Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 383

A book I just found out about –

Did you know that Patricia Wrede wrote a book about writing?

It just came out in December.

For characters, it’s hard to beat Amberglas from THE SEVEN TOWERS, but my favorite book by Wrede is probably . . . oh . . . it’s actually hard to pick.

TALKING TO DRAGONS

SORCERY AND CECELIA

MAIRELON THE MAGICIAN

THIRTEENTH CHILD

Honestly, it’s hard to choose. One of those. You should probably read all four, if you haven’t had the pleasure of reading Wrede before. The Dragon ones can be read out of order just fine, btw. I read this one first, so I thought of it first, but the whole series is a lot of fun. This is the fourth, but it works well to read before the others.

Butternut Squash Soup, plus an update

I’m having trouble eating anything right now — stress, you know — and it is so unfair that stress makes you gain weight even if you aren’t eating much. Who made up that rule? (Yes, actually I know why it works that way, it’s just annoying in the modern world.)

I made this soup last night anyway, because a) it’s a soup, so I could tell myself it wasn’t really food; and b) my mother hasn’t been feeling well either (probably just a bug, though maybe she’s stressed on my behalf, I dunno) and this is the kind of thing she will want to try. That’s important because she REALLY stops eating when she feels ill, and, unlike me, she gets into trouble because she loses too much weight.

So: an interesting nonspicy real-food butternut squash soup, very easy and quick to make:

BUTTERNUT SOUP WITH SAUSAGE

1 lb pork sausage

1 onion, chopped

1 med red bell pepper, chopped (I left this out because ugh, bell pepper)

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and chopped

16 oz frozen corn

4 C chicken broth

1 can great northern beans or whatever small white beans you like, drained and rinsed

1 can diced tomatoes, undrained

1 tsp salt

Brown the sausage in a Dutch oven or large pot, along with the onion and (ugh!) bell pepper if you are using it. Add the garlic and cook one minute. Remove from the pot with a slotted spoon and set aside. Add the squash, 1 1/2 C corn, and the broth to the pot. Simmer 20 minutes, until the squash is very tender. Puree the squash mixture with your handy immersion blender. Add the sausage mixture, beans, tomatoes, and salt to taste. Heat through.

There you go, very quick and easy, as I said, and quite good. Even people who are suspicious of squash soups might well like this one.

Puppy update: Five days till the due date! Giedre herself was born this early, by emergency C-section. None of her siblings were alive at the time of the section, and frankly I was dismayed she was alive, since I expected to work really hard to save her and then have her die, too, which was what happened with my last preemie, and yes that was just awful.

Five days early is worse than five weeks early for a human baby — Giedre’s bones were not fully ossified, for example, and her chest deformed during two days of lying on her chest. I noticed at that point and never let her lie on her chest again, propping her in different positions with little tiny stuffed animals. She was fully normal by eight weeks old, but my point is, five days early is really pushing it.

But I did save her, and with zero aftereffects of having been born so early. So last night I celebrated arriving at this point by fixing up the puppy room. Bleaching the floor, setting up and bleaching the whelping box, arranging the special Leerberg heating pad, which heats up just to the correct body temperature of the bitch and can’t possibly burn puppies. I put aside the whelping supplies (hemostats, floss for tying off umbilical cords, bulb syringes for suctioning goo out of little mouths, etc) and laid out the early-puppy equipment, which consists of feeding tubes and syringes, Esbilac milk replacer (a bitch is not likely to have enough milk after a section, it will take days to come in, so I will have to supplement with formula till then), pedialyte (for preemies or really compromised puppies that can’t digest formula), the puppy warming box, carefully tested to have a 100 degree side and a 90 degree side. A scale and my notebook where I record puppy weights — I weigh puppies two or three times a day for the first week so I calculate how much formula to tube-feed them. All my books on puppy intensive care (I have about six books that deal with this).

