Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 90

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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Writing Lessons from Sidney Sheldon

At Kill Zone Blog, this: Writing Lessons From Sidney Sheldon

First, biographical details. Wow, some unhappy things happened in Sheldon’s life. Professional success probably wasn’t enough to compensate, but still:

Sidney Sheldon is the only writer ever to have won a Tony, an Oscar, and an Edgar Award. Let’s see if anybody ever does that again!

In The Writer’s Handbook 1989, Sheldon talked about his method. Here’s some of what he said.

Sheldon was asked, What are some of the devices you have found most successful in getting your readers to ask breathlessly, “What’s next?”

His response: The secret is simple: Take a group of interesting characters and put them in harrowing situations. I try to end each chapter with a cliffhanger, so that the reader must turn just one more page to find out what happens next. Another thing I do is to cut out everything that is extraneous to the story I am telling.

Yes, that’s something to think about. I’ve never tried to end EVERY chapter with a cliffhanger. That can cause readers to turn pages — it sure can — recall that I just said in yesterday’s post that you’re not going to want to stop at the end of chapter 42 or 43 in Tasmakat — but it can also be a little much. Or it seems that way to me. I’m not sure; maybe I should try to actually do that and see what happens.

Like Hemingway, Sheldon would end his day’s work after beginning a new scene. Sometimes he’d quit mid-sentence. “In the morning, when you are ready to go to work, you have already begun the new scene.” Also, he would begin his writing sessions by lightly going over the previous day’s work.

Yes, I find both of those techniques useful. I don’t always start a new scene before quitting for the evening, but I do that if I can because it does help pick up the thread the next morning. It helps with motivation if that’s a problem.

And I virtually always begin each day by going over the previous scene or scenes. I do a lot of minor revision and tightening right then. Sometimes that’s fast, but sometimes I’ll go back over an emotionally difficult scene three or four or six times before I go on, shifting bits of dialogue around and tightening things up. Those of you who have read multiple drafts of one work have seen that happen, as scenes like that change a little bit at a time, over and over. I’m thinking of scenes like, oh, the part in Tuyo when Ryo fled and then was trying to work out whether he should go back; or the part in Tarashana when Ryo was emotionally stuck and Hokino was trying to break him out of it. Or for that matter in Shines Now, when Kuomat is stuck in a different way. That is exactly the kind of scene I was working on this past Sunday and again Monday. I’ll be working on that scene again as part of the revision process too.

From Sheldon again, also this:

You get your readers emotionally involved in your characters by being emotionally involved yourself. Your characters must come alive for you. When you are writing about them, you have to feel all the emotions they are going through—hunger, pain, joy, despair. If you suffer along with them and care what happens to them, so will the reader.

I think that’s true. I imagine some authors might be able to write emotionally engaging characters without being emotionally involved with their characters themselves, but that seems as though it would be difficult.

Lots more at the link. Click through and read the whole thing if you have a moment.

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What Horror can Teach Us

This is a post at Writer Unboxed, very timely since it’s Halloween. I’m wearing my T-shirt that says “I Don’t Do Costumes” and my spider earrings, but other than that, I don’t pay any attention to Halloween, so I generally just about forget it’s there. But of course a Halloween post is a nice thing to do, so hey, I’ll borrow this one.

What the heck was it that made this film [Blair Witch Project]—a 90-minute story of people getting lost in the woods, in which there’s hardly any blood, and we never even see a glimpse of the monster—the one that spooked me to the core?

Found footage movies like Blair Witch have gotten popular in part because they feel more “real.” I’m old enough to remember people having earnest discussions when the film came out over whether it was a true story. But I knew it was more than that. Not only did the found footage style of the film make it feel like something that could realistically happen to me: it made me think about what I would have done in a similar situation. What would I do if I got lost in a wooded area without a map? What would I do if I got lost in a wooded area without a map and I was with someone I didn’t know well, and whom I didn’t trust to keep their head in an emergency?

That train of thought alone was enough to get me feeling anxious.

