Martha Wells's Blog, page 91

Raksuran Tea Pots

Just posted this on Tumblr: http://marthawells.tumblr.com/post/139975113407/someone-asked-once-and-i-finally-remembered-to

Someone asked once, and I finally remembered to answer: this is what a Raksuran tea pot looks like. I think it's an ancient Greek design? I got this from a potter at a craft show years ago and it's one of my favorite things.

The Edge of Worlds Countdown

In case you missed it, The Edge of Worlds, a new Raksura novel, will be out on April 5, in hardcover and ebook, and it's up for preorder now.

(And preorders do help, along with reviews and ratings on Amazon, B&N, GoodReads, LibraryThing, etc, and just adding the book to your to-read list on GoodReads or you collection on LibraryThing helps, too.)

Some things will be done to celebrate the release, including a signing at Murder by the Book in Houston, TX, on Saturday April 9 at 4:30, where I'll be co-signing with J. Kathleen Cheney. You can preorder our books (including all the previous Raksura books and Kathleen's Shores of Spain trilogy) at that link and get them signed and personalized, and then shipped to you.

I'll also be doing an Ask Me Anything on reddit Fantasy on April 7.

I've adjusted the schedule for the Raksura Patreon posts, so I'll have them on March 8, March 22, and April 5, because that will be fun.

I'll also have at least one more guest post somewhere and other fun things, hopefully.

And thanks to everybody for the great comments on the Sex and the Single Raksura post!

Sex and the Single Raksura

It took two years to sell the completed manuscript of The Cloud Roads to a publisher. (My agent was the one doing all the work. I was just sitting at home writing The Serpent Sea and Emilie and the Hollow World (which didn't have a publisher either at that time), and quietly freaking out.) But one of the comments my agent got back on The Cloud Roads was that it was hard to follow.

If you've read it, you know it's not a multi-character, multi-storyline epic. Moon is the only POV and the story is pretty linear. After talking to other readers about it for a while, I think the reason for that comment was the Raksura's gender neutral names.

For me, this was a feature, not a bug. I found it hard to talk about the bisexuality or pansexuality of the characters when they had no concept of heterosexuality, so I tried in various ways to show it. And our concepts of gender don't map exactly onto the Raksura's concepts of gender. Using gender neutral names helped me keep that in mind while I was writing. But for some people it was too confusing; they had to assign a gender to identify who the character was.

There were other things people didn't like. Raksura form intensely close bonds with each other, but are not romantic in the way most earth humans would interpret it. The closest they come to kissing is biting, and they don't say to each other "I love you." The queens and consorts are the only ones who form single permanent sexual relationships that we would recognize as marriages, and even they aren't exclusive with each other. (Though a consort wouldn't sleep with another queen unless he wanted to start a war.) Moon is the only Raksura in the book who has seen any other type of relationship, and even he only has an outsider's understanding of them.

For infertile warriors and fertile Arbora, sexual relationships are friendly and casual. Having children is a serious business, and partners are selected with a lot of attention toward the court's bloodlines and what the court needs. But the relationships between Arbora child-bearing partners aren't exclusive and aren't marriages, the way we'd think of marriages, and children are raised communally. (When it's normal to give birth to five babies at one time, it takes an organized segment of the community to take care of all of them.)

The entire court is basically a very large, often cranky, extended family.

I had beta readers for The Cloud Roads who tried to see the Raksuran relationships as marriages and nuclear families, and it just didn't work for them because the relationships didn't make sense that way. To me, trying to see the relationships of your flying lizard ant lion people as being exactly like earth human relationships was what didn't make sense.

Monday Again

Links

* Women in Science Fiction by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel

* Discussing diversity & representation in SFF – links round up Juliet E. McKenna

* Jim Hines' Link Round-up includes "Mark Oshiro talks about racism and harassment he faced as Fan Guest of Honor at ConQuesT."

