Tropes and my Manuscript, Part 1

I am getting close to finishing the second draft of my manuscript.  Probably Sunday (and if I didn't post this on a Sunday, well, assume it was the closest Sunday to the actual posting date).  I've been having this crisis in confidence lately (again) and I started poking around on the TV tropes website, wondering if I was original enough.  Just because I can't think of anything my work really resembles, doesn't mean there's nothing out there I'm similar to -- it just means I haven't read (or otherwise encountered) it yet.

I won't detail my magical system here, except to say it does have something to do with biological processes.  So when I saw a link to "nature magic," I clicked (the "Friend to All Living Things" trope).  And breathed a sigh of relief when I realized this is nothing like what I envisioned.

My main practitioner of magic is a doctor, which sounds beneficent, and a lot of times, he does use his power for healing, or to protect himself and others when attacked.  But, he also uses it to kill someone in an act of vengeance (basically committing murder knowing he won't be caught), and to disguise a horse he stole.  While I intended for him to be a sympathetic character, and I still think of him as such, he does participate in a lot of activities that involve moral gray areas.

There are so many tropes I could never hope to read about them all, nor do I think I should try.  But it is interesting to contrast what's out there to what I've come up with.  It's probably something I should do whenever I'm feeling that my manuscript is not very good or original.  And if I really can't think of anything else to write about here in the next couple of days, I might do this more just because I find it to be a useful exercise.

What People Actually Read

More browsing of the New York Times "books" section:

What Muncie Read

Some interesting contrasts in there between what we might think we know and the truth, as far as library borrowing habits from 100 years ago, go.  Makes me wonder what a similar study would look like 100 years from now.  (Presumably there'd be better data, with computerized records.)

I see a lot of people writing Amazon reviews that say they check out fantasy books from the library.  Obviously I don't do that -- I keep writing about how many books I bought recently -- but the reason why is simple.  A lot of fantasy comes in series these days.  And libraries (like physical bookstores) don't always have every volume of a series.  And what good does it do, to read volumes 1, 3, and 4 out of 6 books?  Where do you get the other 3 of them?  I know you can usually request books from other libraries, or it may be that the library does have the book but someone else has checked it out.  But that could lead to waiting months or years to finish a series.  (Granted, with the pace some authors produce novels, we have to do that anyway.  But if the whole thing is out, I want to read it all at once.)

Plus, sometimes I do re-read books.  Not lately, as I've got a backlog of something like 33 books to read.  But I have done this in the past, and undoubtedly will do so again.

Well, I'm so far off the original topic now I doubt I'll get back.  Maybe it's better to hit "publish post" instead.

Audio Books

I've written a lot about paperbacks, e-books, etc. on this blog.  But I've never written about audiobooks.  I've never been that big into them.  In fact, I've experienced a grand total of one audiobook in my entire life: The Street Lawyer by John Grisham.  Lent to me by a coworker some 12 or 13 years ago.  I only remember that there was one narrator, and he was cheesy when he did the women's voices.  Now maybe this is standard, and I just don't have the experience of audiobooks to know any better.

So it was a little surprising to read two items in the New York Times about audiobooks:

Wired for Sound
The Mind's Ear

I don't actually know anyone (except that former coworker) who was into audiobooks.  I prefer music in the car (and am suffering right now because I am stuck listening to Atlanta radio until I get a Best Buy gift card this holiday season and a new car stereo with it).  When I walk on the treadmill (about 5 times a week), I usually watch TV.  I've tried reading while using the treadmill before, but it just didn't work for me.  I can totally appreciate that blind people like audiobooks; they used to advertise when I was in college to get students to read textbooks to be recorded for blind students.

The people I know these days who are divided into two camps over reading are not audio versus paper books, but paper versus e-books.

But, to any fellow aspiring writers out there...it might very well be worth reading your OWN work out loud, even if just to yourself.  Sometimes this can help you spot some really dumb stuff that you might have otherwise overlooked.

Amazon's "Best of 2011" Fantasy and Sci-Fi List

I suspect I will be posting a lot of these in the next few days, so get used to it. I'm having a brain freeze when it comes to topics to post. What I do have right now is a lot of time to surf the web, and there are a lot of these lists popping up lately.

Not sure how long Amazon's list will stay up since they're not a site with static pages, so I'm going to link to each of the books they list in their top 10.

• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
• The Magician King by Lev Grossman
• Inheritance by Christopher Paolini
• A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
• Embassytown by China Mieville
• Among Others by Jo Walton
• Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
• Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
• The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
• Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson

I don't have any idea how they came up with this list, and there are some items that undoubtedly do deserve to be included on the list.  But let's just take a couple of examples.

Inheritance: This is a solid 3 stars according to customer reviews on Amazon.  There are nearly as many 3-star reviews as 5-star reviews, and overall, and about the same number of 1- and 2-star reviews as there are 4- and 5-star reviews.  I have never seen a more even spread of reviews.  People have really mixed opinions on this.  I suspect this might have been chosen simply because of popularity, and not because of quality.  (I'll be honest, I haven't read any of Paolini's books, nor do I intend to, though I did see the Eragon movie and thought it wasn't that great.)

A Dance with Dragons: I do have this, and fully intend to read it.  I have enjoyed reading this product's forums on Amazon, including an active one about bogus 5-star reviews.  But it's another solid 3 star book, based on customer reviews.  (Careful about going to the forums as sometimes you run across spoilers.)  It's another one that may have been chosen based on sales.

To be fair, Amazon is in the business of selling books.  And if these are the books that are selling, and that's how they want to make their lists, that's fine.  I just wish they would say.  (I prefer lists where there is some discussion, even short, about why the books were chosen.  Then I know they're based on the opinions of people who have actually READ them.)

"Best of" Lists, Take 2

More "Best of 2011" book lists:

New York Times

The Guardian

No fantasy here (well, I suppose there could be, as I'll admit to not having read every word on both pages linked to), but The Guardian asks readers to name their own favorites of the year.  (At least one of the comments lists fan tasy, as of this writing.)

Anne McCaffrey

Just read that Anne McCaffrey has passed away.  I'll be honest, I have not read any of her books, but again, like I said about Sara Douglass (who at the time, I also hadn't read), she did a lot in terms of women and the fantasy and science fiction genres.

