Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 32

Archon Panel: Is it good yet?

My Literary Masterpiece! 5 Oct 2024, Saturday 3:00 – 4:00. You’ve been working on your novel for years, but you just can’t bring yourself to pull the trigger and try to sell it. How much polishing and rewriting is too much?

This is an interesting panel topic. I’m not sure I’ve seen this topic before. It does sort of fit with the recent over-workshopping posts here, such as this one. Over-polishing and an inability to let go isn’t quite the same thing as over-workshopping, though. Over-polishing sounds to me more like being stuck due to feelings of uncertainty, not like trying to take too much advice or the wrong advice in workshops.

At some relatively recent convention, I don’t remember the panel topic, but I do remember one of the convention attendees saying she had multiple complete novels, that one or more beta readers said they were great, but she wasn’t sure and hadn’t sent any of them into the world. I also remember that one hundred percent of the panelists said, “Stop waiting! Send them out! Do that now!” Something about this situation make us all feel like this person was unnecessarily holding on to those complete and polished manuscripts. That is what springs to mind when I see the description for this panel.

How would you make that call? Presuming you have never yet either queried agents OR self-published anything? How can you tell whether your manuscript(s) are in good shape and you should move forward? What if, as the panel description indicates, you’ve been hanging on to one or more novel for literally years, buffing out every blemish, but you’re still unable to let go?

I really don’t know. Here are some thoughts.

A) Is it your first-ever novel? The only one you’ve completed? I think my advice would be: set it aside. Get it out of your head, write something else. Something totally different, ideally. Different world, different protagonist — was your previous protagonist a teenage girl? Was the story a coming-of-age? This one is a guy in his fifties; the story is about self-sacrifice and saving the world.

If someone keeps fussing with their very first completed novel, that seems to me unlikely to go anywhere useful. I vehemently disagree that a first novel is always garbage, but I do think a first novel is probably going to be flawed in some important ways. Surely the author learned something by writing the first novel. Therefore, they should move on and write a second novel.

B) If multiple well-read friends are telling you the novel is great, it’s probably pretty good in at least some ways. This may be the time to find a real critique partner / beta reader / editor.

One non-friend who is experienced with the genre and who is on the analytical side may be all you need to confirm that the book is good enough. Taking revision advice from one or two people, not a crowd, is probably better, at least until you’ve got the confidence to ignore advice that doesn’t suit the story.

C) At some point, you have to let go. You have to decide it’s good enough and toss it into the world. I really don’t think there’s any way around the need to let go, other than waiting for your heirs to publish your book after your death, and that method does come with a few obvious drawbacks.

I will just note in passing that I didn’t ask anybody for advice about City. I sat down to write a book that would be good enough to publish, I wrote it, I revised it, and the minute I finished primary revision, I queried it. Seriously. Two months to write it and two months to get an offer of representation.

That was not my first-ever novel, of course. You know the saying that you need a million words of practice? I did not need a million words of practice. But I DID need HALF a million words of practice. That’s why I don’t feel it makes sense to obsess over your first-ever novel. Maybe come back to it later. A lot later.

I could not, at the time I wrote City, have revised my original fantasy trilogy properly. That took a lot more distance from it plus more practice putting stories together. Someone with a real knack for plotting could probably have done it much earlier, but even then, maybe it would be easier to write a few other novels first and then come back to the first one. Whatever wasn’t great about it, probably those not-great features will be much more obvious if you leave it alone for a year or two and write something else. If you do write another novel, then at the very least, you’ll have another finished novel, and that’s not nothing.

Here are a couple posts on this topic:

Is Your Book Good Enough for Publication? A Cold-Blooded Assessment — I think this is a good post. I think it’s asking the right questions.

How Do I Know if My Book is Good Enough? — This post is much more about the emotional state of the author than the state of the manuscript.

Is Your Novel Ready to Publish? 12 Signs You’re Still in the Learning Phase of Your Writing Career — This one is for manuscripts that aren’t as close to ready as the author might want.

Here’s what I personally think might be a good strategy for the “Is it good enough yet?” game —

If you think it’s ready to query, then query.

and

If you think it’s ready to self-publish, consider querying instead.

Because what can it hurt? Yes, it takes time to query, but why not give it, say, six months. You can use that time to write another novel or read about self-publishing and promotion. Or both. If you get clear signs of interest from agents, then you’re good to go. Either you can seriously pursue traditional publication, or, if you prefer, you can move into self-publishing with the clear understanding that agents were treating your novel like it was in the ballpark. If you get an offer of representation, that puts you in a good position and you can decide what to do on that basis.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Archon Panel: Is it good yet? appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Special update: Problem with the RIHASI audiobook — fixed

UPDATE THREE: How to get the correct version if you already have the problem version: You should be able to simply remove the book from your Audible library and re-download it. The correct version should download. It definitely has for someone who has done this.

UPDATE TWO: the corrected version of the audiobook should now be available.

UPDATE ONE: the problem has been corrected and the correct version is being reviewed now. Watch for another update about how to correct your own version of the book, if you already bought it.

Okay, sorry, please don’t buy the audiobook right now. Chapter 4 got truncated in production. This definitely happened at ACX because the producer only has one file for Chapter 4 and it’s the correct file, to which I listened three times.

