Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 96

Killer Crabs and Bad Leprechauns

An entertaining post about back cover description: Killer crabs and bad leprechauns: how the best book blurbs excite our brains

Book jackets have been enticing potential readers for nearly 200 years with copy that amuses and intrigues. Here, a veteran blurb writer reveals their secrets and the history of the craft …

My favorite bit is this:

5 Old blurbs are unhinged

Most blurbs written more than 30 years ago now sound highly eccentric. Many don’t want to be liked: the anti-blurb on an elderly paperback of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory informs us that: “A baleful vulture of doom hovers over this modern crucifixion story.” Some bear little or no resemblance to the books they describe, such as the gloriously tin-eared 1990s Tor editions of Jane Austen’s novels. “Mom’s fishing for husbands – but the girls are hunting for love” is the sell on Pride and Prejudice.

Horror blurbs, especially those on the night-black Pan paperbacks found in holiday cottages, are their own special brand of nonsense, whether summoning up killer crabs (“A bloody carnage of human flesh on an island beachhead!”) or psychotic leprechauns (“They speak German. They carry whips…”).

I did wonder about the “bad leprechauns” in the title of the post! Glad get to see where that came from.

Since we’re looking at back cover description, here’s a post at Jane Friedman’s blog about how to write good back cover copy. The take-home message here is: be brief. I agree with that. Sometimes one encounters back cover description on Amazon that goes on and on and on, describing every important detail about the plot, the characters, or sometimes both. Don’t do that. No one is going to read that, and even if they did, it’s impossible to make that interesting to read. Be brief. Really brief.

Here’s a post on the same topic that I think is better, however: 7 Secrets to Writing Persuasive Back Cover Sales Copy

Seven secrets, okay, so what are they?

1. Start with a headline that makes or implies a promise

2. Make your copy “at-a-glance” friendly

3. Choose exactly the right voice

4. Create a powerful rhythm

5. Focus on what your book is about – not on what happens

6. Stir up human emotions

7. Leave them wanting more

You can click through to read the comments under each point, but fundamentally I think this seems right. The headline or tagline is practically impossible for me, but I do think it’s probably a good idea to try to write one. The “at a glance” thing means lots of white space, not lots of words. Voice, rhythm, sure, if you can pull that off. And yes yes yes, do not describe the plot. Definitely not.

I’ve said this before, but the best back cover description I know about is this one:

An impulsive word can start a war.
A timely word can stop one.
A simple act of friendship can change the course of history.

Cliopher Mdang is the personal secretary of the Last Emperor of Astandalas, the Lord of Rising Stars, the Lord Magus of Zunidh, the Sun-on-Earth, the god.
He has spent more time with the Emperor of Astandalas than any other person.
He has never once touched his lord.
He has never called him by name.
He has never initiated a conversation.

One day Cliopher invites the Sun-on-Earth home to the proverbially remote Vangavaye-ve for a holiday.

The mere invitation could have seen Cliopher executed for blasphemy.
The acceptance upends the world.

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WorldCon Schedule

So, it looks like I’ve got four panels plus something called a “table talk,” which I didn’t ask for, but okay, whatever. My four actual panels are spread out over the weekend, like so:

A) Relaxing Reads Thursday — Sept 1 at 2:30

You can see why I checked this one off as a top choice for panels! I’m going to go back and collect everyone’s suggestions for low-tension novels and come up with comments and questions related to low-tension — what causes a book to be low tension and what makes a low-tension story work, despite all writing advice to ramp up the tension. I’m looking forward to this panel a lot. If any of you have read something new that turned out to be low tension, this would be a great time to drop the title in the comments.

B) Sex, Social Systems, and SFF — Sept 2 at 5:30

SO MANY NOVELS. The hard part is to pry people away from The Left Hand of Darkness, which, however admirable, is the merest tip of that iceberg. I’d actually like to focus on less-well-known works. I’m not sure this counts as “less well known,” but I don’t think it’s possible to have a panel like this and not mention Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite, which is by no means my favorite of her works, but she is SUCH an outstanding writer that I don’t care, I’m going to bring this novel up anyway.

Personally, I’d like to address the difference between novels that handle sex and gender issues without totally changing human instincts, vs those that pretend humans don’t have instincts and use that as the starting point. But I’m not the moderator, so we’ll see how it goes.

C) That’s Not How That Works — Sept 3 at 1:00

Here’s the description that made me check this panel as one I’d like to be on:

How much science is there in fiction? Do animals really act that way or is that just fantasy? This panel will help us debunk, deflate, and displace wrongful ideas of how things work. Our panel of experts will take on their own personal pet-peeves on the mechanics of rockets, the care and feeding of horses, the constriction pressure of corsets, the general angriness of bears, the biology of Mars, and other misunderstood realities. We encourage the audience to come armed with questions as we explain, “That’s not how any of this works!”

It’s the second sentence. Do animals really act that way? Basically, NO, particularly not wolves. It’s honestly very interesting to see how this progression has apparently taken place in pop culture understanding of wolf behavior:

Describe alpha behavior in wolves (incorrectly) —> Create many version of werewolves in modern Urban Fantasy and Paranormals —> Pop culture coalesces around an understanding of how alpha werewolves act —> this understanding invades pop culture assumptions about wolf AND DOG behavior —> many dogs get screwed up by their owners because their owners have no clue what dominance is or how it works in the real world.

This isn’t much of a problem for Cavaliers, fortunately. Nobody gets a Cavalier thinking that they have to be all dominant or else the puppy may try to take over the pack and be the leader. That’s not really a thing for people who are looking for a cute lapdog. So that’s useful, because pet owners can still handle a dog in a less than ideal way, but rarely with “alpha rollovers” and other similarly harmful techniques.