I think it's always important to recognize the trailblazers, and McCaffrey surely was one.

I'm not so keen on reading books about people riding dragons as I'm a little sick of the dragon trope lately, but if anyone can recommend any of McCaffrey's books that are not about dragons (post a comment), I'd love to check them out.  Sounds like she was quite prolific so there's got to be something.  (In fact, so many novels that I really wouldn't know where to start, hence the asking for advice!)

Something That Is Difficult to Write About...

Found this piece in the Washington Post:

Stephen King, James Frey nominated for Bad Sex in Fiction Award

While not specifically about fantasy literature, I thought it might be interesting to readers of this blog, as there is certainly a lot of bad sex (and idiotic romance) in fantasy novels.  I found Mark Charan Newton's sex scenes with Brynd in Nights of Villjamur and City of Ruin to be awkward.  Alaya Dawn Johnson didn't handle the topic well in The Burning City (there was a sentence in one of the flashback scenes along the lines of "they had sex right there").  In The Serpent Bride by Sara Douglass, there's a lot of talk about "mounting" and such.  While it may be a technically accurate term, it makes me think of dogs or horses or something, not people.

The examples I listed above are cases when I think the authors wanted to be serious; there are some sex scenes in other fantasy novels that are intended to have shock value (e.g. Richard K. Morgan's The Steel Remains and Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold) and I put them in a different class all together.

Linked to from the Washington Post piece is yet another article from The Guardian:

Why is there no good sex in fiction prize?

Some interesting points are made in both; I particularly like the discussion of how prizes are given out in individual categories (best fantasy novel, best travelogue, etc.) of literature but not for writing about certain things -- best sex, best description of a sunset, etc.  Because some fantasy writers definitely ARE better than others at describing battles, coming up with magic systems, describing travel, etc.

I'd like to add my own category; best description of food or a meal without being completely boring.  Some offenders immediately come to mind: George R.R. Martin and L.E. Modesitt, Jr.  (And J.V. Jones is certainly good at describing one man's disgusting eating habits in the Book of Words series -- an impression is conveyed, though I'm not sure what it is.)

Anyway, something to think about, I suppose.

Review - The Infinity Gate

Finished The Infinity Gate by Sara Douglass yesterday while waiting to see the vet (one of my cats had some GI problems, cost me $440, dammit).

So there really weren't any new characters; these were the same people we've been reading about all along, in The Serpent Bride and The Twisted Citadel.  And in some cases, if you've read Douglass's other works, people like Axis have been around for even longer.  Some characters from previous books almost drop off the face of the earth -- Salome is barely mentioned at all, except for a few pages when her baby is kidnapped by Ravenna, StarDrifter's role is much reduced, BroadWing is killed early on, etc.  At this point, I have to say, I don't see why Salome was even included in the series.  It could just as easily have been someone else who had the Weeper back in The Serpent Bride, someone else who has StarDrifter's baby.  Because Salome has absolutely no role in books 2 and 3.

I also don't understand the point of Hereward.  She's Ezekiel's illegitimate daughter (Ezekiel is one of Isaiah's generals, who actually stays loyal) and she undergoes some horrible things.  Like watching everyone around her get attacked and killed by Skraelings, like Isaiah's resentment of her because she would've been killed if he hadn't agreed to give up his god powers (he gets them back later, for what it's worth).  She also has a chip on her shoulder.  And then she dies in a storm and that's the end of her.  I think if all Douglass wanted to do is get Isaiah to give up his god powers, she could've come up with something else.  Hereward was a distraction, and everyone was terribly mean to her, and then she just died.  (And Ezekiel was sort of put to the side as well; he remained loyal and was presumably present at the end but was never invited to command meetings.)

The pacing in this book is better; I didn't feel it was quite as repetitive as The Twisted Citadel.  So that was good.  I have read online that Douglass had been worried she wouldn't finish the series because of her battle with cancer, and that she crammed the material she'd meant to include in two books, into one with The Infinity Gate.  I actually think this made it a better book.  Although I can tell she had some ideas she wanted to flesh out a little more, and just didn't get the chance.  There are a lot of loose ends in The Infinity Gate.  For example, the epilogue is Ravenna giving birth and dreaming about her son being the Lord of Elcho Falling, but if she ever leaves the Land of Nightmares, where she has ended up (she brought the One here to seal him off from the world), the One will come with her.

Other loose ends included what Inardle is going to do, how StarDrifter is going to rebuild the Icarii race, whether the power of Elcho Falling will be transferred through the female line (since Ishbel is pregnant with a daughter at the end), and what Isaiah and Axis are going to do now that Isaiah has given up being Tyrant of Isembaard.  (Travel south to unknown lands, apparently.)  Any or all of these would've made a new standalone or series, but I guess Douglass didn't have that luxury.  And I do commend her for trying to tie everything together in the face of terminal cancer, that couldn't have been easy, by any means.

I honestly thought Axis and Inardle were going to end up being a couple, as they fought nearly as much as Maxel and Ishbel did in the first book.  Axis goes to some rather extreme lengths to save Inardle when Eleanon curses her but in the end, they go their separate ways.  I do wish Axis hadn't relied on the eagle quite so much; I get the impression that this is a holdover from a previous series, and it's too convenient of a solution to be used more than once, but Axis uses the eagle at least three or four times.  Including, apparently, once in a way that he already did in a previous series.

There is a TON of sloppy editing in The Infinity Gate.  Douglass has made "invisible" a verb, so people can "invisible" themselves.  It's irritating.  Is it really that much more effort to say "make themselves invisible?"  And thereby to use proper grammar?  Another irritating one, which shows up much more often: Ravenna is under the control of first Eleanon and then the One.  Eleanon has her taking these eggs from the Dark Spire in the lower levels of Elcho Falling and putting them around Elcho Falling (it's part of his plan to break the place down).  And Douglass continually refers to this process using another word which is not a verb (or technically, even a word at all): midwive.  Ravenna "midwives" the eggs.  No.  "Midwife" is a verb sometimes.  "Midwive" is not a word (and "midwives" is the plural of "midwife" when it's used as a noun).  Sometimes the names of locations are incorrect; there's a book which the One has taken from Isaiah and Hereward and put in DarkGlass mountain for safekeeping.  This book is an artifact that was removed from Elcho Falling a long time in the past.  So it's described at one point as being an artifact from Elcho Falling which has been residing at Elcho Falling.  But it HASN'T been at Elcho Falling.  It's been in freaking DarkGlass Mountain.  We read about it when the One put it there.  Sometimes the writing is just sloppy; the same phrase could be used two or three times in the same paragraph.  It might be a perfectly common phrase, which you would ordinarily read right past without thinking of it -- until you see it again, and again.

