Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 54

Okay, whew, crazy week

All right, so you know how this past Monday I said I didn’t want to jinx MARAG and therefore I didn’t want to discuss it?

Well, that jinxed it, so I mean, wow, the universe was listening to me pretty closely, I guess.

There’s no telling how this will work out, obviously, because lots of things can and do go wrong (I’ve seen most of those things personally, I sometimes feel), but Morgan was due to come into season in February.

Well, this past Monday, Conner told me she was probably in, and not only that, but probably it was just about time to think seriously about breeding her. Morgan has nearly “silent” heats, so I rely on the boys to tell me these things, so I whipped her to the vet to do a progesterone, and long story short, the rest of this week disappeared in a blur. I needed to do this breeding by artificial insemination, the stud dog is three hours from me, and the repro vet there couldn’t work me in on super short notice. MY extremely excellent repro vet ALWAYS works me in, so I drove to Paducah, picked up the stud dog, drove home, did another progesterone, called my repro vet to ask him to work me in this morning, and therefore I just got home with the dog and Morgan, mission accomplished.

Here’s the dog:

Ch. Closeburn Red Fox at the Front

And I assure that although he looks nice here, he looks much, much more spectacular in person. Good thing his owner knows me well enough to trust me with him for a few days. I will now consult weather predictions and take him home again whenever the weather looks like it will present me with a seven-hour window of round-trip good weather during daylight hours.

One of my favorite pics of Morgan

Oh, if you’re interested, the chance of black/tan puppies from this breeding is 3/8, the chance of rubies is 3/8, the chance of tricolors (black and tan with white) is 1/8, and the chance of blenheims (red and white) is 1/8. That is, of course, provided she has puppies at all. What I would most like is a ruby girl to keep. This puppy need not be show quality, because I am (a) done showing, and (b) done breeding. This will be my last litter. People are nodding indulgently and telling me sure sure, but no, I’m perfectly certain. This is it. Breeding is extremely stressful and quite time consuming and fairly expensive, and this is it. One more litter, one puppy to keep, period.

These should be very pretty puppies! Morgan has produced very nice puppies previously, to my Ishmael, and Red Fox has a lovely seven-week-old litter on the ground plus a litter of tiny newborns. A month till I can do an ultrasound to see whether or not she is pregnant.

MEANWHILE:

MARAG really is going pretty well. Hopefully saying so won’t jinx it again, in perhaps some less desirable way.

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Four things every YA author needs to know about teens

From Jane Friedman’s blog: Four things every YA author needs to know about teens.

My first reaction: skeptical. I think the first thing every YA author needs to know about teens is that teenagers are just as diverse in their characteristics as non-teenagers.

Every single YA panelist at every single SFF convention who has ever said: The thing about teenagers is they’re so angsty! They’re so emotional! Everything is life and death! I am looking directly at you. I hated angst just as much when I was fifteen or seventeen as I do now. Maybe more. Hated it in fiction, hated it in real life, I do not crave emotional upset in any form, thank you, but NO.

This is especially not what I want to see given that a lot of modern fantasy has moved toward the YA pattern: short, fast paced, high angst. I don’t mean everything, but that’s kind of a tendency, or I think it has been for the past twenty years. At least.

Let me just see what this post says …

A) Teens are easily bored

B) Teens are curious

C) Oh, here it is: Teens are highly emotional.

D) Teens push boundaries

I don’t see a single word about teens aren’t all the same, teenagers are a diverse group. Instead, it’s all teenagers have low dopamine levels and I’m like sure, if you say so, I guess it’s a puzzle that teenagers can actually get lost for hours in a specific book, videogame, binge watch a tv series, spend hours fishing or in a deer blind, fiddle with model cars or real cars for ages … you know what, maybe teenagers aren’t all, as a group, easily bored? Maybe the levels of dopamine are high enough in lots of teens to sustain prolonged interest in whatever? Just a suggestion.

But we can certainly say Oh, teens are easily bored, you need to grab a teen reader fast, and then, bonus, we can generalize from teenagers to people and push all books to start with explosions and THEN say Wow, people today have such low attention spans, when in fact if you offer readers long books and/or quiet openings that are engaging, then those books still work fine. It just has to be a good opening rather than a boring opening.

Last I checked, many people, teens included, still love TLotR and other really, really long books, such as, I don’t know, The Hands of the Emperor has a thousand ratings on Amazon. [You know, just saying, but Tasmakat only has 163. If you haven’t ever dropped over to Amazon to rate it, how about now? Preferably with five stars, but whatever, it seems pretty stable at an average of 4.8, so I’m not very concerned about its average star rating.]

I’m just going to note that not only are TLotR and The Hands of the Emperor both really, really long, but both also start quietly, and the quietness continues for a good long time. Yet they are hooky, and plenty of people stay up late reading them.

Raise your hand if you disliked high-angst novels as a teen, and especially if you disliked high levels of angst in romance in novels. Everybody? Of course not. Lots of readers? Yes, for sure. And why are different people raising their hands for different kinds of books? Because readers are a diverse group, no matter their age or, sigh, their dopamine levels.

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Rory and Bran

So, that book written without the letter “e” was interesting, wasn’t it? I thought you might like to take a look at another book that is interesting in a different way. This is Rory and Bran, by Lord Dunsany, published back in 1937. Craig tracked down a copy and gave it to me. It’s pretty snazzy.

