Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 40

Putting emotion on a page.

A post by James Scott Bell at Kill Zone Blog: Oh, What a Feeling: How to Show Character Emotions

Bell says, let’s consider an intensity scale from one to ten, with one being low intensity and ten being high. Then he says: My rule guideline is that any emotion below 5 can, and usually should, be named. If Nancy is worried about how the meatloaf will turn out, you don’t have to go into sweaty palms and racing heart. That’s too much (unless the meatloaf is being prepared for Hannibal Lecter and the cops are nearby). Just write, Nancy was worried about the meatloaf.

But when you go over 5, you should show the emotion. The goal is to help the reader feel, not just know, what the emotion is.

And by “show,” he means physical reactions, actions, dialogue, setting, thoughts. I like the inclusion of “setting” here. Bell uses a Steven King excerpt to illustrate:

It was a Motel 6 on I-80 just west of Lincoln, Nebraska. The snow that began at midafternoon had faded the sign’s virulent yellow to a kinder pastel shade as the light ran out of the January dusk. The wind was closing in on that quality of empty amplification one encounters only in the country’s flat midsection.

Fading light, dusk, wind, emptiness. We are being set up to feel the inner life of the character even before we meet him.

I mean, I wouldn’t immediately want to read this, but Bell isn’t wrong. King is establishing the character via the setting, which is a great thing to do.

Good post, good examples. Also, I happened to trip over related posts at the same time I noticed the one above, so also —

Writers Helping Writers: How to Avoid Clichéd Emotional Reactions

When our character’s feelings are clear and logical, they trigger the reader’s emotions, making it harder for them to put the book down. Character emotion is, in my opinion, the most effective and longest lasting hook in our bag of tricks, so it’s imperative that we get it right in our stories. 

Emphasis in the original. This post declares that you should know your character, including their general style, their emotional range, and their response to stress. The post then offers two examples of characters whom we know and how we express their emotions in a way that is true for each character. The examples are interesting. Let me show you the first tiny, tiny bit of each snippet of dialogue that is supposed to express emotional responses appropriate for each character.

***

A) Character A: Dionne
Personality: Respectful, cautious, sneaky
Emotional Range: Reserved
Fight-Flight-Freeze Response: Flight
Emotional Dialogue Cues: Speech gets short and clipped; fidgety hands; doesn’t meet people’s gaze

“So how’d the party go?”

Dionne plastered on a smile and buried herself in her Instagram feed. “Great.”

“See, I knew you’d have a good time. Who was there?”

Her mouth went dry, but she didn’t dare swallow, not with Dad watching her over his coffee mug. Despite the hour, his eyes were bright and searching, twin spotlights carving through the mocha-infused fog.

Next

B) Character B: Beth
Personality: Bold, confrontational, impulsive
Emotional Range: More demonstrative than reserved
Fight-Flight-Freeze Response: Fight
Emotional Dialogue Cues: interrupts people; volume rises; defensive physical cues

“So how’d the party go?” Dad asked, sliding into a chair at the table.

Beth looked up from her phone, her heart rate kicking up a notch. “Fine.”

“See, I knew you’d have a good time. Who was there?”

She rolled her eyes. “Sarah, Allegra, Jordan—you know, the usual.”

***

The thing I find interesting here is that both of these examples sound to me A LOT like ChatGPT or some other AI generated them. To me, the reactions of both Dionne and Beth seem weirdly over the top and overly physical and just overdone, in a way that feels to me like generated dialogue. So, I opened up ZeroGPT and entered the full sample of dialogue from each sample provided by the post. One came back human and the other 40% generated. I tried another couple detectors and both came back human. I guess my conclusion is that they sound pretty bad and fake to me, but my personal sense of fakeness is either not that great, or else detectors aren’t that reliable (or both).

Regardless, I suggest that it might be best to dial it back from “her heart rate kicking up a notch” or “plastered on a smile.” These kinds of “SHOW THE EMOTION” tags look seriously overdone to me. I like movement tags, but I don’t like these movement tags at all.

I’m trying to think about what I mean by “overdone” here. Here’s what I mean: Using “her heart rate kicking up a notch” as the second line of dialogue in a conversation seems —

(a) self-conscious; like the author is thinking, “Oh wait, I need to show the emotion here, how can I show the emotion?”

