Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 301

Recent Reading: THE STEERSWOMAN by Rosemary Kirstein

Okay, so, all of you who told me I would love The Steerswoman, you were all perfectly correct! I’m grateful to you all for recommending it.

The characters: Well-drawn. Rowan, Bel, and Willam are all quite appealing in their different ways. Rowan’s observation skills and general perceptiveness are beautifully handled throughout, and believable, none of that too-good-to-be-true Sherlock Holmes magic. The whole concept of the steerswomen was delightful, and that, too, was handled in a believable way – pretty tricky for such an idealized lifestyle. I loved the bit where all the steerswomen (and steersmen) gave us some insight about how they look at the world while everyone worked on coming up with a disguise for Rowan. Look at this woman: what story would you believe about her?

I’m not always a fan of the barbarian swordsman type – in this case swordswoman – but I enjoyed Bel and the way her casual attitude toward killing people merged seamlessly with the her general good cheer. And she’s a good foil for Rowan, as her general ignorance of the mainstream culture provides a useful way to seamlessly explain important details.

And I admit to being particularly charmed by Will. There’s something about his fourteen-year-old earnest goodheartedness combined with a natural bent toward figuring things out. Which leads me to . . .

The scientific method in fantasy! Whoa, that’s so different! But here’s Will, changing just one thing at a time as he figures out how to make really quite powerful explosives. Go, Will! He would get along *so well* with Tehre from The Land of Burning Sands, wouldn’t he? Shoot, the two of them together would probably develop quite a theory of natural science, possibly before Will was old enough to shave.

Will might be thinking of his explosives as magic, but his attitude is all science. I was sure we would get a chance to see him use his “charms” sometime in the book, and wow, did we ever. Boom! No wonder he developed such careful methods of handling his pack. And of course Will’s explosives have to raise the question of what exactly magic *is* in this world – is it *all* science, really? It’s hard to see those little fire dragon things as anything based on science, so maybe there’s real magic as well as interesting secret technology and undiscovered science? I look forward to finding out.

We get a lot more of the science and – even better – the scientific mindset from Rowan. I loved her carefully drawing precise graphs as she figured out that in theory it might be possible to throw something so hard it would never fall back to earth! Wow. Next thing you know she’ll take over from Isaac Newton, describe the laws of planetary motion, and invent Calculus.

The world: So, about those laws of planetary motion . . . I wonder what happened to the moon? No moon! It disappeared ages ago. What a great detail to work so casually into conversation. Also, if you’d read this book, did you notice that stuff about green grass as opposed to red grass and black grass – and special goats that can eat the inedible kinds of grass, thus making life possible in marginal regions? It’s so cool the way the habitable zone is obviously creeping outward, as essentially terraforming must be happening around the edges of settled land. None of this is explicitly described or explained, but it’s obvious if you’re paying attention.

Really, this is an excellent book for looking at how to integrate worldbuilding and backstory without ever resorting to an infodump. Honestly, an infodumpy prologue would just ruin this book completely. Instead Kirstein does an outstanding job of setting her story in a coherent world without ever explaining much at all, leaving it to the reader to try to figure out — rationally! — the mysteries of the world. Very nice job here, and so many hooks planted for the future. What could the guidestars actually be, and what is their actual purpose? What in the world is the wizards’ power actually based on, what are they doing, what’s the scary senior wizard up to? What’s up with this obviously quite hostile environment beyond the settled area? Lots of questions.

The plotting: Well put together. Seldom truly unpredictable . . . I mean, come on, like we weren’t going to see Will’s explosives used, right? But if the broad plot is predictable, the details are much less so. Plus the actual storytelling makes it a real pleasure to see how Kirstein works all those details out. It was so different reading this after three of Patricia McKillip’s books (I also re-read The Bards of Bone Plain after Bell and Kingfisher). I read McKillip’s books slowly, a few pages here and a few there, focusing at least as much on the sentences as the stories. In The Steerswoman, I zipped right through the story without really noticing the sentences, which of course is a good sign of a quite different style of excellent writing.

The upshot: Yeah, I grabbed the three sequels immediately.

