Martha Wells's Blog, page 141

Posted by @rachelcaine on Twitter:Via @shilohwalker - a L...

Posted by @rachelcaine on Twitter:

Via @shilohwalker - a Lakota project to help reduce infant mortality on the rez ENDS TODAY, please donate now: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/268593

If you can't afford to donate, please pass the info on.

A Few More Things

I got blood drawn this morning and still retain my superpower of being able to make my veins disappear. Just one more doctor's appointment today and I'm done for the week.


Something I forgot to post earlier:

Con Or Bust is getting started with their annual auction.
Con or Bust helps people of color/non-white people attend SFF conventions. It is administered by Kate Nepveu under the umbrella of the Carl Brandon Society, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.

Con or Bust is funded through donations and an online auction held each February. Learn how to support Con or Bust, or donate money through PayPal now:

Reviews:

* The Cloud Roads was listed by Web Genii as one of her "Best of 2012" novels on Slice of Sci-Fi TV

* Star Wars News site Roqoo Depot did reviews of the Books of the Raksura: The Cloud Roads, The Serpent Sea, The Siren Depths. They gave each one five out of five chainmail bikinis!

Another Old Night Bazaar Post

This is another old Night Bazaar post from 2011: My Favorite Women


This week on Night Bazaar we're talking about our favorite female characters. One of my favorites is the main character of Zelde M'tana by F.M. Busby. I was 16 when the book first came out in 1980, and I still remember the impact the cover had on me. Zelde, facing the viewer, with a gun in her hand and that expression. There were a lot of books with female protagonists, and sometimes the covers didn't show them as just sexy victims, but they aren't as memorable to me as this one. The book more than fulfills the promise of the cover, as Zelde fights her way up from street kid enslaved by a dystopian government to become a space pirate captain and a rebel. It's a rough raw R-rated story, and I was probably a little young for it, but I feel like it was what I needed to read at that time.



I've had a lot of female protagonists in my books but I think my favorite is still Tremaine Valiarde, from the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy. The daughter of Nicholas Valiarde and Madeline Denare from The Death of the Necromancer, she was a failed playwright who had been raised by a master criminal father and an adopted uncle who was the most powerful and mentally unstable sorcerer in Ile-Rien. Having learned everything she needed to know about housebreaking, paranoia, how to hide the bodies, and making sure your enemies never bother you again from Nicholas, Tremaine instigates or controls much of the action in the books. And despite the fact that Tremaine was an expert shot, I still got told by someone that Tremaine was a doormat because she couldn't fight like Xena.

Now, I like female characters who are fabulous sword fighters or martial artists or both, especially both. (Like the characters from Jessica Amanda Salmonson's Amazons anthologies, the first of which came out in 1979 and was also a big influence on me.) But there are people who judge female characters only by that standard: it doesn't matter if they're a leader, a doctor, a scientist, a high priestess, a scholar, an explorer, a survivor, a sorceress, an officer on a starship, someone who walks across continents to save the world, or whatever. Either you fight like Xena or you're a doormat, and there is nothing in between.

What that says about real-life women, I have no idea.

Tremaine has also been described as a "plucky girl." Which was funny to me, because at the end of the last book Ander still thinks of Tremaine as a plucky girl, while Tremaine thinks of herself as that woman who shot an innocent man in the head to steal a truck, because she needed one to save her friends. Because some people will always see us the way they want to see us, no matter what we've done, and what we really are.

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A Few Things

I'm getting the text of The Death of the Necromancer ready to release as an ebook. Hopefully this will happen sometime in the later part of February, if all goes well. The book originally came out in 1997, and was a nominee for the Nebula award in 1998.

I've had the cover done by Tiger Bright Studios, who did the covers for the ebook re-releases of The Element of Fire, City of Bones, and Wheel of the Infinite:





I'll post the Necromancer cover when it's closer to the release date. The book will also be serialized online free by Black Gate Magazine.

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Another cool thing: petercline wrote some music for The Cloud Roads! You can listen to it on my web site on the fan art section for the Raksura books.