I don’t think she will have those puppies today. I think this trick of gradually increasing the terbutaline, using supplemental progesterone to slow down the rate at which you need to increase the terbutaline, will get her through today and tomorrow and by then we will be looking pretty good. A ton happens right here at the end. A day early counts as full term as far as I’m concerned. Two or even three days early is nearly full term, as long as the puppies had good placental attachments and weren’t compromised somehow in utero.

Hopefully we will stick with our scheduled section on Thursday. But my vet assures me she will quickly shuffle other appointments out of my way if necessary — and if she is stuck in surgery or it is the middle of the night, Chesterfield in St L has good vets on call for emergency C-sections 24/7. They send everyone else to the emergency clinic, but C-sections, they come in and do those themselves.

Most authors don’t make money

That could be the title of this article at GalleyCat, which really says: Most Authors Make Less Than $1000 dollars a Year.

As far as I’m concerned, less than $1000 is basically equivalent to zero. I would almost certainly quit writing if that was my writing income on a consistent annual basis. I mean, do you KNOW how many more books I could read if I quit writing?

According to the post, more than 80% of self-published authors make no money to speak of, which doesn’t surprise me a bit; but also more than half of all traditionally published authors do no better, which does surprise me. Hybrid authors — who do both self- and traditional-publication — do rather better as a group. Of course I plan to join that group this year, unless something dreadful goes wrong. I would like to have a minimum of one novel traditionally published and also one self-published every year for the next seven years or so (and then I may take a break!) (this plan is subject to revision!).

It is not actually fair to compare self-published authors to traditionally-published authors, because the former include their own entire slush pile, whereas the latter group have had the bottom of the slush pile removed. You have read the famous article “Slushkiller” by Teresa Nelson Heyden, right? That gives you an idea of the books that do not get published traditionally but do get self-published.

So it is all the more shocking that the traditionally published authors do not do better than this. I don’t know the methodology here; it would be interesting to divide out traditionally-published-by-big-six-publishers from all other traditionally published authors. Mind you, that would give you different kinds of hybrid authors and create a more complicated data set.

Something hidden by these figures, or at least not emphasized, is that your income as a writer will probably be extremely variable. Getting advances broken into chunks helps smooth that out, but also substantially reduces your income in the particular year you sign a contract.

I have never personally fallen into the less-than-$1000 group, but last year my writing income did not even cover my breeding expenses for my two attempted (disastrous) litters. Which expenses, granted, were pretty high. The investment in every litter is three to five thousand dollars, if you’re curious — which is why it hits you so hard if you get zero puppies to sell. So in some years, breeding expenses represent an absolutely insane proportion of my income.

This year is set to be much (much) better for me. Not to mention getting live puppies would help!

In fact, back to the GalleyCat graphs, I think I have personally hit four different income categories from the more detailed graph. Fairly widely separated categories. In only five years.

I know how hard it was to find data on writers’ income when I first got interested in that question, so if you’re interested, you should click through and look over these data.

Perfect lairs for supervillians

Just stumbled across this. Really amazing what people build.

Nothing quite says “supervillain” like a submarine dry dock. This Royal Norwegian Navy auxiliary base located just outside the city of Tromsø offers roughly 145,000-square feet of above-ground buildings and 270,000-square feet of bombproof interior mountain space. Plus a submarine dry dock and hangar and an emergency tunnel system. Of course, a few sharks wouldn’t hurt. In 2012, the base was reportedly put up for sale for $17.5 million.

I’m sure that was a practical installation for Norway. Although if their navy sold it, maybe not. Question: who would BUY a submarine dry dock, other than a supervillain?

Or the Refuge du Goûter. They SAY it is a refuge for mountain climbers, but seriously? I mean, look at it! What you have there is is plainly a supervillain lair.

The most practical is probably that “home” in the Adirondacks, though. For a private home, it sure looks a LOT like a hidden supervillain lair.

Click through and enjoy!

What kinds of series do you like?