Oh, you know what, I really must remember to bring up A Companion to Wolves in this context. The trellwolves are not like real wolves at all, and that makes this a great book for this panel. AND NOT ONLY THAT, but Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear do the most interesting things with sex and gender in this book! I’m going to have to make a note of it for the previous panel too! Absolutely. Oh, while I think of it, here’s my post about the first two books in this trilogy. In this post, I make predictions about the third book that were not correct and I wound up not liking the third book very much because it was very (very) different than the book I actually wanted.

Other panelists are going to have to address the mechanics of rockets and the biology of Mars (really, the biology?) and so on. I’m happy to stick to animal behavior, and we’ll see what else comes up.

D) Sort-of-Overlooked Mass Market SFF of the 80s and 90s — Sept 4 at 4:00

So this sounds like a relaxing panel. Absolutely everyone over a certain age (raises hand) is going to have heaps of titles to recommend.

The single author I most want to bring up is John Varley. He was writing books in the 80s that would absolutely appeal to modern readers, if only they’d ever heard of him.

After Varley, I’m not sure! There are so many! I should do a post just about this and in fact I’m sure I will, but who is ONE author from the 80s and 90s who is sort-of-overlooked today? If someone leaps to mind for you, please drop the name in the comments.

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Update: Progress on all fronts

Okay! So, the kittens, still a dilemma.

I don’t have to make a decision until I’m actually loading the car to drive to Chicago, so that means not till Sept 1 or at the earliest Aug 31. I’m excellent at putting off decisions, so I’m not thinking about this yet. Meanwhile, I’m enjoying having these babies around. They’ve had a vet visit — no point putting that off — so now they’ve had their first car ride (not counting whatever car ride brought them out to the woods and dumped them), and their first vaccinations, and they’ve been wormed (roundworms, ubiquitous in neglected kittens and puppies, one pill and you’re done, so that’s easy). They’ve gained about a pound, maybe more, which means they’ve about doubled their weight, mostly because they were so damn thin when they turned up. They’ve filled out beautifully and no longer look like there’s nothing to them but leg and ribcage.

Akhenaten would be a great name, wouldn’t it?She totally looks like a Nefertiti.

The colors are certainly unique! I like color genetics, but I’m still baffled about how to describe them, except colorpoint. I guess I’d call the boy a blue point tabby? But the stripes are less obvious now than two weeks ago. He may look extremely Siamese-y when he’s an adult. That streaky look on his face is in fact the stripes. The little girl is colorpoint dilute tortoiseshell with white, but I’m not sure if she’s genetically dilute or whether there’s some odd interaction between the colorpoint genes and the tortie genes that’s making the tortoiseshell markings look dilute.

Meanwhile! Tasmakat update:

A) We are in Avaras! Yay! Wow, it took forever to get here, but here we are at last! We have had the first meeting with the king. I must say, Soretes is, what with one thing and another, irate. He’s going to be even more upset shortly. We’re about to have an important conversation that will lead into the final third of the book.

B) I had sort of thought I might put one or two important-ish scenes between Avaras and the country of sand, but now I think probably not. This book is going to be long enough. I think this is probably an excellent time to say briskly, “Two weeks later, we arrived at the border,” and move on.

The southern border is called the Break, at least at the moment. It’s a chasm filled with fire from which poisonous gases rise. You don’t want to trip and fall in. Bridges arch high above the Break to avoid the poisonous gas.

C) 210,000 words and counting. That means a bit over 600 pp, for those of you who may count in pages. This is actually pretty much where I expected to be at this point. I suppose this is a good time to mention that the first draft of Tarashana went to 260,000 words; the final version is 210,000 words. Going long with Tasmakat is fine! I still think October is a generous estimate for the completion date, barring sudden disasters getting in the way.

If Naamah is pregnant, puppies will be due in early October. That would be a great time to have finished a draft so I can send it off to various first readers while I lose sleep hovering over the whelping box. We’ll see how that works out.

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“Rules”

From Writer Unboxed: A Writer’s Guide to Breaking the Rules

This post caught my eye because it starts this way:

In my early writing days–before I was agented, and long before my debut novel was published–I sought writing advice on every imaginable topic: premise, drafting, writing routine, word choice. I was like a sponge, heeding advice from authors who’d reached the goals I envisioned for myself. I also listened to the guidance laid out by agents and editors: they were the ones I wanted to impress, after all. Surely I should follow their advice “to a T.”

And I thought: really? Because I sought writing advice from Patricia McKillip, and the form the advice took was her entire oeuvre. As you may know — I’ve mentioned this from time to time — when I decided to write a short, standalone, publishable fantasy novel, I sat down, read all of McKillip’s books one after the next, and then wrote The City in the Lake. I never thought of trying to follow advice that’s presented as, you know, advice.

This is true even though I sort of like books about writing and have a fair number. They’re interesting to read. It just never really occurred to me to try to follow advice from any of them, partly (I’m pretty sure) because I find it impossible to follow writing advice anyway, so why try? Perhaps it’s just as well that I started writing before advice started proliferating on Twitter, although it might not matter, as (I’m really pretty certain) I couldn’t have followed any advice that appeared on social media either.

That doesn’t mean I can’t take editorial advice, by the way. Specific advice such as “seems repetitive” or “beef up the worldbuilding” or “cut some of the worldbuilding” or “can you cut this protagonist and make this other person the protagonist instead” may be difficult or painful, but it’s perfectly possible to follow advice like that. I mean writing advice like “avoid the passive voice.”

This post starts with that one:

Rule #1 worth breaking: Avoid the passive voice 

Within moments of picking up The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, I scratched my chin: the story was full of passive sentences. (“His tailcoat has been tossed lazily over a velvet armchair…”) I remember thinking, “Morgenstern’s editor let her get away with this?” followed immediately by, “I want to see if I can get away with this.” The fact is, the passive voice is lovely and artistic. It creates a sense of mystery and separation, which was ideal for the magical realm in which The Night Circus takes place.

