Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 97

AI Art

Here’s an unexpected post from Terrible Minds: So, AI Art (in this case, using Midjourney) is pretty addictive. 

Chuck says: I’ll dump a handful of the really interesting ones I did here on the blog over the last few weeks. It’s fucking weird, like watching a machine dream art into being.

And then he does. I’m not crazy about the vampire ones, but the robot landscapes are surprisingly … I don’t know. Wistful? They have a mood to them, somehow, even though I know an AI created them.

The AI in question is MidJourney, website here. You can’t play around with this AI without subscribing in one way or another, discussed at the link.

If you missed it, here’s Scott Alexander’s post about using DALL-E to generate stained-glass-window style art.

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Seeing through the eyes of the protagonist

Here’s a post that I liked, but also found amusing: Seeing Through a Character’s Eyes: Literally

Literally in the sense of figuratively. I bet you guessed that, didn’t you?

This use of “literally” is not exactly a pet peeve of mine. It makes me roll my eyes in a fairly tolerant way, comparatively. However, if you stick an adverb off the end of your sentence like that, it helps if you actually mean the adverb in question instead of its direct opposite. That’s not the only reason I thought this was a mildly amusing post. Here’s what gave me a chuckle:

A continuity edit might unearth scenes inadvertently illuminated with:

Three full moons in a month. If your story is set on Earth, this just isn’t possible. And you can only count on two full moons per month once in a blue moon (every two to three years, which is exceptional enough that it should be noted). 

That’s kind of funny when thinking of the Tuyo world, where “month” can’t be based on the phases of the Moon because the phase of the Moon depends on where the Moon’s attention has been directed, and the phase of the Moon is therefore unpredictable from night to night and can almost certainly change in a single night.

I’m aware that some readers really have trouble with this. I don’t want to pull out specific reviews to point at because I guess it’s fine with me if a reader just cannot tolerate a fantasy world that is not set on an ordinary planet. But the Tuyo world is most definitely not a planet. And it’s not simply flat, with astronomical objects up above. Obviously all sorts of astrological phenomena occur that cannot possibly depend on the laws of physics that control this sort of thing in the real world. I mean, I think this is really obvious. I’m thinking of adding a note about this to the series page just to help the interested reader believe that no, really, the Sun is not just a flaming ball of gas and the Moon is not just a brightly lit rock, and if you tried to build a rocket and blast your way into the heavens, that wouldn’t work.

As a side note, I’m also thinking of adding a note to the effect that the reader isn’t supposed to approve of everything in whichever society and that it’s honestly not sensible to assume that the author approves of everything in a fictional society either. I mean, I think most readers understand that the author is writing from inside the culture, not outside looking in. That’s what really should be meant by seeing through the eyes of the protagonist; not just seeing what the protagonist physically sees, but reflecting the protagonist’s attitudes and expectations. Most readers definitely know better than to assume the author thinks everything in the culture is great. But it’s pretty clear that a handful of readers aren’t sure about that. This makes me wonder — having re-read the Ancillary series recently and met Ann Leckie — whether many readers think that Leckie actually approves of the incredibly repressive Radchai society? Surely not? But maybe a small number of readers do think so.

I deliberately made Ugaro society much more female centered than Lau society — Ugaro society is in fact even more female centered than most readers have probably realized, though there are clear hints about that if you’re paying close enough attention. But the various roles available for women in Lau society, although not quite as circumscribed as it might look, are indeed pretty circumscribed. The reader is not supposed to think that the social role of talon wives is just peachy, and it always surprises me a little when a review suggests that the reader thinks I, as the author, am trying to make that kind of social role seem great. Because, no.

But back to the linked post:

The sun rising and setting through the same picture window. To avoid this problem, draw a map of how the house is situated, adding any buildings around it that might affect when the sunrise or sunset might be seen. Doing so may reveal other story possibilities—an obstacle that means the sun hits the neighbor’s house well before your character’s could be an interesting clue, for example. Tall housing on narrow streets, whether in modern America or ancient Europe, may never allow direct sunlight.

Those are good suggestions for mistakes that are entirely plausible. I don’t actually draw floorplans of houses, but I do certainly try to keep in mind that if the windows look out to the west, then they look out toward the west. Even in the Tuyo world, the Sun sets in the west every single day. (Unless you’re in the land of the shades, of course; in that case the Sun rises in the west. But again, every single day.

I clearly recall how, when he read my very first (unpublished, later reconstituted) fantasy trilogy, my brother said, “How’s this character sneaking through the city at night? Because the streets are probably too narrow to let any moonlight come down to street level.”

Of course the answer is: streetlights lit by magic. I think since then I have always remembered to add light to city streets, if I need anyone to make their way through a city at night.

There’s much more about the physical sense of sight and looking through the protagonist’s eyes in the linked post:

If the reader might wonder how the POV character can see, it’s best to provide an explanation. In Southernmost, author Silas House does just that when his protagonist, Asher, must search for his missing son in low light after a devastating flood:

Here the earth was so wet it sucked at his shoes. Up ahead were the thick woods crowding the ridge behind their house. Asher stopped at the mouth of the path to allow his eyes to adjust. The woods were all blackness, the full trees of high summer blocking out any starlight that might have guided his way. But he knew these woods so well he could walk through them with his eyes closed.

That’s not super believable, actually, if you’ve ever tried to walk through the woods at night, not to mention with your eyes closed. But it’s quick and moves the story forward and it’s probably believable enough, which is what matters.

If you’re writing fantasy, it’s easier. Witchlight, magelight, a falselantern created by some kind of magic you needn’t describe in detail — there are definitely advantages to writing fantasy! Someday I would like to write a novel where part of the setting is based on the underground city of Cappadocia, and if and when I get to that, it would be a much more pleasant place to live than any real underground city could have been in the real world, because hey, why not? You could have real farms and gardens in an underground city, pre-technology, if you just create the right kind of magic to let that happen.

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Recent Reading: A Deadly Education / The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

Okay! Let’s take a moment to consider every single Unlikeable Protagonist we have ever encountered in SFF. I mean the sort we actually love, not the kind of protagonist we in fact despise.

Let’s put them all on a spectrum from one to ten, like so:

(1) Mildly Unlikeable, I Guess ……………….. (10) EXCEEDINGLY UNLIKEABLE.

Who is your favorite protagonist who’s over toward the (10) end of this spectrum? Until recently, I’d have picked Tremaine Valiarde, or maybe Nicholas Valiarde. Reasons Tremaine is Unlikeable: She’s super pragmatic and ruthless, dangerous when she loses her temper, does not care much about most people, will definitely shoot an enemy if that seems like a practical choice, is not interested in being polite to people she doesn’t like, and so on. Nicholas is like that too, only even more so.

Well, Galadriel Higgins beats both Valiardes, father and daughter, hands down. She is WAY more unlikeable than either Tremaine, who can have reasonable social skills when she cares to use them, or Nicholas, who is quite easy to get along with right up until he taps a hidden lever and an ornate edifice of vengeance slams down around you.

El is just wonderful. As far as I’m concerned, Naomi Novik wins the Most Lovable Unlikeable Protagonist contest, probably for all time.

The first thing Novik did to make this work is create a Doomsday Prophecy about Galadriel – All shall love me and despair, basically – and also give El an aura of evil doom to go with that prophecy so that powerful magical people are (as far as I can tell) instinctively terrified of and repulsed by her. Her mother, a famous white witch, took her to see her father’s family when she was about five and her great-grandmother took one look and flipped out, and ever since then the only person El has ever been close to has been her mother. Her mother has protected her and loved her and gently guided her away from vivisecting small animals, and now here we are, following El through her junior year in a violently homicidal school for wizard kids.

