Claire Ryan's Blog, page 10

More about Pay to Play Publishers

A while back, I wrote about Tate Publishing, a subsidy publisher  that had been in the news as a result of some… rather callous business practices. I think it’s a good time to revisit publishers like these in light of a recent comment on that post.

(For the uninformed – a subsidy publisher is basically ‘pay to play’. You pay them some amount of money, usually in the thousands of dollars, and they will do the production work to publish your book, meaning they will typeset the print version, format the ebook, create the cover, and put it up on various sites like Amazon etc. This may sound like a good deal, but it’s not.)

Look, there’s no easy way to say this: it is my completely reasonable opinion that Tate Publishing is complete junk. Consumer Affairs has a list of complaints against them a mile long, and the same issues pop up all the time.

They don’t respond to authors in a timely fashion.
Their royalty accounting is highly suspect.
Royalties are paid late or not at all.
Their production work is questionable at best, sub-standard at worst, and sometimes not even completed.
They miss deadlines.
They constantly move authors from one representative to the next, possibly in an attempt to avoid accountability.
Their marketing department is more concerned with selling services to authors instead of selling authors’ books to readers.
Their marketing department doesn’t even do the barest minimum to market an author’s book.
The up-front fee (around $4000) is supposed to be refunded after an author sells 1000 retail copies of their book, but it seems that Tate actively discourage authors from getting retail sales, and even after passing the 1000 copy threshold, authors still have issues getting any kind of refund.

This is a ‘Christian’ company, as if that’s supposed to be proof against the kind of shady business practices that plague unethical secular companies. In truth, Tate Publishing is just as susceptible to having a lack of ethics as any other, and by all accounts, that ‘Christian’ moniker is for marketing purposes only.

Consider this a warning, if you should deal with a subsidy publisher. The current state of affairs for these companies is that they may talk the talk, but they fail completely at walking the walk. They can’t deliver what they promise. For more information on companies like these, see David Gaughran’s posts on Author Solutions and its many, many subsidiaries.

The golden rule for publishers is thus: if they ask you to pay money up front, then their interest is not in selling your book in order to make a profit. Their interest is in getting your money to make a profit.

Related Posts:

The Author as Customer
Exotic Ebook Formatting
HarperCollins UK Boss Outs Self As Being Hilariously, Wilfully Blind
Kobo Release Another Statement about the Purge
Why Traditional Publishing Will Fail

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Strength Versus Dexterity in Roleplaying Games

So, roleplaying games. The typical RPG has statistics for each player character – in the case of D&D, my system of choice, those stats are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. Stats are used to determine a base level for a character, and they usually affect various skills and abilities a character acquires over the course of the game, particularly in how that character handles weaponry in the case of fantasy RPGs. One thing that comes up very often, that just happens to be wrong, is in the use of Strength for melee weapons, and Dexterity for ranged weapons.

Think about Lord of the Rings, for example, as being the progenitor of this idea. Aragorn uses strength to wield a longsword, and Legolas (being an elf) is dexterous and uses a bow. In D&D, Strength is not applied to ranged weapons, and Dexterity is not applied to melee weapons. Elves are very good with bows, humans are good with swords, etc. Surprise surprise, this doesn’t really hold true for actual real life.

Strength in Melee

One thing you learn very quickly in swordfighting is that, once you develop enough strength to effectively wield your chosen blade, everything comes down to the physics of levers and raw strength matters a lot less than skill and good mechanics. Even when fighting with a large, heavy weapon, like a greatsword, having the strength to hit hard with it doesn’t translate to being able to hit effectively with it.

From my experience with the longsword, I know that the ability to control the weapon depends very heavily on dexterity and applied knowledge of the techniques we’re taught in class. It doesn’t ever depend on how hard you can swing the weapon, because (again) physics! Let me explain…

A longsword is basically a long, steel lever. It’s also sharp, in theory, and it doesn’t have to be razor sharp to really hurt someone.
A longsword has weight. It has weight that’s placed far from the point where you hold it, hence why swinging a 3.5lb sword around will wear out your shoulders pretty quickly.
A longsword requires a certain amount of energy to get it moving through space – and it requires the same amount of energy to stop it moving through space as well.

The funny thing about levers is that you can use them in interesting ways to make your base level of strength count for a lot more than it should. This is something that’s demonstrated quite often in Academie Duello – one fighter holds up their sword, another crosses their sword using the three advantages (across the centre line, true edge forward, forte against debole) to gain leverage. What we see is that a strong crossing defeats the strength of the opposing fighter so effectively that they really have no other option but to disengage from it. Finding the strong crossing requires dexterity.

The funny thing about swords is that they really don’t need to hit very hard. A rapier needs about 4lbs of force to penetrate a body, for example. Shocking, I know, that a weapon designed to inflict grievous wounds on someone can do so very effectively and without much effort! Practically speaking, this means that you won’t really get much extra effect for putting more power into the strike. If your technique is good, you’ll land the hit and do damage regardless of that extra power, and if your technique is bad – well, you’ll probably lose if your opponent has any skill, because a more powerful strike is equally as difficult to stop and change direction when that opponent counters it and runs you through.

