Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 52

Deep Time: Otherlands by Thomas Halliday

Living memory means recent. “Happened within living memory” means that people alive today remember it happening. In 1934, when my mother was born, the world was deep in the Great Depression. Unemployment was about 25%. The February that year – this time 88 years ago – was the coldest month on record for much of the US. A gallon of gas cost 10c, a pound of hamburger cost 12c. Of course, average income per year was $1600, so there’s that. My mother doesn’t remember all this because, I mean, she was a baby, but people alive today do remember all this. This is within living memory.

Historical time still means recent. Historical time means “time since reasonably reliable records started being kept by historical civilizations.” This means historical time encompasses about the past 5000 years or so. (I’m rounding it off, okay, don’t tell me the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs were before that.)

Archeological time still means pretty recent. The Stone Age began about 3.3 million years ago and lasted until the beginning of historical time, basically. If we look at the founding of Rome to the modern day, that is 2725 years, more or less. We would have to step back that far 1100 times to get to the first stone tools. Think of that! How long from the founding of Rome to now and it was more than a thousand times longer to get from stone tools to Rome! That’s astounding.

This is still just a tiny step back into the past. All of archeological time is still pretty recent.

DEEP time means way, way back. I guess we could call the less deep part paleontological time, and the really deep part geologic time. Paleontological time is the kind that is really cool from a biological perspective.

If we stood up right now, right there in our living rooms, and pop, suddenly we stepped back a million years and looked around, the world would look pretty normal. I mean, except for civilization vanishing. The animals and plants and climate would be really similar to what we see right now. Canids in the subfamily Caninae had already outcompeted earlier canids in the subfamilies of Borophaginae and Hesperocyaninae; if you saw a canid, you would just say, “Oh look, a wolf,” or whatever. Modern horses had appeared. Mice looked like mice. Birds looked like birds. Sure, there were differences. Watch out for the saber-toothed tigers! But saber-toothed tigers looked a lot like modern tigers. You wouldn’t think, “Huh, what is that? Would you call that some kind of cat?” because obviously saber-tooted tigers were basically heavy-bodied modern big cats. With big canine teeth. But modern cats. The cat branch of Carnivora separated from the dog branch long before this, the bears and dogs separated long ago, the cats and hyenas separated long ago. The world looked normal. It looked modern. (Mostly modern.)

Anyway, if you looked around and snapped a picture and stepped back another million years, and repeated that 540 times, you would be in the Cambrian, at the dawn of life, and you would have seen a LOT of changes. And that is what Otherlands by Thomas Halliday does, except he takes bigger steps, probably because he didn’t want to include 540 chapters in his book. Halliday’s steps are uneven in the distance covered in time and space, but what he’s doing in this book is walking back through time, taking big steps, and bringing the reader along for the journey.

Looking out from Gargano, Italy, in the latest Miocene, more than 5 million years before the present day, it is hard to countenance the idea that, in a little over a year, swirling brine will be washing these stones. Even harder is to visualize this towering mountain, alone and proud, sending boats out into the intangible air, this sky becoming the centre of trade and warfare, filled with people, goods, armies and ideas for thousands of years. This clifftop will hold communities of fisherfolk, as a limestone promontory surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea. For now, the basin is drained, a salty, dry, inhospitable land reaching down kilometers into the depths of the Earth. From the Levant to Gibraltar, from the North African coast to the Alps, the Mediterranean has run dry.

Neither is this for the first time. As the tectonic plate beneath African and Arabia has pushed northwards, the once mighty Tethys Ocean has grown narrower and narrower, reduced to a small, enclosed sea between Afro-Arabia, Asia, and Europe – the Mediterranean. The only connection between this sea and the rest of the world’s oceans is a narrow gap between what will be Spain and Morocco – the Straits of Gibraltar. Through the last million years, the push of Earth’s plates has periodically closed the gap, with drastic impacts on its environment.

Halliday notes that various rivers pour 600 km3 into the Mediterranean basin per year, but that evaporation pulls 4700 km3 of water back out again. Because the Mediterranean repeatedly flooded with saltwater which then evaporated, because the land beneath the Mediterranean is so far below sea level, there are places where the salt deposits at the bottom of the Mediterranean are three km deep. When you stand at the bottom of that basin, five million years ago, you are standing in a bleak, salty desert where temperatures can reach 175 F (80 C), but it’s going to flood in a hurry when erosion opens up a channel through the Straits of Gibraltar. It’ll start with a trickle, but it isn’t going to stay that way. Water’s going to pour in with unimaginable force, rushing at forty miles an hour through a channel nine miles across, wide open to the full pressure of the Atlantic Ocean. This is the moment Halliday has chosen to show us.