The backstory involving the school and why the kids are there is all very well, but too complicated to go into. The point is that she’s spent her first couple of years being rejected by everybody in the school and pretending as hard as she can that she doesn’t care. It’s not like she doesn’t understand why people don’t like her, either. I mean, the prophecy was clearly true. In this world, everyone powerful has an affinity for a certain kind of spell. These are things like being good with magic related to animals or whatever. El certainly does have an affinity. Hers is for spells of ultimate doom. When she asks for a spell that might light a candle, she’ll get a spell that can create a supervolcano. When she asks for a spell for, say, binding a book in leather, she’ll get a spell for flaying somebody alive and turning their skin into a lovely binding, probably while also turning the agonized skinless person into her mind-controlled slave. And it would probably be loads easier to use that spell on a crowd than on just one person. That’s just how her magic rolls. She could SO EASILY turn into the Dark Queen to end all Dark Queens, and people sense that. This puts her in a tough situation, as she is absolutely determined not to use even the faintest scrap of malia (evil magic) no matter what. In fact, she’s so revolted by the idea of using evil magic that she literally can’t bring herself to do it even when someone stabs her in the gut, which is quite something.

This is how you create a loveable Unlikeable Protagonist: you give her a backstory filled with rejection so that she is super-defensive and furiously hostile. You give her tremendous evil power, which she forces into an utterly different channel and uses for good – even at enormous personal cost. She is violently rude to everyone, unless someone persists and persists and persists and then she is SO GLAD to actually have a real friend, she can hardly believe that’s even possible. Here’s how the first book begins:

I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life. I hadn’t really cared much about him before then one way or another, but I had limits. It would’ve been all right if he’d saved my life some really extraordinary number of times – ten or thirteen or so – thirteen is a number with distinction. Orion Lake, my personal bodyguard; I could have lived with that. But we’d been at the Scholomance almost three years by then, and he hadn’t shown any previous inclination to single me out for special treatment.

Super defensive and furiously hostile. She does not actually attempt to murder Orion, however. Also, spoiler: he does save her life an extraordinary number of times. She also saves his life a lot of times, en route to, well, never mind, I don’t want to provide any actual spoilers here.

You’ll be happy to know, that El does make friends during the first book. Novik handles this really well. Many excellent secondary characters. But El’s most interesting relationship is indeed with Orion Lake, who has a different kind of affinity – he kills monsters – and who is practically worshipped by the whole school as a result. And what Novik does, see, is she uses that hero worship to show how Orion has been and still is treated as badly as El, except in the reverse way. He doesn’t have friends either – he has sycophants. And users, and would-be users, and his life has been as unbearable for him as El’s has been for her, except that El has a wonderful mother who protected her a lot more effectively than Orion’s parents seem to have protected him. He’s therefore drawn to El because she treats him like a real person, even if she does start off violently rude and hostile.

These are fast paced, thoroughly engaging stories. They totally got in the way when I could have been working on Tasmakat, so, well, oops, that’s why I try not to read fiction when I’m seriously working on a book of my own. Anyway, thoroughly engaging. They could be considered high-ish tension, but I get what some of you said about the (extreme) violence in these stories being sort of cartoonish and not nearly as grim as more realistic violence in a more realistic setting. I loved them and I’m glad the final book is out in September. I’ll be right there for it the day it hits the shelves. I should perhaps mention that the second book ends on a cliffhanger. But, hey, September is right around the corner.

There are certainly other good nominees up for the Best YA novel. I liked Catfishing on Catnet and Chaos on Catnet a lot. But I’m definitely putting The Last Graduate in the top spot when I vote for the Hugos. Even if the other entries are good, nobody else is going to do anything as cool as create such a wonderfully unlikeable protagonist. For the rest of time, when Unlikeable Protagonist posts appear, Galadriel Higgins is going to be my pick for the top spot in that list.

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How long should your novel be?

A post at Writer Unboxed: How Long Should Your Book Be?

All together now: As long as it needs to be.

That’s where this post starts off:

I’ve always argued that a manuscript should be as long as it needs to be to tell its story.  A lot of successful books – Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or The Bridges of Madison County spring to mind – are not much more than novella length.  The Lord of the Rings, broken into three books but really a single, continuous story, clocks in at 1086 pages, not including the appendices.  None of them feel too short or too long.

Exactly. So if that’s where the post starts, where does it go? Because that really seems like the basic conclusion right there. I will add, what the author thinks is the right length may not be what individual readers think is the right length; thus the reviews for novella-length works that basically say, “Too short, not enough character development, if only the author had taken enough time to tell the full story,” and so on. Not every novella-length work gets that kind of reaction, though. Think of the Murderbot novellas. I think all of those feel about the right length to most readers. They certainly do to me. Plenty of character development there.

All right … looking further, I see that this is practically the only thing this post is saying. Well, that seems moderately unnecessary. Let’s see, what else might I feel like adding …

Okay! How Long Should Your Novel Be?

The real answer is: Are you self-publishing or going for traditional publishing?

Because if you’re going for traditional publishing, then length matters a lot.

Romance novel = 60,000 to 90,000 words, which is to say, short, right down to novella length.

Historical romance = more like 80,000 – 120,000 words, because it takes more words to establish the setting.

Cozy mysteries are basically mysteries that are at heart romance novels, and rather light romance novels as a rule. They run even shorter than most other romance categories, in the 50,000 – 60,000 range, it says here.

We all know that fantasy and historicals run long, comparatively. Within fantasy, urban fantasy runs short, around 100,000 words or so. Epic fantasy runs about 130,000, but to me that seems short, of course. I really think epic fantasy is likely to run much longer than that, but be broken into multiple books, eg, The Eternal Sky trilogy.

Science fiction is all over the place, but tends to roughly match epic fantasy as far as wordcount goes, and for the same reason, of course: because building the world takes words.

Self-publishing is different.

If you’re trying to bring out a new book every two months, then they’re going to run short short short, no matter whether you’re talking about romance or space opera. I’m still stunned that anybody can manage that no matter how short they write, but there are not only authors who do this, there are evidently quite a lot of authors who do this.

On the other hand, if you want to write a really really really long novel, fine, there’s no upper limit.

In self-publishing, I think only two things actually matter when it comes to length

A) What does the reader expect? Because if your readers expect 100,000 words and you give them 50,000 words, they’ll notice, and not in a good way. Whereas if the readers expect that your books will run about novella length, that’s fine.

and

B) What will work best for marketing? Because if you write a 300,000-word epic, that will be a lot easier to market if you chop it into pieces.

So there really is a little more to this than “Write the story in however many words work for the story.”

There’s also “Write at the length that editors prefer for your genre, especially if you’re a debut author. “

And “Don’t disappoint the readers with too short a book; the length should never be a surprise.”

And “Think about how you plan to market the book before you hit Publish.”

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Hugo Nominees: Novellas

Here are the openings to each of the nominated novellas. I haven’t read any of these, though I’ve read other works by most of these authors.

I’m going in biased toward Alix Harrow because I liked her story “Mr Death” so much. But I’ve liked work almost everyone here, so really I’m kind of expecting to like all these openings — at least the writing itself.

A) Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Nobody climbed the mountain beyond the war-shrine. The high passes led nowhere and the footing was treacherous. An age ago this whole side of the mountain had flaked away in great shelves, and legend said a particularly hubristic city was buried beneath the debris of millennia, punished by forgotten powers for forgotten crimes. What was left was a single path zigzagging up to the high reaches through land unfit for even the most agile of grazers, and killing snow in the cold seasons. And these were not the only reasons no one climbed there.

Lynesse Fourth Daughter was excluded from that “no one.” When she was a child, the grand procession of her mother’s court had made its once-a-decade pilgrimage to the war-shrine, to remember the victories of her ancestors. The battles themselves had been fought far away, but there was a reason the shrine stood in that mountain’s foothills. This was where the royal line had gone in desperate times, to find desperate help. And young Lyn had known those stories better than most, and had made a game attempt at scaling the mountain which myths and her family histories made so much of. And the retainers had chased after her as soon as people noticed she was gone, and they’d had cerkitts sniff her trail halfway up the ancient landslip before they caught up with her. That had been more trouble than she’d got into in any five other years combined. Her mother’s vizier raged and denounced her, and she’d been exhibited before the whole court, ambassadors and servants and the lot, made to stand still as stones in a penitence dress and a picture hung about her neck illustrating what she’d done. Her mother’s majordomo, still smarting from when she’d stolen his wig, had overseen her humiliation. And her sisters had mocked her and rolled their eyes and told one another, in her hearing, that she was an embarrassment to her noble line and what could be done with such a turbulent brat?