Remember what I said about control? The sword is a defensive weapon as well as an offensive one, and the defensive part is the part that suffers when you put too much energy into a hit, such that any counter by your opponent can’t be parried or dodged. Control requires dexterity.

Dexterity in Ranged

So the flip side of this can be seen in archery, with the trope being that archery requires dexterity, nimbleness, whatever. In truth, I’m not sure exactly how this got started in general, or why anyone decided that elves = higher dexterity = weaker strength, and on that basis gave them bows. I can only conclude that the person in question was completely ignorant of anything to do with archery, and never bothered to even open a book on archery.

Take a look at this:

These are English longbows recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose. They are warbows, over six feet long, with draw weights around 150-160lbs. Other longbows have been found with draw weights up to 185lbs.

I just want to be clear about this – a draw weight over 100lbs is absolutely batcrap insane. That’s a hundred pounds of weight, being pulled with only the arm and back muscles, in three fingers (if they’re using the Mediterranean grip) to the side of the head, and still maintaining accuracy and control of the arrow. A reasonably fit adult can pull a draw weight around 60lbs, with practice. There are very, very few modern archers who can draw and shoot a 180lb bow.

I want to impress upon you that handling a bow that can put arrows through an enemy combatant requires so much more strength than a sword that it’s flat out ridiculous. For example: the Bow of Lothlorien, given to Legolas by Galadriel in Lord of the Rings. The Mary Rose longbows start at 100lbs and only go up, meaning that Legolas is not only strong enough to draw at least 100lbs, he’s also strong enough to draw and fire with blistering accuracy at close and far ranges.

Technically this means that the elves would probably beat the Uruk-Hai in arm-wrestling.

Conclusion

Lord of the Rings probably has much to answer for at this point, seeing as many of the tropes and ideas in it have infected pretty much all fantasy in more mediums than I can count. This particular trope is a very odd one, I have to say, as it can be completely tossed on its head in about five minutes of reading! Long story short, it’s clear that Gary Gygax et al. got it wrong, way back when D&D was originally written, when it defined melee weapons as only being affected by strength and ranged weapons as only being affected by dexterity. In reality, dexterity plays a much bigger role in melee, and strength plays a bigger role in archery.

Related Posts:

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A video on strength in swordplay
On plate armour, movement, and fighting with longswords

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Being a New Mother

Whew.

Well, that was an extended leave of absence. My apologies to all, but I was somewhat preoccupied with being very, very pregnant, and then being quite sick, and then actually having a baby. Blogging on top of that might be asking a bit much. But still! I’m back, more or less, and now I have a newborn daughter to write stories for as well. She’s happy, healthy in spite of various shenanigans involved in birthing her, and the joy of my heart.

Normally I’d stick to blogging about writing, publishing, and various sword-related things, but if you’ll allow me a short interlude into mommy-blogger territory, I’d like to discuss a few things – specifically, over the last nine months I’ve been told all kinds of things about what to expect from motherhood, and somehow the following stuff was completely missed.

Your boobs get ‘bigger’

Oh yes, everyone says things like ‘your milk comes in’, or ‘your breasts will get bigger if you breastfeed’. But no one mentioned a few key points: one, by ‘bigger’ they actually mean ‘transform into rock-hard balls of pain’, and two, it happens OVERNIGHT. I literally woke up with boobs that’d make a porn star cry out of jealousy, and found that I’d gained two cup sizes in my sleep and now none of my regular bras were even close to fitting me.

LOL diapers

So. Many. Stories. SO MANY. I was regaled with tales of poop, diarrhea, projectile pee, and more, presumably in an effort to prepare me for the worst. And what I’ve found is that, by and large, diaper changes are a giant pile of meh, no more than a five or six on the one-to-ten scale of gross things. Why, you may ask? Well, I’ve spent years dealing with a particular monthly event where vast quantities of blood, mucus, dead tissue, and other less identifiable but still unbelievably putrid substances gush uncontrollably from my vagina for, oh, five solid days. Mere excrement from a baby’s bottom is just not that big of a deal anymore when you’ve had to regularly handle far worse foul-smelling goo  – and at least excrement washes out of clothes.

Babies are confused as hell

Babies do a lot of cute things, but they also do things that are flat out hilarious. Some of the funniest things are their reactions to sneezes and hiccups that totally throw them for a loop – they’ve never experienced it before, so it confuses the hell out of them. It’s adorably ridiculous to watch a newborn baby hiccuping with this look of complete bewilderment on their face.

You do not have enough washcloths

I asked various parents of my acquaintance what I needed for a newborn baby. I checked lists, of which there were many. No one mentioned that the one thing you really, really need LOTS of is washcloths, or really any absorbent cloths about six to twelve inches square. I did not have enough. I was incredibly lucky that I arranged a cloth diaper service which included a supply of washcloths, and I still had to go buy more because you use them almost everywhere. Babies are messy little creatures, and having a large number of cloths, wet and dry, to hand was by far the most useful thing I did.