And I’m like, Well, why did you ever take advice to avoid passive seriously in the first place? Isn’t it obvious that the passive voice wouldn’t exist in the language if it were useless? The question is when to use it and how to use it; there’s no reason in the world to contort yourself into a pretzel trying to avoid using passive when it’s appropriate.

Although! I have never thought of it as lovely, artistic, mysterious, and useful for creating a sense of separation. Not that I disagree! I’m perfectly ready to entertain the idea that the passive voice can be all those things. I would just have said useful and appropriate when you don’t know the subject or don’t care about the subject. So I’m actually intrigued by this post, much more so than I expected, because now I’m thinking about whether passive voice also creates a feeling of mystery and separation, and that’s a neat idea that’s worth thinking about.

I’ve never read The Night Circus, by the way, though I believe it’s on my virtual TBR pile. How about you? Anybody want to give this a thumbs up or thumbs down?

Without looking, I expect other rules that are worth breaking are probably also proscriptive: Don’t use this, avoid that, eschew whatever. As we all know — surely we can all chant this in unison — All Proscriptive Writing Advice Is Bad. All parts of the language should be used well and effectively; none should be removed from the writer’s toolbox.

A writer should no more throw away, say, adverbs, than a carpenter should throw away nails because someone said screws are better, except that we don’t get heaps of advice on Twitter telling carpenters to throw away nails and we DO get heaps of tweets saying adverbs are bad, don’t use adverbs. I’m sure adverbs are next on this list. Let’s see … ah! No. Here are the rest of the “rules” —

Write what you know. Write for the market. Show, don’t tell. Follow the formula for narrative structure. And — this one surprises me a bit — Don’t use a thesaurus.

I suppose those are all fine, but I wasn’t aware that “don’t use a thesaurus” is common writing advice. Well, that seems odd. I use the thesaurus function all the time. I particularly use it when a word is on the very tip of my tongue … there it is … darn it, what IS that word? When that happens, I type some word that’s kind of in the right ballpark and use the thesaurus function, sometimes in multiple iterations, until I finally go RIGHT, THAT WORD. Then I use the word I was trying but failing to pull to the front of my brain.

I would say: Don’t use words you don’t understand. But I wouldn’t say that’s writing advice for authors. That’s writing advice for students who are working on an essay for a class. They are the ones who may trip over the thesaurus function and use “infinitesimal” when they just mean “small,” or whatever.

The real problem with the particular six rules, imo, is that they are too scattered in focus. We start with something related to craft (don’t use passive voice) and then hit advice about storytelling (write what you know) and marketing (write to the market). I do think lists of this sort are better when they are more cohesive. Therefore, I’m going to add this link: Top Ten Examples Of Common But Terrible Writing Advice, which is the post where I hit the five worst pieces of advice for storytelling and then the five worst craft-related pieces of advice.

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Recent Reading: The Shuddering City by Sharon Shinn

Four quarters, four bridges, four keys, four hearts

So, The Shuddering City isn’t out yet. Looks like it comes out, let’s see, November. However, as you can see, I had an advanced copy, so, although I’ll try to remember to link over to it again later, when it’s actually available, here are early comments.

First: I’ve never thought of starting a book with a … hmm … a prophecy or riddle or whatever, and now I feel like I’m missing out, because I really like that little quatrain above. I found that immediately appealing, much more so than (most) prologues or (almost any) explicit prophecy. I’m not even sure why, but I hope I remember to do something like that eventually.

Second, this novel included possibly my very favorite metaphor of all time. I’m just dying to steal this line. Maybe I’ll eventually use it as inspiration, but I don’t know, I never seem to use metaphors like this. I’ll quote it in a minute, it’s not a spoiler, or not too much of a spoiler, but wait for it, because I want to mention the characters first.

So, the characters. There are lots of characters! I actually remember talking to Sharon a year or two ago about SO MANY CHARACTERS and the challenges this produces. I was writing Tarashana at the time and, well, it would be a major spoiler to refer to the means I used to get most of the characters out of the way toward the end of the book. I’m sure readers have had highly variable reactions to that technique, but I bet relatively few readers guess that one important reason for doing, uh, that, was just that I HAD TO get most of the characters out of the way. (I also wanted to scatter the characters so I could give Ryo a chance to have that private chat with Lalani, but that was extra.)

Well, Sharon obviously didn’t consider trimming the character list important in this book. Or maybe she did, but even after cutting them back, we still have a bunch of viewpoint characters and a bunch more important secondary characters, and this is particularly interesting because she starts off in the viewpoint of a character who is important, but not central. So let’s take a look at —

The characters:

Pietro – an older guy returning to the city after a long time away; he has important secrets. We start off in his pov, but he’s not the central pov character.

Jayla – a mature and confident woman, a professional soldier who doesn’t like to make real commitments; she’s traveled to the city for no special reason. SHE is the most central pov character, which is fine because she’s also my favorite character.

Aussen – a little girl on her own because her whoever was responsible for her died en route to the city. Pietro asks Jayla to take responsibility for her and on no account ever tell him where she is, should he ever ask.

So, yeah, that’s fraught.

Cody – a courier with a lighthearted approach to life and, it turns out, an attraction to serious soldier types who might be commitment-shy.

Madeleine – a possibly spoiled rich girl with a distant father. She is expected to marry a guy who is plainly all wrong for her. Also, people have started trying to kill her, for mysterious reasons. You know what she needs? A bodyguard. You know who would be perfect for that? A female soldier, new to the city and looking for a job.