Most horror films come with an element of the supernatural that removes the characters’ actions from my own day-to-day. What would I do if my train was suddenly filled with zombies? It’s a fun thought experiment, but I don’t know because it’s a scenario that’s highly unlikely to occur (though I’ve lived through enough unprecedented events that I’m not about to tempt fate by declaring in public that a zombie apocalypse cannot happen).

Getting lost in the woods, though? That’s something that definitely could happen. Blair Witch had the right combination of realness (the found footage style) and believability (I could get lost in woods that look just like those woods) to tap right into a well of fear at my center.

I enjoyed this post because I clearly remember those earnest discussions! I think I came down on the side of “No, it’s fiction,” but that was long enough ago that I’m not completely sure. I know I entertained the idea that it might be based on something real, because those discussions were EVERYWHERE at the time. I’m sure the producers made that happen, and good for them, it must have been a great advertising gimmick.

I have also been lost, as in mildly turned around, in the woods a lot of times. I did a project in grad school that took me out into the woods at night a lot, and finally I used reflective tape to mark the trails, although actually I got lost at night rather seldom because few patches of woods were so dense you couldn’t see the lights from homes around the edges. Also, I used to walk my Papillons off-leash in the woods around my house all the time, and though I seldom got turned around, that was because I learned to pay attention. (I don’t take dogs into the woods off leash now because I’m way too lazy these days … or maybe I’m too busy … to train a REALLY solid recall.)

Anyway, I think that immunized me to feeling all that nervous about being lost in the woods as an ordinary thing.

This post carries this idea into writing advice, as here:

Make your characters desperate to avoid the thing that scares them. 

That is really solid advice. But, I would say, it’s then often most powerful to put the characters in a situation where they have to bring themselves to face it. The decision to face the thing that most terrifies them is at the heart of a LOT of heroic fantasy novels because it’s at the heart of a lot of heroes. I’ve done this often enough, of course. In Tuyo, Ryo was put in this position. In Copper Mountain, Miguel had to make this choice. This is not at all unusual, and that’s because it’s really powerful and effective.

Sarah Rees Brennan does this over and over in The Demon’s Lexicon trilogy. That’s why it’s such a tremendously powerful trilogy.

Miles Vorkosigan hits this plot event in … it’s Mirror Dance, right? I mean the one where he has to face giving up his Naismith identity.

I’m sure (very sure) there are lots of others I’m not thinking of right this minute.

Oh, the Spiritwalker trilogy, that’s another one.

Right, how about And All the Stars — that throws multiple characters into this situation, though we don’t realize that until the astounding plot twist.

Ah, here’s one I think we have all probably read.

So I’d re-vamp that rule this way:

Make your characters desperate to avoid the thing that scares them … and then force them to make the choice to face that exact thing.

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Update: Not quite there yet, but So close

All right, so, no, I didn’t quite manage to write the ending of Tasmakat this weekend. Not entirely to my surprise! The rule that everything will take longer and need more words held true, as always.

But!

I did get through the action climax. It took longer to work my way to it and then all the way through it, and then it took some time to revise the next scene, which was already written, in order to flow smoothly into it from the action climax.

Having gotten through the action climax, I now have some useless advice! This is useless because I always check the chapter breaks last thing, AFTER revision, because chapters shorten, lengthen, get removed entirely, whatever. I prefer to keep chapters at about twenty pages or thereabouts until close to the end, when it’s quite normal for chapters to shorten for various reasons. Rechaptinating (is that a word?) is literally the last thing I do before sending a book to first readers and the last thing I do again before sending the final draft to proofreaders.

My point is, I’m not sure where the chapter breaks will wind up or even how many chapters there will be.

But at the moment, my suggestion is: Do NOT start chapter 42 at bedtime, thinking that you’ll finish this one chapter and then turn off the lights. No. You will not be able to stop until you are about six pages into chapter 45. I’m just telling you now. Chapter 42 ends on a cliffhanger. Chapter 43 ends on a cliffhanger. Chapter 44 does not resolve the situation. About six pages into chapter 45, you’ll be able to breathe a sigh of relief.

I’m not sure whether to say that chapter 45 begins the denouement. (That, by the way, is a word I can’t EVER spell correctly, no matter how many times I type it. I have to keep letting spellcheck fix it for me. I’m looking at it hard now to see if I can remember how to spell it for at least the rest of this post.)

