Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 98

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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Recent Reading: “Mr Death” by Alix Harrow

Okay, as you probably realize, this is one of the short stories that’s on the ballot for the Hugo this year.

Here’s a link to an online version.

I might have a few quibbles … no, never mind. I really loved this story. It’s the only one of the stories I’ve read so far, but it instantly became the one to beat. It actually brought tears to my eyes — twice.

If you haven’t read it and have a few minutes, click through, read it now, and tell me what you think.

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Recent Reading: “Mr Death” by Alex Harrow

Okay, as you probably realize, this is one of the short stories that’s on the ballot for the Hugo this year.

Here’s a link to an online version.

I might have a few quibbles … no, never mind. I really loved this story. It’s the only one of the stories I’ve read so far, but it instantly became the one to beat. It actually brought tears to my eyes — twice.

If you haven’t read it and have a few minutes, click through, read it now, and tell me what you think.

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Hugo Awards: Short stories

I’ll probably read all these because, I mean, they’re short. I’m not going to do that right now, though. I’m reading Legendborn instead, and besides, though I may like the occasional short story, I seldom seek them out. Only if they’re written in a familiar SFF world, really, or occasionally when someone presses a story upon me too fervently for me to ignore. Or sometimes I just stumble across one and really love it. That happened with, let me see … right, this one, here it is:

The Thing About Ghost Stories

That’s by Naomi Kritzer, which tells you something right there. If you’ve never read it, you should make sure to click through when you’ve got time and do so.

But back to the nominees this year. Let’s take a look just at the first few sentences of each one. I’ll present them in no particular order, one right after the other. The entries here are going to be very short, so I’ll add separators so you can most clearly see where each one stops. For the first one, I’m cutting details of the address and so on because none of that is important and I want to get to the line that matters while keeping the opening I’m showing here short.

So here we go —

A) Mr. Death — Alix E Harrow

I’ve ferried two hundred and twenty-one souls across the river of death, and I can already tell my two-hundred-and-twenty-second is going to be a real shitkicker. I know by the lightness of the manila folder in my hand, the preemptive pity in the courier’s face as she gives it to me. I read the typewritten card paperclipped to the front with my stomach tensed, braced for the sucker punch.

Lawrence Harper. Address. Time. Cause of death. Age.

Jesus Christ on his sacred red bicycle. He’s two.

***

***

B) Unknown Number by Blue Neustifter. Oh! It’s told as text message exchanges! How neat. Here’s the first exchange:

Person 1: Hello, I’m sorry, this is going to sound weird, but please give me a chance. When you were eighteen, did you have a childhood friend named Carli that you lost touch with after you left to go to college?

Person 2: Um, hi. Who the fuck is this? Carli? This is an extremely creepy way to get back in touch if so.

Person 1: No, this isn’t Carli.

***

***

C) The Sin of America by Cat Valente

There’s a woman outside of a town called Sheridan, where the sky comes down so close to the earth it has to use the crosswalk just like everybody else.

There’s a woman outside of Sheridan, sitting in the sun-yellow booth in the far back corner of the Blue Bison Diner and Souvenir Shoppe under a busted wagon wheel and a pair of wall-mounted commemorative plates. One’s from the moon landing. The other’s from old Barnum Brown discovering the first T rex skeleton up at Hell Creek.

There’s a woman outside of Sheridan and she is eating the sin of America.

***

***

D) Proof by Induction by Jose Pablo Iriarte

Paulie rushes out the elevator doors the moment they part, only to skid to a halt at the sight of his father’s wife. She shakes her head, but he doesn’t need the confirmation. If Tricia is out here and not in the hospital room with his father, it can only mean he has passed. He numbly accepts a hug from her.

***

***

E) Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker

“Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” (Roud 423, Child 313) is a traditional English folk ballad. Like many traditional songs, the lyrics are unattributed. Child transcribed twenty verses, and a twenty-first got added later (and is included here for some unknown reason—I keep writing to the Lyricsplainer mods to get someone to delete it or include it as a separate entry, but nobody responds, and all they’ve done is put brackets around it. Sometimes I hate this site.)

***

***

F) Tangles by Seanan McGuire

There was something unique about the air on Innistrad. Maybe it was the horrors the trees had witnessed here, the blood that had watered the soil on which they fed their thirsty roots, the bones that littered the riverbed, but the air of this plane was like no other. Wrenn and Six took a step — one of their last together — and put their massive foot down on the soil of Innistrad, deep within the Kessig Forest. This was near the place where they had met for the first time.

***

***

Okay! That’s the set! What do you think? I haven’t read any of them, just these opening lines.

I like (A) a lot.

I love the idea of the text message story, so I’m looking forward to (B), also a lot.

FINE, Catherynne Valente can REALLY WRITE, this is like reading poetry and I’m definitely going to have to read this story.

(D) is boring boring boring. AND, bonus, also looks like it’s going to be sad. Absolutely nothing makes me want to read the next paragraph, much less the rest of the story.