One other annoyance with language: the juit birds.  The way these things are described, they sound almost exactly like flamingos.  So why not just call them that, and stop making up words for things that already exist?

I had mentioned the pacing earlier; I thought it was much better in this book than in the previous volume.  It seems like there is something always going wrong for the heroes and heroines of this book.  Sometimes it's relatively easy to get out of (I thought Ishbel's destruction of DarkGlass Mountain was perhaps TOO easy), and sometimes multiple attempts to solve a problem don't work (when the Lealfast use harmonies to break apart Elcho Falling, with the aid of the eggs Ravenna has placed), sometimes people's prejudices prevent them from taking the actions that are guaranteed to work, and sometimes, the well-intentioned actions of the heroes have unintended, disastrous consequences (Isaiah's "mayhems," for example).  I actually thought there was a nice mix of tensions, overall.  We got to experience character strengths and flaws, and for the most part, there wasn't anyone that I just hated at any point (which was not always true for the past books).  I even started feeling sorry for Ravenna (was the rape by Eleanon really necessary, though?).

As for the villains...Bingaleal dies pretty early on, so he wasn't invincible.  Eleanon has all these nefarious plans, and thinks to betray the One, and all he has to do is say a few words and the whole of the Lealfast nation is fully behind his plans.  (Side note: wish it hadn't been repeated so many times that he wanted everyone, Ishbel and Maxel and Axis and Isaiah and everyone else, inside Elcho Falling during his attack.  I think I read this ten times if I read it once.)  So it was nice to see that Eleanon wasn't all-powerful (he couldn't figure out what was going on with the Skraelings, for example).  The One got duped a few too many times in this book for him to be a believable supervillain; he actually spent most of the time trapped or imprisoned or biding his time.

The Skraelings were a weak link in this book.  They've already torn through Isembaard and destroyed everything in their path.  Now, with a few words, Isaiah can convince them to overcome their fear of water to drown themselves and in so doing, become beautiful, magical "River Angels."  With even this possibility floated, they decide not to kill anyone anymore.  The fact that Isaiah simply "forgot" them for thousands of years is implausible.  (The Skraelings also have unpronounceable names like Ozll and Veldmr.)  They do stop the Dark Spire (an evil thing growing in Elcho Falling's basement), in the end, so I suppose they serve some function.  Douglass couldn't very well have left them roaming Isembaard, because the people of the south needed to go back there at some point.  And they are a big unknown -- Isaiah hopes they'll do something to help the people at Elcho Falling, but he can't guarantee it.

At any rate, if you've read The Serpent Bride and The Twisted Citadel, you will probably want to read this one to see how everything ends.  It's a reasonably-satisfying conclusion to the series.  I definitely wouldn't recommend starting with The Infinity Gate as I think you'd be horribly lost.  I have a feeling if you've read Douglass's earlier works (I haven't), you might recognize some plot devices.  But The Infinity Gate is a better book than volume two of this series, so if you made it that far, you should finish reading the series.

Male Versus Female Authors

Found this online during a random web-browsing session:

How women are winning sci-fi's battle of the sexes from The Independent (UK)

Not being much of a science fiction reader, I can't speak to that genre, nor have I heard of the authors they mention in the piece, but I think a lot of commentary applies to the fantasy side of the aisle, as well (to some degree, the piece lumps all speculative and horror fiction together).

The part that hits closest to home for me is the notion that men write something, think it's great, and send it in to a publisher, whereas women are more apt to try to make their writing "perfect."  I will admit that I am doing some serious revising of my own manuscript, and that there is more to come.  I don't think it will take me ten years to finish (I have too many ideas in my head for a single book to take that long!), but it might take me a whole year, or a bit more.  So I definitely fit with the gender stereotypes presented there.

I realized that I've been reading and buying a lot more female authors lately; more than half of my most recent purchases (see Addendum 2 of my library) are by female authors!  (Both C.S. Friedman and N.K. Jemisin are female, which you might not know from the names if you're not familiar with their work.)

New York Times Book Review

I frequently post links to New York Times articles here related to fantasy fiction (when they actually deign to write about that), writing, publishing, e-books, books, etc.  I subscribe to the paper during the week because I need bird cage liner and I'm not happy with the Atlanta newspaper (takes 5 minutes to read).  I'd love to get it on the weekends too, but can't afford it on my grad student stipend.  But since I have a paid subscription, I get free online access to as many articles as I want to read (not just the 20 that "visitors" get).

And I spend a lot of time looking through the Sunday Book Review.  It's one of my favorite sections.  So it was interesting to see the following piece on the Huffington Post:

How is the New York Times Book Review Doing?

Yeah, it's true that a lot of people turn to online reviews, which are very easy to find these days.  And honestly, I don't read book reviews when deciding what to buy or not to buy.  (Probably you shouldn't use my own reviews that way, unless you don't mind big-time spoilers...)  I read reviews because I like the analysis and discussion, I like to see what other people are thinking and whether I agree with them.  It makes my understanding and/or enjoyment of a book that much deeper.

I decide what books to buy based on what looks good on the shelf in the store, or Amazon recommendations, when Amazon actually manages to recommend me something I already have but didn't buy through them.

At any rate, glad to see someone else likes the NYT book review too!

Kindle Lending Library

Amazon has made a big deal out of their Kindle Lending Library lately, where you can borrow one Kindle book a month free, with no due date.