The thing about sleep

I’m not exhausted. I have catnaps. The husband and I tag-team our way through the night, trading hours of sleep at a time, so both of us get something like a normal amount of rest. Overall, the breast pain has been a whole lot more awful than the lack of sleep – frankly, I was getting less when I was eight months pregnant.

Normal bathroom breaks

I was told, ‘oh, you feel empty after you give birth’ with the implication that this was not a nice thing. I would like to disagree wholeheartedly – I cannot describe the relief of being able to use the bathroom without having a baby in my torso. The sheer pressure on my internal organs has been lifted, and it feels fantastic. Not that I regret being pregnant (it was all according to plan) but I am not going to miss the fact that I couldn’t bloody well bend over for almost a month, and I had to use the bathroom every hour.

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Write Like a Girl

Everyone’s talking about the Strong Female Character(TM).

The actual pushback isn’t a mystery, you know? Lots of women said the same thing long before it was even A Thing – that maybe, just maybe, the way anyone with a uterus tended to be written as a sex-dispensing object/convenient plot device was problematic. And there were articles a-plenty on How To Write Strong Female Characters who were maybe something more than that.

Now people are wondering if we’ve traded one rotten stereotype for another. In asking for Strong Female Characters, the Powers that Be have decided to be literal about their response, and we’ve been given the equivalent of Bruce Willis, Action Hero with a vagina, boobs, and a sexy body. We have the Strong Female Character(TM) or SFC, who isn’t so much a character as a different type of sex-dispensing object/convenient plot device.

She is physically adept at fighting and killing, whether using a sword or a gun. Her first reaction or solution to a problem is escalation or violence. She is physically very attractive due to her athleticism. She is stand-offish, snarky, dismissive of the main hero, who is uniformly a man. What, did you think she’d be headlining this film? Don’t be silly, she doesn’t have enough of a personality for that. She is not sexual, in any way that we would understand it – she doesn’t flirt, she doesn’t make any moves, she doesn’t hit on the hero, in spite of her very obviously more sexy attire – or she uses sexual attraction in callous, manipulative ways to get what she wants instead of for her own pleasure. She certainly doesn’t display any inherent sexuality of her own. She will initially react with disgust to the first overture of that kind from the hero, in fact, and only later will she come around to actually liking him. There is only one of her among a legion of dudes.

These traits are not universal to all SFCs, but a lot of them get this treatment. I do get completely exasperated by all of it.

Not a Strong Female Character(TM) – a character with a real narrative arc, who is both female and incidentally pretty strong.

I totally understand that wanting female characters that are not completely flat is a good thing, and so the Strong Female Character(TM) is going to be criticized to hell and back because she doesn’t measure up to Ripley in Aliens, for example. Really, I am so, so tired of seeing one SFC among a team of guys, to the point where such a movie doesn’t even raise an atom of my interest. Superhero movies, I’m looking at you. I should LOVE the big Marvel and DC franchises, because at least there I have a shot at seeing some well-rounded female superheroes. But NOPE, no can do. SFCs all around. Gamora, Black Widow, Peggy Carter, Catwoman… And so on and so forth. The really bothersome thing about this is that occasionally the SFCs get a little time to shine, just to show that they may have possibly had a chance at becoming real characters, but it never goes anywhere. They never get a narrative arc of their own.

Take Gamora, for example. She has her moments, but overall she has no character development in Guardians of the Galaxy, and her whole purpose in the movie is to be a convenient ass-kicking robot. Now… let’s compare the other members of the GOTG team.

Peter. The main character of the movie. Nuff said.
Rocket. The raccoon who gets a scene where he has a mental breakdown due to his inferiority complex.
Drax. Fights against Ronan, loses badly, must face his failure and grow beyond it.
Groot. A walking, talking tree that knows three words. Technically has no character at all.

What irritated me most about GOTG is that Gamora is an afterthought. They managed to add character development for the talking raccoon – who, by the way, might be pegged to get his own movie – but not the token woman. She’s only there to support Peter’s narrative. Sigh. Otherwise Guardians was a fun way to spend a few hours, and ultimately forgettable for me.

But consider this much – it’s a step. A tiny, stupid, astonishingly lacking step, flawed in more ways than I can count, but it’s still a step. I can be tired of it, and honestly wish for better, but it’s a step forward that I didn’t have a few years ago. It’s a sign of progress. The mere presence of SFCs highlights and encourages more female characters, more cultural analysis, and a higher chance of stories that place women doing amazing things front and center in action movies.

So it bothers me, just a little, when articles are written that basically shit all over Strong Female Characters(TM) because they’re not as good as they could be.

I mean… what makes you think things have gotten better everywhere? The ‘woman as eye candy’ trope is still alive and well in movies. Hollywood sexism hasn’t even evolved to the point where SFCs are routinely allowed to not be sexy, for gods’ sake. Things change slowly. I can wish and hope for more, and roll my eyes at the treatment of women as sexy, ass-kicking, but still indifferent and mostly uninteresting characters, and still, still, be grateful for that small step forward. If it wasn’t for that step, we wouldn’t have Maleficent, or Lucy, or The Hunger Games.