The author’s note at the back says she’s working on a fifth and sixth book. Somebody who’s read the first four, please tell me: do these four books form a unified and complete story arc? Complete enough not to be jarring when you reach the end? Because you all know I’m always inclined to wait for a series to be really finished before going on with it, unless I’m sure of a adquate sense of closure. Thumbs up or thumbs down on reading the first four now vs waiting?

When human isn’t good enough

So, I happened across Judith Tarr’s comments at tor.com about the original Deryni Rising trilogy by Katherine Kurtz. I, too, really loved this trilogy when I first read it lo these many years ago. And I also agree that I still enjoy it, though it’s not flawless. I still own the Deryni Rising trilogy, and I think the Camber of Culdi trilogy, too, though I believe I’ve given away the others. The later Deryni books tended to suffer from bloat, imo, and also — here I disagree with Tarr — from Evil Church syndrome, though not in its most extreme form. It’s true, I suppose, that the Christian religion itself is treated sympathetically as a pervasive force in this medieval world, but still, all the true bad guys are Evil Churchmen all through the entire Deryni series.

But that’s not the issue that caught my eye in Tarr’s comments. This is:

For another, unless you’re Deryni, you really don’t have much to live for. We’re told over and over again that humans persecute Deryni, but we never really see it … at the end, humans don’t matter at all. It’s Deryni, and Deryni-powered humans, all the way.

I don’t think I quiiiite noticed this at the time, except perhaps subconsciously. But it actually bothers me quite a lot now. Want to be a cool character? You’d better have magic. Don’t have magic? Too bad, so sad, you’re never going to amount to anything. Your betters will treat you pretty much like furniture, manipulating you without a second thought – and the author will seem to be fine with this, because no subtext seems to provide any pushback against this attitude. It’s particularly annoying because Special Artificial Magic is available to any human characters who look like they’re becoming too important to be left out of the cool kids’ club – a way in which the subtext actually seems to validate ignoring and dismissing merely human characters.

And what that makes me think of . . . switching out of secondary world fantasy . . . is JD Ward’s vampire series, starting with Dark Lover.

This series is actually quite similar to Kurtz’s Deryni series in several ways. (And very different in other ways, obviously). But the two series are similar in that:

1) The individual books are often quite compulsively readable, especially the earlier ones.

2) The later books suffer from bloat.

3) Human characters never get to be really cool. If you have a human character who *is* cool, he or she invariably turns out to *actually* be a vampire, or in some other way is not a mere human. (I should add that I haven’t read the latest three or four books in the series, so for all I know there is a counterexample somewhere in there.)

I actually hate this. I mean, if you stopped me on the street and demanded, “Quick! Your ten most-detested fantasy tropes!” , this is probably not one that would spring to mind. But it turns out that I hate it. You have a superpowered race mingling with ordinary people? Great, add an ordinary human protagonist and you have a great source of conflict and tension: how can this person cope even though he or she is not magic / superstrong / immortal / whatever. Go! Write! But, no. It’s as though the author genuinely thinks ordinary humans are too pathetic to bother writing about. (I’m not saying this feeling is actually in the author’s mind, even subconsciously; it just feels that way to me when I encounter a series that seems to follow Rule Three).

A series that first came to mind in this context and then turned out not to fit the category quite as well is Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels series. When I was trying to think of other series to which Rule Three applies, I thought of this one. But although it’s pretty much true that all the protagonists are superpowered in the original trilogy, this is not true in some of the associated works. In particular, Marion, in the novella where she is rescued and winds up marrying Lucivar; and Cassidy in Shadow Queen, are both witches – but very underpowered compared to the general run of protagonists. Their relative lack of power is something both women have to deal with. They’re still not actually ordinary humans, but fairly close; and they each have their own kind of strength, which is very different from the portrayal of non-superpowered characters as fundamentally uninteresting.

Plus in Bishop’s series, it’s apparently impossible for a normal human person to acquire magic. So if there were to be an important human character . . . which I grant you hasn’t happened yet that I know of . . . I guess they would probably stay human and have to deal with that. Avoiding the thing where you bring a human character onstage and then making him or her Suddenly Cool After All is definitely a plus.

I bet there are others series that fit this pattern to some degree. What am I forgetting, where The Cool Characters all have magic or other superpowers and ordinary people are treated more like furniture than like real people with agency and worth?