Some of you may be familiar with Lord Dunsany and therefore possibly with this book and aware of the, um, the thing. Most of you, I’m betting, don’t know the trick here. Let’s take a look at the first paragraphs! As you know there’s a trick, maybe you’ll figure it out before I tell you what’s going on. I’m going to start with the first lines, then snip my way forward to a section that I think does a good job showing the thing I want to show you.

***

By the great fireplace of an Irish cottage sat an old man and his wife. Logs had burned down to red embers, frilled with white ash; but their glow gave all the light the O’Cullens needed.

[Long discussion of whether their son Rory has the brains to be trusted to take twelve cattle to the fair, where they will be sold. They decide perhaps not, but that will be all right if Bran goes with him. In chapter two, we get to meet not only Rory, but Bran, so we have now met both titular characters of this novel. Then off we go, taking the cattle to the fair.]

The boy left the cattle to Bran, who not only drove them from behind, but ran on in front at crossroads for fear they should stray down little roads. But the cattle showed not wish to stray, plodding slowly on toward Ryan’s farm with the thought of deep grass they had known once in his meadows clear in their memories yet, for it was of a richer quality than any O’Cullen owned, greener, broader, and with better juice.

“What time is it?” said Rory to Bran.

And Bran took no notice. From which Rory learned that the time of day is not one of the essential matters. And thinking it over for a while, as he went down the road at the slow pace of the cattle, he saw clearly enough for himself that this must be so. What heed did the birds, for instance, take of our hours and minutes? Sunrise, noon, sunset and twilight were things of importance, not our trivial and tiny subdivisions of time. No, Bran was right. …

Suddenly there were no more hedges; suddenly trees ceased as though there were something here of which they were terrified; there were no more cottages, no more fields, nothing at all of man’s but the one white road; they were come to the red bog. Heather, not flowering yet, was on both sides of Rory, heather growing upon ten thousand islands, and a strange wide inland sea in which the islands stood. And over all that heather and moss and water, up in the blue sky, a sound he had never known before, a sound that seemed to him like a single harpstring vibrating. It was a snipe drumming, a thing familiar enough to all who have seen the spring coming to marshy lands, but to Rory it seemed it must be some musical angel, an idle angel leaning on clouds just out of sight and touching a single harpstring. Why only one string? He would not play, thought Rory, that anthem that thrilled Heaven, hear within the hearing of earth: he was listlessly touching one string and gazing down at the bog. And surely that was where the angels would come if they came near earth at all; surely those ruby and emerald mosses shining in placid water, ringed round with the calm small hills, were the scene that would keep the angels from getting homesick so far away from Heaven. …

“It’s the place an angel would come to, Bran,” said Rory. “Don’t you hear one of them now?”

But Bran had his work to do, and was interested in the earth most keenly, and though he sympathized with Rory and listened to him gladly, he was far too practical to give in this case the truest sympathy, by feeling about it as the boy did. So busy was Bran with the cattle, keeping them all together, driving on one that had stopped to graze upon one side of the road, then checking one on the other side, that by the time Rory had walked three miles, Bran had probably done five.

[You’ve got it now, right? Well, let’s read a little more anyway.]

Soon there began to appear ahead of them, where the road ran into the horizon, a long shadow upon the sky. It was the Drumlin mountains, the children of Slievenamona, at whose feet they lay, hiding all the peaks of the long range beyond them. During all the morning they altered not at all, but remained a long shadow, until by noon the light was so strong and merry that the shadow of the blue sky should have faded away, if it had been a shadow; but it strengthened; and, as the hours went by and the slow miles passed, the shadow began to take upon itself, one by one, some of the qualities of solids, and the third dimension gradually appeared, and outlines of hills, and hints of hedges began to be seen, till recognizable things were taking the place of magic.

“That’s mountains over there, Bran,” said Rory.

Bran looked up, but his interests were more intense than Rory’s, and confined to a narrower field; his keen observation was well satisfied with what the few square yards about him had to reveal, and he had interest enough in looking after twelve cattle, and incidentally Rory; so that he scarcely troubled to do more than glance where Rory’s arm was pointing, though he looked at Rory himself, more interested perhaps in the pleasure that the boy got from the mountains than in the mountains themselves. He watched for a while to see if Rory would say any more, but when he saw him still gazing quite entranced at the mountains, he went on with his work.

“I thnk it would be a good thing to have dinner,” said Rory next, pulling out a packet of sandwiches.

And Bran agreed at once.

So Bran stopped the cattle, and he and Rory sat down by the side of the road.

“You don’t like mustard,” said Rory. “Begob you should, for it gives a great taste to the meat. But you don’t like it, so you shall have this heap; they’re mutton; and I’ll have these, they’re ham. You see, there’s mustard on them, and you don’t like it.”

And that was certainly Bran’s view, and there was no altering it. Meat, in his view, was meat, and needed no disguising, and could not be improved by any flavouring, and certainly needed nothing to work up one’s appetite for it, provided that it was meat. So he took the mutton sandwiches that Rory offered, while Rory ate the ham. They were still by the side of the red bog; far out in it but for the road, the one solid thing in all those instable acres, the one thing made by man in all that ancient wildness; yet, solid and civilized ats it was, it trembled slightly whenever a cart came by, being quite unable to enforce the principles of solidity, where nothing of the kind had ever been known, where immobility was a thing strange and foreign, its illusory presence departing even under the step of a hare. Straight over their heads, a snipe was still drumming.

“Bran, Bran, the angels are nothing to you,” said Rory.