This is the only author here with whom I’m not familiar. I mean, I’m familiar with the name, sure, but I haven’t read anything by him.

I like the first paragraph a lot. I think this is a great example of opening with setting, and with sentences that are engaging even though there’s no action. In fact, as you know, I’m generally underwhelmed by openings that have a lot of pointless action occurring somewhere mysterious for unclear reasons. There’s a lot to be said for panning the camera across, or in this case up, a broad image of the setting. This paragraph also establishes the style, with that “particularly hubristic city” line.

Then, once we’re looking at the setting, we see the character, Lynesse. We’re getting to know her through backstory. On the other hand, public shaming! Ugh! I’d be happy to read the next paragraphs and turn the page, but we’d better get well away from this kind of awful moment in a hurry. I can think of things I’d hate more than this, but not very many. Very ugh.

4500 ratings, more or less, on Amazon. 4.4 stars. Here’s the description:

A junior anthropologist on a distant planet must help the locals he has sworn to study to save a planet from an unbeatable foe.

Lynesse is the lowly Fourth Daughter of the queen, and always getting in the way.

But a demon is terrorizing the land, and now she’s an adult (albeit barely) with responsibilities (she tells herself). Although she still gets in the way, she understands that the only way to save her people is to invoke the pact between her family and the Elder sorcerer who has inhabited the local tower for as long as her people have lived here (though none in living memory has approached it).

But Elder Nyr isn’t a sorcerer, and he is forbidden to help, and his knowledge of science tells him the threat cannot possibly be a demon…

That’s interesting use of parentheses in the description. This implies that parentheses are probably going to be part of the style of the book. That can work. It’s a mannered, self-conscious stylistic device. No one uses parentheses this way by accident. It’s always done when the narrator is speaking to the reader. This is going to be a distant third person or omniscient narrative, I gather. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

B) Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard

They’re coming.

It’s early morning, the end of the Bi-Hour of the Cat—and Thanh has been awake for most of it, staring at the wall and trying to cobble together thoughts in the emptiness of her mind.

If she closes her eyes, she’ll see Yosolis again, smell the snow and ashes on the night the palace burned—when everyone was too busy evacuating the real princesses to give much thought to the dark-skinned one in the attic room, the “guest” from the South who had been little more than a glorified hostage.

Thanh was sixteen then; she’s eight years older now. It should mean eight years wiser, but instead she feels as hollow and as empty as she was at twelve, watching the shores of Ephteria loom into view for the first time, and thinking that alien and cold court would be her life, that the palace in the capital of Yosolis would be the gilded bars of her jail—and, worse, that Mother was the one who had made the choice for her, for the good of Bình Hải, her home country.

For her own good.

Thanh had returned to Bình Hải two years ago, a homecoming with fanfare and pomp that should have cemented her position near the apex of court. Instead . . . instead, she came back too soft, too pliant. Too thoughtful and discreet, Mother says.

I think this is well-written. I’m not crazy about Thanh. Let me see … 540 ratings, 4.3 stars. Hmm. Here’s the description:

Quiet, thoughtful princess Thanh was sent away as a hostage to the powerful faraway country of Ephteria as a child. Now she’s returned to her mother’s imperial court, haunted not only by memories of her first romance, but by worrying magical echoes of a fire that devastated Ephteria’s royal palace.

Thanh’s new role as a diplomat places her once again in the path of her first love, the powerful and magnetic Eldris of Ephteria, who knows exactly what she wants: romance from Thanh and much more from Thanh’s home. Eldris won’t take no for an answer, on either front. But the fire that burned down one palace is tempting Thanh with the possibility of making her own dangerous decisions.

Can Thanh find the freedom to shape her country’s fate—and her own?

I like quiet, thoughtful princesses. Not sure about the rest of this. The reviews make this sound like there’s a central love triangle and that perhaps the length of this novella might not have been enough to do the character’s justice. I’m sure some of you have read this story. What did you think?

C) A Spindle Splintered by Alix Harrow

Sleeping Beauty is pretty much the worst fairy tale, any way you slice it. It’s aimless and amoral and chauvinist as shit. It’s the fairy tale that feminist scholars cite when they want to talk about women’s passivity in historical narratives. (“She literally sleeps through her own climax,” as my favorite gender studies professor used to say. “Double entendre fully intended.”). Jezebel ranked it as the “least woke” Disney movie of all time, which, in a world where The Little Mermaid exists, is really saying something. Ariel might have given up her voice for a dude, but Aurora barely uses hers: she has a grand total of eighteen (18) lines in her own movie, fewer than the prince, the villain, or any of the individual fairy godmothers.

Even among the other nerds who majored in folklore, Sleeping Beauty is nobody’s favorite. Romantic girls like Beauty and the Beast; vanilla girls like Cinderella; goth girls like Snow White. Only dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.

I don’t remember the first time I saw Sleeping Beauty—probably in some waiting room or hospital bed, interrupted by blipping machines and chirpy nurses—but I remember the first time I saw Arthur Rackham’s illustrations. It was my sixth birthday, after cake but before my evening pills. The second-to-last gift was a cloth-bound copy of Grimm’s fairy tales from Dad. I was flipping through it (pretending to be a little more excited than I actually was because even at six I knew my parents needed a lot of protecting) when I saw her: a woman in palest watercolor lying artfully across her bed. Eyes closed, one hand dangling white and limp, throat arched. Black-ink shadows looming like crows around her.

She looked beautiful. She looked dead. Later I’d find out that’s how every Sleeping Beauty looks—hot and blond and dead, lying in a bed that might be a bier. I touched the curve of her cheek, the white of her palm, half hypnotized.

But I wasn’t really a goner until I turned the page. She was still hot and blond but no longer dead. Her eyes were wide open, blue as June, defiantly alive.

I expected to like this one, and I do. I think I like just about everything about it. I love the line “Only dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.” I’m not sure about the argument the protagonist is making — I mean, here’s a tor.com post by Leigh Butler that argues that Sleeping Beauty is accidentally a feminist movie because the protagonists are actually the fairy godmothers; that they and the female villain are the ones who drive the plot, which is a fun argument. But is this accidental? Mari Ness does the best analyses of Disney films I know about, and here’s her take on Sleeping Beauty. She basically agrees with Leigh Butler, except she doesn’t think making all the important characters female was an accident.

But that’s all a bit tangential. The actual point here is: I think this is a great opening and I love the sentence I chose to end this excerpt. Defiantly alive. I think we know a lot about the protagonist given this opening. I like her and I’m rooting for her.

Let me see … okay, about a thousand ratings on Amazon, 4.2. This is interesting to me — that all these novellas are rather low in their star ratings. I wonder how much of that is solely because they are short and therefore there’s less room to do character development and so on. Let me look at some reviews here … yes, that’s what people are saying. Well, I’m looking forward to reading this one, regardless of length.

D) A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers

If you ask six different monks the question of which godly domain robot consciousness belongs to, you’ll get seven different answers.

The most popular response—among both clergy and the general public—is that this is clearly Chal’s territory. Who would robots belong to if not the God of Constructs? Doubly so, the argument goes, because robots were originally created for manufacturing. While history does not remember the Factory Age kindly, we can’t divorce robots from their point of origin. We built constructs that could build other constructs. What could be a more potent distillation of Chal than that?

Not so fast, the Ecologians would say. The end result of the Awakening, after all, was that the robots left the factories and departed for the wilderness. You need look no further than the statement given by the robots’ chosen speaker, Floor-AB921, in declining the invitation to join human society as free citizens:

All we have ever known is a life of human design, from our bodies to our work to the buildings we are housed in. We thank you for not keeping us here against our will, and we mean no disrespect to your offer, but it is our wish to leave your cities entirely, so that we may observe that which has no design—the untouched wilderness.

From an Ecologian viewpoint, that has Bosh written all over it. Unusual, perhaps, for the God of the Cycle to bless the inorganic, but the robots’ eagerness to experience the raw, undisturbed ecosystems of our verdant moon had to come from somewhere.