Lest We Forget

I was going to write something about Memorial Day. But I don’t have to, because James Scott Bell at Kill Zone Blog put up a post that would be hard to equal:

Lest We Forget

On Sunday, I rested

So, today I nearly took a writing break. Not because it’s Sunday, actually, but because I felt like I was starting to possibly burn out a bit. It’s not like I’m facing a looming deadline. So: a break.

In sixteen days, I’ve added 120 pages to my official WIP, No Foreign Sky bringing that manuscript to a total of 260 pages (80,000 words). That’s great! I’m so pleased with how that’s going. Also good: I’ve worked out the next bit of the outline, so the outline now extends into the back third of the book, more or less. I’m hoping to bring this manuscript in at around 350 pages, which (as you can see) means only another 100 pages or so — I can start to feel like I’m moving downhill. Whew!

Plus, when I say I took a break today, I mean I still managed my official minimum of 2000 words; it’s just I stopped after that rather than going on.

I’ve also added 55 pages to my unofficial WIP, Shadow Twin, bringing that to a total of 115 pages. I’m pretty happy with that, as well, although I feel like one of the new chapters will probably be re-written significantly at some point. I have exactly one more scene in my head and then I’m not sure. I will go back and connect the beginning to the middle, probably.

This turns out to be an average of 11 pages per day for 16 days (counting both WIPs). I’ve written that much that fast before, once, when I was really in the zone, but I would never commit to that writing schedule for a full book-length project. Ugh. Never.

Plus the Extreme Rain of the past weeks helped keep me indoors and at the keyboard which normally you don’t count on (or want). We still have rain in the forecast, but please God not another 48 hours of steady rain any time in the next couple weeks. That would be great at the end of July, but it’s practically a swamp out there now.

This coming week should be calmer as I stop pushing for words per day. A little bit of a break would be welcome and perhaps rejuvenating, plus I need to take time to go on a search and destroy mission against all the burr plants in the yard, do some weeding, etc, all the pressing garden tasks, you know how it goes.

Recent Reading: KINGFISHER by Patricia McKillip

So, even though I’ve been super-busy over the past week, I did find time to re-read The Bell at Sealey Head and then re-read Kingfisher — which I only read for the first time a couple weeks ago. I re-read Bell specifically to help me figure out what I thought about Kingfisher, which struck me as a highly peculiar book on a first read-through (it made more sense to me on a re-read).

Let’s take a moment to recall The Bell at Sealey Head, a story I quite liked that had several unusual characteristics. Remember Bell? That’s the one where the main characters, if they can be called that, had no influence at all on the plot of the book. Judd runs that little inn and has no cook; Gwyneth is the merchant’s daughter who writes stories about the bell – stories which have absolutely nothing to do with the actually bell of Sealey Head.

Emma, the housemaid who opens doors that let her see into the other world; and Ysabo, the princess trapped in rituals within that other world – they influence the plot (in Emma’s case, only slightly), but they don’t get a whole lot of pov time and I don’t know whether they can be considered main characters. Maybe Ysabo. Her more than anybody, I suppose.

Ridley Dow primarily drives the plot. Do we ever get any scenes from his point of view? I just re-read Bell and I don’t think we do. Miranda Beryl, heir to the mysterious Aislinn house, turns out to be important . . . sort of important . . . but I don’t think she gets any pov scenes either. The villain’s motivations are almost completely opaque even at the end.

I should add here, I liked Bell quite a lot and didn’t actually notice how little influence Judd and Gwyneth had on anything until someone else pointed that out to me. They may not drive the plot, but they’re both charming characters and you get pulled into their lives. Gwyneth’s polite unconcern for her aunt’s attempts to marry her off is particularly delightful. She’s like a Regency character being threatened by an unsuitable marriage to Raven Spruill, except that she’s not actually threatened. Judd is a lot more uncertain about that possible relationship than Gwyneth ever is.

And it’s not like the pieces of Bell don’t hang together, because they do, pretty well. The climax is pretty info-dumpy as we are told what kind of spell was actually cast on the other house and world; the evil spell is resolved with a couple of pages of confrontation; but as always McKillip’s prose is so beautiful that the reader is just carried along without quite noticing elements of the story that might well be obvious weaknesses in some other author’s hands.

