Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 70

Update: tedious revision is tedious, but pastries are good

Okay, so, earlier this week, I hit some stuff in Book Two of Invictus that badly needed to be set up properly in Book One. So I went back to Book One and found an appropriate place and dropped the setup in there.

And went back the next day and re-read that part and groaned, because MY GOD WHAT A COMPLETE INFODUMP. Six paragraphs! Six! Of straight infodumping, tucked into the middle of an important conversation. Ugh!

So I spent an entire morning integrating that information actually into the conversation, the way I should have done in the first place. But while I did that, I also realized I should really change the whole political situation under discussion. This is now a better setup, but naturally after that, I had to go back and forth through BOTH books, making sure this aspect of the political situation is the same all the way through. Or I hope I changed that bit everywhere; this is the kind of thing that introduces continuity errors.

This isn’t the super important political situation between the Ubezhishche and the Elysians, but it is a factor that determines the shape of that political situation AND a factor that is crucial in the endgame of the plot, so it does need to be correct all the way through.

So I finished that part and started moving forward again and what did I find at the top of chapter 16? You guessed it: [Take out summary, put in conversation]. SO I DID, but OMG can I just get through the plot climax? Because the relationship arc is fine! That’s been fine for a long time! If I can just smooth out the plot arc, I’ll be done except for very minimal tweaking. Aargh, revision is so annoying.

Well, I’m through that part now, so maybe I am indeed ready to move faster and more smoothly through the remaining four chapters. The last two are short relationship chapters that I’m sure (pretty sure) are in good shape. Almost there!

This bit about having to sort out the political situation to get the endgame to work gets at something interesting that I think Mary Catelli mentioned in the comments some time ago: setup vs foreshadowing. Are those two different things? Maybe? Or maybe they’re two different aspects of the same thing.

For setup, you need to drop brief (brief!) comments about the broader world into the early and middle part of the story. I don’t think it’s enough to have one offhand mention of something in the early part of the story if that thing is going to be crucial later. I think you need to remind the reader about the thing, whatever it is. An element of worldbuilding, a type of magic, the broader political landscape, an aspect of technology. Whatever it is, it can’t come out of nowhere in the endgame, and that means you need to mention it early, where hopefully it is interesting enough to stick in the reader’s mind but does not looks QUITE so fraught as a gun on the mantelpiece. Then, in a long novel, you need to mention it again later, at least once or maybe twice, so that the reader is reminded about this thing. Again, preferably the reader will think this is an interesting aspect of the world, but will not think OH HO, I SEE THE ENDGAME COMING. Or, if the reader does think, Oh ho, I bet that’s important, at the very least they should not see exactly how or why it’s important, especially not if it’s the single most important thing that’s coming up at the end.

Since INVICTUS is a duology, I think the setup is even more important. I’m trying to remember that I need to remind the reader in the second book about stuff that got mentioned in the first book, but carefully. I need to do it briefly and subtly enough that the reader doesn’t think, OH HO. Ideally, reminders should be barely noticed, but just enough to recall to mind something that was mentioned in the first book, but might not have stuck in the memory. This is all part of setup.

Foreshadowing … what exactly is foreshadowing besides setup?

I think one way to frame a possible difference is that foreshadowing is about action and decisions, while setup is about worldbuilding. They’re interdependent, though, because elements of worldbuilding are often crucial for the action and decisions that takes place in the climax. Foreshadowing is setting up the action so that when the protagonist or antagonist or anybody important does something important at the end, makes some kind of important decision, that clicks into place with a little of course feeling, even though the reader didn’t see that exact action or decision coming.

Not sure there’s really an important distinction between foreshadowing and setup, but to the extent there is, that might be part of it.

ANYWAY, lots of that kind of thing with INVICTUS.

Meanwhile!

I have also been doing other things, including continuing proofreading both the the World Companion and TASMAKAT. That’s a lot less annoying because in this particular case, I’m not super bored with either story. That’s a highly variable reaction. I don’t get bored with Tuyo-world novels nearly as easily as with other novels, so I’m a little bored with this, but not a lot bored. Last night I finished making the final tiny little tweaks to TASMAKAT based on MY final read-through. Tonight I will skim through Linda S.’s comments and fix anything she caught that I missed — just opening the file and glancing at it, I see she caught something right at the beginning that I think I didn’t get myself.

Ages ago, I destroyed the paperback file in order to be absolutely sure I didn’t accidentally upload it. (That happened once. Never again.) I have made lots of mostly very minor changes and corrections in the master file, which I have on three different flashdrives and two harddrives because I’m paranoid. Later, recently, I created a hardcover file in order to make sure the pages could be made to fit (barely, with small print). I’ve been fixing all typos in both the master file and the hardcover file, which is of course tedious. After correcting everything Linda found, I’ll re-create the paperback file, which will be a whole different order of magnitude of tedium, but I’m much more efficient about that than I used to be, so it probably won’t take more than an hour or so. I should do all that this afternoon and possibly tomorrow.

I will have days and days to spare before the final version must be uploaded! Which is July 11th. You have to have the final files uploaded four days in advance of the preorder release date. I cannot believe how fast this is coming up. For a book with a looooong lead time, wow, I will once again be loading final files just a couple weeks before the release date. Of course I was doing a lot of other things during the past months.

I don’t know whether the World Companion will be released just before or somewhat after TASMAKAT. It depends on the maps at this point. Either they’ll be ready in time to release the Companion before July 15th or they won’t. We’ll see. The book, by the way, is now up to 115,000 words. This always seems to happen, so I’m not exactly surprised. Though I’m still (STILL!) moving sections around, I’m getting pretty well set to decide they’re in a decent order. I made a paper copy for my mother to proofread and so that I can look at the order of the sections again in a different format.

I’m proofreading the actual story, “Returning Hokino’s Knife.” Early comments have been quite positive and I’m feeling good about this novella. I’m finding a lot to tweak, but very small tweaks. It’s going to come out at just about 38,000 words, or about 120 pages or something like that. It’s a good length, but by no means takes over the World Companion, so I think that’s about right.

Meanwhile, I am pursuing an unusual task that needs to be finished prior to release of the World Companion: I’m testing the handful of recipes that are included. These are mostly recipes I have made before, often many times. However, I don’t really follow recipes as such, so I feel I had better make them again, this time following the recipes carefully, just to make sure everything is at least edible and ideally tasty. Hanneke, who proofread (various versions of) the World Companion mentions a problem where cinnamon can be bitter if boiled in liquid or cooked too long in liquid or something, which I have never noticed at all, and I just made one of the recipes this past weekend and did not notice that happening at all. I’m usually sensitive to bitter flavors — Red Delicious apples are distinctly bitter to me, for example. I think the recipe is fine, but I took a sample to my mother, who is a supertaster for some compounds. She didn’t detect bitterness either. I think it’s fine.

BUT, and this is the actual point, wow, do I have a great pastry recipe in the World Companion.

I made these pastries a couple weeks ago and they were so good that I immediately made them again this past week, and you know what, I think I may just make something based on this recipe every week for the rest of my life. Since this recipe is just outstanding, I’m going to share it with you all here, minus a little bit of commentary that relates the recipe to the books and plus a little bit of other commentary.

Almond-Apricot Pastries

Now, as we enter this recipe, I want to say that (a) this may look complicated or difficult, but (b) it is NOT COMPLICATED OR DIFFICULT AT ALL. Yes, there are multiple steps spread out over multiple days. But all the steps are easy, and when you get to the part where you put the pastries together and bake them, that is so quick and easy that I have literally made these pastries for breakfast every day for four days running and then I take two pastries to my mother and stroll back to my house and eat mine, with about five minutes of work per morning not counting rising or baking time. They would definitely be special enough for an Occasion, but they’re easy enough to make four times a week on weekday mornings, is what I am trying to indicate here.

I got this recipe from a book by Julia Child called Baking with Julia. Many of the recipes in this book ARE complicated or difficult, and unfortunately, in my opinion (Sorry, Julia!) they are often written in a way that makes them hard to follow. That is, directions that ought to be in a bulleted list are instead buried in paragraphs. Also, half the recipe is way back there in “making dough for Danish pastries” and the rest of the recipe is over here in “making Danish pastry,” and really? Who designed this book, anyway?

So, let me start off by giving you a flowchart that will set you up to spend no more than fifteen minutes per day.

Day 1: Make the pastry dough – 5 minutes or so. Chill overnight.

Day 2: Roll out (laminate) the pastry dough – 15 minutes or less. (I set a timer to check and I think, even if you’re not used to rolling out dough, it should still take you less than 15 minutes to do this.) Chill overnight.

Day 3: Make the apricot filling – 5 minutes. Make the almond filling – 5 minutes. Make the pastry cream – 5 minutes.

Day 4 through Day 7: Make four pastries each morning – 5 minutes, plus 25 minutes rising time, plus 10 minutes baking time.

Or of course you could make all 16 pastries at once, but the (only) downside to this recipe is that these pastries are dramatically better fresh. They are best warm, excellent at room temperature, but after 12 hours I would probably feed them to the dogs and make fresh ones. Granted, I am a food snob in some ways and also I have a lot of dogs, but still, these pastries are a lot better fresh than they are left over.

Anyway, presuming that the above does not look too offputting, here is how you make these pastries:

Make the pastry dough

¼ C warm water2½ tsp active dry yeast1/2 C milk, room temp1 egg, room temp1/4 C sugar1 tsp salt2 1/2 C flour2 sticks cold unsalted butter, cut in 1/4 inch slices

Put the water in a bowl, sprinkle with the yeast, and let set for a minute. Add milk, egg, sugar, and salt and whisk to combine. You know how you can bring an egg to room temp in a hurry? Microwave the milk until it is very warm but not actually boiling, crack the egg into the milk, and wait five minutes. You can do this while letting the yeast set with the water. Then pour the milk and egg into the bowl with the yeast, add the sugar and salt, and whisk.