… the Mediterranean to the west is almost full, but the east is as dry as it ever was. Four months after the Straits of Gibraltar first opened, this begins to change, as to the south a standing plume of mist, hundreds of meters tall, rises from the eastern edge of Sicily, visible from many kilometers away. The roar comes further south still, near the modern-day site of Syracusa. … as seawater begins to spill over the dam, the eastern basin will be filled by the greatest waterfall ever to have graced the Earth. It is nearly a mile high, one and a half times the height of the modern-day Angel Falls in Venezuela. The water pours over the escarpment at speeds of 100 miles per hour, and much of it turns to mist before it reaches the ground. Unlike the Straights of Gibraltar, where the descent into the western Mediterranean basin is gradual, weir-like, this is a true, sheer drop, where the force of an entire ocean is channeled into a single five-km-wide site.

This event, the filling of the Mediterranean Sea, marked the end of the Miocene and the beginning of the Pliocene. Obviously all this had massive consequences for the ecosystems of the region, which Halliday describes with special emphasis on the tendency of island faunas to become dwarfed (if the mainland species is big) or giants (if the mainland species is tiny). In broad terms, the fauna and flora of the region was modern. Giant “Terrible Moon Rats” (great name!) were basically top mammalian predators on the island of Gargano, which means they were about cat-sized. They were gymnures, insectivores, related to hedgehogs, though the Terrible Moon Rats weren’t spiny. Among other animals, these gymnures shared the island with giant rabbits (I mean, giant for rabbits, not really that big, about 25 lbs) called Nuralagus, which Halliday describes, accurately, as “wombat-like.” They did not look all that much like modern bunnies, though you can see they’re lagomorphs if you sort of squint.

And all this is close to the beginning, as Halliday then steps back a huge distance into deep time, another 30 million years, and from one continent to another – to Chile in the Oligocene. Then another eleven million years, this time to Antarctica – which here, smack dab in the Eocene Hothouse, is not frozen. The whole story of the Oligocene is a tale of catastrophic cooling and drying from the Eocene Hothouse, ice caps forming at the poles, forests dying out in massive regions, replaced by the brand-new plants called “grasses,” that spread out to form huge grasslands. The appearance and spread of grasses and grasslands led to my favorite ecosystems (savannahs) and the appearance of canids and big horses and the rest of the fauna that’s suited to grasslands. Here, in Antarctica, 41 million years ago, that shift from forest to grasslands hasn’t yet begun and à

The beach is filled with the shouts of seabirds, the older ones insistently calling for their mates, the young pretenders eyeing up possible nesting sites. Littered with the unicorn horns of turritellid sea snails, spiraled Polynices gastropods, and the smooth hooded platters of Cucullaea clams, the shingle has been turned into an exceptionally crowded breeding ground. … Around the beach, the slopes are steep and densely forested; a hanging wood of scale-barked southern beeches, Nothofagus, pours down the hillside. Interspersed among them are tight-packed conifers – monkey-puzzles, cypresses, celery palms – and all are garbed in epiphytes, those plants that grow entirely on the surfaces of others. Vines and lianas, ferns and hair-like mosses, set off by the complex, show-off inflorescences of the proteas, form a cloudy green palette.

Here we are, standing in a temperate coastal rainforest, a lot like the Pacific Northwest of the US and Canada, except in Antarctica. That means the days last all summer long, and when the sun finally sets, it doesn’t come up for three months, just as we see today, except the whole continent was covered in lush forest filled with organisms that had to deal with this remarkable solar cycle. Which they did. There were penguins here, in this beautiful forested Antarctica, but they were much, much bigger than modern penguins, with various species standing taller than I do (I’m short, but still) and the biggest species standing as tall as a tall human, about six feet, and weighing in at about 250 lbs. Their anatomy isn’t as specialized as modern penguins, but they’re well on their way and anybody would look at them and say, “Oh, look, giant penguins.”

Another twenty million years back in time, to Montana. The world has ended. Two years ago, a piece of rock at least ten km long appeared high in the sky to the north, traveling southwards and westwards at thousands of meters per second. Halliday likes disaster stories, I gather. But he walks forward through this chapter, describing the resurgence of life and the rise of mammals. A new age begins, with new gods, and new worlds. After death, life; after extinction, speciation. But we’re not moving forward, remember. In the next chapter, Halliday steps back again, as far again as we’ve come already, to China 125 million years ago, an age of splendor, as we have to step hastily out of the way of giant sauropods. Early birds such as Confuciusornis share the skies with pterosaurs.