(E) is interesting because it’s kind of similar to the Naomi Kritzer ghost story in a way! I didn’t expect that, but it looks like it’s written as though it’s nonfiction. I like that. I’m interested.

(F) sure looks like a horror story. But intriguing.

What do you think? Which of these story openings strikes you as most appealing? If you’ve actually read any of these, what did you think?

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Literature x Cooking

From Book Riot: I COOKED MY WAY THROUGH A JANE AUSTEN COOKBOOK. HERE’S HOW IT WENT.

What a great idea! How DID it go?

Here’s the cookbook that was used. I’ve never heard of this one, though I have one about food in Shakespeare’s time.

Here’s a good one:

GENERAL TILNEY’S HOT CHOCOLATE

This hot chocolate was delicious! The recipe inspired from Northanger Abbey’s General Tilney, who refuses to share his hot chocolate with the rest of the guests on the table. It’s hands down one of the best recipes for hot chocolate I have tried. It asked to cream the sugar until foamy peaks emerged, and that was what truly made the difference. Instead of traditional hot chocolate powder, the recipe called for melting chunks of chocolate in the cup itself, and that made it for a more authentic flavor.

Does anybody remember General Tilney refusing to share his hot chocolate? Wow, there’s a detail that immediately tells you a whole lot about the character. I have to say, traditional hot chocolate powder? Hot chocolate powder is traditional? Oh, how dismal this world has become.

My goodness gracious, the author of this post doesn’t include the recipe! Wow. Listen, if you include a couple of recipes as an invitation for people to go pick up a copy of this excellent cookbook, the author of the cookbook will almost certainly thank you. But if you’re worried, you’re technically allowed to copy the ingredients, so do that. Then write your own description of how to proceed. This is very, very easy to do. Especially for those of us who don’t follow the given directions in the first place, granted, which I just never seem to, even when I didn’t plan to get creative.

Anyway, I personally have been known to make hot chocolate using …. chocolate. And cream. And nothing else. As much cream as it takes to make the hot chocolate more like a drink and less like a ganache. When I have hot chocolate, I don’t mean hot water with powder dissolved in it.

Anyway, neat idea for a post, but flawed in its execution. I’ll try to remember to get my Shakespeare cookbook off the kitchen island and do a post about it.

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Astounding Award: Best New Writer

Interesting new category for the Hugo, and I just wanted to pause long enough to take a look at the first pages (or some reasonable version thereof) of each nominee and think about how they all look.

Now, as you know, I just read Winter’s Orbit and liked it a lot. It’s popular — over 1500 ratings on Amazon — but I really do not think that popular necessarily equals best. I enjoyed the story, but the worldbuilding is light, the plotting predictable, the prose style fine but not great, and the success of the story based almost wholly on the relationships between the two protagonists. If you like that relationship, then you’ll enjoy the novel; if not, then you won’t think much of it.

Let’s take just a brief look Winter’s Orbit and compare the opening to the other nominees.

1) Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell

“Well, someone has to marry the man,” the Emperor said.

She sat, severe and forbidding in a high-collared tunic, in her reception room at the heart of the warren-like sprawl of the Imperial Palace. The arching windows of the tower were heavily optimized to amplify the weak autumn sunlight from Iskan V; the warm rays that lit the wrinkled Imperial countenance should have softened it, but even the sunlight had given that up as a bad job.

Across from her, in a formal uniform that was only slightly crumpled, Kiem — Prince Royal of Iskat and the Emperor’s least favorite grandchild — had been stunned into silence. He was rarely summoned to an Imperial audience unless he’d done something spectacularly lacking in common sense, so when the Emperor’s aide had called him, he’d racked his brain for a cause but had come up empty-handed. he’d half wondered if it was about the Galactic delegation that had arrived yesterday and stirred up the palace. Kiem wasn’t a natural when it came to politics; maybe the Emperor wanted to warn him to stay out of the way.

This was the opposite of staying out of the way.

This opening is just okay for me. I’m not crazy about opening with dialogue; I think that seldom works as well as other options. I’m not crazy about the writing style, though it certainly signals that this is not a story to take too seriously, and that’s useful to know.

I would add, now that I’ve read the whole novel, that it’s rather slow to start. On the other hand, I started liking Kiem quickly even though characters who are spectacularly lacking in common sense are awful. He’s not really a screwup, in fact, and one thing he’s definitely got going for him, he’s a genuinely kind person.

But you already know I liked this book. Let’s move on and look at the other nominees.

2) by AK Larkwood.

I’m starting after a very short prologue type of scene. There’s nothing wrong with that scene, it’s atmospheric, it reads like a fairy tale or like a myth, but I want to show you this part here, where the story actually begins.

One month before the day of Csorwe’s death, a stranger came to the House of Silence. Csorwe did not see him arrive. She was down in the crypt, listening to the dead.

