Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 338

Perhaps unsurprising: yet another installment in the 50 Shades world

I guess this was inevitable? It’s apparently a recap of the story from Christian Gray’s point of view.

The reason I mention it is that Book Riot has an entertaining collection of bloggers and other readers responding to the news of the new book. You can check that list out here.

My personal favorite:

Over at Jezebel, Jia Tolentino wonders if Grey inaugurates a new and entirely unnecessary subgenre:

It’s just absolutely wonderful news for literature lovers all around, setting a precedent that I hope will bring us Lean In from the perspective of a middle-class woman, The Fault in Our Stars from the POV of “our stars,” and Unbroken in the voice of Seabiscuit.

Anybody have a Kobo reader?

If you have a Kobo reader, I have been offered a set of codes for discounts for Kobo titles.

Most are for 20% off.

Comment if you’re interested and I’ll hook you up with the generous offeree.

Books about communicating with aliens

So, Martha Wells has a post up at tor.com: Five books about exploring and communicating with alien cultures.

What a great topic, right? I mean, it instantly catches MY eye, for sure.

Martha Wells picked these five titles:

Leviathan’s Deep by Jayge Carr. I read this several times years ago. I really loved it and I’m sure I still have my copy. Now I really want to re-read it. It’s from the pov of one of the aliens — their world has more or less been conquered by humans, and we see everything from their perspective. Carr flipped gender roles for her species, but imo she did cheat a bit. But maybe not. Anyway, well worth checking it out if you’ve never read it and you’re into alien species and the interface between humans and aliens.

Survivor by Octavia E Butler. If I remember correctly, this was not one of Butler’s personal favorites and she refused to re-issue it. On the other hand, I loved it and read it to pieces. It has a problematical relationship in it . . . but this is Butler, who managed to pull it off. At least imo.

The Pride of Chanur by CJC. Of course. You could hardly leave that one out of a list of this kind. Space opera adventure! With complicated politics and some of the best aliens anywhere in SF.

Hellspark by Janet Kagan. Yes! So pleased to see this book get a mention. As a murder mystery, not the very most mysterious imo. But as a novel about communication and the interface between humans and aliens, it’s hard to beat. Two different kinds of aliens, if you count the AI, who is super charming and one of the best characters in the story.

Uhura’s Song by Janet Kagan. I agree again. This is a wonderful Star Trek tie-in novel, one of my very very favorites, and the communication-with-aliens aspect is certainly central to the story. Not only does Kagan do a good job capturing the feel of the standard Star Trek characters, which I could never do, but she also introduces a wonderful new one-off character just for this book.

I should mention that Kagan’s third book — these were unfortunately the only three she ever wrote as far as I know — Mirabile, a set of linked novellas, is also a lot of fun, although only sorta-kinda believable from a genetics standpoint.

Anyway, then Wells finishes off with:

A Judgment of Dragons by Phyllis Gotlieb. I have never read this one, but considering the company it’s keeping, plainly I must rectify this immediately. It’s not available on Kindle, but it is in paper, so whatever, that’s my TBR shelves are for.

Okay! Moving on from Wells’ suggestions, let me add to this list:

Cuckoo’s Egg by CJC. If you are interested in alien species and human-alien communication, this is a must-read standalone short novel.

The Faded Sun trilogy by CJC. I’m not so sure mri are THAT alien. One might have written that book and made them a human population and I’m not sure it would have changed anything much. But, still, they’re supposed to be alien. Plus there are the regul.

The Foreigner series by CJC. Hello? Communication? Between humans and aliens? This is that.

Okay, okay, who besides Cherryh? How about —

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Breq is not human. This series counts.

Chess With a Dragon by David Gerrold. It’s been a long time since I read it, but I remember liking this book quite a bit.

Spacepaw by Gordon Dickson. I was never a huge Dickson fan, but I liked this one and thought the aliens — bear-like — were surprisingly well done.

Startide Rising by David Brin. Dolphins are alien.