Halliday takes nine more steps back after that, each taking the reader farther back through deep time, all the way to the Ediacaran fauna of Australia, 550 million years ago, pausing each time to sketch the scene. Anybody interested in description might enjoy this time-traveling story of planetary history; and Halliday’s a fine stylist too, often building layered paragraphs of evocative sentences. I wouldn’t say this book is as amazing as An Immense World by Ed Yong, but on the other hand, it would certainly work well as a companion volume, one to showcase animal diversity right now, a snapshot of present time; and the other to showcase animal and plant diversity through time.

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Font Conference

A fun YouTube video Sharon Shinn pointed to on Facebook:

This is funny, and I will just add that I am much, much less into fonts than (apparently) almost everyone. That’s why I like Times New Roman. It just looks normal and non-fancy and straightforward. I like Garamond too, and why? Because it looks basically normal and non-fancy and straightforward.

I don’t much like sans serif fonts and particularly dislike Calibri, BUT, I must admit, I have my Kindle app on my phone set to a sans serif font because it honestly is easier to read without picking up my reading glasses. So I see why some people like sans serif fonts. I just think they’re unattractive compared to any normal serif font.

I bet a lot of you have a much stronger opinion about the best fonts and the worst fonts than I do. But I agree with everyone (apparently) that Jokerman is awful. I hadn’t heard of it until this Facebook thread.

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Update: Juggling Lots of Balls at Once

A lot going on right now, including two promotions, so details about that plus links below.

Let me see if I can count the balls I’ve got in the air right now —

1) Okay, MARAG is out being proofread, and also

2), I will proofread MARAG myself as soon as I finish proofreading something for Marie Brennan, hopefully today, and

3) By “proofreading MARAG myself,” I mean tweaking at the sentence level, not just proofing.

By the way, MARAG is available for preorder, though as you know, it will drop a month early at my Patreon.

4) I will be dropping the next newsletter in a few days, Feb 7, with the last installment of Young Ryo’s story, which I bet some of you have already read via Patreon, but it’s also in the newsletter, along with

5) Information about the first promotions of the year. My royalties in January were pathetic. This always seems to happen, and I seriously, really, truly need to plan ahead well enough to release something on Jan 1 next year to see if I can kick the year into gear faster. Maybe UNTITLED: TANO II, maybe something else if that one is ready to go this year, I honestly cannot plan ahead in that much detail. For that matter, maybe UNTITLED: TANO III, who knows? By July, maybe I’ll be able to make plans that far ahead. Meanwhile,

6) There is a sale on TUYO-world books going on right now. The series promo for the Black Dog series will also be on sale starting tomorrow, Feb 6.

These promos were scheduled using the KDP tools and therefore, while the first books in the series are free everywhere, I think, others are probably only on sale in the US and UK. Later in the year I will do a promo of some kind the hard way, dropping and raising prices by hand. I really couldn’t depend on doing that this time because —

7) — I was not sure I would be excused from jury duty in St L city until very late last week. I had a letter from my mother’s doctor saying no, really, Rachel cannot be this far out of reach, her mother is frail, but the process dragged on and on and the excusal just barely got settled in time to spare me a trip to St L. So I have had a somewhat uneasy time because I couldn’t be sure whether I would be excused or not, but whew, I am not in St L right this minute, and the rest of the month now looks much, much more predictable and I hope it stays that way because I’m a big fan of a predictable, boring life. [It’s not that I necessarily object to serving on a jury, it’s that St L is eighty miles away and my mother really and truly does need me to be available. For crying out loud, they have hundreds of thousands of potential jurors right there in the city.]

I have been kind of frazzled because of the possibility of juror duty eighty miles away … in February … with Morgan quite possibly pregnant … and who knows what else, so it is a massive, massive relief to have this settled.

Also

8) Somehow the epub of OF ABSENCE, DARKNESS had the wrong cover attached at my Patreon. I don’t know why. I had the epub file in a folder on this computer and somehow that file had the wrong cover? Which is not visible because epub files don’t show the cover, at least not on this computer. It’s baffling. I have replaced that file at Patreon, so if you downloaded this book there and you would like a version of the file with the correct cover, you should now be able to go back to Patreon and get it.

9) And yes, I also wrote the first chapter of RIHASI. The bit I wrote last year is now chapter 2. So I have the first fifty pages of this one in front of me and now I just need to get from here to the very cool stab stab stab scene and then from there to the equally cool ending. I know a bit about what happens on the way, but I guess I will be finding out a lot more in a hurry now. I guess I need to include a cat, too. Or at least, references to a cat.

