Sunyi Dean's Blog, page 10

A long dark coffee-time of the soul (or, how I found a literary agent)

I remember greedily hunting down as many of these kinds of stories as possible when querying for the first time, so perhaps someone else will find my data points useful. Warning: this is a little bit long and has some of my usual swearing.

I’m not the kind of person who grew up wanting to be a writer. I sort of figured out at the age of 11 or 12 that writing was a Bad Idea. Everybody wanted to do it, most people sucked, and the few who didn’t suck barely made any money. Before it could ever be a goal or aspiration, I had already consigned the idea of writing to the metaphorical bin.

I mean… I liked writing, and was part of a fan-fiction website for a long time, but more than anything I just really liked reading. Actual books, reviews of books, and forum discussions of books, all of it. I considered myself (and still do) more of a reader. Writing is what you vomit out after swallowing too many novels.

Life rolled by. High-school, university, two degrees, a random sampling of jobs, a decent partner, then a sort-of shotgun wedding. (Look, it WAS love, but I also needed the visa. Don’t @ me, bro.) I started writing for fun in my spare time, because although I’d never really wanted to be a writer, I still enjoyed doing it now and then.

Then we hit the Year of Ridiculous Fucking Bullshit, first of many in a series. I got pregnant, lost my job due to that pregnancy, and our house buy fell through. The Immigration office fucked up my permanent marriage visa and suddenly I was also an illegal alien. Stuff wasn’t working so well.

Enter a hard pregnancy, bad birth, “mild” PTSD and a daughter who never fucking slept.  Tack on two and half years of immigration wrangles and a lot of bad times that don’t deserve space on this page, and that wraps up my late 20s. I also couldn’t go back to work. Initially because of the immigration status, then later a lack of childcare, and finally a lack of confidence; in other words, by the time my external reasons had cleared up, internal ones had cropped up.

In that long dry spell without books or my occasional hobbyist scribbles, I started to miss writing. Literally I was missing something I’d never had. The worse things got, inside my head and outside our house, the more that writing itch dug in. Half-formed ideas and characters refused to go away. Stories nagged me at night.

What actually got me into writing was… baby slings. No, for reals. Collecting and geeking out over baby slings is like, a thing worthy of big internet communities. (Shut up, everybody needs a hobby.) What started out as a necessity with a small clingy child, blossomed into a mild obsession, like everything I’ve ever been interested in. In four months I knew enough about textiles, fabric, weaving, and general baby wearing that I could have qualified as a sling consultant. I didn’t bother, because I knew I’d lose interest in time.

I started thinking–look how much I learned, through sheer enthusiasm. What if I’d spent those months learning writing? How much would I know about the craft of books, if I’d put my mind to that, instead? The itch of writing continued to grow, as my interest in slings and weaving waned.

By the summer of 2016, after we’d tentatively found our feet and Child #2 had arrived, the itch of writing had become a burn. It started to really bother me that I might live my entire life and never write any of this stuff down. I wanted to finish something, anything, because I don’t finish things; I’d left a trail of half-arsed jobs and interests, flirted with but always, always abandoned eventually.

“Just do it,” my partner said, at last. Probably exasperated with my hemming and hawing. “You’ll never be happy if you don’t at least try.”

He had a point. I set myself a time-frame of two years to ‘give it a go’ and see what happened. With hindsight, I realise how laughably short 2 years is to break into writing, but back then it seemed like a more-than-generous period.

It was like ten thousand different doors, locked shut my entire adult life, had suddenly blown down. I’d barely written a birthday card in 15 years and now, suddenly, a whole damn book poured out. I had no idea what I was doing; I wrote. I had to google every aspect of craft; I wrote. I wanted to finish; I wrote.

Desperation provides a beautiful kind of motivation. I burned through words in the frantic months of July, August, September, October; breaking in November to help my partner finish setting up his business; then picking up again and finishing in mid-December. Great! I was done!

I showed my first ever wobbly draft of a novel to my partner. He read 200 words and said, with a grimace, “Is it all like this? I want to stop already.”

