Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 64

Tuyo World Companion: quick note

If you dropped over to Amazon and left a review for the Tuyo World Companion, thank you! I appreciate that! I do think the book’s page looks a lot more attractive to prospective readers with a handful of reviews than without.

One review notes that the ebook doesn’t have a clickable Table of Contents. However, it does, or should, have a clickable Table of Contents. On my phone’s app, the menu icon provides a very short but clickable version of the ToC. If you go to the beginning of the book, you ought to find a much more extensive ToC, still clickable. I just checked again, so I know for certain it’s clickable for me.

Generally speaking, when you uses Word to add a ToC based on headings within your document, the ToC always comes out clickable when you load the book to KDP. I’ve never had a problem with this not working, but who knows what random weirdness might be going on? If your version of the ebook does not have a clickable ToC, then something is wrong. Let Amazon know, and if they don’t know what’s wrong, let me know and I will tackle that from this end.

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Amazon’s problem with AI

In July and August this year, we were seeing a lot of posts like this:

Recently, an indie author, Caitlyn Lynch, tweeted about noticing that only 19 of the best sellers in the Teen & Young Adult Contemporary Romance eBooks top 100 chart on Amazon were real, legit books. The rest were nonsensical and incoherent, and seemingly AI-generated. …

The Motherload website later looked into dozens of books on the platform and saw that a few days after Lynch’s tweets, the AI books had vanished from the best-seller lists, probably removed by Amazon. 

They were, however, still available for purchase, and had enjoyed a significant amount of visibility before vanishing. Also, as Lynch very understandably speculates, the mass uploading of AI-generated books could be used to facilitate click-farming, where ‘bots’ click through a book automatically, generating royalties from Amazon Kindle Unlimited, which pays authors by the amount of pages that are read in an ebook. So, it doesn’t matter that these books disappear. The people running such a scheme could just upload as many as they like to replace the removed ones. 

This is obviously a problem, potentially a much bigger problem than I thought it would be. The obvious solution: Amazon needs to crush every fake AI-generated pseudobook like a bug and nuke the people uploading those books. I mean a ban-for-life, the way they do to identified scammers, which is what these people are.

I’ve seen a number of opinion pieces that declare that Amazon won’t do that because they don’t care about garbage pseudobooks as long as they’re making money. This is probably — I want to say obviously, but I’m not sure I’d go that far — wrong. I’m pretty sure about that. It’s wrong because Amazon is all about presenting readers with books that will make them happy, and wading through mountains of garbage pseudobooks does not make people happy. It makes them mad.

The problem, it seems to me, is that it’s hard to identify AI generated garbage.

The solution, it seems to me, is to get a lot better at identifying AI generated garbage as fast as possible, crush fake books like bugs, and nuke from orbit the people who are loading them.

Amazon is (as far as I’ve heard) very, very willing to delete your account and ban you for life if you try to cheat in ways they have decided matter. Once they nuke your account, you are done at KDP, because (as far as I’ve heard), they don’t give a lot of second chances. (They are apparently perfectly fine with scammers using various other methods they haven’t yet decided to care about.) (No, that is not ideal.)

While I guess this situation could play out in various ways, I will just note that Amazon KDP suddenly has a brand-new button on the “content” page at KDP. “Is any part of your book generated by AI?” asks the button. “Click yes or no.”

While there is no “Because we’re going to crush your fake book like a bug” notification, it’s pretty obvious that KDP will soon be able to exercise various options:

A) You check “Yes” to that question. They let you upload your fake book, but they drop it into a dungeon along with almost all low-content books. No one ever sees it. It’s not presented to readers in KU. Problem solved.

B) You check “No” to that question. They run the text of your book through an AI detector they are currently beta-testing and, if it fails, they give you one chance to explain why and then they crush your book like a bug and nuke you for lying to them.

And, basically, I would be fine with that. I would hope not many real authors will get caught if and when Amazon brings down an enormous hammer, but for crying out loud, 4/5 of all the top books are fake? That hammer needs to come down hard, as soon as possible.

Question: how good are AI detectors at this point?

I’ve heard they’re not great, at least the ones available free to whoever wants to poke at them, but the only one I tested identified my text as close to 100% human-generated. The one sentence that got flagged in the report I was writing was “See figure 1, below,” which I thought was funny. I still think that’s funny, and it also indicates that most text is going to come back less than 100% human generated because certain standard word combinations are just that — standard.