10) Also, I finished the Young Ryo story back in, when? November? December? I haven’t had to worry about what to put in a newsletter for a couple of months, and whoops, now I need another story for the March newsletter. Good thing I have half the boys-who-climbed-the-rainbow story already written. I guess I should finish that this month.

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Up for Preorder: MARAG

Okay, here we go! Now available for preorder:

Remember, this title will be available on my Patreon a month or so before it goes live on Amazon.

I chose April 2 for the release date on Amazon, but I’m sending this book to proofreaders now, so I expect it should certainly be ready to go March 2 at the latest.

New back cover copy! This is what the description says at Amazon. I can easily tweak it, so if something seems off about this, let me know. Your feedback about this is always very helpful, as you’ll see from the way I revised this compared to the first time you saw it:

***

Sinowa inGara cherished his first wife. But now, with his people heading for trouble, he needs the high standing he would gain from marrying again. The best choice would be a singer — preferably an inKarano singer. Only one inKarano singer is unmarried: Marag inKarano.

For ten winters, Marag has turned aside every warrior and every poet who has approached her. She knows she will become one of the foremost singers of all the tribes. She knows whomever she marries will gain great standing through that marriage. Her choice is important — too important to leave to chance. For all these winters, Marag has asked the gods to send her a sign when the right man comes to sit by her fire and ask for her favor.

The gods have never sent her that sign.

This winter, Sinowa catches Marag’s attention the moment he arrives at the Convocation grounds, far to the east of inGara lands. But almost at the same moment, a different problem compels her attention — and his.

Wolves have been singing in the mountains since the Convocation began, bringing good luck and showing the favor of the gods. But now some mysterious curse has come upon the wolves … and that ill luck may be spreading, carried from the mountains on a bitter wind. As the curse intensifies, even the strength of a warrior and the deep understanding of a singer may be hard-pressed to turn the ill luck away from the gathered people and the world.

***

NEXT: I bet I start RIHASI this weekend.

Have a great Friday!

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Plot twists

Here’s a good post from Jane Friedman’s blog: Designing Thriller and Mystery Twists That Work

The protagonist’s journey in both thrillers and mysteries is effectively the unveiling of the villain’s plan, as experienced by the protagonist. The protagonist is our (the reader’s) “guide” through the story, because the protagonist is the character leading the reader along as they uncover what the villain was/is ultimately up to. 

That’s an interesting way to look at it! The protagonist’s journey is the unveiling of the villain’s plan. I guess that’s true!

Twists are the reveal of the villain’s truth. This truth feels “twisty”, because the reveal of the truth is unexpected to the protagonist. … Satisfying twists are the only logical answer to a puzzle that seemed seemingly impossible to solve as the reader/protagonist moved through the story. Satisfying twists are unexpected, but do not appear out of nowhere. They make perfect sense when the reader looks backwards at what they’ve already been shown on the page via the protagonist and what the protagonist saw, but aren’t easily guessed until they’re revealed because the protagonist led us astray. All the clues were “on screen,” i.e., on the page for us to see the correct answer (the villain’s truth), but those clues were seen (but ignored), or seen (but misinterpreted), or seen (but overlooked) by the protagonist throughout the story.

This is all a neat way to look at this. The protagonist is not your ally! The protagonist is misleading you! Whoops!

Viewed this way, I guess part of the trick is to make the protagonist seem intelligent (even though they are wrong about everything). That can be difficult, and that’s a way a mystery can fail as a mystery even if it succeeds as a story in other ways. I rather like Anne Perry’s mysteries, but in one or another, the physical evidence was quite clear and the only reason the protagonist didn’t realize that was because the murderer was a woman. Even in a historical setting, I don’t think most readers would find that very satisfying or “twisty” today.

The author of this post says:  I recommend keeping the protagonist (logically) convinced about a plausible other solution right up until the point they face the truth. This applies to all the main twists: the midpoint twist (at 50%, where the story takes a turn), the climactic twist (at roughly 85%, where the protagonist faces the villain themselves or the person they think is the villain, and restores order) and the final twist (at roughly 98%, where the protagonist uncovers something unexpected, sometimes facing the true villain).

That’s a very beat-heavy, analytical type of suggestion. I guess it’s ideal for formula mysteries if these beats always happen at those points in the story. I would be making a mental note note never to write a mystery or thriller if I thought you always had to follow the beats this closely.

There’s another way a thriller can succeed, though. I mean, a way that has nothing to do with a plot twist, so this departs from the subject of the linked post. But a thriller can be highly successful if the protagonist knows everything early, but keeps encountering obstacles to stopping the bad guy from achieving his nefarious ends. Not sure that’s possible with a mystery, which is one reason, I guess, that I tend to treat them as separate genres rather than lump them together as so often seems to happen, including in the linked post.

