Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 310

Navigating emotions

Here’s an interesting blog post by Philip Athans at Fantasy Author’s Handbook: Navigating the eight emotions: surprise.

This immediately made me think of this quote from Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett:

[T]here is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.

Which is a beautiful quote, isn’t it? Certainly I’m always likely to be most blown away by a story that manages to instill both in the reader, but this particular post is of course about surprise rather than joy. Though joy is included in the list of eight basic emotions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust, and joy.

That’s an interesting list, too, worth a post on its own, but as I say, this particular post at Fantasy Author’s Handbook deals with surprise, and the art of crafting surprises for your readers.

It seems to me that all this [about creating surprise for your readers] can be reduced to a focus on what, exactly, your point-of-view (POV) character knows in any precise moment in the story. By now your should know how I feel about writing from a tight POV, even in third person. … Maintaining a tight POV character means your readers will be surprised by what surprises your character because your readers don’t, necessarily, know any more than that character knows. … these surprises still must be grounded in the particular logic of the story. Just dropping stuff in out of nowhere doesn’t necessarily make for a good plot twist, and laziness in the crafting of a narrative surprise will lose many more readers than maybe any other error in authorial judgment. Here’s another example of that moment in which your own inner voice must be heeded. If you find yourself thinking, “It’ll be okay—people won’t think about it that much,” or “No one will notice,” or any thoughts like that—STOP!

I like all of this, especially the advice to heed your inner awareness that you’ve allowed yourself to tolerate some weakness in your story. People really will pick up on those weak points, which is why you have beta readers. It’s way better for a beta reader to say, “I don’t believe for a second that your character would have acted that way” than for a reader to complain about how out-of-character that sequence was in a review on Amazon.

Also, the example of “The Sixth Sense” is perfect. Or it is for me. I didn’t see the twist coming at all. (Did any of you?) I immediately wanted to watch the movie again from the start to see if the director was playing fair, which I think he was, by the way, but surely that is the single best response you can ever have from a viewer or reader — the desire to immediately go back to the beginning and start over.

In SFF novels, maybe my favorite surprise ending was in Ender’s Game. Hard to top that one. At least if you’re talking about books.

Philip Athans winds up his post, though, by pointing out:

That said, your ending doesn’t have to be a wildly unexpected shock to be effective. If your plot flows smoothly from small but solidly constructed surprise to small but solidly constructed surprise, the ending can follow that same pattern and the overall experience of the book will be positive and satisfying.

That’s true again, and a good thing, too, because can you imagine having to land an ending like in Ender’s Game all the time? It could not be done.

Now I kind of want to think about the plot of some book of mine as a series of small but solidly constructed surprises. And the plot of my current WIP — ooh, yeah, there’s a really neat surprise early on in that one. I hope there will be another as cool late in the book, but since I only know half the plot at the moment, hard to say. I’ve heard writers comment that they like to be surprised by their own books as they write them. I don’t know whether I *like* that, but obviously if you don’t really have a plot, it’s liable to happen.

And I want to consider the plots of the books I’m considering nominating for the Hugo this year with this stuff about surprise in mind. It’s immediately obvious that Ice Cream Star, for example, is constructed mainly of big and not necessarily pleasant surprises. Yep, surprise is most definitely a major element for that one.

How would a romance fit in here? There’s unlikely to be a big surprise twist at the end — the couple had better get together and live happily ever after — I suppose the surprises must be small, and embedded in the journey to the ending rather than ever occurring at the end.

Anyway, definitely a thought-provoking post, with lots of links to other interesting post on that topic.

Grand Master CJ Cherryh

Here is a great post at SF Signal, in honor of CJ Cherryh’s becoming the 32nd SFWA Grand Master.

SF Signal posed the question: What is your favorite Cherryh work, and where should a reader new to her backlist start? People invited to participate in this post are J Kathleen Cheney, Joe Sherry, Paul Weimer, Nancy Jane Moore, Ian Sales, and me.

