Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 89

Back cover copy

Well, shoot, here’s something I bumped into when putting Tasmakat up for preorder: the need to write the back cover description.

So I wrote the description really fast. I will undoubtedly tweak it, especially as you all generally have excellent suggestions. Perhaps you will again. Please consider the following:

It’s a long journey from the northern border of the winter country all the way back to the summer lands — and every problem Aras left behind will be waiting for the moment he sets foot on the southern bank of the river.

Released from every vow he ever swore to Aras, Ryo might stay with his own people, but he can’t let Aras face every waiting challenge alone — especially as the struggle they faced together in the land of the shades still haunts them both.

But even the journey to the capital of the summer country will only be the beginning …

What do you think? Remember, the point is not to be accurate — though reasonable accuracy is desirable, of course. The point is to make the book sound like something readers would want to buy.

I’m assuming that the majority of readers who finish Tarashana will be inclined to click through to Tarashana and buy it regardless of the back cover description. Nevertheless, I’d like to the description to be reasonably enticing. So how about it? Comments, please.

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Update: FINISHED AT LAST

Okay, so, I actually had a four-day weekend, which was exceedingly convenient.

On Thursday, I finally wrote the last chapter! YAY! It took practically all day, thought it’s not a long chapter.

Then on Friday I went back to the part I was most certain I wanted to cut and deleted a chapter and half. This also deleted a conversation I like, and that conversation may well come back later in a different spot, but for right now, that was a satisfying chance to zap ten thousand words in one fell swoop.

Then on Saturday … I wrote the last chapter a second time. Various things about the first version bothered me, mostly things that boiled down to a lack of intimacy. Both Tuyo and Tarashana end with a brief scene with just Aras and Ryo, and this one ended with a crowd scene. This felt wrong. So I deleted most of the last chapter and did it over, reducing the crowd and finishing the chapter a different way. It wound up 2000 words longer, but whatever. I will most likely fiddle with it some more, but I like it much better now. That also took almost the whole day, even though I kept parts of the original draft.

Then on Sunday I opened the file and gazed at it for a moment. Then, rather than doing anything big — there are two chapters I will probably combine, for example, cutting half the length and avoiding some repetition. That’s what I mean by big. But rather than doing anything like that, I went back to about p. 350, which is where Part II starts, and began re-reading and cutting from there. I’m aiming to cut 1000 words per chapter (more or less). More would be better. (A lot better.) Nearly all the cutting is at the sentence level, though every now and then I find a paragraph or even a couple consecutive paragraphs I can cut.

What I’m doing is refamiliarizing myself with everything, especially the overall flow of events and the basic flow of character arcs. Plus cutting. Once I’ve gone through this process, not only will the draft be shorter (It got insanely long, it really did.), I’ll also be in a better position to do the big things, such as combining chapters and deciding whether to put back in some of the more important deleted material. I can also decide whether I should cut something I like, but that doesn’t contribute the the basic character arcs or plot. This should all be finished by the end of the month, and that’s when I’ll send drafts to first readers.

When in doubt, I will leave stuff in, by the way. Everyone who gets a look at the first finished draft will also get a request to please mark any scenes they think are extraneous or any scenes they skimmed, so it’s possible more cutting will happen on that basis, though in fact generally that doesn’t happen. But it might this time; we’ll see.

A certain amount of skimming is possibly unavoidable. Several times, I compress twenty days or whatever to a page or two. Those transition paragraphs need to be there because those days are in the story’s timeline; they have to be referenced at least briefly. If the reader feels those are unimportant transition paragraphs, that is true, but they can’t be cut. A tiny amount of useful character interaction can take place in scenes like that, but fundamentally, they are unimportant. If you pay attention, I would bet you can spot pages just like that in whatever fiction you’re reading now, unless the whole story takes place in 48 hours or something.

Anyway, after that, I’ll do final revision based on the feedback from first readers. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that the book may get somewhat longer again at that point. But my hope is to keep the final version under 1000 pages, which ought to be possible, heaven knows. I’d prefer closer to 900 pages, which is still fairly insane, but not actually that much longer than Tarashana. Anyway, THEN the proofing process, which will involve multiple reads of the paper version before any other proofreaders see it. My actual goal is have it so clean nobody spots more than fifteen typos, though I’m guessing that even if I manage that, most of those will be unique to each proofreader.

