Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 80

What I’m Listening To

Two Steps from Hell is always a good choice!

This is “Vanquish,” which I like a lot, though the vocals make it a little less perfect as background music:

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Update: At Last, TANO

So I expect you all noticed that TANO became available for preorder … was that Saturday? I think Saturday. Just barely in time to hit March 1 as the release date because you have to set that at least five days in advance. Good thing I checked and rechecked the formatting days in advance because I can’t touch it now till it releases.

I’m grateful to everyone who instantly hit the preorder button, which a good number of people did. The preorders went up to fifty or so in about eight hours, which was very nice. I expect a slower trickle over the next couple days, but regardless, I hope that will do useful things to Amazon’s algorithms for the Tuyo sale that starts on the third.

There will of course be paper editions, paperback and hardcover. I hope I will get those covers today, or at least this week. I will hit publish immediately when I get those files.

Meanwhile!

Over the past week, I wrote the first scene for the Sinowa-and-Marag prequel story. It’s a quiet sort of prologue scene, set a couple months before the next scene. I like it. Then I set it aside for later and wrote the first scene plus a middle scene for the Lau story. I think I like that too, but I’m setting that aside as well, for now. I’m having some trouble with it because the story opens, at least right now, in the male lead’s point of view and his voice was not clear to me. I keep wanting to write him like Esau, which is not right. I think I have now figured out his background with enough clarity to help with that, but now –>

–> time to get back into revision! Aaargh! But I actually think my mood about this is less hostile than it was last week, so I guess it was a good idea to take a break. Possibly that will be something to keep in mind for later, as I have months of revision to go, what with No Foreign Sky followed by finishing up Tasmakat followed by probably fairly extensive revision with Invictus. Did I say Aargh? Because, Aargh.

I’ve also started putting together a Dramatis Personae kind of thing for the Tuyo series. People, places, notes about the languages, general notes about the world. I’m certainly not going to include people who are mentioned in passing in one scene, but most characters who are more important than that. I’m probably not going to do it in alphabetical order, but do the first sort by Lau/Ugaro/Lakasha/Ro-Antalet/Tarashana and the second sort by importance. I could change my mind, but it seems better to have everyone who is inGara in one place at the top of the Ugaro list rather than scattered, everyone who is in Aras’ family in one place rather than scattered, and so on.

I also started Nora Goes Off Script, a contemporary romance recommended here recently, and I like it a lot, but I’ve hit a high-tension bit where Leo disappears and despite all promises to the contrary does not return. This is making me a little reluctant to continue, though hopefully Nora will start to pull herself together soon. I do like how supportive everyone is of her and how supportive of each other she and the kids all are.

I have a strong guess about what’s going on. I’m not sure I should share that here? It’s a total guess, not like I’ve read ahead and know whether I’m right. I could be completely wrong. But I’m pretty sure. Is sharing that fair game? Tell you what, I’ll insert a pause and then tell you what I think the problem is. Don’t read the rest of this post if you don’t want to know what I think has happened. If you’ve already read the book, for heaven’s sake don’t tell me whether I’m right!

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I think Leo is being blackmailed by Naomi. Everything points to this, as far as I can tell. We have a comment made in passing, I think made by Leo to one of the children, that Naomi is mean. We have him sleeping with Naomi, but then hanging out in Nora’s house, which would make sense if he’s trying to avoid Naomi. His drinking is at least partly a response to the pressure of being forced to act opposite Naomi and take her to bed when he doesn’t want to do either. We have him resisting going home after the shoot, which totally makes sense because Naomi apparently redecorated his apartment in New York and probably invaded his life in additional ways there as well. When he cuts Nora off, what could explain that? Nothing normal. So it’s something abnormal, and that is Naomi blackmailing him to force him to ghost Nora, which she would do because she’s infuriated that he could prefer Nora to her.

What she’s blackmailing him about, I have not the slightest idea.