I’ll do my best to resolve this as quickly as possible. Apparently this happens from time to time, and ACX ought to open the audiobook to allow corrections. I expect they will allow people to download a corrected version, but if there’s any trouble about that, I’ll handle that somehow.

I’ll let you know when it’s okay to download the audiobook, and in the meantime, if you bought it, thank you, and if you listen to the end of Chapter Four and it stops when Kior says, “You could ride with me for a couple of hours now and then,” then you’ve got the affected version because that’s not where that chapter should end.

Always something, sheesh! You can bet I’m adding a brand-new step to the process of producing audiobooks to make sure this never happens again.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Special update: Problem with the RIHASI audiobook — fixed appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Archon Panel: POV

POV: Keeping it All Straight 5 Oct 2024, Saturday — Nothing can mess your writing up quicker than muddled points of view. How do you chose one and how do you keep yourself from straying to another one?

I’m having some trouble seeing why this is a problem. I’m having to think about this. Both parts of this. And, as you have probably realized, writing stuff down is one way I think about things.

“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” — as Flannery O’Connor said, and quite right too. That, or something like it, was posted on the wall of a classroom when I was in high school, and as you see, it stuck with me. The version I actually remember is, “How can I know what I think until I read what I wrote and see what I said?” I don’t immediately find a source for that, and this quote by O’Connor is close enough.

So, about choosing a protagonist. What do I think about that?

A) How do you choose your pov character?

I have no idea. I just do it. I do not “choose” the pov character. I have the character in my mind and put that character in the first scene and move ahead with the story. I definitely do not think about any of this as “Hmm, who OUT OF THESE POSSIBLE CHARACTERS would make a great pov character?” I don’t have a set of possible characters and then choose one to carry the pov. I have the pov character first.

I guess that’s my starting point for this panel: I don’t choose the pov character, I just start writing the pov character.

B) But I can see this “choice thing,” actually.

There are times, just now and then, when I think it’s screamingly obvious that an author has chosen the wrong character to carry the pov. That is, the pov character is frankly boring compared to a much more interesting secondary character who has been shuffled off to the side and is being ignored. This is the sort of thing that can make me want to pull that secondary character into center stage, and then later I may base an important character on that one.

But, this does raise the question: Why did the author pick a boring character rather than an interesting character for their own book?

1) The author didn’t pick a boring character. Interest is in the eye of the beholder. They genuinely found the protagonist they chose more interesting than the characters they left to the side. Sometimes this is REALLY hard to believe, though.

2) The author can’t accurately judge interestingness. Is that a word? I mean, it is now. I don’t think there’s a great word for that. Appeal, potential for engagement. I really kind of mean “interestingness,” though. The author genuinely can’t tell when a character is bland and boring versus when a character is lively and interesting.

3) The author picked someone obvious to carry the pov and just didn’t think about whether that was a great choice. They’re a plot writer, maybe, and as long as the camera is sitting on someone’s shoulder so the reader can see the events unfolding, they don’t care who is carrying the camera.

4) The author just isn’t that great a writer. They just failed to infuse the protagonist with enough depth, complexity, or life. This a completely different problem, nothing to do with the choice of the protagonist.

C) So how should you choose the protagonist, if you’re actually making a choice?

Well, the standard advice is to let the protagonist be the person who is facing the biggest challenges or dealing with the biggest problems.

That’s not bad advice, as far as it goes. However, lots of times, a fair number of characters are facing big challenges and problems, and then once again you have to choose one of them. And once you’ve made that choice, you’ll be focused on that character, whose problems and challenges ought then to become primary. The author builds those problems and challenges up and keeps them there, surrounding the protagonist, until they’re surmounted, solved, overcome, reinterpreted, or whatever.

This basic idea is what leads to romance series where we start with a group of people and then each book follows one of those people as the protagonist (plus a love interest). They’re all interesting. Only the author’s focus changes. The failure to infuse interest into whatever pov character is central is just that: a failure.

***

Separate question for this panel:

Once you’ve got a pov character, how do you keep from accidentally straying to some other pov?

Honestly … by just keeping track of whose pov you’re in?

Is there a different answer? Accidental head-hopping is just a failure of the author to stick to the proper pov. Isn’t it? What else could it be?

Here are some possibilities:

1) Poor phrasing of a specific sentence.

Sure, that happens to me about once per book. Proofreaders usually catch it. But if it’s only happening once per book, then it’s not a problem.

2) Clumsy omniscient.

If the author is that clumsy with omniscient, they should probably just consider sticking to limited third OR ELSE they should perhaps take a stab at writing something in omniscient specifically as an exercise to focus on this one problem and get it sorted out. Reading something good written in omniscient and paying attention to how that works might help. The two examples I usually think of are Sherwood Smith and Judith Merkle Riley. Jane Austen would also work great, however.

3) Trying to braid different points of view together in too complicated a structure.

I mean, just switch pov at the top of each chapter and boom, that takes care of that. Although you can switch scene by scene, chapter by chapter is so clear to both author and reader that I honestly think it’s much to be preferred, most of the time.

4) Failure to keep track of who knows what and who was present when.

With a large cast [Silver Circle, I’m looking at you], it’s easy to simply loose track of who was present in what scene, during what conversations, and therefore who knows what details or theories.