Meanwhile! I’m going to put it up for preorder. I may hit the Go button by the end of today, so Tasmakat may be up by tomorrow. It may take some days for Amazon to link it to the series page or my author page or whatever. Sometimes all that takes a bit. I’ll post a link when it’s up, of course!

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Ranking Firefly episodes

This is fun: Every Episode Of Firefly Ranked Worst To Best

I have strong opinions on this! At least, on which episodes belong close to the bottom and which ones belong close to the top; I’m sure it’s hard to really sort out the top three and bottom three.

We’ve all seen all the episodes, yes? Including the ones which were never aired? Because the ones that didn’t get shown include some great episodes! I think the DVD and Blu-ray sets have all the episodes. The one where Saffron/Bridget/Yolanda reappears is one of those that wasn’t originally aired, I believe, and imo that episode is close to the top. I shaved off my beard for you, devil woman! What’s that episode called? Oh, right, “Trash.”

I don’t know that this was my very favorite episode, however. I really loved the one where Simon got everyone on board for a heist of a lot of medical supplies. Tons of great stuff in that episode. That was, let me see, “Arial.” But there’s also the one where Serenity is dead in space, only Mal aboard, with tons of great flashbacks beautifully integrated into the frame story. And the one where that bounty hunter breaks into Serenity and River pretends to be even spookier than she usually is. And the one where Mal and Wash wind up in a really terrible situation and the crew breaks them free. Remember that bit at the end where Zoe says, “I think this is something the captain needs to do for himself,” and Mal gasps, “No … no it’s not!” Hah, good times, good times. Now I’m really missing this show.

All right, let me see where this list puts those episodes … ah, I see they rank the episodes from “best” to “bestest,” which honestly seems fair. “Heart of Gold” is at the bottom. I agree. Ah, “Out of Gas,” the one with Mal staggering through the abandoned Serenity, with flashbacks all through the frame story, is their number one. Hard to argue!

Okay, let me wind up this way: Vixy and Tony, possibly the best filk group out there, have done several Firefly filksongs.

Here’s Mal’s song.

And here’s Inara’s song, which has grown on me over time.

And here’s Kaylee’s delightful song.

And, not on a DVD, here’s a song from YouTube about Vera, Jayne’s gun.

Here’s the main website for Vixy and Tony. You can listen to all their songs there, and I suggest you do that. I hardly know which of their songs are my favorites. “My Love was Like the Moon” is up there. So is “Erased,” “Persephone,” “The Girl That’s Never Been” — there’s a great one to sing along to — “Dawson’s Christian” is another that’s especially great that way. “Eight-Legged Blues” is wonderfully funny. And of course, “Uplift” is fantastic.

Well, I didn’t intend to segue into filk, but there you go, enjoy! If anybody knows of a filk group that’s anywhere near as good, please mention them, because I would definitely be interested.

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A Fortress in Paradise

This is off topic, because it’s not about writing or even dogs.

Well, we’ll say that this is a great example of narrative nonfiction, and therefore reasonable to pull out and show you all. It’s also just really funny. It’s from, let me see, American Digest. I don’t remember where I originally saw the link.

I Had a Fortress Once In Paradise

One of the rare pleasures of having boys for children is that, if you are their mother, you can find yourself at the washing machine in the garage holding half a stick of TNT you’ve just found in your 7-year-old’s jacket. Now that is a feeling you don’t get every day.

More pleasant still after seeing your child has a half-stick of explosive in his pocket is the thought, “Just where is the other half?”

Naturally, my mother could not wait to telephone my father at work with the joyful news of explosives in the kid’s clothing. His reaction was, I am sure, “Just where is the other half?”

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Portal Fantasy Bundle

All right here’s a bundle you may want to check out — the SFWA bundle of portal fantasy!

Have you ever had one of those days where you just stopped and thought: What Am I Doing Here? In this StoryBundle we put a fantasy spin on that
with a host of books where the main characters ask themselves exactly that. What am I doing here? And hey…wait…was that magic?

I’m sure that you notice The Year’s Midnight in the center of the lower row.

This is a limited time bundle, so if anything sounds interesting, pick it up while you can. Click through to find out more about the books included. At the link, you can click on the cover of each book to see a synopsis.

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Update: Tasmakat — Cover reveal

Weekends are too short!