SFCs gave me Pacific Rim, a giant, silly action movie about robots fighting monsters that still manages to be completely charming, heart-warming, and defined by the character arc of a young Japanese woman, Mako Mori. Yes, it’s still got issues, not the least of which being that she’s practically the only woman of note among many, many male characters, but it’s something I can be hopeful about. It’s something for me to love because it took a risk that lots of Hollywood movies are not allowed to take, when it centered a woman’s story in the plot and made the guy her emotional support.

Point is, female characters are still a problem, no matter what writers in general want to think. Women are still written horrifically badly, when they’re included at all. You can say that the gender of characters in books and movies don’t matter to you – and this is a common response, still – but in reality it DOES matter. There are lots of writers who still can’t bloody well create a female character without resorting to stupid, tired stereotypes, and the writers who have a clue have an obligation to show them the way if needed. We have an obligation to do better in our own writing.

We can do all of this and more, and still be grateful that things are getting a little better than they were.

If you want to write like a girl, then go ahead and do it, as well as you can. You might still get it wrong, and I’m sorry you’re not going to get any pats on the head for that, but goddamnit, at least you’re trying. You’ll be criticized from every angle if you really screw it up, but at least you’re trying. At least you want to try. There are still giant swathes of the world that don’t even think there’s a problem at all.

And please, please stop treating Strong Female Characters like they’re just as bad as the Sexy Cardboard Cutouts we still have to put up with in so many stories.

Related Posts:

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My Name is Inigo Montoya

Okay, time to talk about another all-time great movie swordfight, again from The Princess Bride. I’ve talked already about Inigo Montoya versus the Man in Black, and yes, I love that fight like whoah, but this one… oh man, this one. Inigo’s Crowning Moment of Awesome.

The fight against Count Rugen.

This, my friends, is a perfect combination of storytelling, character, and really stellar acting. Just watch how the swords move. Rugen knows he can’t beat Montoya, so he resorts to dirty tactics and knifes Montoya in the gut, yes, but when Montoya recovers you can see, with every strike, that he is the superior swordsman. You know from the start that he is better than Rugen, and only getting stabbed in the stomach is going to equalize things.

It’s in every hard downward slash, when Montoya knocks Rugen’s sword away. The casual way he walks towards the Count, and the Count backs away. At this point in the movie, we’ve been with Inigo long enough to know what kind of man he is, and with the Count long enough to know that he’s got a core of pure evil. The outcome is never really in doubt – The Princess Bride is a very particular kind of swashbuckling movie, where good always triumphs – but we need to know how it plays out, and Inigo Montoya delivers with the best kind of film magic.

Again, listen to the music, and how it flows with the beats of the sword. Listen to the difference in the voices, how Montoya speaks with the deepest kind of conviction and barely contained rage, and Rugen is little more than a breathy whisper. I can’t help watching this and thinking that Montoya is fighting more than just the Count. This one fight is the culmination of years of pain, and searching, and the need for revenge, to the point where he’s fighting the idea, the image of his father’s killer, and Rugen is just the body that gets in the way of his sword at the end.

And of course, the final line.

The Princess Bride, like I’ve said before, is easily one of the best pieces of filmmaking ever produced by Hollywood, and part of why I love it so much is that its swordplay is so incredibly well-meshed into the plot. Every swing and thrust has a purpose; there is nothing left spare, nothing superfluous. Compare that to the frankly unnecessary idiocy in the Star Wars prequels… Better yet, compare it to the last fight between Anakin and Obi-wan in Revenge of the Sith. Is that a fair comparison? Hell no! But that’s more a measure of how much the Star Wars fight fails on every possible storytelling level. That fight is ten minutes of complete irrelevance, and the Montoya/Rugen fight is barely more than two and a half minutes while being deeply meaningful.

For anyone still in doubt – please, please, just go see The Princess Bride. It’s a classic for a reason.

Related Posts:

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The Writing of Grim Fandango

So, I do loves me some video games. And video games occasionally deliver some truly stellar story-telling – none more so than the best adventure games.

Little history here: point-and-click adventures were a crazy popular genre, back when I was a kid. They were all about the story – you played a character, who could walk around and talk to other characters and whose entire mission was to solve some puzzle, advance the plot, and experience the story. The best of these games are legends in their own right, beloved by gamers everywhere and thought of fondly even now, years later.

Some of the absolute best were created by Tim Schafer when he was working at LucasArts, and his best was Grim Fandango.

Grim Fandango was just sublime, start to finish. It had an amazing aesthetic, with world-building worthy of any triple-A RPG. The music was fantastic. The characterization was touching. The voice-acting was spot-on.

The story was the best part, though. Occasionally silly, very engaging, and totally heart-warming. One thing that always struck me about Tim Schafer, and Grim Fandango in particular, is that he’s an absolute master of exposition. Considering the truly bizarre nature of Grim Fandango’s world, the short intro cutscene is all you need to grasp what’s going on and why – and it never feels like a lecture, or just plain excessive.

