Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 49

Groundhog Day Time Loops

Here’s an interesting poll on Twitter:

What is the shortest Groundhog-style time-loop you would willingly spend a few centuries in?

— Arthur B. (@ArthurB) December 30, 2023

And here is a post that pulls this question for discussion:

The relevant part is maybe a third of the way down a very long post with lots of links, but then you get to this question:

To answer the question completely, one must ask what are the starting conditions and other rules. If you are starting from a sufficiently terrible position with no good options, such as locked in a prison or in the middle of nowhere, you might need to spend substantial time fixing that each loop if you want to do much. It might even be impossible with perfect play. … Consider this loop: A fully secured room, you can’t get out and no one can come in, one hour, but you have a desktop computer with internet access. With that loop, you can watch every movie and show, read every book, study every intellectual discipline and non-physical skill, speak to a large percentage of the world’s people.

My instant reaction: Ugh, no. I may be a very extreme introvert and a natural hermit, but I would not choose to spend centuries locked in a prison and in a time loop, even if I had the internet, as this post posits.

If you’re talking about loops of over a week in a normal situation, the whole thing is madness. Now you can go anywhere, do almost anything, learn almost anything to help you do it. I’d want to come out of the loop with the code for an aligned AGI.

Maybe? What do you think? Would you want to spend centuries in a looped week, given that you could travel and do whatever you wanted during that looped time?

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Now available in audio: the Tuyo World Companion

So, the Tuyo World Companion is now available in audio format.

I wasn’t going to put this book in audio, because it costs a lot to do ACX royalty share plus and more to pay an audiobook narrator without doing royalty share via ACX. When I say “a lot,” I mean something like $1000 to do royalty share plus and two to four times that to pay a narrator outright. That is for a normal-length novel. When I say “a lot,” I am therefore not kidding.

I should add: royalty share alone costs nothing. But you get more auditions, and more of them by better voice actors, if you check the “royalty share plus” option, which means paying a fee, but less than if you didn’t do royalty share at all.

Do you know how much it costs to do an audiobook via KDP’s new virtual voice service? Nothing. It costs nothing. And the audiobook cannot fall below a certain level of quality because the voices are standardized.

Pros: I have a list.

A) It doesn’t cost anything. The difference between “nothing” and “$1000 or more” is obviously large.

B) It is also fast. I mean, it’s really, really, really fast. Even if you spend hours adjusting every line of dialogue, that’s hours instead of months. It’s enormously faster than a voice actor.

C) It’s easy to edit. You can change a sentence or the pronunciation of a word and in less than an hour download the corrected version and start listening from wherever you left off, now with the adjusted sentence or pronunciation.

D) The voice quality is good. It’s much better than I expected.

Cons: I have a list.

A) Is it fair? Where did KDP get the voices they are using? Did they train their AI voice generator using audiobooks, without paying anything to the actor whose voice they are using?

Answer: It’s probably not always fair to voice actors, BUT, Apple, at least, licensed the rights to base voices on the voices of specific actors. They did not apparently need to pay a lot, relatively speaking, so that suggests that maybe other voice generators are also doing that? I used Amazon’s virtual voice generator because the the option appeared, because I honestly was never, ever going to pay anyone a lot of money to make an audio version of this book, and because I wanted to see what it was like and this relatively trivial use seemed like the way to do that.

B) The audio narration right now is totally unable to voice different characters and it does not try. The best you can do is tell the narrator speed to go up for one character and down for another, for a poor approximation of different character voices.

On the other hand, I’ve been underwhelmed by the ability of many voice actors to voice different characters. I think Patrick did a great job with this for TUYO and TARASHANA and this spoiled me and gave me an unrealistic feeling that most narrators are good at this. They aren’t. I focused on this one thing very tightly for TANO and I think that narrator also did a very good job, especially in giving each of the young men a distinctive and suitable voice. Especially Raga, who is just great. That’s exactly how he sounds.

I’m currently listening to auditions for MARAG and so far I’m not happy with any narrator’s ability to handle different voices. Some are just as unable to do that as the virtual voice generator. I am not willing to pay money for a narrator who cannot give Sinowa and Marag distinctive voices, ideally voices that are close to those we hear in TUYO and also in TANO, where the narrator got very close to the voices from TUYO.

I’m also not willing to produce a free audiobook that doesn’t do that. This is something that matters to me a lot, it turns out. I would literally rather not do an audiobook at all than do an audiobook where the narration does not allow at least minimal differentiation of the characters.

