Jim C. Hines's Blog, page 136

In Which Storytellers Conquer the Universe

The Election Day Giveaway was, I believe, the most popular giveaway I’ve ever done, with close to 600 entries across my various blogs. Congratulations to Kari, who was selected at random as the winner. You should have gotten an email asking how you’d like the book signed and where to send it. And thank you everyone who voted last week.

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Seanan McGuire is doing a giveaway of her new collection Velveteen vs. the Junior Super Patriots (which just happens to include an introduction by me).

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Thinking back to the election, to everything leading up to it and the aftermath from all sides, what struck me was the importance of story. Facts are nice and all, but what really mattered was the story you told. The story of your candidate. The story of your opponent.

I see two problems right off the bat.

These stories involve what we in the business call “unreliable narrators.”1
It’s not just that the election is all about stories; it’s that they’re really bad stories.

I mean, come on. One of the basic lessons of writing is that your antagonist should be more than a cardboard caricature, a mustache-twirling villain who kicks homeless puppies for fun. Every villain is the hero of his/her own story, and I believe it’s important to understand the villain’s motivations, even if you don’t agree with them. It usually makes for a much better story. These campaigns need to go take Remedial Creative Writing at their local community college.

Think about how many candidates try to portray themselves as Washington outsiders. That’s storytelling! They want to be the orphaned hero: Luke Skywalker going up against the Empire! Frodo Baggins marching into Mordor!

And like any series, the storytellers have to keep raising the stakes to keep their audiences invested. “My opponent is a Death-Eater and a sparkling zombie werewolf who intends to enslave you all!”

Of course, the other part of storytelling is that your story is supposed to be believable. A member of the House Committee on Science proclaiming that woman have magic pregnancy-blocking vaginas to protect them in cases of rape? Oh, please. Suspension of disbelief is important, and you just catapulted me right out of the story with that one.

The silver lining to all of this is that it provides a lucrative opportunity for us writers. We’ve been so busy freaking out about the state of publishing that we’ve missed the obvious: We should be the ones pulling the strings of the elections, not those silly billionaires.

All those billions of dollars candidates spent campaigning? Send that money to those of us who know how to craft a decent story. We’ll spin you a tale of tragedy and triumph, with a likable hero, just the right amount of humor, a sympathetic backstory, and page-turning action that will actually make you want to care about politics.

You want people going to the polls? Look at how many people rushed out to buy the last Harry Potter novel, because they just had to know how the story would end.

Oh, yeah. That’s the power of story.

Candidates for 2016 can start sending their checks to my P.O. box.

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And that there was what we call an understatement. ↩

Hapenny Magick, by Jennifer Carson

I spent much of the drive to New York last week listening to Jennifer Carson’s book Hapenny Magick [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy].

Maewyn Bridgepost is the smallest of the Hapennies, working for her guardian Gelbane in a relationship similar to Cinderella and her stepmother. But strange things have been happening around Maewyn - purple eggs, gates mysteriously unlatching themselves - signs that suggest the impossible: a Hapenny with magic.

In the meantime, several of the Hapennies have disappeared, and the culprit might be trolls. The Wedge is supposed to be protected from trolls by an old spell, but if that spell is failing, it could mean the end of the entire village.

This is a book aimed at younger readers, with illustrations by P. A. Lewis, but I enjoyed it. It reminded me of a blend of fairy tales, the movie Willow, and a dash of The Hobbit. Maewyn is a lovely protagonist, and there are many nice and whimsical touches, from Callum and his kitchen magic to Maewyn’s care for her pigs to the disheveled raven who leads Maewyn on her adventure.

There were a few dark moments when it comes to the fate of a few Hapennies, but that’s never described directly, and they aren’t any worse than the old fairy tales. And while there were one or two places where things happened a little too conveniently for Maewyn and the plot, overall it was an enjoyable book, made even better by Simon Brooks’ narration.

Let me put it this way. By the time I finished listening to this book, I was looking forward to reading it to my children.

The Inclusiveness of the SF/F Community

I had a “Duh” moment at ICON last weekend. We were talking about conventions and fandom and such during a panel - maybe the gaming panel? - and someone in the audience commented that overall, fandom tended to be pretty accepting and inclusive.

It’s a claim I’ve heard a lot, and I think we as a community tend to pride ourselves on our inclusiveness. Heck, I mentioned in my speech at Worldcon how finding fandom felt like coming home, how I felt accepted and valued here in a way I never did back in high school.

And therein lies the logical flaw, which hadn’t quite crystallized in my mind until that conversation at ICON. Because fandom is not a utopia of acceptance and tolerance. True, it’s a place where I found acceptance. But the fact that I as a straight white male geek feel accepted and relatively safe here does not therefore prove that this is a safe or accepting community.