So, about Kingfisher. I liked it quite a bit, though I doubt I’d put it in my personal Top Ten for McKillip. (Of course there is a lot of competition for that top ten list; see below.) But structurally it looks, at first glance and I think on reflection too, like it lands somewhere on a spectrum between “unusual” and “a mess.”

What do we have in Kingfisher? Let’s see:

A whole lot of mildly important characters, many of whom do not seem to have any particular influence on the important plot arc. Pierce Oliver, his mother. Carrie, her father and the associated set of characters at Chimera Bay; Prince Daimon; Todd Stillwater and his wife Sage; Princess Perdita and Gareth; Sir Leith and his son Val; Dame Scotia; Vivien and the other women associated with her. How many of those are pov characters? Let’s see: Pierce, Carrie, Daimon, Perdita. I think that’s it. How many of those characters are important in driving the plot? Three, I think.

Arthurian echoes, in King Arden and the knights of his court, including the important knight Sir Leith, who (everyone knows) has been engaging in a longstanding affair with the queen. King Arthur minus the tragedy; everyone involved obviously long ago reached an accommodation about this. King Arden also has an illegitimate son who is set up to tear down his kingdom. Again, unlike the Arthurian myth, that doesn’t happen – in fact that situation is in the end resolved extremely easily and quickly

Fisher King echoes. I had to look up the Fisher King to make sure that he is supposed to be lame. Yep. Wounded king, suffering kingdom, healed by magic, a connection to the Grail. So that’s where the book got its name. But the Fisher King thing in this story is connected to old history. It seems to add depth to the story, but sort of orthogonally to the main plot. Like another full story has been tucked into the backstory, but it shows through a lot more than is usual for novels-embedded-in-backstory – like it’s equally important but at right angles to the story we’re mostly concerned with in Kingfisher.

A most peculiar blending of fantasy with modern-world technology. Magic knives, magic cauldrons, sorceresses all over the place, knights and quests. Luxury cars, motorcycles, cell phones. Very strange. This part pretty much worked for me. It would never have occurred to me to write this kind of setting, but I found the blend oddly appealing.

A dominant male god and a subordinate female god, both associated with rivers. This part really did not work very well for me, I think partly because of the river thing. I could not take Calluna’s subordination seriously. I mean . . . when rivers meet, you can declare that the smaller gets subsumed in the greater, but all the water is equally there. When the rivers reach the sea, all the water together swooshes out into the ocean. I could not quite get worked up about which river flows underground and which aboveground, and the myths about the gods, well, whatever.

A bunch of extremely random events. When I read this book the first time, I could hardly follow it. This was partly because of all the characters. (Who is this again? I kept asking myself.) and partly because nothing seems to hang together.

Well, I went back and re-read Bell and then re-read Kingfisher, and that helped a lot. The second time through I had a much easier time sorting out the characters, plus I happened to notice a short passage that I think constitutes the heart of the whole story. This is on p. 182 if you have a paper copy. Here is the passage:

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Lord Skelton warned. “Wandering around in the realm in search of its oldest power is liable to cause all kinds of disturbances and consequences. There were always unexpected dangers on those early quests.” He sipped wine and added more cheerfully, “Very colorful, sometimes deadly, often mysterious, random, occasionally verging on the ridiculous. No quest was ever safe. They exist to reveal.”

“Reveal what, exactly?” Leith asked in his deep, sinewy voice that Pierce was coming to love. “Lord Skelton?”

“The landscape of the heart.”

… and there you go. That so explains the random, occasionally verging on the ridiculous events that clutter up the story, particularly after the quest is more broadly underway. I was much happier with the book after realizing that. And that landscape of the heart thing . . . maybe, maybe. It’d be interesting to write an essay on Kingfisher and the function of the quest in revealing the landscape of the heart. Also, the disturbances and consequences arising from the quest — that idea is, as far as I can tell, the only thing that ties the main story to the Fisher King story.

Final take on the book: I liked it, I like it significantly better on a re-read, and maybe in a year or so I will re-read it and form a better idea of where to place it among the rest of McKillip’s books.

