Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 5

Vision in … Plants?

So here’s something startling: this great article discusses a vision-like phenomenon that might occur in some plants:

Recently, two additional papers have suggested that even higher plants may experience a sort of vision using plant-specific ocelli, as proposed by Gottlieb Haberlandt. (i) The climbing wood vine Boquilla trifoliolata was demonstrated to modify the appearance of its leaves according to the host plant, perfectly mimicking the colours, shapes, sizes, orientations, and petiole lengths of the leaves …

It’s difficult to get a look at the full article. The link above goes to a truncated version, which is enough to be very interesting, so that’s frustrating. This is, however, a REALLY interesting suggestion about a sort of vision that doesn’t involve having an actual brain. There can’t be any conscious perception of any kind, and the sort of subconscious perception we expect in animals such as earthworms (don’t crawl off that cliff, says some part of its non-conscious brain) can’t be happening either. I wonder very much about the flow of events from sensory perception to changing the physical appearance of leaves and petioles.

If you read the section on vision in An Immense World by Ed Yong, which is most likely the single best nonfiction book I have ever read in my life, you will find that sight is, in a sense (a very real sense) a type of chemical perception. That is, you’re perceiving chemicals. Or the cells involved in sight are involved in chemoreception. Which can happen in animals such as cnidarians — such as the hydra — and that’s my point — visual sensation doesn’t require a brain. A hydra doesn’t have a brain, though it does have neurons.

From An Immense World:

These cells [photoreceptors] might vary dramatically from one species to another, but they share a universal feature: they contain proteins called opsins. Every animal that sees does so with opsins, which work by tightly embracing a partner molecule called a chromophore, usually derived from vitamin A —

I’m pausing to be amused because the maternal advice to eat your carrots because carrots are good for vision comes back to me in this context. But moving on:

The chromophore can absorb the energy from a single photon of light. When it does, it instantly snaps into a different shape, and it’s contortions force its opsin partner to reshape itself too. The opsin’s transformation then sets off a chemical chain reaction that ends with an electrical signal traveling down a neuron —

Not in plants, it doesn’t. So I wonder very much what can be going on in those plants?

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We live in a SF world

Five methods for turning invisible, ranked by the inventor of a real-life invisibility cloak

Invisibility has been a recurring and popular theme in the realm of science fiction for decades. May it one day become real, too? Here is a quick survey of some of pop culture’s approaches to invisibility and the hard science behind them. …

If any.

Still, there are some surprisingly invisible animals:

In The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells, the main character consumes some sort of chemical that changes his cellular chemistry. This makes him transparent—and drives him mad in the process. This approach to invisibility is not entirely fictional. Light moves in a straight line in any medium. However, when it passes from one medium to another, it reflects or refracts. For an object to be invisible, it would need to have the exact optical properties of the medium in which it is embedded.

We can see examples of this in nature. There are species of animals that are nearly transparent to light, like some jellyfish and other sea creatures. The trick is that these sea creatures are always immersed in water, and are also mostly composed of water, so light travels through the animal in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish from water.

Yes, but that’s in water. Are you familiar with the glasswing butterfly?

Also, let’s have a real-world example of dynamic camouflage.

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Poetry Thursday: Tennyson

I know I’ve featured Tennyson before, but here he is, a poet born in August. As it happens, I really like Tennyson, whose poetry is the sort you want to read out loud.

Break, break, break

Break, break, break,
   On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
   The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman’s boy,
   That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
   That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
   To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
   And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
   At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
   Will never come back to me.

***

That’s a famous one. Let me look for something a little less familiar …

SongI

Every day hath its night:
Every night its morn:
Through dark and bright
Wingèd hours are borne;
Ah! welaway!
Seasons flower and fade;
Golden calm and storm
Mingle day by day.
There is no bright form
Doth not cast a shade—
Ah! welaway!