(b) overdone; like why would someone have this huge reaction to a simple inquiry about how the party went? In context, this might work fine. At the tippy top of a snippet of dialogue, with no obvious reason to feel anxious about this conversation, it just looks bizarre.

(c) metaphorically strained. Twin spotlights carving through the mocha-infused fog, really? This kind of phrasing, at least here in this snippet of dialogue, doesn’t look creative and fun to me. It looks silly. And on top of all that, I guess at least some of these bits of dialogue look —

(d) cliched, or an AI detector wouldn’t be tagging any of it as possibly generated.

And, I also sort of think that when you ask yourself to many questions about your characters, and write out character descriptions, and pin them down in a character sheet like:

Personality: Bold, confrontational, impulsive
Emotional Range: More demonstrative than reserved
Fight-Flight-Freeze Response: Fight
Emotional Dialogue Cues: interrupts people; volume rises; defensive physical cues

You are just asking for a problem with being too self-conscious about your characters and too self-conscious about what they do and say and how they do and say everything, when there’s really no need for it. I want to say, “How about relaxing and just writing the character like she’s a real person?” Which says a lot about me as a writer, I know that, and much less about how anybody else should write. But that spotlights-through-a-mocha-haze does look silly to me.

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Edible Geology

Have you ever heard of Geobake? Looks like it’s a contest put on by the Geoscience Society of New Zealand.

Here’s the winner for 2024: This cake represents the columnar jointed basalt found in the Dunedin area, specifically the Organ Pipes. It has a red velvet sponge inside to represent the mafic basalt, and a black sesame-based meringue arranged in hexagonal columns with a dusting of cocoa to mimic the Organ Pipes’ weathered grey surface.

This is amazing. The whole idea is amazing. I love it.

Click through to see this winner, plus a cake that shows “an example of a normal fault that has occurred following the deposition of numerous layers of geological strata. leading to the uplift and offset of the strata on the footwall side” and a gingerbread geologic map of New Zealand.

Here’s the 2023 post, which features — very neat! — a braided rivers cake, very suitable as we visit the braided rivers of Tansan in RIHASI. “Slope-derived sediment deposited on braid plains creates bifurcating channel networks which typify braided rivers.”

Here’s the 2022 post. “Kirsty’s entry depicts Volcanologists sampling fresh lava to gain information on its chemical properties.”

Here’s the 2021 post. “This sourdough bread loaf depicts a basaltic lava eruption. The lava is erupting both from a vent (top) and through subsurface lava tubes. The different dough colours/flavours represent different temperatures of lava—yellow is the hottest, orange is slightly cooler but still molten, and black is cooled, solid basalt.”

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Ensemble Casts

From Writers Helping Writers: Structuring an Ensemble Cast with Plotlines

This caught my eye because Silver Circle is a heck of an example when it comes to an ensemble-cast novel.

POV characters: Natividad, Miguel, Alejandro, Justin, Ethan

Other characters, OMG, there’s no end to the list.

Important continuing characters: Grayson, Ezekiel, Thaddeus, Keziah, Riss, Cassie, Etienne, Colonel Herrod (General Herrod now, but whatever), Lieutenant Santibañez, Sergei Vasiliev, Martya, Anya. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but this ought to be most of the important ones. Plus some may make an appearance later, though they haven’t stepped on stage yet.

Important new characters: A black dog named Gerhard Breault, a black dog called Gris, a black dog named Diego Martinez. Luis Santibañez’s uncle, Senator Santibañez. Keziah’s cousin Malik. I think that’s it for really important new characters … no, wait, also Vitya, the kid who was infected by, if that’s the right term, the poroniec demon.

Massive number of characters. You recall I was trying to think of subtitles involving the idea of “scattering before the storm” for the first book. Silver Circle starts off with one thing after another piling up, it’s very exciting and fast-paced, and then the characters do scatter. Initially, Natividad and Alejandro are both in one group (with Grayson and some others), while Miguel (and Cassie) are off in another direction, Justin (and Keziah) are off in a third direction, and Ethan (with Ezekiel) are off in a fourth direction. Then things happen and groups get reshuffled, so that Natividad and Alejandro are separated, Ezekiel joins Natividad, and Thaddeus joins Ethan. Justin and Keziah remain together.