I don’t like characters like Madeleine very much, as a rule. But, surprise! I liked Madeleine a lot, and for me the central relationship in the story is not any of the various romances, but the relationship between Madeleine and Jayla. I commented to Sharon that it seemed to me that Jayla came to life as a character once she met Madeleine, but looking back on it, I think both Madeleine and Jayla came to life for me when they met. I particularly like bodyguards, so that may have been part of it, but these two also support and complement each other in important ways.

But we are not at the end of the character list! So, moving on:

Tivol – the wrong guy for Madeleine. This is plain from the beginning, but Madeleine’s father wants her to marry Tivol, his mother wants that, everyone wants that, they’ve been promised to each other for ages, she’s been fine with that her whole life and is still telling herself it’ll work out just fine.

Yeah, no, he turns out to be absolutely the wrong guy. In spades.

Reese – the right guy for Madeleine.

Harlo – the high divine. Have I mentioned the backstory? It’s all about a god stitching the world together way back when. There have been a lot of earthquakes recently. Harlo, as the high divine, considers this very important. He would pretty much do anything to avoid the city being torn apart and destroyed, and I admit, you can see his point.

Brandon – a temple guard, currently assigned to guard –

Villette – a young woman who lives in reasonable luxury in a house in the city and who must never be allowed to escape.

That’s not everybody. But it’s all the pov characters and the majority of the most important secondary characters. How many even is that? Ah, ten. All right, that’s a lot. The pov is carried, in order from most important on down, by Jayla, Madeleine, Pietro, and Brandon. So, there are four threads of romance through this story – that’s the four hearts, of course. I hardly need to mention that no one is forced to marry the wrong guy, that everyone winds up with the right person, and that the city is not torn apart by earthquakes. I bet you guessed that.

The plot:

I don’t want to say too much about this. I will say, this story is not actually a fantasy-mystery. Partway through, everything is explained, or almost everything, and we then set about solving problems rather than trying to figure out what is going on. This was fine, although I did think that certain problems had been allowed to become a lot more dire than was perhaps strictly necessary. On the other hand, people mismanage dire problems all the time, so that’s not actually unbelievable. But this construction does mean that if the reader may have the impression that this story is meant to be a mystery, and that’s not really the case. Certain other elements may turn out to be a surprise, I will add.

I wouldn’t ordinarily recommend starting a novel in the pov of a secondary or tertiary character. I would suggest that it’s generally best to start out in the pov of the most important pov protagonist and also wind up in that pov. However, it actually worked well to start in Pietro’s pov and then shift to Jayla. This is perhaps partly because Pietro knows what’s going on and is better able to set up the mystery and partly because to begin with he’s more interesting than Jayla. Actually, he’s more interesting than Jayla period, I just liked her best anyway.

Also, it worked well for me to have all the romances happen around the periphery of the story. The central positive relationship is between Madeleine and Jayla: Madeleine needs Jayla’s strength and confidence, and Jayla needs someone to commit to. The Shuddering City is a fantastic example of a story that centers friendship and parent-child relationships while also including important romances. That always appeals to me very much and it certainly did here.

But, on the way from the beginning to the end, the actual most important relationship is, how should I put this, the anti-romance – it’s Madeleine ditching Tivol. Who absolutely deserves to be ditched. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that he’s betrayed her – I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that just about everyone she most trusted has betrayed her – and the reason I want to say that is because this leads to this stunning metaphor, which yes, I am now going to share with you all:

 She hadn’t wanted Reese to leave, but she hadn’t wanted him to stay, either. Her head was full of thunderstorms and carrion crows, and she couldn’t hear her own thoughts over the din. She had eventually sent him away so she could curl up in the window seat and think, but it turned out she still couldn’t concentrate. So she just rested her cheek on her updrawn knees and listened to the wordless howling in her mind.

Her head was full of thunderstorms and carrion crows! Wow. I don’t think I have ever seen a better expression of the shock of betrayal. I don’t know, maybe many readers just read over a line like that and keep going. I personally stopped dead, re-read that page, emailed Sharon to tell her how much I loved that line, and tucked it away in the back of my mind, where I will refer to it forever when considering examples of perfect metaphors.

Overall:

A fast, engrossing story, low-tension because hey, It’s Sharon Shinn, I think we can all be confident everything will work out. Although I generally prefer stories with a tighter focus on one or a small number of primary characters, I liked all the characters here and had no trouble shifting from one to the next. If you enjoy Sharon Shinn’s work, and I know many of you do, by all means keep an eye out for The Shuddering City this fall.

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Moving between scenes

Here’s a post at Jane Friedman’s blog that’s relevant to anyone who is currently trying to avoid writing a 1000-page draft (raises hand). Or, for that matter, anyone just trying to get through a draft with a minimum of necessary cutting (also raises hand). It’s all very well to have exciting scenes, but you also have to get from one to the next and then the next after that, and transitions are (a) often hard to write, and (b) sometimes boring for author and reader alike, and (c) may end up being cut from the final draft anyway, so honestly, it’s good to minimize transitions most of the time.

However, unless you literally teleport your characters from scene to scene, they have to move through the intervening time and space somehow.

So, this post: Moving Between Scenes with Summary and Spacers

Let’s see what this post suggests …

Summary serves an essential role in the making of the narrative arc. In the first place, summary provides a means of moving time forward without a loss of momentum … But summary also serves as mortar between scenes, holding them together.

Yes, which is why you can’t skip transitions unless you’re actually causing your characters to teleport. I mean, I can’t offhand think of any other way to do it. Oh, wait, I can! You can also skip transitions if you render your character unconscious and someone else transports the character while they are unaware. That’s the only other way I can offhand think of.