This is a genuine pain in the neck. My personal solution: just keep it all in my head AND ALSO repeatedly scroll up and down through chapters to confirm or disconfirm who was present when and who knows what. I am perfectly ready to grant that the need for scrolling up and down is not an ideal solution. Maybe some kind of checklist or table would have been handy. Too late now, since I have basically the whole thing written. Also, I’m not used to using anything other than my brain to keep track of this stuff. USUALLY it’s not difficult because MOST books don’t have as many pov characters engaged in so many different conversations.

The second everyone scatters, all this becomes a lot easier.

5) Failure to realize that every character has a unique viewpoint.

Close or intimate third is popular, and deservedly so. But the author had better realize that in close third, the pov character isn’t just holding a camera — that character is also filtering everything they see through their unique preconceptions, expectations, prejudices, emotional reactions, everything. The second the author starts to filter everything through the author’s own preconceptions, expectations, prejudices, and emotional reactions, every character blurs into Everycharacter. They either all become clones of each other or else they become clones of the author, or both.

Here’s a good post about this:

In close third person, a character should see and observe in a way that makes sense for them, not just as a way to inform the reader of what a room looks like or what is going on in a scene. A wealthy society matron or an interior decorator might walk into a well-appointed living room and recognize the rug as a French Aubusson, but most characters probably would not. …

if a male protagonist is speaking to another man, and they are the only characters in the scene, the second character should never be referred to as the other man. Doing so pulls the reader out of the protagonist’s head, out of the room, to a place hovering above the scene where they are aware of two people talking. The protagonist doesn’t think of the person he’s speaking to as the other man — he just thinks of him as Joe or Dad or whoever he is. These sorts of errors often come into play when writers are looking for a way to avoid using a name or a pronoun too often, but it’s much more important to maintain the established POV than to avoid using he or him a few times in a paragraph.

I remember having this exact problem, and revising to get rid of it. I mostly write a closer third now than I used to, and the closer third person gets, the less this is a problem — at least for me. I don’t know whether saying “Just get closer, use a more intimate third” would be helpful advice for other authors, but it’s something I might at least suggest, should anyone be having trouble keeping pov clear.

And, given that this is a panel topic, I guess that’s what I will wind up suggesting.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Archon Panel: POV appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Griffin Mage #1: The Lord of the Changing Wind

So, here we go! Available at my Patreon right this minute and up for preorder on Amazon, with a release date of November 4. That should give me ample time to finish tweaking the formatting and make the individual files.

The artist took a look at the previous covers, considered the paragraph of description I sent him, and went with a sort of retro fantasy vibe that I think suits this trilogy. After all, it was first published fourteen years ago. (This still amazes me.)

I think a vibe that says Classic Fantasy Here is not a bad idea, since this is pretty much classic fantasy. Yes, this trilogy does have some unusual features — minimal romance (extremely minimal in the first book), different protagonists in each book, things like that. But it is still classic fantasy.

This cover has been finished for a few weeks; I’ve been wading through the last formatting pass and finished the first book last night. Yes, there were still a few formatting issues, almost entirely having to do with inappropriate paragraph breaks in the middle of dialogue. I think I’ve cleared out all those problems. I also found ONE MORE typo, which I think may have been there since the first printing lo these many years ago. It was “as” instead of “was,” the sort of thing that is astoundingly invisible until you see it, then suddenly becomes screamingly obvious.

I’ll be curious to see what happens with the preorder. Who knows what will happen with that. Looking at the product page that’s there right now, it’s really interesting to see what’s happened since Hachette let go of this trilogy. Of course there’s no ebook available right this minute. Also, there is NO description on the paperback version, though the star rating and number of ratings are still shown. The description still shows on the Audible version. This raises a question:

Should I use the same description now, as I re-list the ebook with a new edition and new cover? Here it is:

***

Griffins lounged all around them, inscrutable as cats, brazen as summer. They turned their heads to look at Kes out of fierce, inhuman eyes. Their feathers, ruffled by the wind that came down the mountain, looked like they had been poured out of light; their lion haunches like they had been fashioned out of gold. A white griffin, close at hand, looked like it had been made of alabaster and white marble and then lit from within by white fire. Its eyes were the pitiless blue-white of the desert sky.

Little ever happens in the quiet villages of peaceful Feierabiand. The course of Kes’ life seems set: she’ll grow up to be an herb-woman and healer for the village of Minas Ford, never quite fitting in but always more or less accepted. And she’s content with that path – or she thinks she is. Until the day the griffins come down from the mountains, bringing with them the fiery wind of their desert and a desperate need for a healer. But what the griffins need is a healer who is not quite human… or a healer who can be made into something not quite human.

***

***

That’s not bad. But I could revise it. Here is a possible new version of the description for this book:

***

The griffins come to Feierabiand with the early summer warmth, riding the wind out of the heights down to the tender green pastures above the village of Minas Ford. The wind they bring with them is a hard, hot wind, tasting of red dust and hot brass, with nothing of the gentle Feierabiand summer about it. Fire falls from their wings, and below the path of their flight, red sands turn the hills to blazing desert …

Kes, collecting healing herbs in the hills above the village, watches the griffins arrive. Stunned by their beauty, unable to find words to describe them, she says nothing about them at all. Then a tall man with a griffin’s fiery shadow steps into Minas Ford, seeking a girl who possesses a gift for healing, setting into her hands magic, fire, and an impossible choice.