I’ve been calling this part where I am now the second part of the relationship climax, and that’s true, that’s what it is. But you recall how everything worked in Tarashana. We had the action climax and then a rather brutal break in the relationship between Ryo and Aras and then a long recovery period. Then after that we had a different kind of denouement (hah, spelled it right the first time!) involving Tano and all that part, and working out various other relationship threads. I’m not sure whether to call all of that the denouement or what else to call it. It’s the period of falling action after the action climax, but it’s really important and a lot happens in it, including a secondary action climax, so maybe not. I’m not sure what other term might apply.

Regardless of the terminology, this is a lot like that. We’re through the action climax, which I hope you will all find exciting. There’s a fight, yes, that’s why it’s an action climax in the first place, right? Because there’s action. But I’ve tried hard not to allow the essential problem or this fight be too reminiscent of anything that happened in prior books. I think it works quite well, and I’m looking forward to comments from first readers.

But now that we’re past that, there’s going to be a long recovery period — quite different, but still, a long recovery period — which will be followed by working out various other relationship threads.

I have, by the way, now indicated that some of the Ro-Antalet are able to step from one place to another via magic. There’s a minor reason that was useful in the current chapter, but, of course, the MAIN reason is that I can now use that ability to step from the country of sand all the way back to, well, to the location where the last chapter(s) will take place, without passing through the distance between.

I’m not entirely sure how many last chapters there will be. This is where I will tie up all the loose threads. I’ve been thinking of that as one chapter, but it may be a series of short chapters instead, depending on how the scene shifts work out.

I’m not sure how long it will take to write this last little bit. I’m going back over this important part right here, I’ve been over it several times so far, tweaking this and that, and I’m sure I’ll go over it multiple times still. But I should move forward today or tomorrow, get out of this chapter and into the next, which may be the last chapter and is certainly, unquestionably, part of the denouement. (Took two tries, but I didn’t have to rely on spellcheck.)

How long is this novel now? Over 300,000 words?

Ha ha ha yes wow I really did not think it would go quite this long. If I stopped right this minute and cut a hundred pages from the back half, it would STILL be over 300,000 words. Obviously this is the single longest story I’ve ever written. Also, you know what, the complete arc of Tuyo/Tarashana/Tasmakat — which is truly all one story, though in three self-contained sections — is actually going to be about 680,000 thousand words total. That is about 2200 pages, for those of you who prefer pages.

Wow. That’s kind of stunning to think about even for me.

I wrote 22,000 words last week, by the way. It really helped that it is now too dark to take the dogs for a walk before I leave in the morning. I hate that, but it sure does give me more time in the morning. They are getting longer walks in the afternoon, and by the way I do have an 8000-square-foot yard, so it’s not like they are super deprived if I don’t take them all out for walks in the morning. It’s just they really like to go for walks.

I do think next week’s Monday update may be the last. If not, the full first draft will be really close to finished by then. Wish me a calm, non-stressful week, please! I want to be able to be totally obsessive this whole week and get this done! (OMG, I just realized I will also have a Gen Bio test to grade. NOOOOO. Well, at least it’s a short test.)

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20 Reasons Why Everybody Should Write Short Stories

Who else did a double take at this post title? I did. It’s the title of a post at Jane Friedman’s blog: 20 Reasons Why Everybody Should Write Short Stories

Speaking as someone who literally wrote ten novels before developing the ability to write short stories … most of which turn into novellas … I have to say, really? Because if you don’t have a knack for writing short fiction, you could sure struggle endlessly to produce barely successful short stories while all the time you could be working on a perfectly fine novel. Why would that be useful? Why would anyone recommend this?

Now, I know exactly why, or I think I do. I’m pretty sure the author of this post … someone named Elizabeth Sims … is going to say, “Writing short stories forces you to tighten up your plotting! It forces you to get rid of filler and fluff and make every word count! That will help when you write novels!” This would be sort of true, but it would also be wrong, and wrong in an annoying way, but I’m sure that’s what Sims is going to argue because what else can she possibly have in mind?