On the other hand, it ought to be possible to just draw a fairly arbitrary line, like “If more than 15% of the text comes back AI generated, it’s a fake book.” Or 25% or for that matter 70%, or anything that will let a detector reliably distinguish garbage pseudobooks from real books without generating too many false positives.

Here’s a detector: Copyleaks AI Content Detector. According to this detector, the first chapter of INVICTUS is human-generated. Or rather, there’s a 96.2% probability it’s human generated. Text of an email I wrote recently: 80.2% probability it’s human generated. I note that the conclusion just says “This is human text,” so 80% is good enough for this detector. It’s a short email; that may be why the probability dropped like that. It’s got fairly standard content; that may be why. A piece of a report I was working on a while ago: 69.5% probability it’s human generated! What a huge drop! That’s really interesting! You know what it still says? “This is human text.” I wonder how far the probability has to drop before it says it’s not human text?

I googled “text generator ai, found this site, and entered as a prompt: 1000 word story about a girl and a black dog. This is what the generator gave me:

Julia had always been afraid of black dogs, but when she met one on her way home from school one day, she discovered that this dog was different. The dog, who she named Midnight, seemed to understand her fears and gently led her home. A bond quickly formed between Julia and Midnight, and the dog became her loyal companion and protector. Over time, Julia’s fear of black dogs faded away, and she learned that sometimes the things we fear the most can turn out to be our greatest blessings.

This isn’t anything like a thousand words, obviously, so I guess the generator ignores that part of a request. Whatever, I picked up this paragraph and dropped it in the AI detector linked above. Boom! 98% probability it’s AI generated. I tried a couple other prompts and got similar results.

Here’s another text generator. It says to enter a prompt and hit go. I entered “Once a girl met a black dog” and got this:

Once a girl met a black dog in these circumstances she would just get up and leave, unless of course that dog was the source of the problem and was aggressive. But in that case, I would have to deal with it and our dogs would have to get used to each other. It was a little hard for my young dogs to understand that most of the time the dogs were the problem, not the owner. My birds were at home. The bird room is small and full of birds. Even the floor was littered with feathers and bird toys. It was the first time I’d had this many birds at once, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. My attempts to have them in groups were less than successful. Some kept wanting to be with other birds. Some would try to kill others. Some were fine with one bird in the cage and that bird would be perfectly happy, but as soon as another bird joined the group, then the others in the group would hiss and fight and peck each other. All my birds, even my sister’s ex – therapy bird, were afraid of the floor.

This is fascinating! I sure did not see the birds coming! I dropped this into a different AI detector and found that it is “8% human generated.” I’m told I should edit this text until there’s less detectable AI content. The first paragraphs of INVICTUS? 100% human generated.

Out of curiosity, I dropped the bird thing into Grammarly’s plagiarism detector, which thought it was just peachy. I mean, it said there were errors, but it didn’t say it was AI generated or plagiarized.

The first chapter of INVICTUS? Grammarly’s plagiarism says “significant plagiarism found.” Really? The book isn’t out yet! How can it be finding plagiarism? I’m really startled! It also finds a whole bunch of issues with conciseness, word choices, grammar, and punctuation. I’m not paying for any kind of report, but seriously? I did not have a high opinion of Grammarly prior to this moment, but now my opinion is much, much lower. In fact, all of a sudden I’m wondering if Grammarly is deliberately lying in order to get people to buy it in order to find out what part of their essay or book or whatever looks like it is plagiarized. Suddenly that seems like a plausible scenario!

On the other hand, this ten-minute test of AI detectors seems to suggest that they’re maybe, kind of, pretty much, good at detecting AI-generated text? I hear they aren’t reliable, but whenever I poke at them, they seem pretty good at it. I think it’s reasonable to get a score of 69% human generated and declare it’s human generated enough. That kind of conclusion seems likely to help prevent too many false positives.

Overall conclusion:

I think AI detection is going to get pretty reliable, I think people are probably working on that, and of course AI generation will get more subtle, but it’s not like “AI text generators” actually have brains or intelligence. I suspect detectors will get out in front and stay there for a bit. And … I hope I’m not too optimistic or pollyanna-ish, but I think it’s pretty likely Amazon is currently working on a detector and will pretty soon bring a giant hammer down on fake garbage pseudobooks. I hope I’m right about that, and that unanticipated side effects aren’t as dire as the problem that solves.

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The downside of being an early reader

A post from Book Riot: THE NOT SO FUN SIDE OF BEING A BOOK’S FIRST READER

I assume the downside is the extremely obvious thing that instantly leaped into everyone’s mind: What if you don’t like the book?