II

When we laugh, and our mirth
Apes the happy vein,
We’re so kin to earth
Pleasuance fathers pain—
Ah! welaway!
Madness laugheth loud:
Laughter bringeth tears:
Eyes are worn away
Till the end of fears
Cometh in the shroud,
Ah! welaway!

III

All is change, woe or weal;
Joy is sorrow’s brother;
Grief and sadness steal
Symbols of each other;
Ah! welaway!
Larks in heaven’s cope
Sing: the culvers mourn
All the livelong day.
Be not all forlorn;
Let us weep in hope—
Ah! welaway!

***

One more. This one is funny. I had to look this up, but a hendecasyllable is a line of eleven syllables. Did anybody know that? So this is Tennyson showing off wit and technique while — as you see — tweaking reviewers.

Hendecasyllabics

O you chorus of indolent reviewers,
Irresponsible, indolent reviewers,
Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem
All composed in a metre of Catullus,
All in quantity, careful of my motion,
Like the skater on ice that hardly bears him,
Lest I fall unawares before the people,
Waking laughter in indolent reviewers.
Should I flounder awhile without a tumble
Thro’ this metrification of Catullus,
They should speak to me not without a welcome,
All that chorus of indolent reviewers.
Hard, hard, hard it is, only not to tumble,
So fantastical is the dainty meter.
Wherefore slight me not wholly, nor believe me
Too presumptuous, indolent reviewers.
O blatant Magazines, regard me rather –
Since I blush to belaud myself a moment –
As some rare little rose, a piece of inmost
Horticultural art, or half-coquette-like
Maiden, not to be greeted unbenignly.

***

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House of Shadows — Surprise Summer sale

And by “surprise,” I mean this is one of the innumerable times a publisher did not mention to me that they were going to run a sale.

Here is House of Shadows at Amazon, where it is $1.99 today. And here is it is at Barnes and Noble, where it is also $1.99. I have no clue how long that price might last, but I surmise the price only dropped yesterday.

And I could have put that in my newsletter if the publisher had TOLD ME this sale was going to occur. The ONLY reason I realized is that abruptly Door Into Light sold a good handful of copies, starting yesterday, which is why I think the first book’s price must have dropped at that point.

Here’s Door into Light at Amazon, and at Barnes and Noble. I could have dropped the price of Door into Light if anyone had mentioned that the first book would be on sale, but here we are.

I will say at least the publisher of the first book — Hachette — linked the two books together on a series page, which I could not do myself and which Random House has never bothered to do for The Floating Islands and Sphere of the Winds.

Anyway, this is a fine time to pick up the ebook of House of Shadows, which is wide, so it is probably on sale wherever you like to buy books! I have zero control over this book, so if you want to grab it, now is the time!

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Reading the classics

An older post by Cat Rambo, at Clarksworld: On Reading, Writing, and the Classics

The point I want to make about my perspective on the “classics” is that I’ve read a substantial portion, both of the F&SF variety and the larger set, and made some of them the focus of study in grad school. (Again from both sets, since that focus was an uneasy combination of late 19th/early 20th American lit and cultural studies with a stress on comics/animation. You can see me here pontificating on The Virtual Sublime or here on Tank Girl. I’m not sure I could manage that depth of theory-speak again, at least without some sort of crash course to bring me back up to speed. But I digress.)

So here’s the question that brought me here: should fantasy and science fiction readers read the F&SF classics? And the answer is a resounding, unqualified yes, because they are missing out on some great reading in two ways if they don’t. 

I’m pleased to see that her list of classic authors includes CJ Cherryh, and entertained that it included Lois McMaster Bujold. The former pleases me for obvious reasons and the latter is amusing because I still sort of feel that LMB is a new, modern, contemporary, non-classic writer. I suppose I will still feel that way in another twenty years.

