Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 36

Poetry Thursday

Here’s a poem that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, with thanks to Dame Eleanor, who mentioned this poet in a comment. I’ve read others of hers, but not this one:

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

***

As I’m working on Silver Circle, and Justin’s got that thing with math, so a title combining beauty and Euclid caught my eye. I do like math, of course, though I’m definitely someone who has but far away heard the brush of Beauty’s sandal on stone, since I’m not by any means a mathematician.

You know who was a mathematician? Archimedes. And you know where the very best presentation of Archimedes is in all of fiction? In Bradshaw’s The Sand-Reckoner. You’ve all read this book, right? I mean, you have, yes?

No?

Well, to appreciate the beauty of math, here, have Archimedes, who loves math and you can see the beauty of geometry through his eyes.

Also, Bradshaw does such an amazing job writing a mathematical genius, thus demonstrating how to write genius characters when you aren’t a genius, so that’s well worth admiring.

Also, it’s just a fun story:

The young scholar Archimedes has just had the best three years of his life at Ptolemy’s Museum at Alexandria. To be able to talk and think all day, every day, sharing ideas and information with the world’s greatest minds, is heaven to Archimedes. But heaven must be forsaken when he learns that his father is ailing, and his home city of Syracuse is at war with the Romans. … Reluctant but resigned, Archimedes takes himself home to find a job building catapults as a royal engineer. Though Syracuse is no Alexandria, Archimedes also finds that life at home isn’t as boring or confining as he originally thought. He finds fame and loss, love and war, wealth and betrayal — none of which affects him nearly as much as the divine beauty of mathematics.

The betrayal mentioned above does not really count as a betrayal. I mention that in case the word “betrayal” is an extreme turnoff to any of you when you see it in a book description. It is for me. Even if you feel the same way, seriously, don’t worry about that here. Actually, you don’t really have to worry about the loss or war either. There are sad things in this story, but not, I think, *too* sad. Anybody who’s read it can chime in.

***

Now that we’re through July, let me just add, RIHASI blew MARAG away when it came to pages read in one month. It’s not quite twice as many, but nearly. Also, RIHASI has now, in one month, easily paid for its cover, for its audiobook, for the entire series promo I ran at the beginning of the month, with a good bit left over. Not to mention the stellar reviews, which make me very happy! Thanks again to everyone who’s taken the time to post a review!

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Recent Reading: The House of the Red Balconies by AJ Demas

Okay, so AJ Demas is the author of the really excellent One Night in Boukos, and, as Alice Degan, the even more excellent and completely different From All False Doctrine.

This, The House of the Red Balconies, is, as you see, from the Demas name. That means it’s set in a sort of alternate Classical Greece/Persia type of world. They basically read like historicals. There’s no magic, so “alternate world Classical Greece/Persia historicals” is probably the best description of this sub-sub-sub-genre.

Like all the Demas titles, this is a romance; like most, it’s m/m romance. The House of the Red Balconies offers exactly what we’ve come to expect from AJ Demas: good writing, good plotting, sympathetic and well-drawn characters, great worldbuilding, enough depth that it’s not pure fluff. I liked Red Balconies quite a bit, but what I want to mention here is something that … I’m not completely sure was a thing in the other books? Or not nearly as much so.

This is: secondary characters who are first drawn as pretty unsympathetic, but then are gently nudged toward the sympathetic end of the spectrum. This reminds me a lot of Barbara Hambly, except that when Hambly does this, it’s usually in one fast moment. She sets you up to think of a secondary character as unpleasant and unsympathetic and then in one or a few sentences, completely reorients your opinion. This was a lot more subtle, which is why I say it’s a kind of gentle nudging.

In Red Balconies, there are two secondary characters who are handled differently, but both fit this pattern.

The first is Governor Loukianos. He is ineffectual. He doesn’t take his job seriously. He is impractical. He is shallow. He is passive. And yet … and yet …

This is a character I would ordinarily not like at all. It’s not that Demas makes him not be the way he is. It’s that Loukianos tends to rise to the occasion and do better than the protagonist really thinks he will (or than the reader might think he will). Right at the end, when the primary protagonist basically tells him firmly to straighten up and fly right, Loukianos is at a point when he can and does listen.

The second is the mistress of the House of the Red Balconies. This house is one of half a dozen or so houses of … um … medium repute? Not really ill repute. They’re houses where “companions” live, and the companions hang out with visitors and make themselves good company, and yes, this can extend to sexual relationships, but the actual companionship does seem to be primary a lot of the time. Some of the companions are indentured to the houses, others are free. The mistress of the house in question seems like just the sort of character I most dislike — petty, selfish, none too bright, mean-spirited. But, the thing is, she isn’t. She is in fact none too bright, which is why she comes off like that, but she isn’t actually as petty and not nearly as mean-spirited as she sometimes seems.