Having beta read various books for BVC readers, and having dealt (often) with editorial feedback from early readers myself, I see various possibilities here:

A) You hate the book.

If you really dislike the book, you have two options, it seems to me. The first: pretend you are a suitable reader for the book in question and provide appropriate feedback. You don’t have to love the protagonist to say, “I think when she does thus-and-so, that’s out of character.” You can say that even if you thoroughly dislike the protagonist. Ditto for “I’m confused here,” or “I’m skimming here,” or “I know commas are kind of a matter of taste, but imo the meaning of this sentence is wrong and you really, honestly need a comma here.”

The second option is to say, “I’m sorry, but as it turns out, I’m not really a good fit for this book. I don’t feel I can be a good first reader for it.” Sometimes that’s probably the best choice.

B) You don’t hate the book, but you think it has a lot of weaknesses. The same two basic options: Carefully point out the weaknesses as helpfully as possible or decide you haven’t got the patience, the time, or the skill to deal with it and back out of early reading.

Other than discovering you hate the book / think the book has a lot of problems, I’m not seeing a downside. Let’s see if Book Riot has something else in mind … Oh! No, totally different take on the question!

1) I can’t talk to anybody about the book. The book I read, and loved, way too early is a mystery book so I can only discuss it with someone who has already read it, or I’d just be handing out spoilers like they were going out of style.

That’s not a problem that occurred to me! But you know what, that could be painful! Is that an early-reader thing? That’s kind of a thing whenever you read a book, love it, and whomever you usually rave to about books hasn’t read it. Of course, they can read it right away and then you can talk about it, so that solves the problem.

2. Can’t review it because the review would be kinda negative and I don’t want to drag down the star rating with an early negative review. I don’t mind posting a negative review later, after the book has accumulated some positive reviews, but it’s a pain to remember to review it later. Not even sure I want to post a mediocre review if it’s going to be the first review.

You know, that’s really a nice thought. Thank you, Book Riot post author, for being reluctant to post a negative review early. This is someone named Jamie Canaves, and I now think Jamie is a nice person. It’s quite true that an early negative review is no fun, especially if it pushes potential readers away from the book. After the star rating has settled at a decent level, it’s much less of a concern.

Those are the basic reasons given in the post, so this is not at all “early reading as feedback for the author.” It’s “early reading because I got a review copy,” a different topic. This isn’t a concern for me because I don’t have time to read stuff early; I don’t even have time to read stuff late.

Speaking of reading stuff late, what did you think of The Witch King by Martha Wells? I see it has 1800 or so ratings and a star average of 4.4. That’s lower than I would have expected. Is it low because a lot of readers wanted Murderbot and this is something else? Or is it low because it’s not one of her best? I think her best are, let me see …

Murderbot, okay, I’m just another sheep following this herdCloud Roads and fine, okay, the whole Raksura first trilogyFall of Ile-RienThe Fall of the Necromancer, and I know that is arguably better than the Fall trilogy, but I didn’t like it as well, so here it isWheel of the Infinite, where I was not super happy by certain things about how the plot worked out, but loved the book overallThe other two Raksura books

Those are my favorites, and honestly I could flip (1) and (2), because I just love the first Raksura trilogy. I’m hoping I’ll put The Witch King up in this set of novels, and series, but who knows?

By the way, does anybody know what the heck is going on with Martha Wells’ books? If you search on Amazon, Wheel of the Infinite does not appear to be available in any format. If you go to Google and search, then you can find it on Amazon that way, where the hardcover is pricey and the mass market paperback is INSANELY EXPENSIVE. It’s not available in ebook form, so good thing I already have it as an ebook and I hope it’s still there. This is where I suddenly realize I should back up all my Kindle books via Calibre.

My guess is, it’s going to be republished. The Fall of the Necromancer has been reissued in a collection with Element of Fire and I believe that’s quite new, so that’s what I think may be happening. But not sure.

Meanwhile, honestly, no major spoilers please, but what did you think of The Witch King?

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Update: Aaaah, book releases are stressful!

Okay, so today is the very last day I can make changes to INVICTUS: CAPTIVE before KDP locks its page in preparation for the preorder drop date, which as you know is this coming Friday.

This is fine! It’s been good to go for a week! But last night I decided to simplify the spelling of one word — very last minute, yes — so I did that this morning and then I felt compelled to scan through the entire preview for both the ebook and the paperback version ONE MORE TIME. They both look fine, but I have this terrible feeling that someday I will do something awful, like load the wrong book or something. I always feel compelled to check and then check again and today that’s over because now it’s too late. Pre-release jitters, ugh.