Let me read the post and see if I’m right. Here’s her first sentence:

Short stories force you to practice economy of language as well as of plot material.

Yep, I was right. The reason I find this annoying is because it was just so impossible for me to write short stories for such a long time, and it’s not helpful to be told how helpful writing short stories would be when you just can’t write short forms, or when it’s tremendously difficult to do it.

She’s making other arguments too, however, as perhaps we might have expected given the “twenty points” format of this post. So, what other reasons is she offering to support her thesis?

She’s arguing that it’s less intimidating to start writing when you think you have only a ten-page short story to write rather than a 400-page novel. This isn’t true. Or rather, it’s probably true FOR HER. It’s not true for ME. I don’t find the thought of starting a novel intimidating because I don’t sit there thinking, “Oh my God, how am I ever going to fill up 400 pages?” As you may have noticed, frequently the hard part for me is keeping the novel from getting a lot longer than that. Those writers who find novels easier than short stories — and there are lots of us — aren’t likely to find this argument persuasive.

What else?

Oh, she’s arguing that writing short stories allows you to try out different genres, try writing first- rather than third-person narratives, experiment with different styles and protagonists and voices. Fine, I somewhat reluctantly acknowledge that this is true.

All right, let me skim forward … oh, here’s a marketing argument: you can give away a short story as a teaser to hook readers into a series of novels. Yes, you can, and yes, I have tried several times to write a story story that could do that for the Tuyo series, but alas, so far everything has ranged from a short novel to a really really long novel, so that hasn’t worked.

When I eventually look into setting up a “book funnel” and so forth, that would make a lot of sense for the Black Dog series. Obviously I have heaps of stories there. I think “The Master of Dimilioc,” which is as you remember the one where Ezekiel kills Thos Korte, would be the obvious choice. It’s a prequel story that doesn’t require the reader to know much about the world or the characters. I should definitely look into doing that. I just don’t want to take the time to do it.

What I should REALLY do is write a short story in the Tuyo world that does not contain a spoiler about, you know, that crucial plot point revealed in the first book. Then (somehow) a short story in the Death’s Lady world. Then, I don’t know, a couple of other short stories, I suppose. Package that up with a Black Dog story and give the story collection away. That’s been in my mind for a while. But I don’t want to take the time right this minute to write new short stories because I’m busy with novels and also, despite Sims’ opinion, writing short stories is hard for me.

Sims argues: “A short story is a break from the demands of a novel, which can get to feel onerous. Writing a short story in the midst of a tough slog in a novel can change your mental scenery and freshen the wind at your back.”

And yeah, no, that’s not how it feels to me. For me, if a novel becomes a slog (frequently they do), then taking a break is not indicated. Slogging forward is indicated. Take too much of a break and the odds are pretty good that novel is going to be hard to pick up again.

Okay, having skimmed through the whole thing, I don’t see anything else that feels like it applies to me.

But I grant, you really can try out a different kind of voice or style or something weird like second-person narrative, or a wildly different genre, or whatever else appeals to you, more quickly in short stories than in novels. That’s probably a genuine advantage to short forms.

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Sale: A knot in the grain by Robin McKinley

In case you like McKinley, but haven’t been completist enough to get this short story collection, A Knot in the Grain is on sale right now for the Kindle version. I have no idea how long this sale will last.

I like some of these stories better than others, but personally, I think “Buttercups” is good enough to justify picking up the collection.

And thanks to commenter Carol for the tip!

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Let’s have a fight

Yet another exceedingly helpful answer about sword fighting from Eric Lowe on Quora: I’m trying to write from the perspective of someone who’s talented at sword fighting, but find little details about sword fighting reading online. How do I approach this?

A short excerpt:

Skilled fighters don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what the swords and feet and bodies are actually doing. That part becomes pretty automatic at a certain level of skill. Instead, the well-trained fighter is thinking about what it all means: who’s winning, who’s losing, and how that might turn around.

The good news from a writing standpoint is that this is what most authors are better equipped to write anyway. …

Long answer, like many of his. Video clips and excerpts from possible sword fighting scenes included. Uh, also maybe a mild spoiler for Tasmakat, if you read the comments to this post. But a very mild, vague spoiler because before I posted this, I went back and edited my comments to remove some of the specifics.