This is really unusual! Both these secondary characters are unusual! They could so easily have turned into such complete cliches, but they didn’t! Both of them were better people than they seemed at first, and they both had character arcs that led upward, and that was not just an interesting way to handle them (looking at the craft of the story), it was also a nice way to handle them (looking at the story as a reader). It’s not like every single character in this story is nicer than he or she seems, because no. But it is true that only one unpleasant guy is actually no-fooling unpleasant. Every other character is a pretty nice person — or gets nicer as the story progresses. That is unusual, to take minor characters who are presented fairly negatively and then gently nudge them along until they turn out to actually be okay after all. I appreciated that a lot.

Also!

In the back of Red Balconies is a reference to an upcoming story called Lion and Snake, which is described thus:

In a walled fortress with no way in or out lives the beaten hero of the Western Mountains, imprisoned by his enemies. Up the mountain one spring comes a young man to be his bride—and to kill him. But nothing goes according to plan.

That’s a really good two-sentence teaser. I mean, for me. This sounds like a Beauty and the Beast setup, which is almost guaranteed to make me sit up and take notice.

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Wow, I’m glad I learned English as a baby

Check this out. It’s an explanation of how to pronounce past tense verbs, such as “called” versus “played” vs “walked” versus “visited.”

I literally never noticed how differently -ed is pronounced for different verbs. Not only that, but when I think carefully and touch my throat and all that, I still have trouble telling whether consonants are voiced or unvoiced — though this guy here picks verbs that are clear in this regard.

Wow, I’m glad I don’t have to memorize rules like this in order to pronounce past-tense verbs.

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Update: aargh, so close and yet not there

Okay, so

— YES, I’m over 300,000 words now.

— NO, I’m not even in the epilogue yet.

— YES, I’m in the climactic scenes.

— NO, that doesn’t mean I’m in the penultimate chapter, because yesterday, as I hit the beginning of the first climactic scene, I broke that chapter up. The plot climax appears in two chapters, and I thought the first of those would be a braided-viewpoint chapter, which I sometimes do when it seems reasonable. And that chapter will indeed involved braided viewpoints to some degree, but not as much as I thought, because (not entirely to my surprise), I’m breaking out parts of that chapter and shifting them into different chapters instead. This should produce a smoother build toward the climax and a simpler penultimate chapter.

— YES, that means the number of chapters has increased. It’s now 56 chapters, plus the epilogue. I have two and a half chapters to write, plus the epilogue. But one of chapters is getting shorter as I remove pieces from it and move them earlier or set them into different chapters.

— NO, there’s no chance I’ll finish this book before August.

— YES, it should be finished SOON after the beginning of August.

My real and honest prediction is that I will be finished with the draft sometime in the first half of August and finished with primary revision by the end of August. That means I’m fundamentally giving myself no more than two or three weeks for primary revision, and I do think that will be enough, because I’ve been doing revision as I go. There’s still going to be a lot to do, but I think it will be fiddly and annoying, not huge and time-consuming.

I’m close enough to the end that the niggling awareness of waiting revision was starting to bother me; to wit, the awareness that a particular important plot element was set up with a pure coincidence right in the beginning. This was bothering me more and more, so this past weekend, I finally called Craig and said, “Hey, this important plot element depends purely on this giant coincidence and this is unbearable, please come up with some reason this should actually happen.” And three minutes later, I had a much better idea of how to set that up. This is why it’s helpful to have one person to bounce problems off of, even though AS A RULE, I don’t like to show partial manuscripts to anyone or discuss unfinished stories.

Primary revision will include these basic jobs:

A) Clarify that early plot setup. I made a note about it at the very beginning of the story.

B) Add date stamps at the beginning of each chapter. Some may disappear again later, but I’m going to need them there so I can confirm that everything happens in sequence rather than requiring the intervention of time travel.

C) Read through from the very top, removing the hundreds of boldfaced words and lines as I go. Every single boldfaced word and line means: something to check, something to confirm, something to translate into a different language. To take one random example, the problem with a more or less contemporary setting is that if you’re driving from, say, Florida to New Mexico, states and cities actually exist and you have to be at reasonable places at reasonable times. Right now, there are places where the text says That City or something, meaning I will need to pull up a map and actually decide what city I’m talking about.