Oh, I hit “publish” on the paperback version about five minutes ago, by the way. KDP says it can take up to 72 hours, but usually it’s faster. I wanted to make sure the paperback drops about the same time as the ebook, and a few days early is fine with me if everything is in order. Which, jitters aside, it is.

I will be so interested in reader reactions! (This is a different kind of stress.) (A kind that lasts much longer.) I will be very particularly interested in reactions from people who read an early version, because I tweaked this one more than usual, not to mention adding extra scenes and chapters. But I’m interested in general because I expect a good many readers who picked this up will have read NO FOREIGN SKY, which is very different from this duology.

No Foreign Sky

Is very fast-paced.Is not character-centered, though it does the heavy lifting for worldbuilding so I should be able to do more with characters in sequels.Has aliens, along with wildly different human societies.Is space opera, with multiple iterations of sharply rising stakes.Puts almost everything important right out in front of the reader.Even though some readers didn’t like names such as Kuotaan, the names are short and there are very few unfamiliar words.

Invictus

Is much, much slower paced, especially at first.Is character-centered.Does not have aliens, but does present wildly different human societies.Is not space opera, I’m pretty sure. (What is space opera? I should do a post about that.)Hides a whole lot of important stuff from the reader.The names aren’t difficult, but many of them aren’t familiar — and there are a fair number of unfamiliar words, lots of which are long, such as “vysovashirovasin.”

Every now and then, I indulge my liking for cool words. This is one of those books. In my opinion, English doesn’t offer enough words like “ovoviviparity.” Well, in the non-English-derived language in Invictus, I got to enjoy creating words with lots of v’s and y’s. The language is derived from Russian. There’s a note about this in the book, but I’ll add here that this whole thing with the language in Invictus occurred because I came across the word “ubezhishche,” which means “refuge” in Russian. I really liked this word, the way it looks, the way it sounds in my mind’s ear, so I dropped it into this story and came up with a backstory that justifies the language.

There is, by the way, a glossary in the back. Hopefully readers will notice that as they skim past the table of contents. If you were at risk of missing it, now you know it is there.

But my point is, given the many important differences, how will readers who liked NFS feel about Invictus? I don’t know! Aargh! I guess we’ll find out!

My own level of enthusiasm for this story has gone up and down a bit depending on how much I was struggling with revision at the time, but having just re-read Captive multiple times for small-scale tweaking and proofing, and then just having finished the first round of small-scale tweaking for Crisis last night … I am back to liking this duology quite a bit. That’s a relief.

Also! Thoughts of sequels are drifting through my mind. I’m thinking of doing something with Erec Chatham as a protagonist, Ketsova or Desya as another protagonist — Desya might instead pick up the pov in a different sequel — and someone from the Sokonakoh Empire as a protagonist or important secondary character. Very character-first ideas here. I’ve got no notion about any possible plot. Something arising from complications connected to the Invictus plot, I suppose.

Meanwhile!

Yes, SILVER CIRCLE is moving forward. You’ll be stunned to know that things are taking longer than expected; eg, we’re on chapter seven and juuuuust getting moving after much more time on the setup than I thought it would take. But it’s fun setup! I think! We’ll see what happens later, but I’m pretty satisfied with it so far. I’ll probably do some trimming, but that’s not something to worry about now. I have little boldfaced notes to myself about things I need to remember later. I’m doing foreshadowing and thinking, ack, what if I just forget the element I’m foreshadowing? Thus, notes.

Meanwhile!

You know, if you read the novella in the Tuyo World Companion, I’d appreciate it if you’d go drop a brief review on the book’s page. There’s exactly one review so far. If you don’t quite know how to comment on other elements, which is certainly understandable, then just a quick “Hey, the novella is good!” would perhaps reassure readers who aren’t sure they care about the world notes.

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Who in the world created this cover? Update: Now we know

You may recall this post at tor.com: Do You Know Who Illustrated This Classic Wrinkle in Time Cover?

This post is by Molly Templeton, and here is the cover she means:

If you are of a certain age, you remember it well: The creepy, haunting, downright iconic—and totally weird—cover of the 1976 Dell edition of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. But while many of us remember being scared by (and/or fascinated with) this image, there’s an unexpected mystery behind it: No one seems to know who the artist is.