I’ve probably done this before, but just btw, here are my actual choices for Patricia McKillip’s Top Ten, counting down toward the very very best. See how it compares to yours – I mean, I’m sure we’ve all read everything by McKillip, right? So:

10. Fool’s Run – so peculiar how the whole story is shaped by an event none of the characters can influence in any way.

9. The Riddlemaster trilogy – I’ve read this so many times. It was one of those seminal works for me; I read it in high school and I’m sure it framed my whole conception of fantasy.

8. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld – another foundational work for me.

7. Song for the Basilisk – here’s one where I totally loved the ending.

6. The Sorceress and the Cygnet / The Cygnet and the Firebird – I really would have liked a third book that offered more of a resolution for Nyx.

5. Alphabet of Thorn – I admire it tremendously and I’d put it higher except I think the ending felt a bit truncated.

4. Ombria in Shadow – a beautiful, complicated story that left me puzzled at the ending.

3. Winter Rose – this one is sort of doing the same kind of thing as Alphabet of Thorn. I just love the different interwoven interpretations of events here.

2. The Changeling Sea – a perfect story.

1. The Book of Atrix Wolfe – another perfect story.

The editor’s role; also entertaining rants about fake rules

Here, via Janet Reid’s blog, a post about the role of the editor at Anthimeria Rampant, a blog that I’ll be checking out again when I think of it.

I like this:

Editing isn’t just asking if all the words are spelled right and the subject and verb agree. It’s asking the questions that come after that: Are these the right words? Have we said enough? Have we said too much? Is this even true? Do the ideas flow intuitively from sentence to sentence to illuminate the subject? What’s being implied here that we might not intend to say? What’s not being said that we might be assuming is implicit? Are we repeating ourselves unnecessarily? Are we repeating ourselves enough to make the case for our premises? Is the tone appropriate to the audience, and does it need to reflect a larger body of work so that everything speaks with a single voice? What’s the story here? Who is telling it, who is listening, and why should anyone care?

This post doesn’t address developmental editing, but it seems to really peg the nature of really solid copy editing. I’ve never had a copy editor I really disliked, but my most recent copy editor, for The White Road of the Moon (Knopf, next spring) had a particularly good feel for the book’s tone and style, it seemed to me.

Lotta interesting comments about “zombie rules” in grammar, too, if you click through links in this post and wander around. This in particular, the Peeververein Canon — meaning the list of pet peeves and shibboleths that get passed along like they are real rules when they aren’t. You’ll have to click through if you want to see the actual list; it can’t be copy-and-pasted.

Let’s see, rules, rules, scanning through the list . . .

Welll, I still don’t like the singular they — except in casual conversation sometimes, which also means dialogue and sometimes a character’s thoughts. “Everyone needs to clean up their own mess” is the way we say that. Nobody actually says “his or her own mess” in that sentence. Well, hardly anyone. Probably not your characters, unless they’re Mr. Spock. It’s possible Grayson Lanning would say “his or her,” and for the same reason: like Mr. Spock, he speaks way, way more formally than most people. For most of us, the singular ‘they’ sometimes makes sense, though.

I don’t mind sorting out “persuade” and “convince,” though I’m not fanatical about that.

More than one copy editor has fiddled around with “which” and “that” for my manuscripts; I guess I mostly follow the rule these days just to save wear and tear on us all, even if it is a shibboleth more than a real rule.

I have always known that it’s fine to start a sentence with And or But. Not a single copy editor has ever fussed about that, as far as I can recollect. If they did, I’d roll my eyes and sprinkle Stet through my manuscript a lot more than I usually do.

And my favorite because it is the most obviously true:

MYTH: That the passive voice must always be avoided (frequently combined with an astonishingly ignorant belief that any construction containing a form of the verb to be is passive).

Yeah, the only thing I don’t agree with there is that the level of ignorance surrounding the passive voice is astonishing. It doesn’t astonish me at all, considering Strunk and White couldn’t tell the difference between the passive voice and the past tense and way too many people still are just in love with Strunk and White.