D) Fix up continuity. It’s astounding how many super important things occurred to me over the past week or two. SUPER IMPORTANT HUGE plot elements. Are these elements set up properly in the first, say, 750 pages of the story? They are going to have to be in the finished version and that means reading for that kind of continuity now. I will make a bulleted list of SUPER IMPORTANT HUGE plot elements, review that before I read through from the top, then go BACK through and make sure each of those plot elements is set up properly.

E) Cutting. Might as well. If I’m reading from front to back, that’s the time to revise sentences and trim. I’ve already done some cutting, and in fact there will also be some splicing where I previously cut whole scenes without a lot of consideration for stitching the surrounding scenes together.

That’s pretty much it, I think.

I’m VERY MUCH looking forward to TAKING A BREAK in September.

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Powerful Novels: Night Watch

So, ages and ages ago, I read The Colour of Magic, or part of it, I don’t remember. I thought it was clever-ish and mildly funny and I didn’t touch anything else by Terry Pratchett for a long, long time.

Then I picked up a paper copy of Night Watch at a book sale (or something, I don’t remember exactly where the copy came from, but I wasn’t going out of my way to buy anything by Pratchett). Well, let me tell you, Night Watch is not clever-ish and mildly funny. That is not remotely a sensible take on this book, which comes, as I’m sure you all know, fairly late in the Vimes series.

Let me see, it’s

Guards! Guards! — which is not that great in my opinion, but is worth reading in order to get into the Vimes series. Oh, I see this one was written back in 1989 — twenty-two years earlier than the last of the Vimes series. This is the one in which Vimes pulls himself together and becomes can-do character we all love later.

Men at Arms

Feet of Clay

Jingo

The Fifth Elephant

Night Watch

Thud!

Snuff

I think that’s it for the actual Sam Vimes series, though of course Vimes appears as a minor character in quite a few others.

Also, of course, Pratchett was writing a lot of other books in there as well, and at some point as his skill and wit sharpened and grew more pointed, he quit writing fantasy novels and started writing social satire disguised as fantasy novels, and then the disguise got thinner as the satire got more brilliant, and Night Watch is somewhere near the top. It’s still my personal favorite, though I will grant, I haven’t actually read all of Pratchett’s books. But Sam Vimes is my favorite character. Yes, I like Death a lot too, and Reaper Man is another favorite of mine and would have done just as well for this post. Who will care for the corn if not for the reaper?

Also, Going Postal and Making Money are both brilliant, and I’m re-reading them now, in fact, because writing this post made me want to reread a lot of Pratchett’s books. Although I like the protagonist in those books, I must say, Vetinari is the one I REALLY love. You see, I believe in freedom, Mr. Lipwig. Not many people do, although they will, of course, protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be completely without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based. ….The thing about angels, Mr. Lipwig, is you only ever get one.

But back, with some difficulty, to Night Watch.

There’s lots to like about it, including a glimpse of Vetinari both as a young assassin just starting out and as the Patrician at the height of his power. I do love Vetinari. I honesty don’t know how often I’ve read some fantasy novel or other and thought, “You know, if Vetinari were in charge, this so-called intractable problem would be solved by tomorrow. Morning. Early.”

In my earlier post about powerful fiction, I said that power comes from the confidence of the author, the author’s belief that they are saying something true and something that is worth saying.  In another recent post, I pointed to lines in the Tuyo novels that have picked up a handful (sometimes a generous handful) of highlights and noted that most of these lines comprise some kind of advice. This, I will just note, means that readers think this advice is good advice – that it’s true. Which it is.

Terry Pratchett definitely has lines like this all over the place. My copy of Night Watch is paper, so I can’t check popular highlights, but here’s a line I would personally highlight:

“So what people do matters! What they do is important! The multiverse isn’t infinite and people’s choices are far more vital than they think!”

Throwing this into the story, with exclamation points, in the midst of other dialogue, doesn’t mean Pratchett is just tossing these lines into the story as a way of getting the plot lined up. He put that in because he thought it was true, and it is true, and it’s also important, and that’s why that conversation is important to the reader as well as to Vimes.

Here’s another, a comment in Vimes’ point of view, when he’s thinking about Swing — you may recall, Swing is the head of, basically, the secret police:

Vimes wasn’t against intellect. … Swing, though, started in the wrong place. He didn’t look around, and watch, and learn, and then say, “This is how people are, how do we deal with it?” No, he sat and thought “This is how people ought to be, how do we change them?”