And, it turns out, she succeeded in tracking down the cover artist. Here’s that post, and once again thanks to Robert, who sent me that link.

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How to kill a character, part ii

Okay, so the poll was sort of fun! I’ll have to do another poll now and then, now that I know how to embed them.

Results for “Thematically, who should die?” — 22 votes for DO NOT KILL ANYONE, and Kim, you made me laugh with your comment!

If someone DOES die, four votes acknowledge that it might be thematically appropriate for that to be Grayson. Then there are single votes for Natividad, Alejandro, Thaddeus, Carissa, and Justin.

My main reaction to this is: Honestly, people! Hasn’t Carissa suffered enough? Various other votes here surprise me, but the ones for Grayson don’t. I was expecting some readers to point to him. Personally, if I were a reader, I would have voted for DO NOT KILL ANYONE.

We’ve got significant disagreement here, because under “Who should definitely NOT die?” — 17 votes for DO NOT KILL ANYONE, but nine votes for Natividad. Whoever picked her as a thematically acceptable death, you are in a minority. Two votes for Grayson, so we definitely have readers pulling for him to make it. Interestingly, Keziah and Justin both got votes. I know Keziah is a favorite with some readers. I like her too. (I like all these characters.) (Perhaps that isn’t a surprise.)

I’m going to pull out part of Kim’s comment here, because I think this is a good observation:

[D]eath isn’t actually the scariest thing that can happen to someone. Your stakes aren’t crazy high because everyone might die—it’s because of all the other horrible things that might happen to them, and to the rest of humanity, if they fail.

This is true! This is interesting because it’s a different way to make the death of a character more acceptable. I mean, suppose that the plot goes in such a direction that the choices are (a) death, or (b) something much worse than death. Imagining this dichotomy made me realize that this would be a way to get readers to accept the death of an important character. Oh no, the character is dead! But at least it’s not worse!

I’m not at all saying I’m planning to do that, I’m just pointing out that this is a different way to kill an important character without getting your book thrown across the room by furious readers.

Also, those of you who commented about TASMAKAT. I just could not WAIT for readers to hit that part and if you didn’t quite see how it was going to work out and then loved it, that is perfect and I’m really happy. This books is sitting at 4.8 stars with more than a hundred ratings, so it should be fairly stable at that rating. I wouldn’t be astounded if it eventually dropped to 4.7, I’d be pleased but surprised if it went up to 4.9, but plainly it’s going to stay in that range. Whatever quibbles people have with it, plainly most readers gave it a thumbs up, and that’s great. I will just note that I agree, intensity is quite possible without killing anybody.

Kristi, thanks for the heads up about character deaths in some of Elizabeth Bear’s other books. That kind of character death doesn’t sound like it would work for me.

Kriti, all through The Hunger Games, at various crucial moments, Katniss makes a very short, pithy public statement that captures something important and changes the direction of the story — she pulls people toward a better path than whatever they had in mind. This happens several times. Where does it NOT happen? Right at the end, when Katniss is standing by a microphone and shoots that woman, Coin, but she does not make a speech of any kind. This, in my opinion, was a MASSIVE missed opportunity. MASSIVE. I don’t remember if I stared in amazement at the page or not, but I definitely remember thinking, How could Collins POSSIBLY have failed to have Katniss step up to the microphone at that moment?

Also, though I have done pretty terrible things to some of my characters, I wouldn’t have handled Peeta the way Collins handled him. If you’ve read the World Companion, you know I often react to awful things in someone else’s book by thinking of what I’d have done instead, something less awful, something that perhaps redeems whatever terrible things have been going on. All through that part, I was thinking of what I would have done instead, intensely enough that it interfered with reading the book. The reason the Scholomance trilogy worked for me MUCH better than The Hunger Games is because there’s a much stronger redemptive arc that pulls almost everyone, and almost every terrible thing, into a better position at the end.

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How to Kill a Character; Also, a Silver Circle Poll

Here’s a post at Writers in the Storm that caught my eye via The Passive Voice Blog: How to Kill a Character Without Enraging Readers

The death of a popular character has caused more than one angry fan to send email to the author and unfavorable reviews to chat groups and review sites. So, when you absolutely must cause a character’s demise, how do you do that without enraging your readers?

When and how you choose to kill off a character can make or break a story. It’s quite difficult for authors. The characters are very real. Permanently dispatching them is a bit like purposefully ridding oneself of an ally.