Okay, anybody else have one I missed? Toss it in the comments, please!

May was a good month —

I do enjoy May usually. Rain — usually. (Certainly this year, good heavens, it can stop for a week or two now, please.) Not too hot. (Very much not too hot this year; it was 55 degrees this morning. Amazing. Brr.)

Flowers, of course!

I do not recommend that you actually teach a young dog the sit-stay while simultaneously trying to take pictures, but Ish did fine. Very, very cute, isn’t he? I saw the roses had just hit their stride and instantly started bringing out dogs and taking pictures, and this was my favorite.

May reading: hardly anything, at least not in the past two weeks. Well, 2/3 of the first GOLDEN AGE book by John Wright. I sort of set that aside and now I’m skimming through David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, which is a series I reach for when I need to be actively working on a WIP of my own and thus do not want to read anything new-to-me and very engaging, ie, I have not read UPROOTED, and damn, I sure want to. I’m jealous of all of you who have. I will take my Kindle with me this weekend and probably not my laptop, so who knows, maybe I’ll read UPROOTED soon.

I’m going to take a break when the second set of Raksura novellas arrives, for sure. Tomorrow, I think, is the official release date. I’m familiar with that world and those characters, so it will be easy and not too distracting to pick it up (I am telling myself). Anyway, priorities! I really want to read it, and I will.

May crafts projects: I am not a crafts kind of person, but I have just finished putting together a photo album for my parents’ golden wedding anniversary, which we are celebrating this weekend.

I have learned lots of things from this project, which I will now share with you in the form of helpful advice:

TAKE PICTURES NOW AND THEN, people. Of yourselves, not just of your kids. It will make your children’s job easier when they put together YOUR GWA photo album.

Moms should not be the ones taking ALL the pictures. That makes it hard to find good pictures OF mom.

If you get a photo album with rice paper in between the pages, you may find that it is practically impossible to avoid occasionally gluing the rice paper to the actual page. Don’t worry! Occasional tiny holes in the rice paper just lend your album a charming hand-made aura. (I tell myself.)

Your parents were once younger than you. Amazing, I know.

The world has changed quite a bit since 1965.

May writing:

My WIP (THE WHITE ROAD OF THE MOON) is now 170 pp, which means I added 70 pp to it over the month. That’s . . . not as good as I wanted to do, considering that I wasn’t working in the latter half of May. (Summer classes just started today.) But it’s not actually terrible. When you add the 60 pp Black Dog novella that I also wrote, shoot, it makes the past couple of weeks look excellent as far as writing productivity goes.

I’m now switching to a deliberate page-per-day minimum for the rest of June. I really want to have this manuscript finished by the end of July. Sooner would be great. I figured out a plot point this morning, so that will help with the next little bit. I am rather cluttered up with characters and I’m not 100% sure what to do with them all. Every now and then in the past I have added an important secondary character, then found that the character never does anything important, realized he or she never will, and have had to take the character out. This is a pain but thankfully the Find command lets me make sure the character has in fact been entirely removed from the manuscript.

You know, that reminds me of THE KEEPER OF THE MIST. The copy editor was all like, This gold coin? Where did it come from? Why is it here? Because I had an important gold coin in an earlier draft and that sneaky little coin was still there in one scene only of the final draft. I wound up having a neat idea, adding a sentence of foreshadowing in the first chapter, and then putting that coin to good use after all right at the end.

Well, well, you never know. Or at least, I don’t.

Anyway, gotta work out some important role for four important secondary characters in THE WHITE ROAD (so far). But, as I say, I think I know what I’m going to be doing for the next chapter or so. And I do know the ultimate ending. I think.

So, yep, generally speaking May was a good month. Especially with the self-publication stuff. Thanks to everyone who’s already written a review. I see there are a handful of reviews at Goodreads and one at Amazon. Not bad for just a couple of days! Thanks!

PURE MAGIC update

Okay, CreateSpace was all right. Not too super complicated, I think. I hope! I really hope, because I just ordered a proof copy.

