a child. In YA, the protagonist takes the first irrevocable steps into adulthood.

How does that definition work with the above? Could be an aspect of the same kind of thing.

Here’s another, don’t remember where I saw this one: In MG, the protagonist save the world. In YA, the protagonist figures out tough relationships. Such a definition lends itself to YA-as-basically-romance, a trend which I hate; and it seems at odds with the MG-is-about-forming-relationships idea in the post I linked to.

I don’t read enough children’s literature to have an opinion about that. Or MG, really, though it seems to me it’s true that an awful lot of MG stories start out with the protagonist separate and lonely, and end with the protagonist in a much happier place regarding family.

For YA, I think it’s basically true that the story is about irrevocably leaving childhood behind; which could be expressed in terms of self-realization and autonomy. But I certainly doubt that the YA protagonist is required to effect lasting broad-scale change on the world. Surely a lot of stories are going to be smaller scale than that, especially contemporary stories such as basically all the contemporary YA I’ve read — Saving Francesca, say, and Five Flavors of Dumb, and The Improbably Theory of Ana and Zak.

Quick: what are a handful of YA fantasy / SF novels in which the protagonist does not effect broad change in the world? I can think of one: The City in the Lake is much more about maintaining or restoring the proper order than effecting change. A lot of high fantasy is about restoring the proper order of the world, isn’t it? What are some other YA fantasy / SF titles that do or do not fit the change-the-world idea?