I don’t know that this is right, but it sure fits. Everything fits. I have therefore pretty much committed to this explanation, and if something else is going on, I will be super surprised, which I would enjoy, but I’d enjoy being right too, so either way is fine with me.

And that was my week!

The coming week, I will probably fiddle with the Dramatis Personae and also FOR SURE dig into the final revisions to No Foreign Sky.

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Final TANO cover and hopefully it will appear on Amazon TODAY

Here’s the final cover!

As you see, the pony looks more like a pony, with proportionately larger head. He also has a much rougher coat and some feathering on the lower legs, not a huge amount of feathering, but some.

I think his color could be described in a lot of ways, but though I like the world “ash,” that would imply a grayer tone even though if you actually LOOK at ash in a fireplace, it’s paler and not as gray as you are probably picturing. I will note that I resisted “cream-colored” pretty hard, but couldn’t think of anything better.

And you know why I did not want to use “cream-colored” even though the pony is in fact just about exactly the color of cream? Because long, long ago someone criticized The City in the Lake for using the word “cream” too often. The word “cream” or “creamy” appears 26 times in 81,000 words — I just checked. Not sure that seems over the top. But City was my debut, of course, and I was so sensitive to criticism at the time that I’ve resisted using the word ever since. I guess it’s time to get over that, so “cream-colored” it is.

I thought City was longer, by the way! I remembered it being 90,000 words! I bet it was at some point. At 81k, it’s the third-shortest novel-length book I’ve ever written, after Suelen and Shines Now.

Tano wound up at 115K, a much more normal length for me.

I will be putting this up for preorder hopefully today, with a release date of … drumroll … March 1. It would be nice for it to pick up a decent handful of preorders in order to tickle Amazon’s algorithms just before the whole Tuyo series goes on sale a few days later.

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Capturing emotion

Here’s a post from Helping Writers Become Authors: How to Write Emotional Scenes (Without Making Them Cringey)

In a recent email, reader Jessica commented to me about how, when deeply emotional scenes are executed poorly, the audience “just wants to run and hide.” She goes on:

And yet, some storytellers can pull this off, and not only don’t you want to cringe, it’s your favorite part of the story. So I was wondering if you had any tips around the difference between achieving that heart-melting thrill versus falling into the cringe, cover your eyes for a moment kind of scene.

I completely relate to the sheer difficulty of creating emotional scenes that don’t feel cringey. When I first started writing, these scenes were my least favorite to write. I cringed my own way through all of them. I had to do a lot of soul-searching and work to figure out how to write emotional scenes. What I’ve learned over the many years since is that the single most important key to writing emotional scenes that truly pull their weight is verisimilitude. …

Bottom line: readers cringe when they know the author is trying to make them feel a certain way… and failing. It’s like watching a stand-up comedian who is missing the mark so badly that you’re embarrassed. Cringe.

What do you think? I think … I think it’s possibly true that the scene itself can fail. I can’t offhand think of an example, but that may be because I don’t generally get far enough into a poorly written book to hit a scene that’s supposed to be emotionally intense. I do wonder which specific scenes the initial question had in mind and whether the author of the post is thinking of a specific scene.

I wonder if a more typical failure is simply a failure to make the reader care about the characters. Then the reader hits a scene that should be emotionally intense, but shrugs: Whatever. That’s not a cringe; it’s just indifference. Again, I don’t have a specific example in mind. It’s been years since I forced myself to continue a novel when I didn’t care about the characters.

Personally, I find a lot depends on the emotion in question.

Emotions I loathe:

Oh, if I can’t see him again, my life will be over. It’s worth any stupid unnecessary risk to see him one more time.

The author has to be REALLY gifted to make that work for me. I don’t cringe, except with scorn for the protagonist’s inability to just get a grip on herself. I roll my eyes, or sometimes throw the book across the room, and move on to another book.