What do you bet that within a year, at most two, KDP will be offering a virtual voice generator that lets you select different voices for different characters? It would be absolutely no more tedious to go through and select “voice 1” for one character and “voice 2” for another character than it was to do the speed-it-up/slow-it-down thing, and the result would be massively better.

At that point, every voice actor who can’t voice different characters will be out of a job. So will every voice actor who can, unless they bring something to the table that is literally worth thousands of dollars per book. I am having trouble figuring out what that could be. So I have another prediction: in ten years or less, there will be no voice actors narrating audiobooks. The choice, if you want an audiobook at all, will be to either use AI voice generators or nothing. Questions of whether this was fair will then be moot.

I honestly don’t know what voice actors are going to do.

Here’s a related post from The Passive Voice.

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Here, have a surreal experience

A tremendously surreal video produced by something called Stable Diffusion, which I guess is an AI:

My first try with video
byu/Herolias inStableDiffusion

I recommend that you pause the video periodically to enhance the extreme weirdness.

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Geology? What geology?

This post about setting, at Patricia Wrede’s blog, made me laugh:

On the other hand, sometimes a writer just wants to write a story set in a world where all of the volcanoes and deserts form a wide band around the equator, with oceans forming stripes above and below the equatorial desert, lush forests and grasslands making the next stripes, and so on. In those cases, the author has gone straight to setting, without worrying about the realism or plausibility, and that’s fine…as long as the world is internally consistent and makes sense to the characters.

Why, yes! I agree!

Maybe someday I should write a book where the characters travel in a broad arc across a world that is actually a planet, with ordinary planetary geology, with deserts 30 degrees above and below the equator and on the lee side of mountain ranges, with mountain ranges where one continental plate is subducting beneath another, and shallow seas where the continental plates fall off, and all the biogeographical trimmings. I mean, just so readers understand I totally threw all that away on purpose when I put both mountain goats and ibex in the same mountain range.

Wrede goes on:

Local geography can be important in a story, or it can be ignored because the viewpoint character takes it for granted (but the hills in San Francisco, the river bluffs in Pittsburgh, the weird way Denver sits between pancake-flat plains to the east and enormous sharp-edged mountains on the west are all local geography that go a long way toward giving a sense of place to stories that might otherwise be almost generic urban settings). Geography can be a major or minor obstacle in a story, or it can be a metaphor for something the protagonist has to deal with, or it can evoke a mood or a sense of place.

She does not specifically say this, but one aspect of local geography that is genuinely important is agriculture. If you have a city, farms are probably around that town — or it’s on the coast, or right next to a river — or more than one of the above. The people in that city have to get their food from somewhere. Surrounding a city with deep forest for a hundred miles in all directions is really hard unless the city is supplied with produce in some way that doesn’t involve local agriculture, such as (a) a river, or (b) magic. That’s one reason secondary world fantasy is so convenient, because if you have a city in an unlikely place, magic can help supply that city with whatever cities need.

Having said that, some real-world towns are supplied in mysterious ways.

Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash

How the blazes does Santorini get supplied with anything other than fish? it’s on a volcanic island! Where does it get WATER? Answer: before desalinization plants, Santorini was completely dependent on winter rainfall. What happened when the winter rains were not abundant? I bet that was bad news. It’s probably still bad news.

How about food in a place like this? Here’s a brief post about that:

Santorini’s arid but fertile volcanic soil obliged its inhabitants to develop methods of cultivation unique in the Aegean islands. Barley, split pea (fava), lentils, peas, various types of grapes and wines have been the mainstay of the island’s economy since prehistoric times. 

Even so, wow, I mean, what a place to build a city. Santorini apparently also imported a lot of wheat and cotton and various other produce. So can your city. Was anybody else struck by this detail, in Gillian Bradshaw’s excellent book Render Unto Caesar, when the protagonist, Hermogenes, is talking about grain shipments to Rome and refers to ships carrying thirty tons of wheat as “tiny”?

Wrede actually winds up her post with alternate history:

What if the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska never disappeared? What if the last ice age was longer (or shorter)? What if a key mountain pass never developed (or the author moved it several hundred miles, affecting either trade routes or invasion routes)? What effect would the presence or absence of important minerals have on trade and/or technological development?

This reminds me of the Spiritwalker trilogy by Kate Elliott. Glaciers in the north, the “salt plague” that forced mass migration from Africa to Europe a long time ago, the “feathered people” who are descendants of troodons, I mean, wow. Also, I really admire the wide variety of splendidly drawn villains in this trilogy.