Put the flour in a food processor and drop in the butter pieces. Pulse ten or fifteen times. You don’t want the butter to disappear. You want fairly biggish pebbles of butter. But it doesn’t really matter, honestly. Small bits, bigger bits, it’s going to work fine either way, and I’m not sure this is adequately stressed in recipes of this kind. Julia Child is very stern about the size of the butter pieces, but I swear, it does not matter how big they are. This pastry will be absolutely fantastic whether the butter bits are rather smallish or quite largish at this stage.

Pour the flour mixture into the bowl with the yeast mixture and fold in rather gently. You don’t want to be so vigorous the butter actually gets all the way mixed in. You want the butter in bits because this leads to a flaky pastry. Just stir gently until the flour mixture is fairly uniformly moistened. Don’t fret – however you do it, it will work fine.

Cover and chill the dough overnight or for a couple of days, until you are ready to continue.

Laminate the pastry dough

This pastry dough is pretty easy to work with; not particularly likely to stick, just basically a cooperative, simple dough. I do dust the work surface with flour again before each lamination.

So, turn out the chilled dough onto a lightly floured surface, pat into a rough square, roll out to a square about 16 inches to a side. Or so. There’s no need to be obsessive about this either. Julia Child says a French rolling pin is best. Well, whatever. I used my marble rolling pin, but you could use a wine bottle if you wanted. I’ve rolled out pastry dough with a wine bottle before. It honestly does not matter what you use. Dust both sides with flour periodically if necessary to keep it from sticking, but this is not a difficult dough.

Fold your squarish dough in thirds like you’re folding up a business letter to put it in an envelope. This will produce a narrow rectangle.

Roll this rectangle into a long, thin rectangle, like 24-inch by 10-inch or so. Fold in thirds again, this time forming a square.

Roll out to a 20-inch square (or so). Fold in thirds to form another narrow rectangle.

Roll out into another long, thin rectangle. Fold in thirds once more to form a square. You’re done! Wrap the flat square of dough in plastic wrap and chill again. You can hold the dough at this stage for days. What I suggest is, you’ve got this flat square of dough. Cut it in quarters right now and wrap each piece separately. You can use one piece at a time every day to make four pastries each day.

Rolling out a quarter of the dough at a time also takes less space and is easier, so you may choose to roll it out a quarter at a time even if you are going to make all sixteen pastries at once.

But before you can finish the pastries, you need to make the fillings, so after you put the laminated dough in the fridge to chill, make the fillings. Although! You could ALSO skip the filling and make sixteen croissants with this dough and that also would be great! If you’re not into sweets, then you might want to try that.

Apricot filling

I tend to be generous with the filling and run out, particularly because my mother likes a lot of apricot filling in her pastries, so this makes a lot. If you have some left over, I expect you can find something to do with it, even if that’s just swirling it into vanilla ice cream, which would be very good, by the way. Anyway, if you don’t want filling left over, make half this recipe.

2 C dried apricots – generous cups, so pack them in there.2 C granulated sugar2 C water4 Tbsp lemon juice, preferably fresh squeezed, but bottled is fine1 tsp almond extract

Pour the water and sugar over the apricots in a microwavable bowl. Microwave ten minutes, stirring now and then. Pour this mixture into a food processor and puree. Add the lemon juice and almond extract. Cool and then chill to store. Stores at least a week in the refrigerator, probably longer.

 Almond filling

1 C blanched almonds, raw or toasted1/2 C powdered sugar2 Tbsp unsalted butter, at room temperature1/2 tsp almond extract1 egg whites, beaten

Are the almonds already toasted? No? Toast them. The way you toast nuts is to preheat the oven to 350 F, spread the almonds or any other nuts on a baking sheet, bake three minutes, shake and stir the almonds or other nuts around on the baking sheet, bake another minute, stir, maybe one more minute and stir again. Time will depend on how big the pieces are, so slivered blanched almonds don’t take as long as walnut halves. When the nuts are a little golden and smell fragrant, they’re done. Pour them out on a plate to cool because if you leave them on the baking sheet, they may burn. Or in this recipe, just pour them into the food processor and let them cool there.

Toasting the almonds is by far the longest step involved in making the almond filling.

Place almonds, sugar, and butter in food processor and puree. Add the almond extract and beaten egg white and process again. There you go. Doesn’t matter whether you process this mixture all the way smooth or not. Any texture is fine. Stores at least a week in the refrigerator, probably longer.

Pastry cream

1 C cream1 1/2 Tbsp cornstarch1/4 C sugar1 egg yolk1 tsp vanilla

When I think of making pastry cream on the stovetop, I could cry. This method is so much simpler and quicker. I can’t believe I never saw this recipe before in Baking with Julia. It’s worth buying the book just to get this recipe, or it would be except I’m providing it here. By the way, did you know that no recipe is copyrightable? The ingredients list is never copyrightable unless something about the list is weird. Only the words that are used to present the recipe, the directions and how you chat with the reader and all that sort of thing, are copyrighted. I think it’s nice to credit the author from whom you got the recipe, but there is no copyright issue involved and I just thought I would share that tidbit with you in case you ever want to present a recipe in public. You can, but you need to use different words in the description, and I expect that is why all food bloggers have such personal, chatty styles.

Anyway:

Combine the egg yolk and vanilla. Whisk together in a small bowl.

Combine the cream, cornstarch and sugar. Whisk together.

Microwave 1 minute. Whisk. Microwave 1 minute. Whisk. Microwave 1 more minute. Whisk.

Add a spoonful of the hot cream mixture to the egg yolk mixture and whisk. Add the egg yolk mixture back to the larger part of the cream mixture and whisk. Microwave 30 seconds. There you go, you are done. Cool and then chill to store.

Finish the pastries

This is the fun part! Not that the earlier parts are disagreeable, but this is when you get to actually eat pastries.

Option A: Roll out the dough to a 20-inch square. Trim the edges so you have a straight-edged square. Collect the trimmings and pat into a disk because you can chill it again, roll it out again, and make another set of pastries. They won’t be as flaky, but you know what, they’ll still be good. Cut your neatened square into nine to sixteen squares depending on how much you just trimmed off the edges.

Option B: Roll out one-quarter of the dough to about a 10-inch square, don’t bother trimming, cut in quarters with a pizza roller or knife, and make four pastries.

Beat an egg white and have that handy in a little bowl.

Top each square with a tablespoon of apricot filling. Add a tablespoon of almond filling OR the pastry cream on top of the apricot filling.

Paint two opposite corners of the square with the beaten egg white—you can just use your fingertip—and fold those corners over the middle with the points overlapping. Press fairly firmly to seal and get a little filling to show at each end.

If you are making just four pastries, the rough edges will not show if you fold up the pastries the right way. Paint the nice triangular corner with egg white, fold in the opposite corner, fold over the triangular corner, and pinch firmly to seal. The rougher edges are now hidden by the straighter edges, which is yet another bonus to doing four at a time.

Either way, place the finished pastries on parchment-lined baking sheets, cover with kitchen towels, and let rest at warm room temperature for 25 minutes. If it’s cold, then turn on your oven for two minutes, turn it off, and let the pastries rise in your now-warm oven. The pastry isn’t supposed to double, but it should look a little puffy. If you can’t tell whether it’s puffy, that’s fine, they always turn out great.

After 25 minutes, take the pastries out of the oven and preheat the oven to 400 F. The pastries will finish rising while the oven preheats. Bake the pastries for 8-10 minutes, until lightly golden. When I make these, I spin my baking sheets around after 8 minutes because my oven is hotter at the front than at the back, then bake the pastries another 3 minutes for a total of 11 minutes. Every oven has its quirks, so adjust as necessary.

Cool the pastries on racks and serve warm. Or cool to room temperature, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and serve later that day. Very much best the day they’re made, preferably served within a few hours.

These are REALLY REALLY good. I hope I have emphasized that enough. They are easy and they are excellent and you should all try making them, except Craig, who can count on having me make them next time he visits and therefore may prefer that option.

Okay, I’m now going back to the revision of INVICTUS and the very final proofing of TASMAKAT.

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Ranking CJC’s Oeuvre: SF

Okay, now for the hard one. CJ Cherryh has written a whoooole lot of SF. As with her fantasy, it ranges from practically perfect to books I frankly find disappointing and even forgettable. A wide range of quality regardless, always noting that these rankings are all my personal opinion, but it’s a pretty strong opinion! But I expect disagreement!

Also, she has three different novels or series that are sort of SF, but read like Fantasy (as Mike S. pointed out in the comments of the other post). There are so many SF novels that I unilaterally decided to shove all three into the fantasy post, so they’re not here, they’re there in the earlier post.

I used to think that I preferred Cherryh’s fantasy to her SF. I remember thinking that when I heard or read something about how her SF is better than her fantasy. Well, as I’ve created these posts, I’ve changed my mind and now agree with basically everyone else: I do think that almost all of Cherryh’s best work is SF, not fantasy.

Once more I’m going to go from the best to the worst. It’s going to take a LOT longer to get to novels I really did not care for. The ones at the top all the way through the middle are amazingly good.

1. Cuckoo’s Egg. In the previous post, I said that I thought few readers would agree with me that Paladin belonged at the top, and whoops, I was wrong, a lot of you did agree! We’ll see what happens this time. I think few readers have ever encountered this story compared to Cherryh’s better-known works and therefore I don’t think most people would put it the top. Also, on the surface, I think Cuckoo’s Egg looks less ambitious than Downbelow Station or Cyteen, though actually I’m not sure that’s true. I think Cherryh was trying to do something different and interesting in this story, and I think she succeeded perfectly.

This very short novel does so much in its scant wordcount. Really, it’s astounding. Also, the story is perfect. That’s also astounding as well. Oh, I see it was a Hugo nominee. I didn’t know that. Good taste among people making nominations that year. That was a ways back; Cuckoo’s Egg came out in 1985. I’m glad to see it’s collected in this ebook linked here.