Characters should be killed off when the purpose of their demise will be the most impactful. Death may occur near the story’s end such as in John Steinbeck’s Of  Mice and Men, once we really feel for the victim. Or, like in Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, where deaths frequently happen with no warning, establishing the theme that the characters are never safe.

Okay, let’s talk about character death. Warning: I’m going to mention specific character deaths in real books. But it’s only a moderate warning because, with popular books over a decade old, I doubt the character deaths will come as a surprise. Still, here comes a spoiler for a popular series!

Here it comes! Ready?

All right:

I was pretty thoroughly enraged by Prim’s death in The Hunger Games trilogy. I considered that gratuitous — no. Worse than gratuitous: an utterly transparent manipulation inserted as a deliberate and unnecessary tear-jerker. One other aspect of the ending struck me as even worse, a complete missed opportunity, but this post isn’t about missteps in the ending, but about character death, so let’s stick with that.

I can’t offhand think of any other character death that made me madder than Prim’s but I can think of an author whose transparent manipulation of reader emotions via character deaths turned me off: Stephen King. For a while there, every single time I picked up one of his books — this was some time ago, so I mean books published maybe fifteen years ago — early in the story, a female character would step onstage and I could instantly peg her as the tear-jerker death that would happen at the end. Every time. Didn’t matter how contorted the plot needed to be in order to kill that girl / young woman. She would die no matter what. That happened in Cell, in Duma Key, I don’t remember which others, but it was one after another of the books published around that time. I quit reading anything by King at that point and have never since picked up any other book of his.

That’s what I mean by “transparent.” It’s fine to set up pathos, but the reader shouldn’t see you set it up, certainly not the first moment that character steps on stage. For crying out loud, that’s a huge failure of craft!

A character’s death ought to be inevitable or at least strongly justifiable given the plot. The plot shouldn’t need to undergo contortions to kill the character, because the death should arise naturally from the plot. And the death should be thematically right for the story. Elizabeth Bear didn’t infuriate me with the character death at the end of the Eternal Sky trilogy. That was tragic, but fine. It wasn’t gratuitous, it wasn’t shallow, it wasn’t manipulative, the tragedy arose naturally from the story.

Let’s see what the linked post suggests for this topic:

1. Make the Death Meaningful

2. Foreshadow the Character’s Death

3. Avoid resurrections.

4. End on a Positive Note

#1, make the death meaningful, sure, that’s definitely a good idea, unless you’re creating the sort of grim, nihilistic story where life is cheap and lots of people die and nothing means anything. I guess some readers like that, but ick.

I’m blinking at #2, since I just said I absolutely can’t stand it when I see the author set up the death of the character. But of course successful foreshadowing isn’t the same as a failure of subtlety when setting up the end of the story. The death in Bear’s trilogy was foreshadowed in the right way: by making the reader feel in retrospect that the death was inevitable and necessary, not by adding big neon This Person Will Die arrows pointing at the character in the earliest scenes.

Okay, #3, avoid resurrections, well, I sort of didn’t follow this rule at all in [gestures vaguely] that one book. I’m sure that by the time [this or that character] died, the reader was pretty sure I wasn’t going to leave everyone dead. This is something I’m only going to be able to pull off once. No doubt some readers don’t think I did pull it off, though hopefully most readers followed along and accepted the way all that stuff happened and the way it all worked out. But my point is, if anybody ever dies in a future book, that’ll be a final death, no resurrections.

I agree you probably want to be cautious with resurrections. I was fine with bringing Spock back to life because I wasn’t okay with his death in Wrath of Khan. But in general, the comic-book style death-and-resurrection is just silly. You definitely don’t want your readers to think your story is silly unless you’re actually aiming for that kind of silly tone in the first place.

And #4, end on a positive note, strikes me as a reprise of #1, make the death meaningful. The way you make the death meaningful is to bring positive value to the world by means of that death. That is what makes the death meaningful AND it means that you’re ending on a positive note, that something important has been saved or something important has improved. Not sure you can do one without the other.

Okay! This is all reminding me of a conversation I had with Sharon Shinn, about how letting every important character survive is often not at all realistic, yet we sometimes can’t bear to kill anyone. She said she faced that dilemma with her Twelve Houses series. Oooookay, I’m rolling my eyes pretty hard at Ace. This is a five-book series, but Ace has Amazon showing it as two unlinked two-book series plus an unlinked standalone, and I’m like, Really? Really? For your convenience: Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, Book 4, Book 5. It’s a good series; my personal favorite is the fifth book, which stands alone perfectly, by the way. The first four comprise a single overall story, then the fifth book takes place after that main story has been concluded.