Which may or may not have been true, but with his mouth full of mutton, Bran had hardly been addressed at the right time and upon the right topic. Some perception of this may have come to the slower mind of Rory, for he returned to his ham in silence. The snipe flew on and on, far up, unseen by Rory, soaring and dropping; it was as it dropped that the sound called drumming came, and the sound that Rory thought was a harpstring touched by a finger was really a thread of air being twanged to music by the spread tailfeathers of an exultant snipe. The world is full of wonders, and all the wonders that our imagination paints are but the mirage of them.

***

That’s a good line, so I’ll stop there.

It’s obvious that Bran is a dog, right? Lord Dunsany NEVER says so, and NEVER includes any element of description that would conclusively identify Bran as a dog. But it’s obvious, isn’t it? Hasn’t he done a great job capturing the way a dog exists and experiences the world without ever saying, Oh, by the way, this is a dog? I think this is a great job.

Also, the description is marvelous.

Also, this was written in the bygone era during which people weren’t scared to use semicolons. Or long, long, long sentences.

I didn’t know much about Lord Dunsany, and this book made me wonder about him. If you feel the same way, here’s the Wikipedia entry. He was actually Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, which is a quite a mouthful. He wrote a zillion books. More than ninety, it says, and lots of shorter works and plays and whatever else. He wrote The King of Elfland’s Daughter, which I haven’t read, but at least I’ve heard of it. If you’ve read it, or something else by Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, what did you think of it?

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Sticking the Landing

Here’s a post at Kill Zone Blog: Endings: Words of Wisdom

In this post, Dale Ivan Smith says:

“Sticking the landing” with a novel can be tricky. Wrong tone, wrong payoff, a cliffhanger that withholds some of the payoff and especially emotional resolution, too long a resolution are just examples of endings that don’t work as they should. Endings which can leave your reader unsatisfied.

My novel Empowered: Rebel, the fourth in my Empowered series, ended rather abruptly, immediately after a huge reveal which threw the entire series into a new light, and changed everything for my hero, Mathilda Brandt. Not only did I think this was a fine way to end the novel, I thought it was a fine way to end the series. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Fortunately, I saw the light and wrote Empowered: Hero, the actual final novel for the series, which resolved the series arc, but also had an ending which worked.

With that in mind I’ve found three posts from the wonderful KZB archives that discuss different aspects of endings to share today. Michelle Gagnon asks if thrillers need to have a happy ending, Clare Langley-Hawthorne ponders whether or not you need to provide a resolution, and Joe Moore gives a rundown on the elements of an ending that work.

My immediate take on the questions posed by the first two of these posts:

A) A thriller does not need to have a happy ending, but if it has an unjust ending, you will lose ninety percent of your readers. If the ending is tragic but just, then you’ll lose only half your readers. Half is still a lot, so maybe you should consider an ending that is at least ambiguously tolerable rather than tragic.

I basically think the above applies to most genre fiction. Literary readers may have a higher tolerance for nihilistic messages and bleak, pointless, or unjust endings. (I may not be quite fair when I say that, but there’s a reason I have this impression of literary fiction.)

I see the author of this post is conflating happy endings and pat endings. Well, she should cut that out. An ending does not need to be saccharine to be happy, just as a character does not need to be one-dimensional in order to be a good guy.

This post specifically refers to In the Woods as a book with a dark or ambiguous ending. Great choice! Here is my personal reaction to In the Woods. If you click through and read the linked post, you will find that I specifically think this was a terrible, horrible, awful, repugnant ending. However, the book itself is beautifully written at the sentence level even though we never solve the central mystery and the killer gets away with everything, and I guess this somehow works for quite a lot of readers. It is still a terrible, horrible, awful, repugnant ending.

B) For crying out loud, yes, you have to provide a resolution, and it needs to be a satisfying resolution. I mean a resolution of a whole story arc, not necessarily of a specific novel in the series.

How can that even be a question? I guess I’ll click through to the post and see what the author says about this.

Here is the basic conclusion:  Something has to occur that will give your readers the feeling of satisfaction that the journey was worth the investment of their valuable time and money.

Yes, that’s what I said, basically. Yes, you have to have a resolution. That’s not the same as a happy ending. The post continues with suggestions about how to be sure you include a resolution. Consider ending with a moment of insight. Your character has gone through an internal metamorphosis that causes her to learn an important life-lesson. Her growth throughout the story leads up to this emotional insight that makes her a better or at least changed individual. This is all very well, but this also illustrates why I don’t think suggestions are particularly helpful, as a rule. Include a moment of insight, sure, great idea. Let me add that this insight had better emerge organically from the character and the story, and it would be nice if it is consistent with some central theme. There you go, now that this has been suggested, you’ll certainly find that kind of ending easier to achieve.

Granted, I do that by feel, the same way I do almost everything. Maybe other writers do outline the ending and make notes about the insight they plan to include and would find it helpful to actually think about how that insight emerges from the character and ties into some theme or other.

Okay, great endings! I have one. (I mean, other than Tasmakat’s ending, which I revised over and over and am still very happy with.)

My very first pick for outstanding ending: The Scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novik.

Another superb ending: The Phoenix Feather series by Sherwood Smith

Another: The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia McKillip, who is not otherwise always known for truly sticking the landing, but I think she did in this one.

One more: The Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy by Martha Wells.

What books leap to your mind when you think of great endings?

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Update, and comments about books

First, a very brief update about MARAG:

I started it Jan 1, so that was a nice way to start the new year.