Regardless, because the linked post emphasizes that the villain is central and the protagonist’s role is to be misled and then finally uncover the truth, the villain needs to be able to hold up the story.

I’m not a hundred percent sure that’s true. I can think of mysteries where the villain has some very simple motivation and is not a complicated or interesting person. Just wanted Grandma’s fortune early, maybe. That’s simple and boring. The protagonist and everything else going on then take center stage. I’m thinking of Lindsay Chamberlain‘s novels here, especially the one I just linked, though to be fair, there are three mysteries braided together in this novel: the historical one, the contemporary one, and the one where the protagonist is a target. The historical one is the saddest.

Anyway, much more at the linked post about developing the villain and using that as a foundation for everything else:

[O]nce we understand the villain’s actions and motivations, we can lay the protagonist’s journey (solving the mystery/stopping the crime/bringing chaos to order) on top of the villain’s journey. From there, we can figure out the moments their paths intersect, which is key for understanding how the protagonist might misinterpret the villain’s truth.

Even though usually I’m not that interested in the villain’s motivations, I do think this is an interesting and potentially useful way to look at the design of a mystery plot, which is something I’ve always thought looked difficult.

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Would You Turn the Page? With a ChatGPT Twist

Here’s one of those Would You Turn the Page of This Bestseller? posts at Writer Unboxed.

I’m always up for this, so I often click through and read the page. Yes, this time I would turn the page for sure. I think this is a great opening.

What I’m going to give you here is the first page and then at some point it switches to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT writes the second page. How obvious is the transition and what marks the transition? Fair warning: the real thing shifts to the fake continuation in the middle of a sentence. That’s not me, the Writer Unboxed post broke off in the middle of that sentence, but it adds to the interest when trying to spot the shift.

***

If I leave this house, it will be in handcuffs.

I should have run for it while I had the chance. Now my shot is gone. Now that the police officers are in the house and they’ve discovered what’s upstairs, there’s no turning back.

They are about five seconds away from reading me my rights. I’m not sure why they haven’t done it yet. Maybe they’re hoping to trick me into telling them something I shouldn’t.

Good luck with that.

The cop with the black hair threaded with gray is sitting on the sofa next to me. He shifts his stocky frame on the burnt-caramel Italian leather. I wonder what sort of sofa he has at home. It sure doesn’t cost five figures like this one did. It’s probably some tacky color like orange, covered in pet fur, and with more than one rip in the seams. I wonder if he’s thinking about his sofa at home and wishing he had one like this.

Or more likely, he’s thinking about the dead body in the attic upstairs.

“So let’s go through this one more time,” the cop says in his New York drawl. He told me his name earlier, but it flew out of my head. Police officers should wear bright red nametags. How else are you possibly supposed to remember their names in a high-stress situation? He’s a detective, I think. “When did you find the body?”

I pause, wondering if this would be the right time to demand a lawyer. Aren’t they supposed to tell me about my rights first? I glance at the clock on the wall, its ticking echoing in the tense silence of the room.

“I found it yesterday evening,” I reply, my voice surprisingly steady. “I didn’t know what to do. I panicked.”

The detective raises an eyebrow, studying me intently. “Panicked, huh? That’s why you decided to hide it in your attic?”

I swallow hard, realizing that I’ve dug myself into a deeper hole. The truth is, I didn’t put the body there. It was there when I moved in a month ago. The previous tenant left me a chilling note, warning me about the consequences if I ever revealed the secret hidden in the attic.

“I swear, I didn’t put it there. It was like that when I arrived,” I protest, desperation creeping into my voice.

The detective leans back, crossing his arms. “A convenient story. So, you move into a new place, find a dead body, and your first thought is to cover it up?”

I open my mouth to respond, but the doorbell interrupts me. Another officer, a younger one, walks in holding a plastic evidence bag with a blood-stained knife.

“We found this in the kitchen. Care to explain?” he asks, his eyes narrowing.

I glance at the knife, my mind racing. I’ve never seen it before. This situation is spiraling out of control, and I can feel the walls closing in.

Before I can answer, the detective’s radio crackles to life. He listens intently, then looks at me with a mix of frustration and curiosity.

“Seems we have another lead on this case. You’re lucky this time,” he says, standing up. “But we’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

As the officers leave, relief washes over me. I’ve bought some time, but the mystery of the body in my attic and the ominous warning from the previous tenant remain. I need to uncover the truth before the police come knocking again.

Gathering my courage, I decide to explore the attic once more, determined to unravel the secrets hidden within the confines of my new home. Little do I know that my journey into the unknown is only just beginning.