After all, the other place I felt accepted growing up was in the Boy Scouts…

I love this community, and I think we’ve made progress, but we have a long way to go. Most conventions I attend are still at least 95% white. Women continue to get harassed while men stand around asking why people have to make such a big deal about sexual harassment policies. Awards and “Best of” anthologies continue to be dominated by western (particularly U.S.) names. Our book covers fetishize women and whitewash or erase characters of color. And people who speak up about feeling excluded are accused of being oversensitive, searching for reasons to be offended, and being part of the PC police.

Fandom is accepting of a different subset of people than most other parts of my life, and as a member of that subset, I’m grateful. But I also think we have a lot more work to do to broaden that acceptance.

Election Day Giveaway (U.S. Only)

It’s Election Day here in the U.S. More importantly, tomorrow is “Thank Shadowstar, these %$*& campaign ads are finally OVER!!!!!” day.

To all eligible U.S. voters, I’m giving away an autographed copy of Libriomancer [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy]. All you have to do to enter is:

Vote
Leave a comment saying, “I voted.” (Or words to that effect.)

I’ll draw a winner probably this weekend.

If you already own Libriomancer, I’ll happily substitute one of my other books.

ICON Wrap-up

I got back home just before midnight last night, happy and utterly exhausted. Which is the goal when returning from a convention. ICON 37 was my second gig as Toastmaster, and I had a blast. I was co-toastmastering with Denny Lynch, and we ran our part of opening ceremonies as an improvised D&D session in which he had to rescue the guests of honor. I’m sorry to say that artist guest Mike Cole took an arrow to the knee. Author guest Steven Erikson chose to remain with the goblins.

There was much good programming. I got to talk about gaming and martial arts and writing, did a guest lecture for Paradise Icon, read an excerpt from Codex Born (nobody threw anything at me, so that’s a good sign), and interview our guests of honor.

But the best part was the people. From the moment when writers Cath Shaff-Stump and Shannon Ryan picked me up at the airport and whisked me out for pizza to the end when my liaisons Mark and Michelle McKibben forced me to eat yummy seafood and dessert before dropping me off, I was surrounded by wonderfully friendly SF/F geeks, and I loved it.

[image error]My favorite moment was when a ten-year-old goblin fan named Rhianna presented me with a crocheted Jig and Smudge. Smudge even has a clip so he can ride on your clothes. We talked about the goblins and conventions and books in general. She also gave me a lovely card with pictures she had drawn of the goblins.

Meeting someone who so loved a book you wrote is one of the best feelings in the world. So thank you, Rhianna, for helping to make my whole weekend.

Thanks also to Josh, Lindsay, Athena, Mark and Michelle, and everyone else who helped to make it such a fun weekend.

The downside is that as I was getting ready to board the plane, to come home, I got a message from my editor letting me know that thanks to hurricane Sandy, my plan to visit the DAW office this week wasn’t going to work out. That’s rather disappointing … though there’s a part of me that’s glad to have been able to just sleep in today, and to bum around without having to immediately hit the road again. And I’ll still be going out to speak at the library conference, which should be fun.

In conclusion, life is good, and I am sleepy.

ICON Schedule and Epic D&D Video

Tomorrow morning, I’m off to Iowa for ICON 37, where I’ll be acting as co-Toastmaster. And then after I get back on Sunday night, I’ll be turning around and driving to New York to meet with my editor and agent, then speaking at the New York Library Association conference on Thursday. (At least, I hope that’s what I’ll be doing. Sending good thoughts to everyone dealing with Sandy and the aftermath out there.)

For anyone else who might be at ICON, my programming schedule looks like so. (Posting as much for my reference as yours, so I’ll have something to check when I’m trying to figure out where to go.)

Friday, 7 p.m. - Opening Ceremonies
Friday, 9 p.m. - Reblogging This to Signal Boost
Saturday, 10 a.m. - Martial Arts for Writers
Saturday, 11 a.m. - Paradise Lecture: Avoiding Stereotypes in Fantasy
Saturday, 2 p.m. - Guest of Honor Interviews
Saturday, 4 p.m. - …It’s How You Use It
Saturday, 7 p.m. - Reading
Sunday, Noon - Why Do We Game?
Sunday, 3 p.m. - Closing Ceremonies

That ought to be enough to keep me from getting bored.

And in other long-awaited news, I’m happy to present the full video of Author Dungeons & Dragons, from ConFusion earlier this year. Just in case you felt like watching a room full of authors geek out, old school.

NaNo Pep Talk

On Sunday, I was invited to give a pep talk/Q&A to the Lansing NaNoWriMo group. They had a great turnout at their event, and I had a lot of fun chatting with folks. (I hope it was fun and useful for them, too!)