In the underbelly of the House there were many cellars, hollowed out in the grey strata of the sacred mountain. Deepest of all were the crypts, where the eminent dead among the Followers of the Unspoken Name were sealed to strive for rest. Rest was not something that came easily here, so close to the Shrine of the god. The dead scratched at the walls and cooed in sad imitation of living song.

Csorwe was sitting in the antechamber trying to pick out the words, as she did from time to time, when she heard someone coming down the passage. She drew her feet up into the alcove, hoping she might not be noticed. A bubble of candlelight approached and was opened. It was Angwennad, one of the lay-sisters.

“Csorwe, dear, come out from there, you’re wanted upstairs,” said Angwennad. The other lay-sisters called Csorwe miss or, unbearably, ma’am, but Angwennad had been Csorwe’s nurse, and there were certain liberties permitted her.

Now, I grant, I’ve read the short prologue and also a few more pages, so I’m making this judgment based on more than this tiny snippet. But this is a really nice opening that promises MUCH deeper worldbuilding than Winter’s Orbit. Does it deliver on that promise? I don’t know; I haven’t read it. But I feel like it’s going to.

Also, I’m glad some of you said this one is good and not too dark because wow, the dead scratching at the walls certainly sounds like a detail from a world that could be very dark. So does the description from Amazon:

What if you knew how and when you will die?

Csorwe does—she will climb the mountain, enter the Shrine of the Unspoken, and gain the most honored title: sacrifice.

But on the day of her foretold death, a powerful mage offers her a new fate. Leave with him, and live. Turn away from her destiny and her god to become a thief, a spy, an assassin—the wizard’s loyal sword. Topple an empire, and help him reclaim his seat of power.

As it happens, I like thieves, spies and assassins — depending on how they’re handled — so I’ll be happy to try this book.

Next:

3) The Space Between Worlds, Micaiah Johnson

What a great cover!

My goodness, I love this cover! I would absolutely pick this book up and look at it based on the cover. Even the faded letters of the title don’t cause any problems. The font is so large and simple that I have no trouble reading the title, even at thumbnail size.

This book has more than 4300 ratings on Amazon. Wow. In a straight-up popularity contest, which the Hugo Awards basically are, this one has got to have an edge. Not that I’ve looked at all the nominees yet, but wow. Here’s part of the description:

Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there’s just one catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying—from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun. Cara’s life has been cut short on 372 worlds in total.

That’s interesting, though honestly, I can hardly believe that it’s at all difficult to find people who grew up in such precarious circumstances that they died on hundreds (or thousands) of parallel worlds. But maybe there are lots of people like Cara; who knows? It’s a perfectly fine setup. Let’s take a look at the opening:

When the multiverse was confirmed, the spiritual and scientific communities both counted it as evidence of their validity.

The scientists said, Look, we told you there were parallel realities.

And the spiritualist said, See, we always knew there was more than one life.

Even worthless things can become valuable once they become rare. This is the grand story of my life.

I’m at the base of a mountain, looking over a landscape I was never meant to see. On this Earth — number 171 — I died at three months old. The file only lists respiratory complications as the cause of death, but the address on the file is the same one-room shack where I spent most of my life, so I can picture the sheet-metal roof, the concrete floor, and the mattress my mother and I shared on so many different Earths. I know I died warm, sleeping, and inhaling honest dirt off my mother’s skin.

“Cara, respond. Cara?”

Dell’s been calling me, but she’s only irritated now and I won’t answer until she’s concerned. Not because I like being difficult — though there is that — but because her worry over a wasted mission sounds just like worry over me.

Okay, what do you think? I think this is beautifully written. I don’t like it. I don’t like the pretentiousness of the beginning lines. I also dislike the voice of the main character. She sounds … what? Needy, I suppose. Clingy. Whiny? I don’t know. She does not at once strike me as a character I’d like to hang out with for a novel. I don’t want to turn the page.

Let’s look at the next entry …

4) She Who Became the Sun by Shelly Parker-Chan

I remember this one very clearly from your comments! Many of you said things like, “Wonderful book, but I winced a lot.” I don’t think that’s a direct quote, but it’s close. Tragic story, right? About how the only way to survive is to take and hold power, but holding power will make you into a terrible person. Something like that.

Here’s the description:

In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family’s eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family’s clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected.

When a bandit attack orphans the two children, though, it is Zhu Chongba who succumbs to despair and dies. Desperate to escape her own fated death, the girl uses her brother’s identity to enter a monastery as a young male novice. There, propelled by her burning desire to survive, Zhu learns she is capable of doing whatever it takes, no matter how callous, to stay hidden from her fate.

Grim, grim, grim! I love the trope of a girl dressing as a boy, but this “no matter how callous” thing, I don’t believe I’m up for that. I think I will stick with The Phoenix Feather series by Sherwood Smith instead. That had the girl-dressing-as-a-boy thing and the Asian-inspired setting, but Mouse went in the exact opposite direction of doing whatever it takes, no matter how callous.

But while we’re here, sure, let’s look at the beginning of She Who Became the Sun.