***

Okay, that’s really, really interesting. I mean the shift to ChatGPT and where the story goes after ChatGPT takes over.

Here is the last bit of the real beginning: I pause, wondering if this would be the right time to demand a lawyer. Aren’t they

And I did say it broke in the middle of the sentence. I think the continuation works just great for the rest of that sentence: I pause, wondering if this would be the right time to demand a lawyer. Aren’t they supposed to tell me about my rights first? I glance at the clock on the wall, its ticking echoing in the tense silence of the room. That’s pretty good! There’s nothing wrong with that at all. Where is it for sure fake? I think the obviously fake part may start with the bloody knife, but

A) The details become more standardized. The thought about the bright red nametags is something ChatGPT wouldn’t include. The bloody knife is a typical prop for a thriller/mystery.

B) ChatGPT loves -ly adverbs. It can’t get enough of them. However, it’s not as terrible about that this time as I’ve seen in other extracts from generated fiction But what it loves even more than that is Exceedingly Standard Movement Tags. It’s enough to put me off narrowed eyes forever. It also just drops a thousand cliched phrases into everything. The situation is spiraling out of control! The walls are closing in!

Because of those proclivities, I think maybe you can spot the fake text right at “my voice surprisingly steady.” That is almost at the very beginning of the fake part. If you don’t spot that, then surely at the bloody knife. If not there, then definitely at this part: Before I can answer, the detective’s radio crackles to life. He listens intently, then looks at me with a mix of frustration and curiosity. “Seems we have another lead on this case. You’re lucky this time,” he says, standing up. “But we’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

C) It’s interesting to me that it wants to end every bit of generated text with a concluding sentence. Little do I know that my journey into the unknown is only just beginning. It seems to me that it does this a lot.

D) Coherence is a problem. A bloody knife now can’t have anything to do with a body that was already in the attic a month ago. I mean, not if the blood is fresh.

Overall, I think this is one of the worst story continuations I’ve personally generated. Not the very worst, but pretty bad.

***

The real first page is from this book:

I’m not familiar with Freida McFadden and I’ve never read any of her books, but I’m mildly tempted by The Housemaid. I’m not really in the mood for a thriller and also I don’t have time to read anything at all right now, but I do like the beginning. Let’s take a look at the description …

“Welcome to the family,” Nina Winchester says as I shake her elegant, manicured hand. I smile politely, gazing around the marble hallway. Working here is my last chance to start fresh. I can pretend to be whoever I like. But I’ll soon learn that the Winchesters’ secrets are far more dangerous than my own…

Every day I clean the Winchesters’ beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal for the whole family before heading up to eat alone in my tiny room on the top floor. I try to ignore how Nina makes a mess just to watch me clean it up. How she tells strange lies about her own daughter. And how her husband Andrew seems more broken every day. But as I look into Andrew’s handsome brown eyes, so full of pain, it’s hard not to imagine what it would be like to live Nina’s life. The walk-in closet, the fancy car, the perfect husband. I only try on one of Nina’s pristine white dresses once. Just to see what it’s like. But she soon finds out… and by the time I realize my attic bedroom door only locks from the outside, it’s far too late.

But I reassure myself: the Winchesters don’t know who I really am. They don’t know what I’m capable of…

This is really intriguing, but not very inviting. Nina sounds awful, the husband sounds pathetic, I do wonder about the daughter. (Strange lies, really. I wonder whether whatever Nina is saying about her daughter turns out to be true.) Reviews are interestingly mixed and imply that Nina may turn out to be less awful than the reader first expects.

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Good time to join my new Patreon!

Okay, thank you to everyone who subscribed to my Patreon, downloaded something, and confirmed for me that the files are indeed downloading properly! It sounds like probably they are, though apparently some tech bobbles may be occurring around the edges.

For the rest of February, all the files currently available to subscribers at the middle tier (Early Access Patrons) will remain available. This includes the four Death’s Lady books. I’m thinking of this as a nice thing for early subscribers as well as a way to make sure Patreon is working properly before upload MARAG to Patreon. It’s also a way of modeling how I intend to use Patreon: to enable early access of books that are soon going to become exclusive to Amazon.

Therefore, if you don’t have the Death’s Lady books and think you would like them, this is very much the best time and place to pick them up.

My current expectation is that I will unpublish these books there March 1 and (I think this is pretty likely) drop MARAG into Patreon at the middle tier March 2. Having been unpublished everywhere by then, the Death’s Lady books should be eligible for KU, and they will then become exclusive to Amazon for the foreseeable future. I will then run a sale for this series, but they will never again all be available for $5 the way they are right now at my Patreon.