Oh, whatever shall I do? The villain is succeeding at all his nefarious aims! I wring my hands in dismay at my own total ineffectuality! Alas! Woe!

I despise a helpless protagonist. There she stands, wringing her hands while everything crashes down around her. That is a character type that’s just painful to read about, and an author whom I may avoid in the future. I don’t think there’s anything at all the author can do that makes me accept an ineffectual protagonist. I think it’s really the author’s job to come up with something for the protagonist to do, something effective rather than eye-rollingly idiotic, though the consequences of her actions may be unforeseen and create more problems.

Offhand, I can’t think of any other types of emotions I particularly dislike. Oh, no, wait, I can:

I really dislike public embarrassment. All my life, I’ve avoided every sitcom because a tremendous proportion of all the supposed humor in sitcoms depends on putting characters into embarrassing situations and laughing at them. I don’t find those scenes funny at all, ever. I find them excruciating. I don’t like those scenes in novels either. I don’t think it’s possible for an author to write a scene like that where I wouldn’t cringe — and here cringe is exactly the right word.

However, I do think it’s true that any emotional scene may fail, even if that emotion is not in and of itself a turnoff. Grief ought to be intense, and so should love, and fury, and terror. When scenes that ought to evoke those emotions fail, I think that may happen because of a problem not with the scene itself, but with the leadup.

A lot of the success of emotional scenes depends on building up to those scenes. The emotion in an intense scene has to be earned. If a character is grief stricken, the strength of the loss has to be established beforehand by making the relationship important. If the character realizes she is truly in love, the significant other needs to be established beforehand as worth loving. I wonder if, when someone says they cringe at an emotional scene, the failure is in the prior pages, which failed to lead into the intensity of that scene.

The author of the linked post says When I first started writing, these scenes were my least favorite to write.

They’ve always been my favorite scenes to write. Moving toward a scene like that is motivating. The intensity draws me in and I’m very likely to write scenes like this “in flow,” fast, with a literally painful sense of discontinuity if the phone rings. That’s been true right from the beginning. I’m glad of that, because I can’t imagine not loving those scenes.

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Newsletter, um, news. News about the newsletter

Okay, I have never really liked putting together newsletters using Mailchimp. It wasn’t a particularly intuitive process, or I didn’t find it particularly intuitive, at least.

But this year I will have a whole lot going on, so it seemed reasonable to take time to figure this out. Therefore, over the past couple weeks, I finally sat down, watched a tutorial video, and took my time to slowly and carefully put together a newsletter, taking notes about where to find different things so that next time I will know.

I’m sure you won’t be shocked to hear that really, it’s fine. There’s nothing difficult about it now that I’ve finally taken time to look at it properly.

Therefore, I’ll be sending out a newsletter every two months or so. Each one will have stuff in it that may be useful and engaging.

Sometime in the next few days, I’ll send out the first of these emails. It will contain:

Exact dates of all the sales that will be occurring in March, with links to series pages at relevant retailers.

Details about planned releases this year, which you probably know about already.

The current version of the cover for TANO, which is not quite the final version, but is not the version you’ve already seen here.

Links to reviews of my favorite reads so far this year, which you have also probably seen.

The entire first chapter of Tano, which is significantly more than I posted here.

If you’d like to subscribe to the newsletter, great, I’ll try to make it worth your time to open it. The link is on the home page of this website or here you go, a link.

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Recent Reading: Six Ways to Write a Love Letter by Jackson Pierce

So, Six Ways to Write a Love Letter was recommended recently by commenter Alison.

And I have to say, for me, Six Ways is right up there for favorite-ever contemporary romance — maybe for any romance.