I don’t want to jinx it, so I’ll just say it’s going pretty well and let’s leave it at that.

***

Next, comments! By which I mean, your comments.

Here is the post where I pointed to a new(ish) fantasy novel called Pomegranate Gate, by Ariel Kaplan. This post features a review by Liz Bourke, who as you may know writes really good reviews that tend to point to things important to me. I said in that post that this book looked appealing and I hoped to read it. I also pointed out that negative comments tended to say the pacing was slow and that sounded fine to me. I have not (of course) actually read this book yet. But some of you expressed interest, and commenter Kate read it recently and kindly left a comment. Here is that comment, which I’m pulling out where you’re more likely to see it:

Overall, I liked it a lot, but I do see where some of the negative comments are coming from.

I didn’t think that the story was particularly slow-paced. What I noticed was that the first few chapters were faster, and then once the author got all the characters into their places, the story slowed down. Neither pace seemed unusual or bad to me, but I could see how the change might be disappointing for some readers. The pace picks up a little in the final chapters too.

I think the comment that it feels like a prequel is because this isn’t a book where the main conflict gets resolved by the end. It has the kind of ending where I would usually expect to turn the page and see “Book 2” in the same volume. It’s clearly an intentional choice, but if I had realized that before starting the book, I would have waited to read it until the next book was at least available for pre-order.

As far as good points go, I second everything in Bourke’s review. The prose is lovely, the world is fascinating, and the characters are compelling. I loved Naftaly and found Toba occasionally frustrating, but I could imagine someone else feeling the opposite.

I did worry going in that the threat of the Inquisition might be so looming and oppressive that the book would be too dark for me, but it wasn’t. It certainly wasn’t cozy, but it didn’t get too dark or bleak (for me). HOWEVER, there was one thing that happened near the end made me wonder if future books might be darker. This is mostly because the author is new to me – if a similar thing happened in, say, a Rachel Neumeier book, I would be pretty confident that the rest of the story would make things okay, but with an unfamiliar author, I’m a little bit worried that this might be the beginning of things taking a dark turn. So that’s another reason to wait for the series to finish before giving it a try!

Thanks, Kate! This still sounds very good, but maybe there’s no rush, considering I might like to wait for a sequel, as you suggest. I’m going to just mention to anyone who has picked up the first book that the thing that is most likely to kill a traditionally published book is poor sell-through to the second book, so if you DO like the first book, it would always be nice to pick up the second book when it is released even if you don’t plan to read it right then, in order to encourage the publisher not to cancel the third book.

Next!

Recently I pointed to Molly Templeton’s end of year post at tor.com. This was the quirky post where she mentioned, among other things, “Two books from one criminally underread author.” That author was Alaya Dawn Johnson, who has written various novels that I haven’t read, including one called The Summer Prince that I did sort of wanted to read. A couple of you commented about that, so:

SarahZ says, I loved The Summer Prince, but I read it when I had a lot more capacity for conflict in my books. That being said, I don’t remember it being grim. I really liked the protagonist’s journey as a character, and liked the mix of cyberpunk and mythological influences (although I don’t know a ton about the epic of gilgamesh). It also had a line from a secondary character that really stuck with me.

And Kim Aippersbach adds, I remember The Summer King as gorgeously written, unique, with wonderful world-building and characters I didn’t quite connect with. Worth reading for the twists on mythology and the very Brazilian feel of the futuristic world.

Both of these comments make me continue to want to someday read this. I’m a sucker for setting. In case any of you feel the same, here you go, reader reactions.

Seriously, your comments about books are really helpful! This is true even if I just drag my feet ENDLESSLY about actually reading something. Or, indeed, anything. At the moment, I am writing MARAG and not reading anything at all except tiny bits of nonfiction.

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Math metaphors in literature

From Ben Orlin at Math with Bad Drawings:

Good writing, they say, is vivid and sensory. It involves punchy verbs, concrete nouns, and long descriptions of rain.

Mathematics is not sensory. It is not concrete. And it is not much good for describing rain.

Instead, math is a library of concepts: shelf after shelf of abstract relations between x and y. Mathematical ideas are like pencil drawings of spider webs, airy and ethereal schematics of something that was pretty airy and ethereal to begin with.

And that’s what makes mathematical metaphors so perfect. …

Orlin pulls out half a dozen or so examples, all good. Here’s one from Le Guin:

Wow, she is such a great writer. I don’t like all her books, not by a long shot, but that’s at the story level, not at the craft level. She’s splendid with sentences. This is lovely. You should click through and check out the rest, especially if you happen to like math as well as literature.

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Dipping Into Books: Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tufte

I saw references to this book someplace or other, tossed it onto my Amazon wishlist, and lo and behold, here it is.

I’m not sure it’s the book I’m most pleased about adding to the stack on my coffee table, but it’s up there.  Let me tell you a little about this book.

Tufte leaps into the book with no real introduction or forward or anything; and comments in the chapter are also very limited. This is very much a book about examples. It’s meant to nudge the reader to become conscious of some aspects of syntax, of the effect syntax has on the feel of the sentence. I think if you already notice sentences, you’d probably enjoy this book because who doesn’t enjoy looking at sentences, right? I also think if someone doesn’t tend to notice sentences, this book might help develop a consciousness of sentence structure. Would that be useful? Beats me, but I think it’s a neat thing to notice.