I’m with Jo Walton here, where she delineates four kinds of series and notes that she likes them all but that they are not the same.

Jo Walton says, “What I can’t stand is when I pick up a random book in a bookshop or the library and it’s part of a series and that isn’t clearly indicated anywhere on it. I’ve picked up random volumes that are clearly part of a series in style one or style two, read a bit, been utterly confused, and never looked at the author again. I hate this.”

Yeah, don’t we all! Styles one and two are the kinds where you can’t really go out of order, which is why this failure to mark books appropriately would be a problem.

This is Sarah Monette’s recent livejournal post, referenced by Walton, in which Monette also addresses this issue.

Sarah Monette is discussing her own four-book series, the one that starts with MELUSINE, and says, “This seems to me to be related to one of Ace’s marketing decisions that still puzzles me, namely the absolute, vehement refusal to indicate anywhere on any of the books that they are part of a series. I actually asked about it, back when Mélusine was in production, because the series has a name and was never conceived of as anything but a series, and my editor told me that we couldn’t put Book One of the Doctrine of Labyrinths on the cover or in the front matter. Marketing wouldn’t let us.”

To which my own response is a little stronger than puzzlement. I think that’s outrageous and infuriating as a reader, and I’m not nearly so convinced as Ace’s marketing department that it’s a huge benefit to the writer, either. Me, if a Second Book looks good, I’ll go find Book One and try that one and then go in order if I like it. It’s not like it’s hard to find Book One, my God, people, Amazon is right there! But only if someone is kind enough to inform you that there IS a Book One and it needs to come before Book Two.

Anyway … I’d say that The Griffin Mage Trilogy is actually in between Style 1 and Style 2: the volumes have closure but even so probably work better in order rather than out of order (Style 2) but switching protagonists for each volume means, to my mind, you are perhaps not really required to go totally in order (Style 3). What do you all think?

Puppy update for those of you following along: still pregnant, no crises today, thank heaven.

Famous Book Covers with Corrected Titles

Also, the posts Jo Walton links to from her tor.com post are really funny!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

My favorite cover in Part 1 is the David Eddings cover, with the new title: Remember The First Five Books? Like That.

Or maybe the Robert Jordan cover, which is down farther.

My favorite in Part 2 is once again the one at the top, Mercedes Lackey’s cover with the title: My Little Pony Goes To War.

Hah hah hah! Sorry. That really *is* just what the cover looks like. I also really love the Turtledove cover’s new title.

Not sure which one I’d pick from Part 3.

Anyway, these are well worth clicking through and admiring.

Fantasy with Cusswords

Here is a post by Jo Walton at tor.com, which caught my eye because BLACK DOG is my first contemporary-ish fantasy, and so the first book I’ve written where it’s reasonable for characters to use cusswords or swear. The observation Walton makes about the difference between DOWNBELOW STATION and HELLBURNER is really interesting, though the language that impressed me in HELLBURNER was the integration of French-ish phrases, a lot like the Chinese integrated into “Firefly.”

There is just one character in BLACK DOG who uses profanity — I mean in English, I think sometimes there may be one or two off-color words in Spanish. Anyway, this character is a blue-color kind of guy, and under a lot of stress at the time.

Wow, did my mother have an opinion about cusswords in YA fantasy. Having someone say “Hell!” or “Damn!” doesn’t bother her nearly as much as a character dropping the f-bomb. She is semi-reconciled now, I think, but she never voluntarily reads anything at all where characters swear, which gives you some idea just how fiercely she hates the modern, shall we say direct use of language.

It makes me wonder: what do you all think about using actual modern cusswords? Here’s what I think:

In secondary world high fantasy, never.

In light, humorous fantasy, probably not.

In epic fantasy, no.

In grimdark, well, naturally. It’s part of the there-are-no-heroes trope.

In contemporary world urban fantasy or paranormal, sure, but swearing will (as in real life) have more impact if reserved for situations that are actually more stressful than usual.