One reason to divide everyone up is so that I don’t have to deal with so many important characters in any given scene. The other reason is because plot-related things are taking place all over and different people are handling different parts of this. The plethora of characters and the fast-moving sprawling plot both contribute to this story being a bear to work on, though when I re-read the 600-odd pages I have right now, I was pretty pleased with most of those pages.

But back to the topic. What does the linked post say about ensemble casts?

Typically with ensembles, the trick is that the characters and their plotlines have to somehow be connected to or influencing each other.

We have Frodo, a lead, with his own set. He has an external journey of taking the Ring to Mount Doom, an internal journey of his struggle with the Ring, and a relationship journey with Samwise.

Then we also have Aragorn, another lead with his own set. Aragorn has an external journey with the war, an internal journey over taking his place as king, and a relationship journey with Arwen (and arguably Eowyn).

The Fellowship also breaks down into more plotlines. Merry and Pippin have their own external, internal, and relationship journeys (though to a lesser degree), and so does Gimli. Eowyn, Arwen, and Smeagol are other notable characters who get their own personal journeys.

Every character, though, is ultimately connected into the world/society plotline with the war against Sauron—they are each influencing or being influenced by it. So this is the glue that holds the sets together.

Most of the bold is mine.

I think this is basically true, in the sense that the broad plot is the glue. It’s not just that all the characters are “influencing or being influenced” by the war against Sauron, either. They are all also influencing or being influenced by the other characters, though this may take place at a distance and the characters may not know that themselves. That is, at the end, Aragorn knows that he’s trying to draw Sauron’s attention away from Frodo and Sam, but they don’t know anything about that. They only know that Sauron suddenly looks away from the lands around Mount Doom, giving them a chance to make that last heartbreaking effort to get there.

Of course you know what the basic goal is for everyone in Silver Circle — the initial goal, anyway. It’s to get rid of the witches. This proves to be more challenging than everyone involved might perhaps hope. It also doesn’t turn out to be the ultimate goal. Regardless, the linked post is quite right: this goal, the war against black witches and black witchcraft, is definitely the glue that holds everything together. And yes, everyone is influencing everyone else, probably in ways that won’t be clear to the characters themselves until the end, if then.

Here’s a different and interesting idea from the linked post:

However, on the rare occasion that [the characters are not linked together by the plot and are not influencing each other], then often the glue is the theme. You could technically write a story where the characters never cross paths, nor fit into a greater plotline, but they each have a journey about the same theme…

And that’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? Except to me, that seems more like an idea for a set of short stories. Pity the author of the post didn’t suggest a work of some kind, either a story collection or a novel, structured this way. I guess for this to be a novel, everyone would have to be in the same world — it would be more elegant if they all intersect in ways the reader sees, even if the various characters don’t influence or even notice each other.

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Update: lots of incremental progress on all fronts

There’s so much underway, it’s honestly hard to keep it all straight.

1) I loaded a new epub of RIHASI this past Saturday, but I may do so again because I tripped over one (1) more typo, and now that I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it, even though it is apparently invisible to all readers. Oh, and there were more than two dozen typos in the first epub I uploaded, which is so many! Although I appreciate notes about how that isn’t SO many, it kinda seems like a lot to me.

2) I’ve just this morning made an offer to a narrator for RIHASI. This will be the first female narrator for this series. Rihasi both begins and ends this novel, which makes her the primary protagonist, so that’s why I decided to go with a woman as a narrator. I liked her audition quite a bit — I got four very solid auditions out of the auditions that were submitted. This narrator has a good feel for the sentences and tone and did a pretty good, but not exaggerated, job of character differentiation. I hope this project will move smoothly ahead and that the audiobook will be available maybe a month or two after the release of the Amazon editions.

3) The audiobook for MARAG is finished and as soon as certain hopefully trivial technical difficulties have been solved, I will be hitting the “approved for review” button. I expect this audiobook will be available long before the end of the month.