I guess I should add, I’m the kind of person who, when I hit an interesting or awkward sentence in a novel, will probably try rephrasing it several different ways to see how that feels. I don’t know if I tended to do that before I started writing, but I kind of think I did. I kind of think I’ve always noticed sentences and related elements of craft, like paragraph breaks and whatever else. So I guess I would say, Woohoo, sentences! But I really like this book.

What does Tufte actually cover? Short sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases, adjectives and adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and coordination, dependent clauses, sentence openers and inversion, branching sentences, appositives, interrogatives and imperatives, parallelism, cohesion, and something called “syntactical symbolism.” Not sure what that is, but I really like lots of the stuff she’s talking about. She covers more than that; those are the chapters, but she points out the use of fragments in description in the “adjectives and adverbs” chapter, for example.

I’ve glanced into the book here and there, but let’s take a look at “adjectives and adverbs” because that’s a topic I revisit here rather frequently.

Here’s a sentence at the beginning of this chapter:

The cool globes of dew or rain broke in showers of iridescent spray about his nose; the earth, here hard, here soft, here hot, here cold, stung, traced, and tickled the soft pads of his feet.

This is Virginia Woolf, showcasing adjectives, obviously. (And verbs.) (And parallelism.) What do you think? I’ve never read anything by Virginia Woolf, though I’ve heard of her, of course. I like this sentence. I think this is a dog or cat or some other animal? Oh, later in the chapter, Tufte identifies this – it is an animal; in fact, it’s Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel. It would be a good sentence to use to talk about sentences, especially about commas.

Here’s another:

The limping earnestness of his speech disappeared; he talked as he drank, abundantly.

That’s Desmond Hall, demonstrating the use of the irreplaceable, indispensable adverb, and good for him. The adverb here is doing a lot of heavy lifting. So are the adjectives, but putting the adverb at the end lends it considerable emphasis.

Here’s Virginia Tufte:

Adjectives and adverbs offer to writers extraordinary resources and subtleties. Along with nouns and verbs, they are content words, the four words classes forming the great bulk of the vocabulary whose main job is to carry content or meaning. … the remarkable richness of English word classes, including adjectives and adverbs, and the ways they work ingeniously together in sentences invite creative variety, as seen in the examples that follow. … Lots of examples, and then: Adverbs have a place, an optional niche, at the end of any kernel. But they become the most mobile of all speech parts and are able to work in positions almost anywhere in the sentence …

Gently he stopped the machine. – Romain Gary, Nothing Important Ever Dies

He was always two men. Alan Paton, Too Late the Phalarope.

It was very hot and bright and the houses looked sharply white. – Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.

The acquisition of complex sentences has not received nearly as much attention as the acquisition of syntactic phenomena in simple sentences, unfortunately. – Van Valin and LaPolla, Syntax.

And Tufte then notes that yes indeed, putting the adverb at the end emphasizes it. Setting any single word off with a comma at the end of sentence always emphasizes the word, usually to great effect, as here in this sentence Tufte uses to illustrate this phenomenon:

A few minutes later he slumped from his chair, dead. –Jerry Allen, The Thunder and the Sunshine.

Boom, a common, easy technique of emphasizing a word by isolating it at the end of the sentence. I bet we’ve seen versions of that in one million murder mysteries. Everyone does this, because it works really well.

You also get emphasis if you isolate a single adjective or adverb in the middle of a sentence:

Perhaps they reminded me, distantly, of myself, long ago. Perhaps they reminded me, dimly, of something we had lost. – James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone.

Wow, that’s a neat couple of sentences. I’m distracted by how much I like the syntax here, especially since Baldwin is also illustrating why adverbs are excellent when used properly and well. Let’s pause and look at these two sentences with different punctuation. All these versions are going to be correct. The punctuation is purely a matter of artistic preference.

Perhaps they reminded me distantly of myself long ago. Perhaps they reminded me dimly of something we had lost.

Perhaps they reminded me distantly of myself long ago; perhaps they reminded me dimly of something we had lost.

Perhaps they reminded me, distantly, of myself long ago; perhaps they reminded me, dimly, of something we had lost.

What do you think?

I think Baldwin got it right. His version is the best. Why is it the best? Because it feels the best. What do I mean by “feels?” I mean the pauses feel right, the pauses create the right emphasis, the most effective emphasis.

When I say I pause and try revising sentences when I read, this is what I mean. This is the kind of thing I actually do – not with every sentence (obviously), but interesting sentences, poetic sentences; or the reverse, sentences that seem awkward. I really do pause for a second and try different punctuation or different word order or different word choices in my head, decide whether I think the author handled that sentence as effectively as possible. And yes, I will do that even if I am caught up in the story at the time. It’s like two different experiences of the story are happening at the same time: the story as a story and the sentences as sentences. I wonder if any of you do that? Maybe it’s relatively common among writers, to read a novel with this kind of dual appreciation for story and sentences?

How about this, from later in the chapter on adjectives and adverbs:

Whereas the truth was, as he alone knew, that the heavens were a glorious blazing golden limitless cathedral of unending and eternal light. – John Knowles, Indian Summer.

Wow, that’s wonderful. Would you prefer commas between all those adjectives? I wouldn’t. I like it just the way Knowles did it. I haven’t read this story or essay or whatever it is. Given the sentence in isolation, I would like it even better if you cut “as he alone knew.”

Whereas the truth was that the heavens were a glorious blazing golden limitless cathedral of unending and eternal light.

I like the rushed feeling, the feeling of opening up. I’m not sure I’m expressing that properly.

