Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 41

Why are there more transparent aquatic animals than terrestrial animals?

A Quora question: Why are there more transparent animals in water than land?

The link goes to Gary Meaney’s answer, which is long, detailed, features many neat pictures, and is just overall really fun.

If you’re ever on Quora, then you ought to be following Gary Meaney. All his answers are delightful. His book is also delightful. I don’t know of anyone else who routinely says things about animals that I didn’t know.

As you can see in the photo below, the most conspicuous feature of the frog is its blood, which absorbs lots of light, and contrasts sharply against the rest of the body. So, if a glass frog is in trouble, it pulls out its trump card – it hides its blood!

During the day when it’s vulnerable, the amphibian pumps 90% of the red blood cells in its body into its tiny liver, radically increasing its transparency. Any other animal would suffer traumatic blood clots if it stored much more than 10% of it blood in such a small area! How does the glass frog survive this? As of today, we have no idea …

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Conjunctions and Cadence

Yes, you can begin a sentence with a conjunction. Yes, this has always been true and remains true today. Yes, this means excellent stylists have in the past and still today begin sentences with conjunctions. Yes, this includes short conjunctions. No, the pet peeves of your English teachers are not relevant to this question, except inasmuch as the pet peeves of English teachers apparently scar many students for life. It’s remarkable that English teachers manage to instill certainty that you can’t begin sentences with conjunctions, yet utterly fail to teach students that “it’s” is a contraction, not a possessive. But I guess that’s a digression for another time.

Of course you all know I consider conjunction use an appropriate hill to die on, given everything written from the pov of an Ugaro protagonist. Obviously, anyone speaking taksu as a native speaker is likely to favor short sentences that frequently begin with conjunctions, which gives the speech of these characters an entirely different feel than the long, convoluted, academic-ish sentences of higher-class Lau speaking darau. Or, for that matter, a lower-class Lau speaking more casually. Darau just has a very different cadence and feel than taksu, and this is partly due to the taksu tendency to break sentences into pieces at conjunctions, where a darau-speaker would probably use a comma, or maybe a semicolon plus one of the big conjunctions. This is obviously a deliberate use of syntax to help differentiate the two cultures. But it’s probably equally obvious that I don’t hesitate to start sentences with conjunctions in basically any book, though it’s not as deliberate a stylistic choice anywhere else. It’s true that starting a lot of sentences with short conjunctions will produce a choppy feel, which is part of what I mean by cadence. But use of conjunctions creates rhythm and cadence in other ways as well.

Speaking of conjunctions and cadence, and syntax and style, means – as you may have guessed – that I am looking, right now, at the conjunction section in Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax As Style. Let’s look at some great paragraphs that showcase the use of conjunctions to create cadence:

But as he spoke, the phantom years scrolled up their vision, and only the eyes of Ben burned terribly in darkness, without an answer.

And day came, and the song of waking birds, and the Square, bathed in the young pearl light of morning. And a wind stirred lightly in the Square, and, as he looked, Ben, like a fume of smoke, was melted into dawn.

And the angels on Gant’s porch were frozen in hard marble silence, and at a distance life awoke, and there was a rattle of lean wheels, a slow clangor of shod hoofs. And he heard the whistle wail along the river.

Yet, as he stood for the last time by the angels of his father’s porch, it seemed as if the Square were already far and lost; or, should I say, he was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he has left, yet does not say, “The town is near,” but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges.

This is Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel. It’s lovely. One of the many, many classics I’ve never read, which Virginia Tufte makes me want to pick up. Tufte draws attention here to the use of conjunctions to create cohesion between and within the paragraphs, but she also notes that this use of conjunctions creates a Biblical cadence, which it certainly does.

Here’s another example of cadence created by conjunctions:

Unoka was never happy when it came to wars. He was in fact a coward and could not bear the sight of blood. And so he changed the subject and talked about music, and his face beamed. He could hear in his mind’s ear the blood-stirring and intricate rhythm of the eke and the udu and the ogene, and he could hear his own flute weaving in and out of them, decorating them with a colourful and plaintive tune.

That’s Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart. It seems suitable to talk about conjunctions and rhythm in a passage that is using conjunctions to create a musical rhythm related to its meaning. To me – I’m an aural reader, strongly oriented toward the sound of language – this seems like something the reader ought to notice and appreciate subconsiciously, even if they don’t notice it consciously. I’m sure some readers don’t actually notice rhythm and cadence in prose, and therefore can better appreciate the work of authors who may not have as much of an ear themselves.

Let’s look at one of the many (many) unread books on my Kindle; one I haven’t looked at since I picked it up on the strength of a recommendation from someone here and a one-sentence description. This is The Silence of Bones by June Hur. I’m picking it to look at now because this story is a historical set in 1800 Korea, and I’m a total sucker for historicals with settings far removed from modern-day America.

The capital lay deep in stillness.

By morning, the dirt road usually clamored with life outside Changeok Palace: women crowding fish stalls, farmers carrying produce, scholars garbed in silk robes, and monks with prayer beads strung around their necks. And there would always be a mob of children, faces burnt and glistening in the sticky heat, chasing one another down the street. But not today.