I’ve been doing my own novel push in October, trying to finish this draft of Codex Born by the end of the month. I’ve failed, thanks to a number of reasons I won’t get into now. With that said, I’ve gotten significantly more writing done than I would have without this push, so I’m calling that a victory anyway. And while I won’t be officially doing NaNo in November, in part because I’ve got a Toastmaster gig in Iowa and a week-long New York trip, I’m still going to keep pushing myself to finish this draft.

To everyone who will be doing NaNo, good luck! Here are some of the tidbits from my talk, in the hope that they’ll be useful.

Nobody is born knowing how to write. We’ve created the myth of the Instant Writer, the person who sits down at their laptop and magically produces brilliant, award-winning prose. But writing is just like anything else. It takes practice. Don’t expect perfection the first time through, and don’t beat yourself up if you stumble along the way.

There’s no one right way to write a book. There’s a lot of advice out there. Try different things. Experiment. Figure out what works for you. Anyone who preaches the Gospel of the True Right Way to write (or sell) a book? Smile and back away as quickly as possible. All those readers out there don’t care how you wrote the book. They just care if the end result is worth reading.

What do you want? There’s no right answer here, but it’s important to know if you’re hoping to be professionally published, if you want to self-publish your stuff, or if you’re just writing for you. Maybe your goal is to write that 50,000 word Spock/Doctor Who fanfic piece. Go for it! But it can help a lot to know your goals going in.

Give yourself permission to write crap. This may be the single most important lesson I’ve learned. It got me through the worst bout of Writer’s Block I ever had. I basically imagined a sign over my monitor that said in big neon letters, “IT’S OKAY TO WRITE CRAP!” Now this doesn’t mean it’s okay to publish crap, and I suspect my editor would have some issues if I started turning in incoherent drivel. But don’t demand perfection in a first draft. Allowing myself to get messy, to scribble outside the lines and stumble through my mistakes, this also allowed me to finish the draft, to explore the story and figure out what the book was about. You’ll have plenty of time to edit and rewrite.

Do edit and rewrite. Once you finish your book, the impulse to immediately start submitting it, or to put it up on Amazon, can be very strong. All I’ll say here is that if I had published my first drafts, I would have had to change my name to distance myself from the shame. Everyone’s different, but most of the writers I know (myself very much included) don’t get everything right the first time through.

Watch out for scams. There are a lot of scammers out there, and they know it’s NaNoWriMo. Be careful. As a general rule, “Money flows toward the writer” should protect you from a lot of them. Also, if you’re not sure if something’s a scam, look at how they make their money. Does this publisher have a website geared toward selling books to readers, or are they more interested in selling services to writers? You want to work with agents and publishers who stay in business by selling books to readers, because they have the most incentive to sell your books. Writer Beware and the Writer Beware Blog have been great resources for me to learn about and avoid most writing traps.

Finally, good luck, and have fun! (And to Annette and all of the Lansing NaNo crew, thanks for the sweet hat and other goodies! )

Mooning my Readers Again

I wish I was the kind of person who was willing to get up at 5:30 in the morning in order to set up the telescope and try to see Orion’s Nebula. In the past week, there were several mornings that the sky was incredibly clear, and Orion was right there throwing ancient gang signs at me … and I was just too darn sleepy to do anything about it.

But I did haul the telescope out a few days ago to do some moon-watching with my son. I snapped a few pics as well, and this one of Tycho Crater was the best of the bunch.

Click for a larger view, or check out the Moon set over on Flickr.

And that’s all I’ve got for now, because I’m going to try to spend the rest of the afternoon making some progress on the book. Wish me luck!

Libriomancer Rant (with Spoilers)

I continue to be thrilled and grateful at how well Libriomancer [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] is doing. Reviews are still showing up on Amazon, Goodreads, and elsewhere, and while they’re not all five stars (and nobody would believe them if they were), the overall reaction has been both positive and encouraging.

Now, I knew when I wrote the book that there were at least two things some readers would be unhappy with, and that this would be reflected in the reviews.

I’m okay with that. I truly appreciate everyone who took the time to think and write about the book, even if you hated it. (But especially if you loved it!)

No book will work for everyone. While I’m sad to see negative reviews, and I am very sorry if you bought the book and were disappointed, I have no hard feelings about anyone posting a negative review. Nor do I have any intention of arguing with those reviewers. That way lies madness.

But I am going to rant about a specific aspect of certain reviews, not  because I want to defend the book, but because I want to talk about the attitude behind this particular criticism.