In military SF, sure, even casual profanity seems okay. What do you think of military SF like Tanya Huff’s VALOR series, where the characters swear all the time, but with made-up futuristic cusswords?

In other SF, I was SO impressed by the way Jos Whedon used Chinese in “Firefly.” I would enjoy working that kind of thing into an SF novel sometime.

English profanity in SF — for me, it simply depends on the book. Remember how Lois McMaster Bujold had Miles switch from “Damnation!” as Miles Vorkosigan to “Shit!” as Admiral Naismith, during the burning-liquer-store incident? That right there is a clever, appropriate, and to my mind inoffensive use of profanity.

Thoughts? I’d like input, because at the moment I have someone say “Fuck!” one time in the BLACK DOG sequel. Thumbs up or thumbs down on that?

Recent (Re)-Reading: The Grey Horse by RA MacAvoy

I’m finding it nearly impossible to get any productive work down right now because I am too stressed about Giedre’s upcoming litter — she is due in about ten days; the puppies will be viable in . . . about . . . six days, but the closer to term she can carry them, the better. It can be touch and go, getting preemies through their first week, as I know from experience, unfortunately. All the way to term would be ideal! What I really want is vigorous, lively puppies over six ounces (eight would be better), with fur right down to their noses and toes. I’ve saved one quite premature puppy (Giedre herself, actually), but I’ve also lost one, which is no fun.

I LOVE Whelpwise. And I love having a Doppler, now that I have learned to use it. The first time I tried to find puppy heartbeats, last week, I could find NOTHING. Naturally this was pretty disturbing — I did say I’m stressed out, right? — so I zipped her up to St L and had a professional ultrasound done, which of course was not free but was totally worth it because the puppies were fine. Thank God.

A few days later, a Whelpwise person talked me through the Doppler, listening with me over the phone. I can’t believe what experienced people can tell over the phone! She was like, “That whoosh whoosh whoosh is the umbilical cord, you’re right on top of a puppy, tip the probe one way and another — there, that’s the heartbeat, I know the Doppler is telling you an insanely low number but just keep it right there for ten seconds — there you go, see, good, strong heartbeat. Now let’s try moving the probe two inches forward and one inch up toward her spine…”

And we landed right on top of the next puppy, just like that. And you know what? It’s possible (not certain!) that Giedre has four puppies in there, not three. On the other side, where she was just supposed to have just one puppy, the Whelpwise person — sorry, I don’t remember her name — was all, “Well, I know they said three, but I’ve learned to check, so let’s just move the probe three inches forward and a good two inches up and let’s just listen for a bit right there . . . okay, either you’re listening right through her to a puppy on the other side, or you have four in there, and I kind of think it’s the latter.”

How about that? That was a week ago today. This morning I listened for just fifteen minutes and I’m pretty sure I heard four loud heartbeats, all safely in the range of 220 beats per minute.

I am now doing a uterine monitoring session. At the moment I am doing one hour of uterine monitoring at 8:00 AM, 4:00 PM, and midnight (!). Giedre is on terbutaline to make her stop having early contractions — the Whelpwise people are very reassuring about being able to get nearly every bitch to term with consistent monitoring and carefully adjusted terbutaline. I think I now have a much better idea why Giedre’s mother lost three out of four puppies from her last litter: I think it was early contractions just like this. That will certainly be a new question to ask about prospective stud dogs: did his mother carry puppies to term normally? Did she ever have puppies die a day or two in advance of whelping for no obvious reason? How about his sisters?

All that is a long, long intro for why I am re-reading books instead of a) reading new-to-me fiction or b) getting work done on my own projects. After I (hopefully) have thriving puppies out here in the world, I will be much calmer. Plus locked in at home and desperately bored. That should be a good time to get real work done.

In the meantime: THE GREY HORSE by RA MacAvoy. This book was originally published in 1987, which, wow, is an awfully long time ago now. It’s set in Ireland, and the grey horse is a pooka — mischievous in this case, but not willfully cruel. At least not to people who don’t deserve it.