“Do you suppose the rumors are true, Officer Kyŏn?” Rain pitter-pattered against black tiled roofs as I lowered the satgat over my face, allowing the drops to dribble down from the pointed top and off the wide straw brim. “Whispers that the king was assassinated.”

Mud squelched under boots as police officers trudged ahead.

Officer Kyŏn, the last officer in line and youngest of all, sent me a fierce look over his shoulder. “Watch what you say. The capital is nothing like your countryside.”

He was referring to Ichon Prefecture. A few months had passed since I’d left home, brought to the capital to be trained as a police damo, an indentured servant-of-all-work.

“But, eh, I’ll tell you this much.” Officer Kyŏn eyed our gray surroundings as he adjusted the sash belt over his black robe. “When King Chŏngjo died, there came a terrible noise of weeping from Mount Samgak, and rays of sunlight collided, then burst into sparks.”

This is fine, though not especially elegant as yet. I’m deeply charmed by the last sentence. I would turn the page just because of that sentence. I’m glad I opened this; maybe I’ll actually read it quick before I pick up SIILVER CIRCLE in June. Also, I notice that the third sentence does start with a short conjunction.

Let’s look at a nonfiction book I have sitting here on my coffee table. I’ve been wanting to read this, and here it is, so again, maybe I’ll actually pick it up and read it now. Have I mentioned I’m still re-reading bits of RIHASI and fiddling with it? I swear, proofing has become a compulsive activity. I’m so much looking forward to dropping it on my Patreon, not just because I very much enjoy the thought of everyone getting to read it, but because that means I am officially done with any kind of fiddling other than correcting outright typos, if any are left.

Anyway! This is Under Alien Skies by Philip Plait. I’m skipping ahead to the chapter on Saturn, which is titled One Ringed Planet to Rule Them All. That made me smile, and besides, who doesn’t like Saturn, so that’s the chapter I’m looking at first.

Saturn is the crown jewel of the solar system. In all the sky seen from Earth, there’s nothing quite like it.

With the eye alone it’s actually not much to see, at best a yellowish starlike point, the outermost of the easily visible naked-eye planets. But through the eyepiece of even a small telescope, the planet becomes a tiny disk, and the rings are evident. Viewed through progressively bigger telescopes, the truly glorious nature of this world becomes ever more apparent. Faint bands stripe the planet, and moons come into view – dozens of them, their motion around the planet obvious after a day or so.

But of course, it’s not the planet that is so captivating. It’s the rings.

No one is quite sure how or even how long ago they formed, but they are the single most magnificent thing in our Sun’s neighborhood. Over twenty times wider than our own fair planet, the rings are what make Saturn Saturn.

I’ve shown that planet to countless people through my own telescope, and to a one they gasp, they laugh, they clap their hands, they can’t believe it’s real. …

Of course, as amazing as seeing Saturn can be through a telescope or even on your screen, there’s just no substitute for being there.

And then the author walks the reader through a trip to Saturn. This is going to be a fun book, obviously. The prose is fine, though straightforward rather than elegant. Did you notice the use of a conjunction to start the fourth sentence, and another to begin the third paragraph? Probably you did, given the overall topic of this post.

I picked these two books almost at random. I certainly did not look at the authors’ use of conjunctions before including excerpts here. Both begin a sentence with a short conjunction on the first page – in both cases, the author does this in the second paragraph. Every now and then, someone asks, in real life or on Quora or somewhere, “Is it okay to start sentences with and or but? My English teacher said not to, but it seems to me that real authors do it all the time.” This is the way that question should be asked, because real authors DO IT ALL THE TIME, and it’s therefore hard to believe that anyone could have failed to notice this or that anyone could take this prohibition seriously. It’s even harder to believe that any English teachers could make such a prohibition with a straight face.

This is also (another) example of why I keep telling people to quit asking whether something is okay and go look at actual books. Read the first page of ten books and you are probably (judging from the sample of two random books here) going to discover that sure, it’s fine to start sentences with conjunctions. Then, if you’re interested in style and syntax, you might start paying attention to how that works and why authors might do it, and noticing examples where you think it doesn’t work as well and thinking about why, and this is kind of a neat awareness to overlay on prose as you read books. Or at least it is for me.

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Recent Reading: ALIBI by Sharon Shinn

Okay, don’t go looking for this one; it’s not out and I have no idea if it’s even been scheduled for release yet. But it will come out eventually, and I’ve read it, so here’s a heads-up review post, and when it comes out, no doubt I’ll remember to mention that.

Meanwhile! How many of you have read this one?

This is Sharon Shinn’s retelling of Jane Eyre as a SF novel. After being educated at a technical school that focuses on the growth of the mind to the exclusion of all else, Jenna accepts a job as a nuclear reactor maintenance technician at remote Thorrastone Park, owned by the wealthy Everett Ravenbeck.