Tufte says, An opposite technique to the careful placement and demarcation of isolated adjectives is the deliberate piling up of a number of modifiers immediately in front of a headword. … the result of such insistent modification, such an emphatic welter of description, is often highly charged and emotive. I think that’s right; I think that might be what I mean by “the feeling of opening up” – I might mean “emotive.”

This book is all about beautiful, effective sentences, so there aren’t many examples of bad sentences. Lots of examples of highly descriptive paragraphs, including from Harry Potter, TLotR, CS Lewis. Also Dylan Thomas, Cornel West, lots of others. Lots of great paragraphs, all different, all showcasing great use of adjectives or adverbs. Look at this one – it’s especially interesting –

It was a good peace, that spread. Those were good leaves up there, with a good, bright sky beyond them. This was a good earth beneath my back, soft as a bed, and in all its unexamined depths was a good darkness. – William Golding, The Pyramid.

Try to do that in a classroom setting and the instructor would tell you that you could do better than to use “good” five times in three sentences, but could you? Tufte uses this as an example of creating a mood via repetition of this simple adjective. Where did I see something about repetition to create a mood? … Oh, it was in regard to CS Lewis, The Silver Chair, the repetition of “silver” and similar words when Lewis is describing the underground region.

In this whole chapter, Tufte spares maybe a couple of sentences about the possible misuse of adverbs. The rest of the chapter is all about illustrating what you can do with adjectives and adverbs and demonstrating that description is not something to treat casually.

Great chapter, great book, I’m going to have this one on my coffee table for the foreseeable future.

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A Void, by Georges Perec, translated from the French by Gilbert Adair

So, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this book, Perec’s A Void.

Let me just show you the beginning first. Here we go:

Incurably insomniac, Anton Vowl turns on a light. According to his watch it’s only 12.20. With a loud and languorous sigh Vowl sits up, stuffs a pillow at his back, draws his quilt up around his chin, picks up his whodunit, and idly scans a paragraph or two; but, judging its plot impossibly difficult to follow in his condition, its vocabulary to whimsically multisyllabic for comfort, throws it away in disgust.

Padding into his bathroom, Vowl dabs at his brow and throat with a damp cloth.

It’s a soft, warm night and his blood is racking through his body. An indistinct murmur wafts up to his third-floor flat. Far off, a church clock starts chiming – a chiming as mournful as a last post, as an air-raid alarm, as an SOS signal from a sinking ship. And, in his own vicinity, a faint lapping sound informs him that a small craft is at that instant navigating a narrow channel.

Crawling across his windowsill is a tiny animal, indigo and saffron in colour, not a cockroach, not a blowfly, but a kind of wasp, laboriously dragging a sugar crumb along with it. Hoping to crush it with a casual blow, Vowl lifts up his right hand; but it abruptly flaps its wings, flying off without giving its assailant an opportunity to do it any harm.

Notice anything? If you didn’t already know the trick here, then I bet you didn’t. This book is widely and believably reputed to be the best novel ever written without using the letter E. Even more stunningly, the guy who translated it also did so without using the letter E. The book, incidentally, comes with a little plastic packet filled with tiny paper cutout letters E and a little note that as the book is damaged, the buyer may find these useful.

This is just astonishing – I mean, that anyone wrote a novel-length work without using the letter E in the first place, even in French, but it’s even more astonishing that anyone tackled the job of translating into English while also holding onto that restriction. It’s a stunt, obviously, but it’s a really impressive stunt. And you know what makes it even more astonishing? That in the middle of this novel, the author includes, and the translator translates, the following:

William Shakspar’s “Living or Not Living” soliloquy

PBS’s “Ozymandias”

John Milton’s “On His Glaucoma”

Thomas Hood’s “No”

Arthur Gordon Pym’s “Black Bird”

Arthur Rimbaud’s “Vocalisations”

***

Let’s take a look at a couple you may recognize:

Ozymandias

I know a pilgrim from a distant land

Who said: Two vast and sawn-off limbs of quartz

Stand on an arid plain. Not far, in sand,

Half sunk, I found a facial stump, drawn warts

And all; its curling lips of cold command

Show that its sculptor passions could portray

Which still outlast, stamp’d on unliving things,

A mocking hand that no constraint would sway:

And on its plinth this lordly boast is shown:

“Lo, I am Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, O Mighty, and bow down!”

‘Tis all that is intact. Around that crust

Of a colossal ruin, now windblow,

A sandstorm swirls and grinds it into dust.

What do you think? Obviously it’s terrible compared to the original, but it’s clever, isn’t it? The quartz/warts thing is truly dreadful.

I wonder if it might be a fun assignment in a lit class, to ask students to produce a version of this poem using various constraints, but trying to stay as close to the original in rhyme, rhythm, and meaning as possible. They’d all have to look up “visage,” I expect, and also spend a moment thinking about what the poem means, which could only be beneficial.

Okay, next!

***

The Black Bird

‘Twas upon a midnight tristful I sat poring, wan and wistful

Through many a quaint and curious list full of my consorts slain –

I sat nodding, almost napping, till I caught a sound of tapping,

As of spirits softly rapping, rapping at my door in vain –

“’Tis a visitor,” I murmur’d, “tapping at my door in vain –

                                Tapping soft as falling rain.”

….    ….   ….

Now, that night-wing’d fowl placating my sad fancy into waiting

On its oddly fascinating air of arrogant disdain,

“Though thy tuft is shorn and awkward, thou,” I said, “art not so backward

Coming forward, ghastly Black Bird wand’ring far from thy domain,

Not to say what thou art known as in thy own dusk-down domain!”