And then Pratchett savagely takes apart this rather too common desire of the intellectual to change society by changing human nature, by explicitly identifying this desire and then handing it to an extra-creepy sociopathic torturer. It’s not a coincidence that Swing has that weird puppet-like way of moving and that even weirder way of putting pauses in strange places when speaking. Swing is maybe the single most overtly weird character in the whole series, which is saying a lot, but he’s right up there. He’s so weird he doesn’t seem quite human, and is that pure coincidence? No, it’s a way of amplifying just how completely antithetical Swing is to normal people and normal civilized behavior and normal ethics. And there he is, in charge of the secret police, which, wow, certainly shows Pratchett’s opinion of the people who appointed Swing and support him.

The story goes on and Vimes makes various crucial decisions and so do other people and we finally wind up back home, and, if you recall, Vimes visits those graves, with lilac blooming and sprigs of lilac here and there, and do you recall that Vetinari turns up? And for once does not completely understand exactly how to handle this encounter with Vimes. Here we get the most powerful passage in the novel:

“No,” said Vimes, coming to a halt under a lamp by the crypt entrance. “How dare you? How dare you! At this time! In this place! They did the job they didn’t have to do, and they died doing it, and you can’t give them anything! Do you understand? They fought for those who’d been abandoned, they fought for one another, and they were betrayed. Men like them always are. What good would a statue be? It’d just inspire new fools to believe they’re going to be heroes. Just let them be. Forever.”

Now, of course, I love real heroes and real heroism in fiction (and in real life), and I’m all in favor of encouraging young people to admire heroes because who else should they admire? There is that comment in the earlier post about whether truth in fiction always has to do with heroism, and no, probably not — EC pointed specifically to themes of choices and consequences, forgiveness, and redemption as other ways to bring power into a novel, not in the absence of heroism, necessarily, but without depending on the heroic arc to carry all the power. Nevertheless, heroism is certainly a common element in powerful fiction, because heroism is aspirational. That’s why I’m all in favor of underlining heroism in real life and in fiction both. But here we are, with Vimes passionately denouncing the idea of a statue.

Vimes himself is definitely, for sure, a hero. More than that, he does in fact do the job he has to do, in that time and in that place. I mean, that’s one big reason I love this novel and the biggest reason Vimes is my favorite of Pratchett’s protagonists. What we get in his passionate speech to Vetinari — a speech that Vetinari permits; he’s treating Vimes with kid gloves here — is, maybe, a denunciation of the betrayal of heroism. It’s definitely a paragraph that ought to make the reader pause and think about the whole concept of heroism. I think almost any reader would pause here. That’s not a scene anybody would rush through. It’s a scene that compels attention. That — making the reader pause, compelling attention, provoking thought — is all characteristic of powerful scenes and powerful writing.

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Poetry Thursday

Elaine T mentioned John Greenleaf Whittier, and actually I did remember a nice short poem by Whittier. I think this is one I encountered in high school. I should perhaps add that I always read most or all of the poetry included in any book we were required to buy for a class, not just the assigned poems, so I generally don’t remember which poems were assigned — only which I liked. I was unimpressed by super long unrhymed poems and skipped over those in favor of poems like this:

Telling the Bees

There is the place; right over the hill
   Runs the path I took;
You can see the gap in the old wall still,
   And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.

There is the house, with the gate red-barred,
   And the poplars tall;
And the barn’s brown length, and the cattle-yard,
   And the white horns tossing above the wall.

There are the beehives ranged in the sun;
   And down by the brink
Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o’errun,
   Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink.

A year has gone, as the tortoise goes,
   Heavy and slow;
And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows,
   And the same brook sings of a year ago.

There ‘s the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze;
   And the June sun warm
Tangles his wings of fire in the trees,
   Setting, as then, over Fernside farm.

I mind me how with a lover’s care
   From my Sunday coat
I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair,
   And cooled at the brookside my brow and throat.

Since we parted, a month had passed,—
   To love, a year;
Down through the beeches I looked at last
   On the little red gate and the well-sweep near.

I can see it all now,—the slantwise rain
   Of light through the leaves,
The sundown’s blaze on her window-pane,
   The bloom of her roses under the eaves.

Just the same as a month before,—
   The house and the trees,
The barn’s brown gable, the vine by the door,—
   Nothing changed but the hives of bees.

Before them, under the garden wall,
   Forward and back,
Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
   Draping each hive with a shred of black.

Trembling, I listened: the summer sun
   Had the chill of snow;
For I knew she was telling the bees of one
   Gone on the journey we all must go!

Then I said to myself, “My Mary weeps
   For the dead to-day:
Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps
   The fret and the pain of his age away.”