As this is a Jane Eyre retelling, I expect you can pretty well imagine how the plot unfolds. It’s not my favorite of Sharon Shinn’s novels … full disclosure: I don’t really like Jane Eyre. (Sorry! I don’t!) If you love Jane Eyre, then obviously you should read Jenna Starborn because you’re practically certain to love it. If you’ve never read Jane Eyre, here’s your chance to get acquainted with this classic by reading an SF novel. If you wind up loving Jenna Starborn, you can then go back and read Jane Eyre. I will add, I liked Railsea FAR FAR better than Moby Dick. Sometimes that’s how it works out — the retelling is just a lot more appealing than the original. Granted, Railsea eventually becomes a huge departure from the original. That’s one reason I liked it a lot better.

But the actual reason I bring Jenna Starborn up right now is because it’s an SF setting and also it’s told in the first person. Alibi is a little the same, though it’s not a retelling of any kind and also the SF setting is near-future.

I did pause for a second to think, okay, are any others of Sharon Shinn’s books in first person? And yes — Summers at Castle Auburn is first person, and so are two of the three exquisite Safe-Keeper stories, which are NOT ALL LINKED TOGETHER ON AMAZON, WHATEVER, PUBLISHERS, so here are book one, book two, book three, if you would like to click over to them and take a look. They each stand alone, and my personal favorite is Book Two: A Truth-Teller’s Tale, but all three are lovely. Anyway, as I say, I was thinking about that because Alibi is first person.

Other than that, it’s not very similar! Because it’s near-future SF, so it’s basically like a contemporary setting, only with a few twists. Also, it’s a murder mystery, so that’s different. Wrapt in Crystal, which I loved, has a strong mystery element, by the way. But it’s not really a murder mystery, and Alibi … is almost a murder mystery. More on that in a minute.

So, let me tell you about the future!

1) Cool slang

I loved the slang in this book. Slang is difficult to do well — CJC did a great job with this in Heavy Time and Hellburner, which have been collected in a duology volume called (weirdly) Devil to the Belt. You know what, that makes me feel better about struggling to come up with titles and subtitles, because really? Devil to the Belt? Also, these books do not appear to be available in ebook form either as single books or as this duology. WHATEVER, PUBLISHERS. I linked the duology volume with the weird title because it’s a really good price right now compared to picking up each book separately. I mean, as long as you’re okay with paper rather than ebooks. Another trilogy that comes to mind for great slang is the trilogy by Shelby, Across a Jade Sea, which is not collected in one series page, so here, first book, second book, third book. I really liked this trilogy, which is self-published and could use a cover upgrade, but at least it’s available in ebook form and also, it’s really good, so take a look.

Anyway, slang is hard to do well, and Alibi offers great slang. It feels like it could be real slang and it’s fun. You know what would also be fun? Dropping this book in school libraries and seeing if you could get kids to start using this slang. “Oh, jazz! Jazz without cessation!” It would be hilarious if you could get phrases like that to catch on.

2) Creepy holograms

One thing I have never, ever wanted is a hologram of a dead relative occupying my living room. Ugh.

3) Earfones.

Yeah, we are practically right there at this very moment. I did say this was near-future. I am kind of a slow-adopter of technology, so I doubt I will ever have a phone implanted in my head.

4) Teleportation

And this is of course a really important element of the setting. I wouldn’t mind this invention! Let’s go, somebody invent teleportation!

Also, this creates a situation that is kind of the opposite of a locked-room mystery. It’s not quite the opposite because there are restrictions — you need a code to teleport into someone’s house — but, I mean, if you have the right code, you can teleport right into someone’s house. I mean someone rich who has a teleport both in his house, like our murder victim. Who is a super, super unpleasant guy with, one expects, nigh-unto-infinite enemies.

There are other differences between a real-world setting and this near-future setting, but those are the ones that leap to mind. Especially that last one.

How about the mystery?

All right, so, I don’t read mysteries for the mystery, as a rule. I read mysteries for the characters and the setting. However, I’m usually a little disappointed if the mystery fails too badly as a mystery. So, how does the mystery in Alibi stack up?

It’s pretty good! At least for me! I did not figure out who did it until right before the protagonist figured it out. This is despite clues that in retrospect were pretty obvious, so that’s exactly how a murder mystery ought to work. I will be curious to see, when this book eventually comes out, how many of you and how many readers in general figure it out long before I did. I was distracted by a large number of characters, almost all of whom I really loved and almost none of whom I wanted to be the murderer.

The most unusual thing here is how late the murder takes place — quite near the end. This is why I’d say this story is almost a murder mystery. We don’t meet the victim until rather late in the book, he is just as awful as everyone says he is, we are like PLEASE, SOMEONE, MURDER THIS GUY, and then he is murdered, so that’s just fine. But the book is about the characters and their lives and then also eventually there is this murder. It’s really a slice-of-life type of story. And then the murder. This actually reminds me of Jennifer Cruisie’s Welcome to Temptation. That was the first of her books that I read, and it is a romance … it’s a romance … still a romance … boom! Astonishingly close to the end, it’s also a murder mystery. I did not see that coming AT ALL, though now I realize that kind of thing is fairly characteristic of Cruisie’s novels. Plus, in Welcome to Temptation, the person who gets murdered is not a nice person, so the reader probably doesn’t mind that suddenly there’s a murder mystery in this story.