This story includes a lot of tropes I absolutely love, re-cast into an alien society that is a lot like a human society, but not quite. The last line has a great deal of quiet impact. I just love this story — you can probably tell — and I personally think it makes a great introduction to Cherryh’s work: It’s short, it’s compelling, it shows her facility with alien species and her proclivity for throwing one human into an alien society — she does that a lot — and it is SO MUCH MORE APPROACHABLE than Downbelow Station, it’s hard to express. Honestly the two stories are so different they might as well be in different genres. I get that Downbelow Station is the one people think of, but it sure isn’t the one I’d put at the top. In fact, you can see from this list how far down I personally put Downbelow Station. I’ll explain why when I get there.

2. Foreigner: (2nd trilogy) Precursor, Defender, Explorer. This is the arc that includes the largely defunct station and the kyo. The Foreigner series is my favorite long-running SF series by a mile and this is my favorite arc in the whole series. Could you actually start here? … I’m not sure I would recommend that, but probably. Cherryh is pretty good at working in reminders for the important events; every now and in this long series she includes a long recap in the form of a letter or something.

Regardless, is it worth reading the initial trilogy to get to this one? ABSOLUTELY.

3. “The Scapegoat.” This novella always brings me to tears. I find it very effective. It’s also one of Cherryh’s attempts to show how difficult it can be to grasp the viewpoint of an alien, or for an alien to grasp the human viewpoint. First published in an anthology of three novellas by the name Alien Stars; now available in ebook form, thankfully, in a collection just called “The Collected Short Fiction of CJ Cherryh.” This collection includes the stories from Sunfall, the stories from Visible Light, and various other stories, including “The Scapegoat.”

I didn’t realize this collection existed until now. Reviews are saying it’s a mixed bag. Well, yes, that’ll happen in a largeish collection of short stories and novellas. IMO it’s worth picking up just for “The Scapegoat,” and if you like other stories as well, that’s a bonus.

4. Foreigner: (5th trilogy) Intruder, Protector, Peacemaker. Lots of Cajeiri. The shadow guild is decisively defeated. Fun times, fun times! I like this part of the overall series a lot. I mean, really, a lot.

5. Chanur’s Legacy. This is the one where Hilfy is the main focus, and it is a great story. I was surprised how much I liked it the first time I read it. I hadn’t been especially fond of Hilfy. But this novel is fast, fun, with high stakes that keep rising, AND Cherryh actually made me like the stsho, a species I largely disregarded in the original Chanur quadrilogy. Plus, I love what Cherryh did with the kif in this book. Plus the young male hani who carries part of the point of view. Honestly, this is a great story!

6. The Chanur trilogy: Chanur’s Venture, The Kif Strike Back, Chanur’s Homecoming: This is a single story that follows the first book, Pride of Chanur.. It’s great. Seriously. It’s fairly fast and definitely high tension, but I trusted Cherryh to bring the story to a fantastic conclusion. She delivered. There’s a line near the ending … let me see if I can remember it well enough to quote it … it’s another ship’s captain defending Pyanfar and her people.

This captain snarls to all those who are collectively making themselves an obstacle, “Look at ’em, you say! They’ve got mud on ’em, must be them as brought the flood! And you never seeing they’ve been holding up the gods-be timbers!”

Great scene, wonderful scene! And very high tension because there’s significant risk that the hani species may be wiped out if people don’t get their tails in gear and take effective action right that minute. This moment is the impetus that leads to a handful of male hani going to space — because if all the males are on one planet and that planet gets destroyed, whoa, that’s it.

Lots to love in this excellent, intense, series, which is actually introduced in –>

7. Pride of Chanur. This is the original book, a standalone. As you see, I think the series gets better and better, but it’s great right from the start. The aliens are just about the very best aliens in all of SF as far as I’m concerned. That is, they’re not the most inhuman. Well, the methane breathers are up there. But the kif and the mahendo’sat — and of course the hani — are understandable without being human. The hani are based on lions, as you probably know. Not sure the kif or mahendo’sat are based on any recognizable animal. I didn’t recognize them. Plus of course there is one human, but we never see through his eyes. Anyway, a great book. This series offers a splendid introduction to Cherryh’s science fiction.

8. Foreigner: (4th trilogy) Conspirator, Deceiver, Betrayer. This is the arc where Bren is the tremendously skilled and quite powerful diplomat who sorts things out on the west coast. I love this arc, not least because Bren has ENTIRELY come into his own. This is captured best in the cover here:

Look at that! Bren Cameron, Badass Diplomat, here to solve problems or else. This is really a wonderful arc in the series, which should tell you something about how much I love all the stories and novels above this.

9. Cyteen / Regenesis. For crying out loud, what is wrong with publishers? The first book is not available in ebook form and not linked to the second book on a series page. I bet if CJC tried to get rights back, she probably could, and I wish she would do that and bring out an ebook edition. Who brought out the sequel? DAW. Well, why don’t they make an effort to get the rights to the first book as well? No doubt there’s a story there.

Anyway, about the books. Look. I realize the creation of the azi says uncomfortable things about that society. And the manipulation of a little kid in order to try to re-create her clone mother, very iffy thing to do. But I love, love, love Cyteen.

I mean, not all of Cyteen. When I re-read it, which I have done many times, I skim or entirely skip through the front part, picking up when Baby Ari is born, and read the novel from there. At that point, we begin a wonderful story with a great child protagonist (among others; quite a variety of points of view in this epic SF story). We follow Young Ari as she grows up and takes power in Resuene, following her clone mother. We also follow Justin (most important secondary character) as he grows into himself after a really tough beginning.

I love Young Ari, I love her azi, I love Justin and Grant, I’m even moderately fond of a few of the other characters, such as Yanni. And you know what makes me happy? That Regenesis exists. Did Cyteen need a sequel? Not really. Did we actually need to know who killed Old Ari? Not really. Finding that out is by far the least important thing that happens in the sequel. Did we need to get the political situation sorted out? I guess. But none of that is important to me. What *I* like is that in Regenesis, Young Ari, Justin, Grant, and various other people all get their lives sorted out and get set up for a proper happily-ever-after. THANK YOU, YES, THIS PLEASE. After a long, tense story where a lot of people have to struggle really hard to overcome serious problems, let us by ALL MEANS have an extended epilogue where they do overcome all those problems and get set to move forward into much better lives!

You know what my favorite scene in Regenesis is? The part where Young Ari shows Justin and Grant around the small new apartment complex. I’m a sucker for the coming home to a home you’ve never seen before scene.

10. Foreigner: (6th trilogy) Tracker, Visitor, Convergence. This is the trilogy where Bren gets things under control on the station and then visits Mospheira as the powerful representative of the the aji. It’s great fun. He’s still very much at the top of his game, and this time he gets to demonstrate that to his own people.

11. Foreigner: (3rd trilogy) Destroyer, Pretender, Deliverer. This is the arc after Bren and everyone return from meeting the kyo and discovers that Tabini-aji got deposed and they have to deal with the shadow guild and get Tabini back in power. It’s fine, but it’s by no means my favorite part of the series.

12. Voyager in Night. This is not one I think many people would put at the top. It’s not at the top for me either. But I really liked it. But I have to say, I’m not sure I should. Parts of it are grim, and the resolution is pretty ambiguous.

13. Merchanter’s Luck. I really like this as well. Putting people in such grim circumstances doesn’t always work for me, but the overall arc did in this one. I wasn’t sure why, so I poked around, looking for reviews of this one, and found a fantastic review on Goodreads, which I’m going to quote here because I can’t possibly say anything better than this about Merchanter’s Luck:

The rest of the novel is about the lingering echoes of Sandor’s family catastrophe, about how something resembling post-traumatic stress disorder can screw with a man’s head the rest of his life, and about how hard it is to look past all of these things to find love and trust. It’s a book about desperate love. In a few of Cherryh’s trademark clipped, condensed paragraphs in the first pages, she paints a picture of a young man on the edge of life, scarred by a horrific tragedy in his youth, eking out a living in the shadow of the big players of Downbelow Station. That novel made a big splash in the early 80s, and I read it, but this story is the one that stuck in my mind for thirty years. I come back to it over and over because of the tone Cherryh puts into it, because of the way she expertly balances the yearning in Sandor against his fear of betrayal, his pride, his survivor’s guilt, the secrets and ghosts (metaphorical) that are all he has left. Sandor is a victim who doesn’t realize he’s a victim, so he behaves like a hero and then is surprised when people say nice things about him.

Okay, so … if you haven’t read this book, that’s what it’s about. Moving on:

14. The Faded Sun trilogy

I love this trilogy. I loved this story when I first read it as a kid and I love it now. It’s one of Cherryh’s trademarked stories where she throws a single human into an alien society. She does that a lot, as I’m sure you’ve realized. Here we do get the human’s point of view some of the time. And the society is not quite as different. But you know, in some ways it is pretty different. The people don’t look as different as the hani of the Chanur series or the shonunin of Cuckoo’s Egg, but their society is at least as different — more different, really.

I may not need to say this, but the Faded Sun trilogy is VERY VERY SLOW. The first book is setup. The second book is … more setup. You have to enjoy the character stories and the slow (slooooow) build or I can’t see why you’d bother. The third book then crashes to a close, much faster paced and much more intense. Wait, intense in a different way. The whole thing is intense.

And now we have a break!

We are now leaving the books I just love and entering the category of books I like less. Do you see how long that took? How many books are above this line? Wow. I’m just saying. I hadn’t realized myself how many books are crowded into the top of CJC’s oeuvre for me.

***

15. Foreigner: (1st trilogy) Foreigner, Invader, Inheritor. I like this. I really do, but it’s veeeery slow to get moving and also, if you start at the beginning and read the whole series in one go, there are some inconsistencies that become apparent between this initial trilogy and the rest of the series. Also, Jase is so unhappy for so long, which makes parts of this trilogy a slog. Also, there’s no Cajeiri yet. What with one thing and another, this is not my favorite part of the series. It’s almost my least favorite part of the series. When I last re-read the Foreigner series, I actually started somewhere in the second trilogy, I don’t remember where, but I stepped past this entire trilogy.