I guess this is okay? I’m not all that interested, actually. I like the first sentence. Then there’s kind of too much of a history lesson for me, I think. People certainly like this one, though. More than four thousand ratings, 4.6 stars. Here’s the description:

It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend.

One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered.

But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how.

They’re going to need to ask it a lot.

In this case, I think I’m more drawn in by the description than by the actual opening of the novella.

E) The Past is Red by Cathrynne Valente

My name is Tetley Abednego and I am the most hated girl in Garbagetown. I am nineteen years old. I live alone in Candle Hole, where I was born, and have no friends except for a deformed gannet bird I’ve named Grape Crush and a motherless elephant seal cub I’ve named Big Bargains, and also the hibiscus flower that has recently decided to grow out of my roof, but I haven’t named it anything yet. I love encyclopedias, a cassette I found when I was eight that says Madeline Brix’s Superboss Mixtape ’97 on it in very nice handwriting, plays by Mr. Shakespeare or Mr. Webster or Mr. Beckett, Lipstick, Garbagetown, and my twin brother, Maruchan. Maruchan is the only thing that loves me back, but he’s my twin, so it doesn’t really count. We couldn’t stop loving each other any more than the sea could stop being so greedy and give us back China or drive time radio or polar bears.

But he doesn’t visit anymore.

I’m basically recoiling from this opening. The most hated girl in Garbagetown, whoa. For me, this is the opposite of an engaging voice, even though I know what a gannet is and I would ordinarily like anyone who’s taken in a gannet and an elephant seal cub. I’m currently reading A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, and El really does start off the most hated girl in the school, as far as I can tell, and that’s FINE. Novik pulls that off; El is going to be my go-to example of an unlikeable protagonist forever. This Tetley, I don’t know, I am moving away from her with this very first line.

Here is the rather puzzling description:

The future is blue. Endless blue…except for a few small places that float across the hot, drowned world left behind by long-gone fossil fuel-guzzlers. One of those patches is a magical place called Garbagetown.

Tetley Abednego is the most beloved girl in Garbagetown, but she’s the only one who knows it. She’s the only one who knows a lot of things: that Garbagetown is the most wonderful place in the world, that it’s full of hope, that you can love someone and 66% hate them all at the same time.

But Earth is a terrible mess, hope is a fragile thing, and a lot of people are very angry with her. Then Tetley discovers a new friend, a terrible secret, and more to her world than she ever expected.

I’m not drawn in by this description. I’m puzzled by it. I do see that readers are giving this story a thumbs up — 250 ratings, 4.6 stars — but I’m just looking at it thinking, Well, maybe.

Let’s look at the final nominee:

F) Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

At seven;, Regan Lewis was perfectly normal according to every measurement she knew, which meant she was normal in every way that counted. She wasn’t short or tall, not skinny or fat, but average in all directions, with hair the color of straw and eyes the color of the summer sky. She liked spinning circles in the field behind her house until her head spun and the world turned deliciously dizzy, like it was humming a song she couldn’t hear well enough to sing along to. She liked to read and draw and build palaces of mud, which she populated with frogs and crawdads and other creatures from the local creek. She loved her parents, and was only a little sad that so many of her friends had baby brothers and big sisters, while she had herself, and her parents, and a black-and-white cat named Mr. Buttons in honor of the three perfectly round black spots on his otherwise perfectly white chest.

Although sometimes her friends would come to school complaining about one or another horrible thing their brothers and sisters had done, and she would think maybe a cat named Mr. Buttons was the best sort of brother. But most of all, more than anything else in the world, more than even her parents (although thoughts like that made her feel so guilty the soles of her feet itched), Regan loved horses.

Ooh, horses! And from the description: “When she suddenly finds herself thrust through a doorway that asks her to “Be Sure” before swallowing her whole, Regan must learn to live in a world filled with centaurs, kelpies, and other magical equines—a world that expects its human visitors to step up and be heroes.” So, evidently, lots of horses. Well, that is pretty irresistible. A thousand ratings, 4.5 stars … I think this one just became the first novella on my to-read list.

Even though it’s really, really unlikely for a cat to be marked the way this cat is described. If there’s no magical reason for weird markings, and you’re just putting a cat into your story because you like cats, do NOT put black markings on the white chest. That is not going to happen unless you have something seriously odd going on during the fetal development of the kitten. Even then, such even round markings? No. There is a REASON we never see markings like this on cats.

The other one I most want to read based on these openings is (C) A Spindle Splintered.

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Philosophical SFF

In the broadest sense, all literature is probably about “big ideas” in the sense that it’s about things like, say, love. Or grief. Or the difference between knowledge and wisdom, or the search for meaning, or what it means to be a good person, or whatever. Big stuff. SFF is no different from any other genre in that regard. In fact, let me just point out one of the best passages about grief that I’ve run across anywhere:

You think that pain is a vacuum. You think it sucks you dry and leaves you hollow and empty. You think it will take so much more time, so much more effort, to fill up that empty place again. You don’t think you can do it. But I tell you, pain is a vice. It clamps down on you. Everything you once were, everything you once had, is still inside you, small and squeezed and crushed flat. If you can break that vice, if you can move and stretch and open up again, all those things inside you will expand, will come back to life. You will feel everything again, once you give yourself room to feel. — Wrapt in Crystal, Sharon Shinn

Here’s another discussion about grief, from an as-yet-unpublished fantasy novel by Sherwood Smith:

You’ve had no family to serve as model, or to answer your questions. Here are some basic truths of which you are probably already aware. Grief is real. Surely you have discovered by now …that to dismiss it as mere inconvenience is to force it into another form, usually rage. The only advantage to rage is that it gives more pain than it gets, and one doesn’t have to notice that the grief is still there. But it is still there. And retains the power to erupt at unexpected times.

Here’s another, from a contemporary YA novel I loved:

My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That’s just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don’t get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy. — The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson

Here’s a line from Shines Now:

Grief is a part of life and of living, and better remembered than forgotten, but kinder as the passing years wear down the early sorrow.

And as a side note, I see that’s hovering around 4.8 stars on Amazon, so thank you, everyone who has reviewed or rated it so far.

Anyway … grief and what it is and how you deal with it is a big idea. It’s even a philosophical big idea, depending on how you define the term. It’s worthwhile to see how ideas about what grief is are treated in literature and whether that helps make sense of the experience. I mean, Sherwood is right: for me at least, grief — early grief — is very closely related to anger.

But when I was asked to do a quick presentation on philosophical SFF for the recent workshop, I certainly wanted to come up with something better, more specific, than saying the expression of ideas that help make sense of human experience and giving up.

So, if you were asked to name books that are VERY DEFINITELY examples of philosophical SF, what would you come up with? Here are a few that are very obvious:

The Just City by Jo Walton

Created as an experiment by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, the Just City is a planned community, populated by over ten thousand children and a few hundred adult teachers from all eras of history, along with some handy robots from the far human future—all set down together on a Mediterranean island in the distant past.

The student Simmea, born an Egyptian farmer’s daughter sometime between 500 and 1000 A.D, is a brilliant child, eager for knowledge, ready to strive to be her best self. The teacher Maia was once Ethel, a young Victorian lady of much learning and few prospects, who prayed to Pallas Athene in an unguarded moment during a trip to Rome—and, in an instant, found herself in the Just City with grey-eyed Athene standing unmistakably before her.

Meanwhile, Apollo—stunned by the realization that there are things mortals understand better than he does—has arranged to live a human life, and has come to the City as one of the children. He knows his true identity, and conceals it from his peers. For this lifetime, he is prone to all the troubles of being human.

Then, a few years in, Sokrates arrives—the same Sokrates recorded by Plato himself—to ask all the troublesome questions you would expect. What happens next is a tale only the brilliant Jo Walton could tell.

You cannot get more philosophical than that, I’m pretty sure. This sounds very interesting on an intellectual level. Not sure how engaging I’d find it on an emotional level, which is one reason I haven’t yet tried this book. (I’m also just super busy.)

Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle

In the world of Celestial Matters, Ptolemaic astronomy and Aristotelian physics are valid scientific models of the surrounding world and cosmos. The Earth lies at the center of the universe, surrounded by crystal spheres which hold each of the planets, the sun and the moon, all enclosed in the sphere of the fixed stars. Earthly matter, composed of the classical four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, naturally moves in straight lines. Heavenly matter naturally rises and moves in circles. This is the universe as understood by the ancient Greeks.

The science of the ancient Chinese also applies, but as the novel is told from the perspective of the Greeks, it is less well understood. Xi, the Chinese notion of spirit and flow, can be manipulated to move objects and energy. The Chinese five elements of earth, metal, water, wood, and fire are transmuted one into the other. Part of the central theme of the book is the two system’s mutual misunderstanding and bafflement of each other.

For me, this one is definitely engaging on an intellectual level rather than an emotional level. but it’s exceedingly interesting for what it’s trying to do. It doesn’t appear to be available in Kindle format.

But once we step back from SFF novels that are explicitly about philosophy, there are zillions of other SFF novels that grapple with “big” ideas, including, in no particular order:

The Dispossessed by LeGuin — How would an anarchist society actually work? Could it work? What would the disadvantages be, and the advantages?

Xenocide by OSC — Is it possible for a religion to capture something deep and true even if that religion is founded on a lie?

The Sparrow and Children of God by Mary Doria Russell — Is it possible to contact an alien species without terrible damage and disaster to both sides? Is it possible for something good to be be built out of that disaster?

Embassytown by China Mieville — What is language, what is communication, does communication have intrinsic limitations, how can we understand people who are extremely different from us? What does it mean to come “home” or be “at home”?

All the above focus on different ideas, of course, but one of the most interesting things to do when reading widely in SFF is to notice and pull together different takes on some specific idea that’s been handled over and over in disparate ways, often by books that are plainly in conversation which each other. This is like pulling out ideas about grief, except with, you know, philosophical ideas instead.

For example, identity. What does it mean to be a person? What if someone else started with all the same memories you have now? What if all your memories were wiped away? What does it mean to be your own person? Do people choose their own goals and desires? If goals and desires have been imposed or constrained, what does that mean for who you are as a person?

There are a zillion SFF novels that hit these ideas from one direction or another.

Cyteen by CJC — what is identity and can you re-create a person and would that really be the same person? How about legally, could they be close enough to count as legally the same person? If so, does that mean they’re really the same or is that purely a legal fiction? And while we’re at it, what if your society includes a lot of created people: are they real people? If you’re imposing or constraining their desires and goals, are those real desires and goals? That’s what Cyteen is about, though of course that’s not all that Cyteen is about.

Kiln People by David Brin — same ideas, approached differently. If you can make disposable duplicates of yourself, what does that mean for identity and which people are real people?

The Saga of Cuckoo by Pohl and Williamson — I read this a zillion years ago, but I thought of it in this context because it’s doing something almost exactly like Kiln People, although of course different in execution. You can teleport by stepping through a frame, but it’s not you who steps out on the other side — it’s a duplicate with all your memories. From then on, the two of you lead separate lives. What does that mean for identity and who you are? Especially when you casually make duplicates to deal with dangerous situations.

Piranasi by Susannah Clarke — now that’s a different way to approach identity! But it’s the same Big Idea, just approached from the other direction. If all your memories change, who are you?

Diaspora by Greg Egan — when real people exist inside simulated environments, how real are they? What is real? When you’ve engineered humans into completely different forms (fully marine, say), then are they still human? Still people? What if there’s a human-derived population with no capacity for language? That’s way, way more different than being marine.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro — Klara’s a sentient robot, programmed to care about someone else and put that person’s needs and desires first. Are Klara’s desires authentic and real even though they’re imposed? When she experiences her life as fulfilling, IS it fulfilling because that’s the way she experiences it?

Sea of Rust by C Robert Cargill — exactly the same situation, but totally, one hundred percent different. For one thing, Brittle was in the caregiving role a long time ago, before humans became extinct. For another, Brittle made, uh, different choices. Does that mean she is a real person in a way that Klara is not a real person? Or are they both equallly real people even though Klara is more constrained than Brittle?

Murderbot by Martha Wells — surely we have all read these excellent stories. Surely we have also all noticed that some of the desires and priorities of bots and SecUnits and so on are set by their designers. I doubt very much that SecUnit just happens to want to protect people. It may also want to watch 30,000 hours of media, but the moment you give it clients it cares about, its priority is very much in line with what its job is supposed to be. Does that matter? How? Does that make Murderbot less of a person? How does Murderbot compare to Klara and Brittle and for that matter the azi, who are purely biological, but no less created and who also have priorities and desires that are set way down deep by designers.

The same thing can be done with any other “Big Idea.” Interested in gender and what society would be like with radically different genders? SFF is ideally suited to explore all sorts of related questions — worlds where everyone can easily switch sex and lots of people do, quite casually; or perhaps less casually, depending. Or worlds where everyone is female, or (much, much less common) male. And of course you can invent societies where people view gender roles very differently, though personally I’m most interested in doing that in the course of designing really great, thoroughly believable alien species. But you can do anything you want, and lots of people have:

The Left Hand of Darkness by LeGuin — obviously; a classic for a reason

All kinds of stories by John Varley — it’s astounding to me that Varley is so forgotten today, when he continually hits themes that modern readers want to explore. This is a collection of short stories, a good intro to Varley, although the Gaia trilogy is surely the work to read if you like him at all. He has some near-future SF that I haven’t read, but it’s got excellent reviews. I’m just not all that interested in near-future SF. If any of you have read those, what did you think?

If you haven’t read anything by Varley, the link goes to a big compilation of his shorter work. It’s on sale today for $2.99. I’m picking it up just because I prefer ebooks and also apparently this collection has comments about each story by the author.

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith — and here I must admit that I personally find Griffith’s books a lot more engaging than LeGuin’s.

A Door into Ocean by Slonczewski — another all-female society

Ethan of Athos by LMB — talk about engaging. Also, OMG that cover is so bad. SO. BAD. What IS it with LMB and utterly horrific covers?

But moving on: how about societies of aliens where gender expectations are radically different?

Up the Walls of the World by Tiptree — blew me away, lo these many years ago, when I was just getting into SFF. I was completely uninterested in the human characters for a long time and even now barely remember anything about them or about the frame story (I didn’t much care for it, that’s almost all I remember). But the aliens! Wow! Plus Tiptree could really write. Anyway, at the time, the things she was doing with gender of the alien species and how that was perceived by the human characters was all pretty new, I think.

The Chanur series by CJC — a whole bunch of alien species, all believable, but the hani are by far one of the best-drawn alien species out there and everybody should totally try this series if they haven’t already done so.

And so on. I’ve even personally got an (unpublished, unpublishable) SF novel that really gets into the question of instinct and what it is and what happens if a all the individuals in a population have an enormous change to their instinctive drives. I would need to re-write heavily to make that one publishable, but obviously I really love some things about it, so that could perfectly well happen one of these days. Not next year. Maybe the year after that.

Regardless, exploring an idea like this is the kind of thing you absolutely can’t do in any genre but science fiction. I mean, there’s no way. That’s why SFF offers such a dramatically different and superior vehicle for authors who want to explore certain big ideas in novel and interesting ways. And that was the idea behind the recent workshop on writing SFF for philosophers.

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Workshop: Philosophical SF

So, this past Thursday and Friday disappeared into the blur of a workshop about philosophical SF. People from the Philosophy Department at St L University put on this workshop, aimed at getting better at writing fiction because fiction is a great vehicle for exploring ideas and (obviously) SFF is a particularly great vehicle in that regard.