But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill
   With his cane to his chin,
The old man sat; and the chore-girl still
   Sung to the bees stealing out and in.

And the song she was singing ever since
   In my ear sounds on:—
“Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!
   Mistress Mary is dead and gone!”

***

This poem refers to a custom of telling the bees about important life events, particularly deaths, so the bees could join the household in mourning. I have no idea how widespread this custom really was, but apparently it was a real custom in various areas.

While on this topic, one of my favorite novels involving bees is Chalice by Robin McKinley. I think a lot of the story is pretty predictable, which only goes to show that you may really enjoy a story even if you can pretty much predict the important events. This is a warmly comforting story even though some fairly unpleasant things are going on.

I was trying to capture some aspects of the tone and the worldbuilding of Chalice when I wrote The Keeper of the Mist, and didn’t really succeed, I think. I got the sense of, how to put this. The sense of a place that is small and self-contained and surrounded by a much bigger and much more dangerous world. But my story went off in a completely different direction and didn’t wind up being especially warm and fuzzy. I do like it, it’s just not the story I set out to write.

No bees in my story, but I do have wyverns — though only glimpsed from afar.

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Nom de Plumes

I was a little startled to see this post:

Because why would that happen?

The post starts this way:

With the rise of AI authors, how do you prove you are a human author? Most authors prove their humanity with their names and photos. Your identity protects you from being called a bot writer. But what if you use a pen name? Will AI bring the age of pen names to an end? While pen names are going out of style, there are some reasons you still might consider using one. We will talk about seven reasons authors use pen names and if those reasons still make sense in an era where your verifiable humanity has become a marketing asset.

I’m baffled by this, actually. Is there anything — anything at all — that stops somebody from slapping a fake name and fake photo on AI-generated trash? How can a name and photo “prove” humanity? That makes no sense to me.

I think there are obvious reasons to use a pen name and in fact if I were starting over, way back in 2008, I would have said, “You know what, let’s go with initials and no first name. How about R K Neumeier or R H Neumeier or … what’s a good-looking, interesting letter? … How about R Z Neumeier, just to make people wonder what my middle name could be. (I don’t have a middle name, so that initial would in fact need to have been made up.)

You know how CJC threw an -h on her name to make it more interesting? Maybe R Z Neumeieh. (I’m kidding!) (But I’m kinda serious about the concept, though.)

But fine, what are the reasons this post mentions?

1) To stay anonymous and avoid consequences.

The author of post, Thomas Umstattd, means, the consequences of expressing unpopular opinions, eg, like Thomas Paine. He argues that anonymity is impossible so why bother. Personally, I think that seems odd. Perhaps someone only wants to stay anonymous for, say, ten years, and after that it doesn’t matter. I recall rather clearly how Janet Reid wrote A LOT about publishing and agents as “Miss Snark” for some years before she started writing the same kind of advice (but toned down) under her own name. There could easily be reasons to write anonymously. I’m not buying the uselessness of this reason.

2) To avoid reader bias.

Everyone knows that yes? Umstattd thinks readers aren’t very biased and wouldn’t care. I think he’s dead wrong about this, particularly for romance, but also across the board. I suspect he’s even more wrong about this in the “Own Voices” era, but I also think readers — including agents and editors — always have been and still are decidedly biased. I mean, remember that shocking article about the completely different responses to query letters for the same manuscript presented with a female vs a male name? Where’s that article? Oh, here. Ugh, that page is filled to the brim with obtrusive advertisements. Nevertheless, it’s worth looking at.

I wanted to know more of how the Georges of the world live, so I sent more [queries under the male name]. Total data: George sent out 50 queries, and had his manuscript requested 17 times. He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book. Fully a third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25.

This was some years ago, but I absolutely do not believe that subconscious bias has disappeared at all. It may have moved around a bit. Quick, what do YOU think the reaction would be if a black author wrote a historical fantasy about Scandinavian Vikings in the 9th Century and all the characters, including the slaves, were therefore white? Would agents even look at it? How about publishers? Do you think they would? Would you suggest the author bet on that?

I’m pretty certain that there is plenty of subconscious bias, and probably a fair bit of conscious bias as well, about who gets to tell certain kinds of stories. If I were a male author and I wanted to write Romance, I would absolutely choose a female pen name. If I wanted to write Westerns, political thrillers, or literary, I would choose a male pen name. I said a second ago that if I were starting over, I’d have gone with initials. This is why.