4) I like the narrator who did MARAG. He differentiates characters well, his overall vocal quality is good enough, he is super easy to work with, he is fast, and he makes almost no “typos” while narrating. I am going to move ahead with Death’s Lady ebooks with this narrator. He’s agreed to do the whole four-book set. He’ll start that as soon as the technical difficulties with MARAG have been ironed out.

Gosh, I’m spending a lot on audiobooks this year. I really do audiobooks as a vanity project, though who knows, maybe over a ten-year span they might make something close to what I’m spending on them. (Maybe.)

The thing is, while I was watching ~3000 sales of the Death’s Lady trilogy at the end of May, I was also thinking, Wouldn’t it be nice if there were audiobooks available with links from this trilogy? Next time, if BookBub approves another featured deal for this trilogy, there will be.

5) I asked the Tuyo-series cover artist to make a boxed set cover for me for Tuyo/Tarashana/Tasmakat, with the subtitle “Ryo’s trilogy” and no volume numbers to confuse potential buyers. Previously, I thought this would be insane because of various limitations imposed on boxed sets. That is, you can’t price them above $9.99 without dropping to the 35% royalty rate (from the standard 70% royalty rate), and therefore a boxed set of these three books would have to be sold at a terrible loss … … … except no! Given the featured deal for the DL trilogy, I thought of a way to handle this.

I’m going to publish this boxed set at $21.99 or even $22.99 or something like that — really high. From the reader’s perspective, this is closely in line with the cost of buying the three separate books, which together add up to $21, more or less. However, because of the lower royalty level, I don’t actually want readers to buy the boxed set, so I’m going to price it so that it is just a tad more expensive to buy the three books as a boxed set than individually. I believe it will be worthwhile — very worthwhile — provided I can get a BookBub featured deal for the boxed set. That’s the actual point of making this boxed set at all. They’ve turned TUYO down a lot of times as an individual book, and while I’ll keep applying with it, I do think applying with a boxed set is a good deal more likely to be approved.

And THAT would probably be worthwhile. I can start by applying for a featured deal at $2.99 and work my way down from there and see what happens. I’ll try that later this year.

MEANWHILE

6) I’m moving ahead with SILVER CIRCLE. I had two chapters with missing final scenes — both those scenes are now written and those chapters are complete. I hadn’t written chapter 25 at all. I glared at this chapter, considered the flow of events, and turned that into the end of chapter 22 instead of leaving it as a chapter by itself. Then I finished that chapter.

Then I moved chapters around and renumbered them and moved them around some more and renumbered them again, and this is an ongoing project, let me tell you. There are chapters where a specific confrontation or attack begins and then a cliffhanger and the pick up to that cliffhanger can’t be a hundred pages later, so if I move one chapter, I wind up moving six. It’s really complicated!

But, for NOW, I think all the chapters are in a decent order, PLUS I am finally ready to write a new chapter. Which is exciting because it picks up an attack that began in a previous chapter. This is the point where it’s becoming possible that I may decide to kill someone. We’ll see.

7) Also, I’ve written maybe 7000 words of the new DL story from Taranah’s pov, so I have a good piece to drop into the next newsletter.

And that’s where I am at the beginning of this week! WHEW!

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Banes of our existence

From Writer Unboxed: Join me on my bender, fellow grammar geeks—here are a few banes of a recovering copyeditor’s existence. Today we’re diving into conjugational tomfoolery of some of American English’s most provocative participles.

I rather like the light tone here, compared to the ranting tone posts like this can take.

The pluperfect is the one I always advise authors to use care with, especially in flashbacks, where it can get a little thick and ridiculous—witness this perfectly correct sentence: “The yogurt she had had had had three weeks to turn green in the sink.” Ah, English, you whimsical little minx.

Pro tip: If you’re writing flashback scenes within a past-tense story, which is often where the pluperfect tense comes creeping in, signal that time shift to readers with a well-placed “had” or two here and there, but then drop it or your writing will seem cluttered

Pluperfect = past perfect, as you probably know. I think it depends on how long the flashback is, but if the flashback scene stretches out over more than a page or two, then yes, I think that’s exactly the way to handle it. I mean, use “had” several times as you ease into the flashback, and probably (I would suggest) several times as you ease back out of it. But within the main part of the flashback, simple past is most likely going to work better, even though I very much doubt you will ever be even mildly tempted to write a sentence with four “hads” in it, especially in a row like that. Actually, that would be a good place to throw in a comma:

The yogurt she had had, had had three weeks to turn green.”