On the other hand, you know what the time change means to me? It means I’m suddenly getting up in the middle of the night (practically) and boom! there is now time to write in the morning. I don’t care that I’m now flipping off the lights at eight pm. I’ll adjust my own time to more closely approximate a normal person’s schedule AS SOON AS I’M DONE WITH TASMAKAT, which will be any day now. Though I may leave my schedule orthogonal to a normal schedule until I’ve also gotten through the first fast revision pass, which, seriously, should not take long as long as I have time to work on it during the morning.

I’m not in the last chapter. Not quite. I’m very definitely in the denouement (hah! spelled it right first time!). All kinds of important characters are appearing for little cameos and a few lines of dialogue, just enough to let me tie off their various threads. This is requiring a bit of going back and forth as I realize someone hasn’t said anything for eight paragraphs and is she still actually there? Because if she’s there, she better say something. Plus this is necessarily a crowd scene, and getting more crowded as we go, and that’s always intrinsically difficult.

I’ve got just a few more of these loose threads to tie off before I write the last scene, and in fact something else that ought to happen here just came into my mind — fine, two more things — and this chapter is , of course, stretching out a bit. However, I’m letting this penultimate chapter stretch, because I want the last scene — actually, the last two scenes — plus the transition to those scenes, I guess — to be set off in a chapter of their own. That will be a short chapter, which is fine; the very last chapter is usually short.

The last chapter, by the way, will be Chapter 50, and if that weren’t true, I’d rechaptinate the whole thing to make it true, because 49 chapters is silly when you can wind up with 50 even.

How long is the draft now?

I’m embarrassed to tell you. No, whatever number of words you just thought of, probably the draft is longer than that. I am just longing to take an ax to the back 2/3 of this draft, but I absolutely will not do that until I have written this last … little … tiny … bit.

I will, however, show you the cover now.

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Getting stuff right about swords

Anyone interested in maintaining swords? Here’s a helpful post Eric Lowe pointed me to: Resharpening damaged swords.

A few paragraphs of text plus a video. This is about how Medieval people would have resharpened notched swords, not about how anybody today would do it, which is why it’s relevant to me, and possibly to some of you. It’s also just interesting.

I never plan to write a character who’s a smith, but this is a nice bit of research to kind of have in the back of my mind.

While on the topic, we do have a handful of fantasy novels where the protagonist IS a smith, in particular a bladesmith, including The Swordsmith by Eleanor Arneson and (a duology I’ve mentioned before and loved) Powers and Dominions by James Burton.

Also, the protagonist in Merrie Haskell’s delightful MG novel Castle Behind Thorns is a blacksmith’s apprentice. Not specifically a bladesmith as in the above examples, but still.

Anybody got a suggestion for other fantasy novels where smithcraft of any kind, or bladesmithing in particular, is dealt with in detail?

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Narrative Distance

A post by Donald Maass at Writer Unboxed: The Dilemma of Narrative Distance

Maass starts this way:

The most difficult aspect of craft for participants at the workshops that I teach to master is immersive POV.  (Sometimes referred to as deep POV.)  It’s puzzling, since that narrative perspective is so much like how our human consciousness really is.

Briefly, immersive POV is an enhancement of close third-person POV, that durable perspective on the page which strictly reports only what a POV character would see and hear.  Immersive POV takes that idea a step further.  It reports on the page not only what the camera’s eye and microphone’s ear would get, but a character’s whole experience of what is happening.

The simplest way to understand the difference is that immersive POV adds to any story moment what a character is feeling or thinking about anything in the story environment.  The advantage of immersive POV is that it can capture in words non-material things, such as the mood of a crowd or the effect of a painting on a viewer.

I’m puzzled because to me immersive third person seems pretty common. My impression may be biased because CJC uses close third and I’ve read all her books a lot of times (excluding the Rusalka ones), and she’s written so many books that maybe it just seems a lot like half the SFF novels in the world are written in immersive third. Still, it does seem common.

I think I used to write more in close-ish third person and now I often write in thoroughly immersive third. I mean that I used to say, “…..,” he thought more often, while now I more often bring the reader into the characters pov more deeply than that. Or, thinking about it, I think I kind of do both at the same time. I mean, here, look at this, a tidbit from Keraunani:

The driver had disappeared among the bandits up ahead, so that confirmed Esau’s opinion of the man. The driver’s boy hadn’t. He was a kid, maybe twelve or thirteen, picked up to help care for the horses and heave luggage around. No more a bandit than the merchant’s daughter. Esau disliked the driver for putting the kid in this situation almost more than for setting up the rest of them.