Well. Nothing’s perfect on the first try, right?

I didn’t mind his reaction; I’m thick-skinned. We talked about how and why it didn’t work. Then I rewrote it. Just the beginning because, DUH, the rest of it was fine. And thus began a critique relationship that continued for months. Every chapter my partner read, needed a rewrite. The whole book was overhauled and it was better. Sort of.

Time for some beta readers!  I must admit, I have a laugh every time some writing website recommends getting “one or two” sets of eyes on your work. I had around 24 beta readers for Origin of Sight (I’ve lost count exactly), and I needed every single one.

I had so many because the first fourteen readers I found could not get past chapter 2. Dense, inaccessible, full of passive writing, confusing, no emotion, no character connection, too much world-building, no pacing, no tension, no interest, on and on  and on. Every craft flaw you can think of, and I had it.

So I kept rewriting. I rewrote that entire fucking book every month, for four months. From scratch, each time. That’s not an unusual experience, I’m afraid. Writing forums are chock full of other writers with similar journeys. Your first book is brutal, and for that reason I really think it has to be a labor of love. Only love and a dollop of delusional hope will get you through that misery. Let the cynicism come later.

Eventually, I got somebody to finish reading the damn thing, flaws and all. I found other writers, and we built a critique group. 9 months after starting to write, I began querying.

Obviously, I was querying way too early. It should be a law of the universe that you’re not allowed to query in your first fucking year. In total, I sent 130+ queries to every agent I could find, and a few small presses. I had zero agent interest, and a handful of small press requests which all ended in rejection.

Writing can’t be learned in a few weeks. I think, when we start out, we all secretly hope that it can, that we’ll dash down a first novel and get launched into publication.

Realistically, of course, you’ve got a better chance of being launched into the sun.

*********

In the scheme of things, writing moved pretty fast. But it didn’t feel fast at the time. The sense of being eternally stalled was frustrating. A friend described writing as a career defined by long periods of drought and the difficulty is, you start in a drought and might continue without ever finding raing. At the end of one year I turned 30, and was still in drought with nothing to show for it–at least, not to outside eyes. Objectively, I knew I’d learned a lot, and I tried to keep that in mind.

Here’s the main lesson Origin taught me: there is a difference between sentence-level craft, and narrative shape. I’d practiced sentence-level craft and Origin read well–but only on a paragraph or chapter basis. That’s not enough, though, because you can write a story with the most beautiful phrasing in the world and still have it fall flat as a book. You can have fantastic ideas that dazzle the brain and still doesn’t connect with readers.

As writers, we spend a lot of time honing our sentence level craft and that is very important–to a point. But I’d argue that narrative shape and character-reader connections are probably more important. As a reader, it’s certainly true for me. If I can’t connect with a character, I lose interest in the plot events. If the book doesn’t have a strong story, no amount of beautiful writing will save it.

Building on that, all of my rejections had two overarching themes: we cannot connect to your characters and your story is inaccessible. I suspect some of my struggles to make relatable characters come from my own struggle to relate to neurotypical people, although I didn’t realise that at the time.

Over the following year, as my youngest received a diagnosis for autism and I began the process of getting a similar diagnosis for myself, I came to realise that I needed to adjust my characters for the sake of readers. I already adjust myself–my behaviours and reactions–in real life, as someone who is neurodiverse, and the same principles could be applied to writing.

In an ideal world, neurotypical people would make more of an effort to relate to neurodiverse people on our terms, but we don’t live in an ideal world. In the end, wanting to be heard mattered more to me than misplaced artistic integrity (if that’s even what you could call it.)

I changed tactics, and mentally reorganised everything I thought I knew or considered important about writing, and prepared to start again. Once more, but with feeling.

Narrative feeling, that is. The goal was to make people feel something, you see.

*********

A lot of autistic people report a sensation of existing in a control room inside their own head, a silent dispassionate observer of their own lives. Sort of like a mecha pilot, but less emotional. That’s mostly where the idea for Anchor came from. I have always had a “control room” figure that I’m aware of, a disconnection between those parts of myself, and the concept that this self would gain awareness at night in some dream dimension was a long-running bit of fancy.