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.

Okay, I’m stopping there. I don’t like this. The first sentence is practically calculated to turn me off; plus I hate hate hate droughts, which we suffer through almost every year here; and yes, we all already know that the emperor’s worthiness determines the prosperity of the land he rules. We know that because (a) the peasants just cursed the emperor in the prior sentence, and (b) because we just know that anyway. You don’t need to explain it.

So, I know that some of you admired this book and enjoyed it (even if you might have winced your way through it). But I don’t think it’s for me on any number of grounds.

A couple more, let me see …

Okay, next up is Tracy Deonn, who is interesting right off the bat because I see for the first time that she’s included an essay, a short story, AND a novel in the Hugo Voter’s packet. Given that she has all that available, that’s very smart! Who brought out this book? Ah, this is a Simon and Schuster imprint, it turns out. I do think S & S has more marketing savvy than lots of other publishers.

Let’s take a look:

5) Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

This is an Arthurian retelling! I didn’t know that. Or not a retelling, but informed by the Arthurian mythos, it looks like. 6000 or so ratings on Amazon, very popular novel. Here’s part of the description:

After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus. A flying demon feeding on human energies. A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down. And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw.

There’s a prologue. Let me decide whether I want to pull a few paragraphs from that or step ahead to Chapter 1 … yeah, okay, the chapter opening is fine, but let’s take a look at this prologue:

The police officer’s badge goes blurry, then sharpens again.

I don’t stare at him directly. I can’t really focus on one thing in this room, but when I do look, his face shimmers.

His badge, the rectangular nameplate, his tie clip? All the little metal details on his chest ripple and shine like silver change at the bottom of a fountain. Nothing about him looks solid. Nothing about him feels real.

I don’t think about that, though. I can’t.

First person present tense is my least favorite narrative mode. It can work for me. I have to grit my teeth through an adjustment period, but I do get used to it and then, as I say, it can work. But it’s never going to be my favorite. This prologue is short. This girl’s mother has just died in a car wreck, I believe. This is a tough way to open a story, so wise decision, keeping it short. Chapter 1 opens more gently, some months later. At college. This is looking like a YA story. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I wonder if that’s part of why the author chose first-person-present. That style became popular in YA some years ago and maybe still is.

Okay, I do like the opening above, and reading a little bit farther, I kind of like the opening of the first chapter as well. This is reminding me a little of The Queen of the Dead by Michelle Sagara / West — which is my favorite of hers, in fact. That thought is making me want to possibly move this book up closer to the top of the stack, maybe actually read it. You know what, I think I’ll send this one to my Kindle right now. … There.

Okay. Now let’s look at the last nominee for this category.

6) Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

I know one of you pointed to this one as very dark. Let me take a look at the description:

The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn’t matter that the girls often die from the mental strain.
 
When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it’s to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister’s death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected—she kills him through the psychic link between pilots and emerges from the cockpit unscathed. She is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises instead.​..

Wow, I hate this. All about hatred between boys and girls, institutionalized hatred, from another bit of the description, it looks like it’s deliberately set up that way. Ugh, no.

But fine, let me see how it actually opens …

The Hunduns were coming. A whole herd of them, rumbling across the wilds, stirring up a dark storm of dust through the night. Their rotund, faceless bodies, made of spirit metal, glinted under the silver half-moon and sky full of glittering stars.

A lesser pilot would have had to fight off nerves to go meet them in battle, but Yang Guang wasn’t fazed. At the foot of his watchtower just outside the Great Wall, he compelled his Chrysalis, the Nine-Tailed Fox, to launch into action. It was as tall as a seven- or eight-story building and bristly green. Its metallic claws pounded across the earth, shaking it.

… and I am so done. I don’t think this writing style is appealing at all. 4500 ratings or so, 4.7 stars, and I’m like, really? Really? This is a boring opening to me, all bland action with no sense of the character. The language is pure modern American. Fight off nerves, he wasn’t fazed. These are not word choices that pull the reader into a compellingly drawn world.

The Nine-Tailed Fox is green. Green, like a fox, I guess. It’s as tall as either a seven- or an eight-story building? Well, which? Its claws are pounding the earth? What a weird anatomical feature to pound the earth with. Crabs hold their claws up in the air when they mince across the sand on their smaller claws. If you want to pound the earth, how about hooves? (Like a fox, I’m trying not to add.)

I was kind of prepared not to like this, but I was also prepared to think the writing was good. I didn’t expect to like She Who Became the Sun — and I didn’t — but the first sentences there were vivid. This isn’t vivid. This is boring, and the writing style immediately turns me off almost as much as the girls-against-boys setup. I’m not in the least inclined to bother reading further.

OKAY.