Authors and publishers are not enthused.  Here is a piece in The Guardian about it.  If you don't want to bother to click the link, it seems many authors, literary agents, and others are upset because they feel this is a breach of contract -- that they have deals that allow Amazon to SELL e-books, but not to lend them out or give them away free.  (Here is a post from DailyTech on the same thing.)

I'll be honest, I have no idea what kinds of royalties authors get from the sale of e-books.  But it takes a lot of time and effort to write a book, and when you sign a contract, you expect the terms to be adhered to.  (This is true between authors and publishers, and between publishers and distributors.)  I think I'd be angry if my book ever got published and became part of a the Kindle Lending Library.  (Wonder if people whose publisher is Amazon -- see this post -- are automatically required to be included?)

FYI, The Guardian has a lot of good posts about books, publishing, writing, reading, etc.  If you're into reading about that sort of thing, check them out at www.guardian.co.uk.

Time for the "Best of" Lists

Kirkus Reviews has come out with their Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2011 list.  Even though the year is not over yet.  I own precisely one of the books on this list (The Cold Commands by Richard K. Morgan, which I just received in the mail last week and haven't gotten around to reading lately).

Next month, when the year is actually over, I will make my own "best of" list.  Probably not of books published in 2011, but of books I've read in 2011.  Because (1) I don't want to go back and look at the publication dates for everything and (2) I don't buy a lot of books until they come out in paperback, which can be some time after their hardcover releases.

I suppose that's a bit egocentric, but it's my blog, and I can do that if I want to.

I'll post more of these as they turn up.  Or make note of fantasy novels on conventional "best of" lists, though I don't know how many of those I'll actually find.

Editing Update

Haven't posted about my progress in a week or two. Don't honestly know why I'm doing it now, as I have 7 or 8 posts lined up, which will take me well into next week. (I tend to go through phases with this blog...either I have a bunch of spare posts, or almost none. But I've finished reading some books lately, and I've found a lot of interesting online content I thought I'd share. So it's one of the good times right now.)

If you haven't read any of my posts on my own writing project before, here's a summary: I wrote a novel by hand in spiral notebooks, typed it, printed it, and scratched up all the pages with red pen.  I'm now at the point where I go back and incorporate the changes in red pen, into the Word file.  I focused most recently on correcting the timeline, showing instead of telling, and fixing blatant inconsistencies.

It's not so bad typing in a new scene, or changing words here and there.  What sucks is fixing the timeline.   I decided I would prefer to have events chronologically arranged.  Have the major groups of characters meet up at a certain point.  But this means lots of cutting and pasting of long passages, which is annoying.  It's also going to mean assigning dates/months/etc. so that when I talk about it getting colder, or what crops are in season, I'm not just making sh*t up.  I'll save that for another round, though.  I'm about 3/4 of the way through this process.  I was going to divide into chapters at this stage, but I think I've got a lot more of the major structural editing, as I've been calling it, still to do, and chapters can come later.

Side note: I just don't get the people who write one draft and say they're done.  I realize at some point I'll just have to stop editing, that I'll never think it's perfect and I don't want to spend 10 years editing one book, but good writing is a lot of work!

Speaking of editing, I should go do that now...

Review - Stands a Shadow

While I was waiting for volume three of Sara Douglass's DarkGlass Mountain trilogy to arrive, I had a couple of days, so of course I started a different book immediately.  (If I can, I like to read a series in its entirety at once.  Realizing, of course, that this is not often possible.)  This time I chose Stands a Shadow, the second in The Heart of the World series by Col Buchanan.

I'm sure there are spoilers below, FYI.   I haven't written them yet, but they'll be there.

It's been awhile since I read Farlander, the first volume in this series, and there was a lot I had forgotten.  Characters, setting, etc., etc.  What I remember about Farlander is that I was reading along, thinking that it was a decent coming-of-age fantasy in a semi-familiar sort of setting, albeit with some unique elements, and then Nico, the "special boy" around whom coming-of-age fantasies often revolve, was NOT rescued at the last moment by his mentor Ash (who, in fairness, desperately wanted to rescue Nico but was unable to, and who feels a lot of guilt about it in Stands a Shadow).  Nico died horribly in a fire.  And so I finished the book and I was thinking, wow, what a way to take something that seemed conventional and make it totally unexpected.  And it made me love Farlander.  So I was excited about the sequel.

The first maybe 1/3 of Stands a Shadow, I had a tough time following along.  I knew Ash was the Farlander from the title of the previous volume, and that he was bent on revenge against the Holy Matriarch of the Empire of Mann for ordering Nico killed.  I vaguely remembered Che (with an accent over the e, sorry but I have no idea how to do that in HTML and don't really feel like looking it up at the moment), or at least that there was a character who betrayed Ash's and Nico's order, the Roshun (again, leaving out special characters in the names -- I feel the need to mention this so you're not led to believe I don't remember the spellings of these characters, since so many online reviewers screw up character names).  Everyone else, even if they'd appeared in the first novel, I had simply forgotten.  Nico's aunt and uncle in Bar-Khos, Nico's mother, etc.  I *think* the prostitute Curl was a new character, because we're given a fair amount of her backstory, but I can't say I'm 100% certain.

Anyhow, there are four main viewpoint characters -- Ash, Che, Curl, and Bahn (Nico's uncle) -- with a few minor ones (a prisoner named Bull who is semi-major, the Matriarch's mother Kira, one of Mann's generals, one or two others).  I think Ash and Che were definitely the strongest, so I'll focus on them a bit later.

Bull is introduced as a sadistic killer, but we find that there's a reason he did what he did, and when given the opportunity to aid the army of the city that has imprisoned him, he agrees to do so.  He apparently enjoys fighting and is quite good at it, in addition to being a very large man.  He helps lead an escape from the Mannian camp.  But other than getting a bit of backstory, and perhaps discovering that he's not as evil as he was made out to be, he doesn't figure into the story much, either.  It's possible he could turn up in a future volume, as well, and that we were just introduced in this volume because he figured in the action somewhat.  It can be difficult -- I am struggling with this in my own manuscript right now -- introducing new characters who take part in events, but who don't figure prominently until later.  So I'll cut Buchanan some slack here.