Now, you really should click through and check out everyone’s answers to this question, because it’s fascinating how practically everyone picked different works. It seems like virtually every well-known Cherryh title is represented somewhere in that post. Downbelow Station is almost the only work that appears in more than one answer. I find that surprising; I’d honestly have expected more convergence even though Cherryh has such a big backlist from which to choose.

To be sure, I cheated by naming four or five works where someone might start. It seemed impossible to narrow it down to just one.

So, if you’re familiar with Cherryh and have time to click through, who do you most agree with and who do you most disagree with?

And if you’re new to Cherryh, which of the works mentioned do you think sounds most appealing?

Poetry day

You know, there are a lot of lovely short poems out there that I love, but I really haven’t paid much attention to poetry since college. Maybe even high school. So that’s one thing your HS and college classes do well, and ought to do: introduce students to poetry when they most likely would never read any otherwise. That’s something I need to remember when I’m rolling my eyes at the assigned novels I loathed.

Apparently the real National Poetry Day, inasmuch as such a thing is recognized, is March 21st. Well, it’s practically March, so close enough! I’m going to try to remember to post one short poem every now and then all year. I always particularly loved Emily Dickinson, and of course for short poems, she’s right there. But to kick off, here’s one from Yeats that I happened to think of recently:

The Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light;

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Recent Reading: SILVER ON THE ROAD by Laura Anne Gilman

Well, spoiler, but am I ever pleased I picked this one up off my TBR pile. And also that Saga set February ebook prices for their titles at $2.99; what an inviting price when you are already kind of inclined to try a new release, which I have been since it hit the shelves last year.

I’m not sure, but think Gilman’s latest book might have initially caught my eye because of the cover:

Or because of the title, which is just the kind I like best, evocative and puzzling. And, by the way, eventually put into proper context by the story.

To my surprise, when I googled Gilman’s backlist, I discovered that this is the first book by her I’ve actually read. Honestly, I thought for sure I’d read others of hers, but no. She’s written, let me see, a high fantasy trilogy, it looks like, and a bunch of urban fantasies in at least three different series, plus a series of what look like cozy-ish pet-centered mysteries (under the name LA Kornetsky). If any of you have tried her other work, have you got any particular recommendations? Because, after reading SILVER ON THE ROAD, I definitely expect to delve into Gilman’s backlist. This is one of my top three reads for the year so far. (Along with POWERS by Burton/Hetley, and BONE GAP by Ruby, if you’re keeping track.) It certainly goes into the possible-Hugo-nomination file on my Kindle. That actually gives me five possible titles to nominate, so we’ll see if I read anything in the next month that bumps one.

So, SILVER ON THE ROAD. It could definitely be read as YA or as adult. I would bet that in this case, that ambiguity of category was a real obstacle. I noticed Gilman’s dedication: “For Joe Monti and Barry Goldblatt, who believed in this project when others didn’t.” I happen to know that Joe Monti is her editor at Saga, and Barry Goldblatt is her agent. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Gilman had trouble placing this book. I can practically *hear* every single adult-fantasy editor in the world declaring, “The writing is beautiful, but this is definitely a YA protagonist. I love it, but it’s not right for my line.” And then every single YA editor shaking a sad head and saying, “The writing is lovely, the protagonist is wonderful, but this is waaaaaay too slow-paced for YA.”

It’s not just the leisurely pace, either. We also get two points of view in this story. The primary protagonist is a teenage girl, but the secondary pov protagonist is a young man who’s probably about eight or ten years older – definitely not a teenager. I strongly suspect this would be another issue for many editors: YA novels today are mostly limited to just teenager points of view. My CITY IN THE LAKE is one of the few exceptions that I know of that was published in the last decade. I am certain that it’s harder to place a book with both teen and adult points of view than one that sticks to one or the other.

Also, there is no romance in this book. These days, when YA fantasy sometimes seems to have almost become a subgenre of Romance, I bet that could have been a problem. So, my guess is that for all these reasons, SILVER languished until Saga, which is a new imprint and actively seeking great writers to take on, and is also showing a definite think-outside-the-box attitude, grabbed it. If I’m right and this book’s history is just like that, then good for Saga because they got a wonderful book.