And that will certainly provide a sharp discontinuity in the narrative. Normally we fill in those discontinuities with transitions. This post divides summaries into two sorts:

Sequential summary offers an efficient if compressed accounting of a particular period of time—as in a day, a week, or a month—organized in the order in which the events occurred.

Circumstantial summary is another matter. It’s not about a single trip to the store; rather, it provides a glimpse of the way these trips generally go.

Examples of both are provided. They’re good examples, so here:

Sequential summary

She persuaded a Spanish Town doctor to visit my younger brother Pierre who staggered when he walked and couldn’t speak distinctly. I don’t know what the doctor told her or what she said to him but he never came again and after that she changed. Suddenly, not gradually. She grew thin and silent, and at last she refused to leave the house at all.

Circumstantial summary

My mother usually walked up and down the glacis, a paved roofed-in terrace which ran the length of the house and sloped upwards to a clump of bamboos. Standing by the bamboos she had a clear view of the sea, but anyone passing could stare at her. They stared, sometimes they laughed. Long after the sound was far away and faint she kept her eyes shut and her hands clenched.

I was going to say, either way, it’s telling, not showing, but in fact I must reluctantly concede that both telling and showing are obviously used effectively in these paragraphs, so I can’t pause here to declare triumphantly that telling is fine. I mean, telling is fine, but no one here is arguing otherwise.

I’ve said this before, probably, but the most extreme summary I’ve ever used was in my debut novel The City in the Lake, where I grew Timou up from an infant in a cradle to seventeen or thereabouts in just a few pages. And to do that, I went to Patricia McKillip’s The Sorceress and the Cygnet and read the bit where she does this over and over.

He was a child of the Horned Moon. That much Corleu’s great-grandmother told him, pipe between her last few teeth, as she washed the mud out of his old-man’s hair and stood him between her knees to dry it. “You have your grandpa’s hair,” she told him.

“Tell him take it back!” A thin, wiry child, brown as dirt otherwise, he stood tensely, still trembling with the indignity of having been crowned with mud, tied up with Venn’s granny’s holey stockings, and left in the sun to dry.

A few paragraphs later, Corleu is a teenager. A few pages again, he’s a young man. And the whole time, McKillip is also telling the reader about the astrology of this world: Cygnet broke the Warlock into pieces and trapped him in the Blood Star. His shadow fell to earth, into the Delta, into Blood Fox’s shadow. That’s why they say: beware the Blood Fox with the human shadow …

Might be about time to re-read a lot of Patricia McKillip’s stories.

The other kind of summary, this circumstantial summary, is interesting! I hadn’t thought of that as a particular kind of summary, but I think that’s accurate and, now that I think of it, I can think of plenty of times I’ve used this kind of summary too. In fact, the opening of The City in the Lake uses exactly this kind of summary:

But after darkness falls, it will be the tigers of the bridge that look real and alive. They shake themselves out of stone and come down from their pedestals, the lambent fire of sunset in their eyes, to stalk on great velvet paws through the night — so it is said.

And there we go — that’s exactly the type of circumstantial summary described above.

Anyway, that’s summary! What about spacers?

Spacers are the white space you leave when you jump ahead in time. Sometimes they’re filled with a little symbol, though personally I sometimes find the little symbols distracting. Sometimes they’re plain; just an extra line that’s left blank. The linked post has a good suggestion here: If you don’t know where to end a scene, if you can’t get out of a scene, if the scene keeps going on and on and you can’t wind it up — put in a spacer and jump ahead to the next day or the next week.

Good advice! Especially for me, especially right now, as I work on getting through a couple of scenes and then moving on rather than bogging down.

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Update: Life, plus Tasmakat

Okay, so, I realize blogging was practically nonexistent this past week, but!

a) I suddenly had to drive to St. Louis three times in quick succession;

b) We’re between the summer classes and the beginning of the fall semester, so I’m not at a real computer with real internet access very often;

c) I have acquired two kittens, at least temporarily, and they’re distracting.

As some of you may possibly have guessed, when I say “suddenly had to drive to St L a bunch of times,” this actually means that a girl I want to breed came into season. In this case, that was Naamah.

Naamah is three. This is the first time I’ve ever tried to breed her, so who knows? That is, I’m positive the progesterone levels were appropriate for breeding, but her mother had real trouble catching, so … who knows? I’ve scheduled an ultrasound on September 6. That’s when we’ll know.

To further complicate my life, Morgan came into season at the same time, but my boys were so focused on Naamah that they didn’t mention this and I missed it for quite a while. When I finally realized and ran a progesterone, the number was high enough to suggest that it might be too late unless I dropped everything and drove to Paducah right that minute, plus (worse) Morgan short-cycled — an interval of less than 150 days since her last season. This is why I wasn’t paying close enough attention to notice she was in; she shouldn’t have been, not yet. Short-cycling means she might well not be able to catch this time anyway. This is disappointing since I very particularly long to have puppies from Morgan and that stunning ruby boy in Paducah, but instead here we are, skipping this cycle for Morgan. She should come back into season roughly the middle of winter, and let me tell you, ice storms have derailed more than one hoped-for breeding, so we’ll just have to cross our fingers.

But fine, whatever, these things happen. If Naamah is in fact pregnant — believe me, that is by no means guaranteed — that will give me plenty to do in a couple of months. Especially if she has girls! I would certainly keep one! However, at this point, that’s not the concern. The Flowchart of Hope goes like this:

I hope she’s pregnant! –> With multiple puppies! –> That are healthy! –> At least one girl! –> With good markings! –> And excellent structure!

So as you can see, it’ll be a while before I get to the stage of worrying about whether there’s at least one girl.