If you were really starting for the first time, sure, read this. Treat the entire first book as a prologue. I mean, I know there’s a prologue. Just treat the ENTIRE first book as ANOTHER prologue and you will probably be more patient as you work your way into the world. Which is very much worth doing. Seriously.

16. Hunter of Worlds. There is so much about power relationships here. Power relationships with huge disparities of power. The iduve have complete power over the people they rule, the kallia, who are very definitely slaves. There are also the amaut, who are also subordinate but much less humanoid, and way, way over yonder, the edge of human space. Humans are unknown, basically, and guess what we have here? That’s right, a single human who has been acquired by a specific iduve. This iduve has also acquired, very much against his will, a particular kallia, whom she intends to use to understand the human via an involuntary mindlink … wow, this sounds awful.

It is awful, pretty much. And yet … this story is also about building friendship and trust. And accommodating huge power disparities without losing yourself. And the importance of powerless people in achieving good outcomes. The outcomes, I will add, are in fact good, or at least much better than they might be.

This is a story I see as an early attempt to do something like Chanur and something like Foreigner. It’s not the same as either. It’s pretty successful on its own terms. The things Cherryh does with language here are really interesting; language is an intrinsic part of the worldbuilding. I actually like this book quite a bit. But not nearly as much as Chanur or Foreigner.

Let’s have another break!

***

Okay, here are the books I don’t actually like that much.

17. Serpent’s Reach. One human among aliens, sort of. I don’t like the protagonist very much at all. The aliens are fine, I guess. I’m somewhat bored with hive-mind aliens. Actually, I’m a lot bored with hive-mind aliens. There are lots of them and they’re all the same and I don’t believe in any of them and … and … what can I say? Even though I do think Cherryh’s hive aliens are much better handled than is generally the case, and even though I liked this book, I honestly did not like it that much.

If I ever create hive aliens, they will tilt everything about this trope hard sideways. I would enjoy doing that.

18. 40,000 in Gehenna. I know some of you are going to put this much, much higher. (Hi, Pete!) The problem for me is that this story is … diffuse. It is the story of a colony, not of a person, or even people. We follow one person and then another and we keep going through the generations and this is interesting, but it is not actually very engaging. I mean, for me. Particularly since a lot of people we follow are basically unhappy.

I like the part with the mature colony the best, the part where two competing models of human/Caliban society are pitted against each other and the nicer society wins.

18. Port Eternity. The Camelot theme was a little much for me. But I loved Mordred. Oh, and this may be the wackiest idea CJC ever came up with, so there’s that. It’s pretty darn wacky for any SF novel. But I did love Mordred.

19. Rimrunners. I liked this story, which is about … I don’t know. Loyalty, including loyalty after people have failed you pretty badly. Some grim stuff in the backstory that is echoing forward in the present-day story. I like how this works out, but I found some of it tough going.

20. Foreigner: (7th trilogy) Emergence, Resurgence, Divergence. This is the trilogy where CJC forgets how she handled Nomari, an important secondary character, at the end of Emergence and completely misses her step as she opens Resurgence. AARGH. She recovers somewhat in Divergence, but not really. Plus nothing could really smooth out the huge, glaring discontinuity between Emergence and Resurgence, which was an outrageous mistake that should never have made it into the final draft.

Not that I have strong feelings or anything.

21. Finity’s End. I’ve only read it once and don’t remember it well. But I think I liked it?

One more Break!

***

These are books I honestly do not like or don’t remember at all.

22. Brothers of Earth. This book is interesting. It’s one of Cherryh’s early “throw one human into a terrible situation in an alien society and see how that works out.” It is therefore similar to so many others. Hunter of Worlds, Cuckoo’s Egg, Foreigner, Chanur, they all have this basic setup, though they’re very different in other ways. However, in this one (a) really horrible stuff happens, like practically everyone getting killed except the lead characters. And (b) I just don’t like it very much, even aside from point (a). Honestly, I’d rather re-read this than Downbelow Station, though.

23. Heavy Time / Hellburner. I’ve read them twice, but I don’t particularly like this duology. Too grim, far too claustrophobic. Things do work out, but the PTSD part is hard to take. What time is it? — aargh. But I’d rather re-read these than Downbelow Station.

24. Downbelow Station. Yes, it won the Hugo. I don’t like it. It’s too big and impersonal. Too many points of view, too many I don’t care about. Way too much about the political situation, none of which I care about. I’ve read it twice, but I ought to just give away my copy because I am never going to re-read it.

25. Forge of Heaven. The discontinuity between this book and the prequel, Hammerfall, in the previous post, was so immense that I could not get into this book. I was not interested, I could not get interested, I remember nothing about it except my complete lack of interest and something about social influencers. That’s it.

26. Tripoint. Like Finity’s End, I’ve only read it once and don’t remember it well. But I think I didn’t really like it?

27. Alliance Rising. I haven’t ever read it, and given my disinterest in Downbelow Station and the fairly crappy reviews, I doubt I ever will.

28. Hestia. I know I’ve read this at least twice, but I don’t remember it AT ALL. Complete blank. I’m putting it at the bottom because I guess it was super forgettable for me.

WHEW.

That is A LOT. Half the books and series above are in the “REALLY LOVE IT” category, then another chunk in the “Still like it quite a bit” category. I honestly feel I should probably go re-read Tripoint and especially Hestia.

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People are always asking —

On Quora, there are hundreds of questions about the difference between self-publishing and traditional publishing. There are also a lot of answers I sort of agree with, but not really. This has caused me to think about the question. Camille M asked about my take on that the other day, and I thought, you know what, I’m going to answer that.

My perspective is skewed because of course I had my first ten books come out from Big Five publishers, so I did have SOME readership and also a blog when I moved rather suddenly into self-publishing. I also had the rights for those ten books unfortunately locked up in ways that are not likely to actually be relevant to authors now.

First, I think that traditionally published authors on Quora such as Mercedes Lackey are largely missing the point when they declare that self-publishing is so much less likely to go anywhere, and I also think that self-published-only authors like Timothy Ellis are also missing something, though not as much. I mention those two by name because they each answer a lot of questions on this topic.

Mercedes Lackey says over and over that authors are likely to make between $0 and $100 per year, that most traditionally published authors make very little and self-published authors do even worse. Timothy Ellis says over and over that the way to succeed in self-publishing is to write fast and publish fast. I think they’re both right, but also both wrong in important ways.

Here’s what I think are actually the most essential differences in a nutshell:

A) Traditional publishing involves A LOT MORE LUCK. A LOT MORE.
B) Traditional publishing involves FAR more unpredictability in income from year to year, but can be significant right out of the gate.
C) Income, as well as everything else, is FAR more under the author’s control in self-publishing, but it’s a slow build.
D) The control over what you write may be EVEN MORE IMPORTANT than the control over income.

A) Luck.

There is nothing you can do to make a good agent offer representation. I had that happen fast. There is nothing you can do to make a Big Five publisher offer a contract. I had that happen fast as well. I think this was partly because my debut novel was good, but also partly (a lot) due to luck.

Luck continues to be super important for traditionally published authors after their debut novel comes out. Sales of your debut novel are partly (a lot) dependent on luck, and sales of subsequent books are also dependent on luck. If you talk to authors, I think you will find that almost everybody has a point where their career came to a standstill. This is not exceptional at all. It’s the rule. Almost everybody has this story. All sorts of things can produce a stall and it takes significant luck to get moving again.

If Borders declares bankruptcy between Book One Of Your Great Trilogy and Book Two, and your sales absolutely tank for Book Two because of that, then you’re screwed. Book Two sales were horrible. Your publisher will hold that against you because that’s how publishers are.

If your book’s first print run is 2000 copies and it sells out in two weeks, but there’s a paper shortage, the publisher will not print more copies and they will then hold your poor sales against you because that’s how publishers are.

I don’t mean editors. My editors have been great. It wasn’t my editor who asked me to write a sequel to The Floating Islands and then, after I wrote it, said, oh no, they didn’t want a sequel, they wanted something else, a standalone. That was the acquisitions board following the merger of Random House and Penguin. In other words, it was bad luck. My editor couldn’t do anything. Neither could I.

This kind of thing happens all the time. Seriously. All the time. And this crushes authors’ careers. And there is nothing you can do.

Nothing is about luck in self-publishing and that is where Mercedes Lackey goes wrong when she cites average numbers (and a lot of other people also make this exact mistake, obviously).

A competent author is not competing with the forty million horrible, unreadable, vaguely book-shaped objects down in the bowels of Amazon’s ratings. At all. Those books might as well not exist. This means that a whoooooole lot of “authors” making $0 per year might as well not exist either, as far as figuring out average incomes. Those are not people publishing readable books. There is no point in saying that the average self-published book sells ten copies in its whole lifetime. You have to remove horrible, unreadable books before you take the average. (And it wouldn’t hurt to define “lifetime.”)

You also need to remove authors who might be writing decent books, but who don’t know the first thing about self publishing and plunk them into Amazon and there they go, whooosh, down into the abyss. Not quite as far down, but those books are all down there in the dark somewhere.

When I first self–published Pure Magic, it sold a decent handful of copies, and I went on with the series but did absolutely no marketing because I wasn’t taking self-publishing at all seriously. I just looked at KDP for this book while writing this post, and actually I’m surprised that it did kind of okay even at first, selling several hundred copies as soon as I self-published it. But certainly its sales were not exactly impressive, especially after the first few months. It didn’t disappear, but it was certainly at the edge of the abyss. That’s how it is with self-published books if the author does no marketing at all.

A Prime) How to make your own luck

A self-publishing author is in control of cover, description, keywords, categories, marketing, whether the book is a series novel or a standalone, and if it’s in a series, how long the series will be.

She is also in control of the book’s quality, including formatting, proofreading, and the quality of the actual story. I realize no one can just sit down and produce a masterpiece like, I don’t know, Piranesi, which I’m picking because I can’t imagine anybody just sitting down and writing something like that. Even though I guess Susannah Clarke did. But I mean, you can’t just choose to write something spectacularly beautiful and weird, or most people can’t. But you can choose to write something that’s pretty good. I think that’s where a lot of you-can’t-succeed-nobody-succeeds–it’s-like-playing-the-lottery advice goes wrong. There’s a huge amount of advice out there just like that. People say 95% of writers have day jobs or 99% of self-published books never sell more than ten copies as though numbers like that are relevant. Those numbers aren’t relevant.