But back to the topic of character death. I’m thinking about it again, and in Sharon’s case, I’m not sure that’s really a dilemma. Her books are so often romances, and these are. Once you set up a series where every book is a romance, it’s tough to kill anybody in the main set of characters. Granted, you can set up secondary characters and kill them, but protagonists, not really. Therefore, if you’re following romance beats, no matter how implausible it might be to have all the pov characters survive to the final denouement, probably that’s what’s going to happen.

In non-romance, it’s harder. Now that I’m finally working on SILVER CIRCLE, naturally the Black Dog world is back in my mind. Obviously a whole lot of people died in the backstory of Black Dog, and then various named characters died during the course of the story. No pov protagonists, but I hope characters that people liked and were sorry to see die. Ever since, few if any named characters have actually died, though a few, yes. Also, plenty of characters have had a tough time now and then. But … is it plausible that all the pov characters will live to the end of Silver Circle? Really, that is not very plausible. This is a dangerous world. The backstory establishes that death is likely. And here we are, going into the endgame against powerful enemies.

So let’s have a poll! This is the first time I’ve ever tried to embed a poll, so we’ll see if it works.

This is, I should emphasize, strictly for fun. In this series, there are characters I know for certain aren’t going to die and other characters who might in theory die if the story goes that way. I do know which of these characters are in which category. I’m not going to tell you, obviously, but I think it’s likely you can guess for some of them.

var pd_tags = new Array;pd_tags["12681076-src"]="poll-oembed-simple";

Alternatively —

var pd_tags = new Array;pd_tags["12681092-src"]="poll-oembed-simple";

I bet some of you are now thinking that even if a certain character’s death is (a) meaningful, and (b) foreshadowed, and (c) not a cheat with a resurrection, and (4) the story ends on a positive note, you would NEVER FORGIVE ME. I wonder if everyone agrees about which character(s) should most definitely survive? Emphasizing again that I do already know who is in which category! Some characters are FOR SURE not in danger of death, though they may, of course, have a difficult time.

But one point here is that NOTHING ON EARTH could make you accept the death of certain characters. Isn’t that right? I’m sure that’s true. It wouldn’t matter if I had foreshadowed that during all four of the previous novels, made the death meaningful, and brought good things to the world by means of that death.

This is absolutely for sure true for many characters in many novels. If Cajiri died in the Foreigner series, that would be totally unacceptable. If Dr. Mensa or Ratthi died in the Murderbot series, no. Ludvic in The Hands of the Emperor, no. Huge numbers of characters occupy that kind of role where they can’t possibly die.

It’s a bit amusing for me to think about this, because how many of you would have been fine with it if Ryo had died at the end of TASMAKAT? What do you suppose the star rating would be in an alternate world where I had done that? Even if I’d set it up perfectly, wow, I bet I would have gotten tons of mail and also the star rating would be two point something. It’s funny to me to think of what reader reactions would have been if that had happened because there was never the remotest chance.

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Cover Creation: Invictus

Wow, the release date for Invictus: Captive is coming up super fast now! Luckily I am loading the final-final-final version of the ebook and paper edition today, whew! There will be time for one more proofing run, but I don’t plan to obsess about whether this particular comma should be removed or that particular line should be in its own paragraph or whatever. I think it’s good to go.

Now, I’ve got this neat video clip about the cover art for this book.

When I first started thinking about the covers, I said to myself,

–Must look different from No Foreign Sky, and I mean totally different.

–Must scream “This is SF.”

–You know, a spaceship would be ideal.

Spaceship covers are a dime a dozen, so I spent a few hours of my life looking at premade SF spaceship-type covers. However, I could not find anything I liked. Everything had a planet in the foreground, or human figures that didn’t look right, or something else I didn’t want. I also didn’t want to spend more time looking. So eventually I just ordered custom covers instead. Once I made that decision, there didn’t seem much reason to delay, so these covers were ready long (long) before the release dates for the duology. It’s certainly good to have the covers ready and waiting, I have to say. You may have noticed that I ordered the covers for next couple Tuyo-world books before I started writing them. I’ll probably do that much more often from now on, because (I have discovered) I just hate waiting for covers to be ready.

In this case, the cover artist — this is the same person who did the cover for No Foreign Sky, incidentally, but this one was digital and that one was illustration. Anyway, he put together a video showing the creation process for the first of these covers. It’s so interesting to watch the process, so here you go:

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Update: At last pivoting to Silver Circle!