Umstattd says: To hide your sex, you will also need to avoid using a photo. With no photo and no name, you start to look like an AI author rather than a human author.  

And I think, what are you even talking about? You HAVE a name. It’s YOUR PEN NAME. Don’t tell me you need a photo or people will think your books were written by AI. If people can possibly think your books were written by AI, you’re not much of a writer. But you could probably use a fake photo if you wanted. Heck, you could probably generate a fake photo with AI.

3) To simplify spelling.

I’m surprised Thomas Umstattd says this is not a good reason. He says that if you type variants into Google, he’ll pop up. That may be, but if you type variants into AMAZON, he won’t. I just tried, and you have to get it right. On the other hand, I agree that an unusual name can be an asset for name recognition.

I think the worst names — this might be just me — are homonym names: Stephen/Steven, Theresa/Teresa. I have never once typed “Stephen King” without checking the spelling because I can never remember which it is. I think you can find those authors without much trouble, but I really prefer to spell their names correctly every time, I have to check every time, and if you want your child to grow up to be an author, please give the baby a name that only has one common spelling so people do not have to check the spelling a thousand times because it gets annoying.

Or name her Makiia Lucier, because wow, that is a very neat name. It’s worth having to check which letter is double, the “a” or the “i.” I definitely have to check because the maackia is a tree — I have one, in fact, though it’s just a baby sapling — but because of this, doubling the “a” seems reasonable to me.

But I digress. Back to the linked article and the idea that pen names are passé.

4) To avoid confusion with another author whose name is similar.

5) To avoid confusion with an infamous person.

6) To avoid confusion with a celebrity.

Those are all the same reason: to avoid confusion with someone else with the same or a very similar name. Umstattd thinks this is unimportant, but let me just mention that I’m still ticked off because ten years ago I bought a book by Patrick Lee. I thought I was buying a book by Patrick Lee. I didn’t realize what had happened for some time and didn’t feel right about returning the book by The Other Patrick Lee when I eventually figured it out, because it had been on my Kindle for a while by then, but I’m still ticked off when I think about it. I believe at the time Amazon was having a problem where they combined author pages if the author names were the same. They seem to have sorted that out, and a good thing. Nevertheless, a pen name may well be good if an author happens to have the same name as someone else, especially another author.

Oh, I’m glad I wrote the above paragraph, because looks like The Correct Patrick Lee had another book come out in 2022. I missed it. It’s a YA thriller; it’s only $2.99, I’m picking it up immediately.

7) To keep also-boughts clean on Amazon.

Umstattd isn’t thinking of the same thing I instantly thought of. Umstattd thinks it’s important to keep your squeaky-clean sweet fairy romances separate from your fiery hot vampire erotica … he doesn’t put it quite that way, but that’s the point he’s making. He thinks that’s a good reason to use a pen name. I definitely agree, as does Ursula Vernon / T Kingfisher and Joel Dane / whoever he is when he’s writing MG.

Actually, Ursula Vernon really ought to be writing under three names, because it wouldn’t hurt anything to split off the horror from Paladin romances.

However, that’s not what I thought of first.

“Also-boughts” is the term for all the OTHER books that appear on ONE book’s product page. The term is derived from “people who bought this book ALSO BOUGHT this other book.”

This includes books by the same author, but it also includes … let me see … on RIHASI’s page, I also see books by Sherwood Smith, Victoria Goddard, Katherine Addison — HEY, she has another book up for preorder, did you know that? Thanks for showing me that, Amazon! I may or may not get it, depending on reviews, because I just don’t like Thera Celehar that much, but I’m glad to know the book exists. Lots of others, by authors I recognize and others I’ve never heard of. Oh, look, there’s AJ Demas’ most recent! That one, I’ll go ahead and pick up at once.

You know, for all the complaints about algorithms that show you stuff, Amazon’s algorithms do a good job of showing me appropriate titles.

But my point is, keeping the also-boughts clean is NOT just a matter of keeping your adult military SF from getting mixed in with your charming MG fantasy. It’s ALSO about keeping Amazon’s algorithms clear on what your book is and what readers would like it and what other product pages your book ought to go on. I expect that my books show up on Victoria Goddard’s product pages. Let me check. Yes, they do. That’s what ought to happen. Amazon’s algorithms ought to show both her readers and mine a certain subset of fantasy, a subset that does not include Joe Abercrombie’s books, and it’s important not to confuse the algorithms. That’s why you need to keep the also-boughts clear of unsuitable books that are unappealing to your readers.

Overall conclusion:

–Readers are not going to get confused and think your books are written by AI, are you insane? That can’t happen unless your books are dreadful.