Things I had to fiddle with a good bit: the margins. It kept putting them in less generously than I expected so I would have to go and change them and then upload the file again. Then for some reason the margins changed everywhere but on page 51, so I had to change that. Then it didn’t like where the page numbers were, so I took out the page numbers and put them back in, this time centered instead of in the corner.

CreateSpace told me I had three or four typos, but they were all just Spanish words, so I’m not sure why it chose those particular words to highlight? There are a lot more Spanish words than that in there. Also, I hope there really, really aren’t any typos at all left, but I would be a bit startled if that turns out to be the case.

Then I had to go change all the page numbers in the table of contents, because their conversion process didn’t renumber the table of contents when I messed with the margins.

It turned out to be 348 pp but that does include a few pages in the back for the endmatter and so on. I made it 5 x 8 to match BLACK DOG.

Finally I ordered a printed proof copy. I must say, I bet the printed proof copies are a major way that CreateSpace turns a profit, because they charge $28 for a copy (counting S & H). That seems awfully high, but if I take a look at it and find the margins are way too generous now or something, I guess I will be glad I checked. I am supposed to have a copy delivered around June 8th. I hope it looks perfect!

Meanwhile, it is pretty exciting to finally have the ebooks out. Changing to single-spaced looked hideous on the computer but turned out to do the trick as far as solving the double-spaced-only issue that some people experienced with the Black Dog Short Stories, especially with paperwhite kindles. It turned out that the only way to get appropriate paragraphing was to paragraph via the Page Layout menu. This wasn’t too awful; I “found” all tabs and “replaced” them with nothing. Poof, the Page Layout menu paragraphed everything instantly with attractive, short indents. I scanned through the whole manuscript just to make sure it looked good, and it did. I also bought a kindle copy and looked at the first chapter on my kindle and it looked good there, too. So: learning experience! But I think it’s good.

I now have a file of tips, because I never again want to fight with trying to figure out how to put in a live table of contents or how to get the indents to look right. I know myself well enough to be certain I will forget those kinds of things before I need to do it again!

Meanwhile … I hope you all enjoy PURE MAGIC! And I hope the paper copies will be available soon.

PURE MAGIC, at last

Okay! All the remaining problems have been sorted out . . . I think . . . and I hit Go on Amazon and Draft to Digital. So PURE MAGIC should be appearing everywhere in the next day or so, in ebook form.

Tomorrow: Figuring out CreateSpace. Hopefully I will get that all in order in one fell swoop tomorrow. Otherwise, I sure hope it will all be done at least by Monday.

Whew!

Patience, please

Your continuing patience, though involuntary I suppose, is appreciated. I now have the cover, but it is refusing to load. Also, although I’m now also paragraphing exactly as the Kindle people suggest, the paragraph indents are all wrong in the Kindle preview for no obvious reason. I’m sure the helpful Kindle customer service people will figure this out soon.

In the meantime, I thought you might like to see the various versions of the cover.

The extremely dark first version:

The second version, with more light:

The version with people added:

The front cover of the paperback, with the title:

The back cover copy:

Following the defeat of their deadly enemy Malvern Vonhausel, Alejandro and Natividad – and their human brother, Miguel – have begun to feel that, against all odds, they may have succeeded in making a new home for themselves among the black dogs of Dimilioc. But keeping that home safe involves challenges they never anticipated. It’s bad enough that stray black dogs, taking advantage of Dimilioc’s weakness, are appearing everywhere; much worse are powerful rivals who would tear Dimilioc down entirely and claim Dimilioc’s authority for their own.

Then Dimilioc is shaken by the arrival of someone unexpected: Justin, who is both Pure and male; who is at once wholly ignorant of traditional Pure magic, yet uniquely talented; and who becomes immediately both a source of contention within and a potential asset for all of Dimilioc.