SPOILERS AHEAD

The two things I expected would lose some readers were Isaac’s moon battle and the resolution of the love triangle. The former in part because it breaks the accepted standards and norms of urban fantasy. The latter because the expectation is that a love triangle will be drawn out through multiple books, with two opposing “teams,” until the protagonist finally makes his/her choice.

I wanted to break that trope, which is one of the reasons I had Lena choose both Isaac and Nidhi at the end of Libriomancer. Now, there are plenty of ways to critique the romantic subplot. You could say I didn’t set up that ending well enough for it to be believable, or that I didn’t develop Lena’s character in a way that let you see why Isaac fell for her, or that I focused too much on the physical, or that I just flat-out can’t write romance for crap, and should stick with nose-picking jokes.

All of those are totally valid opinions.

What makes me cranky are reviews that come off as more of a knee-jerk, “Polyamory is bad and you should feel bad!”

Or to put it even more simply, “This book fails because the relationship is different from the kind of relationship I like.”

I’m sorry, but I have no patience for that kind of attitude.

For what it’s worth, polyamory doesn’t work for me personally. But I also know people who have made it work, and who have built relationships that, as far as I can tell, are as solid and stable as my own with my wife.

I’ve also seen people attempt polyamorous relationships, only to have them go down in flames. I’ve seen that with attempted monogamy, too. So what? It’s one thing to know your own romantic preferences. It’s another thing entirely to presume that all other preferences are wrong, or to simply pretend those other preferences don’t exist. Especially as an author, where I feel there’s a duty to be honest about the world.

Fanfic possibilities aside, I would never have tried to put Danielle from the princess books into a polyamorous relationship. She and Armand were traditionally monogamous, and were very happy that way (when he wasn’t getting kidnapped or cursed or whatever). But for Lena Greenwood, it made sense. For Isaac and Nidhi, it will be a harder adjustment, but they’re both characters who would be willing to at least explore the possibilities. Nidhi in particular has the communication skills that could help this work.

Will it work out in the long term? Great question. Lots of relationships don’t, regardless of how many people are involved.

But I promise you this much. If their three-way relationship does fall apart, it will be due to problems within the relationship, the natural conclusion of conflicts and other challenges that they’re unable to resolve.

It will not be due to a knee-jerk judgment that a consensual relationship between three adults is “icky” because it doesn’t look like my own relationship.

Thus endeth the rant.

Diabetes Details 12: By The Numbers

On October 31, it will be fourteen years since I went to Sparrow Hospital in Lansing and was officially diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. (Tip: Halloween is a crappy day to become a diabetic.)

I’ve talked about the disease before, because yay education and knowledge! Those entries are available by clicking on the diabetes tag.

I thought it would be interesting to try to figure out some numbers as of the fourteenth anniversary of my pancreas calling it quits. As of 10/31/2012…

I will have tested my blood sugar approximately 28,000 times. (That’s 2800 times per finger.)
By the time I switched to the insulin pump in 2006, I had taken about 15,000 injections.
On the pump, I’ve switched sites about 840 times, rotating to different spots on my belly, and occasionally the hips.
I’ve worked with three different endocrinologists, one of whom I dumped because he was a prick, and one of whom left his practice.
The lowest blood sugar I can remember was when I was in grad school, not too long after the diagnosis. I was walking to a class and started feeling really fuzzy. By the time I got back and tested, my blood sugar was in the 20s. (Normal is around 100, give or take.)
The highest was the night before my diagnosis. I went out to dinner with my family, then checked my blood on my dad’s meter to confirm whether I was right about being diabetic. The meter errored out because it couldn’t read that high, which means my blood sugar was above 600.
Blood sugar as I write this blog post: 96.
I’ve had between 40 and 50 blood draws for labwork. (Most of which have gone very smoothly. Props to the Sparrow Lab on Pennsylvania.)
Best guess as to the total cost of medicine and equipment to keep me alive these past 14 years: $86,000.

$33,000 (test strips)
$8000 (lancets)
$18,000 (insulin)
$1000 (syringes)
$16,000 (insulin pump sets)
$10,000 (insulin pumps - 2)


Cost of the initial hospitalization, visits to the endocrinologist, pump education, and dietician, and miscellaneous labwork: I have no freaking idea. Let’s just call it “a lot.”
Average number of years this disease shaves off of my life expectancy: 5.

But screw that. I plan to live forever.


Number of additional years of life I’ve gained thanks to a century’s worth of research into insulin and diabetes treatment: 14 and counting.

All of which makes me very grateful to be in a position where I’m able to get reasonably good health insurance, as well as for living at a time when this disease is manageable, as opposed to being a death sentence.

A cure would be nice, and sometimes diabetes is a significant pain in the ass, but given the alternatives, I will happily keep jabbing my fingers and pumping insulin into my belly.