For me, Legendborn is the one I find most appealing as an option to try next. It should be easy to get into, with its contemporary-ish setting — I think I’d have to work harder to get into The Unspoken Name. However, my feeling is that if I read both of those, I may decide to put the latter first on the ballot. I do like creative, ornate worldbuilding and even if I wind up liking one of the others better personally, I may pick The Unspoken Name as the one of these that I’d prefer to win the award. I suspect that the thin worldbuilding of Winter’s Orbit will cause me not to put it first, even though I really did like it a lot.

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Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell

So, this is a book I tried some time ago as a sample and liked pretty well. And then Everina Maxwell turned up on the Hugo ballot for the Astounding Award which is their new award for best new writer, which meant that Winter’s Orbit appeared in the Hugo Voter’s packet. Since I’d already read the sample, it was an easy choice to go on with this book … especially because I strongly suspected it wasn’t the sort of novel that I’d have to think about a lot.

Basic setup: in order to solidify extremely important treaty agreements between two worlds, Prince Kiem is forced into an arranged marriage with Jainan, a representative from the other world, whose previous marriage partner, Prince Taam, just died a week ago in a flyer accident.

If you’re immediately suspicious that the flyer accident wasn’t an accident, bingo.

If you suspect broad-scale nefarious actions may be taking place surrounding this crucial treaty, you are absolutely correct.

If you expect that probably the heart of the story is a very, very slow-burn romance between Kiem and Jainan, with the murder mystery, the rest of the plot, and the worldbuilding all spiraling around that romance, you’re right on the money.

So, how does this all work?

The story is a lot of fun. I enjoyed it a ton, even though I’m super-distracted by working on Tasmakat. 

Want to see how to write a really extroverted character? Here you go: that’s Kiem. Super-introverted character? Jainan.

The reader is going to be very clear that Taam was abusive as hell, but this is handled subtly enough that Kiem doesn’t seem ridiculously slow to pick up on that. A little slow, sure, but because he’s bending over backward not to pressure Jainan – whom he assumes is grieving – and also because he would never in a million years treat someone the way Taam treated Jainan, it’s plausible that he would be this slow. Plus Maxwell manages to handle Jainan in a way that makes it reasonable he wouldn’t just lay out the truth for Kiem. Especially because the truth is not super obvious. This is a great example of a horrible relationship that is drawn so deftly that it’s reasonable that Jainan isn’t sure he’s not the one at fault. And! Bonus! The horrible relationship is in the past, so thankfully the reader does not have to follow Jainan as he suffers through it. We only get glimpses; the part we see is his recovery.

Have I mentioned that I really liked both Kiem and Jainan? I really liked both Kiem and Jainan.

Okay, so, how about the plot?

Oh, a lot of the plotting is predictable, I suppose. The first time the interrogation machine is mentioned, for example, I think we can all be pretty sure someone is going to get a very close look at that machine, and sure enough. On the other hand, (a) the plot is not the heart of the story, and (b) Maxwell does a fine job ratcheting up the tension. There’s a deadline for this treaty, see, and we get one obstacle after another as that deadline approaches. I enjoyed that. I mean, no matter what, this was still not a very tense read because there is not the slightest doubt, not the slightest doubt in the world, about the ending. This is a romance, and the happily ever after is in sight right from the beginning. This is probably one reason I enjoyed the story so much.

The one thing that annoyed me was that honest to God, all kinds of people ought to have been investigating this stuff and ought to have figured out what was going on. The Emperor comes out pretty badly. Treaty, super important treaty, maybe she should have dug into this mess a whole lot more effectively. But whatever, the focus was not on the Emperor.

The one thing that pleased me the most was that an antagonist gets shifted into the non-antagonist category. I liked that. I very specifically wanted that to happen. It’s not like he turned into an important character, but when this person turned up, I thought right then that if I were writing the story, that guy would not be a bad guy. And that’s how it worked out, and that made me happy. This wasn’t as beautifully handled as, say, Barbara Hambly would have done it, but it was a detail I particularly appreciated.

My favorite moment was when I thought we were heading back to town for a heavy dose of political machinations, but had a flyer crash instead in the mountains instead. Very nice! My other favorite moment was when Bel reveals the Awful Truth about her past and Kiem is like, Can we talk about this later, important things to do, let’s go! My other favorite moment would be too much of a spoiler. I had quite a few favorite moments.

How about the writing?

It’s good. Solid. Not lyrical or anything, but that wouldn’t have suited the story. Witty dialogue from Kiem, extremely restrained, inexpressive dialogue from Jainan. That’s what carries the story. The story is in close third, shifting between the two protagonists, so practically everything is from one pov or the other and Maxwell handles that really well.

Overall:

If this is the kind of story you like, you’ll enjoy it a ton. Is it reasonable that this entry put Everina Maxwell in the category for Best New Writer? Probably not. I can see why it has considerable appeal, but Best New Writer, I don’t know.

Based on your comments about nominees, I have one other book on my Kindle from this category. After I try that, I’ll probably read the first page of the other nominees and think about whether to read them. But (a) very into Tasmakat, don’t have time to read everything; and (b) not up for anything super dark, and thank you so much for your comments because that helps eliminate some really dark nominees.