* Vintage Coloring Collecting, Curating, & Creating Coloring Books of Bygone Art</a>

* Quartzen on Twitter has an awesome set of obscure SF/F book recs here: https://storify.com/quartzen/obscure-sff-book-recs


Books

* Chase Me by Laura Florand
A Michelin two-star chef at twenty-eight, Violette Lenoir could handle anything, including a cocky burglar who broke into her restaurant in the middle of the night. Or so she thought. Elite counterterrorist operative Chase “Smith” had been through things that made Hell Week look easy. But nothing had prepared him for a leather-clad blonde who held him at bay at knifepoint and dared him to take her on.

* Tamaruq by E.J. Swift
Fleeing from her family and the elitist oppression of the Osiris government, Adelaide Rechnov has become the thing she once feared, a revolutionary. But with the discovery of a radio signal comes the stark realization that there is life outside their small island existence. Adelaide’s worries are about to become much bigger.

* The Days of Tao by Wesley Chu
Cameron Tan wouldn’t have even been in Greece if he hadn’t gotten a ‘D’ in Art History. Instead of spending the summer after college completing his training as a Prophus operative, he’s doing a study abroad program in Greece, enjoying a normal life – spending time with friends and getting teased about his crush on a classmate. Then the emergency notification comes in: a Prophus agent with vital information needs immediate extraction, and Cameron is the only agent on the ground, responsible for getting the other agent and data out of the country. The Prophus are relying on him to uncomplicate things.

* Chains of the Heretic by Jeff Salyards
After escaping the capital city of Sunwrack, Captain Braylar Killcoin and his Jackal company evade pursuit across Urglovia, tasked with reaching deposed emperor Thumaar and helping him recapture the throne. Braylar’s sister, Soffjian, rejoins the Jackals and reveals that Commander Darzaak promised her freedom if she agreed to aid them in breaking Cynead’s grip on the other Memoridons and ousting him.

* Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary by Pamela Dean
A young astronomer and her sisters and friends confront magic moving into her neighborhood.

Raksura Patreon Day

For Patreon people, I just posted the next Raksura patreon snippet. https://www.patreon.com/user?u=2458567&ty=h It's Jade and Balm, set during The Cloud Roads, right after Jade sees Moon for the first time.

I'm really happy with how the Patreon is turning out. The snippets have been averaging about 800 to 1000 words, and I'm having a lot of fun with them.

Books! and ConDFW

Guest post I did: Monsters in the Books of the Raksura


Books!

* Pillar of Fire by Judith Tarr
Nofret is the daughter of a Hittite nobleman, captured by enemies from Mitanni and sent as tribute to the Pharaoh in Egypt: the strange, otherworldly Akhenaten, who rules from his raw new city of Amarna. As servant to his daughter, she witnesses the rise and fall of Akhenaten and his one god, the lives and deaths of his queen and his heirs, and the brief reign of Tutankhamon. Then, freed at last from Egypt, she embarks on a years-long journey into the desert oases of Sinai, and there finds love and family.

* Dearest by Alethea Kontis
Readers met the Woodcutter sisters (named after the days of the week) in Enchanted and Hero. In this delightful third book, Alethea Kontis weaves together some fine-feathered fairy tales to focus on Friday Woodcutter, the kind and loving seamstress. When Friday stumbles upon seven sleeping brothers in her sister Sunday’s palace, she takes one look at Tristan and knows he’s her future. But the brothers are cursed to be swans by day. Can Friday’s unique magic somehow break the spell?

* The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria by Carlos Hernandez
Assimilation is founded on surrender and being broken; this collection of short stories features people who have assimilated, but are actively trying to reclaim their lives. There is a concert pianist who defies death by uploading his soul into his piano. There is the person who draws his mother’s ghost out of the bullet hole in the wall near where she was executed. Another character has a horn growing out of the center of his forehead—punishment for an affair. But he is too weak to end it, too much in love to be moral. Another story recounts a panda breeder looking for tips. And then there’s a border patrol agent trying to figure out how to process undocumented visitors from another galaxy. Poignant by way of funny, and philosophical by way of grotesque, Hernandez’s stories are prayers for self-sovereignty.