Remy Young — his actual name is Remember Young, which I must say is a very cool name — is a drummer and producer in LA. He belongs to a small band that had one hit song some years ago — the other real member of band is his brother, Val, whose actual name is Valor. Val and Remy ran away from their Pentecostal family a good while back. Now here they are in LA, struggling to make ends meet, but not really in desperate circumstances. Val had a problem with cocaine, but he kicked the habit. Remy and Val are very close, very loyal to each other. Remy could build a career as a producer, but doesn’t want to leave Val alone. Not that his brother would be entirely alone, as Val has a girlfriend, Celeste, a celebrity-focused blogger. But Val is struggling with his inner demons and Remy is afraid he might start using again.

All that is backstory. We get glimpses of the backstory in the form of half a dozen flashbacks.

Vivi Swan is a super-popular pop star who does fancy performances in huge arenas in front of 60,000 fans. Her image is The Wholesome Girl Next Door, but her specialty is breakup songs. Well, that’s her thematic specialty. Her real specialty, the thing that pulls in the fans, is her gift for empathy, for making every single fan feel like they’re in a personal relationship with her. She does small-group meet-and-greets after her shows and gives the lucky fans who get a spot in one of those chocolate chip cookies, which she bakes herself …

… does she really bake those cookies herself?

Yes, she does. I just thought I’d say so right now, because although that’s not clarified until later in the story, that tells you SO MUCH about Vivi. She’s been a celebrity since she was fifteen, but she still bakes chocolate chip cookies for her fans herself.

Anyway, her shows are really spectacular, and her drummer just broke his elbow. She needs a drummer, people in the industry recommend Remy, and Remy thinks … Well, I don’t want to leave Val alone … but Celeste would be here … and this would be such an opportunity … And that’s the basic setup for this story.

What did I like about Six Ways?

The characters. I loved Remy. And Val. Also Vivi Swan. Honestly, I liked them all. More about everyone in a minute.

The technical background. I know almost nothing about the music industry, except what absolutely everyone knows. I didn’t know what a producer does, for example. This story pulls you right into this world, which was almost as unfamiliar to me as a secondary fantasy world. I really enjoy books that can do this. It almost doesn’t matter to me whether the profession or avocation is, though of course I have a prior interest in baking and anthropology and so forth, but I really, really loved this background. It was not too technical for the ignorant reader, which I can say with assurance because I’m as ignorant as it comes in this respect.

The plotting. This was about as low-stress as any romance novel can be.

You know how the beats are supposed to go in a romance. They go like this: Protagonist… in a setting … experiences an inciting incident … new situation … problems … problems get worse … problems get worse … huge crisis followed by black night of the soul … protagonist experiences a revelation and takes action … resolution.

This is fine! But you know what is more fine? If it goes like this: Protagonist … in a setting … experiences an inciting incident … new situation … problem, which is resolved … problem, which is resolved … concern, which does not turn out to be a problem … problem, which is resolved … huge crisis followed by the protagonist coping … protagonist experiences a revelation and takes action … resolution.

That’s pretty much how Six Ways works.

You noted that I said the brothers are close and that Val used to be an addict, but kicked the habit. And I said Remy is afraid to leave him alone. Who immediately assumes that Val will crash when Remy leaves? Raise your hand if that would be your expectation given this backstory. Everyone, right?

Nope! Val does fine — in fact, he pulls much of his life back together and he and Celeste turn out to to be even better suited than the reader might have expected. Also, they stay in touch through the story and support each other all the way through and don’t have a personal crisis. IN FACT, when Val gives Remy good advice, Remy follows that advice in the very next chapter! And it WAS good advice.

And now back to the characters, because this is something I really loved. No one falls apart. There are misunderstandings, but no one deliberately betrays someone else. Everyone tries to be supportive of everyone else — everyone IS supportive of everyone else. I’m talking about Remy/Val/Celeste here. Vivi is pretty much trapped in her own image; her story is almost entirely about overcoming her painfully learned self-protectiveness. But she tries hard! And, of course, because this is a romance, she ultimately succeeds.

Okay, what else?

The writing.