So, let me tell you about SILVER ON THE ROAD.

First, the primary protagonist: Izzy. Izzy – Isabel – is definitely a perfect YA protagonist. She just turned sixteen and this story is all about her journey to figure out who she is and what her place in the world might be. This is a story about a girl taking her first irreversible steps into adulthood.

Izzy grew up in the devil’s household, and she takes his power and authority for granted. More about the devil in a moment; the point here is, Izzy has lived her whole childhood around power and authority, and she knows she has a lot to learn, but she’s ambitious enough to want power and authority of her own. So right away she is not a sweet little girl. I mean, she’s not mean or vicious or deliberately bitchy, but she’s not sugar and spice and everything nice, either. She is ambitious, and at the beginning young enough to be focused mostly on herself and how others see her. She’s confident in some ways, tentative in others. She’s experienced in some ways, thoroughly naïve in others. She knows what she wants in some ways; has no clue in others. This sets her up to really grow into herself during the course of the story, so much so that, honestly, it does take this long, leisurely book to properly show her personal journey into adulthood and the acceptance of responsibility. Any shorter or faster-paced and I think Izzy’s personal story would have felt rushed.

Next, the secondary protagonist, Gabriel. He’s the young man who offers to mentor Izzy on her journey through the devil’s Territory. Gabriel’s background and motivations are mysterious when we meet him, and at the end of the book he is still pretty mysterious, although we have been offered tantalizing glimpses of his background. We do find out some important things about Gabriel, though. Like, he has the good sense and self-confidence to decline a chance to bargain with the devil (yes, yes, more about the devil in a moment). Right at the beginning, Gabriel decides that he doesn’t need to strike a deal with the devil: if he can’t get what he wants by his own efforts, he can live without it. For me, that is an excellent introduction, because when it comes to a novel’s protagonist, I dislike impulsivity and greatly prefer discipline, restraint, and self-confidence. Also, Gabriel is not the sort of young man who would take on a mentor role and then seduce a girl so much younger. As I said, this is not a romance. I so much appreciated the way Gilman handled the relationship between Gabriel and Izzy. If a romantic relationship does grow between the two protagonists in a later book, I’m sure she will develop it in a slow and believable arc.

Okay, second: the world. The slow unfolding of this world is such a delight! This story is absolutely for readers who love subtle worldbuilding, because there is nothing here that even faintly resembles an infodump. In fact, at the end, even though we’ve traveled through a good bit of the Territory with Izzy and Gabriel, we still have mostly guesses about how the world actually works.

A first this looks like a fairly-close-to-ours Old West kind of setting, but it so is not. The United States takes up about the eastern third of our US; the Spanish lands of Nueva España take up the western third and stretch down into Central America, and the Devil’s West encompasses the middle third of the continent. So far, so good, but here in the Territory – the Devil’s West – the land is just saturated with magic. Which the characters never think about unless it’s relevant to the plot – everyone knows about it, so why think about it? So the reader is constantly tripping over one or another startling detail about rattlesnakes or whatever. Always be polite to a rattlesnake was the first lesson every child learned. I don’t know, maybe it’s better to encounter a rattlesnake that thinks it’s funny to make you jump than one that is just attracted to your warmth?

Plus there are definite implications that magic is quite different outside the Territory. I have no idea how the various Native American tribes interact with the people of the United States or Nueva España, but in the Territory they have plenty of their own magic and nobody pushes them around. We barely see the Native Americans in this book, but in later books I bet we see more. In the same way, here in the Territory, the prayers of friars from Nueva España seem essentially powerless whereas the power of the devil is indisputable. But I kind of have a feeling that might not be true once you cross the mountains into the Spanish lands.

The devil: So, when European settlers first crossed the seas to the New World, they found that a powerful, mysterious person was already there. He blocked them from their desire to expand their own lands, so they were predisposed to dislike him; and he makes bargains that are always scrupulously fair but often rebound in unwelcome ways. Of course they called him the devil. Now people travel from all over to make bargains with the devil, generally unwisely.