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Update: Boring progress; but also Recent Reading: Tribute by Sherwood Smith

Okay, so nothing new to mention regarding RIHASI. It’s moving along, that’s all. Very much same old, same old. I think there are two more chapters before the very fun final resolution, and I suspect there might be an epilogue. That seems pretty likely, but I won’t be sure until I get there. I expect I’ll be making that decision in a couple weeks, but for now, nothing much to say.

Therefore, how about a different topic? I haven’t been reading anything because (as you have noticed) I’ve been writing, but recently, I volunteered to beta read a book in the Phoenix Feather world called Sage Empress.

This book is set after another book called Tribute, though that one stands alone perfectly.

Now, I really loved the Phoenix Feather quadrilogy. I mean, a lot.

One of the many things I loved about it was that it was very slice-of-life and that when the good guys actually faced a bad guy, the bad guy would be defeated practically at once so that the story could refocus on the lives of the important characters. Because of the emphasis on daily life and the deemphasis on long dire struggles against bad guys, this quadrilogy seemed to me to basically be pretty low tension most of the time, and I mean low tension in a good way.

How does Tribute stack up to the Phoenix Feather quadrilogy?

A) In the quadrilogy, there were three really important pov protagonists and a good handful of other secondary pov characters. In Tribute, the focus is tighter. The story is contained in this one book. Although pov shifts, Bu is very much the primary protagonist. The other pov characters are distinctly secondary.

B) In the quadrilogy, I liked all the pov characters. In Tribute, yep, I really liked all the pov characters. I greatly enjoyed Bu, who is not a typical fantasy heroine, far less so thatn Mouse/Ari/Firebolt. I loved Granny Zim. I loved YinYin. I liked the various princes and the princess and the Emperor, all of whom were drawn deftly. I mean, there were some not-nice princes, but we didn’t see them a lot and they did not succeed in their machinations. Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but I think it’s pretty minor as spoilers go because I don’t think the reader is going to be super worried about them.

C) In the quadrilogy, flashy bad guys are defeated briskly when encountered. In Tribute, this is if anything even more true. The emphasis on slice-of-life is very similar. There is a shocking scene I didn’t see coming AT ALL that leads to the plot going off in a direction I didn’t anticipate, and this part is NOT SLICE-OF-LIFE. I mean, it was like, WHOA. But (a) I kind of liked it at the time, and (b) I liked it MUCH BETTER later, after everything was resolved. That’s my attempt to avoid extremely big spoilers, sorry, I know it’s super vague. If you read Tribute, you will definitely for sure recognize this plot twist when you get to it.

D) In the quadrilogy, the ending seemed possibly a little truncated. In Tribute, maybe a little? But not as much. In the quadrilogy, there were certain scenes I wanted very much and wrote in my head and those scenes didn’t occur and perhaps other readers don’t tend to write scenes ahead of time in their heads that way? Anyway, that wasn’t the case in Tribute. I wanted pretty much the ending we get. Sure, it’s a bit pat, but happily ever after is what I wanted and there it is. Although it’s not “ever” because Sage Empress takes place long after Tribute.

E) Tribute has a different emphasis. The quadrilogy was about the martial arts. Tribute is about music. I loved, loved, loved all the music. You can sure tell Sherwood Smith knows A LOT about music, far more than I do, and Bu’s journey from student to master was just absorbing and wonderful to read about.

The recent post about YA novels that are on the low-romance side? I forgot about these, but add them in. I mean everything in this world. There is romance, I don’t want to imply there isn’t, but it’s restrained and low-angst.

Overall rating: 5 out of 5. For me, Tribute just completely nails it. If you haven’t read it and you enjoyed the Phoenix Feather quadrilogy, don’t hesitate for even a second and let me reiterate that Tribute is self-contained, so don’t be put off by the “book 1” designation.

Meanwhile, I just finished my beta read of Sage Empress and will now be reading through that again and adding comments. I didn’t think the beginning was as engaging as in Tribute, but I think this is a natural consequence of the protagonist’s childhood life and my personal interests. It kicks into gear maybe 20% of the way in, as, well, as various important things happen all at once.

Sage Empress doesn’t stand alone. Out of everything in this world, Tribute is very definitely the single book that stands alone perfectly, and it would make a great introduction to the world. I highly recommend everything set in this world, but if you’re hesitating to start a quadrilogy, then Tribute is the entry point you’ve been waiting for.

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Fly and be free!

I just dropped MARAG at my Patreon!

If you haven’t joined my Patreon yet and now you’d like to, red button top right.

Have a nice weekend!

If you like, you can tell me what your favorite line is. My personal favorite is “Thank you, o king. I would be very, very grateful.”

You’ll know why when you get there.