Bertaud, close friend of the king of Feierbieand, knows nothing of griffins, of the desert, of the magic that drove them from their own land into his. When word comes of red sand and hot winds above Minas Ford, his king sends Bertaud to investigate. On his road waits a powerful griffen, a burning wind, and an impossible choice.

The griffins did not ride their desert wind into Feierabiand by their own choice. But here they will make their stand against their enemies. Kes and Bertaud, with nothing in common but an affinity for fire, will have to choose whether to set themselves alongside the griffins or against them, with their own lives and land in terrible peril no matter which choice they make.

***

***

What do you all think? The original version, the new version? Any tweaks you’d suggest to either?

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Griffin Mage #1: The Lord of the Changing Wind appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Archon panel #1: Aliens

So, as usual, I’ll be at Archon this year — it’s the only SF convention that’s so close I can drive back and forth. I most particularly don’t want to put my mother in the position of feeling she should take care of my dogs or stay overnight at my house — she is getting a bit frail for that — so coming over to let the dogs out, sure, but anything more than that, not really. Therefore, I took myself off the schedule for evening events, with the expectation that I will definitely come home each evening and drive back up to Collinsville each morning.

I do like Archon. It’s generally well run, by people who have been doing it a long time and have the process down. It’s not a big convention, but the costumer’s guild in St Louis is apparently top-notch, because Archon usually has a fantastic masquerade, which alas, I will be skipping because I will be on my way home before that.

Anyway, looks like one panel on Friday and the rest on Saturday.

Here’s the first panel:

Alien Species That Make Sense 4 Oct 2024, Friday 14:00 – 15:00 — How do you create alien species that make sense to the readers? Not doing so will create gigantic plot holes, so learn how to avoid this!

I mostly disagree with the idea that fictional alien species need to make sense. I do, however, agree, that alien species should make sense TO THE READER or FOR THE STORY.

For a subset of SF novels, the aliens ought indeed to make sense, and by “make sense” in this context, I mean they should make anatomical, behavioral, ecological, and evolutionary sense, and they should not be clones of humans in any of those realms. If you’ve got an arthropod-like species that’s rather like a giant mollusk — and if you do, then you need to either ignore or explain why the exoskeleton is not too heavy, because, spoiler, it’s going to be too heavy — but if you do have this species, then it is just stupid to make it psychologically and behaviorally and socially just like shelled humans with pincers.

The giant mollusk should not be psychologically just like a human because that’s nuts.

Unless you’re writing a farce or something and then, sure, the giant mollusk can in fact have a personality cloned from Conan the Barbarian or whatever the author wants. That’s why the needs of the story trump everything else.

I think there are basically the following categories of aliens in SF:

A) Aliens that are really humans; ie, if you are writing something called “The Alien’s Mail-Order Bride,” then probably your aliens are going to be very, very human. Very. This is not at all plausible (obviously), but creating plausible aliens is not only not the point of the story, it’s totally antithetical to the point of the story. Other examples in this general vicinity:

— Ascending (Vardeshi Saga), Pechenick. I don’t care that the aliens are basically just like humans except much more gorgeous and stronger and faster. Yes, they might as well be vampires or something. No, they are not at all plausible. This story is deliberately getting as close as possible to The Alien’s Mail-Order Bride without (quite) descending into B-movie territory. I will just mention here that although I liked things about the story, I found the high level of character stupidity almost unendurable. In fact, it was literally unendurable and I DNF the book

— Cuckoo’s Egg, Cherryh. This is a very different example, which is why I picked it. Here, the author is not skirting B-movie territory at all. The author is saying something thematically important, using aliens who are about as different socially as, say, contemporary American society is from Heian Japanese society, and much less different than either is from Sparta. The things that might make them more socially different don’t wind up making them actually socially different — I mean shonun have reproductive seasons, but this makes no difference to their societal development as far as the reader can tell. This is fine because bringing out societal, behavioral, and psychological differences would be antithetical to what Cherryh is doing with this story.

B) Aliens that look pretty human, but aren’t (quite) as human as they look.

— Foreigner. Here, the aliens are pretty human behaviorally, but they have these emotions that aren’t quite like human emotions, there is fertile ground for misunderstandings, and thus we had the War of the Landing. The emotional differences are a big, big part of the story and intrinsic to what Cherryh is doing with the story. But at the same time, the atevi are more or less accessible to the human reader, because, I mean, that’s pretty important.

C) Aliens that don’t look human, but are socially, psychologically, and emotionally identical to humans.

— Mindtouch and others by Hogarth. There are all these nonhuman aliens, but they’re all basically varieties of furry quadrupedal humans. Not quite. But basically, that’s what they are. Also, socially they’re identical to humans. I don’t mean all of the different types of aliens are identical to one human society. I mean they’re basically all variable within the typical human types of societies — not as different as the Spartans. They occupy one end of a similarity spectrum — they’re just like humans, basically.

D) Aliens that don’t look human, and are socially and psychologically different from humans.