Moving on:

I already knew that advice to learn sword fighting yourself in order to write scenes involving sword fights had to be somewhere between overstated and nutty. You can’t learn to do everything before you write scenes involving everything; I mean, obviously you can’t. How could that possibly work? To take one excellent example, I’m not a surgeon, and if I were, I wouldn’t have been trained in medical techniques 2000 years ago, so if I’m going to write a surgeon protagonist, what then?

Ditto for the Death’s Lady trilogy: I’m not a psychiatrist and I’m not going to get multiple degrees before writing a novel or series.

Obviously an author does a certain amount of research and tries for plausibility, regardless of the thing she’s writing about. Flying kids, psychiatry, whatever, obviously I write about a zillion things where I am not and can’t be an actual subject-matter expert.

For that matter, at this point in my life I definitely, for sure, could not learn sword fighting. Although I’m glad to say that last weekend, for the first time in five months, I took some of my dogs to the park. I can now walk (slowly) for pretty long distances. I can also go up stairs without pain (in the morning, though not in the afternoon, and down is still problematic). Regardless, progress! I’m hoping that by Christmas or so, my knee will be back to normal. Or close.

Anyway, it’s perfectly obvious that nobody actually thinks authors have to learn subject-matter expertise before writing novels involving whatever that subject may be, so why does that advice even get proffered? Which it does; at least one answer to the above question offers that exact advice. So it’s good to see that Eric Lowe agrees with me about that, since as far as I can tell, he knows way more about sword fighting and (much more important to me personally) about how to handle scenes involving sword fighting than practically anybody else in the universe.

While looking at Eric’s answers, here’s one I particularly like and recommend you read all the way through for the sheer entertainment value: Assuming I know nothing about sword fighting, but I’m about to be forced into a sword fight, what’s the best advice you can give me in 5 minutes or less?

In case you don’t have time to click through right this minute, here’s an excerpt:

First thing: choice of weapons. If you are given the choice of weapons, provided that it’s a sword, pick the longest thing you can. For you, in this situation, all considerations are secondary to length. If you have the choice of a one-handed weapon and a two-handed weapon of equal length, pick the two-handed weapon. Always fight with both hands on a weapon (even if it’s the same weapon) if you can.

Second thing: do not cut. I don’t care what kind of sword you have. If you have only five minutes and have never handled a sword before, your plan is to stab that guy like a homicidal sewing machine. Non-fencers often underestimate how hard it is to cut with a sword. This does not mean that you need to put a lot of force into a cut – anybody can do that, and you usually don’t need to. It’s about the technical demands of cutting as opposed to thrusting. History is full of half-trained swordsmen whose cuts failed to inflict more than a superficial wound. By contrast, it is really hard to screw up “the pointy end goes into the other man.”

Third thing: keep your point in line. In this situation, your sword is for stabbing the other guy like a homicidal sewing machine. Stab, stab, stab, stab.

Fourth thing: keep your distance. Let your feet defend you, not your sword. Your sword – for you, in this situation – is for stabbing the other guy like a homicidal sewing machine.

Fifth thing: don’t stop. No matter what happens, don’t stop. It doesn’t matter if he’s better than you. It doesn’t matter if you’re bringing a sword to a freaking machine gun fight. Your ability to walk away from this, to go home, depends on you deciding, right now, ahead of time, that you are going to make your opponent wish he’d never been born. Did you stab him? Stab him again. You get hit, you stab him. He gets on top of you and you start wrestling? Stab him. No matter what happens, you must stab him. Stab him like a homicidal sewing machine. On PCP. You want to see your kids again? Your lover? You wanna go home? Stab him. Stab him. Stab stab stab stab stab stab stab STAB HIM until you literally can’t stab any more, then stab him again.

How about that? I mean, vivid AND persuasive. Now I’m just dying to hand some untrained protagonist a sword and throw her into a terrible situation. STAB STAB STAB. It’ll probably happen someday, the kinds of books I write. Maybe I can have her disguised as a man, throw a prison break and a bodyguard into the same story, and hit a bunch of fun tropes all at once. I mean, don’t hold your breath — I’ve got lots of other stuff I’m doing already — but still. STAB STAB STAB.