Anyway, Anthimeria Rampant looks like a really interesting blog to keep tabs on. Here’s a post with a lot more about the passive voice, as well about elevated diction in (high) fantasy. Here’s a bit of this (long) post:

Bradley makes two mistakes here that make it frankly impossible for me to take him at all seriously. The most immediate one is the matter discussed above, that he’s both misidentifying passive voice and treating it as some kind of stylistic error on Greenwood’s part. Deep were the dragon’s eyes is a solidly active construction … and while it’s certainly not a plain-language phrasing – and why should it be, in a fantasy novel? – the only reason I can see for it “throwing the reader out of the action” is if that reader has absorbed the idiotic idea that all infinitival (be-variant) constructions are passive and that moreover Passive Is Bad.

The other error on Bradley’s part is a more subtle one, and it’s that he seems to be tone-deaf to the history and conventions of the genre he’s attempting to critique. The inverted sentence structure of Deep were the dragon’s eyes is a nigh-perfectly compact example of deliberately elevated diction – an attempt to invoke the style of a mythic and formal storytelling mode.

And then the post offers a really good example of elevated diction in a fantasy novel I’m sure all of us will recognize, adding, as you might expect, “I hope no one’s about to accuse Tolkien, philologist and conlanging pioneer, of not knowing what he’s doing with words.”

Yeah, no kidding.

By the way, had you heard of the “by zombies” rule for identifying passive constructions? I don’t think I’d seen this before. It’s pretty cool, actually. It works like this:

…my personal favorite test is that if you can insert “by zombies” after the verb phrase, it’s passive voice. So Bob was eaten by zombies is in the passive voice, but Bob was going by zombies home is nonsense in English, and so that “was going” is not, in fact, passive.

Pretty snazzy rule! I will keep that one in mind, for those admittedly rare moments when I care about whether a sentence is passive rather than whether it sounds right.

Busy now

It’s not that I’m bored with the internet and this blog. It’s that classes have ended, summer classes don’t start till June 6th, and in between I am not at work, I am at home. This means I can’t look around for stuff to post about before work or while I eat lunch or whatever.

I have a new phone, though! I mention this because the new phone is better than the old in many ways. For example, its signal seems dramatically better than the old phone. I can connect to the internet even though it is May! But not very well. I’ve untethered and re-tethered twice so far to check email and start this post. But it still beats driving in to work when I don’t need to be there for any purpose other than using the internet.

Driving is not what I want to spend my time doing, because I am busy. In the mornings I am working on my official work-in-progress (OWIP?) and in the afternoons I do stuff like weeding and transplanting, and in the evenings I work on my unofficial WIP (UWIP, I guess).

My minimum on the OWIP is 2000 words per day, which is about six pages if you still think in pages. I’ve actually written anything from 2500 words to 4000 words every day this week.

I have no actual minimum for my UWIP, but I’m hitting about 1000-3000 words per day on that. This is the first time I have ever worked every day on two different WIP, both of which I enjoy working on. It’s a bit odd, but working so far.

Plus weeding.

So that’s why I’m busy and have not been on the internet much lately.

OWIP: This is my space opera. One important alien species on screen, one important alien species so far entirely off screen, this weekend is the first time I will have to decide whether to show the second species. I have three pov characters so far, all human. I think I will be sticking to the human pov for this book, though I wouldn’t actually take oath on that.

The working title is NO FOREIGN SKY, but I do not quite know what was in my mind when I chose that and I may change it before I send it to my agent. Which I would like to do July 1st, but even though it is moving so well now, no promises about that. Anyway, that’s probably about the time the entire publishing world goes on vacation, so July 1st, August 1st, it probably doesn’t make much difference.

When I picked up this WIP this past Monday, I had 140 pages written plus an outline that extended into the middle of the book. I am about to run out of this outline, after which I am not sure what happens next. I have a couple vague ideas. I will try to develop those and see whether they seem to work. I kind of have an end point in mind, but not an ending scene as such. I sure hope one appears within the next few weeks so I have something more definite to work toward.

UWIP: This is SHADOW TWIN, the third Black Dog book. I am writing this in such a peculiar way: not straight through from beginning to end but from the middle outward. That is, I wrote the first bit ages ago, from Natividad’s pov. Then to get myself unstuck, I jumped forward and wrote chapters 8 and 10 from Miguel’s pov — choosing random middle-ish numbers for those chapters. I have chapter breaks for chapters 9 and 11. I know broadly what happens in chapter 9, which will be from Alejandro’s pov, but I really do not know what happens in chapter 11 or what pov that will be in.