                                Quoth that Black Bird, “Not again.”

***

Obviously I just pulled out a couple of stanzas here; the whole thing has been parodied in the novel. It’s amazing how the rhyme, rhythm, and wordplay has been captured not just presumably by the e-less version in French, but again by this translated version. I’d be really interested in the French version – whether it has anything of the feel of the original.

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End of Year Lists

From Molly Templeton at tor.com: Rethinking the End of Year Book List

Templeton says: Not everything I read is on one of these lists, but every book I read this year, regardless of publication date, could be included. Each book can appear only once. Each list can have a maximum of five books on it. And sometimes, a list is just one thing. …

Then she offers the following categories:

Three excellent series books.

Five books I should have read a long time ago.

Let’s all read more books about art.

One book from which I learned something I didn’t know I didn’t know.

Two books from one criminally underread author.

Some of the most excellent books I read this year that came out last year.

One absolute WTF? book.

Two beloved poetry collections

Five brilliant debut novels.

This is a great job creating quirky, fun categories! I’m impressed! I haven’t done a best-of list for 2023, or any kind of list for 2023, but maybe I should, taking this kind of list as a model — any categories I happen to think of, no need to take anything too seriously. Maybe I’ll take a stab at that tonight.

Meanwhile, what looks especially interesting in Molly Templeton’s list? To me, this one:

Glass Hotel is the “one book where I learned something I didn’t know I didn’t know,” and the thing in question is what a Ponzi scheme really is and how it really works:

I did not fully understand the term “Ponzi scheme,” despite reading it in the news approximately seven thousand times, until I read this book. It is a very, very, very good book, but for some reason I wanted to note this thing that I did not expect to learn from it. You just never know what you’ll take away from a great book, is all.

I remember struggling with the idea quite a long time ago, when I was a kid. I think I had a teacher (or friend? or brother?) show with a diagram scheme how a Ponzi scheme works until suddenly it crashes down. Oh, you know what, I remember this coming up in the context of chain letters. That’s the context. I don’t know if chain letters are still a thing.

Anyway, here’s the description:

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis’s billion-dollar business is really nothing more than a game of smoke and mirrors. When his scheme collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.
 
In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.

This sounds evocative, if not exactly inviting. I wouldn’t be interested except that I liked and admired Station Eleven. Well, plus if Molly Templeton says it’s a “very, very, very good book,” then it’s probably great in at least some ways.

Who is the criminally underread author? Not me, alas! It’s Alaya Dawn Johnson, who has been somewhat on my radar since she wrote Summer Prince.

A heart-stopping story of love, death, technology, and art set amid the tropics of a futuristic Brazil.The lush city of Palmares Tres shimmers with tech and tradition, with screaming gossip casters and practiced politicians. In the midst of this vibrant metropolis, June Costa creates art that’s sure to make her legendary. But her dreams of fame become something more when she meets Enki, the bold new Summer King. The whole city falls in love with him (including June’s best friend, Gil). But June sees more to Enki than amber eyes and a lethal samba. She sees a fellow artist.…

It’s a YA dystopia, but for me, it stood out from the vast horde of YA dystopias that we saw after The Hunger Games. I’m a fan of setting, which is probably why I noticed it. It looks pretty grim, which is probably why I didn’t read it.

Have any of you read anything by this author? What did you think?

Templeton also says this book:

The Spear Cuts Through Water is the great overlooked book of 2022. That’s quite a statement. What’s this book about?

Two warriors shepherd an ancient god across a broken land to end the tyrannical reign of a royal family in this epic fantasy

Hmm. Tell me more.

With the aid of Jun, a guard broken by his guilt-stricken past, and Keema, an outcast fighting for his future, the god escapes from her royal captivity and flees from her own children, the triplet Terrors who would drag her back to her unholy prison. And so it is that she embarks with her young companions on a five-day pilgrimage in search of freedom—and a way to end the Moon Throne forever. The journey ahead will be more dangerous than any of them could have imagined.

Hmm. Let’s look at the top review:

I’m having a hard time describing this incredibly layered, ambitious, and unconventional book. It is familiar in its epic fantasy/folk tale story beats, but it’s told in such a unique, experimental, metaphysical style. It’s woven deeply into the novel and doesn’t feel like a gimmick. A little preview: there’s the story of the reader, who is then invited to a play in the spirit realm, and that stage play is the main heart of the book.

The author adds little asides told directly to the reader as if the characters are there watching with you, their commentary adding spice and giving a sense of the wide scope of a fully lived-in world. And still, the writing feels intimate, giving voice to side characters that could have been so easily discarded. Reading this book feels like you’re really in the audience of a theater with actors breaking the 4th wall (and maybe the person next to you keeps adding little quips since it’s actually based on their life…)

Well, it definitely sounds interesting. It sounds like the kind of thing where I will keep putting off looking at it. However, sure, let me drop a sample onto my kindle so I don’t completely forget about it. I should do a top ten list of “books I would most like to read someday, but they look too demanding and I don’t feel like I can spare the attention.”

More realistically, I ought to do another set of Ten Novel’s Opening Paragraphs. That, I can manage for sure.

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Update: New plan! Also, here’s a book to try in 2024

Welcome to 2024! I hope it’s a great year for us all personally, and it sure would be nice if it turned out to be a good year for the world.

