Jane Lindskold's Blog, page 135
July 14, 2014
ARTEMIS AWAKENING Quiz!
I wrote the Profession descriptions for the quiz myself, and they include a sneak peak at one Profession not yet mentioned in the series, as well as a host of behind-the-scenes details.
What's your Artemesian Profession?
July 10, 2014
TT: Whither Weather
JANE: Last time we were talking about gale force winds in New Zealand. How often do you get hit by them?
ALAN:Surprisingly frequently, particularly during the winter.
Flying into Wellington or Albuquerque
Wellington is actually nicknamed the Windy City – rather like Chicago in your neck of the woods and for much the same reason. We’ve run a couple of SF cons here, which we called Windycon of course, and once we got a full membership from a person in Chicago who wanted one of our T-Shirts so that he’d have bragging rights when he went to the Chicago Windycon…
Anyway, there was a severe weather warning for Wellington just a couple of weeks ago. We were all told about the possibility of roofs blowing off and the inevitability of power cuts as trees and power poles fell over. The winds arrived exactly as predicted and…
…absolutely nothing happened.
When it was all over, an official spokesman said, rather drily, “We’ve had so many gales this year that everything that can blow away has already blown away.”
JANE: That’s scary. We get high winds here, but you have us beat.
I bet a lot of people are blaming this on global warming.
ALAN: That might have something to do with the frequency with which these things occur, but there is evidence in the geological record that we have had very high winds in the past. There is a huge forest covering large parts of the top of the North Island. It is growing on top of the remains of one, or possibly two, much older forests which were completely destroyed long ago. As far as anyone can tell, the trees in these older forests had evolved large root systems that easily resisted the force of the prevailing winds. But one day a huge storm came in from an unusual direction and the trees, having no large root systems to protect themselves from those unexpected gales, were all uprooted, collapsing en masse.
Someone once asked, “If a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?”
Well, maybe or maybe not. But when a whole forest falls over all at once, I imagine that it must be quite noisy!
JANE: I’ve always hated that question… It’s so humanocentric. But I will resist ranting about that… Suffice to say that existentialism and I did not mesh.
Other than worrying about having your roof blown off or your house getting crushed by a falling tree, how else do those high winds influence your life?
ALAN: I always get a bit of a sinking feeling in my tummy when I know the gales are on their way. I fly around the country a lot, and big winds can make landing at Wellington Airport more than a little hairy. The powers that be hate closing the airport because it causes so much disruption so it takes very extreme weather conditions indeed to close the airport down. Rumour has it that once you have landed safely at Wellington, you will never be scared in an aeroplane again. I’ve had far too many experiences of planes being thrown hither and yon all over the sky as they line up for the final approach…
JANE: Oh, dear. I’ve always wanted to come back to New Zealand, but maybe I should make sure I don’t land in Wellington. Turbulence and Jane do not mesh well.
A couple weeks ago, when I was coming home from my signing tour in California, my plane’s landing in Albuquerque was quite rough. The skies were blue and bright, but a combination of winds and thermal updrafts made the plane buck like a bronco. I’d been working for most of the flight, but I finally resigned myself to locating the airsick bag and hoping I wouldn’t need to use it. I didn’t, but it was a close thing and I felt cruddy for the rest of the day – not precisely the homecoming I’d been imagining.
ALAN: I once read a novel in which a small child, seeking to amuse itself, went sneaking around an aeroplane when nobody was looking and cut the bottoms off all the airsick bags…
JANE: Oh, yuck! I will now need to check in advance of every flight.
ALAN: You live in a desert which I always think of as being hot and arid, and yet the incident that started this discussion off was a hailstorm that damaged your roof. How can that happen in a desert?
JANE: Technically, I live in a high altitude grassland. This is because Albuquerque gets seven and half inches of rain per year, rather than seven. However, given that we’ve had drought conditions for the last several years, this is a moot point.
Deserts aren’t always hot and sunny. Even at lower altitudes, the aridity can make for very hot days and extremely cold nights. Albuquerque is at a mile high, so thirty degree temperature shifts are usual and fifty degree shifts are not unusual. It’s quite possible for the temperatures to be warm enough that I’m wearing short sleeves during the day and covering my plants against a freeze at night. That’s why even in mid-winter, the Indians could get a lot of use from their flat roof living space.
ALAN: Ah, I see. I wasn’t expecting that. Robin comes from Perth in West Australia. It’s a true desert town and every time I have been there (in summer anyway) it has always been very hot during the day and quite hot at night as well.
JANE: New Mexico has particularly odd weather. I’ve watched it rain out of a clear blue sky. The first time I went to Santa Fe, it was raining on one side of the street and not on the other. I felt as if I was in a fantasy novel.