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Tasmakat Update

I hope you all had a great weekend, and if you’re in the US, a great 4th of July! I really did not pay a lot of attention to the 4th as such because mainly I was just happy to have an extra day to pour into Tasmakat. We live much too far outside of town to go to a fireworks display, especially when it is REALLY hot and unpleasant, which it certainly is. The humidity is through the roof right now. It’s like the Wall of Humidity when you step outside. The windows are literally steamed up and trickling with water in the morning.

Oh! We did have a thunderstorm this past weekend, which contributed to the humidity, but it was GREAT, because we had zero rain in June and all the trees and shrubs were curling up and going crispy and emitting those silent shrieks of despair, as plants do, and really, a thunderstorm was a Very Good Thing. We got an inch of rain and Boy 4 got his first exposure to thunder. He sat up and looked at the adults, completely unbothered, and went back to sleep. He did that for the first three cracks of thunder and there you go, probably that one experience conferred lifetime indifference to thunder, very handy. There are ways to ensure a puppy doesn’t develop a thunder phobia, but the easiest is definitely to have a lot of calm adult dogs who absolutely do not care one bit about thunder. He’s doing great btw and can now come up a whole flight of stairs on his own.

Anyway, other than appreciating that one thunderstorm, I’m just enjoying having lots of flow with Tasmakat, even though I also took a couple of steps backward.

I mean, I FINALLY reached the river, crossed into the summer country, and butted the beginning of the beginning up against the end of the beginning, so to speak. I am now connecting everything up. I wrote two connected scenes I have been dying to write for a year, and now I am going back and writing transitions to get to those scenes and then from one to the next and so on. In the process, I rearranged the timing of certain events and cut 7000 words, some of which may occur kind of soonish, but not here in the borderlands, it turns out.

So:

–I’m now past the 100,000 word mark, even after cutting 7000 words.

–I’m at the end of the beginning, or nearly, and about to move into the middle.

–I still haven’t written one fairly important scene and will need to go back and do that, but at least I have some ideas about it now. And I think that scene will be short. Relatively short.

–I’m still, as of today, doing some stitch work to get from one scene to the next, but I think I will finish that today. Or maybe tomorrow.

–I’m just about to be able to tie the last scene I have here into the narrative, rather than having it sit isolated at the end of the manuscript. It’s a scene I wrote a long time ago, not exactly important, but fun.

–I have re-introduced Esau, now with Keraunani. I can’t absolutely guarantee they’ll both still be here in the finished draft, but I hope so.

–Aras has now officially declined to execute Kerren Rahavet and his entire extended family, in a way that I believe makes sense given the setup from Tarashana while also contributing to the various problems everyone is going to face in Tasmakat. That’s not too much of a spoiler, right? You all knew he wasn’t going to do it, right?

–While we have not yet met her, I suddenly realized how I can make Selili, Aras’ oldest daughter, important enough to have her accompany everyone to Avaras! YAY! I’m not sure why that took so long because it makes sense in story terms, it also makes sense in worldbuilding terms, and it is pretty obvious now that I’ve thought of it. Also, I’m pretty sure Selili’s daughter, Aras’ granddaughter, does exist. Not completely sure, but pretty sure.

And that’s where we are.

I also read Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell, so you can expect comments about that fairly soon.

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Fool them all

From Kill Zone Blog, this entertainingly titled post: Tips to Deceive Characters and Readers

Sometimes you certainly DO want to get to a particular moment and Surprise! it’s not the moment people thought it was going to be. No doubt you more often want to surprise your readers rather than your characters. Or at least, you may want these two groups to be surprised about different things at different moments.

So, sure, sometimes you want to nudge people — let’s say, readers — into expecting one outcome when all the time you plan to deliver a different outcome. You want plot twists, in other words. Is that what this post is about? Let’s see …

Not quite! Or not exactly.

What if the main character lies to themselves about who they are or their current circumstances? Because the truth may be too difficult to accept, the charade continues. One of the most widely known examples is The Sixth Sense.

What a great movie that is! Plays completely fair, but the twist was a complete surprise to me. I immediately wanted to watch it again and see how the scriptwriter built in this deception. This is the kind of deception that comes from an unreliable narrator. That’s one focus of the linked post, though not the only one.

Creating an unreliable narrator takes a skilled hand. Fail, and the reader feels tricked. Succeed, and reap the rewards. The one advantage we have is that trust is often automatic. Because narrators act as our guide, deception isn’t something readers expect. 

I would say that really, while we may expect honesty, we don’t necessarily expect reliability. I mean, all first-person and close-third-person protagonists are at least somewhat unreliable. Their expectations, desires, and biases cause them to interpret events in certain ways. Sometimes they’re obviously unreliable about everything; at other times, they’re providing a unique point of view that is fundamentally honest, but not entirely accurate.