— The Cloud Roads by Wells. I love this story so much. Although the Raksura are socially different from humans and have different reflexes, and that’s very neat, emotionally and psychologically they are VERY similar. This is one reason the story carries so much emotional impact. Wells doesn’t have to persuade the reader that Moon is a sympathetic and relatable protagonist. He is incredibly sympathetic and relatable right from the first moment. But the different reflexes are a great touch, and of course the society is unique.

— A Darkling Sea, Cambias. Everybody loves the Ilmartans, including me. They are the aliens who live in lightless seas of Europa and who resemble 9-foot long lobsters, and for a species that are so exceedingly different physically and occupy such an exceedingly different ecological niche, they’re remarkable similar to humans socially, behaviorally, and emotionally. Not completely identical. But really very similar. This gives the reader something to get hold of. The Imartans do work well in the story. But their society is rather close to ordinary human societies, except for reproductively, which I grant is pretty different. Okay, very different.

— A Fire Upon the Deep, Vinge. You have to be kind of different when your personality is a gestalt of individual dog-like creatures. There are lots of features of the tines that are different from humans. Emotionally, they’re still quite similar. It’s hard to write aliens who are emotionally very dissimilar from humans and still have them work for human readers.

— Mother of Demons, Flint. Here are the giant mollusks. I had a hard time deciding to put this book in this category. I basically did that not because of the weapon-swinging battle mollusk on the cover but because of the other species, the Maia, who are so crucial to human survival. They really are not at all like humans.

— No Foreign Sky.

Emotionally quite similar, but socially pretty different, and that impacts the emotional experience of life too. There’s the plural thing for the female turun and the social isolation of the male turun. Plus a strong instinct to close ranks and defend the family (for the females) versus attack as individuals (for the males). Much less tendency to generalize from family to city-state or nation. Much less aggressive than humans. Plus seeing things as fours and multiples of fours, not as dichotomies of two.

We should get deeper into turun society and the integrated human/turun society in the next book, if I ever get to it, sigh.

SO, what is YOUR favorite alien species in SF? I would greatly appreciate suggestions because here comes this panel, and also, did I miss any categories?

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Archon panel #1: Aliens appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Special update: Problem with the RIHASI audiobook — fixed

UPDATE THREE: How to get the correct version if you already have the problem version: Pending

UPDATE TWO: the corrected version of the audiobook should now be available.

UPDATE ONE: the problem has been corrected and the correct version is being reviewed now. Watch for another update about how to correct your own version of the book, if you already bought it.

Okay, sorry, please don’t buy the audiobook right now. Chapter 4 got truncated in production. This definitely happened at ACX because the producer only has one file for Chapter 4 and it’s the correct file, to which I listened three times.

I’ll do my best to resolve this as quickly as possible. Apparently this happens from time to time, and ACX ought to open the audiobook to allow corrections. I expect they will allow people to download a corrected version, but if there’s any trouble about that, I’ll handle that somehow.

I’ll let you know when it’s okay to download the audiobook, and in the meantime, if you bought it, thank you, and if you listen to the end of Chapter Four and it stops when Kior says, “You could ride with me for a couple of hours now and then,” then you’ve got the affected version because that’s not where that chapter should end.

Always something, sheesh! You can bet I’m adding a brand-new step to the process of producing audiobooks to make sure this never happens again.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Special update: Problem with the RIHASI audiobook — fixed appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Update: WHEW

Four nice things happened this past week:

1) I finally finished primary revision for Part II of Silver Circle and sent that out; and

2) I also finished secondary revision for Part I of Silver Circle and sent THAT out; and also made a proofing copy for my mother, with a warning that there is a cliffhanger of sorts and that it may be a few weeks before she gets a chance to go on with the story. And

3) I got excused from jury duty in St. Louis.

Those of you with good memories may be saying, “Wait, wasn’t that a thing last winter?”

Yes, yes it was. Apparently whoever handles this, whatever bureaucracy it is, thought maybe my mother might have gotten younger over the past eight months, so I got summoned again. This, I will remind you if you have forgotten, is for a courthouse in downtown St Louis, which is 80 miles away. I have no keen desire to have to fight through downtown traffic and deal with downtown parking. At rush hour, no less. I’m not at all familiar with downtown St L, though I know some bits of St L rather well. The only good thing was this time there was no chance of ice storms. Oh, and I didn’t have a pregnant dog who might suddenly encounter a dire emergency. So it wasn’t as bad, but it wasn’t great.

Anyway, I did an online excuse request, and that got turned down, which I didn’t mention to my mother because I didn’t want her to worry. So FINALLY, not quite at the last minute, the online excuse thing reopened — I just happened to check, they don’t notify you — so I did a second excuse — all of this with my mother’s doctor’s updated letter saying “Are you insane?” except more politely and with a few more words like “frail” and “elderly” and “requires her daughter to be reachable” and so forth. ALL OF WHICH IS TRUE, would you idiot bureaucrats PLEASE summon people IN ST LOUIS if you want them to be on a jury in St. Louis city? I would basically be fine, or at least not horrified, at the idea of being on a LOCAL jury.

ANYWAY, that finally worked and thank heaven I can now cross this off my list of things to worry about. The excuse approval looks different, more formal, so maybe it’s a more permanent approval than last time. I can hope.