* You can now preorder: Congress of Secrets by Stephanie Burgis but first there's Masks And Shadows, coming out in April.

* The Keeper of the Mist by Rachel Neumeier
Keri has been struggling to run her family bakery since her mother passed away. Now the father she barely knew—the Lord of Nimmira—has died, and ancient magic has decreed that she will take his place as the new Lady. The position has never been so dangerous: the mists that hide Nimmira from its vicious, land-hungry neighbors have failed, and Keri's people are visible to strangers for the first time since the mists were put in place generations ago.

* Bleeding Earth by Kaitlin Ward
Lea was in a cemetery when the earth started bleeding. Within twenty-four hours, the blood made international news. All over the world, blood oozed out of the ground, even through the concrete, even in the water. Then the earth started growing hair and bones. Lea wishes she could ignore the blood. She wishes she could spend time with her new girlfriend, Aracely, in public, if only Aracely wasn't so afraid of her father. Lea wants to be a regular teen again, but the blood has made her a prisoner in her own home. Fear for her social life turns into fear for her sanity, and Lea must save herself and her girlfriend however she can.

* Games Wizards Play by Diane Duane
Every eleven years, Earth's senior wizards hold the Invitational: an intensive three-week event where the planet's newest, sharpest young wizards show off their best and hottest spells. Wizardly partners Kit Rodriguez and Nita Callahan, and Nita's sister, former wizard-prodigy Dairine Callahan, are drafted in to mentor two brilliant and difficult cases: for Nita and Kit, there’s Penn Shao-Feng, a would-be sun technician with a dangerous new take on managing solar weather; and for Dairine, there's shy young Mehrnaz Farrahi, an Iranian wizard-girl trying to specialize in defusing earthquakes while struggling with a toxic extended wizardly family that demands she perform to their expectations.


ConDFW

I'll be reading from The Edge of Worlds on this Friday the 12th at 6:00 pm of ConDFW, the last reading I'll be doing from it before the book comes out. The incomparable Tex Thompson will also be reading then from her newest work. You don't want to miss us because we are both very special.

Writing Beginnings

Michael Mock said: Heh. I've got a different problem: I can't find my opening. I know the characters, I have (I think) a pretty good feel for the world, I know what I want to have happen, or at least a loose sequence of events. I know my antagonists, I know how they connect to the characters, I know how they fit into the larger world. I'm pretty excited about the journey, and I feel like if I can just get it started it'll go pretty smoothly. (I could always be wrong about that, of course.) I just... can't seem to get myself onboard the train, so to speak.

I realize there are people who write the opening last, and at this point I totally understand that. I don't think I can do it, but I totally understand it.


There's a lot of reasons why this can happen. There may be something about the story you haven't figured out yet, and your subconscious brain is dragging your conscious brain's feet until you realize. Or you may just not have come up with the right point of attack yet.

I would try focusing in on your main point of view character. Try to get into their head and think about when the story starts for them. The moment where things change, or when they notice something strange is happening. There are writing advice books that say you always need to open with an action scene, and this is not true. You need to open with something happening, but it certainly doesn't have to be action. (Like the way the Lord of the Rings starts with Bilbo's birthday party, even though Frodo doesn't leave the Shire until much later. Bilbo acting on the decision he's made to leave and not take the Ring is the start of the story, even though Frodo doesn't know it yet.)

A good place to start is often with the character leaving a familiar place and arriving at a strange one. (This also gives you a lot of opportunity to describe your world, since your character will definitely be noticing things that are different compared to what they're familiar with.) The arrival of a stranger is also a good start, or a friend or enemy returning. But you need to think about what begins the story for your POV character.