This post is from Kill Zone Blog, which is basically focused on mysteries and thrillers, so we also get the kind of deception common in books like that:

What if a character believes they’re right? They genuinely want to help and don’t mean to misdirect the detective. I’m talkin’ about eyewitnesses to a crime.

That’s certainly a staple of detective fiction. Even more common: everyone lies to protect themselves or other people. This reminds me of the TV show “House.” Isn’t “everybody lies” a mantra of House’s on that show? I seem to remember that.

But in addition to misdirecting the reader via an unreliable narrator or character telling little white lies to the police detective, here’s a way to potentially mislead the reader that I hadn’t thought of:

Symbolism and atmosphere can reinforce a specific message, feeling, or idea. If you look at the setting and the character’s state of mind, think about what you want the reader to see. Is there a symbol or setting that might help foreshadow the truth or reinforce the deception? For example, the following foreshadows danger:

MiragesHeatwavesVenomous snakesFogPoisonous plants

Symbols of triumph and joy:

Breathtaking sunriseRainbowFour-leaf cloverButterflyCardinal

Both these lists are so common they’ve become cliche, but we can use that to our advantage. What if you took a symbol that commonly brings joy and flipped the script? Now, the reader will no longer be able to trust their own instincts. You’re toying with their perception. Thus, able to deceive.

I never thought of this! I guess it’s true? True-ish? Although, I mean, sometimes heatwaves just mean that it’s hot. All you want to do is establish the setting in the reader’s mind and it’s hot, so heatwaves. When I send characters into the land of two Suns in Tasmakat, there may well be mirages. I mean, it’s a desert. Mirages kind of go with the territory. So, if the setting reasonably includes heatwaves or mirages, does that count as “symbols of danger”? I would say some of these are actually symbols of confusion if they’re symbols at all — mirages, fog. But of course confusion can be dangerous and probably always increases tension. I guess I’m willing to agree that if the author includes a mirage, the reader is going to anticipate potential confusion and danger.

Does a sunrise symbolize joy? Maybe it does, even if all the author is thinking is that it’s about time for morning to arrive so the character can get moving. The author could just type, “As soon as the sun was up over the horizon, he got back on the road.” There you go, sunrise without a bit of symbolism or any mood being evoked or anything like that. Maybe if you take the time to write a paragraph about the luminous sky and the streaks of gold and pink clouds and so on, you do mean to evoke a mood. Not necessarily joy. I would say, hope, peace, or a new beginning.

It never occurred to me to use visual description to reinforce deception, though. That’s a new idea for me. Maybe next time I see fog in a story, I’ll wonder about this.

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Unlikeable characters

Kind of a theme at Crime Reads recently: ON WRITING UNLIKEABLE CHARACTERS is sitting here right next to IN DEFENSE OF UNSYMPATHETIC PROTAGONISTS.

Now, there’s two main directions posts like this generally seem to take.

Method One: Treat all characters who aren’t just sweet as pie as “unlikeable” or “unsympathetic” and declare that these are still great characters and you are so especially discerning that you love them even though they are not very nice. A good many posts that go on and on about unlikeable protagonists treat sweet, nice protagonists as the norm, particularly as the norm for female characters. I’m always like, Oh please, what have you even been reading? That is not remotely the norm for any genre with which I’m familiar, including Romance. The norm is snarky, not sweet, and has been for a good long time. In fact, now that I think of it, the most typical norm for female characters in particular might be impulsive, emotional, and silly, which is certainly annoying, but is not remotely the same thing as the norm being nice.

It’s actually hard to list off sweetness-and-sunbeam characters who ARE sympathetic and likeable, rather than treacly and annoying. Sara Crewe in The Little Princess comes to mind. Not every author who tried to write a character like that could pull her off. Super-nice characters who are also sympathetic and likeable are few and far between.

Method One therefore annoys me very much. It treats characters who aren’t especially nice as unlikeable, which is not the case at all. It’s extremely easy to list off zillions of wonderful, sympathetic, likeable characters who are not particularly nice. I mean, what the heck, here: Tremaine Valiarde, Nicholas Valiarde, Stone, and for that matter Pearl and Malachite; Vlad Taltos, Locke Lamora (and everybody else in those books); Aristide Couerveur  in The Bones of the Fair, and for that matter, Kaoren Ruuel, who is fundamentally not all that interested in most people and very, very far from warm and fuzzy; Briony in Chime, Brittle in Sea of Rust, and so forth and so on, ad infinitum. There is nothing at all unusual about extremely likeable characters who aren’t nice and there is certainly nothing unusual about readers enjoying those characters.

Method Two: Defend ineffectual, aimless antiheros or flatly evil protagonists as great fun.

This doesn’t annoy me. I’m just, Well, different strokes for different folks, but count me out. There’s no point defending this kind of unsympathetic or unlikeable protagonist to me. I don’t care that this worked for somebody else. That story is not for me.