Curl is a bit of a cliche character who undergoes a transformation (not in a cliche way, so kudos to Buchanan for that) but who just doesn't seem to do anything all that important for the story.  She's a refugee from Lagos (an island, not the capital of Nigeria) who has fallen into life as a prostitute after the Matriarch destroyed the population of her homeland.  She's a drug addict but seems relatively sensible, able to keep a roof over her head, etc.  She decides to volunteer to help the army against the coming invasion of the Mannian army, and ends up as a medic.  One night, she meets Che in a bar, intending to sleep with him; they have to run as he is being pursued, and while they do eventually hook up, she finds out he's a Mannian and has her fellows from the army beat the shit out of him.  (More on that in a bit.)  I don't know what other purpose she serves.  I think she has potential, though.  She is still alive at the end of the book, and maybe we'll see her again.

Bahn seems to exist mainly so we have a viewpoint from the inside of the defending army.  He loves his wife and children (though he's paying Curl for sex and feeling guilty about it).  He takes part in the battle, is around for strategy sessions, so we get a hint of what the Bar-Khos commander (Creed) is thinking, and in the end, I believe he is one of those who escapes with the help of Bull, but he doesn't do a whole lot that makes a difference to the outcome.  He is tortured by the Mannians, and we've gotten some hints of what they can do to people (through Che, for example), so there is always a possibility of something important happening with him later, too.

Now, for Che.  Che is a Mannian Diplomat, and is favored by the Matriarch Sasheen because of his instrumentality in the Mannian raid on the Roshun order.  (The Roshun were carefully hidden, but Che was kind of like a sleeper agent for a long time, then later led the Mannians back along the secret paths to the Roshun.)  We get a few hints that he is torn by two allegiances; he is not terribly happy with the Mannians.  They have control over his mother and attempt to control him by dangling her fate over him.  (She is, or was, some sort of prostitute.)  He's not big on their theology, but has to play along because they are, at the heart, a religious order, if an extremely odd one.  He knows a lot of secrets and this is a danger to him; there's another Diplomat (or two, as I'm not sure if both the brother and sister Guan and Swan are Diplomats, or only the brother) watching him.  (Diplomats are not diplomats in our sense, but appear to be some sort of secret agents who kill or do other unpleasant things that the Mannians want done.)  Che kills a catamite favored by a general who rivals the Matriarch, whereas Guan and Swan seal a whole bunch of people inside a building and light it on fire, so I guess Che is supposed to be more sympathetic because he only killed one person.  In this book anyway.  Although he really is more sympathetic.  Some of his actions, like being the one who actually shoots the Matriarch, like saving Ash later in the book, like killing Guan and Swan, like caring about his mother's fate, actually do make him more complex and sympathetic.  He is torn, for a long time, by his dual nature, as he has Roshun training and Mannian indoctrination, and he eventually makes the right choice, so to speak, only to have it come back and bite him in the ass when Curl calls her fellows to beat him up.  I don't know whether or not he survives the beating, we're not told.  And based on Buchanan's history in Farlander, it is entirely possible this viewpoint character was killed off.  We'll just have to wait for the next book to see.

Ash is the last of the main viewpoint characters I'll discuss; his order, the Roshun, are dedicated to vengeance, but only for certain people.  It was possible, in Farlander, to purchase a seed which was worn as a pendant around the neck.  This was a sort of insurance; whoever killed one of these seed-bearers was marked for death at the hands of the Roshun.  Ash's troubles began in the last book when the Matriarch's son killed a seed-bearer; vengeance was exacted, but only at the later cost of Nico's life.  Ash is old (62, which is my parents' age, so I kept trying to picture someone like my dad) and has a lung complaint for most of the book after traveling across the sea as a stowaway on one of the Mannian army's ships.  His goal is personal revenge, which will separate him from the ways of the Roshun.  He seeks to kill the Matriarch but his plans are thwarted time and time again, and in the end, Che has to save him and also it is Che, not Ash, who kills the Matriarch.  Ash has deep-seated fears about the fate of the Roshun after the raid instigated by Che in Farlander, but when he returns to the order's headquarters, he finds reason to hope -- a number of the youngest Roshun, and one or two of the elder ones, are alive and have set up a tent city.  The order faces a choice, a new direction, and the book ends with a change in their mission.  They finally agree to choose a side, to come into conflict with Mann.

Well, that's a roundup of the viewpoint characters.  What of the enemies?  There are no fantastic creatures in this book; mounts are some sort of animal called a zel which sounds a little like a zebra, so basically they're still horses or horse-like.  I don't really count that, and horses probably would've done just as well.  The Matriarch of the Holy Empire of Mann, Sasheen, is one of the chief adversaries for most of the viewopint characters.  And for the most part, she's entirely unsympathetic.  Mann is awfully close to being one of those unrealistic societies I wrote about earlier this month.  A lot of her anger is motivated by the loss of her son, who was a horrible little monster, although she didn't acknowledge that about him.  At any rate, by the end of the book, she is dead and there is an issue of succession.  This could fracture the Mannian army, which could be good for the people under siege who wish to remain free of Mann, but we're left hanging about that.

Side note: Sasheen keeps a former lover's head alive in a jar of something called Royal Milk (which is also some sort of stimulant drug, and which has amazing healing properties).  She takes him out and he can talk, though it seems most of the time he can hardly be understood.  Reminds me of all the Presidents (and others) with heads in jars in Futurama.  At any rate, Mannians do a lot of drugs and spend a lot of time in sexual debauchery, and have ungodly numbers of slaves, and a huge army, but they're not fighting for their homes, and they can be taken by surprise, and this evens the odds a bit with respect to the clash of the two armies.

Now, I've already admitted to not remembering a lot about the world Buchanan has created when I started the book, and this made the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the book slow for me.  It took me a couple of days to get through those parts.  But then early today, I got to the first scene where the armies meet, and from there, I was hooked.  The pace got better, the stakes suddenly got higher, there was tons of action, and some unexpected twists (though nothing as unexpected as Nico's death in Farlander), and I finished it in a couple of hours, didn't want to put it down.  Probably if I'd gone back to remind myself of what happened in Farlander, I wouldn't have had a problem with the first part.