I was surprised and pleased to find that the whole story is from the pov of the male lead. That’s unusual. I can’t think of another romance written solely from the guy’s pov. It worked better this way than it would have if the author had switched back and forth because Vivi works well seen from the outside only.

Also the writing itself.

After the first six-week tour for which Remy was hired, he thinks:

It was done. Whatever it was, it had to be. The job, Vivi, the tour, his role in it, and her and the music. It was over almost as suddenly as it had started — the rest of the tour would belong to the original drummer, which was appropriate. It belonged to him, after all — this entire experience was just something Remy had borrowed for a time. Like being a one-hit wonder. Like living in Florida. It was a slice of a life, not a life.

I love that line! It’s a slice of someone else’s life, it’s not your life. That’s great.

Or there’s an intense moment between Remy and Val:

[Val] stretched his arms to the ceiling and yawned. “I have that new song almost done. Want to hear it?

This was said so casually, so effortlessly, that Remy did a sort of mental double take, where his mind processed the words, then had to immediately do so again. He met Val’s eyes and saw recognition there — that despite the yawn, despite the effortless words, Val knew how big a deal this was — yet also wanted, desperately, for Remy not to recognize it as such.

“Sure,” Remy said, and shrugged, while his internal organs rearranged themselves. Val was writing again. Val was writing again — no, wait: Val was finishing again, and doing it without drugs. It was the inverse of hearing that Val was using again — a level of joy that would have perfectly mirrored Remy’s devastation.

That’s just a great moment! Plus, if it wasn’t yet clear to the reader that no one is going to get ground to emotional paste in this book, this should help with that, because look at how the author is stepping smoothly around devastation and pouring joy into her story instead.

As a side note, I personally appreciated that this is a closed-door romance.

This is Jackson Pierce’s first adult novel; she’s got some YA fairy tale retellings, of which this one caught my eye. I’m going to try that one on the strength of Six Ways.

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Unexpected birthday presents

Birthdays: a reminder that one is getting older! Not exactly something I like to notice.

However, I’d like to show you a birthday present the world unexpectedly offered me today: Babies’ First Blooms

My current phone has a dreadful camera, so these pictures are not crystal-clear. Nevertheless, check it out! This is so exciting!

Both of my oldest hybrid magnolia seedlings have cracked their buds, following their maternal parent in bloom timing. The top photo is the ONE flower that this baby magnolia is going to have this year. The bottom photo is a sibling tree that has seven flower buds. It’s going to rain today, apparently, but it’s warm, so hopefully I will have a chance to see both these flowers open into full bloom. Even right at this moment, it’s clear the top tree is going to have cream-colored flowers with a pink streak at the base, very much like the Yulan parent. The bottom tree is plainly going to have much pinker flowers than the Yulan, but probably a flower shape much the same.

Here is a post from good few years back, showing the parents of these baby trees, among others — the Yulan was the seed parent and the M x loebneri hybrid was almost certainly the pollen parent, as that and the saucer were the only tree that overlapped in bloom time and the saucer magnolia is largely sterile.

The first time the Yulan set seeds, it set just four seeds from one flower and that was the total seed production for that year. I collected all four, but destroyed one in removing it from the fruit (way more delicate than it looked). To get the other three seeds to germinate, I planted them in a barely moist potting mixture and set the container in the fridge for two months, then set the container under lights and kept a casual eye on the moisture level. All three germinated, but they were not happy indoors and one died before I could get them outside. I planted the other two in a nursery bed in March and prayed it wouldn’t get too cold. They both thrived, and so maybe four or five … or six? … years ago I transplanted them to their permanent homes. These babies are maybe a decade old or so, about six feet tall, and as you can see, flowering for the very first time. The Yulan has opened all the flowers on the top half of the tree and will hit full bloom tomorrow, probably, barring disastrous weather.

I have four more younger Yulan hybrids in the nursery right now, plus a very special single ‘Woodsman’ x ‘Butterflies’ hybrid. They should all get transplanted to permanent locations this spring. I will have to hire someone to do it. I’ve had enough birthdays by now that don’t believe I’m quite up to digging out largish seedling trees from the nursery.