I took that idea and then I sat down with my CPs, and my partner, and looked very critically at books which ‘connect’ well with readers. First person was an obvious boost; more immediate for most readers. (I’d only written in third until that point.) My new novel would need to be in first person. Sarcasm and extroverted characteristics were popular.  No more quiet, withdrawn characters, then. High concept, fast paced. Okay, so no more philosophy or social commentary. Make it simple, make it commercial; the goal is cheap paperback pulp. No pretentious pretentiousness or self-satisfied delving into phenomenology.

In short, I sat down to write a book that I thought I’d hate, because I was an arrogant coward without integrity who desperately wanted to sell.

In my defense, I don’t actually have any other skills in life, so I did kind of need to make this writing thing work. You know how it is.

********

Anyway, I started over with book 2 (Anchor). The idea of doing this again, from scratch, and without any guarantee of different results was totally fucking terrifying. Especially as I read more and more stories of authors on their 8th, 9th, 10th+ books still struggling to find publication; good writers who just couldn’t get a good break. Luck is brutally important in publishing. I didn’t have the fortitude to stick at it for decades, and I knew that. And what was I doing it for? To write a book I didn’t really enjoy or believe in?

But in the end, I couldn’t do anything else except try. Besides, I had more experience, an awesome critique group, and a year left on the timer.  What else was there to lose.

A lot, as it turned out. We didn’t have a good year. My partner suffered from ill health for months (kidney problems). The depression came back, his and mine. Youngest received his autism diagnosis and became steadily more challenging. We bled money and swelled with debt. Life stagnated. I should have tried to get a proper job; instead, I wrote. The dumb and illogical decision. At least I’m nothing if not consistent. Our ship was sinking and instead of bailing water, I was concentrating on making pigs fly.

In the Geek Feminist Revolution, Hurley wrote: “I’d reached a point in my life where I didn’t know how to do anything else but finish the fucking book.”

That’s pretty much where I ended up. Life was falling apart; keep writing. Nothing made sense; keep writing. No future and no way to dig ourselves out of the endless chasm we were falling further into. Keep writing. All your words are going into a void but at least if they’re down on paper, they’re not eating you up from the inside out.

Besides, my two-year time frame was still running. Shameful as it was to continuing writing when I should have been doing anything else, it’d be even more shameful to quit before the two-year mark–yet another thing abandoned before it’d really begun. I was acutely aware that if I packed it in now, I probably wouldn’t be trying again.

So… I kept writing. Like the total fucking selfish moron that I was, but whatever. You are what you are. Or, ‘you do you’ as they say on the Internets.

One thing that helped keep me sane was the short stories. I wanted to learn this medium and found it useful for a number of reasons which you can read about elsewhere on the site. I wrote my first EVER short story last July… and got it published. Like, I got paid and everything. I was so ridiculously, naively, smugly proud and I won’t even apologise. Publishing my small story felt like the only good and useful thing I’d ever done.

All in all, I wrote six short stories between July 2017 and June 2018; five of them got published. Sometimes with praise and, in the case of “–Good.”, with some kind reviews. But more important than simply being published, they evoked emotion and created connections with readers. That great elusive thing I struggled to do, in real life and in my first manuscript, I was finally getting a grasp on.

Somehow, we staggered through that awful year and emerged into an exhaustion-riddled spring. Partner’s health cleared up, and the business tentatively started again. By then I’d sold four short stories and, to my surprise, Anchor was growing on me. I no longer hated the premise, writing, or main character with the fiery passion I initially had, in large part because the novel had changed into a discussion on topics that interested me.

I’d planned Anchor to be the kind of novel I thought would sell, ie with as little bizzareness as possible, and not much darkness, but despite my best efforts the novel had turned out weird. Really damn weird. Also, dark as fuck. Oh, well. Another lesson learned: you can’t be something you’re not.