I’m noticing so much about this book that I wasn’t prepared to notice almost thirty years ago. Like: I love how important characters are seventy years old. And another important character is nine or so. Both feel right, both the old Anrai and the young Toby.

I love how the romantic interest is not conventionally pretty, and has a “punch on her like the kick of a horse.” I love how the Catholic priest is presented, and how the conflict between Christianity and the fairy world is presented as . . . far from irreconcilable, shall we say.

Some of the family relationships are pretty sad, though. In fact, every single family is shown as having one serious conflict: Blondell and his snobbish English wife, Maire and her unkind father and sister, and most of all Anrai and his wastrel son. All of these relationships drive the real conflicts in the story and lend the whole novel depth, which would be lacking if the major conflict was, say, the race between the “native-bred” pooka and the English Thoroughbred.

I really enjoyed all the characters — I appreciated even the characters I didn’t like. I already knew I loved Ruairi MacEibhir, the pooka. That, I remembered. I love how he is not conventionally heroic, drawing instead from the Trickster tradition, but nevertheless has a good heart. The first scenes, where he seduces Anrai into sitting on his back and then runs away with him in a good-natured but slightly malicious way, is priceless. Anrai is not in the slightest danger of anything but embarrassment, since he’s a fabulous horseman and anyway the pooka isn’t trying to drown him or anything. There is so much for horse lovers to enjoy in these scenes.

I love how Ruairi courts Maire, too. I love the house he builds for her, and how he had no idea one could by slate tiles for your roof as you can buy cabbages — such a baffling problem for him until someone explained it.

And, yes, I enjoy MacAvoy’s writing. “A little moment later, as the horse was rising up (very fast, as though on springs), it occurred to Anrai that the thing to have done was to put the halter on the horse before climbing on. Simple mistake. Because now the animal had bounded off, striking sparks from the road in its flight, so there really would be no opportunity to do so now…. Anrai sat the wild gallop of the wild horse with his hands in his lap, thinking that he had done a very silly thing, for an old man.”



And here, in Chapter Two: “Aine said the pig trotters were ruined. This was not true, of course, but it was the closest she could get to scolding Anrai for coming home wet and weary, when that had been no fault of his own. Anrai, wrapped in a blanket and with his feet in wool over a hot stone, sat by the kitchen fire and ate two of the trotters and a great heap of mash, both of which he covered in buttermilk and a crystalline layer of salt. He told her about the horse, but not that he had mounted it without bridle or halter. She told him the chestnut filly had kicked Donncha, and what liniment she had used, but she did not tell him about the letter from Seosamh, their only child. Aine and Anrai had been married for forty years.”

They had been married forty years. That is a very, very nice way to end that paragraph.

If you love horses, or for that matter fairies, or Irish settings, then this a story that’s well worth looking up.

The five best punctuation marks of all time:

This is not an argument about the natural coolness of (say) the semi-colon (though I trust we all appreciate a well-used semi-colon).

It is a paean to five particular punctuation marks in famous literary works (only one of which I’ve read, btw).

Nabokov

George Eliot

TS Eliot

Dickens

Levi

I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever read another article that made me kind of want to rush out and read a bunch of classics. Particularly the one by Primo Levi. “Levi’s strange, lovely, mostly memoir-ish book includes everything from short stories to accounts of his imprisonment in Auschwitz to a subtle investigation of chemistry — both as a scientific discipline (he was trained as a chemist) and as the invisible infrastructure of the world.” Huh. I never encountered this book, but it sounds like maybe I should pick it up.

Anyway, click through, by all means, and take a look at the brilliant use of a parentheses, an em-dash, an ellipsis, a colon, and a humble period. What do you think? Do you think the author of the article, Kathryn Schulz, is right that all these punctuation marks represent great moments in literature. I’m willing to buy it; I think it’s great to focus on punctuation marks.

