Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 90
April 21, 2015
How to improve
The bad news is that after 5 books (plus a novella and a bunch of short stories) and 7 years of trying, I’m still not published. The good news is everything I write is better than the last thing.
Back when I didn’t know how to write, all I could do was:
1) Create an interesting person in an interesting scenario (charaterization and worldbuilding)
Then I listened to the Odyssey Writing podcast and the Writing Excuses podcast and got some feedback and figured out how to:
2) Write so that someone can understand what’s going on in a given scene (mechanics)
That got my agent’s attention, and she taught me how to…
3) Make plot and character arcs, where tension rises to a climax (plotting)
But I still wasn’t actually selling anything. That’s where the Martian story is, and it’s where Petrolea was before someone told me to
4) Keep it simple, stupid! The reader should know the character’s motivations and plans, so they feel rewarded and punished along with the character (emotional payoff).
For too long I’ve been patting myself on the back thinking “I’m such a clever-clogs to have made this story is so complicated!” When actually I just made it flat. At least at my current skill-level, I need to streamline things and be two notches more explicit than I think I need.
When Tex heard that, she compared my writing career to metroids...which is…good?
April 19, 2015
94 Polishing your Shmoo with Tex Thompson
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/94Tex.mp3
You may not be aware that my best buddy Arianne “Tex” Thompson has published her second book, Medicine for the Dead. We’re using it as an example how authors improve from one work to another. Now bear with me. The shmoo part is going to make sense.
One Night in Sixes (the first book)
My wish for you is that you’ll always look back on your earlier work and think it sucks.
Don’t be like Vegeta
Reviews of Medicine for the Dead and Kingdoms of Evil. Which are worse??
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia
I finally whip out the shmoos?
I recently wrote a novella…
Wonderful, Awful Ideas every Friday!
Dare I dream of a second alternate history fan?
A. Lee Martinez and Daryl Gregory
I don’t suppose I need to link to Terry Pratchett, do I?
Or Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosiverse? (Including Ethan of Athos! Come for the man-love, stay for the telepathy!)
Are you tuned in to the rustling of the sea urchins?
If everyone loves your stuff, it’s not being read widely enough.
— Joe Abercrombie (@LordGrimdark) April 12, 2015
Dan Koboldt! (he knows about archery)
Bokken in the back seat
Saga is the f-ing BEST
Okay, so here’s me on a Sunday afternoon, having NOT taken my nap , goddam CRYING because some moon-begotten, pie-filled TROLL took it into her energy-drink-addled head to mail me all three volumes of Saga. Now excuse me while I pull on some underwear, scrub the grounds out of the coffee maker because the Grandmas never NEVER use a filter, and boot up my rantin’ laptop because I couldn’t nap because Saga was so good, and DADDY NEEDED HIS NAP.
So, Saga ( Brian K. Vaughan/Fiona Staples) is about space-babies and war. Star-crossed lovers. Bounty hunters. Magic. Human rights. Land Walruses. In short: a cross-cultural couple’s desire to procreate sends them spiraling through a hallucinatory vortex of war and love, which just about matches my personal experience.
Yes, there are some problems. You’re not going to do much running around mere minutes after giving birth, and there is no way you’d have milk for the baby in such a stressful situation as being caught in a firefight between goat-horned space-warlocks, robots, and GM angels (and a monkey was in there somewhere? The monkey confused me). But whatever. There’s a good story here, composed of a delightful balance of romance, humor, and violence). There are good characters. There’s some internal logic (if you squint). There’s even a goddam moral. What more could you ask for?
You could ask for less soul-searing imagery and laser-guided mastery of pacing and tension, is what! I stayed up all afternoon grinding through this story, and any second now my 2-year-old is going to wake up and tell me she’s a tyrannosaur.
5 stars.
April 16, 2015
Hanlon’s Empire
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
— Robert J. Hanlon
When the Dark Lord was defeated by the elvish armies, the people of The Land thought his evil empire would crumble and leave them in peace. They were wrong.
It takes a lot of administrative work to make sure all the orcs are properly fed and armed, and the Dark Lord was only the top of a mighty pyramid bones and bureaucracy. Now, even a thousand years later, War 52A-B(3) rages on, and the Land is wracked by paroxysms of secretarian violence, misappropriation is rife upon the Accountant Sea, and the People toil in full compliance with the Standards of Subjugation.
But once a quarter, so it is said, between the hours of 11:45am and lunch time, deep in the labyrinthine vaults of the Rooms of Waiting, there opens a slot in the Complaints Window. And the smallest of heroes may find in his hands the One Form, which, when properly signed, stamped, copied, and notarized, may be cast through that Window, and get his permit approved to re-zone all the Land.