Alibi is like that too. It’s a slice-of-life story with a significant romance subplot and then it’s also a murder mystery. The mystery itself does not drag out for all that long. The protagonist is a primary suspect (though really there are any number of suspects), and she loses her head a bit and stumbles onto the real murderer, and this all takes place quite quickly, after which we have the falling action where the unpleasant murder victim is dead and everyone else gets set to have a nice life.

So, how about the protagonist and other characters?

Here is where the story really shines!

There are roughly ten thousand characters and (other than the murderer) they are all neat people who are fun to spend time with. It’s amazing that Shinn can bring this many characters to life on the page, but here they are: vivid, distinctive, real people, all of whom are unique and appealing. It’s the characters that make this story sing.

The protagonist, Taylor, is an English teacher, so that’s fun right there. She assigns her students to write a post-apocalyptic story and suggests they set it at the school and bring their classmates into their stories as characters and you know what, I immediately wanted to teach a creative writing class and assign that exact project. Taylor is also really into poetry, so there’s plenty of poetry in this novel, including a snippet of a poem by Emily Dickinson.

As imperceptibly as Grief

The summer lapsed away —

Too imperceptible at last

To seem like Perfidy —

The whole poem is here if you would like to read it. The poetry also makes this story sing. It’s practically impossible to include too much poetry in a novel, as far as I’m concerned. But, besides being an English teacher, Taylor is also specifically good at connecting with people. The romance subplot depends on this element. It’s a restrained element, possibly because there are SO MANY other characters and Taylor is friends with them all. I loved her brother (and would have liked to see more of him), and her friends Marika and Domenic (I would LOVE to see MUCH more of him, and suggested him as the lead in a possible sequel).

Taylor is the first-person protagonist and she does drive the action, such as it is because mostly this is slice-of-life, remember. But the center of the story is actually Quentin, a kid with a progressive neuromuscular disease that will eventually kill him unless some effective treatment is developed. The story and most of the characters revolve around Quentin, including Taylor, who is hired as his English tutor; the male lead, Bram, who is an ex-cop and now head of security; Dennis, who is Quentin’s physical therapist; Francis, who is the butler; Bordeaux, who is difficult to describe so I’m not going to try; and Quentin’s father, who is fortunately mostly offstage as he is so very unpleasant that we definitely don’t want to spend time with him. And almost anybody except Quentin’s father would ALSO make a neat lead character for a sequel, especially Bordeaux. But also Bram or Dennis. Honestly, there is just a plethora of very neat characters here.

Overall:

I’m not sure I would have pegged this as a Sharon Shinn novel if I hadn’t known. I recognized Ninth Daughter as Barbara Hambly even though it’s a historical mystery and the name on the cover is “Barbara Hamilton.” I pegged that one because a specific incident reorients the reader’s opinion of a secondary character in a way that is highly characteristic of Barbara Hambly. There were probably turns of phrase I recognized as well, but didn’t consciously notice. It was characterization that did it for me there.

I think, here, if I’d recognized the author, that might have been due to some of the metaphorical language plus characterization. Sharon Shinn is outstanding at powerful metaphorical imagery that capture emotional truth. That’s the case here as well. There’s a particular metaphor … let me see …

“I had this picture in my head, all these bodies kneeling on the ground, hunched over, their hands over their heads. Just one big desert landscape dotted with these dark sad people who were close enough to touch and yet separated from each other by miles of — grief, I suppose.”

And this is what Taylor is all about, actually — reaching out to people who have been separated from each other, bringing them together.

So — eventually! When this book is released! You can see what you think. In the meantime, it gets added to the surprisingly large stack of novels I’m beta reading for people this year.

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Update: Well, that was exciting

Okay, bottom line first — yes, the BookBub featured deal paid for itself, but not by much. If I’d had the trilogy set for a 70% royalties instead of 35%, obviously it would have yielded a nice return on investment. If and when I get a BookBub deal just for the US, I’ll definite be using the KU tools to lower and raise the price in order to be able to use the 70% option. I really, really wish I could do that and still have prices go up and down properly in other countries, not just the US and UK.

However, regardless of immediate payoff, it’s almost certainly going to be a good thing that more than 2000 people bought the trilogy. Hopefully some decent fraction of those people will read it sometime this year, love it, and go on to try Shines Now and then others of my books. There’s a teaser for Tuyo and also a teaser for Black Dog at the back of the trilogy, because, I mean, of course there is.

Also, I believe I’m seeing a rise in KU pages read. We’ll see how that looks over the next month or so.

This featured deal sure made me tense, I will say. I was clicking over to KDP to look at the numbers every two hours all yesterday until I went to bed. I did get a nice orange banner for the first time:

See that? Best seller. Pretty neat, eh? Right now, this omnibus is sitting at #155 in the entire Kindle store, which is impressive. Also, it’s at #1 in Contemporary Fantasy (I put it in that category because of the first book), #9 in Epic Fantasy (because of books two and three) and #10 in Paranormal and Urban Fantasy (which is NOT my decision; KDP put it in that unsuitable category, and later I will ask if they would kindly take it out again because it’s really not reasonable to show it to paranormal/UF readers). But later, later, I don’t want to mess with it while the sale is still running.