I’m currently working on chapter 12, which is from Alejandro’s pov, but he and Miguel and Natividad are all back together again now. I am pretty sure I know what happens for the next couple of chapters and then I don’t know about the end. Ideas, yes. Firm ideas, well, I wouldn’t go that far.

I do know how to connect the first part to the middle part, though. I mean, roughly.

At the moment I am almost sure the 60 pages from Justin’s pov, about this trip where he and Keziah go visit Justin’s grandmother, will remain a separate novella and appear in the second set of short stories. But I am not ABSOUTELY sure about that. But adding that novella to this actual book would complicate matters and add to the number of points of view. Plus it would mean I need to write at least one more story for the second set of short stories. More likely two.

The action in what is now the novella is important to what happens in the book, though. Several of the short stories in the second batch set up SHADOW TWIN, and at least one sets up stuff that happens later than that. I’m trying not to let too many balls fall out of the air, but I do seem to have a lot of loose ends, some of which I might be able to grab in this book and tie off.

Carissa, remember her? Nicholas’s sister who nobody knows what happened to her?

Zinaida, the Black Wolf of Russia, how about her? I wonder what she’s up to these days.

There’s a relative of Keziah’s we meet, briefly, in the next batch of short stories. He’s in just the right place to cause trouble in SHADOW TWIN. Or he could be, if it seems convenient.

We’re in the Denver area, btw, so all kinds of things could be happening back in Vermont.

Well, well, lots to do, lots to figure out. I need to go take the dogs for a run so I can think about one WIP or the other.

Janet Kagan’s books re-issued

Oh, hey, take a look: via File 770, a pleasing newsflash: Baen has re-issued Janet Kagan’s books.

I see they’re available on Amazon, too, if that’s more convenient for you.

Hellspark is a novel, one I highly recommend. It’s a murder mystery, and AS a murder mystery, it’s second-rate. However, as an anthropological study it’s a delight in several different ways.

Mirabile is a lot of linked short stories set on the world of Mirabile, where very odd things happen with animals and plants because long ago human colonists nested hidden genomes inside the genomes of the animals they took with them.

Uhura’s Song, not one of the ones re-issued by Baen, is one of my favorite Star Trek tie-in novels.

And The Collected Kagan appears to be a bunch of other shorter works. I’m not familiar with this but from the table of contents, it looks like a collection of 20 short stories. I’m going to go ahead and pick it up, even though I am not that keen on short stories.

The Nebula winners —

Via File 770, I see that the Nebula winners have been announced:

Novel

◾Uprooted, Naomi Novik

Novella

◾Binti, Nnedi Okorafor

Novelette

◾‘‘Our Lady of the Open Road’’, Sarah Pinsker

Short Story

◾‘‘Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers’’, Alyssa Wong

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

◾Mad Max: Fury Road, Written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nick Lathouris

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

◾Updraft, Fran Wilde

Good for Uprooted! I think Novik has a very good chance to take the Hugo as well. I can’t remember offhand how many past books have taken both the Hugo and Nebula.

Interestingly, Chaos Horizon pegged The Fifth Season as the likely winner for this year’s Nebula. He did think Uprooted had a real chance, though.

Of the others, I did read “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” and liked it okay. On the other hand, I liked three of the other short story nominees better — “Cat Pictures, Please” by Kritzer, “Today I am Paul” by Shoemaker, and “Damage” by Lavine. I hadn’t read any of the other short fiction nominees.

I saw the Mad Max movie and liked it quite a bit, way more than Ex Machina, but not nearly as much as The Martian. I sure hope The Martian wins the Hugo.

And of the nominees for the Andre Norton award — here they are if you don’t remember:

Seriously Wicked, Tina Connolly

Court of Fives, Kate Elliott

Cuckoo Song, Frances Hardinge

Archivist Wasp, Nicole Kornher-Stace

Zeroboxer, Fonda Lee

Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older

Bone Gap, Laura Ruby

Nimona, Noelle Stevenson

Updraft, Fran Wilde

— I loved Cuckoo Song and Archivist Wasp and Bone Gap, and, although I haven’t read Updraft and hope I love it, too, based on the ones I’d read, I was REALLY rooting for Archivist Wasp. Though that is a pretty stellar list of nominees and if I’d been a judge, it would have been very difficult to narrow it down.