Meanwhile! Everyone in creation — I mean: all the bad people in the county — are dumping kittens right now. My general vet has acquired two new kittens for her practice, one of the techs at my reproductive vet has acquired a couple new kittens, I’ve personally seen various dumped kittens disappear because I couldn’t catch them in time to save them, and then there are these two very tiny kittens that my neighbor caught and handed over to me.

So, I have, at the moment, these two completely charming little Siamese-ish kittens.

The first kitten is a boy, I’m pretty sure. He’s not quite as Siamese-ish as he looks. He’s got clear tabby stripes under the Siamese coloring. The second kitten is very obviously dilute tortoiseshell under her Siamese points. My first thought was that these kittens might be about seven weeks, but they’re really quite small and now I think they might have been six weeks when I first got them, maybe even younger. They were very thin, but appear free of parasites, which is kind of amazing for dumped kittens.

Anyway, the past week has involved a lot of socializing the kittens — the little boy was very hissy and panicky at first. But this is the right age to socialize kittens, and they’re both little purr machines now. Plus they are learning that they don’t need to run away from dogs. The dogs are cooperating by taking orders not to bark at, lunge toward, or chase the kittens. Of course supervision is very (VERY) tight. Quite a few of my dogs are fervent enthusiasts when it comes to killing bunnies and squirrels. I do not plan to leave the kittens loose around the dogs until I’m very sure the dogs aren’t going to suddenly flip into prey mode. I mean, many of them have known cats. But none of them has ever seen a kitten.

Do you realize that it’s been TWENTY-TWO YEARS since I last had a kitten?

I’ve found these kittens a fine prospective home, with the trade-off to happen at Worldcon, BUT, well, we’ll see. I have always, always particularly liked colorpoint markings on kittens and I have always, always wanted to have two kittens at the same time (somehow I never had that happen before). In three weeks, if I think these kittens are safe around the dogs … maybe … well, we’ll see, that’s all.

Meanwhile, vet appointment next week to check them out, make sure they don’t have anything dire like FIV, all that stuff.

MEANWHILE, Tasmakat.

So, yes, I’ve been working on Tasmakat too. It’s been going a lot more slowly, which is irritating because this period between summer and fall semesters is ordinarily a good time to make a lot of progress. But it’s not that irritating because I’ve genuinely had a lot of other things going on. It’s also picking up again now, so I hope I’ll make a lot of progress over the next few weeks.

I’ve hit a couple mile-markers worth mentioning:

a) We’re in Gaur at last! Very soon we should LEAVE Gaur, enjoy a quick visit to the Peacock Desert where one or two fairly important things ought to happen, and then arrive in short order in Avaras, the king’s city. We will then have one or two intense conversations and reach a major turning point. Aras and Ryo will hope to solve one or two intractable problems by heading into the country of sand, but, spoiler, their problems will turn into different and substantially more difficult problems shortly thereafter.

b) I’ve passed 170,000 words, which is about 500 pp. Those of you who are hoping for a REALLY long book are going to get your wish.

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Hugo Nominees: Best Novel

Okay, well, I’m doing (slightly) better than I thought I might at reading SOMETHING in each fiction category, but it’s pretty obvious at this point I’m not going to read every nominee in the novel categories. I don’t have time. Voting closes August 11th, which is coming up super-fast. I don’t know whether I’ll vote in the Best Novel category at all – if I don’t read at least a couple of them, I probably won’t. That does mean that the openings of the novels matters a lot. If a nominee isn’t engaging practically at once, I’m almost certainly going to move on to something else.

So let’s take a look at the openings!

A) The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

There’s a prologue, but the first paragraphs there are very setting-heavy. Let’s take a look at the opening of the first chapter instead

When Speaker awoke, Tracker was nowhere in sight. This was to be expected. Tracker was always the first to be up and about. As egglings, Tracker had been nearly free of her shell by the time Speaker had started to crack through her own – a fact neither twin remembered, but one their relatives relayed time and again. Speaker had never known a life without Tracker in it, nor a morning when she’d awoken with her sister still in their bed. As such, it was not the sound of a busy sibling which roused Speaker than morning, but instead, the loud chime of a message alert.

Okay, this is an interesting example of opening in the point of view of an alien species. This is worth noticing as an example of the writing craft. Something that many prospective writers struggle with is doing this smoothly – revealing to the reader that the point of view protagonist is not human, doing it in a way that doesn’t seem strained. This works well, I think.

I will add that I read the full prologue and the entire first chapter and didn’t find this novel as immediately engaging as I have others of Chambers’ novels. I love well-drawn aliens. Nevertheless.

***

B)  The Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

Shh …

Yes, it hurt. It was definitely not just a bruise. Yes, she was scared. Her throat was raw from screaming.

Cautiously, Katrina Nguyen felt under her bed.

Girl clothes. Boy clothes. Money. Birth certificate. Social security card. Toothbrush. Spare glasses. Backup battery. Makeup. Estradiol. Spironalactone.

Katrina had made an escape bag the first time her father threatened to kill her.

I’m not drawn in at all. I get that we are opening with conflict, but I am not in the mood for conflict; or at least not this kind of nasty family conflict. She’s going to run away, obviously, and it sounds like it’s about time, but I’m not very interested in following along.

As far as craft goes, notice how every paragraph is super short. This is a way of speeding up the pace, and that does work. I think this is an effective opening. It’s just one that immediately pushes me away. However, I would go on and see if we succeed in immediately escaping, leave this family behind, and get into a better place. If that happens fast enough, I could be drawn in.

***

C) A Master of Djinn by P Djeli Clark

Archibald James Portendorf disliked stairs. With their ludicrous lengths, ever leading up, as if in some jest. There were times, he thought, he could even here them snickering. If these stairs had eyes to see, they would do more than snicker – watching as he huffed trough curling auburn whiskers, his short legs wobbling under his rotundity. It was criminal in this modern age that stairs should be allowed to yet exist – when lifts could carry passengers in comfort.