Schafer combined so many odd elements to create Grim Fandango that it almost seems impossible that it was made at all. It’s got strong noir/pulp themes, drawing on the likes of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, along with art deco elements, Aztec murals, the Latino feel of the Day of the Dead, and the hard-bitten criminal silliness that sometimes reminds me of Sin City. But he makes it work, as the story evolves, and I don’t think there’s a single instance of lazy characterization or plot in the whole game. Even small bit characters are interesting and vibrant; again, something that Schafer is known for, especially if you’ve played his other games like Psychonauts or the more recent Broken Age.

One thing I truly enjoyed is the voice acting. It’s so easy for a game to phone it in, even in a top tier title – I’m looking at you, Dishonored! But Grim Fandango never fell into that. The actual characters are all oddball skeleton caricatures with little in the way of actual expressions, and the game was released in 1998 when high definition 3D graphics were simply unavailable, so the voice acting has to work overtime to provide nuance – and it does it in spades. I remember one of the first cutscenes, when Manny meets another main character called Meche and the player has to go through a number of dialogue options, and every time I’m simply blown away by the sheer sincerity of the voices, of the lines delivered so well that it’s as immersive as a movie.

Yeah… Grim Fandango is one of my favorite games. Like Broken Age, I’ll forgive it a lot of sins simply because it was crafted by people who really believed in it, and who wanted to make something truly good.

I’m bringing this up now because Grim Fandango was just recently remastered and re-released, which means that we can all play it again and appreciate it again. It’s just such a great game! I highly, highly recommend taking a look at it, on your platform of choice, especially if you’re a writer. It may be a video game, but it’s got many lessons on truly excellent storytelling to teach us.

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The post The Writing of Grim Fandango appeared first on Raynfall.

Living in the Past

Some time ago, I decided that I wanted to keep up with the press releases of the various New York publishing houses. Mostly I wanted to know what they thought was important enough to issue press releases about, and I thought it would be enough to simply subscribe to their RSS feeds or something.

Except I can’t. What I found was that most of them don’t have RSS feeds for their press releases. They don’t have a method of subscribing to their press releases for people who may be interested. I mean… good grief. What century are you living in? I only have a WordPress blog and I have two feeds available at least.

Anyway – that’s not really want I wanted to talk about. What I’m really interested in is the way that the big publishing houses seem to be flailing about on the Internet like drunken soccer hooligans when it comes to social media.

Maybe I’m being too harsh?

Nah.

Let’s take a look at the Twitter feed of Simon and Schuster, for example. It’s full of nicely scheduled tweets and retweets, and absolutely no replies or interactions with non-official Simon and Schuster imprints, as far as I can tell. There’s also a random mix of genres and information – it’s so unfocused as to be close to useless.

How about Penguin Random House? Here’s their official Facebook page. Notice that the posts are a mix of promotional news items and links from other people that seem to be posted with the sole intent of creating engagement, but PRH itself doesn’t actually engage with the commenters.

Let’s try Hachette US. Here’s their official Twitter feed, and again, it’s like Simon and Schuster. There is no engagement.

I’m seeing a trend here, one that’s highlighting something rather interesting about the legacy publishing houses.

Social Media as News, not Conversation

The big trad publishers seem to be living in the past. They’re treating social media, a fundamentally interactive medium, as yet another news platform where they talk and the readers listen without responding. This betrays a fundamentally different way of communicating, a mindset that doesn’t allow for feedback, discussion and conversation.

The question really is whether readers are interested in this, if they can engage with the authors directly without needing to engage with their publishers, and the authors respond. I sometimes take my husband as an example here – he inhales science-fiction, and spends a lot of time on Twitter enthusiastically tweeting about books to his favourite authors. I doubt he knows who publishes any of them, and I’m sure he doesn’t care at all as long as he gets the book.

The point is that I can clearly see a pattern of the big publishers spending good money on establishing and maintaining a social media presence, but they seem to lack the very human qualities that turn a social media presence into a worthwhile endeavour. For example, Penguin Random House’s official Twitter account has just over 700,000 followers. PRH is the largest publisher in the world. Stephen King, a single author (though admittedly a very famous one) has almost 650,000 followers on Twitter, and the engagement with his tweets – measured by retweets and favourites – is an order of magnitude higher than PRH.

Wil Wheaton, former actor and current nerd who really knows how to engage with his fans, has 2.7 million followers.

That’s the power of treating social media as the interactive medium that it is, and not just another bullhorn for the stuff you want to sell.

Specificity

The other problem I’m seeing with the social media of the traditional publishers is just how completely random they are, most of the time.

If ever there was an indication of wasted money, it’s in the scattershot approach to social media displayed in most of their accounts. Again, going back to PRH, you can see that they tweet regularly about their books. But what reader is going to be interested in all of those different genres and styles? On their feed right now, for example, I can see ‘What Pet Should I Get?’ by Dr. Seuss, ‘Confessions of a Comma Queen’ from a copyeditor, and ‘Dead Wake’, which is a book about the Lusitania.