Anyway, the list of classic authors:

Isaac Asimov, Lois McMaster Bujold, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Octavia Butler, C.J. Cherryh, Samuel R. Delany, Carol Emshwiller, P.K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Zenna Henderson, Robert E. Howard, Ursula Le Guin, Fritz Leiber, H.P. Lovecraft, Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton, Joanna Russ, Cordwainer Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, Jack Vance….

So much more balanced a list than you sometimes see, I think. Not that there is any pretense that this list is at all complete.

But! The real reason you should click through and read the post: Cat Rambo quotes what is possibly the longest sentence ever written in English. She makes no such claim for it, so maybe not. But, wow.

I admit the antiquated style and spelling would indeed put me off. But I have read old editions of books that did weird things like “was n’t” and you do get more or less used to it, I guess.

I count 13 semicolons in that sentence. But I wouldn’t swear that I got them all.

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Would You Turn the Page?

This is the latest of Rhamey’s “Would you turn the page?” posts. Here’s the page in question:

***

While I’m washing the blood off my hands in the kitchen sink, the doorbell rings.

I freeze, my hands full of pink suds, the steaming hot water causing my fingers to burn and tingle. There’s somebody at the door. Somebody waiting patiently on the front porch for me to answer. The timing couldn’t be worse.

Could it be a package delivery? Maybe they’ll drop the package at the door and go away. Or else leave me a note. Sorry we missed you! We’ll be back tomorrow!

And then: three hard raps on the front door.

“Coming!” I call out in a strangled voice, even though it’s unlikely they’ll hear me. I scrub furiously at my fingers, and then at my fingernails, where the blood seems to have settled into the cracks. Who knew it was so hard to get blood off your hands? “Just a minute!”

I shut off the hot water and examine my palms, flipping them this way and that. Good enough? It’ll have to be. I wipe them dry on a light green dish towel, leaving a smear of red behind. Damn, I didn’t get it all—I’ll have to wash my hands again.

As soon as I get rid of whoever is at the front door.

My heels clack against the linoleum floor of the kitchen, then go soft when they hit the plush carpeting in the living room. …

***

What do you think? I said no, but I wasn’t sure why. Then I thought about it, and three things occurred to me: The author is trying too hard; the character is thinking too much, and I had a suspension of disbelief problem.

What makes me think “trying to hard”? It’s right at the front — “hot water causing fingers to burn and tingle.” I don’t think hot water causes my fingers to tingle? I think that’s rather different from burning? And why “causing to” rather than “more directly burning” — and besides, hot water doesn’t actually burn you unless you need to adjust the water heater. And the freezing part, and the strangled voice, both look to me like “trying too hard.” Specifically, it looks like the author is thinking, “I must show, not tell,” and trying to show show show.

What makes me think “protagonist is thinking too much”? Well, that’s easy, I just think she’s thinking too much.

Plausibility? Well, when I scrub blood off my hands, I don’t leave smears of blood on a towel afterward. It’s NOT that hard to get your hands BASICALLY clean. Blood isn’t petroleum jelly. It washes right off. Also, why answer the door at all? Of course there might be some reason the character has to open the door, but even in that case, there’s no need to rush. Whoever it is will wait another twenty seconds. That’s what I think.

What did Rhamey think?

***

There was the hot water “causing my fingers to burn and tingle.” A couple of things—I think “causing” is clumsy and a step back from a close narrative–how about “The hot water was burning my fingers…” Also, I’ve had my hands in hot water and, while it felt like burning, it never “caused” tingling. ”I freeze” is a bit of a cliché. This bit seems absolutely unnecessary when she has just heard three hard raps on her front door: There’s somebody at the door. Somebody waiting patiently on the front porch for me to answer.

Then there was the “strangled” voice. Felt odd to me. Seems like “who knew it was so hard to get blood off your hands?” is a bit flip for what the narrative is suggesting has happened. Does it matter that the dish towel is light green? I think not. And then the dramatic scene veers off track to the history of the floor, info dump stuff that has no bearing on what’s happening.