ALAN: New Zealand is a bit like that as well. We have quite a lot of geography cluttering up the country and that tends to divide the whole place up into a collection of isolated micro-climates. The weather forecasters make sweeping generalisations that are broadly true, but local conditions can override that, and the weather at one place can often be quite different from the weather just down the road.
JANE: Ah, microclimates! Any gardener learns to deal with them, but here we really need to take them into account.
Not only does New Mexico get rain – when it does rain – out of a blue sky, I’ve also seen it raining up high – and the rain doesn’t reach the ground.
ALAN: Gosh! That’s bizarre. I’ve never seen anything like that.
JANE: It’s not uncommon. There’s a meteorological term for this: virgas.
ALAN: Wait! Isn’t that what you called the Spanish roof beams that you mentioned a few weeks ago?
JANE: No, those are vigas.
ALAN: Oh, so perhaps we’re talking astrology then? Are they named for the zodiac sign?
JANE: No… That’s Virgo. Admittedly, Virgos are known for being orderly, but I don’t think that extends to controlling whether or not rain touches the ground.
ALAN: So are you saying a virga is just like a raincoat for the ground – it keeps the soil dry in the same way that a real raincoat keeps you dry?
JANE: Absolutely! Have I mentioned that you are a very silly human?
I just realized that we’ve mostly been focusing on the hot, dry, and windy. I never did really get around to hail. How about next time?
July 9, 2014
As Summer Wanders On
Artemis Awakening has been out for a bit over a month now and good things are still happening. I’m doing a signing this coming Saturday (July 12) 3:00 pm at Bookworks (4022 Rio Grande NW next to Flying Star Café). Drop in and bring your questions not only about this book but about my other books or writing or whatever…
Our Variation of Green
Later this month, SFWA President and author Steve Gould and I are signing at the Barnes and Noble at Coronado Mall (also here in Albuquerque). In addition to reading and signing, we’ll probably be talking about some of the challenges involved in writing series.
Finally, don’t forget, Bubonicon, New Mexico’s premier SF/F convention, is three weeks early this year. The dates are August 1-3. It’s a great convention, drawing both authors and fans from around the country. Check out their website for more information.
This week started a multi-part series in which Scot Noel and I discuss various aspects of the Cover Art Contest we were both involved in. (See WW 1-29-14 for details.) This week we talk about why we put quite a lot of time – and hard-earned money – into this project. In subsequent weeks we’re going to be taking a closer look at some of the art, starting with some interesting pieces that didn’t make the Finalist gallery but still struck our fancy, then moving onto the Finalists and Winners. It’s a great look behind the scenes of the creative process.
Here on the home front, I’m taking a break from writing fiction to write a book about writing. The book is an expansion of some of the pieces I’ve written for these Wednesday Wanderings over the years. I also intend to address the question of the elusive Golden Key. When I’m done, the book will be available as both an e-book and POD. I’ll keep you posted as I move along.
I haven’t given up on fiction. Not in the least! I’m currently researching two short stories. One will go with the first prize winning piece for the Cover Art Contest I mentioned above. The other is for the anthology Shadows and Reflections, a tribute collection to the late Roger Zelazny. Which one gets written first is up to the Muse. Again, I’ll keep you posted.
When I’m not doing any of the myriad aboves, I’ve been enjoying my yard. The yellow lilies I featured last week are still going strong — and we now have three separate patches so the yard smells wonderful, especially in the evening. Last week,we started the squash harvest. I’m also cutting Hungarian peppers and a few eggplant. We nearly an inch of rain spread out over four days, which has freshened everything up.
It’s actually green! Amazing…
July 3, 2014
Houses that Flex, Winds that Roar
Looking for the Wednesday Wandering? Page back one and find the Adventures of Little Quail. Then join me an Alan for whare and housing woes…
JANE: In answering your question about flat roofs here in the southwest, I found myself going into the sort of details that an author uses when world-building. That got me wondering about what might have influenced the various building styles there in New Zealand.
A Brightly Colored House
ALAN: The Maori in New Zealand were fortunate in that they had a lot of natural materials to work with. A typical house, or whare (that’s pronounced FORR-EH, by the way)…
JANE: Why? I mean, why didn’t they just spell it “Forreh”? I swear, British words seem to require a code book to pronounce them properly…
ALAN: (putting on his linguistic digression hat):When the British arrived in New Zealand they found a very sophisticated stone age culture already in place. However, the Maori didn’t have a written language and attempts by the invading British to record the sounds of the language were formalised phonetically. It so happens that some Maori tribes pronounce the “wh” sound rather like the aspirated English pronunciation in words such as “where” and “when”. However other tribes pronounce it with a much harder sound, approximating the English “F” . This last is slightly more common, but nevertheless the initial “wh” spelling remains. Similar phonetic arguments apply to the rest of the word.