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Book View Cafe: Stories to Honor Octavia Butler
Eleven original stories by recipients of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship (2007 through 2012), plus a reprint of "Speech Sounds" by the scholarship's namesake, Octavia E. Butler. This anthology also includes a brief memoir of Butler by her Clarion classmate Vonda N. McIntyre and an introduction by Nalo Hopkinson. Edited by Nisi Shawl, published by the Carl Brandon Society, the administrator of the Butler Scholarship Fund, and available at Book View Cafe.

Saturday at the Haunted Restoration Hardware Mansion

Saturday I was in Houston for a little bit. I had wonderful shrimp and grits for lunch, and then we went shopping (I found a frame for the Terri Windling print I got for Christmas) and then we visited the Haunted Restoration Hardware Mansion.

We weren't that keen to visit it because everything in it is too expensive to buy but it was blocking our way to the cupcake store. I wish I had taken a picture, because seriously. The Disney Haunted Mansion looks less like a haunted house than this place. It's three stories tall, with the top story that is mostly open terraces, and the style is sort of Craftsman. I know that sounds good, but the outside is all in shades of black and slate gray, so the effect is more like "this is the house where that guy murdered all those people with an ax" instead of wow, that's a nice Craftsman style.

Inside it's the same, with everything mottled black or gray or bone white, including all the furniture. It's like a production of The Seventh Seal or the original Nosferatu is about to break out. And this includes the baby furniture. (The baby/children's section is separate from the rest of the store and is a narrow high-ceilinged corridor with little cubbies off it. It looks like the part of the haunted attraction you have to run through or or people will jump out and grab at you.) The top floor with the terraces and all the outdoor furniture should be really nice, but with the color scheme it's like, imagine Spain in the spring or summer. Now imagine a horrible energy/soul-eating cloud descended and sucked out all the light and color and life, and now it's Dead Ghost Spain.

This is kind of sad, because it used to be less expensive, and also sold furniture and cool things that were in 30s and 40s styles. Even at Dead Ghost Spain store, there's still one room that had furniture sort of designed to look like it was made of old plane parts, and it was actually kind of attractive.

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Links:

* Cynthia Leitich Smith: Day by Day Diversity

* Last day for the Worldbuilders Fundraiser for Heifer International

New Raksura Fan Art!

Updated the web site with new fan art! It's Jade, Moon, and Chime by pentapus I love fan art!

Some Things

* A great review from The Book Smugglers on The Siren Depths
The world-building is unquestionably well-established and thought-through, the Raksura a wholly different species without being completely alien.

It also features a matriarchal society of completely badass women, a different type of Consort that doesn’t mind being protected AND saved by his Queen but who wishes he can be more proactive, friendship bonds, reasoned and negotiated romance, as well as moments of pain and loss mingled with beauty and inspiration.

As I mentioned on here before, since the publisher has let The Cloud Roads go out of print, there won't be any more Raksura books. It is still available in ebook and audiobook, for now.

* SF Site is having their annual Vote for your favorite SF/F books of the year.

* Book rec: John R. Fultz' sequel to Seven Princes is out: Seven Kings
Book two in Fultz’s imaginative visionary tale is the epitome of fantasy. His worldbuilding is in a class by itself. His battle scenes explode with inconceivable actions, his imagery and descriptive narrative gives voice and life to his awe-inspiring characters and his heroes and nightmarish creatures give face to his epic tale. The novel stands well alone, but the series should be read in order.

* Weird internet things: Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking And Inspirational Story Of The College Football Season, Is A Hoax This kind of thing always seem so incredible, except for the fact that I know of someone who has done this sort of scam several times, for attention, for fun, and for money.

The Star Wars Leia Book

Yesterday I finished a complete draft of the Star Wars Leia novel. Yay! I haven't turned it in yet, because I want to spend the next few days reading over parts of it and poking at it and polishing a bit more before I send it in on Friday.

Questions I expect people will have and my mostly inadequate answers:

What is the title?