Anyway, that means that Silver Circle and everything else should continue to move forward on schedule. Which did seem likely. But I couldn’t be sure, because after all they did turn down my first online excuse request. Those people are insane.

***

ALSO

4) As a reward for zipping through secondary revision of Part I of Silver Circle, I took off a few hours and read Aral Vorkosigan’s Dog, which as you may know or recall from the Fanfic post, is the one that retells the back half of Shards of Honor from Simon Illyan’s pov. It was great, the moment when Illyan makes a silent oath to Aral is especially great, and I’m really glad I did that post, because otherwise I might never have known that fic exists.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Update: WHEW appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Remarkable Novels: Cuckoo’s Egg by CJC

So, I just finished listening to the audio version of Cuckoo’s Egg, by CJ Cherryh.

My version was this:

The link goes to the normal Audible version, however. I hope it’s the same. I can’t tell whether the version I have was narrated by the same guy — the Audible narrator was Peter Ganim. I hope it’s the same person, because the narrator for the CD audiobook version was great. I just loved Duun’s voice. Other voices were fine. Duun was perfect, just perfect.

If you prefer to read a book rather than listen, here’s the Kindle version of Cuckoo’s Egg, bundled with Serpent’s Reach, which is fine, I suppose, but definitely not one of my favorite’s of Cherryh’s works. Cuckoo’s Egg is a favorite.

But I don’t exactly want to explain why I love Cuckoo’s Egg. What I want to do is point to a couple of things this very short novel does amazingly well: time compression and viewpoint shifts.

Compressing time:

Cuckoo’s Egg starts in Duun’s pov. It has to, because the other main character, Thorn, is a tiny infant at the time. Duun is a shonun, not human, but although the shonun culture is somewhat different from familiar human cultures, the differences are unimportant. This SF novel could be told almost as easily in a fantasy setting with different human cultures rather than in an SF setting with different species. That’s important, actually, that the shunun are very similar to humans psychologically and socially. That’s not a random choice or accidental; that similarity is actually thematically crucial. But that’s a different point. Let’s think about time compression.

So, there we are, at the beginning of the story, and Thorn is a newborn. Then we proceed through the story. Thorn is an infant, a toddler, a child, a boy, a youth, and let me remind you this story is basically a long novella. Cherryh is cramming all this passing time into this very short novel. I bet it’s not over 80,000 words. It’s really short. Yet the story doesn’t feel rushed. We get a clear sense of passing time, but for most of the story, the pace actually feels slow. Anybody who is trying to compress a lot of time in a novel really ought to look at this story and see how Cherryh did this. I can’t at the moment think of another story that handles this in quite the same way — I mean, with SO MUCH of the story being compressed.

The passing of time also leads to the other really amazing thing Cherryh does here —

Viewpoint shifts:

Thorn is not a character until he can stand up and toddle, and not really an important character until he’s a boy and then a young man. He’s a crucial plot element, but that isn’t the same thing. Duun is the protagonist for the first part of the story — he has to be — and then, as Thorn gets older, Duun’s viewpoint braids into Thorn’s pov, and then Thorn gradually takes over as the primary protagonist.

I can’t think of any other novel that does that, period. If anybody else can, what was the story? I mean where you begin in one pov and then braid that into a different pov and the protagonists completely switch in importance? I did that a little bit in Invictus, actually. But not nearly as much as CJC does in Cuckoo’s Egg, and she does it in a novella-length story, not a long duology! And this shift from Duun to Thorn feels smooth and natural. This is just a remarkable thing to do!

What else is unusual about this story?

A lot of things. This is a story where a LOT of internal reactions and thoughts are set off with parentheses, for both Duun and Thorn. It’s well worth reading just for that — I mean to think about reactions vs internal thoughts vs direct thoughts vs actions, and why did CJC use parentheses plus italics, what is she doing with that? And why does it work? Or if it doesn’t work for you, why not?

And then, I think it’s just very noteworthy that the shonun are so much like humans. Obviously Thorn is very much set apart because he’s the only human on the planet. He’s set apart for other reasons too, actually. That’s important in the story. Of course it is. And yet, everything different about Thorn crashes into the last lines of the story and get abruptly reoriented.

I don’t want to tell you the last lines of the story if you haven’t read it, because that doesn’t seem quite fair. But it’s those lines that makes it crystal clear that Cherryh is saying something about what it means to be human and what it means to be alien and what it means to be a person. These last lines are remarkable.

Anything else?

The pacing is really peculiar. I didn’t notice that until I listened to the audiobook, for a lot of reasons. First, I was a kid the first time I read this story (and the second time, and the third). Second, when I’m reading, I can skim, and when I was a kid, I think I skimmed a lot of the last part of this book. Despite reading it repeatedly, I hardly remembered that last part. The last lines, definitely. The last section, not so much.

This is a really slow-paced story for a long time. Then it pivots around a central incident and crashes into fast. There’s an unhurried feel to most of the story. Then there’s a huge rush forward until we arrive at a crystalline pause right at the end.