So, while the initial action raises a strong story question, the narrative suggests that there are speed bumps and other discomforts along the way, and I’m not up for that. A new story question: Did an editor ever see this book?

***

So, I see my reactions overlapped with Rhamey’s to some extent. I don’t mind if the towel has a color. I think it’s fine if the floor exists. I think Rhamey is largely wrong to want the world to be less present, but possibly right that the world is being drawn in a somewhat less smooth way than might be ideal. I didn’t think of the “flip tone” of “who knew it was so hard” line, but I think I agree with that. But it’s also a reasonable way to set the tone of the novel — maybe it’s supposed to be flip. Is it?

This is Do Not Disturb by Frieda McFadden. Here’s the description from Amazon:

***

Quinn Alexander has committed an unthinkable crime.

To avoid spending her life in prison, Quinn makes a run for it. She leaves behind her home, her job, and her family. She grabs her passport and heads for the northern border before the police can discover what she’s done. But when an unexpected snowstorm forces her off the road, Quinn must take refuge at the broken-down, isolated Baxter Motel. The handsome and kindly owner, Nick Baxter, is only too happy to offer her a cheap room for the night.

Unfortunately, the Baxter Motel isn’t the quiet, safe haven it seemed to be. The motel has a dark and disturbing past. And in the dilapidated house across the way, the silhouette of Nick’s ailing wife is always at the window. Always watching. In the morning, Quinn must leave the motel. She’ll pack up her belongings and get back on the road to freedom.

But first, she must survive the night.

***

92,000 ratings on Amazon, average star rating 4.3. It sounds okay to me, if I’m in a certain mood. It’s kind of cliched? Only too happy, is he? A dark and disturbing past, is it? It doesn’t sound like it’s supposed to be flip and funny, so I guess I agree that the line “Who knew it was so hard” line seems a bit light for a thriller.

Overall — and by now this isn’t a surprise; mostly these bestsellers don’t seem to appeal to me — but I’m not very keen on this opening.

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Update: Too Much Going On, Honestly

OKAY, FIRST

Tuyo series sale went live on Saturday and will continue through Wednesday. This would be a good time to point friends toward this series!

SECOND

Please, please leave a review for HEDESA if you’ve already read it. Here it is at Amazon. Here it is at Goodreads. I VERY MUCH APPRECIATE THIS!

THIRD

Actual update:

You know, it’s remarkably difficult to do two different things at the exact same time, I find, and therefore Sekaran slowed down last week, as I prioritized proofreading and tweaking Eight Doors. Aargh, I’m sick of it. I think my patience with proofreading has declined over time. Or, possibly even more plausible, maybe I always feel like that at this point and just block the memory.

Regardless, they’re both coming along. Part of one chapter to go plus maybe an epilogue for Sekaran. About finished with the tweaking read-through of Eight Doors. If it were just typos, that would be one thing, but it’s a thousand tiny tweaks. I can’t help myself, even though I’m dying of the tedium of making these teensy tweaks and then correcting the file.

MEANWHILE

I’ve put four audiobooks in motion: Invictus I and II, Hedesa, and This Hour. Yes, Tasmakat is still underway, and yes, progress has been made, and no, I don’t want to discuss it. I actually brought this up in order to report a strange but interesting phenomenon:

When you do an audiobook through ACX, you’ve got various alternatives, including payment options and so forth. Also, you can open a book for auditions or contact a specific narrator, and you can combine that by opening a book for auditions plus emailing as many narrators as you want and asking them to audition. There are thousands of narrators with samples, and you can filter by “male” and “fantasy” and then scan through and listen to the samples and decide who sounds like maybe they’d be good and you can then email them and if they feel like it they can do the audition. So this is relatively straightforward.

I listed Invictus I and Hedesa on the same day.

Overnight, Invictus I got 32 auditions. Hedesa got zero.

I honestly, truly thought that saying “Ability to pronounce Russian a plus” and including “eschahastesha” and “vysovashirovasin” in the audition script would scare people off. Instead, there appears to be a huge pent-up desire to narrate science fiction?