You can’t make sales on Amazon with garbage. But you can make sales on Amazon with books that are pretty good. And a lot of people can write something pretty good, especially if they take their time and don’t try to write a novel per month or anything nutty. If someone turns out to be able to write fast later, fine, but it’s not sensible to aim for that right out of the starting gate, in my opinion, and it’s definitely not sensible to advise new authors that they should aim for that and they’ll fail if they can’t do that.

In my opinion, any decent writer can learn enough about how to handle writing and the associated tasks well enough to get their books out of the abyss. I don’t think that takes luck. Buying a lottery ticket is about luck. Writing and marketing involves learning how to do it and then doing it, which is not about luck at all, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable to let yourself learn about all this over time, not try to figure everything out before you even start.

Personally, I think it’s crazy to try to learn everything all at once because you can’t and you’ll drive yourself around the bend. But you can learn enough to make a difference pretty quickly. That takes everything out of the realm of luck.

Obviously challenges like suddenly having premature triplets or whatever will make learning how to write and how to publish hard. But it is not that difficult as long as you have some time to put into writing and some time to put into formatting, proofreading, and the rest. Also, a lot of people are very happy to share what they know about keywords and categories and so forth, and they can point you to places where you can learn more. All that stuff changes. KDP recently made a huge change to how they do categories. Once you’re tied in to any network of people who talk about this stuff, you hear about that kind of change and that helps a lot. Anybody can get tied into that kind of network. Subscribe to David Gaughran’s newsletter and there you go, that’ll do it.

B) and C) Income

The year I signed a two-book contract with one publisher and a different two-book contract with another publisher, I had quite a respectable income from books. Three years later, I had no income from books. This was not a disaster for me because I have a day job. But this kind of variation is common and this is a big, big reason why writers need day jobs. I’m sure that for Mercedes Lackey, income from book contracts is fairly stable. But for most traditionally published authors, it is not.

For some other careers where incomes varies massively from year to year, you can do income averaging and lower your tax burden in a bad year. With writing, you can’t. For other jobs where you are employed, your employer takes out withholding. For writing, no one takes out withholding unless you do it yourself and you will be hit with a godawful tax burden in April. This is one reason I have a CPA. She tells me how much to send in for withholding every quarter, and that is a noticeable chunk that someone without a day job is going to have to budget for, by the way. But it’s better than getting whapped with an even bigger tax payment in April.

So traditional publishing is likely to produce very large variation in income from year to year, and if you get a good advance for your debut novel — I did — then you can get that kind of very large variation right from the beginning. In contrast, if you are self-publishing, your income will be small at first, but it will keep building as you (a) bring out more books, (b) learn more, and (c) are able to invest more. This is just going to be true for anyone who is writing decent, readable books. Any books on the spectrum from readable to excellent. Anywhere on there will do. I think this is obvious because we see successful self-published authors everywhere on that spectrum.

In 2020, I brought out TUYO and got suddenly much, much more interested in self-publishing. Prior to that, my income from self-publishing was less than $100 per month most of the time, and I never paid attention to it because I didn’t care. From the time TUYO came out and I started to take it seriously, my income from self-publishing began to climb. I broke $1000 for a single month later that year and for the first time, in 2020, self-publishing represented more than pocket change. In 2021, my income from self-publishing was half again what it was in 2020. In 2022, my income from self-publishing was double what it had been in 2021.

In 2023, my best guess is book income will be about half again as much as it was in 2022. This won’t equal what I make from my day job, but it will be getting pretty close. In 2024, it should be higher again, and so forth, every year until I quit writing new books and/or quit marketing at all. My goal is to get to the point where I would be comfortable quitting my day job. Whether I do in fact quit my day job is a different question, but I want book income to be high enough that I could. I think that should happen around 2025, barring very significant disasters such as the whole economy crashing. Barring that kind of disaster, my opinion right now is that getting to that point is basically under my control but it is not going to happen overnight. That is a very large difference between self-publishing and traditional publishing.

D) Control over what you write and over what gets published.

Because I do have a day job and do not depend on income from writing, I can relax. I mean, for values of relax that include “spend all my time writing.” But I’m choosing to do that. I like to do that, at least for now. I would literally rather write the next TUYO world novel than watch anything on TV — even though I hear there are lots of good shows on TV these days.

I’ve actually always been able to write what I want to write, more or less, because I’ve written most of my books “on spec” and then my agent placed them. But if I had placed TUYO with the best traditional publisher in the world, it would probably be a standalone today. If there were sequels, they would be different sequels. If the publisher had wanted a sequel, they wouldn’t have wanted a prequel like NIKOLES or an offset story like SUELEN. If I’d written TARASHANA, almost any publisher would have probably told me to cut the length by half and I would have been forced to remove Tano and everything to do with him, because that book was really long. I would not have been able to write the TUYO-TARASHANA-TASMAKAT story unless the publisher decided to let me write a six-book series and that would have been up to them. I couldn’t have made them agree to that.

Only self-publishing guarantees I can write absolutely anything I want. Anything.

It’s not just the TUYO world, though this series is very important to me. The freedom to write exactly what I want to write and know that it will get out in the world and be read by people who might love it and also by the way turn into income is huge. This freedom is ENORMOUS. There is absolutely no way to do that with traditional publishing unless you are Steven King or somebody like that because publishers can always turn down something you wrote. Which they do. All the time. Everybody has a novel or two or five that their agent couldn’t place. Everybody. It’s like a stall in your writing career. Everybody stalls and everybody writes books that publishers don’t want. Only truly famous authors don’t have those things happen.

I got a heck of a lot of rejections for Death’s Lady, and many were detailed rejections that included a line like this: “It’s beautifully written, but it’s too commercial/literary/young adult/adult/weird, and we don’t know that it’s right for our imprint, so we’re going to have to pass.” Some had more substantive comments, but fundamentally that was not a story anybody wanted. Now it’s out because I brought it out. It’s not a big income source for me, partly because it’s not in KU and I have never taken the time to look seriously about how to market a wide series. But, let me just look … if it’s true that current average advances are running $3000 to $5000, then it’s doing better than that, which is not hard.

E) What about rights?

Camille specifically asked about rights, and I will say that I HATE not having the rights to Islands and the others. I HATE it. But having a book locked up as badly as this is much less likely to happen today. I’m probably in the very last cohort of authors who got nailed because the rights reversion clauses did not adequately address ebooks. Nobody should sign a contract that doesn’t clearly specify how the rights revert, including a clause that ebook sales aren’t enough to prevent rights reversion. Given any sort of sensible rights reversion clause, I could have gotten the rights back to almost everything years ago.

However, possibly not Islands. I’m still getting (small) royalty checks for that one now and then. The year I don’t see any royalty checks coming in from that book, I will write to Random House and try to get them to revert the rights to me. If I don’t get a positive response, I will probably write every month and see if I can pester them into reverting the rights. If I write the third book in that series, I’ll probably try to do that regardless. However, if a traditionally published book is making sales, then it may be impossible to get the rights reverted.

BUT, and this is important to understand, if I hadn’t had my first novels come out from Big Five publishers, I most likely would not be writing at all today. There are two reasons traditional publication was important to me. It’s hard to overemphasize the validation, that’s one. The validation of having my first novels come out from Big Five publishers was important. Besides that kind of validation, in order to succeed as a novelist, you have to keep writing books, and making a tiny trickle of income is not very motivating, while making sudden windfalls is. Occasional fairly sizeable advances are really motivating. If you could write novels or do something else, then motivation to write novels is very important. Therefore, in the long run, it was worth it to me to lose the rights to my first novels in order to get to the point where I suddenly decided that self-publication was a direction I wanted to go. I do not regret going with traditional publication at all, even if I would now really like to have the rights back to all my books.

Would I in the future try traditional publishing again? Maybe. Will I keep going with self publishing? YES.

Today, with self-publication being shoved into your face as an option from the start, maybe the boost from traditional publishing is not as important. I’m not sure. The validation has got to be a major boost for a lot of writers. On the other hand, if it’s true that current advances are $3000 to $5000, that is not very motivating at all. It’s even the opposite of motivating. You could make that much doing lots of things easier and faster than writing a novel. An advance as low as that is honestly insulting. We love your novel, but we’re only willing to pay you $3000 for it? I would want a hell of a rights reversion clause, like automatic reversion after two years, something like that, or I would never agree to that kind of advance.

F) Which way should you go?

I don’t advise anybody to go one way or the other. If someone thinks traditional is the way to go, more power to them, and I will wish them all the luck in the world, which they will need. But many people do have enough luck that they can take off, and stall out, and then take off again. That’s obvious by looking at how many traditionally published authors have careers that span decades. Obviously most of them have had enough luck to keep flying.

Martha Wells stalled completely before Murderbot pulled her out of the stall and kicked her career into the fast track, and I will add that everyone cheered because she’s both a nice person and a great writer. She deserves every bit of her success. But look at her oeuvre. It took a lot of books and then a shift from fantasy to Murderbot. If she hadn’t written that first Murderbot novella, she might never have recovered from her stalled career. It took great writing and persistence and luck to get her up and flying again, and that’s how it happens. But it does happen.

If someone thinks self-publishing is the way to go, more power to them, and I will hope they figure out at least the bare minimum about marketing. I feel that’s about where I am, just at the bare minimum, and I’m pretty happy with how that’s working, though I know it could be better.

But I would suggest to anyone going that way that you should probably expect your self-publishing career to build kind of slowly. Let it build slowly. That’s fine. Don’t let yourself burn out. And then, if you do that and keep going, I think you can probably build a pretty decent career that is a lot less about luck and a lot more about writing books and learning at least the essentials of marketing.