Fact is, no one is interested all of these, and tweeting about all of them at once displays a fragmented approach to cultivating an audience. All of the big traditional publishers seem to have this issue: they spread themselves too widely. But going back to Wil Wheaton, again, you basically know what you’re getting in advance – nerdy silliness with a side order of snark. Wil knows his audience, and he’s not about to start tweeting links to, say, websites on gardening without a damn good reason.

The end result of this is that the big publishers’ social media presences feel nebulous. It feels like they’re not ‘real’, as it were. A lack of engagement and a lack of specificity translates to meaninglessness, on a large scale. It makes their brand feel like it doesn’t really represent anything, because, at a very basic level, it doesn’t. It’s a big, useless, impersonal catch-all.

So, with all this in mind, I’d like to ask some questions of you.

Do YOU follow any of the big publishers on social media? (Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan)
If so, why?
As a reader, do you know who published the last book you read?
If so, do you follow them on any social media platform?

Feel free to leave your answers in the comments below.

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Fire Eyes, Shadowblade

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not really very good at titles. I’m good at writing long things. Short things, eh, not so much.

That said – I’ve procrastinated long enough. Time to put my money where my mouth is, or something. I’m announcing the title of my first book – my first real story. The first of a trilogy. This has been too long coming, but I have to commit at some point. So here it is, along with a short blurb that I will inevitably change later.

The world hides too many secrets. The elves guard their magic, the dwarves hold fast to their goddess, and the orcs… the orcs have the power of mekkaneering.

It took a master thief to infiltrate the heart of the orcish Citadel, and steal a rare mekkaneering device from under the nose of the Empress. But Tyberius Shadowblade didn’t count on being double-crossed and thrown into prison to die when the time came to collect his pay, and now he’s out of time and almost out of options.

It took a master spy-assassin to hunt down the thief and bring him back to face justice for his crime. But Graska Fire Eyes needs both the thief and the device, and the Empress will not be satisfied with anything less.

The mysterious mekkaneering device, the Core, is gone – taken, by unknown forces with evil plans. Tyberius and Graska both have their reasons for wanting it. Their only hope of finding it lies in an uneasy alliance, marred from the start by deception and secrets. But if they cannot learn to trust each other, the Core will be lost forever – and all that they know will be destroyed.

The tentative release date is going to be sometime in the summer. Watch this space for updates!

Related Posts:

It’s Valentine’s Day and I Can’t Even
Take Sword, Add Protrusions
Exotic Weapons in Fantasy Adventure
Grimdarkness in Fantasy
An Author’s Life, or Why I will Never Do a Kickstarter

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It’s Valentine’s Day and I Can’t Even

Yep. I just Can’t Even. Today’s the day that Fifty Shades of Grey is released in the cinema. Predictably enough, it’s set to break every box office record from here to Jupiter.

Perhaps I shouldn’t take it personally, you know? And yet I do, because I’m a writer. Because stories matter, in a way that nothing else does. I have a theory – and admittedly, it’s probably something that someone has come up with before – on storytelling.

In Irish tradition, the role of the storyteller – the seanchaí – means something. It was/is a profession, a person who kept the lore, who knew the history, like a living textbook. The job of the seanchaí is to tell the story of what was. Ancient Ireland, at least, understood that history is nothing more than shared narrative. It also understood the power of words – the poets of ancient Ireland were outright feared for their ability to rip someone’s reputation apart through the composition of satire.

(Fun fact – one of the most well known modern seanchaí in Ireland, Eddie Lenihan, was a teacher in my secondary school back in Ireland. Mad as a hatter, but at least he was never boring.)

So what I’m saying, more or less, is that stories and words have power, and they gain power in the telling and re-telling. My ancestors knew this and respected stories. Everything – every news article, every blog post, every movie, every book – contains a narrative, a way of looking at the world. Those narratives feed into us and out of us every day. They shape our thoughts, and our feelings on different subjects.

You think you’re not influenced? Think again. It’s not just advertising that’s trying to get into your head.

Narratives can be insidious, vile, twisted things that change how you see people by reinforcing harmful stereotypes. There’s been so much scientific research on it that I really don’t think it’s up for debate at this point. This reinforcement is the problem; it’s the re-telling, over and over, of a world view that says ‘this is the way things are’ that doesn’t match up to what really is. People who only know the narrative, and not the reality – or who know the narrative better – are fooled into believing that the narrative IS reality, and think and act accordingly.

There is the narrative of the rapist. The rapist is a loner, a twisted, violent man who jumps out of the bushes, drags women away, and violates them. He is a mentally disturbed, ugly stranger who can’t get women to sleep with him by choice. But somehow the narrative doesn’t include the friend who violates a woman while she’s black out drunk, or even the woman who coerces her partner into having sex by manipulation, or the older man who convinces a young, immature girl that she should sleep with him. But these things are still rape, because in reality the only criteria for rape is whether consent IS and CAN be freely given, and whether the rapist knows their victim or not has no bearing on this.