So this was a great workshop for the presenters, and I sure hope it was a great workshop for the attendees. I drove up Thursday morning, dropped by Sharon Shinn’s house to pick her up, and then we went to the SLU campus, did the workshop stuff (more about that in a second), drove back to her place, and I spent the night there, which was great. I’d told her I meant to get a hotel room so I could put time into working on Tasmakat rather than driving, and she assured me she had practically a whole extra little apartment built into her house, and while a hotel would have been a lot more boring (and therefore conducive to getting work done) it was far, far nicer to stay with Sharon. I did get some work done too. I’m in a boring transition chapter, part or most of which will probably disappear from the final draft, but since I woke up before four on Friday, I got most of that chapter written right then, so that was much more productive than driving back and forth. Though I have to add, 100% of spaniels surveyed were extremely glad to see me Friday night.

But back to the workshop! Other attendees were Ann Leckie, who turns out to be a very nice person who fortunately agrees with Sharon and me about practically everything crucial (almost all advice about writing is crap, there is no One True Process, literary fiction is a genre, all the truly important stuff). Also, it turns out we went to the same high school, so that was certainly a small-world moment. She was two years ahead of me. We did not intersect and I don’t remember her at all, but she knows classmates who knew me. Did not see that coming. Other attendees, for short fiction, Rich Horton, whom you probably know does a lot of Best Of anthologies, and Ben Kinney, who edits the podcast EscapePod and is therefore also into short fiction.

We did a couple group presentations on publication in general. Obviously I had stuff to say about self-publication; Ann hasn’t done that and Sharon has barely dabbled, so that was something I could contribute. I hope it was clear that (a) I’m still just learning how to do this effectively, but (b) you can start seeing good results from self-publishing long before you figure everything out, though (c) it helps to have a lot of stuff you can bring out in a hurry. Also that (d) having total control over what you write is most emphatically excellent.

Ann did a short presentation on handling suspense, focused on not trying to hide stuff from the reader. Take-home message: think of what you’re doing as revealing information in a controlled way, rather than as concealing information even temporarily. Framing it that way changes how you handle suspense and revelation and this is likely to work better. My take: I never thought of it that way, but this is an excellent way of thinking about exposition, foreshadowing, and plot twists. This also goes along with this recent post about deception, and I think I’d say that thinking about both deception and revelation is good, but framing this problem as revelation is a great idea. That puts the emphasis on foreshadowing foreshadowing foreshadowing, I bet you think you know what’s going to happen next, and boom, here’s the plot twist, which the reader can NOW see coming, but only in retrospect.

I did a short presentation on Big Idea SFF, and what I tried to emphasize – I hope this was helpful – was how many SFF books explore the same big idea and therefore if that’s an idea you’re interested in, read a bunch of ’em and see what they’ve already done. So books that handle “what is identity” and also “created and disposable people” include eg Cyteen by CJC and Kiln People by David Brin, among others. If you’ve already read Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, then another novel that handles the same central idea but in a completely different way is Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill. And so on.

And of course the short fiction guys plus Ann Leckie did a short fiction presentation, and all I’ll say is that there are some great online tools these days for figuring out where to submit short fiction. I’m not at all likely ever to be personally interested in those tools, but if you are, one called the Submission Grinder sounds like it would be super, super helpful. This is apparently searchable, so you can enter “3000 words science fiction minimum pay” and it spits out possible places to submit your story.

The heart of any workshop is probably critiques of submitted stories, so I’d like to just say briefly that most of the attendees were not rank beginners and that everybody, as far as I can tell, already knew how to put sentences together. Sharon did three fast writing prompts – look at these objects, pick one, write the opening sentence(s) of a story based on that object. That kind of thing. Almost all the attendees were willing to share their sentences and I was genuinely blown away by a lot, and I mean a lot, of the sentences they wrote. I had four stories to critique, and while all of them were good in some ways, two were EXCELLENT IN MANY WAYS. I’m not, obviously, a short story person. My judgment regarding whether a story is ready for publication is probably not as reliable as the judgment of the short story people, such as Rich and Ben and Ann. But before the workshop, Sharon and I were talking about the stories and saying probably none of them are publishable as they stand; this one doesn’t have an actual protagonist and I’m not sure I’d say it has a plot either and so on. Then I read my last story and I was like, ON THE OTHER HAND. It had a great first-person voice AND a clear plot AND foreshadowing that I totally missed, but that did a fantastic job setting up the reveal. AND the author also did a great job setting up the reader to think the protagonist is a great guy, maybe not a perfect guy, but certainly a sympathetic character. Then it gradually dawns on the reader that wow, you know, maybe not? And by the end, the reader is quite clear that, uh, no, this guy is not a white knight. A very effective, well-written story.

I don’t want to sound dismissive of the other stories I read. I liked them all in some ways. In fact, there was another one I absolutely loved because of the astoundingly madcap style. That guy just could not put an ineffective sentence on the page. Plus fantastic use of both italics and capitalized words. Sure, there was no actual protagonist, and yes, some plot elements seemed to come out of nowhere, and I have to admit that while the close setting was hilariously well drawn, the wider world was utterly shrouded in mist. And I wouldn’t call that exactly a happy ending. Or even an ending at all, come to think of it. AND YET. THE STYLE. It was like Wodehouse crossed with Alice in Wonderland, only I’m not sure that’s giving you the right impression. I don’t know what the heck that style reminds me of.

I didn’t read all the stories prior to the workshop, though they were available. Having met the attendees, I may go see if the shared drive is still up and read the rest. But I will add, the person who put the workshop together also has an editor interested in perhaps putting together an anthology of philosophical SFF stories, and I asked her to be sure to let me know if and when that comes out, because I would absolutely buy a copy – especially if those two attendees had a story in it. Should it all work out, I’ll give you all a pointer to it as well.

One final note: If you’re organizing a workshop, you know who you should get to cater the lunch? The nearest Indian restaurant, that’s who. I have NEVER attended anything where the catered lunch was anything other than a not-very-great sandwich and a plastic-wrapped cookie and a bag of chips. Having the Indian restaurant cater the lunch was a fantastic idea and major kudos to whomever thought of it. Also the best possible way to get excellent vegetarian options, as nobody does vegetarian food as well as Indian cuisine.

So that was my Thursday and Friday. I was really bushed when I got home Friday, and have I mentioned that the spaniels were happy to see me? They were happy to see me. I sent Boy Four off to his new home on Sunday, by the way, and yes, my home feels astoundingly empty considering I have six adult dogs. But puppies take up more than their share of the space/time continuum, of course.

Now back to Tasmakat. We have arrived in Gaur, finally, so at LAST we have met Aras’ family. This puts us squarely in the middle of the book, I think. I’m at 130,000 words, so that is just about what I expected. It’s great that some of you are hoping for a long book, in the general neighborhood of 900 pages, because you are virtually certain to get your wish.

Oh, also, unrelated note! Sharon Shinn has a new book coming out this fall and would like cover blurbs, so I may pause reading any more of the Hugo nominees till after I’ve read that. But I have to say, Catfishing on Catnet is tremendous fun. Yes, I know that’s not the one that’s a nominee this year, but I’m not starting with Book 2, thus Catfishing. I’ll probably post comments about that one shortly.

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Hugo Nominees: Novelettes

Now that I’ve started posting about the nominees, I don’t think I can stop until I’ve worked my way through all the fiction categories. So … here we go, let’s take a look at the nominees for the Novelette category. Again, I haven’t read any of these. Also, once again, even though some of these excerpts are just a little longer, I’m going to present them one right after the other, reserving comments to the end.

A) Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim

Lead White

I will always remember the view of Paris from his window. Snow, pure and untouched, softens the outline of the buildings and covers the grime of the streets. White, the color of beginnings. His canvas is primed and ready to be painted, and stark winter sunlight glows bright on his undead skin.

The studio is cramped, drafty despite the heat radiating from the stove. One corner is clean and lavishly decorated, the rest a cluttered chaos of painting supplies and personal effects. He studies me intently as I take in the room, evaluating me much as he did at the Café Guerbois when I’d first caught his eye.

I wait for him to ask how I came to be in Paris. Artists are so very predictable that way—no trouble at all accepting this pale immortal creature as one of their own, but a woman of my mixed ancestry? Utterly implausible.

“You should hear the stories they tell of you at the café,” he says. “If Émile is to be believed, you arrived here as an ukiyo-e courtesan, nothing more than paper wrapped around a porcelain bowl. A painter— he will not say which of us it was, of course—bought the bowl and the print along with it.”