Thank you to everyone who took a moment to put a review on the trilogy. I’m sure that helped sales — I mean, whenever I’m thinking of picking up something via Freebooksy or BookBub or whatever, I ALWAYS look at the top few reviews and often decide yes or no based on those reviews. I definitely think a handful of thoughtful, positive reviews helps a lot.

So, whew, and I’ll continue applying with Tuyo and hope eventually I get a featured deal for that one.

Meanwhile!

I didn’t get a lot else done yesterday, other than writing the first paragraphs of the No Foreign Sky sequel. I’d like to complete the first chapter of that book by June 1, after which I will put it away and pick up Silver Circle. Which I am now looking forward to, so putting it aside for five months and writing other things was probably a good idea in every way. I figure June, July, and surely I will have a complete draft by the beginning of August even if the entire build-up to the climax is a total bear to write. The climax itself should be fine. Then there should be a lot of falling action. I’m guessing (you know how much these guesses are worth!) that the total overall length will be about 300,000 words, which will yield two books of perfectly reasonable 150,000-word lengths when cut in half. It’s at 210,000 words right now, which, I mean, SURELY it cannot take more than two months to finish it.

A fair bit of revision, probably. But I hope I will be sending it to early readers no later than the beginning of September and releasing it in October/November. We’ll see!

Meanwhile!

Big storm blew through last night. Very exciting! I went out and walked around on the deck, keeping an eye on the clouds, just in case. If I’d seen anything that looked truly dangerous, I’d have ducked inside and called the tornado warning to my dogs (“Hey, dogs! Want to go downstairs and have a COOKIE???”) and tucked everybody into crates in the bedroom. But, no. Very high winds; dark, dramatic clouds; gusts of rain; and the whole thing was past us in about ten minutes. After which, a much more serene moment to finish the evening:

And that was Sunday. Whew.

Also! Happy Memorial Day.

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Friday update, with puppies

I didn’t do a regular update this past Monday, and didn’t quite notice that because I was distracted by other things. But!

Puppies are still cute:

Joy with Maximillian, in a peaceful moment

One of the extremely identical black-and-tan puppies with Maximillian, in a slightly less peaceful moment, but Max was quite tolerant.

The puppies are learning to walk (or scamper, really) on leash.

Each puppy does fine as long as the other dogs are adults rather than other puppies. Two puppies together tangle the leashes, of course. They have a tendency in that direction even when they accompany one or two adults, but it’s not nearly as much bother. The adults also modeled not being scared of the astronomical number of trucks that went by. Some neighbor is up to some sort of major project, judging from the trucks bringing in nigh-unto-infinite loads of fill dirt. One of the trucks was big and loud, so it was good to have an adult dog implicitly telling the puppy, Whatever, trucks are harmless, sometimes they make noise like that, don’t worry about it.

In other news, wow, all of Thursday disappeared into an exceedingly tedious bout of tweaking and adjusting and final-final proofing for RIHASI. I honestly thought I was past that stage, but was doing one more proofing read-through and wound up doing quite a lot of tweaking, usually just changing one word to a different word or taking out two words or whatever. I did add just a tiny, tiny bit here and there. Anyway, this took ALL DAY and in fact some time this morning too. Wow, was that annoying and tedious.

I am now making the epub file, as I think I am actually no-fooling done with tweaking at this point. I will now send the epub to my kindle app and skim through it, but I sure hope it will prove basically one hundred percent ready to go because I am now officially tired of fiddling with this book.

I opened a new file this morning, and started compiling a character list for a sequel to NO FOREIGN SKY. At the moment, this sequel is titled UNFORGIVING SKY, because that popped into my head. Don’t take that too seriously as the real no-kidding title for the second book, but I do rather like it.

I think the subtitles for SILVER CIRCLE will probably be Part I: Scattered Sparks / Part II: Shattered Skies — I guess the alliteration is okay with me. Not totally sure, but that’s what I think I will probably wind up going with.

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Write like a … tree?

A post at Writer Unboxed that caught my eye because of the title of the post, and also because it was written by Juliet Marillier: Write Like a Tree

I’ve loved the books of Marillier’s that I’ve read, beginning with Daughter of the Forest. Her writing is absolutely lovely.

This is the cover I have, a lovely cover.

The new cover, not bad, but I don’t think it captures the tone of the story

“We all accepted that this land was a gate to that other world, the realm of spirits and dreams and the Fair Folk, without any question. The place we grew up in was so full of magic that it was almost a part of everyday life – not to say you’d meet one of them every time you went out to pick berries, or draw water from your well, but everyone we knew had a friend of a friend who’d strayed too far into the forest, and disappeared; or ventured inside a ring of mushrooms, and gone away for a while, and come back subtly changed. Strange things could happen in those places. Gone for maybe fifty years you could be, and come back still a young girl; or away for no more than an instant by moral reckoning, and return wrinkled and bent with age. These tales fascinated us, but failed to make us careful. If it was going to happen to you, it would happen, whether you liked it or not.”