Anyway, I asked half a dozen of the people who auditioned for Invictus to please consider auditioning for Hedesa — male narrators split right down the middle into “sounds like an adult” vs “I could believe this is a teenager,” so it literally took less than five seconds per audition to decide who might be good for Hedesa. Then I scanned through producers and emailed another half dozen or so, and as a result Hedesa accumulated a dozen or so auditions as well, though you see this is still about a third as many as Invictus got in the first day. Anyway, several of the auditions were great, so that is now underway as well.

I’ll be interested, when I do No Foreign Sky, in seeing how that works. Is all SF going to get a huge amount of interest? Meanwhile, I’m going to be getting whiplash from listening to chapters of Hedesa alternately with Invictus.

MEANWHILE

Continuing drama on the dog health front, unfortunately. Poor little Haydee has an eye injury, a significant cut that seems to have probably picked up a serious infection in a hurry. She was squinting on Wednesday, she was at the vet on Thursday, she is getting eye drops every six hours plus oral antibiotics plus painkillers. She’ll be at the vet again this afternoon, and if the eye doesn’t look like it’s moving along in the right direction, the next step will be (sigh) an emergency visit to the ophthalmologist in St L, ideally right away. So I’m crossing my fingers, for both our sakes.

Haydee, showing the big eyes that are prone to injury, with cousin Joy.

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The Best SFF Novels since 1970

I think this is a relatively hopeless effort, but on the other hand, I clicked through: Determining the greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy novels since 1970

While each of these communities and suggestions has its merit (reading is subjective after all), it got me wondering… could there be a more objective answer? Is there a dataset that could yield a more robust list? Now, one of my favorite past-times is using my amateur programming and data science skills to make the world a bit easier to understand. …

Alrighty, so we have a dozen or so awards with varying tenures and goals across 50+ years. The challenge now is, how do we combine this treasure trove of knowledge into a single, easy-to-digest ranking?

What the author of this post is doing is, basically, a meta-analysis of award winners. I will say that the author of the post asserts: Book awards do not typically signal the “most popular” or easiest reads, and maybe that’s true if you include the word “typically,” I’m not sure. But the Hugo is definitely a popularity game where the popularity of the author counts for almost everything, which is why every single thing by Mira Grant always gets nominated and she had four different works nominated in 2012, and do not try to tell me popularity is not the primary driver for Hugo nominees, because yes, it is.

A dedicated fan club can ensure their favorite author always gets nominated, BUT ALSO, every single thing Connie Willis writes gets NOTICED and widely read and people EXPECT to possibly nominate it for whatever big award. This is true for a very significant proportion of all the authors who get nominated every year. They’re well-known. They’ve won the award before. Everyone reads whatever they’ve written with an eye toward nominating it. There is therefore a very strong “fame bias” to who gets nominated for all the big awards. I think this is obvious.

On the other hand, whatever, sure, show me what you did with your meta-analysis. This is someone named Cassidy Beeve-Morris at Medium, by the way, that’s where the linked post goes.

A ton of data mining and coalescing, sprinkled with the simple algorithm described above, and we can already start to sort books within a given year (we still can’t compare books across years however). Let’s take a look: The following graphics show the top ranked book from every year in our awards data. Note that all years quoted in this article are the year of the award, which is almost always 1 year after the publishing date.

There was more about the statistics, which mostly is sort of “whatever, sort of applicable statistics, I guess,” and then the graphics. Here’s the first set:

What do you think? I think I didn’t read the books published during this decade widely enough to have an opinion about how these books actually compare to everything else published in the decade. I think (a) LeGuin was a wonderful stylist and a great writer, which doesn’t mean her books actually appealed to me a lot. They didn’t, except for The Tombs of Atuan, and I don’t know why that one stood out for me. But I think plainly she belongs on this list. Three times? I don’t know. The only other books I really liked from this seet were Ringworld — for the setting — and Dreamsnake — for the story and characters. That’s a random comment about my personal preferences, not a judgment of quality.