The personal side was unexpected, though. The novel had a lot of me in it. An embarrassing amount of real-life anecdotes. My go-to example is the story-within-a-story of Dylan’s suicide, who was an actual person although I changed his name. The phobia of drowning was real, for reasons Remy details in her book, and naturally I have strong opinions on healthcare, abortion, general existence, etc., which all made it in. So much for no social commentary.

I have no idea whether shedding my skin for that book was better or worse in the final analysis. I did it anyway because whatever.

But summer had arrived, and my timer for playing Author Pretend had run out. I needed to put the writing on hold and find something more useful (and hopefully more money-making) to do with my time. If nothing else, youngest was needing more and more care.

Still, Anchor was more or less done, and I could at least query it in the background.  I started subbing, and sat back to let the rejections roll in.

*********

 

My query letter process I detailed in another post (link incoming) so I won’t go into that here. Needless to say, it was a totally different experience from Origin; I got an offer within twelve days of starting to query. Twelve days. I couldn’t believe it; I think I was in shock, in a good way. The Call was terrifying (I hate phones) but Naomi was brilliant, and very kind.

Seriously, though. The time-frame stunned me. I hadn’t even finished wrapping up my writing and already my plans to quit had been foiled, in the best possible way. I bought cheap champagne and cried into a glass.

Same day as the offer of rep came through, I got an email telling me that my final short story had found a home. On the heels of that, revisions for another short (sold but not yet published) arrived in my inbox, and those are always fun to work through.

It seemed I wasn’t done with writing just yet.

*********

I know how lucky I am. Writing is supposed to take years, multiple books, and a lot of misery (although I think I could make a case for Origin counting as multiple books, since every draft was SO different–but I digress). I know that I’m a product of privilege, and will continue to be as my career progresses.

A part of me thinks about how quickly everything happened, and cringes with guilt because others who deserve it more have been trying longer and harder. I listed 130+ rejections, over 200 if you stack in short story refusals, but that’s not a huge amount in this business. People routinely collect hundreds, if not thousands. For years, sometimes decades.

Regardless, this is the path I took which got me picked up by an agent. There’s still a lot more left to do–as I’m writing this, I’m elbow deep in the first round of pre-submission revisions, and the submission process itself will be months or years with, again, no guarantee of success.

That’s okay; there are never guarantees. The only thing you can be sure of is what you’ve already done.

*********

I have no idea whether this long-winded and rather dull story will be useful to someone else, but here it is all the same. Thanks for reading, and double thanks if you made it to the end!

 

 

 

 

 

A year of short stories

About this time last year, I started trying to figure out how to write short stories (inspired in no small part by reading Darby Harn’s short fiction via Absolute Write.) I wanted to know they worked, how the fit together, how writers managed to put complete arcs in such low word counts.

Since last July, I’ve completed 6 short stories, 5 of which I considered good enough to sub. 4 have found a home and the 5th is trying its luck in a ‘zine queue at the moment. I’m not prolific by any means, but partly that’s because I tend to reject anything which I feel isn’t working out, usually by paragraph 2.

It’s been the single most useful thing I’ve done to try and improve my craft. (Not that you’d know that from these garbled blog posts, but hey ho.) That’s probably not news to anybody with any sense but it bears repeating. Figuring out how to create the suggestion of back-drop or back-story without actually spelling it out, how to do effective character sketches in a couple of sentences or less, and how to build emotion in a relatively short space has been absolutely invaluable.

Often, the stories I finish are born out of a realisation that something isn’t quite right in whichever novel I’m working on atm, and thrashing out a short piece helps show me a microcosm of what’s going wrong in the full length MS.

John Kills Jenny (forthcoming from Sub-Q in August) is an interactive fiction piece that perhaps best encapsulates the above; it helped me to wrap my head around the structure of plot and narrative in relation to what’s important versus what is window dressing. That probably sounds very banal to most people, but it’s a simple thing I struggle with (identifying what’s important or useful in a narrative, versus optional.)

No doubt others have had similar experiences, of course–I’m under no illusion that I offer anything unusual for examination, other than to join the chorus of people already shouting Learn short stories!