The Polynesian languages are all quite closely related. Maori sounds very similar to Hawaiian, to give an example slightly closer to your home than to mine. Does that help?
(Alan takes his hat off again).
JANE: Excellent!
ALAN: Meanwhile, back to houses. A whare was built of wood and thatched with reeds bound together with flax. The slope of the roof was quite steep to encourage run off. No trout lakes here either.
JANE: Isn’t flax what linen comes from? Then they had linen ties on their roofs? Interesting…
ALAN: Indeed they did. Flax can be pounded into fibres that are used to weave cloth and to make very strong rope and string. Actually the rope it makes is of such high quality that it was in great demand for rigging the sails in the ships of the Royal Navy.
The fabric produced from it isn’t quite linen because the New Zealand flax is a different plant from its Northern Hemisphere equivalent, but it’s close enough to make a good comparison. However, the cloth itself wasn’t used to make roofs. Just the string and rope were used to bind the reed thatching together.
JANE: Thanks! I must admit, I had a momentary image of bed sheet-covered thatching. Pray, continue…
ALAN: These days, houses in New Zealand continue to be mostly made of wood – it flexes and bends in earthquakes, so houses built of wood are more likely to survive quakes that would destroy houses built of more rigid, less flexible materials such as brick. Because the houses are made of wood, they obviously need painting, and walking down a typical New Zealand street can be a very colourful experience indeed. A friend of mine has painted his house a rather vivid purple, though he is regarded as more than a little eccentric and I suspect he might have to re-paint it in a more conservative colour if he ever tries to sell it…
JANE: I miss brightly colored houses. During my recent visit to San Francisco, I very much enjoyed the colorful houses. When Jim and I had our house re-stuccoed a few years ago, I pointed out to him that there were some non-brown options. I rather liked a vivid blue. Jim looked quietly horrified.
Still, he got adventurous enough to suggest a warm reddish brown shade called, I believe, “Sedona” after the famous “red rocks” in that area of Arizona. We didn’t think it was all that dramatic, but one visitor insisted the house was now “pink.” It isn’t. It’s still brown, just reddish-brown.
It seems to me that, when looked at the way we have, houses can be seen as mechanisms for keeping out the weather. Design features, especially in the olden days, weren’t a matter of architectural whim, but intended to deal with aspects of the weather.
ALAN: Quite true. New Zealand weather tends very much towards extremes. Huge rainstorms, gale force winds, and very cold winters alternate with fierce sunshine in the summer. Trying to reconcile all of these in one building is really rather tricky. My house is in desperate need of painting at the moment. The relentless sun of summer has dried the paint out and it is flaking off. The steel roof absorbs heat very well and the roof space is always much warmer than rest of the house.
JANE: We have extremes as well and they influence lots of things – including aspects of one’s car. New Mexico gets over three hundred sunny days a year, so owning a car that is painted black or even dark blue or green is not a good idea. Those dark colors soak up heat. Even if you do opt for a darker vehicle exterior, plastic or vinyl seat covers are a very bad idea. Many people cover their steering wheels as well.
ALAN: Three hundred sunny days a year? We’re lucky if we get a tenth of that…
JANE: They’re some compensation for the high winds. At least we get to watch fluffy clouds scudding off against a clear blue sky.
ALAN: Much of New Zealand suffers from a lot of very windy days – and I do mean gale force winds. Gusts of up to 150 kph are common in Wellington (where I live). They are less common elsewhere, but still not unheard of. Just a few days ago, Auckland had 175 kph gales! Naturally, these can cause chaos as trees blow down and fall indiscriminately on power lines, and the power poles themselves often blow over. Thousands of people lose electricity, sometimes for days at a time. There was an interesting video shown recently on the TV news of a house being battered by the winds. Suddenly the entire steel roof just peeled off and blew away!
JANE: Now I understand why you have steel roofs rather than tiles! Tiles would get flung all over the place and asphalt shingles wouldn’t have a chance.
Who took the video?
ALAN: Someone who was in the right place at the right time with a mobile phone, though what they were doing taking movies instead of huddling in a dark corner I really don’t know.
JANE: Wow! What courage – or, uh, idiocy. I’m not sure which… Anyhow, I’d love to go on talking about the weather, but I should get to work. Maybe next time!
July 2, 2014
The Adventures of Little Quail
The gigantic yellow lilies in the accompanying picture are only one of our outdoor bright spots these days. The hummingbirds are back, reveling in the flowers on our trumpet vines and desert willow. We’ve also had migrating orioles through. The males are nearly the same brilliant orange as the trumpet vine blossoms. Funny – one never thinks about super bright orange as providing camouflage.