A whole bunch of the books listed for the next decades appealed to me a lot more. And the ones that didn’t, I agree are great books — Gene Wolfe is here, and I think he’s objectively a great writer; I just found The Book of the New Sun unreadable personally. Marching through the decades … onward … Oh, there’s Uprooted, which did not work for me nearly as well in retrospect as when I was reading it. I thought Spinning Silver was substantially superior. I think so even though I think Uprooted won more awards. Nevertheless.

Ancillary Justice, yay! Lots of books I really loved. Miéville does it again in 2010 with the single most awarded novel in our dataset, The City & The City, says the author of this post, and I have to say, that’s a great book in a lot of ways.

Then some more statistical slight of hand, and the post ranks the top 30 SFF novels of all time. This is laughable imo, but perhaps interesting. You can click through and see what you think. I’m not sure how I’d rank these 30 novels personally, but I do know I’d put Ancillary Justice in the top five. In fact, that’s a question — what, out of these 30, would I put in the top five?

Ancillary Justice

Startide Rising

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ringworld

The City and the City or maybe The Diamond Age — I didn’t much like the latter and loved the former, but I think both are impressive.

I think I’m prioritizing setting and scope? And breaking the mold? I’m not sure I want to call that creativity, but maybe that’s what I mean. And I think I’m picking SF because of feeling that setting is important.

And some of the ones that are on this list of thirty look silly to me. Network Effect is a fine story, but it is not by any means the best Murderbot story. I guess the novellas were somewhere else. I really, truly believe that Spinning Silver is decidedly superior to Uprooted — it’s not just that I liked it better; I think the ending of Uprooted was genuinely weak, and weak in ways that reached backward for me and pulled the whole story down. Also, there are just authors on this list whose work I don’t like: Asimov. And tropes I’m not fond of: time travel. Blackout/All Clear struck me as a historical novel with teensy SFF elements (eg, time travel). It’s really, really impressive, but though I didn’t hate it, I did give it away after reading it, and reading it was a slog.

So, like everybody else, there’s a good deal of personal bias to the five I picked. And those aren’t my five favorite (though Ancillary Justice would still be on the list if I picked five that way).

If you click through, you can see which ones you’d tend to put at the top and which you think just really shouldn’t be on the list. Plus you can recite: Statistics is a way of going wrong with confidence!

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Poetry Thursday: William Henry Davies

From My Poetic Side: Born in Newport, Wales, in 1871, the son of an iron worker, Davies lost his father when he was three years old and subsequently went to live with his grandparents. … Davies wrote his first poem, Death, when he was 14 which was prompted by the moment he was asked to sit with his grandfather who was dying at the time. He went to work at an early age, first for an ironmongers and then as a frame maker … Determined to go to America, he left his apprenticeship and began to take casual jobs, crossing the Atlantic several times over the next five years. He lived largely as a tramp or hobo, taking casual work when he could … Intending to go to the Klondike and earn his fortune during the Gold Rush, Davies attempted to jump on board a train, lost his footing and fell. The resulting accident meant that his leg had to be amputated and was a major turning point in his life in more ways than one. Many observers suggest that it was this incident above all others that led him to become a working poet.

Eventful life!

Davies’ poetry and simple and easy to read. I found several I liked with no trouble at all. Here are a couple short poems:

Thunderstorms

My mind has thunderstorms,
That brood for heavy hours:
Until they rain me words,
My thoughts are drooping flowers
And sulking, silent birds.

Yet come, dark thunderstorms,
And brood your heavy hours;
For when you rain me words,
My thoughts are dancing flowers
And joyful singing birds.

***

Here’s a good one for summer:

When on a Summer’s Morn

When on a summer’s morn I wake,
And open my two eyes,
Out to the clear, born-singing rills
My bird-like spirit flies.