The devil is a fascinating character. He is onstage only briefly, at the beginning of the story, but that’s enough to make it quite clear that he isn’t a normal human person. I sure look forward to seeing more of him in later books. Plus, one of the enjoyable little tidbits from the book is the way all the normal sayings about the devil take on a new and more literal meaning. Idle hands are the devil’s tools – because if you have nothing useful to do, he’ll find you some chores that need doing. Perfectly normal, ordinary chores.

Third, the writing: Really strong.

+++++++++

She had heard the stories, of course, about the great herds. She had seen the dark, shaggy pelts, thick enough to dig your fingers into, warm enough to laugh at a winter’s storm, but a pelt did not move, did not thunder, did not fill the world until there was nothing else but the immense, incalculable swarm of creatures moving across the land, dust raised for leagues in their wake.

They were too far away to pick out individual details, the long black smudge and golden dusk behind spreading seemingly forever, and she thought that maybe the herd would never end, that it would continue forever, even after they had ridden on, pouring from the horizon until the sun set again, thick hooves setting their medicine into the dirt and stone.

“Can you feel it?” Gabriel asked her, and she nodded, unable to speak. Like the river when it was in full flood, or the boss when he was angry, restrained but powerful, pressing against her until she couldn’t breath and didn’t need to breath. The thundering of their hooves was her heartbeat, the beat of the stone beneath their feet, the air heated by the snort of their breath, and the warmth of their shaggy hides the pulse of blood under her skin . . .

And then the herd let go of her, so suddenly that she fell back into the saddle, not even aware that she’d risen in her stirrups, trying to see better.

“Breathe,” Gabriel said. “Your first time, it can be overwhelming.”

++++++++

I bookmarked any number of pages. It was hard to choose a representative sample. I love the ambiguity: do the bison herds in the Territory really have their own kind of magic? This is never explained outright, but I sure bet they do. Everything in the Territory seems to.

Lots of other stuff is also left ambiguous or unexplained. Like one minor Native American character, Calls Thunder, is referred to with plurals. “They gave you a gift.” Why? I have no idea. And the demon, later, when we meet it. Them. Whatever. The word is used as though it is both singular and plural. They mythology behind this is not explained, either. There are many familiar terms that are applied to entities with which we really are not familiar at all. The minor character Graciendo. “He’s not . . . entirely human, is he?” Izzy asks. “Not even slightly,” Gabriel answers, and then reconsiders. “Well, slightly.” Okay, I’m intrigued. But we don’t find out the story behind Graciendo. We just get hints. This all contributes to the atmosphere of a setting that seems simultaneously familiar and very odd indeed.

The one worrisome detail: The devil’s fundamental, overall bargain that holds for every entity in the Territory concerns being able to coexist with everyone else as long as you don’t give offense. If you offend someone, you seem to step outside the devil’s bargain and bad things can happen to you.

Well, since it’s utterly impossible to go through your days without offending people, not to mention that some cantankerous people just aren’t happy unless they’re offended about something, it’s a bit difficult to picture how this rule could work. My guess so far, partly based on how the word seems to be used in the book and partly on just thinking about what might actually work, is that the term is actually reserved for, say, deliberate trespass against the important laws or customs or boundaries of people not your own. Like, if you’re a townsman and another townsman bumps you and doesn’t apologize, that doesn’t count, even if you get in a snit about it. But if you deliberately cross into a Native American tribe’s lands to hunt, then that does count, especially if you persist even after they make it clear you’re not welcome to hunt there. I’m pretty sure that’s the way the rule must be interpreted, and it does seem consistent with how it’s used in the book.

Overall rating: Five out of five, obviously, and heading for a pretty good run at a ten out of ten. I’m very much looking forward to the second book, which I presume is coming out this year.

Left brain / right brain

The left brain / right brain thing is probably overstated to the point of being totally misleading, and yet I must admit that this quiz is more interesting and fun that you might expect.

The close-one-eye thing was interesting; I wonder if the thing with drawing the letter “c” is kind of the same? The red-blue thing was VERY interesting. I finally chose red, but it was hard!