And you can see the effects of this narrative every day. People don’t believe victims of rape because they willingly had sex with their rapist before, because they were friends, because the rapist seems nice and normal, because he’s attractive. There is a whole narrative told and re-told about how women should have sex, for example, and this narrative interacts with that narrative and suddenly the victim becomes a liar because their telling of their own story can’t compete with that. Because ‘I said no and he didn’t stop’ gets smothered by ‘you had sex with him before, surely you’re mistaken’.

So it goes. We believe the stories we want to believe; the convenient ones that mesh nicely into the narratives that we’ve already absorbed. It’s easier to believe the narrative of a stranger lying to damage the reputation of someone we know and like, than it is to believe that the person we know and like is capable of terrible, vile acts.

And this brings me back to Fifty Shades of Grey.

The books are nothing but wall-to-wall abuse, and, yes, rape. Christian Grey is a rapist. Ana Steele says no, and he ignores her refusal and has sex with her anyway. He hurts her because he’s angry at her, not because it’s related to kink. He stalks her. He tries to control her life. We are supposed to excuse all of this because, sometimes, Ana thinks she loves him; sometimes, she says yes; sometimes, she has an orgasm.

Sometimes, he says he loves her.

The narrative of rape says that he cannot be a rapist because he’s rich, attractive. He could have any woman he wanted. She had sex with him before, willingly. They’re in a relationship. But we have reality laid out for us here, in the words of the author. The only criteria for rape is whether consent IS and CAN be given freely, and he had sex with a woman who did not consent, and could not give it freely.

Christian Grey is a rapist.

The narrative of abuse is even more twisted. Christian Grey cannot be an abuser because he had a terrible childhood. He really loves Ana, deep down. She stays with him no matter what he does to her. It’s not really abuse because she enjoys it sometimes. And again, we have reality laid out for us, and it tells a different story; one of coercion, isolation, psychological manipulation, actual harm, and excuse on top of excuse. That the author tries to spin it as some part of BDSM (when many of us know damn well that BDSM is complex, personal, and very much NOT related to abuse except on the most superficial, surface level) is just the icing on a very horrible cake.

Christian Grey is an abuser.

If this were one narrative among many, then there would not be a problem. If this were one story among many others that DIDN’T reinforce harmful tropes about women, men, relationships, and kink, then perhaps I wouldn’t be writing this article at all. And yet here we are; because Fifty Shades is a giant, international bestseller, and Hollywood snapped it up to make a movie out of it, and there are millions of women across the world who will go to see this movie and absorb the narrative that a man who has sex with them when they say no isn’t really a rapist. They will re-tell the narrative to survivors of abuse and rape, compounding their pain. They’ll enter relationships where they will be abused by men who swear that they love them, and they’ll be less likely to question every excuse because these books, and this movie, told them that love means abuse may be excused.

It matters because there are not enough stories or narratives saying that abuse is always wrong, no matter the context, and rape is always rape when consent is not given freely.

If I ever had a reason to get into writing romance, and I admit I honestly can’t because I can’t wrap my head around the genre at all, it would be this: to counter the immense, towering pile of evil that so frequently turns real, complex human relationships into horrible wastelands; to fight against the easily swallowed narratives (and of course they are the most popular ones) that paint abuse and rape and control as normal. Fifty Shades of Grey has its bestseller spot, and it has never, ever been so little deserved, and there is nothing that I can do about it except to write articles like this, and someday attempt to write romance that contradicts its premise.

I’m not going to lie, the very thought is depressing to me.

On this Valentine’s Day, I’m going to go and spend time with a man who loves me, who would never, ever hurt me, and who would never force me to do something I don’t want to do. And I know full well that these three things are not a package deal, and I could have been unlucky enough to find a partner who, perhaps, could only manage two out of three. But it should not be a matter of luck that I have them all. If Fifty Shades were a different kind of book, then perhaps it wouldn’t be a matter of luck for more women as well.

Related Posts:

Fifty Shades of Crap
An Author’s Life, or Why I will Never Do a Kickstarter
Take Sword, Add Protrusions
“Writing is the closest thing we have to telepathy…”
So You Just Want to Write

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Take Sword, Add Protrusions

There must be some kind of law about fantasy swords in video games. There’s a recipe to them, if you know what I mean. It’s not enough for a sword to be a long piece of sharp metal. It’s got to have… extra stuff, extra colors, extra everything! Presumably this is because normal swords are boring, or something.

I can’t quite fathom why various different blades designed purely to kill people real good might be considered boring, but there you have it.

The Recipe

Take the basic sword concept, i.e. a flattened length of material of three to seven feet or more depending on your personal level of comfort with absolute silliness. No need to make it straight – any line that meanders around and eventually goes from point A to point B will do.
Consider the type of material. Metal, wood, energy, ice, dark matter. This can be anything that can conceivably be formed into the usual flattened sword shape, whether by magic or advanced technology or whatever.
Choose a random justification as to why this particular material can be used as a sword shape and might be able to cut like a blade should, usually in defiance of any kind of sensible scientific theory or basic common sense.
Add flashy colors or lights, in whatever pattern or aesthetic is required by the art department. They should follow the general reasoning behind why this material can be used as a blade etc, but don’t feel constrained by that. You can and should go nuts.
Add a hilt. It doesn’t have to look comfortable. It doesn’t have to have a pommel, or a crossguard, or even be attached to the actual blade. Bonus points if you design a hilt that can’t be wielded by anyone with normal hands without hurting themselves.
Add protrusions. Spikes, knobbly bits, random stuff that sticks out everywhere in all directions, stuff that floats around the blade at random angles. A million bonus points if the protrusions are all but guaranteed to hit the wielder if they do more than hold it out in front of them.