April 14, 2015
Eastercon: Full-on Friendship!
From Friday the 3rd to Monday the 6th of April, I was lucky enough to attend Eastercon Dysprosium with my good friends Tex Thompson, Kim Moravec, and Shay Dee (oh my God, Shay, I literally just realized your name is a pun. I’ve known those guys since forever (i.e. Loncon 3), but what was cool about Eastercon was we didn’t just hang out with each other, we reached out and pulled more people into the dark embrace of our friendship. If eating with someone means making a bond with them (it does) our Conclave of Eostre absorbed Marieke Frankema, the renowned C.E. Murphey (about whom more later), as well as several other people who don’t have web presences so I can’t tell you how awesome they are.
We had great conversations, ate great food, and I learned so much. The first lesson of which is how great it is to be…nice? To make…friends? It was a big shock: all of those things we learn in kindergarten about sharing, listening, figuring out what other people want and giving it to them, all of it works. There are now projects I have in the works with some of these people that would blow your freaking mind. More later.
Then I get home, and guess what was waiting for me? Melissa Walshe and this little darling:
Dracorex, knitting and design by Melissa Walshe
That’s a Dracorex based on a painting I made as a gesture of thanks for Melissa’s excellent critique of my novel Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen. Check it: she did something nice, took the precocity and turned it into something even NICER. Power of niceness…growing…stronger! Can’t…resist…FULL-ON FRIENDSHIP!
April 12, 2015
5 things more important than the Broken Hugos.
Less than a week ago, I got to see the 2015 Hugo nominations announcement break over the attendees of Eastercon like a fart in a quiet elevator. Apparently, a group of right-wing genre-fiction fans and authors calling itself the Sad Puppies managed to convince enough people to buy Worldcon membership to vote in candidates for the Hugos calculated to piss off the left-wing genre-fiction fans and authors. Since then, everyone has been talking about how their tribe is fighting against the other tribe, casting about for stones to hurl at the other side.
I don’t want to cast stones, living in the glass house of the internet as I do, but maybe there are some more important things we should be talking about? Like, five of them?
1. The New York Times Bestseller’s List
As of the 11th of April, fiction lists (hardcover, paperback, and e-book) are exactly tied between male and female authors. Although I don’t know the authors’ politics, there doesn’t seem to be any gender war going on in the place that actually matters: the books most people are willing to spend money on. The only genre fiction currently in the best-sellers’ list is the Martian by Andy Weir, which is the best scifi book I’ve read in years and should be taught in schools. This only goes to show that the Hugos are a sop for the people who don’t win the REAL literary prize: having your work bought, read, and enjoyed by millions of people.
2. 47 North
The only Hugo category anyone cares about, Best Novel, includes Lines of Departure, published by 47 North, Amazon’s genre imprint. You couldn’t say hello to someone at Eastercon without hearing how Amazon is (at best) emulsifying the publishing industry (a good summary of what seemed to be the general consensus can be found here ). What does it mean that Amazon’s pet e-press has enough of a following to get a nomination for Best Novel?
3. The Value of the Award
Winning a Hugo used to mean a big jump in sales for a book, but recently that correlation has been weakening (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/04/04/a-note-about-the-hugo-nominations-this-year/). Recent shenanigans aren’t going to make anyone more likely to take the award seriously. The Sad Puppies aren’t striking a blow for their political faction, they’re striking a blow against the Hugos.
4. The Taint of Crazy
Some of the authors on the Angry Puppies’ got roped into it unawares, which cannot be good for their careers, as they are now grouped with authors who say things like:
“I have no hatred in my heart for any man’s politics, policies, or faith, any more than I have hatred for termites; but once they start undermining my house where I live, it is time to exterminate them.”
And what about the guy who wrote that? (no, I won’t link to him or mention his name here, but you can find him by googling that awful termite quote). How is anyone going to read HIS books anymore? They might be the greatest works of literature since Shakespeare, but they were written by a guy who advocates exterminating people. That’s a serious case of crazy-taint.
5. Literally Anything Else
The sun is shining through my window, making me uncomfortably warm. Someone broke the window into the basement, which we’ll have to replace now, I guess, which means another week of dealing with my wife’s mom’s cousin, the contractor, whose sister just said something catty about my wife’s mom. Meanwhile, my two-year-old daughter has decided its easier to learn tumbling than to watch where she’s going when she’s running. All of these things are more important than the Broken Hugos.