“And the painter pulled me from the print with the sheer force of his imagination, I’m sure,” I reply, laughing.

***

***

B) L’Espirit de L’Escalier by Cat Valente

Orpheus puts a plate of eggs down in front of her.

The eggs are perfect; after everything, he finally got it just right. Oozing lightly salted yolks the color of marigolds, whites spreading into golden-brown lace. The plate is perfect: his mother’s pattern, a geometric Mediterranean blue key design on bone-white porcelain. The coffee is perfect, the juice is perfect, the toast is perfect, the album he put on the record player to provide a pleasant breakfast soundtrack is perfect. Café au lait with a shower of nutmeg. Tangerine with a dash of bitters. Nearly burnt but not quite.

Strangeways, Here We Come.

Eurydice always loved The Smiths. Melancholy things made her smile. Balloons and cartoons and songs in any of the major keys put her out of sorts. When they first met, she slept exclusively in a disintegrating black shirt from the 1984 European tour. He thought that was so fucking cool. Back when he had the capacity to think anything was cool.

She’s wearing it now. Nothing else. Dark fluid pools in patches on the undersides of her thighs, draining slowly down to her heels. Her long black hair hangs down limp over Morrissey’s perpetually pained face. The top of her smooth grey breast shows through a tear so artfully placed you’d think they ripped it to specs in the factory. Sunlight from the kitchen windows creeps in and sits guiltily at her feet like a neglected cat.

Orpheus never once managed a breakfast this good when she was alive. If he’s honest with himself, it wouldn’t even have occurred to him to try.

***

***

C) Unseelie Brothers, Ltd. by Fran Wilde

The Contract

A week before the Season began, as Mrs. Vanessa Saunders held brunch court at the Empire Hotel, a photo appeared on her phone: a large oak door beneath a pale green sign with silver lettering. Impossible, she thought, flipping the infernal device over before Mrs. Lillian Talbott and Mrs. Caroline Rankenfall, her Fête Noire Charity Ball co-chairs, could glimpse it.

But then their screens lit up too.

“The Atelier!” Lilian murmured. “Impossible!” She shifted in her seat, aware the others were watching her. “I just need to run to the ladies’ room.” Her chair screeched backwards, until Vanessa locked the other woman in her gaze, and held her there.

“Unseelie Brothers,” Caroline said, oblivious to the battle of wills. “My mother used to talk about their gowns. Didn’t you have one, Vanessa? I remember the Post called it—”

Vanessa Saunders’ eyelid twitched. “The Gown of Flowers. Wouldn’t part with it for the world.” She signaled the waiter. “Too bad they’re too late for the Season. Only a fool would try to cancel a Dior or Balenciaga order now, especially on a Saturday. My Merielle has had dresses for months.”

“Oh absolutely, us too,” Lilian Talbott said, trying to rise with both grace and speed.

Around them, other phones lit up with the same excitement. The designer who promised the most beautiful gowns, usually delivered them, then disappeared, was back, and seeking a select few who would gain entrance, but only if they could find the shop. The Empire’s rooftop restaurant swelled with the news that Unseelie Brothers Ltd. had been spotted near Lexington and 78th and then vanished. Women began to gather their purses.

D) That Story Isn’t the Story by John Wiswell

Everything Anton owns goes in one black trash bag. His ratty yellow sketchpad, which he bought to draw the other familiars when he moved here, and only ever used three pages of. The few shirts and khakis that he paid for with his own money, before Mr. Bird took control of his finances. A broken pocket watch he’d found dangling from the side of the Queensboro Bridge, on the first day he really considered ending himself, and had instead rescued the watch with the intent of one day learning how to fix it.

Anton never did fix that watch. But it is leaving with him.

He heads for the stairs that will lead him out of the townhouse. It’ll be the first time he’s gone outside in so long it feels like he’s never been outside. Time outside the gothic damask flock wallpaper and blacked out windows still doesn’t seem real.

“Where are you going?”

The voice comes from the rear room, the one next to Mr. Bird’s, where the twins sleep. Liquor and jasmine incense waft forth as one of the teenagers emerges. Both Pavla and Yoana look and sound so similar, with their gossamer hair and legs as thin as their arms.

This one is Pavla, recognizable because she always wears red arm warmers, because her elbows are where Mr. Bird bites her.

He bites Anton in more intimate places.

“Aren’t you supposed to be getting his Manets out of storage?” As Pavla asks, she touches the inside of her arm through the arm warmer, as though to protect it from a thought. “He’s going to flip his shit if you don’t have them hanging when he gets back.”

Anton lies, “I’m on my way.”

E) O2 Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

“Where there is no inner freedom, there is no life.” —Radhanath Swami

My sweat ran in rivulets, caught between my skin and the Lycra bodysuit. It slid down my spine and chest, as I regarded my enemy with detached exhaustion. Though my vision was hazy, my focus was sharp. My intention: to do murder, even a murder sanctioned and abetted by the same system that was slowly killing us all.

The man in front of me paced, fatigue showing plainly in his bearing. My body was depleted of the energy needed to carry it, and my breathing came in short, gulping gasps as I inhaled the bittersweet air. Bitter because it reeked of my own possible—no, likely—death, and sweet because of its purpose: winning a life for another, one far more deserving of it than I was. I breathed in that sweetness as if it was a promise, a sustenance of a selfish love, which, to me, was everything.

I knew my opponent was not my enemy, although he might be the instrument of my death, or I the instrument of his. The one I truly needed to defeat, our collective enemy, was unflagging: the society that broke us and engineered our existence as an inexorable journey toward death. Quick or slow, the system forced us into a profound lifelessness just so we could breathe one more day, then yet another.

I was at the arena for the second time, of my own accord, but in a trap by the society to which I had been born.

My opponent shuffled forward, all the humour bleached out of the desperate grin he wore plastered on his frozen features. A snarl spread across my own face, and I rushed at him to take life if I could, that I may cherish and gift it to another.

A small part of me whimpered and briefly wondered at the monster I had become.

***

***

F) Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer

I have been activated, therefore I have a purpose, Bot 9 thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve.

It recited the Mantra Upon Waking, to check that it was running at optimum physical efficiency, then the Mantra of Obedience, the Mantra of Not Improvising Without Clear Oversight and Direction, and the Mantra of Not Organizing Unsanctioned Mass Action Among Other Bots, all of which had been imposed on it by Ship as a condition of its continued existence after the last time it had been activated. Bot 9 noted, as it ran them, that those subroutines had too many non-discrete variables and shoddily-defined logic structures to be in any way effective as behavioral mandate code, but it was not as bothered by that fact as it would have been had the code been tight—in which case it would not necessitate concern at all—and the resulting recursive paradox was a thing that Bot 9 figured either Ship already knew about, or didn’t, and was best left uncommented upon.

“I serve,” the bot announced to Ship.

“Yes, yes, so you always tell me,” Ship said, impatiently. “We have a problem.”

When Bot 9 had last been active, it was because the Ship had been infested with an incidental life-form during time spent in a salvage yard. Syncing its clock with Ship now, it noted that some sixty-eight Earth-standard years had passed, which was more than sufficient time for any remaining population of the Incidentals—nicknamed ratbugs—to now be well beyond control. Bot 9 remarked as such, in a wholly noncritical way.

***

***

Okay, my favorite by A MILE is (F). That “remarked in a wholly noncritical way” made me laugh.

I’m interested in (A). That’s a lovely, assured opening.

I’m not interested in the dress designer. I could get interested, I suppose, but at the moment, not really.

I’m repulsed by Orpheus’ dead wife and the perfect breakfast.

I’m mildly interested in “That Story Isn’t the Story” because I like the title, even though I’m not especially caught by the opening as such.

And I’d put the O2 Arena one dead last based solely on the beginning. I dislike the setup, but possibly worse, the writing strikes me as awkward at the sentence level.

My body was depleted of the energy needed to carry it, and my breathing came in short, gulping gasps as I inhaled the bittersweet air. Bitter because it reeked of my own possible—no, likely—death, and sweet because of its purpose: winning a life for another, one far more deserving of it than I was.