Yellow Lilies
I had an adventure last week, when I was out riding my bike early in the morning. I saw two adult quail hurrying across the street ahead of me, but it wasn’t until I was nearly on top of them that I realized that their newly hatched chicks were trailing after. The chicks were impossibly tiny, still in stripes and fluff. Although most of the babies jumped up onto the curb after their parents, one was scared by my bike and went racing along the edge of the street at speeds that I would have thought impossible for something that small.
Afraid the chick would get completely separated from its covey – which had taken refuge in the thread-leaf sage and four-wing saltbush in the nearby park – I tried to get ahead of it. To my astonishment, I found it was nearly pacing me. I was trying to figure out if I could somehow herd a fluffball without giving it a heart attack, when the chick turned around and went racing back the way it had come. I braked and swerved out so I could watch without interfering.
To my astonishment, the quail chick ran downhill, then stopped exactly where the majority of its family had jumped the curb and gone up into the park. Since there were no auditory signals (quail can be quite loud), I guess the chick was using scent to track. I’ve never really considered birds as scent trackers but, given how often they use camouflage, there’s a certain logic to it. Why hide the babies and then give away their location with loud noise?
I watched as the quail chick considered the curb, decided it was too high, then ran another nine feet to where the curb dipped to allow for baby carriages and suchlike to be pushed up onto the sidewalk. (Nine feet doesn’t seem like a great distance until you consider that this creature was maybe two inches from beak tip to rump.)
“Good,” I thought. “It’s going to be okay.”
As soon as the chick was up on the sidewalk, the little idiot started running full speed in the wrong direction. Keeping my distance, I glided my bike down to where I could try to block it if it went out into the street again. However, as suddenly as before, the chick stopped, spun around, and ran back. At last it dove into the park, presumably to rejoin its family.
I turned my bike around and resumed my interrupted ride. When I was parallel to where the chick had entered the park, I glanced over, wondering if I would see it. I don’t ask you to believe this next bit.
Sitting in the gap between the wall that borders the park and the nearest shrub was a cottontail rabbit. It looked for all the world as if it had been waiting to direct the chick into safety. I could almost imagine the scene in an illustrated children’s book.
“Little Quail ran up and then he ran down. He was scared and couldn’t remember how to get into the soft scented green where his family had vanished. Then he looked to the side. There was Mistress Cottontail, sitting with her ears high and her whiskers twitching.
“’Here is the path, Little Quail. Come here and I’ll show you where you can find your family.’ So Little Quail did. Mistress Cottontail nudged him to where Mother and Father sat under a four-wing salt bush, all the brother and sisters nestled close. He dove under Mother’s wing and soon was fast asleep.”
A nice way to start the morning…
June 30, 2014
CONTEST: Write a Review, Win Your Choice! NEW DEADLINE!
To enter the contest, simply paste the URL of your review as a comment on this post on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/janelindskol...) Any review posted online is eligible (this includes blogs, review sites, Amazon, BN, Powell's, Goodreads, etc.) Two winners will be chosen at random from among the eligible entries.
Contest entries must be posted on Facebook by 11:59pm your local time on Sunday, July 20th.
The fine print: This contest is open to U.S. residents only; books, if chosen, will be mailed U.S. media mail. Audiobook download winners will be sent a download code which will expire on September 29, 2014. Upon redeeming the code and receiving the credit the redeemer will have 92 days to use the credit to select Artemis Awakening free of charge.
The Artemis Awakening audio book is narrated by Joe Barrett. Joe is a seven-time Audie Award finalist whose narration of Reed Farrel Coleman’s Gun Church won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile Magazine has granted Joe thirteen Earphones Awards, most recently for James Salter’s All That Is. Joe has performed both on and off-Broadway and in regional theaters from Los Angeles to Houston to St. Louis to Washington, D.C. to San Francisco to Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television and in hundreds of television and radio commercials.
You can listen to an excerpt at https://soundcloud.com/audible/artemi...
June 26, 2014
TT: Flatlands… Oops! Flat Roofs!
Looking for the Wednesday Wandering? Page back one and hear about Adara the Puppy, contests, and offer a few thoughts on short stories. Then join me and Alan as we world-build our way into the question of flat roofs.
JANE: Last time I promised to unravel the mysteries of flat roofs. Between my husband, Jim, being an archeologist and our good friend, Chip, being a roofing estimator, I know more about flat roofs old and new than I ever thought possible. To really understand the phenomenon of the flat roof – at least in the American Southwest – you need to know a bit about the region.
Flat Roof, Note Parapet
Unravelling the mystery involves distinct similarities to the sort of world-building one does when writing SF or Fantasy.
Interested?
ALAN: That sounds fascinating. Tell me more.