So, MARAG will hopefully go live on Patreon March 2. If that goes as planned, it will be unpublished there at the end of March and become exclusive to Amazon on April 2. I haven’t put it up for preorder because certain things may be complicating my life and at the time I write this, I’m not sure I can absolutely for certain commit to that release date. I’m also delaying putting it up for preorder there until people have a chance to notice I have a Patreon. However, probably MARAG will go live for preorder in early February.

And I’m very much looking forward to that, let me tell you.

I’m also hoping to have RIHASI ready to go in April / May, but obviously that is just a hope, not a plan, since I have only written part of the beginning of that book so far. It won’t go as fast as MARAG because, I mean, this isn’t Christmas Break and so obviously I don’t have as much time to pour into it. Nevertheless, as I say, I would like to have it ready to go in the early part of the year, not that long after MARAG.

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The middle

Here’s a post from Patricia Wrede about getting through the middle of a manuscript.

I liked this part particularly:

Unexpected assistance can come similarly, from other characters (intentionally or not), from landscape or weather that helps the protagonist, from unexpected helpful twists that result from thing the protagonist did a while back. Or the “ups” can result simply from the protagonist’s grim determination to continue in spite of all the obstacles they’re facing. …

which led into this part, which made me laugh:

As with the protagonist, the solution for most writers, most of the time, is to slog steadily onward with grim determination.

Ha ha ha sob, yes, that’s pretty much the experience for at least part of the middle, for at least most books. There’s a great extended metaphor here, about slogging onward through the blizzard vs backtracking and heading for the gates of Moria:

Ultimately, the important thing is to keep moving. If you sit around in the blizzard thinking for too long, you (and your story) will freeze to death. Backtracking to a safe pausing-place is still moving. A safe place to pause, for the writer, is one where one has options to consider. The pass is full of snow, but the Mines of Moria are still a possibility—dangerous, but so is this whole journey. An alternative is to consider which of the characters’ options would be the most fun to write, or which would provide the greatest opportunity for the writer to throw in an unexpected cave troll or Balrog. This is where the advice to “have ninjas jump through the window” turns up—it’s not really about the ninjas, it’s about what the writer can do to make the story fun and interesting to write again. Because generally, in my experience, if the writer has fun writing it, the readers will have fun reading it.

And here I would say: readers almost always love the parts I loved best while writing, BUT readers also generally seem to be pretty happy with the parts that were a slog. Not always, but that seems pretty typical. Which is a relief, for some books in which the whole dratted middle was a dire slog, which can happen.

One of the things I don’t see here, but fine to be true personally, is that some books don’t have a tough middle. They move right along from front to back. That’s why they’re fast to write. For MARAG, I’m wondering whether any early reader will point to a few paragraphs about 15 pages in, 20 pages in, and say, “This seems slow right here.” But then things start happening, and I enjoyed those earliest chapters, but the action kicks up at the end of the third chapter and is almost, but not quite, nonstop from there. With a lot of grim determination to continue in spite of increasingly difficult conditions.

Even the action climax was fun. Both action climaxes, which happen boom-boom, one right after the other, though in alternating points of view. Then the falling action. I almost always like the falling action part.

It’s a lot less typical to enjoy the middle. Definitely nice when that happens, as with most of the books in the Tuyo series.

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Cute dog pic

Okay, so also

Here’s the dog I bred Morgan to, winning a Group Two placement at a show this past weekend! Way to go Ch Red Fox at the Front!

2nd place in the Group means he won his breed, then placed second of all the winners of all the dogs in the Toy Group. I wasn’t there, but a well deserved win for sure, he has great structure to go with his lovely head.

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Update: Progress! In an Unexpected Direction!

Okay, so as you know, I finished MARAG earlier this month (yes, it was even faster than TANO; yes, it sets a new record for me) and sent it off to beta readers this past Wednesday.

Last Thursday was a wicked, evil day in which I drove to St L and back in the rain, in rush hour, with an important set of stoplights blinking red and no way to completely avoid the problem, apparently, as Waze only detoured me around part of the resultant traffic jam. The whole last hour of the drive home was dark as well as rainy. Oh, I guess I should add, I was taking Morgan to the ophthalmologist for an eye check and she was fine, so I mean, the day wasn’t totally without redeeming features. But we got home way after our proper dinner time and if Morgan wasn’t as grumpy as I was, I don’t know why not.

Friday, I read part of a book I’m beta reading, including the very fun action climax. But I also felt weird because MARAG was out of my hands and I felt strange not working on something. I don’t want to start RIHASI until I’m prepared to be serious about it. I trust this will happen in February, when I’m down to proofing MARAG, but I don’t want to point my attention in that direction right now.