He stopped to rest against a giant replica of a copper teapot with a curving spout like a beak, setting down the burden he’d been carrying. It was shameful that someone of his years, having reached sixty and one in this year 1912, should suffer such indignities. He should be settling down for the night with a stiff drink, not trotting up a set of ruddy stairs!

This mannered, tongue-in-cheek style could hardly be more different from the above nominee. This is a much lighter tone, something that suits me much better this year. Right now, just looking at these three nominees, this is the one that is most immediately appealing. The author isn’t asking me to take this novel all that seriously, at least not yet. It’s a relaxing style. I like it.

It’s also interesting because saying “he thought” is distant third, but everything else is close third. This plus the setting is making me wonder if the narrative is actually going to turn out to be omniscient, because it’s got the nineteenth-century feel to it.

***

D) She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

I looked at this for the Astounding Award. I feel this time it’s best to take a much better look, so rather than just the first few lines, let’s take a look at a couple of full paragraphs:

Zhongli village lay flattened under the sun like a defeated dog that has given up on finding shade. All around there was nothing but the bare yellow earth, cracked into the pattern of a turtle’s shell, and the sere bone smell of hot dust. It was the fourth year of the drought. Knowing the cause of their suffering, the peasants cursed their barbarian emperor in his distant capital in the north. As with any two like things connected by a thread of qi, whereby the actions of one influence the other even at a distance, so an emperor’s worthiness determines the fate of the land he rules. The worthy ruler’s dominion is graced with good harvests; the unworthy’s is cursed by flood, drought, and disease. The present ruler of the empire of the Great Yuan was not only emperor, but Great Khan too: he was tenth of the line of the Mongol conqueror Khubilai Khan, who had defeated the last native dynasty seventy years before. He had held the divine light of the Mandate of Heaven for eleven years, and already there were ten-year-olds who had never known anything but disaster.

The Zhu family’s second daughter, who was more or less ten years old in that parched Rooster year, was thinking about food as she followed the village boys towards the dead neighbor’s field. With her wide forehead and none of the roundness that makes children adorable, she had the mandibular look of a brown locust. Like that insect, the girl thought about food constantly. However, having grown up on a peasant’s monotonous diet, and with only a half-formed suspicion that better things might exist, her imagination was limited to the dimension of quantity. At that moment she was busy thinking about a bowl of millet porridge. Her mind’s eye had filled it past the lip, liquid quivering high within a taut skin, and as she walked she contemplated with a voluptuous, anxious dreaminess how she might take the first spoonful without losing a drop. From above (but the sides might yield) or the side (surely a disaster); with firm hand or a gentle touch? So involved was she in her imaginary meal that she barely noticed the chirp of the gravedigger’s
spade as she passed by.

Yeah … still don’t like this. It’s just so unhappy! I’m amazed those of you who love this book got past this grim beginning.

***

E) A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

I’m stepping past a short prologue and starting with chapter one. But I like entries from imaginary books and things, so sure, I’ll include those.

. . . INTERDICT SUSPENDED—for a duration of four months,
extensible by Council order, the interdict regarding Teixcalaanli
military transport through Stationer space is suspended; all
ships bearing Teixcalaanli military callsign are permitted to pass
through the Anhamemat Gate—this suspension does not authorize Teixcalaanli ships, military or otherwise, to dock at Lsel
Station without prior visas, approvals, and customs clearances—
SUSPENSION AUTHORIZED BY THE COUNCILOR FOR THE
MINERS (DARJ TARATS)—message repeats . . .
—priority message deployed on diplomatic, commercial,
and universal frequencies in the Bardzravand Sector,
52nd day, 1st year, in the 1st indiction of the Emperor
of All Teixcalaan Nineteen Adze

Your Brilliance, you have left me with all the world, and yet I am
bereft; I’d take your star-cursed possessing ghost, Six Direction,
if only he would teach me how not to sleep.
—the private notes of Her Brilliance the Emperor

Nineteen Adze, undated, locked, and encrypted NINE Hibiscus watched the cartograph cycle through its last week of recorded developments for a third time, and then switched it off. Without its pinpoint stargleams and Fleetmovement arcs inscribed in light, the strategy table on the bridge of Weight for the Wheel was a flat black expanse, dull-matte, as impatient as its captain for new information. There was none forthcoming. Nine Hibiscus didn’t need to watch the cartograph again to remember how the displayed planet-points had winked first distress-red and then out-of-communication black, vanishing like they were being swallowed by a tide. No matter how thickly laid the lines of incoming Teixcalaanli ships were shown on that cartograph, none of them had advanced into the flood of blank silence. Beyond this point, Nine Hibiscus thought, not without a shimmering anticipation, we are quite afraid to see.

I think the writing here is MUCH more appealing than any of the others. I really like this! I know it’s book two of a series, I know it’s supposed to be pretty grim, I don’t plan to read it right now, but I have to say, based solely on this opening, I’m far more likely to eventually back up and look at the first book.

****

F) Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

“What’s two plus two?”

Something about the question irritates me. I’m tired. I drift back to sleep.

A few minutes pass, then I hear it again.

“What’s two plus two?”

The soft, feminine voice lacks emotion and the pronunciation is identical to the previous time she said it. It’s a computer. A computer is hassling me. I’m even more irritated now. “Lrmln,” I say. I’m surprised. I meant to say “Leave me alone” – a completely reasonable response in my opinion – but I failed to speak.

Interesting to compare this one to (B), above! This is the second nominee with very, very short paragraphs. Does it work? Yes, certainly. This is really almost always going to work in the sense of at once providing a sense of speed, in getting the reader into the novel at once. This is far more likely to do that than long paragraphs about the setting or about panting up flights of stairs or, in fact, long paragraphs about anything. Even good paragraphs. Of course, it depends; sometimes you might want to start with long paragraphs anyway.