This is also remarkable. Anybody interested in pace as it relates to plot might want to take a look at this very short novel and consider what Cherryh is doing to achieve a leisurely feel for two-thirds of the story at least, then a rushed feeling for most of the rest. And also, does that work? For me, as a kid, not really. I didn’t remember the fast part at the end. Other readers are likely to be bored to tears by the early part, then cheer their way through the latter third.

Maybe because I’m older (a lot older, sigh) or maybe because of the audio format, I appreciated the whole story much more this time than I did when I first read it. Oh, let me just look: when did this book first get published? Ah, 1985. I probably read it that year. I wasn’t as young I thought — I was in high school.

What is Cuckoo’s Egg leading to, for Cherryh?

As a huge CJC fan and CJC completest, I’ve read almost everything Cherryh has ever written, almost all several to many times. Yes, I hated the Russian trilogy and didn’t read the whole thing. But other than that, I’ve read all her books at least several times each. A lot, I’ve read four or five or six times. Or more. (I really like re-reading books! That’s probably why I like audiobooks best for favorite books I’ve already read several times.)

It’s interesting listening to Cuckoo’s Egg. Listening to a book rather than reading it slows it down and makes it easy to notice things I never noticed before. Here’s what I noticed:

Wow, is Cuckoo’s Egg like Paladin. The slow pace with just two characters, one a teacher and one a student, is very similar. I apparently like this setup because I liked it a lot in both these novels, even though the novels are different in every other way.

Wow, is Cuckoo’s Egg like the Faded Sun trilogy. The thing where one human gets isolated in an alien culture and then absorbed into that culture? There it is. Again, the alien culture is actually not very different from a human culture. Distinctive, yes. But psychologically not that much of a stretch.

Wow is Cuckoo’s Egg a precursor of the Foreigner series, but in microscopic miniature. I really never thought of that before. That’s because Thorn is the only human on the shonun world from beginning to end, whereas Bren stands between the atevi and a human population. But, if Cherryh had continued with Cuckoo’s Egg, making that the first book of a series — which I don’t think she should have done; this story stands best alone, in my opinion — but if she HAD gone on with it, then I think she would have written a different version of the Foreigner series, starting ten years earlier.

The atevi are a lot more different from humans, psychologically. It really would have been a different series. But super interesting. It’s fascinating to think where she might have gone with that, if she’d done it.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Remarkable Novels: Cuckoo’s Egg by CJC appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Poetry Thursday: Keats

Here’s a sonnet that is perhaps less well known than some. I found it by googling “great sonnets that should be better known” or something like that. Here it is:

Blue! ‘Tis the life of heaven, – the domain
Of Cynthia, – the wide palace of the sun, –
The tent of Hesperus and all his train, –
The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey and dun.
Blue! ‘Tis the life of waters–ocean
And all its vassal streams: pools numberless
May rage, and foam, and fret, but never can
Subside if not to dark-blue nativeness.
Blue! gentle cousin of the forest green,
Married to green in all the sweetest flowers,
Forget-me-not, – the blue-bell, – and, that queen
Of secrecy, the violet: what strange powers
Hast thou, as a mere shadow! But how great,
When in an Eye thou art alive with fate!

I love the joy that pervades this poem. I feel like Keats must have enjoyed writing it, that he was gazing at the sky and flicking out vivid words without, perhaps, trying too hard. I might be right: this post here describes the background of the poem. This post is short and well worth reading and I encourage you to click through if you have a moment, then re-read the sonnet.

Here’s another by Keats, perhaps quietly warm than joyful, but beautiful and, if you’re in the northern hemisphere, appropriate for this time of year:

Ode to Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cell.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Poetry Thursday: Keats appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Problems in UF Worldbuilding

Here’s an interesting post at a new-to-me website called Mythcreants: Five Common Problems in Urban Fantasy Worldbuilding

My first impression of Mythcreants is positive, not just because the name is entertaining, but because the posts are long and interesting rather than the extremely short, facile posts that we see all over the place. Those short-and-shallow posts annoy me a lot. They’re like fake posts. Here, have a post about problems in UF worldbuilding in 350 words with a cute picture! It’s like, why even bother? So it’s nice to stumble across a new website that puts more into its posts than that.

So, what ARE five common problems in UF worldbuilding? I wonder if, when building the Black Dog world, I tripped over anything the author of this post would find problematic?

Right up front I see I avoided a problem — the unbelievability of The Masquerade. Yes, that’s a problem, and one of the worst examples I can think of offhand is the ridiculous masquerade in Ilona Andrews’ Innkeeper series, where in the first books, normal people just about trip over evidence of the secret stuff going on over and over. The reader is supposed to believe that somehow everything weird has been hidden for … how long, now? Really?

Now, I love Ilona Andrews, and imo the Innkeeper world is not one you’re supposed to take too seriously. But the silliness of the worldbuilding is why I quit reading that particular series. I mean, I think it’s purposeful silliness, and for readers who like that, it’s really well done, but it’s a little over to top. I like all their other series a lot better.

Anyway, I think I handled that just fine: a single comprehensive supernatural explanation for why no one normal could notice the supernatural stuff in the world, and when the miasma finally failed, it failed completely and the masquerade ended at once.

None of that counts as one of the five problems. The Mythcreants post just says readers have to go alone with the masquerade, which is sometimes true, I suppose. Then they go on to what they think are real problems.

1) Ordinary humans are boring.