 

Metronome, by Olive Langmead

Metronome by Oliver Langmead

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Relative to the wider population of fantasy books available, literary fantasy is in short supply. Partly this is down to readership; most readers prefer a touch of literary at most, but many more don’t seek that sort of discussion within their novels (which is, of course, completely fine). Partly it is somewhat hard to break into as a subgenre, being dominated by the existing giants of that particular fishbowl. And partly, anything literary is bound to be subjective and fickle in its reception, meaning an ambitious novel can miss its own mark with the slightest of missteps. All of these contribute to a ‘type’ of book which doesn’t sell easily to either readers or agents, and which is–imo–under represented in the fiction market.

It was therefore with a mix of trepidation and intrigue that I went and bought an unknown Lit-FA book from a small indie press (Unsung Stories–all their books are firmly in the literary end of speculative fiction).

The short version–I enjoyed it, and would recommend it, with some subjective preferences influencing my final rating (4 stars).

The longer version contains spoilers; read at your own risk .

‘Metronome’ follows the story of William Manderlay, an ex-sailor and former professional musician living out his last days in a retirement home. (Straight away the narrative gets a boost from me–older characters are very underrepresented in fantasy, and it’s refreshing to see one lead the story.

William begins to experience nightmares, either interspersed with memories or with the dreams themselves set within locations from his youth. His life unfolds in bits and pieces alongside the wider plot (or deeper plot, if you wish to be pedantic), drawing him further from his mundane life and into a plot involving his own musical compositions. The name of the novel is drawn from a ship which he sails on for much of the ensuing quest (but of course, has musical and psychological connotations too).

The writing is beautiful, musing, thoughtful; Manderlay’s observations show intelligence and awareness, in both character and (no doubt) the writer. The thread of Manderlay’s life is (I feel) the strongest element in the book; his self analysis is eloquent, and quietly tragic. There is nothing to fault in that respect.

Metronome was very nearly a five star for me (I try not to give those out very often). The things that held me back were all relatively small, but still significant in their own way. Firstly, the surreality. It’s an expected–even required–element of any dream fiction, but at times the sheer disconnectedness diffused the focus of the novel. Secondly, there is a suggestion early on that some aspects of the narrative could be read as a descent into death, or dementia. But though the imagery is heavily suggestive, Manderlay’s end is not explored or examined with the same gentle forensics which he applies to his own life, and I’m uncertain what the metaphysical consequences of Manderlay’s final choice will be, if indeed any. Perhaps that is deliberate (probably so, in fact) but I’m not sure it works for me.

Still, so much of the novel is enjoyable and intriguing, and it’s well worth the time to peruse.

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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo IshiguroMy rating: 3 of 5 stars...

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I originally started this novel awhile back, and gave up about a third of the way in because I wasn’t enjoying it. However, I restarted it once more on the recommendation of a friend.

My overall experience of the novel was one of suffocation, on which I will say more in a minute; and while I appreciated various aspects of it, I became aware that some of its attributes–namely, many of those for which it has rightly accrued praise–were ones which didn’t appeal to me as a reader. There’s not a lot to do about that, nor is that Ishiguro’s fault. Such preferences are subjective and insurmountable.

Let’s start from a place that makes sense to unpick. Rereading the novel, I found the set up as disorienting the second time round as I had the first. The opening chapters spend a lot of time moving from one small life event to the next, usually told outside of chronological order. Ishiguro likes, at least with this book (I’ve not read others), to begin or end each scene by intimating significance. ‘I remember this event, and it was significant… [story section]’, or ‘Let me tell you about this event… [story section]… and you see now why that was significant although it didn’t seem so at the time.’ The meat of the narrative focuses heavily on the minutiae of the characters’ lives, their intricate relationships and day to day, and this is told in a back-and-forth arc which moves across the years, with occasional references to the present day.