You see? Lovely writing. I grant, I didn’t particularly like her 12 Dancing Princesses retelling, Wildwood Dancing. That’s because of protagonist ineffectuality, nothing else. I haven’t read anything by Marillier for a long time. No doubt I should. Harp of Kings, maybe. Heart’s Blood. Have any of you read either of those?

But, back to the post about writing like a tree. What can that mean? Start with the trunk — the theme, maybe? — and then branch out? Or maybe start with the roots deep in the soil — the author’s experience and vision — and let the story grow from that? or something else? Let’s take a look …

‘There were trees here once, in another age,’ Mother Rowan said. ‘Great, wonderful trees something like the one you called the Ancestor. Such things they witnessed in their long lives: the fall of kings, the deeds of heroes, the passing away of tribes and the grief of survivors. Courage and cowardice; justice and tyranny; love and hate. No wonder old trees are so full of wisdom.’

That’s a tidbit from Marillier’s current WIP. Then the post, with this conclusion:

Writing can be more powerful, more thought-provoking, perhaps also more comforting, if it comes from deep roots, long memories, storm and calm, the passing of seasons. Writer, imagine yourself as a tree, whether it’s a towering larch, a stately oak or a compact hawthorn. Think about your roots: family, tribe, culture. Place of birth and growing up; places that are important in your life; place of the ancestors. Think about your branches, your leaves, your bark: experiences, growth, change; give and take. 

So it’s the latter. Let your writing grow from your own roots, your own experience — your own voice. That’s probably unavoidable. But perhaps it’s not bad advice, even if it’s also unavoidable. It could be heard this way: Don’t try to write to the market. Don’t try to write something you don’t like yourself. Don’t try to write a story that you yourself find unbelievable at its heart. I think that’s all good advice.

Quotefancy

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Dangerous advice: Show don’t tell

I don’t much care for the “Show, don’t tell,” advice, though every now and then I feel compelled to note that a particular scene in a specific book would be a lot better with more showing and less telling. Still, as a rule, I’m not a fan of this phrase. Therefore, this blog post at Anne R Allen’s blog caught my eye: Why “Show Don’t Tell” Can be Dangerous Advice for New Writers.

I know why I don’t like “show, don’t tell.” I dislike this advice because

–It makes it sound like telling is bad.

–It prevents new authors from figuring out when and how to tell effectively.

–It makes new authors self-conscious about the wrong things.

–It ignores books that are heavily into telling, or treats those books as inferior.

***

Let’s look at one of those books.

A Winter’s Tale, by Helprin

And sometime not too deep in winter, each year, the Lake of the Coheeries would surprise everyone by freezing over during the night. In the second week of December at the latest, the inhabitants of Lake of the Coheeries Town sat by their fires after dinner and stared into the darkness around their rafters as Canadian winds rode in hordes and attacked their settlement from the north. These winds had been born and raised in the arctic, and had learned their manners on the way down, in Montreal—or so it was said, since the people of Lake of the Coheeries hadn’t much respect for the manners or mores of Montreal. The winds ripped off tiles, broke branches, and toppled unwired chimneys. When they came up, everyone knew that winter had begun, and that a long time would pass before the spring made the lake light yellow with melting streams that fled from newly breathing fields. …

The lake had frozen in one night, which meant that a harsh winter was due. Just how difficult it would get could be forecast by the smoothness of the ice. The finer it was, the harder would be the succeeding months, although—in the days before it snowed—iceboating would be unlike anything on earth.

It lay there almost laughing at its own perfection. There was not a ripple, streak, or bubble to be seen. The terrible wind and the incessant castellations of foam had been banished and leveled by the fast freeze of heavy blue water. Not a flake of snow skidded across the endless glass, which was as perfect as an astronomer’s mirror.

“The monsters must be sealed in tight,” Mrs. Gamely said. Then she grew silent in contemplation of the winter to come. The ice was airless, smooth, and dark. For two weeks the sun rose and set on Lake of the Coheeries Town, low and burnished, spinning out a mane of golden brass threads. A steady and gentle breeze moved from west to east on the lake, sweeping the flawless black ice clean in a continuous procession of chattering icicles and twigs that fled from wind and sun like ranks of opera singers who run from their scenes gaily and full of energy in a stage direction stolen from streams, surf, and the storms which fleece autumnal forests.

Even though the air temperature never went above ten degrees, the weather was mild because the wind was light and the sky cloudless. With their wells freezing up and their world nearly still, the inhabitants of the town took to the ice in a barrage of Dutch pursuits that saw the sun rise and set, and gave the village the busy and peculiar appearance of a Flemish winter scene. Perhaps they had inherited it; perhaps the historical memory deep within them, like the intense colors with which the landscape was painted, was renewable. A Dutch village arose along the lake. Iceboats raced from west to east and tacked back again, their voluminous sails like a hundred flowers gliding noiselessly across the ice. Up close, there was only a slight sound as gleaming steel runners made their magical cut. A little way in the distance, they sounded like a barely audible steam engine. Miniature villages sprang up on the lake, comprised of fishing booths ranged in circles, with flapping doors and curling pigtails of smoke from stovepipe chimneys. Firelight from these shelters reflected across the ice at night in orange and yellow lines that each came to a daggerlike point. Boys and girls disappeared together, on skates, pulled into the limitless distance by a ballooning sail attached to their thighs and shoulders. When they had traveled so far on the empty mirror that they could see no shore, they folded the sail, put it on the ice, and lay on its tame billows to fondle and kiss, keeping a sharp eye on the horizon for the faraway bloom of an iceboat sail, lest they be discovered and admired to death by the younger children who sailed boats into the empty sections just to see such things.