As for the milieu, I've already said there are no magical creatures.  There's not much magic at all, to tell the truth, at least not in Farlander and Stands a Shadow.  We're led to believe the Mannians have some sort of power at their disposal that allowed them to brainwash Che so he could infiltrate the Roshun in the first book.  There clearly has to be some sort of magic with the seeds that the Roshun use, so they know who was killed and who they have to go after to satisfy their contracts.  There are hints of the idea that magic exists towards the end of this book; we're told of the Isles of Sky and how the people there are able to extend their lives, and Ash expresses hope that he may be able to bring Nico back, with their help.  There are airships and guns, though the guns are not without problems -- they get wet and stop working, they get hot, they're a pain to reload, etc.  (Guns have been a trend in fantasy that I've read lately, which is not altogether a bad thing in my opinion.  It's much less awkward for a lot of authors to describe fights where guns are used as they don't have to resort to things like dumb names for sword moves (ala Robert Jordan), and it's more realistic than crossbows, which I am told are actually quite difficult to use properly and which are not instantly reusable for another shot if the first one misses.)

A lot of times when I review a book, I mention the writing.  I didn't really notice it here (other than some Britishisms which always annoy me, even though they're apparently correct in British English: "the company were" instead of "the company was," for example).  Buchanan lives in the UK and it's fine if that's how he wants to write.  And at least he's internally consistent (which is more than I can say for some books I've read lately).  I figure, if I don't notice the language, there weren't big-time errors.  So either Buchanan knows how to write, or has a good editor, or maybe even both.  Which I applaud, in any case.  If I don't notice the language, that means I can simply sit back and enjoy the story and not nitpick all the time.

If you look on Amazon.com, this book only has one review, and it's from the Klausner-bot.  Granted, according to the item's page, this book has only been out since November 8, so I suppose it will collect a few more reviews if given time.  I can't bring myself to post when Harriet Klausner is the only other one up there.  (This was also a problem for Blackdog, which I also reviewed recently.)  If you enjoyed Farlander, you should also like Stands a Shadow.  If you didn't read Farlander, it was a pretty darn good debut novel and I suggest picking both it and Stands a Shadow up at your earliest convenience.

My Fantasy Library - Addendum 2

It's been a long while since I had a library post.  But I've bought a lot of books lately, so this is overdue:

• Song of the Beast by Carol Berg
  
• Stands a Shadow by Col Buchanan
• Reap the East Wind by Glen Cook
• The Infinity Gate by Sara Douglass
• Legacy of Kings by C.S. Friedman
• The Kingdom of Gods by N.K. Jemisin
• Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence
• Heaven's Needle by Liane Merciel
• The Cold Commands by Richard K. Morgan
• The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson
• Antiphon by Ken Scholes
• Shadow's Son by Jon Sprunk
• The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet
• The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne M. Valente
• The Folded World by Catherynne M. Valente
• The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells

This list is really all over the place.  I've got some old favorites (Carol Berg and Glen Cook), a bunch where I've read the first couple in the series and am continuing on (Buchanan, Douglass, Friedman, Jemisin, Merciel, Morgan, Scholes), some where I've been happy with the publisher (Night Shade Books) in the past and decided to take a chance (Valente and Wells), and a couple of others to boot.  I actually am reading Stands a Shadow right now but I still have tons of books on the shelves, besides these, that I haven't gotten to yet (at last count, I think it was 35).

And yet again, I am totally out of shelf space.  Could buy a new bookshelf but I have no idea where to put it.  Living in a 2 bedroom condo with a ton of pets, a ton of books, a ton of exercise equipment, and a ton of kitchen gadgets doesn't leave much room for more bookshelves.

Something to Keep in Mind if You're Writing a Novel

While this piece uses a lot of examples from film, there's some discussion of literature sci-fi/fantasy/horror, too, and some cautions for would-be writers:

Why fiction’s freest genres need its most rigid rules

I suppose getting out of a difficult situation using the tools at hand would make you MacGyver or at the very least, the Professor from Gilligan's Island...

I've found a few features of my own manuscript that need to be revised for consistency in the magical system, not necessarily in response to the article I link to, but regardless of the motivation, making the changes will make it a better story.  (Sure, there are a few unexplained things at this point, but my manuscript is the first volume in a projected series; gotta leave some things for later.)

Some fantasy works with good approaches to getting out of difficult situations:

• Elric: The Stealer of Souls by Michael Moorcock -- Elric calls on his dark god, but the dark god doesn't always answer and sometimes Elric has to use his own abilities
• Morlock Ambrosius in This Crooked Way by James Enge -- Morlock has a lot of resources at his disposal; sometimes his solutions to problems really come out of nowhere but after you read them, you always think they fit perfectly with his character and the milieu

Some fantasy works with bad approaches to getting out of difficult situations:

• Anything by Terry Brooks; in The Measure of the Magic, there are TWO prison breaks where someone slipped something into the guard's drink

And a fantasy work where there is NO way out of a difficult situation for the protagonist:

• Farlander by Col Buchanan, where (spoiler alert), THE SPECIAL BOY DIES (this totally made this book awesome for me, I'm reading Stands a Shadow, the sequel, right now)

More Fantasy Series Worth Reading

I was doing some work on this blog tonight and I realized there were a couple of good fantasy series that I left out when I was posting lists recently.  So, not to slight anyone, here are a couple more good fantasy series to check out:

• Psalms of Isaak by Ken Scholes; these are unique and whimsical and I really enjoyed reading them.  I just ordered the third in the series and can't wait until it arrives.  Can't believe I left this one out before!
• The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett; the magical system is innovative and the characters feel real to me -- they grow and change as the story moves on.  And there are some surprises; the first volume sort of led you in one direction regarding the hero's romantic interest, and that completely changes in volume two.
• The Dread Empire series by Glen Cook.  This is some of his earliest work -- although he is now finishing up (the final manuscript was stolen from his house years and years ago).  But if you've read all his other fantasy, you should definitely check this out too.
• The Prince of Nothing by R. Scott Bakker.  This is pretty dark fantasy.  Apparently Bakker incorporates a lot of philosophy into these books, but I didn't find it to interfere with the story (I've heard that in the Dune books, the philosophizing can be downright unbearable, and of course I've complained about the Sword of Truth series and Ayn Rand worship before -- so Bakker manages this well).  There's a new trilogy with a couple of volumes out that continues with the story, though I haven't had time to read those yet.