My favorite questions, and the most intriguing, were the ones with colors. I like flowing, pastelly, flowery kinds of colors and shapes, in case you’re interested.

The career choice with “novelist” being one alternative was kind of a forced choice for me, I guess.

The first time I took this quiz, I got 53% left brain, 47% right brain — surely us balanced people are objectively superior, right?

Well, the second time, just now, I got 60% left and 40% right. I think I know which questions I answered differently. Honestly, when it comes to attending either an academic talk or an art exhibit, how CAN you choose without knowing the subject of the talk?

Anyway, if you have a few minutes, you might enjoy taking this little quiz, even if the dichotomy in question is iffy.

Cover reveal!

Hey, check this out! I just got the new cover for THE MOUNTAIN OF KEPT MEMORY.

Nice, isn’t it? Now, yes, I grant you, it would be perfectly in character for the girl to be leaping boldly down toward a window ledge or something rather than standing demurely on the roof, because Oressa is that kind of girl. Though her brother Gulien might not like to actually watch her in action, so perhaps she is having pity on his nerves. Certainly Oressa is perfectly capable of pretending to a demure attitude.

Anyway! The city looks great, the mountain looks perfect — it’s not actually visible from the city, but artistic license, right? The falcon! That’s a subtle but excellent detail, not only because falcons are just in general snazzy, though they are, but because the falcon really is important in the story.

My favorite element is actually the light. So eye-catching, and letting the sunset reflect in the river leads the eye down to the figures in the foreground. The mountain is not a volcano, but the impression is apt, because it certainly does contain immense power.

The cover artist is Marc Simonetti, and his Deviant Art gallery is here. If you visit his gallery, you can see that he often likes dark, shadowy scenes with light coming down from above or shining up from below. It does add drama, even in dark covers such as the one for Game of Thrones.

The cover designer is Michael McCartney, and if the scrollwork was his idea, well, good job! It’s very elegant, whoever thought of it. Nice clean font, easy to read the title and (a not-unimportant detail) my last name stands out well.

What do you think? I think this one’ll be hitting the shelves round about October-ish. Fall, anyway.

Missing scenes in the climactic act

I found this post by Tina Jens at Black Gate intriguing.

Jens is ranting about an unnamed book, and says:

[Y]ou don’t get to leave out the middle of the third act! It would only have been a couple scenes; they could have been done in as little as 4 or 5 pages (though 8-10 would have been better), but they were important scenes. You can’t just toss the events off in a couple of graphs of narrative summary in the scene you jump to.

You had built that villain into a bad mo-fo: you can’t cheat us out of the meat of their encounter! … The big bad-ass villain came across as a paper-tiger, and so, I wound up being much less impressed by the wherewithal of the protags to defeat him. They were all afraid of him, but without a longer section up-close and personal with him in the third act, he didn’t scare me. He seemed like a caricature.

After reading the entire post, I decided that “middle of the third act” must constitute an important chunk of the climax.

So I am trying to think of a story where the author skipped over one or more climactic scenes. And right at the moment, I can’t think of any.

I can think of books where the author set up a huge, important mystery and left it unsolved: IN THE WOODS by Tana French. Which was a book where the good guy totally screwed up his life and the bad guy totally won, so I hated the book for reasons that had nothing to do with the unsolved mystery.

I can think of books where the author seemed to kind of stop before the proper ending, and then wrote a long epilogue rather than actually finishing the story: UNDER HEAVEN by Guy Gavriel Kay. A book I loved despite this and now that I’m thinking of it, I really want to re-read it.

I can definitely think of books where the protagonist stopped short of dealing with the problem when the opportunity was totally offered to her, thus requiring an extra 300 pages of toil and suffering before finally achieving the victory that was in her grasp far earlier: MYSTIC AND RIDER, or at least one of the Twelve Houses books by Sharon Shinn, not sure if the scene I’m thinking of was in the first book or later in the series. I love Shinn, but that kind of thing drives me nuts.

I can think of any number of books where the author took the plot in a direction I didn’t like and I stomped around thinking I would have done it way better.