I think I pretty much dodged that one too, because I enjoyed building Miguel up into a primary protagonist. I hope readers like him as much as I do. He sure was fun to write in Copper Mountain, when it becomes clear that being brilliant does not cure all ills.

But this point makes me think of a UF vampire series that I just could not keep reading. This wasn’t only because the human characters were all boring, but they totally were, in a particularly obtrusive and annoying way. This is JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series, which I see is up to 23 books now, the most recent of which is scheduled for release next year. I see they’re still picking up high star ratings and lots of reviews. I can’t remember when I quit reading them, but a long time ago. There were two reasons. No, three.

First, all the cool characters are vampires. If a human character is in the least danger of becoming interesting or important, he or she ALWAYS turns out to REALLY be a vampire, because humans need not apply to the Cool Kids Club, apparently.

When you have a superpowered race mingling with ordinary people, that should provide a fantastic source of conflict and tension: how can ordinary people cope even though they are not magic / superstrong / immortal / whatever. Go! Write! But Ward doesn’t do that at all. Instead, Ward’s books give the impression that she thinks ordinary humans are too boring to bother writing about. Her books are therefore Exhibit A for this type of failure.

As a side note, my second problem with that series is that the vampires, who are the main characters, and whose enemies are the total epitome of evil, have a culture that is so horrible that I sort of found myself wondering if maybe it wouldn’t be just as well if the demons won and exterminated the vampires. Every single thing that ever gets revealed about the vampire culture — the horrible way they treat females; the vicious brutality with which they “train” “soldiers,” the revolting way they have happy! slave! servitors! who are delighted to do menial labor for them, I mean, it goes on and on. My third problem was verbiage blot. The books kept getting longer, but not because there was more story. I mean, I love long books, and I don’t mind a slow pace, but I had the impression the editor just quit saying, “How about trimming 60,000 words?” because Ward got too successful for her editor to care.

Having said all that, I did like the first several. None of the stuff I disliked became apparent for quite a while.

Anyway, what is the second problem identified by the linked post?

2) Vampires have a curfew.

Wait, why is that a problem? That’s totally standard and expected!

Oh, the post is arguing that many authors fail to justify vampires not being destroyed. If these factions are in open conflict, then all the opposition needs to do is attack during the day, and the vampires can’t fight back. 

Well, I guess, but I think lots of authors handle that just fine. In fact, one obvious way to handle that is to avoid “factions that are in open conflict.” Boom, now there are lots of ways to avoid the instant destruction of vampires.

What’s another potential problem?

3) Generically aristocratic fae.

That’s an interesting one!

Unfortunately, it’s easy for fae to come across as little more than feudal humans, with dukes, knights, and crowns, oh my. There’s little to differentiate the kindly ones from a medieval French court, except that the fae are a little meaner and presumably have fewer Viking raids to deal with. 

That did make me chuckle.

For hard-to-understand nonhuman fae, I really like the winter fae of Spinning Silver. Here’s my review. Honestly, I admired that book tremendously, though it doesn’t come close to my favorite of Novik’s, which is the Scholomance trilogy, of course, and here are my comments about what I would argue is one of the very best fantasy trilogies ever written. However, no fae in that, of course, while the fae in Spinning Silver are wonderfully nonhuman and not at all like the medieval French court, or more to the point, the Russian court featured in the story.

4) Swiss Army Mages

Ha ha ha! That’s a great term for an annoying phenomenon! This is exactly why I didn’t like Dr. Strange when I was a kid — always a new Amulet of This or Crystal of That, whatever he needed was always available, in infinite variations. I’m sure that’s what this post is talking about.

The issue is that in this scenario, most supernatural creatures are limited to a narrow set of powers, while mages can do almost anything. The number of spells is far too high for a novel to list them all, even if readers could retain such an info dump. Once a few powerful spells are introduced, it raises the possibility of countless other spells that simply haven’t been mentioned yet. …

Then we have suggestions about how to balance mage powers against the supernatural abilities of vampires and werewolves and whoever, so that the mages don’t have too overwhelming an advantage.

5. No Reason for Conflict

Not keen on this. This isn’t a criticism that’s at the same level as the other four. This is a storytelling problem, not a worldbuilding problem.

Well, this post disagrees with me about that:

There’s a problem: most urban fantasy factions have no reason for conflict. In real life, group conflicts are typically over tangible things, be they land, money, minerals, water, etc. Ideology and personality also play a role, but they aren’t usually enough to create a confrontation if neither side has something the other wants. …

That’s because I’m thinking of conflict between specific characters much more than trying to come up for reasons resource limitations would create tension between vampires and werewolves, or whoever. However, there’s a super obvious solution: the supernatural creatures all need the same resource: human people. It’s not about iron or access to a good harbor or whatever. It’s about who gets to hold power over humans and exploit human populations. There you go, problem solved.

This post is offering solutions to everything. I wonder if they suggest this solution. … Nope. Well, I really did think that was pretty obvious. No need to come up with the Golden McGuffin that both vampires and werewolves need if they both need or want to rule human populations, but for different reasons and to different ends, as (for example) in the Black Dog world.

I do like Mythcreants and will definitely be checking out their other articles and posts.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Problems in UF Worldbuilding appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.