It’s not that I’m totally, one hundred percent finished with INVICTUS, because of course I’m not. I’ve completed one more proofing read-through of CAPTIVE, and so has my mother, which leaves time for maybe one more because there’s no such thing as too much proofing, as we have all seen amply demonstrated. Also, I’ll soon be doing final-final revisions for CRISIS and then that one will enter the endless rounds of tweaking and proofing.

BUT! Nevertheless! I’ve finally actually started SILVER CIRCLE, which is a great thing.

I’m allotting all of September, all of October, and if necessary all of November to this book. I can hardly imagine it will be super-fast, though I would sure be happy if it turns out to be. I am basically certain it will go long, though it can’t possibly [she says with determination] go as long as TASMAKAT. If it goes to half that length, that’s fine. That would be 160,000 words or so and that would be excellent. Oh, I notice I’m feeling like I should be able to write 50,000 words per month. Well, that does seem likely; that’s a pretty ordinary pace for me, barring interference from real life. I haven’t started keeping track of words per day, but soon I will probably start because that’s motivating for me (until the book goes way too long and then it’s kind of weird to watch the wordcount click upward, though not actually demotivating).

I would like to have December clear to write something else (MARAG!) and ideally January for something else (RIHASI!) and that would put me in a really good spot early next year. Lots of things I could work on once I get that far.

Possibly I shouldn’t look quite that far ahead.

So: SILVER CIRCLE.

I’ve started this book in a way I’ve never used before: I put -1- for chapter one and wrote one sentence, spaced down and put a page break; then -2- and one sentence plus a page break; then -3- and one sentence; then -4- and one sentence; then -5- and quick notes. The first three chapters will be short and fast. Then in chapter four we’ll introduce two other complications — no, three. Then in chapter five, we’ll start moving forward.

This structure is (a) amusing for me; I’m chortling about how everything clicks together in chapter four. Also, (b), this lets me write a good handful of scenes I want to write, getting into the story and building momentum. Also, (c) it allows me to rapidly reprise certain issues and problems and remind the reader about the state of the world. This should all feel natural, smooth, fast, and not at all like a series of infodumps. That’s the plan for sure: do not feel like a series of infodumps.

Then in chapter five, I can start moving characters into place for the endgame. This will take a long time, as the endgame includes the leadup to the climax, the climax, and the denouement. Setting that up will comprise the main body of the novel. We should see all our favorite characters take important roles, no matter who counts as “our favorite characters.”

Justin will take a pov role, by the way. I’m guessing his first pov chapter will be chapter five or six. I feel this is necessary, as he was an important pov character in the second novel and hasn’t taken the pov again except in one novella. I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing pov chapters from Natividad, Alejandro, Miguel, and Justin — and maybe Ethan. Lots of balls I’m juggling in this book ,that’s for sure!

Could I, at this point, write a chapter-by-chapter or event-by-event outline? No; at least nothing rigorous. I have eight pages of notes, mostly about things I need to happen OR things I just don’t want to forget. I’m sure about the climax, or nearly sure. As sure as I can be without actually putting the words on the screen. A series of early scenes, a handful of notes about coming events, and the climax means this story is in fine shape.

How far have I gotten so far? I wrote chapter three first, then chapter two, then chapter one. Next, I’m going to enjoy writing chapter four. Then chapter five may be from Justin’s pov OR I might start cannibalizing the unfinished novella I started from Grayson’s pov. It won’t be in his pov as I work it into this novel. Four-maybe-five points of view are plenty.

So, coming up: Final tweaking and proofing for INVICTUS, and real progress, I hope, for SILVER CIRCLE.

Oh! And! If you haven’t yet tried anything in this series, the BLACK DOG series will remain on sale through tomorrow, so this would be a good time to pick up at least the first few. Sale prices should apply everywhere since I reduced the prices by hand. I’ll probably put the prices back up on Wednesday.

This ad didn’t perform well either. This time that wasn’t a surprise, and I just put a little money into the BookBub ads, so it was fine. We’ll see what I can figure out later this year or next year, when SILVER CIRCLE will be finished and I’ll be picking a release date.

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Sale This Weekend

If you subscribe to my newsletter, you know this — but if not, here you go:

The Black Dog series is on sale this weekend:

If this is a three-day weekend for you, I hope you enjoy it! It’s a three-day weekend for me, AND the weather is nice, so with any luck I’ll get to the park with some of the dogs. Definitely a labor day weekend for me; eg, lots of labor lined up, which I hope will be productive and fun!

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