Sometimes it helps to just start freewriting scenes you know you want to have happen and see if that jogs anything loose. I've had books where the first scene I wrote, intending it to be the beginning, actually ended up in chapter eight.

The Writing Middle-Slump

(I'm going to try to do more posts about writing, so here's some thoughts on the difficulties of middles.)


I wanted to do a blog post about getting through writing slumps, because of something someone said on Twitter. (I can't remember what it was now, but that's how my brain rolls lately.)

A lot of people talk about the mid-book slump. Writing the beginning of a book is exciting, everything is new, you're creating the world, meeting the characters for the first time. The end is also exciting, because all the plot threads are tying up and you should be done soon.

The middle is the hard part, where you have to make the magic happen and start pulling things together, increasing the complication but starting to find answers to mysteries. You have to make all the cool stuff you came up with in the beginning make sense. You have to set up the end. The story engine has to be fully engaged, etc.

Sometimes it feels like a slog, and that's when you want to quit and go write something else. You want that really, really bad sometimes. If you do that with every book you write, it's going to be a problem and end up getting you zero finished books. (This, by the way, is why agents, and publishers who take unagented submissions, only want to see finished books from new authors. It's a lot easier to start a book than to finish it, and they want to make sure you can finish. A lot of people are certain they can, and then don't.)

So if your book-middle feels like a horrible slog and you'd rather go out and shovel snow or haul rocks or dig holes in the back yard, it isn't necessarily a problem. It's just that middles are hard.

But one thing I've noticed about myself is that if the writing doesn't come easily (and it's not just because I'm tired or unwell or stressed) then the chances are good that there's a problem that part of my brain is aware of even though the rest of me is willfully trying to ignore it. Figuring out what that problem is can be tricky, but first you have to figure out whether it's actually a problem.

I think you do need to ask yourself some questions. Is the book-middle like climbing a mountain backwards through a mud storm because you're tired and need to just keep going? Or is there an actual problem? Is it a pacing issue, are things moving too slowly? Are the characters still in character, are you making them act in ways you kind of know they wouldn't just to make your plot work? Is there something you're trying to do now that needs more setup earlier in the book? Did you forget to put in something you know you really needed?

Or are you actually getting bored with your plot? Because if you're bored with your plot, readers may be bored with it too.

If you're saying: "I have to write this part and I don't want to." Ask yourself: Do you really have to? Is it necessary for the plot, characterization, the story? Why don't you want to? Is it not right for the pacing, slowing things down when it should be speeding things up? Maybe it doesn't need to be there.

If you don't like it anymore, it's okay to make something else happen instead.

You can always take a step back and re-imagine your plot. You should know the characters better at this point; maybe your plot needs to change to accommodate that. (It's often hard for some writers to create a character in a vacuum. It's only when I write characters interacting with other characters and facing situations that I start to get a real sense of who they are and how they behave under stress.)

What is the coolest, most exciting thing that could happen here that will still fit the story you want to tell? Maybe you should be writing that instead.

Your plot is not carved in stone, even if you did an outline. One thing I've found out over and over again is that plot points can sound great in the outline and it's only when you start actually writing those scenes that you see the flaws.

This is where experience and understanding how your own writing brain works is important. The only way to get experience is of course to keep writing through those middles, no matter what you have to do to get to the end.

ConDFW

I'll be at ConDFW in Dallas, Texas, on February 12-14. This is a great con, and this year the guests of honor are Seanan McGuire and John Scalzi.

Here's my schedule:

Friday

READING (ADAMS) Friday, 6pm: Tex Thompson, Martha Wells
(I'll be reading from The Edge of Worlds)


Saturday

PROGRAMMING 2 (MADISON) Saturday, 12pm:
Creating your Fantasy Hero
Panelists: Marshall Ryan Maresca (M), C. Dean Andersson, Tracy S. Morris, Martha Wells, Bradley H. Sinor, J. Kathleen Cheney
There are many stereotypes of hero out there in Epic Fantasy. The brawny barbarian, the wise wizard, the crafty thief and the pious cleric are all choices. Which hero fits your world that you have built? Or do you want to go counter ‐ trope and build something against the norm? We’ve put together the brains of our fantasy authors and they will give you ideas on how to build the perfect hero for your world.