I don't know yet. Usually either I think of a title mid-way through writing a book and it is the perfect title and all titles fall before it, or I can't think of anything and finish the book and wonder what the hell I'm going to call it. This was the second one. I gave the editor several suggestions and so we're waiting for somebody to come up with something else or decide one of those is wonderful and convince everyone else of it.

When will it be out?

I don't know yet. Maybe at the end of the year? I'll post it here as soon as I know.

What is it about?

Okay, I do know that one, but I'm not sure how much I should say yet. I'm also crap at describing my books so I may wait until someone who is good at it writes the little blurb-description paragraph. It does have the other characters in it, but is about 75-80% Leia's POV. It takes place about two years or so after A New Hope.

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Other than that, I'm tired and stressed out and kind of depressed. I would like to take a short vacation, but the only place we can afford to go is Galveston (it's only about a 2 and half hour drive away) and it's a little too cold to enjoy at this time of year, at least for me. I don't have time for much of a break, because I need to get started on the sequel to Emilie and the Hollow World which is due this summer. I think I will take a couple days off next week to catch up on doctor appointments I'm supposed to have, take the cat that's due for shots to the vet, get my hair cut, dig the yard out from under the piles of leaves and broken branches, etc.

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Posts I did recently:

* Twentieth Year Anniversary and Links
It's been 20 years since my first novel, The Element of Fire, was published.

* Don't Let Then Take Your Reynards This is a re-post from 2011, where I tell the story of how the copyeditor tried to take a gay character out of The Death of the Necromancer.

* I've been trying to mirror posts on my Tumblr here, plus post photos and re-blog cool stuff, etc.

Re-Post from 2011: Don't Let Then Take Your Reynards

I'm going to be re-posting some old Night Bazaar posts I originally wrote and posted in 2011. Here's the first one:

Don't Let Then Take Your Reynards

The Death of the Necromancer , published in 1998, was my third novel, and my first with a new publisher, Avon Eos. Everything went fine through the editorial process, right up until I received the copyedit, and found that one of the major supporting characters, Captain Reynard Morane, had been all but removed from the book. And it happened that Reynard was gay.

I'd worked hard on Reynard, and I liked him a lot. He had started out as a template. I wanted the main character, Nicholas Valiarde, to be Ile-Rien's version of Moriarty, and Reynard was his Colonel Sebastian Moran. But in the writing, Reynard emerged immediately as funny and kind to his friends and deadly to his enemies. The one guy in the room that everybody knew they really didn't want to get in a fight with. A very good soldier, a very good friend, and a very sexual person. He was kind of a weird combination of Oscar Wilde and Oliver Reed, but unlike Oscar Wilde he wasn't going to come to a bad end because of a love affair. He was a little too old and too experienced and too much of a serial monogamist to fall too hard for anybody. I wanted him to be the polar opposite of the stereotypical gay character who suffers and dies because of his forbidden whatever, and to end the book better off than the other characters.

(One digression, for those who don't know about the publishing process. The editor, usually the person who has acquired the book for the publisher, is the one who edits the book and suggests changes to improve plot, characterization, and other major elements. The copyeditor is the person who reads the book after it's in its near-final form and checks for things like grammar, spelling, continuity, and style.)

By the time I got the copyedit, I had already revised The Death of the Necromancer based on the editor's comments and things I realized I needed to fix, so the copyedit should have had only minor changes at best. (To give you an idea how minor, back then the copyedit was handwritten marks done on the actual printed manuscript. The copyedited manuscript was sent to the author who would go through it and accept some of the copyeditor's changes, stet others (an instruction that means the original text is supposed to be that way and to leave it alone) and handwrite additional changes on the pages. Then someone would take the whole thing and type it in, it would be printed in galley form (the actual printed pages that you see in books) and then sent back to the author for a final proofread.)