But at the moment, I can’t think of a single book where the author simply neglected to write the climactic scenes, skipping lightly over the confrontation with the Dark Lord in order to get the the happily-ever-after denouement. And I say that as a writer who almost always loves writing the denouement and would fairly often be okay with skipping over the climactic scenes.

So…. how about you? Can any of you think of a book where the author left out the middle of the third act? Did you like the book despite that, or did you wind up throwing it across the room like Tina Jens?

Progress! Or, now I have half an outline.

So, here I am working on this SF novel because my agent REALLY wants me to write a space opera kind of thing real quick and give her a chance to shop it around this year. Fine, fine, I said, which by the way will mean putting off SHADOW TWIN, but I will try to get that done this year, too, and definitely the next short story collection. I will hopefully finish the final stories for that over spring break, which is coming up in early March.

Anyway, this past weekend I tipped over 100 pages (30,000 words) for my WIP, always a nice landmark. I also connected the beginning of the novel to the one scene that takes place in the early middle of the novel and then, unfortunately, ran out of Stuff I Knew About.

So this morning I let the actual manuscript rest while I fiddled around with an outline. I had one vague idea of something I might like to have happen. So I took that as a definite scene that must happen — luckily it will serve to drop everyone out of the frying pan into the fire — and then figured out how I might possibly justify getting to that scene and figured out what the aftermath of that scene would be. And then stalled out again. I’ll need to light a bigger fire or set off a bomb or something, up the stakes — pretty sure I know what the ultimate stakes are, but how to ratchet up to that, not sure.

But uncertainty about the last quarter or third of the plot is fine, because I estimate that the outline I have now will carry me through the next 200 pages or so, and by then I should know where the plot is actually going and more nearly know how to get there.

Biggest question right now: do I want more pov characters? Right now I have two. I don’t object to two, I would be happy to limit the pov characters to two, but are these actually the BEST two characters to carry the next 200 pages? If not, maybe I’d better back up and convert one of the earlier scenes to a different pov so that switching doesn’t come as a shock when it happens in the middle? Not sure, not sure. It would certainly be simpler to stick to just these two pov characters.

They’re both guys, as it happens. I’ve been sticking to young female pov protagonists so much lately, that might be why, maybe I just felt like I needed a change from that kind of protagonist. In this new WIP, though, I do like my secondary female characters a lot. Maybe one of them would like to step into the spotlight and be a pov character? Would either of them be the BEST choice to carry the narrative, though? And a bunch of secondary characters are still developing; maybe one of them will turn out to be a good choice for a pov character. Besides that, right now the human characters are carrying the pov. I think I’ll stick to that, but it’s *possible* I’ll decide that one of the alien characters should also take the pov for some portion of the narrative.

Decisions, decisions. Luckily nothing is set in stone at this point, but on the other hand I have no special desire to re-write half the narrative in a different pov, so it would be nice if the choices I make at this point are ones I’m happy with two months from now.

So, that’s my writing life right this moment. Punctuated by puppies, of course! But basically in decent order.

Meanwhile, I just finished reading SILVER ON THE ROAD by Laura Anne Gilman. Loved it! I’ll write up my thoughts about it soon, but two thumbs up for sure.

Nebula nominees

So, the Nebula short list was announced some time over the weekend — thanks to social media, I find out about this sort of thing only a little after the fact these days. Interesting list of nominees! Of course I haven’t read any of the shorter works, but the nominated novels are:

Ancillary Mercy, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Uprooted, Naomi Novik (Del Rey)

The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu (Saga)

Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard, Lawrence M. Schoen (Tor)

Raising Caine, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)

The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Updraft, Fran Wilde (Tor)

And as far as I’m concerned, the single most interesting thing about this list is the echo we see in the Andre Norton Award YA nominees, which are as follows:

Cuckoo Song, Frances Hardinge (Macmillan UK 5/14; Amulet)

Bone Gap, Laura Ruby (Balzer + Bray)

Archivist Wasp, Nicole Kornher-Stace (Big Mouth House)

Court of Fives, Kate Elliott (Little, Brown)

Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older (Levine)

Seriously Wicked, Tina Connolly (Tor Teen)

Zeroboxer, Fonda Lee (Flux)

Nimona, Noelle Stevenson (HarperTeen)

Updraft, Fran Wilde (Tor)

See that? UPDRAFT is nominated for both the Nebula and the Andre Norton Award! Has that ever happened before? If it has, I don’t remember. I actually have UPDRAFT on my Kindle; obviously I need to move it up to the top of the TBR pile.