To hear the Blackbird, Cuckoo, Thrush,
Or any bird in song;
And common leaves that hum all day
Without a throat or tongue.

And when Time strikes the hour for sleep,
Back in my room alone,
My heart has many a sweet bird’s song —
And one that’s all my own.

***

And one for when summer becomes far too hot and humid and you’re longing for winter:

Winter’s Beauty

Is it not fine to walk in spring,
When leaves are born, and hear birds sing?
And when they lose their singing powers,
In summer, watch the bees at flowers?
Is it not fine, when summer’s past,
To have the leaves, no longer fast,
Biting my heel where’er I go,
Or dancing lightly on my toe?
Now winter’s here and rivers freeze;
As I walk out I see the trees,
Wherein the pretty squirrels sleep,
All standing in the snow so deep:
And every twig, however small,
Is blossomed white and beautiful.
Then welcome, winter, with thy power
To make this tree a big white flower;
To make this tree a lovely sight,
With fifty brown arms draped in white,
While thousands of small fingers show
In soft white gloves of purest snow.

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Grit

From Jane Friedman’s blog: The Secret to a Writing Career May Boil Down to Sheer Grit

My instant reaction is: It sure may, and in fact it does.

Maybe not for everybody, but … maybe for everybody? I’m sure we can all think of authors who got a lot of recognition with their first book, but it’s so much easier to think of authors who got significant recognition eventually, like Martha Wells, who wrote a zillion books before Murderbot bounced her visibility way up.

By the way, I’m sure a lot of you have read Witch King, and you may know that the second book is due out relatively soon — October. I would be really interested in comments about the second book! Ideally without spoiling the first too terribly, as I haven’t read it yet! But reactions to the first book often seem to include “doesn’t totally stand alone,” and I would like to know if the second book ties up the story in some satisfying way. And also do you give it a basic thumbs up or thumbs down? For me, so far, the only Martha Wells book that didn’t really work for me was City of Bones, because the world — the city in which most of the action takes place — feels very claustrophobic to me. BY THE WAY, there’s a new edition of City of Bones out, apparently? Has anyone read THAT, and if so, what did you think of it?

But my actual point was, I think Martha Wells surely exemplifies this idea that grit is essential for a career as a novelist. A lot of other authors do too, though. Including a lot who have written plenty of fine books and haven’t yet hit a hugely popular ball out of the park.

Then we get this:

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not a conscientious writer. In fact my writing efforts occur occasionally in spasmodic bursts of creativity but more often in damn, slogging drudgework. I am also easily distracted (ADD) and not very good on details, a combination that definitely curtails my efforts. Too often I’m distracted by something bright and shiny and lose my often-tattered thread of plot. … elements of my drafts such as names, places, and descriptions seem to remain liquid, never resolving until the penultimate draft is unknowingly submitted. 

I just thought that was funny in conjunction with my reaction that everybody needs grit to succeed as an author. In fact, the linked post does not refute that:

Editing provides both the bane and pleasure of writing. The bane is realizing that the piece I just completed is in fact an atrocious piece of poorly worded, rambling, disorganized crap. The pleasure comes from the continual polishing of successive drafts to make each word matter until the pearl steps from the oyster as it were.

Pretty sure that is a demonstration of conscientiousness at work, and also, wow, it’s amazing to me that anybody finds editing the fun part. I’m thinking of how I was so fed up with Eight Doors after intense revision that I couldn’t stand to look at it for years. To be fair, I could have gotten it out again before this year, it’s just I had other things to do, while this year I decided I had time to deal with it.

It’s not that I hate editing a draft. It’s that I hate it by the time I’m on the third round of revision and have gone blind and can’t see anything about the draft clearly anymore. Thank heaven they don’t all need that much revision, because possibly I might have some degree of grit, but ugh, it would be really unpleasant to have to do that much revision every single time.

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