For me, this situation is more engaging than (B) because it’s a puzzle rather than an immediate look at a hurt girl escaping from a toxic family. I don’t know much about the book – I read the description, but it was a long time ago and I don’t remember it now. I imagine this is someone being woken up from cryosleep or something like that. That’s a very standard SF trope, not that there’s anything wrong with that. What I’ve actually heard is that this book is okay, but not as excellent as The Martian. Of course, sheer regression to the mean implies that this would be the case, plus practically any other SF novel Weir wrote would probably make use of a more ordinary plot than The Martian, so that’s not surprising.

The publisher didn’t do this book any favors; it was only added to the packet in pdf form with, I kid you not, HUGO NOMINEE stamped across every page in hard-to-ignore letters. The pdf looks terrible on my Kindle and worse on my phone. So … I probably won’t read this before I vote. Which is surely going to be the case for lots of voters! Bad decision by … ah, a division of Penguin/Random House. Well … I can’t say I’m entirely surprised. I feel bad for Weir. I don’t think he has a chance and this ridiculously bad presentation in the Hugo Voter’s packet is one reason why.

***

Okay, picking just one to go on with, I find, somewhat to my surprise, that I’m more interested in (C) A Master of Djinn than anything by a more familar-to-me author, and a LOT to my surprise that the most appealing nominee is actually (E) A Desolation Called Peace. The title is such a turnoff, but nevertheless.

I think I’m currently more in the mood for (C). That’s because it’s a novel that has a lighter tone; a more mannered, affected tone – less immediate, less stressful. I think that appeals to me partly because I just read Novik’s Scholomance books and A Master of Djinn presents an extreme stylistic contrast, which I like. If I waited a month and looked at these novel openings again, I suspect my response might be different, but that’s where I am right now.

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Describing a swordfight

Here’s another great Quora answer from Eric Lowe: How can a prospective novelist get better at describing sword fights?

I’m going to go against the grain here and say that the key thing is to get better at observing human emotion and character development.

I don’t mean that to be glib. If you literally want to get better at “describing sword fighting,” then I guess you could learn how to fight with a sword. But I am 99% sure that what you want is to get better at writing scenes that involve sword fighting, and “telling a story” and “describing” aren’t the same thing.

It’s interesting to me that Eric Lowe can both be a total expert on medieval weaponry and fighting AND understand that writing a story isn’t about being a total expert in anything except storytelling. But he absolutely gets this.

What makes a fight scene enjoyable to read is not technical correctness, nor exacting specificity. It’s that the reader clearly understands the stakes and challenges at any given point in the scene. In other words, you aren’t focused on what the characters are doing with their swords. You’re focused on what it all means. … You aren’t recording a sword fight in exacting detail so experts around the world can provide armchair critiques of the participants’ performances. You’re writing a story, and stories are about characters, not action. Don’t stop writing a story just because you’re personally curious about the dynamics of a sword fight.

It’s posts like this that made me buy Lowe’s book. But it’s also probably worth joining Quora solely to follow a handful of experts, even if you couldn’t care less about telling people over and over to take their dog to a vet (or whatever). If you’re writing fantasy, Eric Lowe is one of the experts you definitely ought to follow. I mean, here is another recent post of his, this one about what we mean when we say that a sword is “sharp.” He seems to toss off posts like this all the time, and they’re all worth reading.

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Time in Fantasy Novels

Here’s a post by Marie Brennan at Book View Cafe: The Cultural Weight of Time

Lots of posts about time recently, plus complications with months and day/night and so on if you’re in an unusual setting. Here’s how Marie Brennan starts this post:

There’s another dimension [to time], though, which is vital in its own way: the significance we attach to our construction of time.

Probably the best-known example of this is the zodiac. Astronomically speaking, the zodiac is the region of sky through which the Moon and the planets we can see with the naked eye move; astrologically speaking, this has been divided into twelve zones dominated by a particular constellation. Its origins lie in Babylonian culture, but it ultimately spread both west to Greece, Rome, and Europe as a whole, and east to India. This contrasts with the Chinese zodiac, which — although likewise divided into twelve signs — has a different astronomical basis and devotes a full year to each sign, rather than roughly a month.

Still, the two systems share in common the idea that the sign in play influences the world below and the people in it. From this you might derive anything from marriages (your horoscopes should harmoniously match), to the notion of certain days being lucky or unlucky for certain activities, to the directional taboos of Japanese onmyōdō in the Heian Period, which proscribed travel in certain directions on certain days. Adhering to that kind of thing was an elite pastime, of course; you needed someone educated enough to calculate the auspices for a given day, and farmers couldn’t afford to neglect their fields just because heading southeast was temporarily a bad idea. (On the other hand, in fiction you can spin out interesting scenarios from this: a society where the government takes responsibility for disseminating this vital information to the populace, and villages have arrangements where they tend each other’s fields to accommodate the directional taboos.) …

This is a wonderfully different and important way to think about time. I had trouble not just copying the whole post and pasting it in here. By all means click through and read the whole thing.

In Tasmakat, we’ve just met Selili, who is, among other things, an astrologer. I now need to figure out what that actually means and how astrology is different from astronomy and what that means in this world. And you know what I may go for? Something like Marie describes here:

The Mesoamerican calendar commonly referred to by the Mayan name of tzolk’in in no way corresponds to the astronomical year; its cycle is 260 days long. Furthermore, it has no actual beginning or endpoint. It consists of twenty day names and thirteen day numbers, continually cycling like two intermeshed gears. …

I’m going to print her post and think about this some more.

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