Ask me in ten years, even five, and I might write something pretty different. But that’s my view right now.

Ask me any questions you like.

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Haydée at three months

My goodness, what a difference a month makes! Suddenly all the puppy fuzz has disappeared and Haydée is a sleek, slim, long-legged, short-coated puppy. She probably weighs about eight lbs by this time, not sure. She feels about that heavy when I pick her up to coo at her. Eight lbs is about half the adult weight and she does not really look half the adult size just yet, so maybe I’m off a little. She’s going in for vaccination this Friday, so we’ll see!

Here she is with Morgan. Markings not great, plus that little pink snip still on her nose, but actual head very cute! Expression very cute! Smart and willing, good structure, maybe I’ll show her just in Rally and not in the Breed ring, who knows.

Haydée cannot get on the couch by herself because she thinks the steps at the end of the couch are weird and scary. Beats me why puppies get these notions. She’s fine going up and down the full flight of stairs from the deck to the yard, and I don’t mind lifting her to the couch, so I guess she’ll probably figure out the steps someday, but it doesn’t really matter.

Good news on the housetraining front! Haydée finally made a mistake, so I finally had a chance to say No no, not in this room, not even if this room is far away from the living room. ONE mild correction seems to have done the trick. She can’t be truly reliable at this age, but nearly. Didn’t I say smart and willing? Ah, easy dogs are the best. I do appreciate Cavaliers, who are just generally easy puppies. Of course it’s nice that Morgan, Naamah, and Leda — even the boys sometimes — play with her and keep her exercised and entertaining.

Alas, one non-perfect trait has cropped up. Haydée is a zipper puller. If she finds a zipper on a pillow, dog bed, or cushion, she is very certain that the right thing to do is pull on the zipper and then remove the insides from the pillow, dog bed, or cushion. This is funny, but I am going to have to stitch up yet another pillow this afternoon, as she not only unzipped the pillow, but also broke the zipper.

As problems with a puppy go, however, I think I can cope.

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Sales this week

Okay, so, I realize I have been running repeated sales on series for the past couple years. This is because that makes sense financially. Generally, a series sale pays for itself in direct sales during the sale period, then produces profit in a slight uptick in direct sales and a sharp uptick in KU pages read over the next couple of months.

It makes no sense to run sales on books that aren’t in a series. But, on the other hand, it seems to me that probably some readers might like a chance to pick up non-series titles at a discount, and you know, it doesn’t cost all that much to run a sale, so why not? So in the future, I’ll probably put these books on sale periodically. Probably not more than once per year, though.

Now, to be clear, there’s only so much I can do with some of these books.

I don’t control this book’s price, sorry

I can’t run a sale on The Floating Islands. Random House sets the price. As far as I know, they never run sales. I can only run a sale on The Sphere of the Winds. That means if you would like just the second book, here you go; if you would like the full duology, the overall price for both books together is at least reasonable.

This book is $1.99 this week

So, that’s one duology where I don’t have the rights to the first book, only the second. Here’s the second such duology:

I don’t have the rights to this one either

Hachette does run sales on occasion, but they don’t notify me when that happens and today, sorry, is not one of the times House of Shadows is on sale. At least Hachette does permit the first book to be linked to the second on a series page, which is nice. Door Into Light is also $1.99 this week.

Also $1.99 this week

Once again, that makes the overall price of the duology fairly reasonable.

One more: Beyond the Dreams

Also $1.99 this week

Of course Beyond the Dreams is a collection. I personally think the stories are pretty darn good. There’s a story set in the world of The Floating Islands, so that may mean you want to pick up this collection if you pick up that duology. Or vice versa. It happens to be my favorite story in the collection. I would be very curious to know how readers rate the various stories here and which they pick out as their favorite. Too bad there’s no function that lets readers rate each story individually as they get to the end of that particular story. That would be a neat feature for every story collection.

And finally —

Also $1.99 for this week

I’m running a book launch promotion for No Foreign Sky via Written Word Media. This is the first time I’ve ever tried that. It has to be scheduled within a certain amount of time following the release of a book, and there are various other boxes to tick off to run this kind of promotion, plus it’s a bit pricey. I’m not sure what will happen. I mean, you never know what will happen with any promotion, but I’m particularly uncertain what will happen this time. I will be watching with considerable interest and it sure would be nice to see a lasting effect. I’m also running my first ever BookBub ad, scheduled to start at the tail end of this promotion.

Why, you may ask, am I going to this much trouble for a book that is not (yet) a series book? There is exactly one reason, and it turns out I’m not sure it was necessary. I scheduled both this book launch package and the Book Bub ad in order to do my absolute best to get this title in front of space opera fans, thus encouraging Amazon’s algorithms to show No Foreign Sky only, or primarily, to SF fans, not to readers who prefer fantasy.

I was really, seriously worried that early sales of this book would be so heavily slanted toward people who read my fantasy novels, and therefore to people who read fantasy, that Amazon would show my space opera to fantasy readers, not SF readers, and thus accidentally kill sales.

To my considerable relief, that doesn’t seem to have happened at all. On the product page, where Amazon lists “Products related to this item,” it’s all space opera. Not a fantasy novel in the bunch. WHEW. I think that means I dodged a potentially serious bullet. Maybe stacking a whole lot of SF terms in the keywords also helped. In fact, maybe that was all that was necessary. Not sure! But I am sure that for the month of June, No Foreign Sky has twice the KU pages read as Tuyo. That’s unusual and promising. I think that implies that Amazon is showing NFS to the right KU readers — that is, to space opera fans.

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Update: pivoting to INVICTUS, again

You know, I’m kind of trying to remember how many times this year I’ve said, “At last! Now I can get back to revising INVICTUS!”

Have I been here just twice before this year and this is the third time, or have I picked up this project three times previously and this is the fourth? I’m starting to lose track.

Well, last time, looks like I smoothed out a lot of minor (mostly very minor) stuff, got to the top of chapter 10 in the second book, discovered it said “Turn this summary into action,” and left the project sitting there while I did other stuff. No wonder. Who wants to do that much work, right?

Well, this past weekend, I finally turned the summary into action and moved on through chapter 10. A huge discontinuity error waited for me in chapter 11, which I vaguely remember I ought to have expected after changing stuff in the previous couple chapters, but I certainly blinked when I got to it. That character’s still on the bridge? I said to myself. Pretty sure he left the bridge in the previous chapter? I checked, and yes he had, so I took the character out of chapter 11.

Then I got to chapter 12 and once again, at the top of the chapter, I had put a strikethrough through the first paragraph and a note: [Take out this summery and turn it into action.]

SO I DID, and I sure hope I do not hit another bit like that because what a total pain in the neck. Also, when I pick up and put down a project and pick it up again and put it down again, repeat repeat, then I’m probably either (a) repeating something I actually clarified in an earlier chapter, or (b) failing to notice that something I’m doing now is inconsistent with an earlier chapter. BUT I DON’T WANT TO GO BACK AND READ THE WHOLE THING. Do you realize how much time it takes to go back and re-read the whole thing again, and then again, every time you pick up a project? Worse, that is a great way to procrastinate and waste a whole morning. I would rather introduce problems as long as they are SMALLER problems and easy to fix. What I want to do now is get through this revision! THEN I can re-read the whole book from the top.

Probably I will need to read about five chapters from Book 1 and then all of Book 2. Which is fine! As long as I am finished with the part of the revision that says [Take out this summary and replace with action]. I am definitely ready to move on.

I think I’m through that part. As far as I recall, I’m through that part. That means the rest of this revision should be both faster and less annoying.

I’m about to hit the climactic scenes, meaning the climactic scenes of the plot. I can then enjoy reading through the denouement, which involves sorting out all the relationships. And, considering that it’s the 19th and a third of this month still lies before us, I do think I can tie this duology up with a bow by the end of the month, which means that it’ll be ready to send to first readers while I do final, the very final, polishing of the Tuyo World Companion and TASMAKAT.

I’ve also been proofreading TASMAKAT on my phone this past week, by the way. I’ve found three semi-dire continuity mistakes but almost no typos. A scattering of phrases I might revise a touch, but there’s not very much to do at all. I’m really happy with how clean the draft is at this point.

By the way, do you realize a hardcover published via KDP can’t be over 550 pages? I had to drop TASMAKAT to Garamond 10 to get it to fit in that limit. Sorry. It doesn’t make a lot of difference to me personally, since I need reading glasses for TNR 12 anyway, so whatever. But it’s going to be small print and that’s the way it is. The paperback will have slightly larger print because for some reason the page limitation is not nearly as tight for paperback as for hardcover.

ANYWAY, barring unexpected disaster, I should for sure be ready to tackle SILVER CIRCLE by the time TASMAKAT drops on July 15th. BUT, I’m thinking I might take a couple weeks off at that point, read a lot of books, whatever looks enticing , clear out of my head everything I’ve been working on during the first half of the year — my God, where has the year gone? — and prepare to reread the back half of the Black Dog series and pick up SILVER CIRCLE in August. August/September/October/November, that is four months, which is a generous amount of time to finish a draft, especially since I have a pretty clear idea what I’m doing in this book. I mean, I actually know the ending and everything! Even adding in final revisions and proofing of INVICTUS, even taking a fairly relaxed pace, I ought to be able to get through the draft of SILVER CIRCLE by some point in November.

I must say, I’m looking forward to getting away from one revision after another and into a new draft.

Also!

Weather has been fairly nice here — I mean, disregarding the pretty serious drought, at least it hasn’t been super hot — so I have been taking the dogs over to the arboretum fairly often. Haydée LOVES going over to run around in the fenced acre and a half, as you might expect. She has also discovered that running in front of me to try to tackle my toes is possibly not the best idea, though fortunately she did not get kicked very hard.)

I now take her over to the arboretum on leash, though not yet on a brace or group lead. She would almost certainly follow everyone else; Cavalier puppies have a strong follow instinct. But they are a little more independent at 12 weeks than 10 weeks, so a leash, just to be sure. But a long individual leash because I don’t want to frighten her by letting her get pulled.