Perplexity I don’t mind, but NLMG verged into shamelessly coy in places. It felt as if the narrator was determined to obfuscate events for as long as possible. I suppose that’s the aim of authors in many novels, but in this particular case I wanted a clearer understanding of what was driving these kids, and their motivations. This style of narration does, to a large extent, mirror the way in which the children of Hailsham were educated: subtly, everything obfuscated, pieces dropped in here and there; nonetheless my preference would be for slightly more context. However, I felt the way in which revelations were made also lessened their dramatic impact significantly, much as they were for the students—an artistic echo at the expense of tension.

Even once the purpose behind Hailsham gradually came to light, the logistics frustrated me. Why let them be carers? It seems a terrible idea to let donors take that role; surely it’ll just upset them to see how they’ll end up. Why raise humans at such cost and with such difficulty to do what animals could more easily offer? We’re closer to breeding pigs for organs than we are clones. I commented recently to a friend that you cannot write clones seriously in science fiction these days; while this is certainly a serious novel about clones, I won’t be eating my hat in its entirety, either, because NLMG suffers from the same suspension of disbelief problems which often plague this concept. (Just about the only setting in which I’d swallow clones without choking is far-futuristic transhumanist novels.) It would, imo, make more sense to just breed normal people for harvesting, but then of course there would not be any discussion over whether or not clones have souls (which, btw, seemed to me a foregone conclusion—I personally needed more convincing that anyone could think otherwise, and was indifferent to that particular revelation.)

I’d have liked to see more interaction with non-clones; I would have thought that living among real people, without some kind of stigma or marking, meant that people would be much more likely to side with the children, and to see them as human. Setting them apart as different is surely a necessity for maintaining the system. Instead, they fit more or less into human society, if somewhat on the fringes.

That sense of suffocation I mentioned at the start, came from the same carefully-constructed claustrophobia, which refused to discuss said logistics, and the tiny, fake world to which the characters were confined for long periods. Kathy’s friends exasperated me to no end; with the exception of Tommy they were almost uniformly false, living in strange fantasy worlds of their own concoctions. Ruth I found particularly irritating, and didn’t see what she offered to Kathy, especially since Kathy herself seemed far more grounded than the rest. Perhaps Kathy enjoyed the lies because she couldn’t tell them herself, I don’t know. Either way, there was little sense of the world outside their school, their cottages, their carer dormitories; the characters felt stacked atop each other, oppressively so much of the time. Their existence was almost wholly interior, yet they spent huge swathes of time avoiding internal reflection.

Finally, I was surprised that Kathy et al made no attempts to leave. Not necessarily from Hailsham, which was a closed environment (and certainly the guardians seemed concerned this would happen, hence security), but later on in the Cottages, and especially as carers. Kathy could drive, was often (one presumes) gone for hours at a time for her job. Why not runaway, flee, go somewhere else? One could concoct simple reasons for this without authorial prompt… although personally I prefer to have some authorial input into how the world works on a point I see as plot relevant… but my bigger beef was Kathy’s lack of reflection on it. Did it simply not occur to her to try and leave? She didn’t think of asking for a deferral—that being entirely Ruth’s idea—and never seemed to consider in any capacity the idea of leaving. That she should treat her own situation with such alarming resignation stretched belief for me.

But on reflection, perhaps that was part of Ishiguro’s point—that most of us don’t examine as closely as we should the inertia present in our own lives. We do, as a species, seem willing to settle for unpleasant circumstances, undeserved fates, wholly avoidable heartache and hardship. CS Lewis once wrote that we are like children making mud pies in a slum, unwilling to accept a holiday by the sea because we cannot fathom an existence better than what we have, and so have learned to be content with misery. Perhaps the same principle could be applied here (though I’d argue it’s still somewhat extreme).

The novel is billed as an examination of friendship through the years (among other things), but to me the stand-out issues and themes centred on what the characters were willing to live with, accept, and refuse to change. In relation to my earlier comment that Kathy’s friends seemed to exist in their own fantasy universe, it could also be argued that this is not dissimilar to how ordinary people live. While I may not have enjoyed as much as most people seem to, it certainly inspired a reasonable amount of speculation, as evidenced by this unusually long review.