Up again, and down again, and look at this, the narrow mouth of a cave. Wasn’t this going to be fun.

Oh, hey, Keraunani is up to 100 ratings and reviews on Amazon! That’s nice to see, good round number, book’s only been out since, I’m not sure, this spring sometime. 4.6 stars, the same as Tuyo. Well good. But what I meant to say was that Esau disliked the driver is close third. Look at this, wasn’t this going to be fun is immersive third. Both are useful, and I think the overall feel when writing like this is immersive.

So, what does Maass have to say about this?

There are two ways to convey the substance of a story: to float apart from it or to dive into the deep end.  There are pluses and minuses to each approach.  Each gives readers a different reading experience.  Standing apart from the story means showing what’s happening to readers, letting readers see the story in their mind’s eyes and feel the story’s effect for themselves.

Conveying characters’ emotional and cognitive involvement in what’s happening, on the other hand, is intimate.  It brings readers right inside the mind and heart of someone else, bringing alive another person’s authentic self and enriching a story with meanings that readers might not have found on their own.

It’s a dilemma, then: Do you trust your readers to “get” the story or do you want them to lift them from themselves and immerse them in another’s consciousness?  In one approach, readers are sure to see the story vividly.  In the other approach, readers are certain to understand what characters in the story are going through.

This is really interesting! I hadn’t thought about it quite like this, partly because I’m not at all analytical when I write, so I never ask myself what I want the reader to do or feel. I’m just telling the story. However, looking at craft analytically does interest me. I see that Maass is arguing that the skilled writer should use both, just as the skilled writer uses both telling and showing. That seems right. He’s arguing that the author ought to use both to surprise the reader:

Thus, the choice has less to do with what’s going on at any given moment on the page and more to do with what will catch readers off guard.  Readers may see more vividly when they feel something they don’t expect.  They may feel more profoundly when they are directed away from feelings themselves and are instead cued by things that they visualize, or hear, or should, but that are missing.

Interesting! Maass then goes on to illustrate his point with an excerpt from a novel, taking an analytical look and concluding:

Thus, the choice [of immersive or more distant] has less to do with what’s going on at any given moment on the page and more to do with what will catch readers off guard.  Readers may see more vividly when they feel something they don’t expect.  They may feel more profoundly when they are directed away from feelings themselves and are instead cued by things that they visualize, or hear, or should but that are missing.

More like that in the post: excerpts followed by analysis of how close the third-person pov is and why that works.

His conclusion:

My point here is that what feels like a dilemma, a set of opposing and mutually contradictory narrative modes, actually only exists in a writer’s mind.  When narrative distance is neither always aloof nor relentlessly intimate but rather blends together, it allows us to experience the story both for ourselves and as the characters also do.  There’s room for both.  Even more, I would say that there’s a need for both.  The dilemma has a solution and it’s to recognize that there’s really no dilemma in the first place.

A good post, interesting and meaty. By all means click through if this is the sort of thing that interests you.

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Public Service message: Aargh! edition

Listen, if you have children who are in school, would you kindly teach them effective memorization techniques now so that they have those skills available when they are in college?

I mean brute-force, no-frills, straight-up rote memorization.

Quit worrying about critical thinking so much and teach children how to effectively and quickly memorize a decent number of facts. Also, they need to be able to tell whether they know something or don’t know something.

If they can put memorized facts into a framework of broader knowledge, great.

They can think critically about information only if they have the information in their heads so that it’s available to think about.

This Public Service Message brought to you by a good number of General Bio students who apparently just cannot sit down and memorize the basics of the steps of mitosis and meiosis, or the three basic things mitosis is for vs the one thing meiosis is for.

I really thought this test would be better.

One student who is trying hard to improve her scores is effectively doing so. Whatever she’s doing, it’s working. But other students who are definitely trying to improve their scores aren’t succeeding. Why not? Because they can’t memorize a small amount of basic material. This is most likely either because they just have no clue how to memorize stuff (even though I have explained multiple techniques that will generally work) or because they can’t tell whether they can recall information out of their own head versus recognize or understand it when someone else explains it (even though I have explained that this is a common problem and how to avoid that problem).