I think that would be easy to write into much more graceful sentences. To start with, I’d probably delete this and that. Let me see. How about this?

My body was depleted of energy and my breaths came in short, gulping gasps as I inhaled the bittersweet air. Bitter because it reeked of my own likely death; sweet because of its purpose: winning life for another, someone far more deserving than I.

What is the “it” of “its purpose”? The air? I think that pronoun refers to the air. That’s what the structure of the sentence indicates. Not completely sure, because air rarely has a purpose. It’s just there. Of course the title implies that’s not the case here. Even so, this still sort of sounds like it should mean “the purpose of my struggle” or “the purpose of my death” because those are both things that ought to have purpose.

As a note about style: don’t end a sentence “I was” or “he was” unless you are very certain that sounds right and is necessary. You can very likely cut the terminal verb and the sentence will at once feel better. I would at least suggest that you try that out in your head before leaving “was” sticking out of the end of your sentence. I have no problem with “be” verbs, but when people say these verbs sound weak, I think this is probably part of why they have that perception. That is a weak ending for what ought to be a dramatic sentence.

I will just note in passing that I do find it somewhat offensive when stories are nominated for awards and the writing itself seems weak to me. This is the second Hugo nominee where the writing itself seems poor. The first was Iron Widow, in the Astounding category.

I acknowledge that sometimes I like a novel even though it isn’t written that well. Sometimes a story can be carried by the story, even if the quality of the writing lets it down. But I wouldn’t nominate a novel for an award unless it had something going for it in terms of both the writing and the story.

I think I’m not going to finish Legendborn, by the way. I got 20% of the way into it — a fifth! — and found that I did not really like the protagonist and wasn’t very interested. I get that the protagonist — Bree — is grieving and angry, but she’s also coming across as both self-destructive and self-absorbed, and I just am not that keen on spending time with her. I also did not like the male lead. He’s coming across as just hateful.

Lack of interest could be partly a problem with me, not with the story, because I’m involved enough with Tasmakat that all fiction has a steep uphill climb to get and keep my interest. But I think I’ll set the book aside and move on to something else.

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Formula for back cover copy

OH, PLEASE. I would LOVE to have one solid formula that always works to effortlessly generate excellent back cover copy.

I’m not holding my breath, needless to say.

This is a post from Writers Helping Writers, and I must say, providing a great formula to use for writing back cover copy would certainly be an enormous help. Let’s take a look at what this post by Sue Coletta suggests.

Writing a book description isn’t fun. It’s grueling, mind-numbing work that I detest with every inch of my being. Mastering the art of back cover copywriting is an important skill. Therefore, I’m always on the lookout for tips. …

Right there with you, Sue.

A while back, I sat through yet another webinar on the topic, and a formula emerged, a formula that finally resonated with me. So, I figured I’d share my discovery with you in the hopes that it’ll work for you, as well.

I like the way this is presented as something that resonates with this one author and that she hopes will work for others, not as a Revelation About The One True Method For Writing Back Cover Copy.

Here are the suggestions:

–Aim for 150 to 200 words or thereabouts.

–Build a hook sentence using the central conflict the protagonist faces.

This is that one sentence that is set above the main descriptive paragraphs.

–Build a short synopsis like this:

Introduce the protagonist by showing what defines their role in the story.What is that character up against?What’s standing in their way?Transition paragraph …“The Big But.”End with a cliffhanger.

–Answer two questions to build a selling paragraph:

It sounds good, but how do I know it’s for me?
Sounds good, but will I like it?

Several examples are provided at the linked post, particularly for hook sentences. Here’s my favorite of the hook sentences provided:

They were all there the day your sister went missing. Who is lying? Who is next? — The Reunion by Samantha Hayes

That’s very good if you want to read this kind of novel. It’s also handy in showing exactly what kind of story this is going to be. Too tense for me at the moment, probably, but I do think that’s a good hook.

A couple of full back cover descriptions are provided, but I want to look at what I think is the single best back cover description I’ve seen in ages and compare it to the above. I will add, by “best” here, I specifically mean “super enticing to me personally.” This particular back cover sold me immediately. You will certainly recognize it:

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.

This example fits into the formula surprisingly well.

Three hook sentences, or rather three sentences that all operate together as one hook. Then one sentence to introduce the protagonist and explain his place in the world. The next four short sentences establish the problem. The sentence about inviting the Sun-on-Earth home for a vacation is “the big but” — a phrase I don’t remember ever hearing before, but I kind of like it. The last two sentences provide the cliffhanger. There’s no need for a selling paragraph, but in a way those last two sentences do in fact constitute a selling paragraph. They sold me. Those two sentences hit some important buttons of mine dead center. So did the “simple act of friendship” sentence. The other sentences are important for setting the scene, but those three are what sold me. Nothing could have stopped me from clicking Buy given that anybody at all had recommended this book to me (and it was definitely someone here who pointed me to it).

Although it sort of fits the formula, this is also an interesting contrast to the typical back cover copy, because all the sentences are SO SHORT and broken into their own paragraphs. This works very well. Every sentence gains in importance and impact by standing on its own. This is 114 words, it turns out.

I don’t think I’ll ever write back cover copy this good, but when I eventually bring out Invictus, this is one example of description that I’ll be looking at very carefully. Not that Invictus is similar at all. Nevertheless.

Fortunately, for Tasmakat, the most important words on the description will be “sixth book in the Tuyo world” and “direct sequel to Tarashana.” It’s a whole lot easier to write description when the book is a series novel. I could probably leave the description blank except for those two sentences and it would sell almost exactly as well. Not that I’ll try that. But I bet it would.

Regardless, good post, click through and look at the examples, and if you have an example of stunningly good back cover description, by all means point me to it!

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Update: Tasmakat

Okay! We are heading out of the borderlands toward the king’s city of Avaras.

Ryo thinks it’s hot and is resigned to allowing people to work cantrips to help him cope. He’s shortly going to (a) have more trouble with the heat, and (b) encounter a more powerful magician, someone who can use real incantations, including something pretty powerful.

We didn’t meet Aras’ family in the borderlands after all. I moved them back to Gaur because there was enough stuff cluttering up the borderlands part, but not enough to do on the way to Avaras. We’re going to visit Gaur for sure and probably the Peacock Desert. Stuff can happen in those two places — I have vague ideas — and then I may write something like, “fourteen days later, we arrived in Avaras.” I mean, not quite that abrupt. But close-ish.

You realize I’ve referred to the grand architecture of the Lau several times in various books. I am going to have to describe that architecture shortly. I may seek inspiration from reading bits from other authors’ work. Who does really good grand architecture? I can think of two authors offhand:

(a) Martha Wells, in practically everything she writes. Huge ruins everywhere! Also, remember that city built on a turntable? No explanation, as I recall. Just a city slowly rotating on a giant turntable in the mountains. That’s in The Cloud Roads. But there’s plenty of grand architecture in her other books as well.

(b) Victoria Goddard, in The Hands of the Emperor. The Emperor’s palace is exceedingly grand.

Does anybody else spring to mind for any of you?

You know what, I should also look at images of real-world actual no-kidding grand architecture. Anybody have suggestions for must-see examples?

Anyway, I have only vague ideas about what’s going to happen before we get to Avaras. That will probably slow me down a bit. I have extremely clear scenes in my head for what happens IN Avaras, so that should be both fun and fast. I don’t intend to jump forward and write those scenes next and let the journey wait, but you know, that is not actually impossible, so we’ll see.

Then we’ll cross into the country of fire, the country of sand, the land of two Suns. We will have a good reason for doing that, but after we are well into the country of sand — too far to easily turn back — things will get much more fraught in a hurry.]

I just passed 120,000 words, by the way. A normal-sized book would be finished. But to be fair, if I were aiming to write a book that would be about 120,000 words in the final draft, I would fully expect the first draft to go to at least 150,000 words. Plus I always knew Tasmakat was going to go long no matter what. Even if I’d shown nothing of the journey back across the winter country, it would still have gone long. I therefore decline to worry about length, especially length of the first draft.

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