JANE: All right, here goes. First, you need to understand that the original southwestern flat roofs were built in areas that lacked two things: rain and long pieces of timber. The long, hot summers and the fact that, even in mid-winter, days can be pleasant and sunny (if not overly warm) also played a role.
Sloping roofs need beams to create the slope. To make beams, you need large pieces of timber. In many parts of the southwest, large pieces of timber simply aren’t there. The nearest trees are small and scrubby. Cottonwoods are notoriously soft (and explosive, but that’s another matter entirely). If you want roof beams, you need to go up in the mountains, cut the trees, then haul the logs all the way back to where you live.
This was done but these beams then became highly valuable items. Are you familiar with the “old wood problem”?
ALAN: No – I’ve never heard of it.
JANE: This is a problem archeologists out here encounter when they try to date a structure (actually, anything at all) by wood or wood residue. Wood can be dated in several ways, including C14 dating and dendrochronology.
ALAN: Ah yes! I know all about that. C14 dating measures the concentration of radioactive Carbon-14 in organic material such as wood. Since it decays at a known rate, the concentration gives a measure of the age of the material.
Dendrochronology is where you cut a Beatle in half and count the rings in order to calculate the age of the drummer. Hmmm… That doesn’t sound quite right…
JANE: Ouch! But, you’re almost right. Dendrochronology is also known as “tree ring dating.” And since I anticipate jokes about dating services for trees, I’m not going to ask you if you know how that works. I’m going to be grim and serious and focus on roofs.
The old wood problem arises for a number of reasons, but I’m going to stick to the one that has to do with roofing beams. Since the beams took a lot of labor to acquire, when a group left an area, they’d let the houses go back to mud and stone, but they’d often take the beams with them. This means that archeologists can’t assume that the date they get from testing the wood is the same as the date for the structure. The beams might, in fact, be the equivalent of family heirlooms, handed down for generations.
ALAN: That must have made the reading of the will rather tense. Which child will get which bit of the roof? And think of the bargaining afterwards! “I’ll swap you three joists for a gable truss…”
JANE: Actually, I suspect there would have been discussions quite like that – even if the terms were different.
Now, back to flat roofs… Out here the main types of beams are usually referred to by their Spanish names. Vigas are tree trunks, usually stripped of their bark and smoothed. Lattias are slimmer, either cut from saplings or from long branches. None are cut into planks or joists. They’re just pieces of wood, valued for their length and hardness as much as anything else.
Now, imagine you’re a Pueblo Indian. You’ve carefully constructed your house either from adobe (a blending of mud with straw) or from mud mortared stone or some combination of the two. If you used adobe, you coated the exterior with various forms of mud plaster.
The time has come for the roof. First you lay down vigas, then crosswise you put a dense layer of lattias. Then you layer on other materials: brush, smaller branches, dry grass, and suchlike. When this is in place, you start layering on mud. Techniques varied, but the end result was a very thick roof – one or two feet thick was not uncommon.
ALAN: That sounds rather like thatching – though thatched roofs do slope because they are built on joists, and there isn’t a final covering of mud. But the layering of other organic material is typical of the type.
JANE: Good comparison – but thatching wasn’t done here, probably because there wasn’t sufficient timber to build the joists necessary to support the roof so that it would properly drain.
The southwestern style flat roofs not only kept out the worst of the rain and snow, they provided extra living space. The evidence is that – except in the worst extremes of weather – the rooms were used more for storage than as living space. Additionally, the thick walls and roofs provided excellent insulation, making for rooms that were cool in the summer and would retain heat in the winter.
When the Spanish came to the area, they adopted similar building techniques. I believe they were the first to introduce “canales” – channels or canals that encouraged runoff into gutters that jutted over the side of the structure so as not to erode the mud walls. This rain was often caught in rain barrels and stored for later use.
Until the railroads made transportation of building materials practical, variations on this type of structure continued. Re-plastering and otherwise repairing the houses was an annual event.
ALAN: We do have some houses here that are built to look like that. They are known as “Spanish Style” houses.
JANE: Yes… And that ties into my next point. In modern times, various architects admired the appearance of both “pueblo” and “territorial” style architecture and sought to emulate it for modern structures. However, since they were no longer designing roofs at least a foot thick and made of absorbent materials, all the problems you listed last time occurred – without the advantage of creating trout fishing ponds.
Often these modern flat roofs were covered in tar and gravel. This would seal the roof for a while but, eventually, hollows would appear, creating weak spots, which, in turn would create leaks.
Nonetheless, architects and home owners persisted in wanting the look of “traditional” southwestern architecture and that demanded flat roofs (or a combination of flat and peaked roofs).
These days, advances in building materials make flat roofs possible to construct with fewer leaks. In new construction, a parapet running around the edge of the roof often conceals the fact that the roof is actually not completely flat, but is pitched to encourage runoff. This, in turn, is channeled into the modern version of canales.