But this copyedit came back with massive alterations handwritten on the manuscript, with bad grammar and incorrect word choices inserted, weird demands for all sorts of things to be explained that didn't need to be explained (like the color of the tablecloth in a room description, or the main character's choice of beverage), and odd demands for rewrites. (The copyeditor wanted me to rewrite one section because she thought it was too cold for the characters to be outside.) (The publisher really doesn't want you to rewrite the manuscript during the copyedit. They really, really don't. And they really don't want a copyeditor to tell you to do it.) There were a lot of seemingly random deletions of descriptions, whole scenes, conversations and other things you needed to understand the plot, but the thing that stood out to me was that Reynard's dialogue had been all but excised from the book, and that the cuts to his part had started after it became apparent to the reader that Reynard was gay.

He was important to the plot in a number of ways and helped uncover some of the information that let Nicholas and Madeleine, the other viewpoint characters, solve the mystery before the Necromancer kills them. In the copyeditor's expurgated version of the book, Reynard is still around for the first couple of chapters, but after the point where it was made clear that Reynard is gay, suddenly his dialogue was all marked as deleted.

The conclusion I instantly snapped to was that Reynard had been removed for his sexuality. Of course, I don't know for certain if that was the case and I sure can't prove it. I never found out why the copyeditor did what she did, or why she thought she could get away with it, if she thought it was really her job. (And some of the things she did were really strange, not like she had never read a fantasy novel before and didn't understand the genre, but like she had never read fiction before.) But on that day, I would have sworn in court that Reynard was deleted because he was gay.

And it amounted to the same thing. He was gay and he was gone.

Would have been gone. It turned out fine. For my first two books I hadn't encountered a problem even remotely like this, and this was my first time with this publisher, and I panicked. During a semi-hysterical sleepless night I carefully assembled a list of everything that was wrong with the copyedit, wrote down what I was going to say so I could pretend to be calm on the phone, then called my editor in the morning. I made it through maybe two items on my list before she stopped me. (Actually, she started laughing. I think it was the one where the copyeditor told me I couldn't say that an evil sorcerer was buried in the crossroads because it was "a Christian concept.")

The editor asked me if I could just stet everything, but I thought the book really needed a real copyedit, and it hadn't gotten one. I sent back the mutilated manuscript and the editor ended up throwing out that copyedit entirely and having it redone, so everything was fine and my version of The Death of the Necromancer (with Reynard intact) was the one that got published. And the book ended up on the 1999 Nebula ballot.

This was an extreme case, and if I had been so dumb as to let this go by, my editor (who liked Reynard just fine) would have noticed that something had gone terribly wrong. (The copyedited expurgated version of the book was half the size it was supposed to be, for one thing.)

But I guess my point is, it's your book, and don't let anybody take your Reynards out of it.

Twenty Year Anniversary and Links

I realized this weekend that this year will be my 20th anniversary as a published author. The Element of Fire came out 20 years ago in July, 1993. That's 20 years, twelve books out with three more on the way.

I should probably do something for it, but I'm not sure what yet.

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Since Hugo PIN numbers are going out, another reminder: the Hugo Nomination period is open. The Serpent Sea and The Siren Depths are both eligible. You can nominate if you are: Members of LoneStarCon 3 and Loncon 3 (the 2014 Worldcon) who join by January 31, 2013, and all members of Chicon 7, the prior year’s Worldcon, are invited to submit nominating ballots. If you didn't get the email with your PIN, you need to email the Hugo PIN email address on the front page of the Lone Star Con site.


Places I'll be going so far this year:

February 15-17, 2013. ConDFW, in Dallas, Texas.

May 4-5, 2013. DFW Writers Conference, in Hurst, Texas.

August 29-September 2, 2013. LoneStarCon 3, the World Science Fiction Convention, in San Antonio, Texas.

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Book rec: The Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding

Art sites: Fantasy of Color tumblr.
We're here to share art, pictures and stories of people of color in fantasy or steampunk settings.

Book rec: A post on the Booksmugglers site about The Other Half of the Sky an anthology I have a Raksura story in, which will be coming out in April.

Book rec: Hurricane Sandy Benefit Anthology