The justification there is the overriding rule for commas — the ur-rule, as it were — which is that, when in doubt, commas should be used in a way that enhances the readability of the sentence. Should you find yourself compelled, for some reason, to use four “hads” in a row, that’s the exact moment at which to remember this ur-rule.

On the other hand, in my opinion, the far more common problem with the past perfect is that a lot of authors won’t use it even when it is entirely appropriate, and that’s really annoying.

Nevertheless, the linked post has a lot of tips like this:

Al Roker may forecast the weather, after which he has also forecast it…at which point it has been forecast. Sweet lord in heaven.

And that kind of phrase kept making me chuckle, so by all means click through and read the whole thing.

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Passivity, Paralysis, and Restraint

A post at Writer Unboxed: When a Character Does Nothing: Passivity, Paralysis, and Restraint

Modern readers tend to like protagonists who do stuff, rather than those to whom stuff happens. Bold, feisty characters who choose, persevere, overcome, attain. …

Largely true, but you could also say, “Modern authors tend to present protagonists who do stuff.” Readers can only enjoy the protagonists who are presented to them. It’s a bit like saying, “Readers of YA dystopias tend to prefer first-person narratives.” Do they? Or do they read first-person narratives because that became the standard for YA dystopia following The Hunger Games, and therefore if they want to read YA dystopia at all, they’d better be okay with first person?

Still, I think this thing about active vs passive protagonists is largely true. That is, I certainly dislike protagonists who are too passive, particularly if the protagonist is drifting through life, making occasional ineffectual gestures at doing things and then sinking back into hopeless passivity. I know for sure I’ve condemned protagonists who were too ineffectual, as in, for example, Wildwood Dancing. Beautiful story, protagonist just cannot get a grip and move decisively to solve the problem, it’s thoroughly frustrating. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the protagonist’s job to take effective action and the author’s job to make sure they do.

Paralysis, if it arises from any personality style that looks to me like clinical depression, would be worse. That’s the very last thing I want to see in a protagonist. I’m not sure whether that’s what the author of the post has in mind. Let’s see:

Passivity, as a trait, stems from a lack of force rather than a lack of means—a temporary (situational) or permanent internal condition that makes action impossible. … Think of William in Hello, Beautiful by Ann Napolitano. William is the book’s central character, but not the agent of the plot; he responds, generally by acquiescence, to what others want or do or fail to do.

As trauma theory teaches us (see, for example: Bessel Van Der Kolk), paralysis can occur when both fight and flight seem impossible and the only option is to freeze (the third trauma response). … Inaction through paralysis may be followed by regret, guilt, shame, and/or rash acts of over-compensation, which have their own consequences. In that way, the paralysis can actually fuel the plot.

Neither of those works well for me as a reader, but particularly not paralysis. This wasn’t exactly what I was thinking of. I was thinking of Hamlet, who’s indecisiveness and inability to act look to me like depression. This idea, of paralysis occurring when both fight and flight options are impossible, seems at least as bad. I have no desire to follow a protagonist through regret, guilt, shame, and/or rash action. I would prefer to see an effectual protagonist who takes decisive action, and then oops! Whatever the action was, it turns out to have unforeseen (and unforeseeable) consequences. Then you may see regret, guilt, or shame, but not for failure to act. I prefer that.

How about restraint?

Why would a character refrain from acting, which action seems so obvious?  From fear of the consequences, perhaps; better to stay invisible, and safe. Or from the desire to protect someone else, honor a pledge, or refrain from an over-sharing that would cause discomfort, confusion, shame. … Restraint might even be an act of generosity—holding back so the other person has a chance to step in, prove his mettle, and have the life he desperately needs. … [Restraint can be] a gesture of kindness and power.

Now we’re talking! That’s what I want to see! Suddenly I like the linked post much better.

I do think restraint is an undervalued virtue. Culturally, we like boldness, bigness—from the larger-than-life hero who singlehandedly vanquishes the band of attackers to the Everyman who finds his moxie and surprises us (and himself) by standing up to the big evil corporation. Restraint seems old-fashioned. Yet it’s the basis of so many powerful and enduring stories…

I like all this. Not that I dislike singlehanded heroism. But I like this whole idea of having the protagonist exercise restraint so that someone else can step in and shine. That would indeed produce a powerful moment.