ALAN: So the flat roofs are actually optical illusions? How clever.
JANE: That’s it! And, as I mentioned all those years ago when I visited New Zealand, New Mexico remains stuck on brown as the only acceptable color for houses. Even though modern frame stucco construction is no long constrained by the color of mud, the majority of houses are some shade of brown with color reserved for trim.
ALAN (to the tune of “The Hippopotamus Song” by Flanders and Swann): Mud, mud, glorious mud…
JANE (singing along): …nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
And the house.
ALAN: (sung to the tune of “Food, Glorious Food,” from Oliver!”) Mud, glorious mud…
JANE: (singing along) “Hot Tar and Gravel!”
And while we’re talking about roofs, I have a few questions about how the climate in your part of the world influences construction. After all, there’s not only world-building – the world influences buildings!
June 25, 2014
Namesakes, Contests, and Short Stories
It’s been busy here. (Is it ever not?) However, the sequel to Artemis Awakening, tentatively titled Artemis Invaded, is now revised and turned into my editor at Tor. I’ll admit to feeling pretty satisfied—and impatient to see the book out. We’ll need to wait until next June, though.
Now it’s time to turn my energies to new projects. Among these will be a couple of short stories and maybe, if I can get my act together, that short story collection you folks requested a while back. I’ll fill you in as soon as these come closer to being realities, rather than dreams.
Adara the Puppy
Artemis Awakening hasn’t even been out for a month and already it’s having an influence. One of my vets has named her new puppy after Adara the Huntress. Adara the Puppy is very small and lives in a household with two large (but friendly) adult dogs, several cats, a rabbit, and assorted wild animals who are being fostered. Her owner says she chose the name to give the puppy something to grow into. I hope the name’s an inspiration.
I’ve got to admit, I giggled for about a week after finding out and couldn’t resist sharing. Isn’t she cute? I’ve seen a short video of her and her two adult canine companions and it’s quite clear that in her mind Adara the Huntress isn’t too big a name.
On other fronts, for those of you who like to write book reviews or enter contests, you might want to check the contest we’re running from my Facebook page: write a review of Artemis Awakening, provide a link, and be entered into a drawing to win either a signed, personalized hardcover or an audio download of the novel. If you’re interested, check this.
The other day I found myself thinking about the strange dichotomy involved with me and short stories: I like to write short stories but I’m actually not much of a short story reader.
This was brought forcefully home to me when I was recommending Laini Taylor’s collection Lips Touch Three Times to a friend. I heard myself saying, “I don’t usually read short stories, but I really liked this. Of course, there are only three stories and they’re long enough that they’re more or less novellas…” Later in the same conversation, I mentioned that among my future projects I was looking forward to writing two short stories. I definitely heard the disconnect.
So, obviously, I need to think this through. First, there are definitely authors whose short stories I not only read but seek out. Roger Zelazny and Charles deLint both spring to mind. I bet if I thought longer, I could come up with others. There are those authors who are often better at a shorter length. I really like Walter Jon Williams’ novels, but I think some of his strongest work is shorter. His novel This Is Not A Game is structured like two interconnectednovellas and is all the better for it.
When I think back, I’ve actually read a lot of single author short story collections and, in most cases, enjoyed them. So what’s my problem?
Well, for one, I’m not a big fan of gimmick stories, no matter the length. I’m also not a big fan of inconclusive endings. Both of these are more likely to happen at shorter lengths, rather than longer. I have read too many short stories that are in reality descriptive vignettes. Someone has a clever idea or image and thinks that’s all a story needs. It doesn’t.
Fact is, a short story needs everything a novel does – and needs to present it within a smaller space – or at least with fewer words. (I leave the image because for me stories do seem to occupy a physical space. And I don’t think it’s just a lump of pages.)
Roger Zelazny said – I’m not sure just where – that a short story should feel as if it was the final chapter of a novel. Maybe that’s why I like his shorter works. He doesn’t leave me hanging. I certainly have tried to follow that advice with my own short stories and so am surprised how often when I finish reading a story aloud, the immediate response is “But what happened next?” Of course, I get that with my novels, too.
Short stories are also more often driven by ideas than by characters. I’ve written a lot of stories for theme anthologies. Sometimes the theme is very generalized – dragons, let’s say, or angels – and sometimes it’s more specific – alien pets or girls, guns, and monsters. I enjoy the challenge of trying to come up with a story that won’t resemble anything else in the collection. That often means starting with a list of the usual – big dragons, wise dragons, nasty dragons – and vowing to avoid these.
Once I’ve made my list, I start musing about who the main character will be. For a short story, usually I try to keep the focus on one POV character. Sometimes I’m in the mood to write about a certain type of person. Other times the theme dictates it. For the Mother, Matron, Crone collection, for example, a female protagonist was pretty much a given.