–It’s perfectly simple to generate a fake picture if you really feel you have to put pictures of your pen name up on your website, though if you don’t, I doubt readers will notice or care about the lack of pictures.

–There are lots of reasons you might want to use a pen name and I don’t think there’s any reason whatsoever not to if that would be helpful in any way.

–Except if you want readers to find all your books because they’re in different genres, but not that different, and then probably you don’t want to use a pen name for either genre.

Maybe I’m missing something, but that’s how this looks to me.

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Powerful Novels

Okay, so I’ve been thinking recently about big topics – I mean passion and power, depth and resonance. I’ve been thinking about how these big qualities work in fiction. I’m thinking about the creation of truth in fiction. About how one novel can feel like a popcorn read or a beach read – shallow, light, trivial – while other novels can feel powerful and true. Or, for that matter, powerful but false. I’ve happened across various novels this year that made me think of this, with one being The Ocean and the Stars, as I mentioned in a recent post.

Power and resonance isn’t an adventure vs interior journey type of distinction. It’s more a shallow vs. deep distinction, but I don’t think that’s really what’s going on either. I may be biased by the strong (very strong) cultural tendency to assume that joyful means shallow while depressed means deep, which is a notion that is both wrong and pernicious, but I don’t think that’s it.

Notice that I declared that the idea that joyful = shallow while depressed = deep is wrong and pernicious. I don’t feel any great need to argue about this, or justify the statement, or back away and say something tentative and cautious. I didn’t say in my opinion. I mean, I’d be fine arguing about this, I would enjoy that argument under the right circumstances, but I don’t feel it’s necessary to proactively take a defensive stance. I can and do just say, That’s not only wrong, it’s wrong in a harmful way. That’s because if someone disagrees, I don’t really care. This is something I’ve thought about enough that I’m not at all likely to change my mind. I’m confident I’m right about this.

I think this is also true: authorial confidence leads to power in fiction. Power is not about truth. It’s about conviction. In order to write something with power, the author has to be confident they’re saying something that is worth saying.

At the end of RIHASI when Marathani says to Rihasi, “It’s a wonderful play. And do you know why? Because it’s about someone doing something difficult and dangerous and worth doing.” – that’s a very meta statement, and I recognized that when I put that line into the story. This wasn’t just something one character was saying to another. This was also me, declaring, “This right here, this story you’ve read, is a good story, because it’s about someone doing something difficult and dangerous and worth doing.” I was also saying, “A story will be better – more true, more powerful – if it’s about people who do things that are difficult and dangerous and worth doing. A story isn’t likely to be all that great if it’s not about that.” I’m confident this is true. That’s why my novels are about that. That’s why they’re the antithesis of grimdark, where the author is saying, “Life is brutal; there’s no point striving to make the world into a better place or yourself into a better person; you can’t succeed; everything will get worse forever.” A novel like that can be powerful if the author writes with conviction, which is why power and truth are not the same thing.

Whether a story is true at its heart or false, it’s authorial confidence that leads to thematic coherence, because the author is in fact saying something. It might be true or otherwise, but it’s something that the author wants to say and they’re saying it with conviction and they want you, the reader, to hear what they’re saying beneath the words on the page. Hearing the themes below the words is what we mean by resonance. This story really resonated with me means I felt this story was true to my life, or I felt this story was about something true.

Authorial skill also matters. Lack of skill with storytelling is what causes message fiction to lose power. That’s because power in fiction depends on telling a story that resonates, and when fiction delivers a sermon rather than telling a story, then it loses power even if the message is a good one. Therefore, power in fiction depends on the ability to tell a story with conviction, not just to deliver a message with conviction. This is also why some authors say, “I’m just writing to entertain! I’m just telling stories!” while they write stories that capture truth. When Lois McMaster Bujold has Ekaterin say to a younger woman, “Adulthood is not a good conduct prize you win by being a good child,” she’s said something true. (Bujold is really good at witty one-liners that capture something true.) Stories that are light in tone can still resonate because the author is writing with conviction at the thematic level. Terry Pratchett exemplifies this kind of writer. I bet he never once apologized for a single line he wrote – certainly not by the time he was writing social satire disguised as light fantasy.

Power also depends on skill with the prose. Various qualities are important for prose to become infused with power: rhythm, allusion, precision, vividness, density of meaning, ability to evoke the scene and create a world that the reader feels is real. It seems to me – notice that I’m being cautious here; I’m not as confident about this – but it seems to me that some readers are able to read past less skilled prose, seeing the themes below the story even when the prose is not that great, and that therefore these readers can experience a story as powerful when I probably wouldn’t. Even so, I do think skill with sentence-level and paragraph-level craft is important in creating a story that will resonate, that will feel true, for many or most readers.