End result: swords that look like these.

To be honest, these shapes stretch definition of ‘sword’ to a maximum. But these are from a video game, and yes, it’s almost expected that the weapons will be so incredibly silly that the players might as well be hitting each other with colored-paper-and-LED-light-festooned sticks.

It’s all about why you have weapons like this.

The Purpose of a Blade

If you’ll allow me to wax philosophical for a moment, let’s examine why the relative silliness of weapons increases in video games.

Obvious answer: because they ‘look cool’ and the players want stuff that looks cool!

And I totally get this. Consider MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, for example. Part of the game theory that makes it akin to hard drugs on the addiction scale is the impression of improvement and achievement, and this is accomplished by way of leveling up the player avatar, completing quests or other objectives, and – most importantly – gaining the visual indicators of accomplishment. Most of the weapons above are only attainable by dint of extreme effort, through the expenditure of time or the application of skill. Many take months to acquire, or plain luck. Once a player has them, they can now show off an immediate visual cue that advertises that effort to other players in the world, and thus gains them in-game respect.

To a lesser extent, non-MMO games use this same psychological trick to keep the player engaged. They have a vested interest in keeping the player’s attention, as this directly translates to sales; notice how much emphasis there is on flashy graphics for most modern triple A titles these days. The only one I know of that even vaguely reins it in somewhat is Dark Souls.

But outside of video games, for the most part, we don’t see the same level of complete nonsense. There are still many offenders – the snap-together blade belonging to the Kurgan in Highlander, Conan’s teeny little Atlantian sword (seriously, why didn’t someone give him a proper longsword?), the six-swords-in-one wielded by Cloud in Final Fantasy: Advent Children. And of course, lightsabers. These weapons are nowhere near as ridiculous, and that’s not because Hollywood is more restrained than the video games industry. Trust me, if it made sense for them to go as nutty as game designers do, they would.

The Importance of the Medium

Really what I’m trying to get at here is that the medium makes a difference. In a live action movie or TV series, it’s because the medium requires the use of actual physical objects that can be held and moved through space by human beings. But notice that, even when physical sets etc are not a concern, a medium that’s heavily invested in the narrative above all else tends not to go for the whole ‘flattened, dubiously straight shape covered in sparkly bits’ routine. Most swords that come from a non-video game fantasy setting are normal, for a given value of normal. Why is that?

I think there’s a few reasons.

The first is the level of importance and attention ascribed to the weapon. In a narrative-driven structure, especially in a time-limited medium like a movie or an episode of a TV show, the relative importance of each element in the plot directly translates to how much screen time it gets. Now, it’s possible to write a plot that makes a sword important – see The Sword in the Stone; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – but you’ll find that the plot is less about the sword, and far more about the wielder.

Swords are still largely inanimate objects, and narrative is driven by animate objects like people, animals, talking cars, that kind of thing. It’s more important to show the strike made by the master swordsman than it is to show the level of intricate detail on the blade making it, because that’s what holds our attention in a time-limited medium.

Video games, though they might be narrative-driven, don’t have the same kind of time limitation. They do have large stretches of gameplay where the amount of time the player takes to complete a section is unknown, and, in that case, flashy weapons and even flashier moves are part of what keeps the player’s attention.

The second is, again, related to time limitations – that of competition in a given scene. Imagine, for a moment, that Highlander had been filmed with one of the swords in the picture above. Who would we, the viewers, be looking at? The actors, or the swords? Answer: we already know from looking at the Star Wars movies. Lightsaber battles are completely overshadowed by the lightsabers themselves, to the point where the actors are almost entirely backgrounded by them (with some notable exceptions, i.e. Luke vs. Vader in The Empire Strikes Back).

The flashier and more silly a sword is, the more of our attention it holds. This is desirable in a game sequence where narrative is not always taking place, but far less so in movies and TV where there can be no breaks in the narrative. The whoosh-flash-twirly madness of video games slots in perfectly as part of the player’s engagement with the game, but it’s woefully distracting and out of place in a medium that can’t use gameplay as engagement.

Hollywood and TV tones down the silliness of weapons because it makes the products of their medium worse, whereas the same silly weapons in video games makes them better. Though we can spend hours criticizing said silliness as being unrealistic and ludicrous, we have to recognize that these weapons do have their place – and perhaps we should be criticizing them only when they’re used badly.

Related Posts:

Video Games Swordfighting Fun
The Swordplay of Legend of Zelda
The Problem With Lightsabers
The Best Movie Swordfights – The Princess Bride
Accuracy in Dungeons & Dragons Combat: Hit Points

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