I just went in and had a quick look at my shelves.  Hope I haven't forgotten any more favorites.  (I haven't included a number of series with only one book out so far.  I'm going to reserve judgment on those until the authors are a little further along.)

Going a Bit Nuts Lately

I think in the last week I've ordered online or bought in a store 16 fantasy novels.  I don't have any idea how many are left on my shelf that I haven't read yet, but 16 new ones coming.  This is me, this week:



I know, not the best meme in the world, but the one I thought of first.

Going Native

I've read a lot of books lately where two (or more) different races have had to live together in the same physical location.  This usually takes the form of a more-privileged and a less-privileged race, with the less-privileged race often being the people who are actually natives of the land, and the more-privileged race being composed of invaders, though this is not always the case.

Note: I'm not counting when at least some of the other races are non-human (e.g. Steven Erikson or Mark Charan Newton).

Here are some examples of where this is handled well:

• The Castings Trilogy by Pamela Freeman
• Isles of the Forsaken by Carolyn Ives Gilman
• The Winds of Khalakovo by Bradley P. Beaulieu
• The Price of Spring by Daniel Abraham (note: Abraham has a lot of different races in The Dragon's Path but I'm going to reserve judgment until more volumes are out)

And here are some examples of where it is not handled well:

• Wizard's First Rule and sequels by Terry Goodkind (the descriptions of the Mud People and other primitive natives strike me as flat-out racist)
• The Innocent Mage and sequels by Karen Miller (the Olkens just sing along happily despite being invaded and treated like crap by the Doranen)

I remember reading a commentary on Robinson Crusoe in college and one thing that has stayed with me since then (fall of 1996, I think? first semester of freshman year) is a line about Friday.  He progressed to communicating in simple sentences rapidly, but in all the time after that, his grammar NEVER GOT BETTER.  At least Daniel Defoe was writing in 1719.  300 years later, we should be doing better -- and some people are!

Review - The Twisted Citadel

I finished The Twisted Citadel, Sara Douglass's sequel to The Serpent Bride, last night.  (The last review sat around awhile before posting, I did not read this 643-page book in one day.  I have grad school and pets and a long commute and tons of other stuff occupying my time.)

The act of reading this book irritated me less than The Serpent Bride, though it's difficult to say why.  I think part of it is that I'm just used to the capital-letter-in-the-middle names and some of the other worldbuilding nuances that I was just getting adjusted to in the previous volume.  (Although, reading back over the review before posting, I don't have anything nice to say...)  At least there was only the barest minimum of Coroleas included, I really couldn't take reading about that place in the last one.

By the way, this review will contain MAJOR SPOILERS including one that happens near the very end of the book, so if this is a problem for you, stop reading now.

I had mentioned in my review of The Serpent Bride that I thought the characters were quite strong and well done.  Not so much, here.  Ishbel has gone from being a socially-awkward, passive-aggressive individual to a being a strong, independent woman.  While this is a nice change from the previous book, it seems like her change is remarked upon constantly, and that gets a little old.  Maxel is also pretty one-sided, Ravenna more one-dimensional than ever (she kills her own mother to try to prevent Ishbel from releasing the Weeper).  Armat is also one-sided, and Eleanon and Bingaleal are, as well.  StarDrifter retains a bit of complexity -- he harbors some resentment against the Lealfast.  BroadWing and Salome are just names on the page (Salome has almost no part in this; BroadWing plays the role of "generic Icarii" and has no personality other than one incident -- not even written about, but only discussed in its aftermath -- where he's not nice to Inardle).  Inardle is a bit of a mystery to me, I don't necessarily mean that in a good way.  She's a bit like the Salome of the last book.

Probably there should be some discussion of Inardle here, since I baited you with that.  Inardle is one of the Lealfast, these half-Icarii/half-Skraeling ethereal winged people.  They claim to have loyalty to the Lord of Elcho Falling (Maxel), thinking him to be the only one who can free them from their dual natures.  But then they hear about the One (more on him later), and they see Maxel as weak, and they start to plot.  They believe the One can give them what Maxel can't, and they leave Inardle in Maxel's camp as a spy.  They tell her to become Axis's lover.  Axis really does have a thing for her, even after a military disaster wherein many Lealfast are slaughtered (as a ruse to disguise their true military might).  She's taken away by one of Armat's men (he was one of Isaiah's generals; he deserted and took a lot of men with him) and raped and beaten.  Later we find out she had the power to prevent this.  So she knew how to avoid being raped, and didn't try avoid it.  Just to keep up the ruse.  Even though she's not as sure of the One as her brothers are, since the One is rather anti-female.

I have written about this before, but most fantasy authors can't handle rape.  At all.  Doesn't matter if the writers are male or female.  I believe it is a difficult topic to write about, and since most of us have not suffered this horrific crime, we might not realize what it can do to a person.  That's not to say you have to have been raped to write about rape.  But please, if you are going to include it, realize that it's serious.  Think about what a woman might actually do, how she might actually respond if this happened to her.  Even if all you do is watch a couple of episodes of Law & Order Special Victims Unit you will probably have a better understanding than most fantasy authors seem to.  I can't think of a single woman who is physically able to avoid rape who will subject herself to the pain and fear and humiliation of it anyway, except under extreme extenuating circumstances.  Inardle, and Salome in the last book, just don't make sense to me.  At all.

So, the characters were either one-sided or completely baffling and unrealistic.  What about the plot?  Well, it doesn't get much better.  In fact, you can pretty much sum up the book as follows:

1. Ravenna tells Maxel to break it off with Ishbel
2. He gets angry at Ravenna for saying so
3. The Lealfast plot their betrayal of Maxel
4. Some stuff goes on in Armat's encampment
5. Some stuff goes on in Maxel's encampment
6. Isaiah sits (or later, travels) with Skraelings all around but not touching him
7. The One (more on him later) does some stuff in the glass pyramid
8. Maxel and Ishbel learn more about the Twisted Tower
9. Maxel and Ishbel think about getting back together
10. Someone talks about how Salome's baby will be born soon, or how pregnant she is, or something like that
11. Some rat that was used to torture Josia (the spirit inhabiting the Weeper, a member of the ancient Persimius family that Maxel and Ishbel are also part of) runs about unnoticed by everyone except the author (and I really have no earthly idea where she was going with this rat thing)
12. Start back at #1 and repeat 17 more times

Variation on #1: Ravenna tells someone else to tell Maxel to break it off with Ishbel.  (Axis, Isaiah, etc.)