Blazing fires on shore ringed inward bays and harbors like necklaces. At each one, there was steaming chocolate, or rum and cider, and venison roasting on a spit. Skating on the lake in darkness, firing a pistol to keep in touch with a friend, was like traveling in space, for there were painfully bright stars above and all the way down to a horizon that rested on the lake like a bell jar. The stars were reflected perfectly, though dimly, in the ice, frozen until they could not sparkle. Long before, someone had had the idea of laying down wide runners, setting the light-as-a-white-weddingcake village bandstand on them, and hitching up a half-dozen plough horses with ice shoes to tow the whole thing around at night. With lights shining from the shell, an entire enchanted village skated behind it as the Coheeries orchestra played a lovely, lucid, magical piece such as “Rhythm of Winter,” by A. P. Clarissa.

When the farmers all along the undulating lakeshore saw a chain of tiny orange flames, and the shining white castle moving dreamlike through the dark (like a dancer making quick steps under concealing skirts), they strapped on their skates and pogoed through their fields to leap onto the ice and race to the magic that glided across the horizon. As they approached, they were astonished by the music, and by the ghostly legions of men, women, and children skating in the darkness behind the bandshell. They looked like the unlit tail of a comet. Young girls twirled and pirouetted to the music: others were content just to follow.

***

This is a beautiful story with many dreamlike scenes, especially winter scenes. I’ve read it maybe half a dozen times. I think the first time, I was too young. There was a lot I didn’t understand and I wasn’t sure I liked it, but I knew I loved the language of the story. Later, I read it slowly and I think I understood it better. I know I liked it better. I also still loved the language of the story, which is, as you see, heavy on telling, as beautiful description always is, and perhaps that’s why I always disregarded “show, don’t tell” advice myself, because I’ve always loved beautiful description.

What “telling” is for:

–Description that goes on more than a line or so.

–Establishing tone.

–Getting through unimportant transitions as briskly as possible.

–Getting through anything else unimportant as briskly as possible.

What avoiding telling necessarily causes:

–Limits description.

–Makes it hard to create a tone at all.

–SLOWS DOWN THE STORY A LOT, and I mean A LOT, and this is a problem even for an author who doesn’t care much about description.

So, what does this post at Anne R Allen’s blog say

A) Too Much “Show Don’t Tell” Slows the Pace.

Some newbie writers confuse descriptions of violence with conflict. If you describe every blow and scream of pain in a fight scene, your story is not moving forward. The story stops until we know how the characters react to what’s going on and how the fight alters the trajectory of the plot.

B) “Camera’s Eye” Showing Skimps on Information

But when a novelist tells us a character clenches his fist, he is not letting us in on much. … You’re not a camera. You’re a novelist. And it’s your job to give us as much information as possible to tell your story.

C) “Show Don’t Tell” Can Distance the Reader from the Character.

An author’s job is to create a connection between the reader and the character. Readers want to get inside the character’s head. But when we meet that guy with the clenched fist, we are just looking at him from the outside. We’re shut out of the story.

D) Withholding Information Annoys the Reader.

Let us know where we are, who the protagonist is and what he wants, or you’ve lost your reader before chapter two. If you have to tell rather than show to keep the reader from leaving, go ahead and do it. Seriously. It’s okay.

E) It’s Hard to Say Anything Original about Body Language.

How many times have you hit the thesaurus looking for a new way to say your character is afraid or angry or elated?

F) Too Much “Showing” Can be a Sign of Over-Workshopping

 I know writers who have workshopped the same novel for decades in everything from college classes to writers’ conferences to online critique groups. They often try to follow the advice of every person who gives feedback. What they’re doing is giving away creative control of their own book. They are letting their book be written by committee. They’re also following a recipe for bland, boring writing. Don’t do it. 

These are all good points. But surely that last is pure insecurity. This is where the only advice that matters is QUIT ASKING FOR ADVICE. Oh, maybe, PUT THAT AWAY FOR A YEAR and also QUIT ASKING FOR ADVICE. I really feel someone who does this ought to benefit a lot by putting the over-workshopped thing in a drawer and writing something else. When they have their new project finished, they should perhaps ask ONE beta reader for a critique, and then revise ONE time and then make a decision on that basis about whether to send it out into the world.

Having said that, I overworked a book once, and had a difficult time rebuilding it. That was NO FOREIGN SKY, and it was a lesson to me. The lesson was: Don’t keep rewriting according to different people’s advice. Just don’t. Minor revision is one thing; that’s fine. But big rewrites, do it according to your own vision or don’t do it at all. I may not stick to that rule forever, who knows, but that’s my rule for now.