I’m curious about which method of argument these posts are going to use, or whether either of them actually manages to come up with something different. Let’s take a look:

ON WRITING UNLIKEABLE CHARACTERS

…what really hooked me was that many of the characters in it were deliciously awful. Take beautiful, dumb Anthony Marston, whose selfishness is so pure that it’s almost to be admired. Almost. Or Emily Brent, a pious, self-righteous spinster who regularly indulges in the deadliest sin (pride, that is). Philip Lombard is the closest the book has to a hero, and he’s as morally gray as they come (though any quick scroll through #booktok will inform you that a morally gray hero is actually what the boys and girls want these days).

Method One combined with Method Two!

This post was written by someone (Kate Williams) who enjoys reading about totally selfish characters — that’s Method Two. Then Williams defends morally gray characters as though there’s something new and exciting about them — that’s Method One.

Selfishness is actually one of the most serious turnoffs for me. Pettiness, stupidity, selfishness, I hate hate hate reading about characters like this, and if the characterization is absolutely masterful, then I hate it even more. I don’t care that Williams loves to read about these characters. Not for me. And then telling us that morally gray is what people want! As though that hasn’t been true since the dawn of time!

When you have unlikable characters, especially unlikable female characters, who grow and evolve without ever achieving the gloss of perfection, you will inevitably turn off some readers. …

There it is! The typical strawman (strawwoman) in almost every post about unlikeable characters. This is nonsense. We do NOT expect sweet perfection in female characters; we do NOT reject female characters who are non-sweet or flawed, that is just not true and hasn’t been for at least a century, if it was ever true. Don’t go telling readers they may not like your main character because she is flawed. They’re all flawed (except for little Sara Crewe). If you made your main character selfish, petty, self-righteous, or whatever, then she is genuinely unlikeable for me because you picked flaws I detest. If you’d make her ruthless and monofocused, or even an outright sociopath, those could be flaws I’d enjoy! If I detest YOUR main character, that’s not me rejecting unlikeable protagonists in general — that’s me rejecting YOUR unlikeable protagonist.

All right, next!

IN DEFENSE OF UNSYMPATHETIC PROTAGONISTS

In The Killer Inside Me, [Thompson’s] most famous novel, the protagonist is a small-town sheriff named Lou Ford. Initially, Ford seems friendly and good-natured, if a little odd (he speaks almost entirely in clichés), but it doesn’t take long for the reader to realize that Ford is a complete psychopath. By the end of the novel, the bodies pile up in gruesome fashion and in sickening detail. How did Thompson get away with that in the 1952? Did his publisher even read the book? In any case, after reading The Killer Inside Me, I decided I wanted to become a writer. And, more importantly, I wanted to write from the point-of-view of a psychopaths, just like Jim Thompson. 

Method Two! This is a guy who thinks it’s fun to read about evil protagonists doing evil things.

Why aren’t my protagonists more relatable? Why aren’t they more heroic? The simple answer is that, for me, unsympathetic protagonists tend to be more interesting and dynamic than those heroic everymen. 

And back to Method One! A different kind of strawman — not a strawwoman this time, but a straweveryman. That’s actually funny! The person who wrote this post is Jon Bassoff. Do you suppose Bassoff actually thinks that heroic protagonists are all the same, while evil protagonists are interesting and dynamic? Probably not. Probably if you pressed him, he’d agree that heroic protagonist vary widely — let’s say, along a spectrum from Kit in From All False Doctrine to Nicholas Valiarde, more or less. This is a broad, broad spectrum, but protagonists from both ends can absolutely be described as heroic. So why this everyman indictment? Why, because that’s a version of Method One — sure, heroic instead of sweet as pie, but it’s exactly the same otherwise.

It’s apparently just really difficult to write a defense of evil protagonists without resorting to some pretense that non-evil protagonists are too ordinary and boring. That’s too bad because it pushes a potentially interesting discussion — why do some readers like reading about unpleasant characters, or even about evil protagonists doing evil things? — into an argument with a false premise: that characters who are not unpleasant or evil must therefore be boring or unrealistic or be painted with a gloss of perfection or some other variant along the same lines.

I actually do not understand why some readers like reading about unpleasant or evil protagonists doing awful or evil things. I would actually like a post that focuses on that phenomenon without starting off with the premise that those protagonists are so much more realistic or dynamic or unusual or whatever, when that is clearly not the case.

The author who comes to mind for me here is Jack Vance. Stylistically, he was an impressive writer. But his protagonists were generally awful! Really awful! Cudgel the Clever springs to mind. My brothers both liked Jack Vance, but I couldn’t stand him, and protagonists like this are why. I remember when Cudgel was faced with this situation: to be permitted to continue some sort of journey, people demanded that he give them the woman he was traveling with. So he did, and went on with his journey. That’s what I remember. For me, it seems as though the style of the writing and the cleverness of the plot matters to someone who likes this book, but the characters don’t matter at all as people. Is that right? I don’t know! That’s just what it seems like to me. THAT would be an interesting thing to talk about.

I’ll have to remember that next time I suggest panel topics for a convention.

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