The second most interesting thing, or maybe the first, is that NIMONA is a graphic novel. Has *that* ever happened before — anything other than a novel nominated for the Andre Norton Award? I’ve definitely heard good things about NIMONA. I guess now is a good time to take a look at it.

So, let’s see, of the Nebula nominees, I’ve read ANCILLARY MERCY and UPROOTED. Two thumbs up for both of those; they’re very good and very different and I have no idea how I would sort them out if I were judging them against one another.

I’ve read a sample from BARSK, which I might or might not go on with . . . I’m interested, but it didn’t instantly grab me and pull me in the way the two above both did. And I’ve also read a sample of THE GRACE OF KINGS, which surprised me because honestly — this was a surprise — I did not find the writing all that strong on a sentence-by-sentence level. I have admired some of Liu’s shorter work, and yet there it is: for this one, I don’t. And I disliked the two boys we meet first, one brave and rule-defying and the other timid and rule-following, both cliched as all get out. Maybe the book winds up being great, but I don’t know, it fell off my urgent must-read-now list after the sample.

I have the first book of Gannon’s series on my TBR pile, but I doubt I’ll start the series any time soon. I don’t have THE FIFTH SEASON yet, and it was priced pretty high for a book that sounds offputtingly grim, but maybe I’ll read the sample and see.

Now, for the Andre Norton nominees:

I’ve read CUCKOO SONG and loved it; I’ve read BONE GAP and loved that; again they are quite different and again I would have a hard time ranking one above the other. I’ll have to think about it.

I’ve heard good things about ARCHIVIST WASP and have a sample on my urgent pile. I’ve heard mixed reactions to COURT OF FIVES, but I have loved some of Elliot’s other books, and I think I have a sample of that one, too.

SHADOWSHIFTER, SERIOUSLY WICKED, and ZEROBOXER I don’t know anything about. I don’t remember ever hearing of them before.

So, very interesting lineup this year and I know for sure there are multiple books in each of those categories that I would be able to root for. Congratulations to all the nominees!

Sale pricing of lots of great titles

Okay, mostly I ignore promotion I see on social media, but this one seems worth passing along: 101 SFF ebooks for $5 or less, and I see many noteworthy older titles on the list.

Tea With the Black Dragon is on here — a lovely short novel by RA MacAvoy.

Adulthood Rites by Octavia E Butler, that one is stunning sociological SF and I deeply regret I will never be able to ask Butler if she deliberately designed a species with absolutely hardwired instinct and did that on purpose to contrast the oankali with humans. I’ll never know, but this series is still so impressive.

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor is one I have been thinking of checking out eventually. It’s a Saga title, I see, which I hadn’t known. Well, that explains why it’s at a very inviting $2.99 right now; I think that’s Saga’s price for all it’s ebooks for February.

The Awakened Kingdom is a novella by NK Jemisin; I didn’t know it existed. I’m happy to add that to my TBR pile.

The Curse of Chalion and the Paladin of Souls and one of the Sharing Knife books. Only one Sharing Knife novel? Looks that way. Well, I have all these in paper. If you happen to want an ecopy of one of these, though, this might be a good time to pick it up.

Same with CJ Cherryh, she has four or five titles on this list.

Wasn’t one of you recommending MCA Hogarth just the other day? I have one of hers on my TBR pile; there are three more on this list. Same with Helen Lowe, she has a couple on here.

Has anybody read anything by Kylie Chan? Those look interesting. Shoot, at $.99 I guess I’ll just pick up the first one and try it eventually.

Okay, that gives me three I picked up. And I may look back over the list. If you’d particularly recommend a title I didn’t mention, point it out in the comments, please.