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YA (and YA-adjacent) SFF without Romance

Okay, so this is a post compiled from a recent post about books aimed at teens, but without romance, especially without angsty romance. I went through the comments and pulled out most of the titles suggested, leaving out just a few that I think are much more aimed at young MG readers. Actually, I think a few of these here are probably aimed pretty young as well, but I wasn’t sure because I haven’t read them. When in doubt, I left them in because children’s books can be so wonderful, why not? But most of these are YA.

So, here are mine:

City in the Lake

The Floating Islands

The White Road of the Moon

The Keeper of the Mist

And now, here are the ones by everyone else, starting with the few I suggested and going right on in no order at all except by order of comment.

 The Lake House by Sarah Beth Durst

 I am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells

Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card

E.C. suggests:

Diana Wynne Jones (and since EC did not pick out a title, I will: my personal favorite is Dogsbody.

Garth Nix (and I think the place to start is Sabriel)

Rosemary Sutcliff (and I think most people start with The Eagle of the Ninth)

Dragon and Thief by Timothy Zahn

Arthurian stories by Gerald Morris (seconded by Kathryn M) (Beginning with The Squire’s Tale)

The Castaways of the Flying Dutchman series by Brian Jacques. I’ve managed never to read anything by Brian Jacques, though I keep meaning to.

Wabi, Bearwalker, Wolf Mark, and Dark Pond all by Joseph Bruchac

Boys of Blur and 100 Cupboards by N.D. Wilson (not SFF)

Alcatraz by Brandon Sanderson

The Secret Country trilogy by Pamela Dean

Alison contributes:

The Prodigy by John Feinstein (Not SFF — it’s a sports story.)

OtterB suggests:

Airborn series by Kenneth Oppel (I second that pick)

and OtterB adds

Another source of reading for teens are the Alex Awards, which are for books published for adults that the American Library Association committee thinks appeal to teens as well. Winners include All Systems Red by Martha Wells, The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi, and Educated by Tara Westover.

As long as YA exists as a category, then this is a great type of award and we need more emphasis on it. I would pick The Cloud Roads over Murderbot for an award like this. Moon is very much a YA type of protagonist.

Moving on —

Lydia says:

The Year of the Reaper, by Makiia Lucier

Wow, great cover:

This reminds me of Michael Whelan, and I don’t say that lightly.

We Rule the Night by Claire Eliza Bartlett. Not vampires! The description begins: Two girls use forbidden magic to fly and fight — for their country and for themselves — in this riveting debut that’s part Shadow and Bone, part Code Name Verity. My response, ! Wow, that’s quite a comparison to live up to, and also, Code Name Verity is another good one for this list.

Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson. I’ve had a sample for a while.

The Wicked and the Just and Spindle and Dagger by J. Anderson Coats (warning about heavy themes)

The Silence of Bones by June Hur (historical fiction novel without romance, about a servant girl at a police station in 18th century Korea; I immediately picked up a sample because this sounds so interesting!)

Megan Whelan Turner

From Elaine T:

A Darkening of Dragons and A Vanishing of Griffins by S. A. Patrick (a fantasy “using the Pied Piper of Hamelin, in a setting where Pipers are a trained, known thing and Hamelin’s had done what none of them ever should,” says Elaine, and that certainly sounds promising.)

Hanneke:

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome (which has been on my TBR pile for AGES)

From Heather:

The End of the Alphabet by Fleur Beale (Heather says, “it’s about relationships, but it’s MUCH more family relationships than romance. There’s romance in there but it’s… not great AT ALL and seems to be an afterthought.”) (Not SFF)

Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant’s, (but Heather adds, “the sequel is more violent and put me right off reading further in the trilogy,” to which I respond, wait, there are sequels?)

The Raging Quiet by Sherryl Jordan (Historical)

Enchantress from the Stars by Sylvia Engdahl, and wow, that takes me back! I loved this book when I was a kid.

The Christmas Mystery and The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder

The One Memory of Flora Banks by Emily Barr. Heather says, The narrator has amnesia, which is Very Much a main point. She can’t remember *anything* that happens day-to-day… until she does. Just ONE thing. And she goes off looking for it. (Despite the thing she remembers being a kiss with a boy, this isn’t a romance story. And it’s not horrible, either – the strangers she encounters are kind. I don’t think there’s really even a villain to the piece – not one with nasty intent, anyway.

WHEW. There are a LOT here that I’ve never read and a lot I’ve never even heard of. Should someone be looking for books aimed at teens, with no romance or very restrained, non-angsty romance, this might be a good place to start.