AUTOGRAPHS (THE GALLERY) Saturday, 1pm: Martha Wells, Stina Leicht, K. B. Bogen


PROGRAMMING 2 (MADISON) Saturday, 4pm:
Broke Down and Out of Gas... in Space
Panelists: Tex Thompson (M), Paul Abell, Martha Wells, KM Tolan, Chris Donahue, T.M. Hunter
Because even Furiosa occasionally gets a flat. Let's talk about all the fun you can have when spaceships break and flux capacitors blow – and how our favorite characters MacGyver their way back into action!


Sunday

PROGRAMMING 3 (HAMILTON) Sunday, 12pm:
The Wand of Deus Ex Machina
Panelists: Kristi Hutson (M), Seanan McGuire, Michael Ashleigh Finn, Paul Black, Bradley H. Sinor, Martha Wells
Every hero has their emergency bag, or their special revolver, or their hellfire staff, or their wand. It’s as much of a signature as the clothes they wear, or the car they drive. Our writers talk about equipping their heroes, and why you shouldn’t skimp on describing them

Books!

Books!

* Out today: Dreaming Death by J. Kathleen Cheney
Shironne Anjir's status as a sensitive is both a gift and a curse. Her augmented senses allow her to discover and feel things others can’t, but her talents come with a price: a constant assault of emotions and sensations has left her blind. Determined to use her abilities as best she can, Shironne works tirelessly as an investigator for the Larossan army.

* Children of Ash by Jaye Wells
Several months after their first victory over the vampires, Meridian Six and her band of rebels are called in to Book Mountain for a brand new mission. The leader of another rebel group needs help saving children who were captured by the Troika and sent to Krovgorod, the worst of the vampire labor camps. Getting inside the prison camp will be simple, but escaping it will be hell.

* This is looks like only the UK edition is available now: Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan
A woman with wings that exist in another dimension. A man trapped in his own body by a killer. A briefcase that is a door to hell. A conspiracy that reaches beyond our world. Breathtaking SF from a Clarke Award-winning author.

* Magic Banquet by A.E. Marling
Dragon steaks, ambrosia, and chimera stew. The Magic Banquet is to die for, they say, and they are right. One guest perishes each night. The street waif, Aja, just wants a few mouthfuls of the first course, but this is a party not so easily left.

* The Risen: A Novel of Spartacus by David Anthony Durham
From the author of Pride of Carthage, the superb fictional rendering of Hannibal's epic military campaigns against Carthage's archenemy Rome, comes the perfect follow-up: an equally superb novel of the legendary gladiator Spartacus and the vast slave revolt he led that came ever so close to bringing Rome and its supposedly invincible legions to its knees.

* Hellebore & Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic
The essence of fantasy is magic and the folklore of women has often dwelt on the innumerable powers they possess. Magic that heals, magic that destroys, magic that saves their community. All these elements and more can be found in the queer women of Hellebore & Rue. These lesbians shape their worlds, their wants and needs, and, most important, their destinies.

* For Preorder: The Root by Na'amen Tilahun
A dark, gritty urban fantasy debut set in modern-day San Francisco, filled with gods, sinister government agencies, and worlds of dark magic hidden just below the surface. When a secret government agency trying to enslave you isn’t the biggest problem you’re facing, you’re in trouble.

* For Preorder: In the Labyrinth of Drakes: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan
The thrilling new book in the acclaimed fantasy series from Marie Brennan, as the glamorous Lady Trent takes her adventurous explorations to the deserts of Akhia.