So I thought, you know what, I think I’ll write the first chapter of UNTITLED: TANO II. I’ve had that chapter in my head practically forever, and it’s in a familiar voice, and it’ll be fun, and I can write one chapter and set it aside, which works very well for me a lot of the time, by the way. I wrote the first bit of MARAG about a year ago.

So I opened my laptop and gazed thoughtfully at a blank Word document for about ten minutes (this is a long time for me). I typed one sentence and gazed at the screen some more, and finally thought, maybe I should start with a brief, active scene that presents a problem and lets Tano show off a little. I mean, a scene that reminds readers that Tano is insecure, but in a crisis, he thinks and moves very, very fast. Of course he has taken a big step up as far as the insecurity goes, that was the the point of TANO, but this story opens right after TASMAKAT closes, so it hasn’t been that long and he is still struggling somewhat because getting through something like that is obviously going to take time. And yes, at first I meant to jump ahead ten years and start when he’d really found his feet, but I didn’t wind up doing that, so here he is, this is Tano pretty much as he’s shown in “Returning Hokino’s Knife.”

So I mused for a bit about what kind of brief, short, quick, unimportant scene I might start with and then I wrote a wholly unexpected first chapter of about 10,000 words, thus bringing back a couple of characters we haven’t seen for a while (and that I didn’t expect to see here), plus introducing a couple of characters who I think might turn out to be important secondary characters for UNTITLED: TANO II.

That was Saturday.

On Sunday, I finally wrote the chapter I had in mind at the beginning. This is a very intense conversation that sets up the broad situation and also incidentally clears a whole lot of important characters out of the way, giving them things to do elsewhere, so that Tano can take center stage for the journey back to the starlit lands and eventually to the sunless sea. This was another 10,000 words. What can I say? It was an unexpectedly immersive weekend.

Until I wrote the first chapter, I thought most likely I would skip through the entire journey from the river to the mountains by saying, in effect, “Sixty days later, we finally came to the roots of the great northern mountains.” But … now I have these neat new characters. I mean, I don’t have to bring them into the main story. They could stay just in the first chapter. But they’re right there! And I’m chuckling about how they’d interact with Tano and Raga and everyone! And I can see potential for bringing back some characters we meet in MARAG, and then those characters will need to be established properly as well.

So we’ll see. Depending on which characters move forward, we may see at least a little of that journey. I realize we’ve seen the winter country already. I would have to handle this journey in a way that prevents readers from getting bored with that. I definitely wouldn’t want to spent the whole book in the winter country! Lots to do in the starlit lands! I barely know anything about that part, but I’m sure there will be a lot to do!

The next scenes I have very clear in my mind are almost certain to take place in the subsequent book. I mean, it depends on how fast this story moves, but it would be pretty remarkable if it moves fast enough to get to the part where a Saa’arii becomes an important character.

Oh, I know more about the Saa’arii now! Not a lot, but something! And more about the Tarashana, too, though again, not a lot.

However, I don’t think I’ll tell you anything about Saa’arii castes or Tarashana pronouns just yet. Instead, let me show you the first paragraphs of UNTITLED: TANO II.

***

Raga spoke darau almost as well as I did, but he did not understand Lau as well as he spoke their tongue. The problem came from that.

Also, many Lau think they understand Ugaro better than they truly understand us. They are especially likely to make this mistake if one of our people speaks to them in their own language. The problem definitely came from that.

***

There you go. Then we have a few paragraphs of setup, and then the problem occurs and Tano steps up without even thinking about it. I sort of hope I will actually write this book in time to release it this year. RIHASI first, though. And the last part of SILVER CIRCLE. And at least part of a NO FOREIGN SKY sequel.

I would order a cover for Tano’s new book right now, though, if I had the faintest idea what the title was going to be. Maybe I should pick a word and make that word important later. That’s actually a pretty keen idea; maybe that’s exactly what I’ll do.

Meanwhile! The first couple of early readers have already gotten back to me about MARAG, and while there will be a bit of revision — as always, I’m startled by how I missed some very obvious weaknesses — I do think this will be something I can do quickly. I will probably do a fast round of revision in the next few days, then make a print proofing copy for my mother to read and tell the artist how many pages I think the paperback will be and start proofing seriously, on the theory that I probably won’t be doing so much more revision that the page number changes dramatically.

My best guess is, I will probably be putting the preorder for MARAG up on Amazon for April 2, on the theory that I should be able to drop an epub at my Patreon at least two weeks before that, probably more. If everything happens later that that, I hope it won’t be much later. I also hope I will make that decision by this time next week, but a couple things in my life might still interfere, so we’ll see.

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