Well, we can hope.

Update: Totally new plan for writing schedule this year!

Well, not TOTALLY new, but pretty new.

A) Silver Circle is going to be TWO BOOKS. There is no possible way it’s going to be one. This is great!

I mean, in some ways. This means, among other things, that it was fine to take four (more likely five) whole months to write it. Them. The two books it’s going to be. It also means I don’t have to worry about length anymore, yay! because that was plainly getting out of control by Christmas. I mean, it’s all very well to say “I’m going to cut 30,000 words!” because the truth is, sure, yes, I’m certain to do that, but I can also see that I’m probably going to add about that much length in order to deepen character arcs and do *waves hands vaguely* other writerly stuff like that. So it’s going to go over 200,000 words and that’s fine. The draft is currently 210,000 words and STILL not complete.

The only real problem is that now I need (a) a new title for book five, or, (b) subtitles.

I’m leaning toward the latter, because I don’t think this is going to be two self-contained books. I think it’s going to be a cliffhanger situation. Subtitles will prevent readers from being surprised about that.

B) Releasing Silver Circle this spring is not going to happen. This is not only not finished, it is also a horrifically rough first draft and I’m not even going to think about pushing to get it out before fall. I don’t need the stress, and you all deserve the best story I can write, and that means slooooow down. No one is even going to see this draft till I’ve had time not just to finish it, but also to clean it up. I’m going to aim to release these books in October / November and plan to release both of them close together, though probably not on the same day.

C) So! Before I look at even finishing Silver Circle, I’m going to take a break from it and write Marag. This one should be short, about as long as Suelen. (I think. We know what that feeling is worth, right? Not much. But I hope less than 80,000 words.) I mean, we’ll see, but I’m hoping to write a good chunk of it before classes start (Jan 17th) or at least by the end of the month. Granted, I don’t know what the heck to do about a certain plot point, but whatever, I’ll figure it out when I get there.

D) After Marag, I’ll write Rihasi. I’ve got the whole basic plot in my head, I’m pretty sure. I’m thinking it should wind up a normal length, maybe 115,000 words or thereabouts. It should be fast, barring unanticipated problems, and I am dying to write it.

I’ll schedule those for preorder just as soon as I have complete drafts. Obviously that can’t be super early in the year, but maybe March for one and May for the other. That’s what we might call a wild-ass guess.

Meanwhile:

E) After Rihasi, if I haven’t already done so, I’ll write first chapters for (i) a NFS sequel, and (ii) an Invictus sequel; and (iii) the first book of a series featuring Tano.

F) Then, while early readers are reading Marag and/or Rihasi, I will finish Silver Circle, then revise the whole huge thing into a readable draft. And that’s as far as I’m planning. Because I think I might stick to this much of a schedule, more or less. If I get this far without anything going sideways, I will then think about the back half of the year.

***

Meanwhile!

About midway through December, I saw this post at tor.com: Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2023

And I didn’t really care because my TBR pile is more than high enough, thank you, and I am much more interested in the books you all mention here anyway. However, I noticed this specific line from Liz Bourke’s comments in that post:

Valerie Valdes’ Where Peace is Lost is my favourite novel of the year. It’s a well-executed, rip-roaringly good planetary space opera adventure with an incredibly skilled warrior protagonist—a protagonist whose commitment to the cause of least harm involves a willingness to die rather than kill, because her enemies’ lives are also valuable. A refreshing and entertaining look at the ethical conundrum of armed pacifism.

So I poked around, looking for a full review, because Liz Bourke writes great reviews, and I found this one at Locus:

When [Kel’s] young friend Lunna brings word of a dormant Pale war machine suddenly reactivated, Kel finds her past life feeling much more present. If the giant automated machine isn’t stopped, it’ll devastate everything in its path. The two strangers – charming, flirtatious ship-captain Savvy, and laconic, private, former soldier Dare – have their own secrets and their own goals, but it turns out they’re honest about their desire to turn off the war machine, and their potential ability to do so. War machines don’t just turn on by themselves, though. A group of Pale soldiers turned this one on in order to extort a huge payout from the populace, indifferent to the death and suffering that would ensue. They could turn it back on very easily, or worse, let loose other war machines stored in a remote, disused Pale military base. And if they learn who Kel is, who Kel used to be, they might burn the whole planet to get to her. And Kel won’t let that hap­pen. Kel will hand herself over for execution first.

That’s a brief, telling excerpt from Liz’s review, which you should certainly click through and read in its entirety, but here’s another bit:

[This story sees the protagonist] choosing to keep her ethics, even in extremis, to reclaim her identity as a protector rather than a refugee in hiding, to kill only when she can find no other option to protect others.

That makes it a deeply felt, deeply moving novel. And a very effective one. If you’re look­ing for something fun, fast, and unexpectedly thoughtful, give this one a try. There are few science fiction novels in the last two decades I’ve enjoyed more, or found more entertaining. It helps that Valdes isn’t lecturing on ethics, but making thematic arguments.

You know what this reminds me of? The Phoenix Feather quadrilogy. This is exactly how Sherwood Smith presents Mouse … or Ryu/Ari/Firebolt, whatever name she goes by … my point is, this sounds very similar in its treatment of what Liz is calling “armed pacifism.”

I’ve picked up a sample, downloaded the sample to my phone, and I have to say, based solely on this review, I am thinking of deliberately making Where Peace is Lost the first novel I pick up in 2024. It sounds like it would strike just the right note for a new year.

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