Recent reading: variable but intense

I just re-read CRYOBURN. Parts of CAPTAIN VORPATRIL’S ALLIANCE, too. That was Maureen’s fault, since she’s been re-reading all the Vorkosigan books recently.

You know, I think I appreciate CRYOBURN more now than I did the first time I read it. It still isn’t my favorite Vorkosigan book — I think that might be THE WARRIOR’S APPRENTICE. Or maybe A CIVIL CAMPAIGN, though that’s rather different. I’d say the former is space opera and the second is a comedy of manners. Wouldn’t you say that’s right?

Anyway, I really did not like having so much of CRYOBURN be written from other peoples’ points of view. I still don’t really like that, but … the book has grown on me anyway.

And that last line, you know. That’s pretty intense.

I also recently re-read “Snow-Kissed” by Laura Florand. THIS time I got the fairy-tale — the first time I was too caught up in the story to pay attention and missed it completely, despite the protagonist being named Kai. Here is a great review — pair of reviews, really — for “Snow-Kissed”, over at Dear Author. I thought Sunita and Willaful did a really interesting job contrasting their different responses to the novella. And the soundtrack Willaful picked for the novella is PERFECT.

I will say, “Snow-Kissed” certainly is angsty, but the angst is a) fully justified by the recent experiences of the protagonists, and b) NOT DOES-HE-LOVE ME STUPID ANGST, which is the kind that drives me berserk. No, this is in a whole different category. So even thought this is an emotionally intense, claustrophobic story, it worked well for me. Her least angsty novella is “No Place Like Home”, btw, which also has a fairy-tale worked into it — that one is too obvious to miss, I think. Though my favorite of Florand’s novellas is “Turning Up The Heat”, btw, even without any fairy-tale element.

By the way, Florand’s most recent Chocolate Romance is out. THE CHOCOLATE TEMPTATION. I may read that today, though … I don’t know … I just got a good idea for a BLACK DOG short story and I think I will try playing with that, first, today, and see where it goes. I would like to bring out a couple or four BLACK DOG novellas or short stories later this year, maybe (no promises).

Okay, and then for something different: I do read more nonfiction when I’m working on projects of my own, and so I recently read A DOG FOR ALL SEASONS by Patti Sherlock. It’s a memoir, so the reading experience is similar to fiction. I basically don’t read memoirs (which means I kind of do, occasionally, if one falls into my hands, but I don’t seek them out). This one was really good, though — good as a story, well written. The author is a writer, and the structure of this memoir shows that.

You know, I am always saying that a person has to be crazy to get a border collie — unless they have sheep. Well, the author DID have sheep; she and her family raised sheep, and they needed a border collie to be a working dog.

Though the book isn’t about that, really. That is the frame within which we get the story of Patti Sherlock’s life. Not the whole thing, no, but . . . enough. I think I may steal elements of that life for a protagonist, some day. Because it has just the right kind of structure to be perfect for fiction. Which is too bad, in a way, since the author’s life had some grim stuff in it. Which she overcame, you know, or I would have hated the book.

And then there’s the dog. And a beautiful insight about what dogs mean to us:

“You’ve heard plenty of times how dogs love us unconditionally . . . dogs show us how to live big. They do everything with gusto . . . But here’s what strikes me as most important. And it’s not about what they give us, but about something we give ourselves. We get to love a dog full out. . . . we don’t often give our hearts without reserve. With dogs, though, we can. Our feeling isn’t complicated by hurts of the past or about our independence. We feel no need to be coy or cautious. The humans we love have aspirations that don’t always mesh with ours, and when we come up against those different longings, we rein ourselves in. But we aren’t so scared about loving a dog. . . . So we open our hearts to them and discover our hearts hold an extravagant amount of love. We let it flow out. Think what this does for us as people. Think how that enlarges us.”

I sure couldn’t put it better than that.