Meanwhile!

I do like the linked post, and I hadn’t thought specifically of how “show don’t tell” can be translated as “don’t put us in the character’s head,” but wow, it sure could be taken that way. Speaking as someone who benefits from being asked, “Can you bring us more into the character’s head?”, I now wonder if this is one reason I dislike “show don’t tell” advice so much — because “show physical movements, avoid revealing the emotional context” is exactly the wrong advice for me. It might be okay for someone else. It might help a different author tone down the angst. Though my impression is, authors who write characters who wallow in angst do it on purpose, so maybe not.

Anyway, bottom line, everybody needs to show effectively and also tell effectively, whatever that means for them; and (as always) proscriptive advice is bad advice.

Also, maybe I should re-read A Winter’s Tale. Maybe I’ll wait till July, when I long for winter. Or for February, when I want to enjoy the winter more.

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Aliens!

Giant Structure Lurking in Deep Space Challenges Our Understanding of The Universe

Superpowered alien civilization that is organizing entire galaxies into giant structures, for excellent reasons, no doubt. Maybe it’s an art project.

Anyway, I thought you might like to click through and read about weird astronomical phenomena that we can’t currently explain.

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KU pages and royalties: a look at numbers

I thought you might like a peek at some interesting numbers. This is from a Written Word Media post. They do a lot of posts on all kinds of topics, often interesting and sometimes helpful. This one is about KU readership.

The KU global fund is the money that KDP uses to pay authors whose books are in Kindle Unlimited. The size of the global fund reflects the number of KU participants. When KU started, in July 2014, the global fund was $2.5 million. In September 2014, it doubled to $5 million. In December 2015, it was $13 million — barely more than doubled again. That’s a lot slower growth than I would have expected.

In January 2018, the global fund hit $20 million for the first time. It had been edging up on that for some months prior. In April 2020, it hit $30 million, and at that point, it was tending to go up faster month by month. In December 2021, it hit $40 million. In January 2024, for the first time it hit $50 million. That’s an (indirect, obviously) measure of how many readers have joined KU. Presumably there are close to 25 times as many KU readers now as their were in 2014.

What does KU pay authors? That’s in the linked article too. I don’t usually look up the fluctuating number, but the amount is (slightly) different every month. When it started, KU paid $.005779 per page. Ah, those were the days! I had nothing in KU at that point. It went down to $.004 something rather fast and has been under $.0049 basically ever since. The least KU has ever paid was last year, when it went under .004 for the first time ever — in July of last year, it went to $.003989 per page, and a good many people pulled at least some books out of KU. Either because of that or for some other reason, KDP changed its mind and the payout has been above $.0040 ever since. That low point was unfortunate timing, as that was when I released TASMAKAT, which got a lot of pages read. Too bad it was the worst-paying ever month for KU! Though obviously the difference between 0.00389 and 0.00410 is pretty tiny.

Anyway, since then, the payment per page has gone as high as $.00458 (last November), then it went back down, and at March 2024 stood at $.00415.

That doesn’t seem like much, does it? But it adds up.

I just multiply pages read by .004 for purposes of estimation: 10,000 pages read = just over $40, and now it’s easy to calculate everything else, isn’t it? Obviously 100,000 pages = $400 and 1,000,000 = $4000 and so on. You just keep adding zeros.

These are KENP, which means Kindle Edition Normalized Pages. A normalized page has fewer words than a page when you’re looking at the document in Word, TNR, 12-point. In KENP, MARAG has 574 pages. It’s just barely over 125,000 words, so that tells you about how a normalized page is calculated — a normalized page is about 220 words (or so, this isn’t exactly right either). KENP has nothing to do with the pages shown on the product page, by the way. The product page shows the number of pages for the paperback OR hardcover, whichever is less, which is why it says that TASMAKAT is 550 pages long. The KENP is close to 1400 pages. That means KU pays about $5.60 if someone borrows the book and reads the whole thing, which is obviously less than the $6.99 for a direct sale. On the other hand, KU royalties are just about exactly 50% of total royalties for TASMAKAT, and the proportion will go up over the next year or so because royalties from KU will tend to outpace royalties from direct sales over time.

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Please leave a review for the DL trilogy

OKAY, YES, I should have thought of this LAST WEEK, but this didn’t occur to me until late last night. BUT, the Death’s Lady trilogy has only one review and fifteen ratings. If you have previously left a review and rating for the individual books, this would be an EXCELLENT time to copy and paste one of those reviews over to the trilogy’s product page, here.

If you left a review for the first book and would like to copy and paste from there, here is the link to that one.

Here is the link to the second book.

Here is the link to the third book.

If you have read SHINES NOW but haven’t left a rating or review, this would be a great time. Here’s the link.

I dropped prices Sunday to make sure they would be down in time for the FIRST scheduled promotion, which will be Thursday the 23rd. The price change went through promptly with no weirdness, whew, and therefore prices are down right now.

The BookBub promo is scheduled for the 26th. The last scheduled promo is the 27th, but I scheduled Written Word Media to run Facebook ads through the 30th. I will then raise prices again probably June 1.

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