Between these two I arrive at my setting. Plot comes last of all. To avoid slipping into vignette-mode, I make sure I know what the conflict will be… even if I don’t know the resolution. But I make certain there is a resolution. Just about the only people who like stories with indecisive endings are English professors – and that’s because it gives something to discuss in the classroom.
Any recommendations of good short story collections out there? I’m not talking “Year’s Best” or “Nebula Award stories” or like that – I can’t help but read those with my critic brain on. I’m just looking for a good read…
June 19, 2014
TT: What’s on the Rooftop?
Looking for the Wednesday Wandering? Page back one where I wander on about how gardening considerations and writing considerations are not as dissimilar as they might seem. Then join me and Alan as we examine our severely battered roofs.
JANE: Hey, Alan, remember when I told you about how my house had been pummeled by hail, ruining the roof on the sun porch?
After the hailstorm
ALAN: Yes, I do. It must have been a frightening experience.
JANE: Turns out the repair is going to be a lot more complicated than anyone imagined at the time. The company that built the porch in the first place has gone out of business. Happily, for us, there is another company that makes a similar product, but the panels will need to be custom fabricated. We’re still waiting on that.
Didn’t you tell me that you and Robin are having your roof replaced? I hope it’s going a lot more smoothly.
ALAN: We’ve not had the whole roof replaced, but we have had some very extensive repairs. About a year ago, after a big storm, we had some leaks in the roof. The cats took exception to being dripped on, so we got a roof man to investigate. He told us that there was some corrosion round the nails, and he recommended that we have the nails replaced with screws and have the holes resealed. We did that (it took a couple of days) and the leaks went away. The cats were happy again.
JANE: How cats react to storms is fascinating. Currently, Jim and I share our home with four. Each one reacted a little differently to our barrage of hail. Persephone went to the window to watch, then decided she’d seen enough and hid. Ogapoge – who is such a big bruiser that everyone assumes he is scared of nothing – went into his favorite hiding place, the file drawer in my desk.
Kwahe’e looked as if he was going to get scared, took a look at me and Jim, decided we weren’t hiding, and snuggled down to await developments. My favorite reaction was Kel’s. She analyzed the situation, clearly decided one roof just might not be enough, and went into the knee-well on my desk. She didn’t hunker down or look scared. She looked as if she’d moved into a cat-sized residence.
I hope that your repairs ended your problems.
ALAN: Well, they did and they didn’t. Certainly the leak went away, but round about the time you had your hail damage, we had another big storm and the roof started to leak again. A different roof man came to investigate. He reported that the first man had not done a very good job – there were still nails and corrosion in some of the harder-to-reach nooks and crannies. So we had those fixed as well.
JANE: Nails and screws? What sort of roof do you have?
ALAN: The roof is made of corrugated steel which is nailed (well, screwed now) to the joists. That’s probably the most common roofing system here. I must confess that when I first came here from England, I thought it all looked a bit crude. I’d grown up in a house with a slate roof and when I bought a house of my own, it had a roof made of ceramic tiles. But I’ve got used to the look of steel roofs now and these days I rather like them. But there’s a dramatically rusty one on a house just down the road from us which really looks quite ugly. I can’t imagine how it stays watertight, if indeed it does. The house is generally very dilapidated so I suspect it’s a rental property.
JANE: Interesting variations… I really don’t know what the roof was on the house where I spent most of my childhood. The house was so tall and the roof so steeply pitched that I never went out on it. I think the roof on the house where we summered was some variation on asphalt shingles. That’s a pretty common material here in the U.S. It’s what my current house has. However, I have lived in a house with a metal roof, when I lived in Virginia.
ALAN: Ah! So it’s not just an antipodean phenomenon. That’s interesting.
JANE: My house in Virginia was – by American standards – quite old. Most of it had been built before the Civil War. I think the “new” rooms were added in the 1880’s. The house was roofed in metal – what is usually called a “tin roof” here, although I have no idea if it was tin or some other metal. In any case, I was very surprised to learn that care for this roof included keeping it painted. Since the house was fairly tall and had a very steep pitch (I am seeing a trend), I arranged for the roof to be painted by professionals.
My cats (a different crew then) were all quite calm until I made a flippant comment about there being monsters on the roof. Then, between one breath and the next, they all melted into hiding. Seriously. I do not exaggerate. I had a friend visiting at the time and he could bear me witness.
ALAN: Our cats paid no attention at all to the man banging on the roof. But a couple of months ago the largest seagull I’ve ever seen in my life went stomping all over the roof with his size ten hob-nailed boots on. Every so often he stopped and had a really loud peck at something as well. He spent more than an hour marching around up there. The cats were initially puzzled, but then Harpo, the cat who isn’t afraid of anything except the things he is afraid of, went and hid in a deep, dark cupboard, and Bess came for a reassuring cuddle.