But, along with both storytelling craft and sentence-level craft, power absolutely requires confidence on the part of the author. This is one big reason I detest questions about writing that go, “Is it okay if I write about [whatever]?” You just absolutely cannot ask for permission to write the story you want to write. You absolutely have to decide to tell the story you want to tell, the way you want to tell it, because you are not going to be able to write with any power while you are hunched into a defensive ball in case some reader somewhere might someday be offended.

Nor do you need to worry about whether you have something worth saying. Who knows? Put that out of your mind and just write the story you want to write. Write a story to entertain, that’s absolutely fine. If you write the story you actually want to write, I expect something true will probably turn out to be in that story. If readers declare that the story resonates or is meaningful or that the world desperately needs more stories just like yours, then you can be sure of it, even if you’re still feeling your way into the themes that matter to you as a writer. If the story is in fact shallow and light and fluffy, well, the world needs light entertainment too. But I sort of suspect that if you have something to say, it’ll turn out to be there, under the fluff. That’s why, even if you say, “I’m just writing to entertain!” you should strive to write that entertaining story as well as you possibly can.

Coming up: Various blog posts about powerful novels. I’m not going to say, “novels that I personally think are powerful.” I’m just going to say flatly, These are novels that are powerful, and I assume everyone will get that I mean that’s my personal opinion since this is my personal blog. I don’t think everyone in the universe will agree, but regardless, I’m confident I am indeed right.

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Update: Progress despite it all

You know how much time I spent following the news in January? Zero time. Maybe five minutes per week, which rounds down to zero.

You know how much time I spent following the news last week? Probably at least an hour a day.

My fondest wish is for a completely boring life in which nothing happens. I don’t want to live in interesting times! Ugh!

Despite this, I did make substantial progress on Silver Circle. Another chapter went long, got split in two, and thus the total number of chapters went up. However, I also thought, “You know what, I don’t think I need this current chapter 52,” and deleted it (unwritten, thankfully), which brought the total number of chapters back down. Therefore, the full thing is still sitting at 54 chapters plus an epilogue.

I should be completing the current chapter this afternoon. (Easily! I think it needs just a couple of paragraphs to tie it up and lead into the next chapter.) This is one of Alejandro’s chapters. He thought he was going to be doing something important, but he has just discovered crucial information and is now making rapid decisions to ditch that and do something else instead.

Then a short chapter that sets up part of the climax. I hope this will be ten pages or so.

Then there’s a chapter which, right at the moment, is the penultimate chapter. I expect this chapter to switch rapidly between three different points of view, all braided together in the same chapter, but I won’t know for sure if that’s the way it really happens until I write it. This is all part of the climax. I think this will be thirty pages or so.

Then the last chapter, simpler, which is the actual climax and resolution. I think this will be maybe twenty pages or so.

Then, the very important epilogue, which will contain all the gentler things that tie up the whole story and show that the resolution is holding and the world has come past a crisis and wound up, probably permanently, in a better place. (I trust that does not strike anyone as a spoiler.) I’m thinking of this as maybe twenty pages, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it goes longer, because there’s quite a bit to tie up. I really like my idea for how to handle this part. This is the Ice Cream Epilogue that I’m very deliberately holding up as the reward for getting through everything else between here and there.

There’s a little more about how Silver Circle looks right now over at my Patreon — it’s a public post, so if you want to know about how much pov space each pov character is getting, click over there.

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Kind vs Nice

Here’s a post about words on a blog called Math With Bad Drawings, and yes, I am particularly amused to see Ben Orlin departing from math topics to hit an English topic.

Kind vs. nice.

There are two kinds of people in this world, and no, I don’t mean “kind” and “nice.”

I mean “people who use the words ‘kind’ and ‘nice’ interchangeably” and “people who care passionately about the difference.”

Certainly, kindness is the deeper virtue. A world without niceness would be a bit of a grind; a world without kindness would be unendurably lonely. If the internet were full of writers blithely conflating the two, or insisting that niceness is the key to life, then I would of course speak up in defense of kindness. But we find ourselves in the opposite world, where many are inclined to round niceness down to zero (or even treat it as a vice!). I thus offer the most banal conclusion any writer has ever uttered: being nice is Good, Actually.

Click through and read the whole thing.

Ben has done quite a few good posts. Here is a collection of some of the most popular.

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