April 9, 2015
The Empire of the Oak
So I’ve been listening to the History of English podcast recently, and it’s gotten me thinking about what I thought back when I was first learning Japanese language and history. Namely, that the British and Japanese islands have a lot in common, sitting on the margins of big, continental empires. The big difference being, of course, that it’s a lot easier to get to England from Europe than to Japan from Asia (the Korea Strait is at best about half as wide as the Strait of Dover). But what if it wasn’t? What if the British Isles were just 50km north and east of where they are now?
~~~
The first mention of Albion is in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, where he describes Britanniae, or “the Britians.” Insula Albionum (“the island of The Land”) is attested 3 centuries later, in the work of Avienus.
Julius Caesar made repeated attempts to conquer the islands during the Gallic Wars, and although neither he nor his successors managed to make any British polity more than a de jure vassal, Roman civilization made a lasting impression on Albian culture. Albia preserves traditional dress, cultural practices, and religious observances that have been all but lost on mainland Europe.
The Vikings were more successful as invaders and occupiers, but never as colonists. Although archaeological evidence indicates the Albian imperial family is indeed descended from Germanic-speaking sea-raiders (the obscure Angles and Saxons have been put forth as the most likely progenitors of the Oak Throne), their language and culture has mostly vanished, and their genetic legacy was minimal.
The state the raiders created proved robust, however, and by 1,000 CE, the Hed state had unified all but the most northerly reaches of Great Britain. Entranced with the cultures of mainland Europe, Hed emperors imported much Norman and Frankish art and music, laying the foundations of modern Albian art-forms such as the Ballad and Tennis.
The Black Plague brought about the breakdown of communication between Albia and Europe, as well as the collapse of the Hed state. Renaissance traders were met with shock and surprise, and due to their meddling with the affairs of local warlords, were entirely banned from the British Islands following the rise of the Gadnog military government in 1600.
Greater and Lesser Britain and Iceland remained in isolation until the 19th century, when Russian whaling interests brought about the Claer Reformation and forced the country to open its borders.
The late 19th and early 20th century saw rapid industrialization in the Albian Empire, as well as its aggressive colonial expansion in North America. Although France protested the ethnic cleansing and assimilation of its Francophone brothers in the Dominion of Quebec, not until World War II, when Albia allied with Nazi Germany and conquered France and much of Spain, did Russia intervene.
Modern Albia is a peaceful island nation steeped in ancient culture and bustling with modern business and technology. Companies such as Abon and Temes are household names around the world, and tourists from around the world flock to get a glimpse of this enigmatic and exotic culture.
April 7, 2015
The Bigfoot Conspiracy
Bigfoot is a tool of Big Conservation!
April 5, 2015
93 Young Adult Fiction with William Campbell Powell
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/93BillApril15.mp3
This week I’m talking with William Campbell Powell, author of EXPIRATION DAY, a Young-Adult Science Fiction Robot Crossover. Bill didn’t know he was writing YA until his editor at Tor told him he had.
I’m not sure if YA exists
The Hunger Games, Ender’s Game, Naughts and Crosses
When all the characters have their own agency, that’s a good book
Fair Coin, Sister Mine, Summer Prince
The movie and the derivative movie
Vn, Little Brother,Homeland, and When We Wake
Australia’s policy on climate change
Do you ever really grow up?
Charles Stross and Aliette de Bodard
Jennie Goloboy, my agent
And for discussions in the comments:
Where does the pairing between YA and post-apocalypse come from?
If the main characters are growing, at what point do the books in a series stop being YA?
Do you have any suggestions for our list of excellent recent YA fiction?
93 Young Adult fiction with William Campbell Powell
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/93BillApril15.mp3
This week I’m talking with William Campbell Powell, author of EXPIRATION DAY, a Young-Adult Science Fiction Robot Crossover. Bill didn’t know he was writing YA until his editor at Tor told him he had.
I’m not sure if YA exists
The Hunger Games, Ender’s Game, Naughts and Crosses
When all the characters have their own agency, that’s a good book
Fair Coin, Sister Mine, Summer Prince
The movie and the derivative movie
Vn, Little Brother,Homeland, and When We Wake
Australia’s policy on climate change
Do you ever really grow up?
Charles Stross and Aliette de Bodard
Jennie Goloboy, my agent
And for discussions in the comments:
Where does the pairing between YA and post-apocalypse come from?
If the main characters are growing, at what point do the books in a series stop being YA?
Do you have any suggestions for our list of excellent recent YA fiction?