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Here, have a music video

Here’s the remarkable a capella group Pentatonix with the equally remarkable violinist Lindsey Stirling, in the postapocalyptic song Radioactive by Imagine Dragons. I just thought you might like it.

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Victoria Strauss: Dealing with Scammers

You all know, of course, that Victoria Strauss is the power behind Writer Beware.

And you also know that Writer Beware is your first and best asset in checking publisher legitimacy. “Goodnovel Writer Beware” brings up this post, for example, which tells you a lot about what good contracts look like by way of contrast with this utterly terrible contract.

***

 – The grant of rights is really sweeping (see the Licensed Rights Terms clause). Not only does it include pretty much all subsidiary rights in the work, including film, TV and games, but any “prequel, sequel, special edition, continuation, series, or the like” that the writer may produce. 

In other words, writers aren’t just signing up for one work, but for any other works related to it. 

– The rights grab extends not just to related works, but, potentially, to all future work.

Taken literally, which contracts generally are, this requires the writer to submit anything they ever write to GoodNovel, forever.

***

And so on.

So here’s a new post from Victoria Strauss: Coping With Scams: Suggestions for Changing Your Mindset

Mindset 5: Phone solicitors can be convinced to take no for an answer. This one is specific to the publishing/marketing/fake literary agency scammers that are especially aggressive phone callers. I often hear from authors who are at their wits’ end thanks to constant repeat calls from scammers they’ve tried over and over to refuse.

Strauss’ advice: Say no, do not explain, do not offer reasons, say no and hang up. Do that as often as necessary until the scammer finally, finally gives up. She doesn’t offer a statistical analysis of whether you can get a scammer to shut up and leave you alone faster by saying No in a much, much more emphatic way, but personally, that’s what I would try. After the third time, I wouldn’t be saying No and hanging up, I would be saying

I SAID NO, YOU JACKA$$, GET OFF MY PHONE, GO DIE IN A FIRE AND LEAVE ME ALONE.

Or something along, you know, those general lines.

Strauss adds,

It’s not just a matter of avoiding annoying calls, either. Scammers sometimes resort to threats and insults upon being told no.

To me, this would not be a problem. A scammer in Philippines or wherever (apparently a lot of these particular scams are from the Philippines) is not going to be able to follow through with a threat. Who cares what they say?

Anyway, as always, if you’re not sure you’re looking at a legitimate publisher, check with Writer Beware, and if someone contacts you out of the blue and offers their services for money in advance, back away slowly.

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Patreon: Death’s Lady series available for just another day or two

This post is just a reminder that

A) I do have this new Patreon, and

B) The Death’s Lady series is available for download there

and

C) It’s going to be removed from Patreon this week, after which it will become exclusive to Amazon for the foreseeable future.

Book One: A gifted psychiatrist, Daniel Dodson is perfectly aware that he’s in a tough place personally following the death of his wife. Then a mysterious new patient offers a welcome professional distraction. … The world of swords and magic that Tenai so vividly remembers obviously can’t be real. The deadly enmity and long war that left such deep emotional scars plainly symbolize something else. But perhaps Daniel can use the signposts of those confabulated memories to aid Tenai in moving forward into a new life in the real world.

As I’m not actually a psychiatrist, I appreciated this Amazon review from someone who is:

“I loved this whole series. As a shrink, I appreciated Daniel’s job and the work he did–along with all the “symbolic” storytelling and the dealing with extending her hospital stay–but mostly I just adored the character. It’s a very character-driven story without sex and romance and all the tropes. I have been reading others by this author and enjoying them–but this series is the one I’ve liked the best. If you want to explore hardcore loyalty and trust and what it means to have power….check it out.”

And again, same reviewer:

“The first book was like nothing I had ever read–Tenai was a fantastic character to meet. I almost never read “crossover between worlds” books, but this series works really well. It helps that I’m a shrink and I approved of Daniel’s therapy style…and also, I know what it’s like to be in a room with someone whose anger is bigger than the hospital. As the trilogy wound on, I was far more interested in the politics and wars than I usually am, partly because Tenai was always pivotal even when she wasn’t the main character. I would love more stories about her–but also about that world. I have definitely found a new author.”

The above comment is especially interesting (as well as flattering) because of course this review makes the point that Tenai is the protagonist, even though she never carries the point of view. I specifically set out to do that, it was challenging, it came out well, and a lot of my readers pick this series as their favorite.

Also, as you may know:

D) The first chapter of MARAG is available for anyone at Patreon, and as you almost certainly know,

E) MARAG will become available at Patreon this coming Friday. I was going to upload it there March 2, but that’s a Saturday. Therefore, March 1.

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