As a slightly related side-note, guess what else I’m doing to celebrate my birthday?

I’m starting a new Tuyo-world story, the one where Sinowa meets Marag.

YES, I AM STARTING A NEW BOOK AS A PRESENT TO MYSELF. Wow, I am so obsessive.

I’m going to give myself the rest of this week to write the opening scene(s) of this story and maybe the opening scene(s) of the Lau story for the pure fun of it.

NEXT week, I will go back to revision.

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Is the story about what it’s about?

This is from a post by Charlie Jane Anders at tor.com: What the Original Star Wars Trilogy Teaches Us About Storytelling

I think one decent litmus test for any story is: is it about what it’s about?

This may sound kind of silly—how can a story not be about what it’s about? Except that I think this happens fairly often, to some extent. It’s one of my pet peeves, and it’s something I think about a lot in my own work. I spent years learning how to make my stories be about what they’re about, and this is still something I struggle with.

Here’s what I mean: a lot of stories neglect their crux or their core issue, getting distracted by shiny objects or fun digressions. I’m not just talking about stakes, or plot stuff generally—I’m talking about the heart of the story, the thing that we keep coming back to and obsessing about. The emotional core.

Anders uses the original Star Wars movies to talk about this idea. Then:

1) What are the characters asking themselves and each other? What is/are the problem(s) or philosophical issue(s) that they worry about and debate and fuss over? Put another way, I think a really good scene is worth its weight in gold, and when I write a scene where the characters are talking about something and they seem really alive and present and I can feel their personalities shining through, I think to myself: I should find ways to get them to talk about that thing more, whatever it was. It’s obviously something that cuts close to the bone for these people.

2) What does the ending come down to? If the final moments of the book come down to an omelette-making contest in which the hero proves they can make the best omelette in the world, then I probably need to see the hero practicing making omelettes before this—but I might also want the hero to worry about whether they’re ever going to be a good enough omelette-chef, and what exactly is the nature of a perfect omelette? Do we judge omelettes by cohesion, shape, fluffiness, some other criterion? Is there any such thing as a Platonic ideal of a perfect omelette? 

These two points interest me because I think the first really captures something. I have seen quite a few people say that in some of my books, the conversations are more intense than the battles, and I like that! I hope the most intense conversations do seem AS intense as most of the action scenes, though maybe not every possible action scene. I mean, I sure hope the conversations hold the readers’ interest, and no doubt that depends on the reader, but that’s definitely the target I’m trying to hit. Let’s say that I want some of those conversations to capture something true.

But the second point here, I’m not sure I quite understand it. Or I’m not quite sure the part in bold is capturing this idea. What IS this idea? Let me re-read that and think about it for a second. Okay, maybe …

2) Does the ending carry weight?

I’m not sure that’s it. How about this …

2) Does the ending resonate?

I think maybe that’s closer. I think Anders is saying here that the ending needs to matter all the way through the story so that when you get to the ending, the resolution resonates with important thoughts and conversations and events that have taken place on the way. That way the ending seems important and justified. I think that’s what I meant when I asked Does the ending carry weight?

This is a kind of foreshadowing, isn’t it? The most important kind. The author needs to arrange for that to happen. This is also like saying the author ought to keep the end in mind all the way through (or go back and make sure it seems that way). It’s also like saying The story needs to have a central theme and the ending needs to resolve that theme.

That puts both Anders’ points into one statement: The problems that matter to the characters need to revolve around a central theme and the ending needs to resolve that them. Maybe it should be “problem” or “even philosophical problem” rather than theme; I’m not sure.

Regardless, if that happens, then the story is about what it’s about. That’s a nice phrase and I’m going to try to remember it.