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Would you turn the page?

Here’s one of those “Flogging the Pro” posts at Writer Unboxed: Flog a Pro: Would You Turn the First Page of this Bestseller?

Here are the first couple of paragraphs of the first page — the very first paragraphs a reader would see. Remember, this is a bestseller.

“Who the hell is this?” barked Amos Decker.

He had been awoken from a sleep far deeper than he usually achieved. The insomnia had been getting worse, and it was adding nothing positive to his already unpredictable temperament. He hadn’t looked at the phone number on the screen before answering it. In his line of work, calls came at all times of the day or night and not always from those on his contact list.

“Amos, it’s Mary Lancaster.” Her voice was low, tenuous. “Do you remember me?”

Amos Decker sat up stiffly in his bed and rubbed his unshaven face. He saw on his phone screen that it was nearly three in the morning.

My very first response: Is that clunky or what?

First, starting with dialogue is tricky. It’s something to handle carefully, and really you should only do that if you’re sure it’s working the way you want it to. I don’t hate that first line, but it doesn’t really work for me either.

Second, the second paragraph just seems clunky. Every sentence of that paragraph seems clunky. I don’t mind the author telling rather than showing — that can work fine — it can even work in the very first paragraphs of a novel, though again, I think telling this much in the first paragraphs is something the author should think about carefully. But the real problem isn’t the telling; it’s the clunkiness. How would I revise that paragraph if it were me? I’m not sure. Let me see … how about this?

He had been jerked infuriatingly out of sleep for once deep and dreamless. He didn’t look at the number on the screen, just snatched up the handset and barked, “Who the hell is this?” before he was entirely awake.

What do you think? It’s not deathless prose, but I do think it’s better than the version that made it into print. The first pages are so important, and I just think the author could have done better without that much effort.

Given these posts, I’m really starting to wonder how many bestsellers jump to the top purely on the reputation and solid fanbase of the author, who might be pretty good at storytelling, but is kind of slacking off on the sentence-level craft. In this case, this is David Baldacci. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything of his. I guess this book is a police procedural or a thriller, but given this first page, I’m going to continue not reading anything of his.

Anyway, click through if you’d like to read the whole first page and vote. I voted No, obviously. Nothing about the first page made me want to turn to the second.

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So you’re Stuck in a Cozy Mystery

This is a fun post from Book Riot: SO YOU’RE STUCK IN A COZY MYSTERY: A SURVIVAL KIT

It’s really about preparing to be the protagonist in a cozy mystery, complete with suggestions for lockpicks.

You, my friend, have stumbled upon a mystery. 

Surely you’ve prepared for this? You can whip open your carpet bag and pull out exactly the item you need. Perhaps a camera to photograph the crime scene? Or a notebook to take down your observations? No? Nothing? What’s that? A phone? Sure, if you want to call someone else to take care of this.

Listen, if you’re planning a life of amateur sleuthing, you’re going to have to be prepared. … Of course, you’re going to need a flashlight. A nice heavy one can do double duty — yes, obviously that is what I mean. And no, I don’t want to hear another word about your phone. Notoriously shoddy batteries and no reception in caves.

And on to the suggestions for how to Be Prepared, like a cross between Miss Marple and a boy scout.

However, I particularly liked the reference to this book, which I’d never heard of, but it certainly sounds entertaining.

This looks a lot like the Cozy English Mystery version of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which I have enjoyed flipping through. As you know, DWJ’s The Tough Guide is the … “handbook to everything you might find: Evil, the Dark Lord, Stew, Boots (but not Socks), and what passes for Economics and Ecology” in a fantasy novel. I didn’t know anybody had written a version for any other genre. It kind of makes me wonder what various other travel guides to genres might look like. The “don’t get murdered” idea makes me think of one for horror, with blood and worse dripping from every page …

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Just Appearing on Amazon: Cliopher’s second book

Out today and available for preorder on Kindle: At the Feet of the Sun

And thanks to commenter Yen, who kindly send me an email to let me know!

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