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Can you read this title?

Amazon’s “June First Reads” just arrived in my inbox. These are books that are being offered for free to Prime members, often just as they’re released. I’m seldom that interested, but I usually look them over.

This time, this cover caught my eye:

Can you read that word after “of the”? Is it “Flores?” It seems to be “Flores.” The meaninglessness of this word makes me doubtful. It looks like it might be Spanish for “Flower.” Let me check. Okay, it’s Spanish for “flowers,” plural. Since “curse” and “women” are in English, why is “flowers” in Spanish? How is it helpful to make sure the title is difficult to read unless you’re bilingual? And why is “flowers” plural? “The Curse of the Flowers Women” does not sound good in English. It sounds like it should be “The Curse of the Flower Women.”

Maybe “Flores” is a place name in the book. But if so, how is the prospective reader supposed to know that?

I just think this is a terrible title. I do like the cover itself, more or less. Here’s the description:

Eighteen-year-old Alice Ribeiro is constantly fighting—against the status quo, female oppression in Brazil, and even her own mother. But when a family veil is passed down to her, Alice is compelled to fight for the rights of all womankind while also uncovering the hidden history of the women in her family. Seven generations ago, the small town of Bom Retiro shunned the Flores women because of a “curse” that rendered them unlucky in love. With no men on the horizon to take care of them, the women learned the art of lacemaking to build lives of their own. But their peace was soon threatened by forces beyond any woman’s control. As Alice begins piecing together the tapestry that is her history, she discovers revelations about the past, connections to the present, and a resilience in her blood that will carry her toward the future her ancestors strove for.

Brazil? Does “flores” mean “flowers in Portuguese? Yes, google tells me it does. I don’t think much of this description, for several reasons. She’s fighting “even” against her own mother? How is that “even?” Practically all young women experience that. There’s a veil? A family veil? Is that like a family wedding dress? Are we supposed to know that? The Flores women? The protagonist’s name is Ribeiro, so “Flores” isn’t her family name. The town is called Bom Retiro, not Flores, so where does “Flores” come from? I just don’t think anything is clear from this description. Here’s the link if you want to click through and look at it yourself.

There’s one fantasy novel in this email. I think it’s presentation is a lot better. Here’s the cover:

The title is readable, and Still the Sun is evocative, and I like the cover. I don’t usually like stylized covers, but I do like this one. I’ve never heard of this author. Here’s the description:

Pell is an engineer and digger by trade—unearthing and repairing the fascinating artifacts left behind by the mysterious Ancients who once inhabited the sunbaked planet of Tampere. She’ll do anything to help the people of her village survive and to better understand the secrets of what came before. Heartwood and Moseus are keepers of a forbidding tower near the village of Emgarden. Inside are the remnants of complex machines the likes of which Pell has never seen. Considering her affinity for Ancient tech, the keepers know Pell is their only hope of putting the pieces of these metal puzzles together and getting them running. The tower’s other riddle is Heartwood himself. He is an enigma, distant yet protective, to whom Pell is inexplicably drawn. Pell’s restoration of this broken behemoth soon brings disturbing visions—and the discovery that her relationship to it could finally reveal the origins of the tower’s strange keepers and the unfathomable reason the truth has been hidden from her.

I think this description is better too, though I may be biased because I think the title and cover are better. It sounds more SF than fantasy to me. It’s probably in the intersection between the two. It sounds a bit like Elder Race by Tchaikovsky, a story I liked a lot. Reviews are mixed, but interesting. Since it’s free for Prime members, sure, why not. Picking it up now. If any of you have read something by Holmberg, what did you think?

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Magic is not science

A post at Patricia Wrede’s blog: Science vs. Magic

[T]he “rules” of magic—which usually involve things like the limits of magic, the price or cost of spell-casting, and the mechanisms by which magic works—do not have to look or sound like the laws of physics. They can—and it often makes it easier for readers to accept magic if it has “laws” like “you can’t transform rocks into food that will actually sustain you” or “the laws of Similarity and Contagion.” But if that’s not what the story needs, it is perfectly fine to have magic that works based on different rules of poetry or intuition.