Her Uncle Conner is teaching her to enjoy Turtle Hysteria.

I think Conner is responsible for Leda and Morgan also joining in Turtle Hysteria. (This is Leda poking her nose at the turtle here, blurry Naamah in the foreground.) He’s so enthusiastic that he pulls the younger dogs into his obsession. He can actually flip a turtle over and pick it up, then carry it for long distances — he has a special technique, honed over the previous six years.

No, I do not let him settle down and really get into chewing on a turtle. I don’t want him breaking a tooth, or the turtle’s shell — you may know, the shell is actually the turtles ribcage, not exactly okay to break it. I have seen a Cavalier punch a hole in a hickory nut, so I know they have more bite strength than you might expect. So I take the turtles away and put them outside the fence, to everyone’s extreme disappointment.

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Ranking CJC’s Oeuvre: Fantasy

Recently, I was thinking that (a) CJ Cherryh is one of my very favorite authors and has been for decades; and (b) my science fiction is therefore inevitably drawing on a lifetime of reading CJC’s SF (and for that matter my fantasy also draws on CJC’s fantasy); and (c) CJ Cherryh has written roughly one zillion books and stories, most of which I have read several times, including the entire Foreigner series.

Then I thought, I’ve pulled out various other authors — Gillian Bradshaw, Sharon Shinn, Patricia McKillip — and done a personal ranking of all their books. Why haven’t I ever done this for CJC? Is it just because there are SO MANY that the idea is exhausting?

Maybe that is why.

In that case, the sensible thing to do (for values of “sensible”) is do two different posts, one for her SF and one for her fantasy. There’s plenty of both! And that will make each post manageable. Well, more manageable. Therefore, I’m going to try to do the fantasy today and then sometime in the next few days, the SF.

Forthwith, CJ Cherryh’s large fantasy oeuvre, ranked from best to worst. Obviously we all already know that opinions are personal and subjective. I already know that Elaine T’s Teen probably disagrees with where I’m placing the Rusalka trilogy. I’ll be curious to hear about where you all think I’m totally wrong.

The Paladin — I suspect almost no one is going to agree with me here, but this is the single CJC fantasy I like best. Practically everyone must have read the Morgaine books first, or the Arafel books first, and therefore probably has nostalgic feelings for those. And I like both series a lot. But I still vote for Paladin up at the top. This is a clean, smooth story, with a tight focus. That’s one reason it’s so good. There’s no adventure for the sake of adding excitement, which means if you want adventure and excitement, you’ll put this book a lot farther down on the list. It’s a character study, which I like very much, and an extended training story, which I also like very much. Then we do get the exciting bit at the end, which also works very well for me, and the denouement, which I think also works well. So I like all the elements of this story and I’m putting it at the top. I will add that although it’s very different, I feel that readers who like the Phoenix Feather series by Sherwood Smith would most likely appreciate this book.

Fortress in the Eye of Time — I think this book starts slowly. Very slowly. This is common with CJC, so no surprise there. About the time Tristen starts being allowed to chat with his guard, the story becomes more engaging, and then it winds up as one of my favorite of CJC’s fantasies, even though I personally do find the ending somewhat abrupt and confusing. Also, I am realizing for the first time that probably Esau is partly drawn from Tristen’s guard. Then there is Fortress of Eagles, Fortress of Owls, and Fortress of Dragons — the rest of the story which the first book leads into. This series unrolls, mostly slowly, into a great epic fantasy story. At this length, where CJC has room to stretch out, she’s really at her best. I happen to really like a lot of the first book (once we’re past the very slow beginning), but all these exactly at the same level as the first book.

Arafel’s Saga — I probably do not need to say that this story unfolds rather slowly. Maybe I should just assume that everyone expects that. Anyway: This was one of the first Celtic fantasies I ever read and it blew me away at the time. I love, love, love the names. Meadhbh, pronounced “Meave!” Who wouldn’t love that? I LOVE that. If you ever wondered who to blame for the sometimes, ah, challenging names I occasionally use in certain books, it’s CJC’s fault. I mean, when readers complain, I usually dial it back in my next book. That’s why The Keeper of the Mist wound up with such simple, easy-to-pronounce names. Personally, however, I strongly prefer names like “Inhejeriel” and “Gajdosik” and “Ubezhishche” and so on. Interesting, fun names that are not much at all like modern American names! I remember clearly how much I loved the names in this series and I’m certain that influenced my preference for really neat names.

But maybe I should say something about the story. Arafel is a very interesting character! But she is not exactly nice. Not vicious or anything. She’s just … not exactly human. She was one of the first sidhe characters I ever encountered, and she does rather set the bar high for the sidhe. Not human, not exactly nice — I’m putting that wrong. Not exactly safe. I would not want to bump into a sidhe personally. Though if I did, Arafel would be a good choice. The language, the actual writing, is beautiful. This story showcases Cherryh’s ability with language maybe better than anything else she’s ever written. It’s just lovely. The story itself unfolds a little at a time. It’s best for a patient reader who enjoys the story at its own pace and doesn’t get impatient when there’s not an exciting adventure on every page.

The Morgaine series — Although I love a lot of tropes here — you know what, maybe I should add this series as an inspiration for TUYO — anyway, I love the setup and a lot of the way the series unfolds. It’s generally slow. Everything by CJC is slow, so that’s fine. But there are also things I don’t enjoy as much. This story is like … it’s like … you know what, it’s actually a lot like you replaced Aras with Tenai from the Death’s Lady series, handed Tenai a quest she hadn’t yet fulfilled, and then told the story from there. Morgaine is obsessively focused on her goal and this makes her much (much) less sympathetic than Aras. She is interesting! But she is specifically not very nice! And I like her, but it takes rather an effort. After Morgaine finally starts to care about Vanye, I like the story better. This takes a while. I like Roh, eventually. This also takes a while. Very much worth reading! But I put the above books above this one.

Hammerfall — Do not tell me this is really SF. I am aware of that. It reads like fantasy, and I’m treating it like fantasy, and yes that puts this book here and its sequel in the other post on SF, but that’s the way it goes when you write a novel that is fantasy-but-really-SF. I like this book a lot. It’s weird, but I like it a lot. There’s a huge amount of traveling from point A to point B and back again and then back AGAIN, which actually does not bother me! I enjoyed it! But just so you know, the entire book consists of traveling from one place to another repeatedly, with increasing urgency. The SF elements don’t (to me) make a lot of sense, but I like it a lot despite that. I don’t like the sequel very much. It feels totally different. It feels like it is in a different universe. I expect CJC did that on purpose, but it doesn’t work for me. The existence of the sequel pulls this one down, in my opinion. I would suggest reading this book as a standalone and maybe dragging your feet a bit about the sequel.

The Goblin Mirror — For me, this novel almost works, but not quite. I love some things about it. Other things, much less. I really love the ending, though. It’s lovely and poetic and I LOVE the way the goblins are like, “But there has to be a bargain!” and the protagonist just laughs.

Merovingen Nights — This is a shared world universe, with one novel by CJC plus lots of story collections. The stories are written by CJC herself; by Janet Morris, whose stories I do not like; by Mercedes Lackey, who wrote some really good stories here; and by various others. I have the whole set. There’s an overarching story that goes through the whole series, which is an impressive achievement when working with a shared world. I do like the series. But the world is quite claustrophobic, with most people struggling to get by. Claustrophobic settings are difficult for me. I always find it difficult to enjoy a story set in a world where a lot of people are pretty much trapped by circumstance.

Legions of Hell — Speaking of being trapped by circumstance! Lots of important historical figures, particularly from Ancient Rome, fighting to maintain a decent afterlife for their people, in Hell. Complicated and hard to follow if you come in at the middle, because this is a long, long shared world series of collections plus some number of novels. Let me see — okay, here is a Wikipedia page about this series. Oh, nine novels and 16 story collections. That’s bigger than I realized! That has to put this series second only to Eric Flint’s 1632 shared world. I never read anything else in the Heroes in Hell series, and found the one I read more interesting than engaging. Janet Morris was heavily involved in this series and wrote far more stories than Cherryh, and, sorry, but I just never like basically anything that Janet Morris ever wrote, so that prevented me from searching for the rest of the books and anthologies in this series.

Rider at the Gate / Cloud’s Rider — I like the idea, I like the nighthorses. But (a) the world is fundamentally highly claustrophobic, with almost everyone tightly constrained by circumstances, which is not what I like at all in a world. And (b) wow, if people weren’t so appallingly incompetent, the main problem in the story, which was horrible by the way, would have been much more solvable.

Look, it’s a bit like having a horrible sorcerer in the Tuyo series. Actually, it’s almost exactly like that. Saying, Oh, but it’s not her fault is not useful. Saying, Oh, we can’t kill her, poor child, we’ll just have to take the risk that she’ll torture everyone in the town to death is absolutely insane. I just could not stand the obviously horrible choices everyone made all the way through this duology, leading to terrible outcomes. Yes, the outcomes could have been even worse, but for heaven’s sake, they could have been far, far less terrible. The whole second book should never have happened!

In other words, put any other plot in this world and I would have been happier. Lighten up on the constraints suffered by almost all people in this world and I would have LOVED it. As it is, I find the duology almost unreadable. BESIDES ALL THAT, (c) there was obviously supposed to be a third book, which did not get written, leading to a dangling thread of the worst kind. Having said all that, all the reviews are much more positive than I’ve made it sound.

Faery in Shadow — I did not like this story much; see below.

“The Brothers” in the anthology Visible Light. Now also in the collection here. I did not like this story at all. One young man accepts a curse in order to gain the assistance of a sidhe to free his brother from a terrible situation. This works out, but it’s an ambiguous ending at best. The novel above is basically a sequel that makes the events in “The Brothers” seem marginally less awful.

Fortress of Ice — Hated it. Not every single scene, but overall, no. This was a series where CJC should have stopped while she was ahead.