JANE: Do you folks typically paint your roofs like I had to do?
ALAN: Yes – lots of the roofs are painted. There’s always a section in paint shops devoted just to roof paint, though I’m really not sure what makes roof paint different from any other kind of paint. A house I lived in a few years ago had a roof that had been covered with some sort of adhesive which had what appeared to be gravel embedded in it. It looked very attractive and was highly effective at keeping the weather out.
I’ve seen flat roofs in some American movies and TV shows. They strike me as really rather a dumb idea. With a sloping roof the rain can easily run off and water the garden. Surely with a flat roof the rain will just collect into large lakes? I have a surreal picture in my mind of whole suburbs full of people sitting on their roofs and fishing for trout…
JANE: You are absolutely right that flat roofs are a stupid idea. However, answering your question involves a bit of history and even archeology. Perhaps we should save it for next time…
June 18, 2014
How It Goes… Or Grows
Life here has continued insanely busy… I’m happy to report that the two events this weekend for Artemis Awakening went really well. I had a great time talking with the folks at the Albuquerque SF club on Friday evening. The questions were wide-ranging and thoughtful. Answering them gave me an opportunity to talk about some world-building considerations, including oddities like linguistic drift. I must have not been the only person to have fun, since a bunch of those attending also showed up at Page One Books on Sunday afternoon to buy copies of the novel and get them signed. It was also great to both catch up with some of my long-time readers and meet some new ones.
Replanted Radishes
Remember the Cover Art contest I talked about a of couple months ago? (If you don’t, see the WW for 1-29-14.) The winners have been chosen and are really amazing. If you’d like to see which pieces won, you can look here: www.sffcontest.com. It’s amazing how many really good pieces were submitted. I’m still mulling over which of the winners will inspire my promised short story.
However, writing that will need to wait until I respond to my editor’s comments for the second Artemis book (probably to be titled Artemis Invaded). I’ve been so busy with promotional stuff (including the Tor.com pop quiz, two short essays for the Writer’s Read site, and a completely different Q&A for the Riffles site)that I’ve had to put my writing more or less on hold. I’ve promised myself that this week writing moves back to getting priority.
Here at home, Jim and I are viewing our garden with some anxiety. First there was the plague of grasshoppers, then the hail storm, and now our already-battered plants are being harassed by high winds. We had to replant a lot of seeds – probably because the winds have been persistent enough that the seeds were buried beyond their ideal germination depths. This past weekend, we went out and purchased three tomato plants to replace ones the grasshoppers harassed and the hail finished. We also over-indulged in jalapeño pepper plants.
I’m pretty worried about two other tomato plants that are holding their ground, despite nearly having their stems snapped. I’ve been tempted to give up (except I hate giving up on anything that’s struggling to stay alive) and buy new, large plants. Of course, those might not handle the winds as well… If they got battered, they’d break, not bend.
As I was writing about my concerns regarding our garden,I realized how similar they are to worries I have – and have heard other writers express – when a story is “planted,” but doesn’t seem to be thriving. So often the impulse is to rip out and replant, rather than trusting that with time and effort the plant – or story – will survive and thrive.
Certainly, especially after the hail storm, our east bed looked very pathetic. The pepper and eggplants had shredded leaves and bruised stems. In two cases, the stems on pepper plants had snapped. The temptation was to give up on them entirely. But, as I said, we have a lot of trouble giving up on something that’s alive and trying to keep living. We decided to give them a chance. Now, a couple of weeks later, all but the two plants that had their stems snapped have recovered. We have a Hungarian pepper just about ready for picking. A few eggplant have set. The rest of the plants have flowers.
If we’d torn them out and put in new plants, would they have done better? Not necessarily. These plants, battered as they were, had put roots down, roots that sustained them when the winds have blown. Admittedly, the situation has been harder on the west side of our yard, since winds here are often from the west or south. Still, roots are often a lot more important than foliage, especially when the going gets tough.
That’s true with stories, too. Sure, revising is valuable, but I’m a firm believer that you need to have something to revise before you start in on the story. It’s one thing if you realize that what you’d thought was a vegetable plant is a weed, but too often writers get insecure about the value of what they’d initially “planted.” Maybe they think about it too much or talk about it too much, and don’t write very much. A story can lose its freshness that way.
Sometimes, the best thing to do is see if with a little attention the story will start growing again. At the very least, your efforts to take the project forward may help you see if you need to rip out the whole garden or maybe just a plant or two. One thing is for sure, if you keep ripping out, your plants will never flower, much less set fruit.
The same, or so I’ve found, can be true for stories…