It’s that last bit I want to pick up.

I’m fine with magic-as-science if that happens to be what the author wants to do and it’s right for the story. But I’ve also had editors press me to develop rules that will make magic be more like science, and I have reluctantly done so when this conception of magic wasn’t violently opposed to the story. But it’s not necessary for magic to be like science. Magic can instead by like … magic.

The linked post is fine and I agree with everything Wrede says, but also, there are times when the conception of magic-as-science is not just unnecessary, but violently opposed to the story. And when does that happen? It happens when the story is using fairy tale magic rather than some other kind of magic. Because fairy tale magic does follow rules, but the rules aren’t scientific.

Fairy tale magic has rules like this:

–If you enter the enchanted forest, you won’t come out unchanged.

–It’s easier to go into the enchanted tower than to come out.

–Going through any doorway is fraught. Almost anything could be a doorway.

–If an animal asks you for help, you should help it.

–You should be careful about making promises.

Rules are poetic rather than scientific. There’s no “weigh out three grams of saltpeter” alchemy; there’s no scribbling down equations; and you probably don’t want to try to find a loophole, because that probably wouldn’t end well. Fairy tale magic is much more about doing the right things, possibly for the right reasons, and much less about applying a formula.

Of course the best essay about fairy tale magic is On Fairy Tales, by Tolkien. It’s a long essay; here’s a pdf version, and here’s an important bit from near the end of the essay.

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good
catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which
is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,”
nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace:
never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow
and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face
of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting
glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its
events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it,
when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed
accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar
quality.

I can’t say anything to match that, so I’ll stop. Click through to the pdf if you’d like to read the whole thing.

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Update: Well, this is unexpected

Welcome to June! The cicadas are tapering off, we’ve had a run of truly splendid weather, and early summer is off to a good start. Friday afternoon, I took the dogs out to the arboretum — a fenced acre and a half where I’ve planted a good many trees and shrubs — and I thought you might like to try your eye at spotting an unusual addition to the day. Take a look:

See it? Look past the puppy and on the other side of the fence.

Yeah, I didn’t think you would be able to see it. Let’s try that again:

This fawn is indeed visible in the other photo, but you have to blow it up and look carefully. I coaxed the dogs to stay away from this area and then I was extra careful they did not poke their noses over in that direction as we left the arboretum. You can sure tell fawns have no scent, because the dogs had no clue. Pretty neat!

Okay, so also on Friday, I loaded the final version of RIHASI at Patreon and set the post to go live Sunday morning. Therefore, if you are a patron and haven’t picked it up, you might want to drop over there and download it. I’m SO looking forward to everyone getting a chance to read it! Those of you who read an earlier version will see that I’ve tweaked it in many small but imo important ways. Proofing really did turn a bit obsessive, but I expect that as always, there are just a couple typos in there somewhere. If you spot any, by all means let me know and I will correct the epub file and replace it at my Patreon.

That part of the weekend was expected. Here’s the first unexpected part:

You know the Death’s Lady BookBub promo ran on May 26th, and that I surrounded it with other promotions to help the sales build and then buffer the decline. This strategy, leading up to and away from BookBub promotions, is supposed to be useful in getting Amazon’s algorithms to continue to show the on-sale book to potential buyers. Well, I think that worked, because the omnibus continued to sell about a hundred copies per day for some days after all promotion stopped. It’s tapering off now, so I’m going to raise the prices. But not all the way. I’m making a stern mental note to raise the prices all the way later, but I’m going to leave the price pretty low for a week or two just to see how that works. Regardless, I can now say that this promotion definitely yielded a (small) direct profit and hopefully will lead to better sales moving forward, hopefully of everything.

Meanwhile, here’s the second unexpected part:

So, I was thinking about what story to write next for my newsletter. Several of you have made good suggestions about that, but because of the Death’s Lady promotion, that series was on my mind. Therefore, I’ve started a story from Taranah’s pov, set during the midwinter that follows the events of the trilogy and Shines Now. You remember Taranah? This is Taranah Beringilan-sa, the king’s aunt and also the the woman who — it is hinted — may be interested in more than friendship with Daniel.