Another possible problem is sheer reading comprehension. Maybe some students can’t answer questions because they don’t understand the question when they read it. A lot of students are answering “What are the functions of mitosis?” by telling me something about mitosis that is true, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the functions of this process.

A third reason, of course, is total refusal to read the textbook OR go carefully over the powerpoints OR ask me questions outside of class.

The students who ARE asking me questions outside of class are tending to do better, which is not astonishing. The two students who got As on the most recent test also stayed after class yesterday when I said I was staying in the classroom to answer questions for anyone who cared to stay and work on genetics assignments at that time — a time that I know their schedules are clear because the class didn’t officially end as early as I ended it.

Regardless of the various reasons — I know one girl’s dad has cancer — he is my age, btw — anyway, regardless, this is very frustrating for me. I can’t imagine the students are very happy about it either. If they had learned effective memorization techniques AND that sometimes you are going to have to sit down and spend an hour memorizing stuff you don’t care about, I’m pretty sure most of the students who are struggling would be doing better.

Next up: I handed out a genetics checkpoint — not a quiz, but a thing taken like a quiz, worth participation points and extra credit. I want to see right now whether any of the most basic stuff about genetics is sticking. I mean, the first question just asks: identify the following two-letter genotypes as homozygous, heterozygous, or nonsense. I would really like everyone to get this sort of thing right because if they don’t get this very basic stuff, they won’t be following anything right now.

Update: The student who emailed me to tell me she didn’t understand anything about genetics pretty much doesn’t. Most students are doing better, but some have not figured out that each gamete must have ONE allele of EACH type, which is absolutely key.

One student said that an AB genotype could be nonsense OR codominance, while an ab genotype was definitely nonsense. I wrote many happy little comments next to that perfect answer, which I did not expect anyone to give me.

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Book Review: the Malleus Maleficarum

I don’t have time to write a post today, but from Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Did you know you can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum? You can go into a bookstore and say “I would like the legendary manual of witch-hunters everywhere, the one that’s a plot device in dozens of tired fantasy novels”. They will sell it to you and you can read it.

So Scott bought a copy and read it. This is his review, posted for Halloween.

I was only dimly aware that the Malleus Maleficarum was a thing. But this is an interesting (and long, of course, because this is Scott Alexander we’re talking about here) review. Here we go …

I myself read the Malleus in search of a different type of wisdom. We think of witch hunts as a byword for irrationality, joking about strategies like “if she floats, she’s a witch; if she drowns, we’ll exonerate the corpse.” But this sort of snide superiority to the past has led us wrong before. We used to make fun of phlogiston, of “dormitive potencies”, of geocentric theory. All these are indeed false, but more sober historians have explained why each made sense at the time, replacing our caricatures of absurd irrationality with a picture of smart people genuinely trying their best in epistemically treacherous situations. Were the witch-hunters as bad as everyone says? Or are they in line for a similar exoneration?

And then, later (much later), toward the end:

I’m not especially interested in rehabilitating Henry Kramer, at least not in the same way Montague Summers is. But I think there’s a tragic perspective on him. This is a guy who expected the world to make sense. Every town he went to, he met people with stories about witches, people with accusations of witchcraft, and people who – with enough prodding – confessed to being witches. All our modern knowledge about psychology and moral panics was centuries away. Our modern liberal philosophy, with its sensitivity to “people in positions of power” and to the way that cultures and expectations and stress under questioning shape people’s responses – was centuries away. If you don’t know any of these things, and you just expect the world to make sense, it’s hard to imagine that hundreds of people telling you telling stories about witches are all lying…. … …

This is how I think of myself too. As a psychiatrist, people are constantly asking me questions about schizophrenia, depression, chronic fatigue, chronic Lyme, chronic pain, gender dysphoria, trauma, brain fog, anorexia, and all the other things that the shiny diploma on my wall claims that I’m an expert in. In five hundred years, I think we’ll be a lot wiser and maybe have the concepts we need to deal with all of this. For now, I do my best with what I have. But I can’t shake the feeling that sometimes I’m doing harm (and doing nothing when I should do something is a kind of harm!)

They say the oldest and strongest fear is the fear of the unknown. I am not afraid of witches. But I am afraid of what they represent about the unknowability of the world. Somewhere out there, there still lurk pitfalls in our common-sensical and well-intentioned thought processes, maybe just as dark and dangerous as the ones that made Henry Kramer devote his life to eradicating a scourge that didn’t exist.

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