Then, as it becomes clear that Dimilioc has an unexpected and much more serious enemy, Natividad decides that, whatever the cost, both she and Dimilioc are going to need every asset they can gather. If Dimilioc black dogs won’t risk Natividad in battle, if Justin won’t help Dimilioc, if everyone won’t pull together voluntarily – then Natividad has a plan …

UPROOTED by Naomi Novik

So, kinda in honor of just picking up Uprooted . . . which should be arriving in thirty seconds or so given the magic of electrons . . . let me draw you to this guest post by Naomi Novik over at Fantasy Book Café.

The post is about flow; that is: “My very favorite thing about writing — about almost any creative work — is the wonderful experience of falling into flow. You know flow if you’ve experienced it, that glorious mental state where you find yourself sailing through words or code or art almost effortlessly, often with an underlying sense of sure confidence that your work is going well, with no desire to stop working.”

Novik then adds, “Oddly, it’s not that work done in a state of flow is actually better — in my experience, the parts that come easy are indistinguishable from the parts that come hard. It’s that working in a state of flow is infinitely more fun.”

Now, I know that I am always saying that Everybody’s Experience is Different. But THIS IS SO TRUE. It is almost funny how much I can dislike working on some books/parts of books versus how compulsive working on other books/parts of books can be. Yes, I have been in both states for long periods. No, the various books are not distinguishable on the basis of whether I loved working on them or not.

What’s also interesting is that for Novik, interruptions can apparently kill flow. For me, not so much. I guess for me it more depends on whether I’m living in the story or not. Many books switch partway through: the first quarter is easy, the next half is murder, the back quarter is compulsive. But there’s so been so much variance now that I don’t count on that pattern.

I do disagree with this bit: “I don’t really believe in writer’s block in the sense of a state you get stuck in where words just won’t come.” I like the idea that if you’re used to writing in the flow, you might mistake your first slog-through-it experience as writer’s block. But I think writers who declare that there’s no such thing as real writer’s block must not live with clinical depression. (Neither do I, which is a blessing. But I’m convinced that clinical depression is responsible for the phenomenon that some writers experience as writer’s block, and I think this confusion of terminology and experience is not helpful.)

Anyway, if you, like me, have been looking forward to Uprotted *sigh* Uprooted (as more than one of you noticed) more than just about any book due out this year, then if you have a minute you can click through and read the whole thing.

Artistic invention: gryphons

Via a link from tor.com, this tumblr: gryphons made by combining various species and breeds of cats with various species of birds. The most peculiar is the ostrich-tiger thing. My favorite is the peregrine-cheetah, which almost looks like it could work:

Pastoral fantasy

Here’s a nice post at Book View Café by Sherwood Smith.

Anyway, for whatever reasons, pastoral fantasies largely went out of fashion, at least I hadn’t seen any until this month when two came out within days of each other. They contained a lot of similar elements, they were not set in an idyllic England, and they are very, very not twee.

These are Crimson Bound, by Rosamund Hodge, and Uprooted by Naomi Novik.

Before I talk about them, I want to address what I think pastoral fantasy is. This is an old form that resurfaces every few generations, in art, poetry, and fairy tales. It’s not always twee or cute, though there is an emphasis on natural beauties. But pastoral fantasy can explore beauty that is dangerous, inspiring but unsettling, powerful and even subversive because it has not been neatly clipped into box hedges, cemented over, and civilized into an urban pretense of order.

Let me tell you, I am so looking forward to Uprooted. Even though I see that Sherwood says it flirts with horror and has a “Die Hard” body count. Good to know, I guess; now I won’t be taken aback.

For me, Cruel Beauty was okay but not out-of-this-world. I liked “Gilded Ashes” better. But I’ve been hearing good things about Crimson Bound. We’ll see.

Anyway, given this post’s take on pastoral fantasy, I hereby declare that The City in the Lake totally qualifies. Enchanted forest, check. Humans not the most powerful force, definitely check. Quick take on this concept of “pastoral fantasy” — I wonder how thoroughly it intersects with my conception of “fairy tale style fantasy”.