Congratulations to the winners — and the nominees — and I’m definitely looking forward to reading the rest of those YA nominees.

Recent reading

Okay, I’ve read another couple of titles off my TBR pile. Plus I finally gave in and bought FIRE TOUCHED by Patricia Briggs, because I really, really wanted to read it and now I have. One disappointment, one implausibility, but basically a satisfying installment of the Mercy Thompson series.

But first, in reading order:

CORSAIR by James Cambias.

This took me a little while to get into, for a couple of reasons. It’s near-future SF, not my favorite type of setting, that’s one. Then I wanted to like David, AKA Captain Black the Space Pirate. David is our first pov protagonist and therefore feels like he should be the primary protagonist plus the good guy and the guy we root for. But he is such a total jerk. Honestly, he seems to have sociopathic tendencies – other people don’t seem to be quite real to him. Then our secondary protagonist, Elizabeth Santiago, an Air Force captain, is much more sympathetic but also . . . maybe a trifle boring? Or maybe the problem is that she is a bit ineffectual. She is trying to set things up to thwart David, but her (slightly illegal) plans get discovered and go nowhere. A third pov character, Anne, drifts along, tangential to the actual plot, and one wonders what the heck she has to do with anything.

Then the story takes off. The real bad guys appear, so it gets easier to root for David. Shortly after that, David gets shocked into noticing that other people are real after all and actually grows up a bit and becomes a lot more likeable. Anne gets pulled into the primary narrative. Elizabeth sorts out her priorities and goes for broke to stop the real bad guys, and I would say that she and David team up, except that it’s not exactly voluntary on David’s part. When Elizabeth gets going, she is pretty hard to say no to. The pace picks up and whoosh, straight through to the end. Plus an epilogue so we can get the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

Overall a satisfying story, and though I hope Cambias goes back to designing alien species for this next book, I do think I’ll be willing to pick up whatever he writes next, even if it’s another near-future SF story.

Okay, so I sometimes don’t feel like starting another new-to-me book right after finishing one, so I picked up FER-DE-LANCE by Rex Stout instead of anything off my TBR pile. I’m sure I’ve read Fer-de-Lance before . . . it’s the very first Nero Wolfe mystery, and I’ve read all of them, but I didn’t actually remember it. Well, I read through the Nero Wolfe mysteries a long time ago. Rex Stout hasn’t quite settled all the elements of his characters and world down yet in Fer-de-Lance, but all the essentials are in place. Every now and then I miss a reference – it was written in 1934, after all – but that certainly does give that feeling of depth to the setting.

I liked this one, though not as much as later installments.

Do you realize that in twenty years, the Nero Wolfe series will be 100 years old? And I’m sure people will still be reading and enjoying these stories. Pretty amazing.

All right, after that I guiltily stepped away from my existing TBR pile, gave in, and bought FIRE TOUCHED by Patricia Briggs. What can I say? It’s been in the back of my mind since it came out and I finally decided I really, really wanted to read it, even though it was still more than ten bucks for the ebook.

The disappointment: I like Honey, I keep expecting Briggs to give her a somewhat more central role, but not in this one, either. Well, there are so many characters, it must be hard to pull any of the minor characters into the spotlight. Still, I was disappointed.

The yeah-sure moment: Wow, it sure was easy for Adam to sort out the problems between his pack and Mercy. Makes one wonder why he didn’t take care of that a long time ago. Yes, there was a nod toward I’ve-been-wanting-to-do-that, but I still found myself rolling my eyes.

The relief: I’d heard there was a death in this one, which turned out to be a trifle misleading, though not actually untrue. I’ll just add that nobody I particularly cared about died.

The story: Another fun installment. I’d have liked Bran to play a larger role, but I usually feel like that. I sort of wonder whether the trouble between the fae and the humans will be that easy to sort out, but on second thought, maybe it wasn’t actually all that easy – and there’s lots of room for continuing trouble.

Now reading: KINGFISHER by McKillip. I’m only halfway through it, though, because I’m also trying to (finally) finish this Black Dog short story. Well, novella. That’s why it’s taken so long; it keeps getting longer and more complicated. Just about got it today, though. I’ll finish it tomorrow.