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Update: Fine, Just Go With It

So, last week I opened up No Foreign Sky and began to turn worldbuilding text red in order to better assess how much there is and how infodumpy vs integrated the worldbuilding is. And this, in combination with the comments of first readers, is proving useful.

However, when we got to this three-day weekend, I kind of just really, REALLY wanted to go back to Tasmakat.

Hmm, I said. It’s only February, I said. I don’t actually need to have No Foreign Sky totally finished until May, I pointed out to myself.

Besides, my birthday is coming up, so why not treat myself to working on Tasmakat this weekend as a (slightly) early birthday present / consolation for getting older?

So I did.

The main revision here is rolling one minor character’s role into a different character’s role, and since this isn’t relevant until the final third of the book, that’s far (enormously far) from the most extensive revision I’ve ever done. Especially since for a whole whopping lot of the final third, neither character is on stage.

The significant decision regarded whether to remove the minor character entirely, and for various reasons I didn’t. Having removed minor characters in the past, I can tell you that the Find command is crucial for complete character removal. Never trust yourself to get every single mention of a character without it, that’s my motto. But I decided to reorient the minor character’s role in a different direction rather than remove him entirely. He has an even more minor yet still important role now.

Anyway, this turned out to be not that much trouble at all, EXCEPT, the minor character is male and the character who is picking up his role is a woman and therefore all the pronouns need to shift. You know what is really difficult that the Find command can’t help with one bit? That.

I know from experience that it’s almost impossible to get all the pronouns. You think you have, you’re positive you have, you re-read those sections a zillion times, but no! In one sentence, she raises his hand, and it’s all very provoking. I’m betting that every proofreader finds one instance of a wrong pronoun and that I still find one at the last second on my final read-through of a paper copy, because that just seems inevitable, but we shall see.

Anyway, I will totally finish this basic revision by the end of the day, I believe.

My new laptop is very nice and significantly less annoying in a thousand different ways, but I am having to train the grammar checker. That is, rather than going into the options and turning off everything in creation, I’m letting the grammar checker say “Are you sure you want a comma here?” and “Wordy — would you like to rephrase?” and hitting “Don’t check for this issue” over and over. That is less annoying than trying to adjust it all at once. I’m also observing the sorts of things it isn’t catching. It ought to pick up period-period-space, but it doesn’t always. It would be nice if it caught failure to put a period at the end of a paragraph, but it doesn’t always. It would be great if it caught “has” that should be “had” because for some reason I keep doing that lately, and I’m calling that part of the homonym blindness. It seems blind to that mistake, which is weird, since verb tense errors ought to be something a grammar checker is reasonably capable of picking up.

ANYWAY, after this, I will indeed go back to No Foreign Sky.

I’ve seen various sketches for the cover, by the way. You know what that means, of course. It means I have to try to write back cover copy.

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Recent Reading: Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen

Okay, my fundamental reaction to Other Birds was, This was surprisingly delightful.

And I say “surprisingly” because I honestly wasn’t sure about it at first.

When Other Birds begins, it’s just suffused with melancholy and sadness. We have several point of view protagonists carrying the story — here’s the setup:

When Zoey Hennessey comes to claim her deceased mother’s condo at The Dellawisp, she meets her quirky, enigmatic neighbors including a girl on the run, a grieving chef whose comfort food does not comfort him, two estranged middle-aged sisters, and three ghosts. Each with their own story. Each with their own longings. Each whose ending isn’t yet written.

So we have Zoey, who is chipper and upbeat, but her mother died when she was twelve and her father has barely tolerated her since he remarried. She does, however, have an invisible pigeon, so, I mean, there’s that.

Then we have the “girl on the run,” which is a dreadful description because Charlotte is not a girl; she is a young woman, and “on the run” is a serious exaggeration. Charlotte has a terrible past, however, and it’s true that she doesn’t want her past to catch up to her. Zoey and Charlotte are the two main protagonists.