Rusalka trilogy — Loathed the first book, bought the second and third because I’m a CJC completetist. Could not bring myself to read the second book, gave the books away. Ugh. This was actually once more a response to what I perceived as a horrifically claustrophobic situation; a person trapped by a terrible type of sorcery and other people trapped in that situation with him. I realize it works out. I just could not get through the long, slow slog to a better situation.

Okay! What’s your favorite CJC fantasy? Least favorite? What is wildly off base in this list? What did I leave out? I think I’ve read (pretty much) all of CJ Cherryh’s books, but I might have missed something somewhere because really, there are lots.

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Just sent the June newsletter —

With information about an upcoming sale AND with the current version of the Table of Contents for the Tuyo World Companion, among other things.

I will mention the sale here when it actually begins, which will be in a few days. Most of these books are not in KU, which means I will have to go into KDP and Draft to Digital and lower prices by hand. That also means I can’t set them to free because that is a serious pain in the neck for non-KU titles. Also, these aren’t exactly series books, so I don’t expect to actually make any money by dropping the prices, or very (very) little. It’s just I never run sales for them, so I thought I would. As I say, in a few days.

However, this part I will share with you now: here is the current ToC for the Tuyo World Companion. This is the brief version, showing all the main headings and most or all of the secondary headings, but none of the tertiary headings, because I bet you can recite the letters of the alphabet all by yourselves and don’t need things like that listed out.

This ToC has been revised heavily many times and is still changing on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis as I move sections up and down, delete sections (and put them back more often than not), and add sections. I’m not putting it here just for you to gaze at it, though I hope you’re interested. I’m putting it here because if anybody has anything that isn’t covered here, a different section that might be added, you can definitely send me those suggestions. People keep saying, “I think there should be a section on the land of the shades,” or “Could there be a section on Ugaro dogs?” and I’m always going YES, WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT? and adding a section that includes that topic. So, what I’m saying is, don’t hesitate.

General Notes
Potential spoilers
Internal series chronology
The World
    The world north to south
    The world east to west
What happens to the Sun when you cross the river?
Does the Moon change phases in one night?
Inspiration for the Tuyo world
The Peoples of the Tuyo world
Sorcery and Magic in the Tuyo world
Metaphysical Places in the Tuyo world
    The edges of the world
    The vault of the heavens
    The land of the shades
Places in the Tuyo world
Social structure
    Family in Lau society
    Women in Lau society
    Gender in Lau Society
    Class in Lau society
    Warfare among the Lau
    Ugaro family and tribal society
    Ugaro social roles
       Male Roles
       Female Roles
    Gender in Ugaro society
    Warfare and duels among the Ugaro
    Family, class, and social roles among other peoples
    Marriage
    Legal systems and customs
Architecture and material culture
Measurement in the world of Tuyo
Lau astrology
Lakasha astrology
Languages
Recreation
Domestic animals
Food and cooking
The story of the inKarano as Marag inGara told it to Lalani
Letters
   From Aras’ wife to his mother
    From Aras to Soretes
    From an Ugaro mother to her daughter
    From Suelen to Prince Sekaran
    From Lady Pasolaun to a colleague
    From Lucas to Aras
    From Selili to a colleague
    From Etta to Ryo
Alphabetical Character List
Interview with Rachel Neumeier
Returning Hokino’s Knife

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Thinking about Paragraphs

A post by Molly Templeton at tor.com: Do You Ever Stop and Think About Paragraphs?

Yes, frequently! Not sure whether that is a writer thing or a reader thing or both, but I always think about sentences, chapter breaks, transitions, word choices, and all the other elements of writing prose, including paragraphs.

Molly Templeton’s posts are always worth reading. What does she have to say abut this topic?

The first sentence of Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial is more than 200 words long. Two hundred and seventeen, if my hasty count is correct. I’ve had writing assignments meant to cover entire movies or concerts that were shorter than that. And there is more to that single paragraph—in the edition translated by Ursula K. Le Guin—before the writer moves on to the next thought, the next indent.

I think about this paragraph, with its one epic sentence, a lot. And I’ve been thinking about it more since an online event a few months ago during which the interviewer asked Kelly Link if there were any questions she wished people would ask her. Link said, after thinking for a moment, that she would like to talk about paragraphs. That she had questions about paragraphs.

Oh, that’s a great beginning to this post! I’m really interested now. I’m also mad, because you know what was going on last week? I was getting emails from upcoming conventions asking for suggestions about panel topics. And you know what I did not think of? Correct: it did not occur to me to say, “Hey, how about a panel on paragraphs?” I would actually have suggested sentences and paragraphs. But I think this is a great topic, far more interesting than it might seem at first glance.

I went looking for that first sentence/paragraph of Kalpa Imperial because who wouldn’t want to take a look at it after that introduction, right? And what did I find but another post at tor.com, this one by Sofia Samatar, whose book A Stranger in Olondria I still have not read, but still want to.

The prose of Stranger is supposed to be particularly beautiful, so when Samatar writes a post about the first sentence of Kalpa Imperial, that’s especially interesting.

Here is the first sentence in question; translated, by the way, from the original Spanish by Ursula Le Guin, who is, of course, also noteworthy for beautiful sentences. I bet she did a good job with the translation. Here it is: Kalpa Imperial:

The storyteller said: Now that the good winds are blowing, now that we’re done with days of anxiety and nights of terror, now that there are no more denunciations, persecutions, secret executions, and whim and madness have departed from the heart of the Empire, and we and our children aren’t playthings of blind power; now that a just man sits on the Golden Throne and people look peacefully out of their doors to see if the weather’s fine and plan their vacations and kids go to school and actors put their heart into their lines and girls fall in love and old men die in their beds and poets sing and jewelers weigh gold behind their little windows and gardeners rake the parks and young people argue and innkeepers water the wine and teachers teach what they know and we storytellers tell old stories and archivists archive and fishermen fish and all of us can decide according to our talents and lack of talents what to do with our life—now anybody can enter the emperor’s palace, out of need or curiosity; anybody can visit that great house which was for so many years forbidden, prohibited, defended by armed guards, locked, and as dark as the souls of the Warrior Emperors of the Dynasty of the Ellydróvides.

Well, that’s really something. I mean, I’m not in the mood to read this right now, but that’s a splendid sentence. It’s a lot like the introductory sentence of A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Not quite as long, but definitely long. Obviously the element that catches the ear is the repetition. Gorodischer’s sentence goes now that … now that … now that while Dicken’s goes it was … it was … it was, but obviously the element of repetition is the same. So poetic and compelling!

Here is what Samatar says about the first sentence of Kalpa Imperial:

I quote it in full because what was I going to do? Cutting this sentence would do at least three terrible things:

–It would break that breathless, intoxicating rhythm

–If I cut the end, it would strip the sentence of meaning—the conclusion demanded by the insistent now that… now that… now that…

–If I chopped out a piece of the middle, the sentence would lose the repetitions that create a sense of temporal entanglement.

By “temporal entanglement” I mean that Gorodischer’s sentence tells us there is nothing we do that does not have a history. Teaching and archiving, sure, but also arguing, singing, fishing—each has a past. Every now is a now that.

You should certainly click through and read Samatar’s post, which is brief and poetic. But let’s go back to the other tor.com post, the one about paragraphs.

It is difficult, when one assigns oneself the task of writing about paragraphs, not to become self-conscious about one’s own paragraphs. (One may even feel compelled to offer the caveat that one is not an expert or English teacher or copyeditor and is not at all here for semantic nitpicking.) But as both a reader and a writer, I have a comfort zone, like so many do. I love a long paragraph when I need to stay caught up in a thought, a short one when someone wants to make a point, or hit home an emotional moment. I like variety, though I don’t always remember to have it, or rely too much on one short paragraph, one single question, amid the longer bits.

Oh, this is a really solid post. The feel of long paragraphs, the feel of short paragraphs, the feel that the author is trying too hard to evoke an emotional reaction … Yes. I notice all that. And obviously I spend a certain amount of time thinking, “Should I break this sentence out of the preceding paragraph? How about this sentence? Can I do these three sentences each in its own paragraph, or is that too overt? (That’s the same question as: Am I trying too hard?)

Sentences and paragraphs are important. I pay attention to them pretty much all the time, even if I’ve been thoroughly drawn into the story as a reader, or even if I’m thoroughly in flow as a writer. This is definitely a fine topic for a panel or a workshop, for anything devoted to the craft of writing.

By the way, I sometimes paragraph as I go, but at least as often, I notice that a paragraph is getting overly long and spend half a second thinking about where to break it, then go on. I rarely re-paragraph any section, but in passages that are carrying a lot of emotional freight, I often do. This is where I might try breaking out three sentences in a row, each in its own paragraph; and then try putting one back in the preceding paragraph; then two, then break them both out again and read through the section once more. Paragraphing is always important, but it’s at least a hundred times more important when a scene is intense.

That’s what I think about paragraphs.

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Once more available in Audio!

Once more available in Audio — TUYO

YAY!

This turned into more of a project than I expected because:

a) The narrator, Patrick, was 100% on board with shifting from royalty share to a flat fee, so that was no problem

b) But ACX wanted an email exchange on record between Patrick and me that made it clear he agreed to the change.

c) Then Patrick had to send me all the audiobook chapters and I had to load them to ACX

d) During which I encountered technical difficulties which I had no ability to resolve

e) But Patrick kept sending me new adjusted files and I kept loading them until they all worked

f) Then I had to submit the book as though it were completely new for ACX to review and approve

And so as you can see everything was annoying and time consuming. However, it’s all fine now and the audiobook went up yesterday, I believe.

It is just under $22, or of course free if you happen to join Audible and get it as one of your free books.

My next step, as soon as I get a moment, is to load the audiobook on Findaway Voices and get it on Chirp and figure out how to run sales. I have of course never done anything before with Findaway Voices or Chirp, so this will no doubt constitute yet another learning experience, sigh. I will probably need to come to the office next weekend and take a stab at figuring all this out from a real computer rather than trying to do it from home.

However, I’m glad to say that TUYO is actually available now, and if anybody is planning a long drive this week, here you go, I hope you will try it!

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