This coming midwinter is rather fraught, I realized. For several different reasons. Lord Death will be walking abroad, in person. Tenai is likely to find memories of the past crowding her newfound peace. Besides that, midwinter is the time when the veil between the worlds thins to the point that Tenai could take Daniel back to our world … if he chooses to return. I wonder if he has quite made up his mind? Or whether, when faced with the option, he might change his mind? I bet Taranah wonders that as well.

I think this story may go long, but I do think I’m going to write it and bring it out, in installments, in my newsletter. Then, depending on how long it is, we’ll see.

I’m going to be putting more of my attention toward SILVER CIRCLE, which I have started re-reading, in preparation for writing the rest of it. But I will probably be continuing to work on this other DL’s story at the same time.

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At the Solar System’s Edge: Pluto

This is from Plait’s Under Alien Skies, of course. I’m not specifically interested in Pluto, but Plait caught my attention at once when I flipped to this chapter and read:

If you peruse the internet about Pluto, you may find articles asserting that from this distant world, the Sun would look like any other star in the sky. However, this is simply not true. The brightness of an object drops as the square of your distance from it. At its farthest, Pluto is about fifty times farther from the Sun than Earth is, meaning that the Sun will look 1/2500 as bright.

This may sound like the Sun would be seriously diminished, but in fact the Sun is about 400,000 times brighter than the full Moon in our sky. That means that even from Pluto, the Sun would still appear 160 times brighter than the Moon does from Earth. That would provide plenty of light to see by, like being outside at mid-twilight on Earth. It’s bright enough that looking directly at the Sun would still make you squint.

More profoundly, the Sun would be small. When Pluto is at its farthest, the Sun would be one-fiftieth as big as it appears from Earth. As it happens, that’s below the limit of the human eye’s ability to resolve an object, to see it as anything but a point. So in that sense, yes, the Sun would look like a star – a painfully bright one, but a dot in the sky. …

Faint as it would be, though, the Sun is still bright enough to create an amazing sight on the nearly airless Pluto: a blue sky.

The blue sky is because Pluto actually has an atmosphere, which I didn’t know. It’s an extremely thin nitrogen atmosphere, but at atmosphere that goes up about a thousand miles – and it’s enough of an atmosphere that it’s not only blue, but it separates into distinctly different layers of blueness because of the differentiation in particles suspended at different heights within the atmosphere.

Then this:

The ship touches down once more, and everyone shuffles off the ramp and down onto another platform. It’s local night here, but unlike before, where everything was pitch black, there’s a glow on the ground that allows you to see where you’re walking. There are shadows too, you notice, from the other people positioning themselves on the platform to get a good view of the sky. The shadows all point to your left, so the source of light must be on the right, and you turn and look.

There, hanging low in the sky, is Charon.

You flinch involuntarily; Charon is big. Much larger than the Moon as seen from the Earth. Just 750 miles wide, but only 12,000 miles away from Pluto’s surface, Pluto’s largest moon appears 3.5 degrees across, or seven times wider than the full Moon from Earth. It’s roughly the same size as a quarter held just 15 inches from your eye. Big. It feels like you could fall into it. And, surprisingly, even this far from the Sun, it’s still pretty bright. Despite the much fainter sunlight, Charon is closer to you, appears bigger, and is about twice as reflective as the Moon.

And so on, as Plait takes us for a tour.

This part about the brightness of the Sun reminds me of a great bit from XKCD, about the brightness of a supernova.

Also, Plait sidesteps everything about the argument having to do with Pluto being a planet. Personally, I’m fine with giving Pluto status as a planet regardless of other trans-Neptunian objects because it was discovered first and it’s big compared to most known trans-Neptunian objects AND because various people are continuing to call it a planet.

ALSO, I can’t help but think of the other Pluto. No, not the cartoon dog. I mean Hades, and my favorite filksong about Hades is “Persephone” by Vixy and Tony, which you can listen to here if you wish. I wish they would put out another CD or downloadable music, whichever.

Oddly, I don’t think I’ve read any Hades/Persephone retellings. If any of you have one to recommend, I’d be interested. I’m primarily interested if Hades is not a villain, though ambiguous is fine.

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