Then there’s Mac, who is an award-winning executive chef at a successful restaurant —

— anybody else pause at that? Because that is just as great as you’re imagining. No, it’s more great than that. Mac is a wonderful character and I want SO MUCH to eat at his restaurant. But he was orphaned young and raised by the woman who taught him to cook, and she passed away some time ago — she was really old — and Mac has had trouble letting go of her. You recall the ghosts from the description, yes?

But moving on. Lizbeth Lime, who is seriously mentally unstable. Her sister, Lucy Lime, from whom she is bitterly estranged. Lizbeth’s son Oliver, who is hanging out with the wrong crowd way across the country. Also Frasier, who is the manager of the condo building called the Dellawisp, which is also the name of the little turquoise birds with the orange beaks, which live only here, apparently.

I’m not crazy about the cover, by the way, because while I’m all for artistic license, the birds look very wrong to me. Birds are unlikely to be so utterly mono-colored. Here, for example is an actual turquoise bird:

This is a turquoise dacnis, which is a type of honeycreeper, I believe. Photo by Dimitry B on Unsplash.

No real birds have solid, unchanging color all over. The birds on the cover look weird, like plastic toys. Cheap plastic toys. Personally, I made a real effort to visualize the dellawisps pretty much like the turquoise dacnis, because they’re described as really small and perky, and to me the dacnis looks right for the role.

Back to the actual book. As I say, initially the story is sad. It’s not that Zoey is sad, exactly. She’s actually really happy! She wants to live in her mother’s condo and get a feel for her mother that way. She wants to explore a new town and meet new people and she’s happy about the idea of starting college in the fall and really, Zoey is a charming protagonist, very easy to spend time with. But there’s this sadness in her past. I will just add that her mother’s name was Paloma, in case that suggests anything to anyone about the invisible pigeon.

Charlotte is in a tougher spot. She’s coping, but it’s tough.

Mac is not just a great chef with a difficult childhood behind him, he’s also shy and kind and did I mention I love Mac? But there’s all this sadness in his past. Everyone has some kind of sadness behind them …

… and then the story moves on. Zoey is so outgoing that she pulls Charlotte into a friendship, and then Mac, and it turns out Mac has been attracted to Charlotte for years — you probably recall that Sarah Addison Allen writes romances — and Oliver starts texting with Zoey and is reluctantly charmed and everything pulls together and is thoroughly touching and satisfying. Here’s a great exchange between Oliver and Zoey shortly after they meet in person:

“If you come, I promise not to scream your name and run into you, like I’ve done twice already,” she said. “Think about it.”
“I don’t know, that’s a nice way to be greeted.”
“You say that now, but wait until I do it to you in public.”
He stared at her before saying, “You’re exactly how I imagined you.”
“Thank you,” she said, delighted with the idea of him imagining anything about her. But then, “Wait. Was that a compliment?”
“Yes,” he said, “it was a compliment.”

Such a delightful moment, and Zoey is such a hopeful, upbeat person.

I see from reviews that I’m not the only one who felt this novel opened with a sad, difficult feel to it. Some readers, I see, did not like this book, partly because of that, but I do wonder if that means they stopped partway through, because, again, see above, completely delightful moment, and that certainly does show you how the story moves gently past the sadness in everyone’s past.

Other comments refer to the way that nothing exciting happens. Well, to be fair, I don’t think the story was super exciting and in fact the most exciting element could have been removed and that would have worked exactly as well as far as I’m concerned. Excitement is not what this story is about and not what it needs.

I think I would say that this story is understated, and that it’s essential theme is grief, and recovery via found family. I found it deeply touching. I don’t know that this is my favorite book by Sarah Addison Allen, maybe it isn’t. But on the other hand, maybe it is. It stuck in my head long after I finished it.

I’ll end with my favorite lines from the novel:

Stories aren’t fiction. Stories are fabric. They’re the white sheets we drape over our ghosts so we can see them.

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