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Too Like the Lightning – Ada Palmer

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If I could define Too Like the Lightning in a word, it would probably be “overwhelming”.

That perhaps seems at odds given my rating, but it is fully immersive, carefully thought out and planned, densely written, complex, layered, intelligent, powerful. There aren’t a lot of books where I need to stop every few chapters and review my mental notes; this is one of them.

It’s certainly not for everyone, but nothing is, and what is (probably) lacks in pulp appeal it makes up for with lively discussion and intellectual engagement. The plot is surprisingly tight, but it takes awhile to emerge from the heaving morass of humanity as depicted.

It is something of a setting junkie book, and the plot takes awhile to get going. I was also dubious about the pacing–there’s always something jarring to me about a book which takes longer to read than it does to “happen”, by which I mean events occur in a matter of days during the novel. Meanwhile it took me weeks to read it.

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The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton

The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Clever and detailed, not to mention elegantly written, but ultimately the narrative is constrained by the very strictures it sets out to explore and (I felt) a little lacking in emotional depth, despite being in first person.

I have a pretty high tolerance for musing, thoughtful, character novels which ramble gently without heavy plot, and of course the promise of Socratic dialogue in spades was a huge draw.

However, the book did drag in places even for me; I found myself skimming Maia’s sections but avidly reading Simmea’s and Apollo’s.

What definitively knocked the last star off for me was Sokrates. Any story which includes him as a character is always going to be taking a risk, since he is a phenomenally influential character for whom readers will have high expectations.

Matt Hilliard once said that authors should be careful about writing messianic messages or sermons unless they are themselves Messiahs. A similar comparison springs to mind re authors and philosophers. The didactic rhetoric and Socratic dialogue often fell flat for me, with logical disconnects between arguments. I would also argue that Socratic dialogue isn’t really debate; it’s artificial and constructed to prove the main speaker’s point. Walton seems to have aimed for a halfway point between true rhetoric and group discussion, but didn’t quite nail either in many instances. Sokrates versus Athena carried well (the Final Debate) but not so much Sokrates and Simmea/Apollo.

The novel did offer a robust defense of the Republic which often gets much flack, although in the end it did come down firmly on the side of Plato’s ideas being too unworkable in many cases.

I think its other strong point (I don’t usually say this) is the thoughtful and scintillating examination of feminism in this context, with full nuance and no easy answers.

I would happily recommend to any fans of Jo Walton’s other works, or fans of literary and/or philosophical science fantasy.

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Getting Published

Two full requests out with two different publishers.

Not quite a year since I decided to start writing and Finish That Book–this is amazing progress, and I’m really happy.

I have yet to hear back from Cornerstones–they may also provide me with more options.

I am pretty confident at least one of these three routes will take me somewhere, but even if none of them do, I feel (perhaps optimistically) that publishing is just a matter of time, now.

First full request

Situation as stands: I submitted pages + synopsis to a small but well-known publisher back in April. In May they contacted me to say they liked the writing but had no space for anything new, however they had forwarded me on to another small (but very good) indie press with a recommendation.

Second press said they’d read in “a month or so” but I’m not expecting to hear back really! However, they didn’t flat out turn me down.

This past week a second small publisher have requested full MS.  Response in 4-8 weeks.

So far I’ve only had interest from actual publishers, and not agents, making me think I should be submitting to slush piles.

I turned 30 today.It’s like a secret that nobody knows, ...

I turned 30 today.

It’s like a secret that nobody knows, and that pleases me, so I’ll whisper it here where nobody reads.

Children of Time by Adrian TchaikovskyMy rating: 4 of 5 ...

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found this surprisingly good. Surprising because I tend towards the soft and literary end of SFF, and also because I bloody hate spiders. So much hate.

I looked up the author and was not at all surprised to see his roleplay interests. This would be a fantastic roleplay setting (and hey, the spider story is good too). He does a good job connecting you to characters who change (as in live, die, and are replaced by new ones) through the centuries.

I found some of the human portions slow but the whole thing pulls together nicely at the end, with subtle moments of profundity and quirky, interesting observations and insights.

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