Side note: The constant reminders by various characters of the dire consequences if Maxel sleeps with Ishbel again, are about as irritating as all the "Richard and Kahlan must not have a baby" junk from the The Sword of Truth books (although it's nearly everyone who warns Maxel away from Ishbel -- at Ravenna's prompting -- as opposed to just Shota with Richard and Kahlan).

That's my problem with the plot -- some very big things happen in this book, but we spend almost all our time reading about the little stuff.  Why not more time on:

1. Kanubai is destroyed very early on in the book; he's swallowed up by DarkGlass mountain
2. Maxel raises Elcho Falling
3. Maxel is disemboweled but Ishbel brings him back to life (not immediately, but within a few hours)
4. Actually creating a situation wherein the Lealfast's choice between Maxel and the One is in doubt (you know, not making a snap judgment on something really important)

The enemy, distant for most of the book, is called the One, and he apparently embodies mathematical perfection.  He's the result of the ancient Magi trying to touch infinity (um...he can't be both One and infinity, but then the whole concept of mathematical perfection as a bad guy who wants to take over the world doesn't make a lick of sense...it's best not to dwell on that, I think, I can't really wrap my brain around it).  He's so powerful, he can swallow up Kanubai, the evil god and main bad guy from the previous novel, the one everyone tried to prevent the rise of, with barely a thought.  He can strip Isaiah's god powers, he can send false visions to Ravenna.  He can turn a river to glass and is in fact made of glass, or something that looks like glass.  (Science nerd in me here...but glass is not mathematical perfection, it's an amorphous solid and has no crystalline structure...)

So why is the One so against Maxel and Ishbel getting back together?  Why this effort to prevent it, from Ravenna's visions, to the curse he pronounces, etc.  Maxel supposes it's because it somehow makes the One vulnerable if he and Ishbel are married.  But the One thinks to himself that in the end, it doesn't matter whether Maxel and Ishbel are united or not.  So why sow all these false seeds?  To fracture the opposition?  Then maybe you really aren't so powerful after all.  Honestly, at least as things have been laid out so far, the One is everything that we thought Kanubai would be, so maybe it would've been better to simply keep Kanubai and let him be the evil dude.

I mentioned Elcho Falling has been raised.  This place can make itself big enough to hold an army of hundreds of thousands.  It's protected from the sort of enemies who try to broach its outward defenses.  It can provide food or whatever else is needed.  So it really makes no sense that the Persimius family would have ever walked away from all that power.  With the One against Elcho Falling, it's perfection against perfection, unrivaled power against unrivaled power, and I can predict the instant in book three when someone finds some tiny little flaw in the One and defeats him with something really simple.  Because right now, I just can't see this series ending any other way.  (If Douglass did something drastically different from my expectations, well, then good for her.  Volume three should arrive in a day or two and I can find out.  But I just don't expect it to have anything other than a completely conventional ending.)

Hopefully we won't see Ravenna again; Ishbel finally gets back at her and that's at least a little satisfying as Ravenna is an entirely unlikeable character in this book.

So anyway, this book wasn't so hard to read, apparently, but it wasn't a very good book.  There was a lot to criticize and very little to like.  This book certainly suffers from the "second-novel-in-a-trilogy" problem, it seems like just a placeholder to get from here to there, with major events at the beginning and the end.  I hear Douglass shortened this series to three books because she wanted to finish it before she died, but I wonder if it would've been better off as only two books?  Without most of the repetition in The Twisted Citadel.

You might want to read this if you read The Serpent Bride and want to see what happens.  Otherwise, don't even bother.

Review - The Serpent Bride

So sometimes while browsing at the bookstore, I notice that a particular author has a lot of books on the shelf.  If these books look at all interesting to me, I choose some of them to buy.  I don't usually go and buy everything by an author at once, but maybe I'll pick a single trilogy.  Love it, and I go back and get everything else by that author.  Sara Douglass was one of these "test" cases.

So the DarkGlass Mountain trilogy, of which The Serpent Bride is the first volume, is probably not the best entry point to Sara Douglass.  She previously wrote The Wayfarer Redemption and those books were set in the same world and feature some of the same characters.  And apparently contain a lot of background information I'm missing out on.  At any rate, keep that in mind as you continue to read this review -- if I'm seeming overly negative, it may just be that I picked the wrong book to start with.  I do intend to finish the DarkGlass mountain trilogy; Douglass did put out the final volume before she died recently after a battle with cancer.  (Something which definitely speaks in her favor, but which is also rather sad, is that there was a point when she tried to finish everything up and decided to only write standalones, so as not to disappoint her readers as she confronted her own mortality.  But I digress.)

One thing which I found supremely irritating about this book was the litany of names and words with capital letters in the middle.  It's now a pet peeve of mine, right behind systematic character names (meaning, characters named for words in a group, like colors or rocks), too many apostrophes in names, and unpronounceable names.  DarkGlass, SunSoar, StarDrifter, StarWeb, BroadWing, argh!  Enough already.  A LOT of authors do things like this, if not this particular thing, and maybe they think they're being clever, but it can really backfire.  (Douglass throws in Ba'al'uz as a name, which kind of stands out as it is the only one with too many apostrophes and it just doesn't fit with the rest.  It's like she's telling us...watch this guy, he's going to do some bad stuff, so I'll call attention to it by giving him a weird name and then incorrectly using the possessive " Ba'al'uz' " instead of the correct (albeit more awkward) "Ba'al'uz's."  (If this is different in UK/Australian Engish, well, okay, then ignore that criticism.  But if you look in actual grammar books in the US, names that end in "s" or "z" still take the apostrophe + "s" for possessives.)

There is a little bit of the Aerith and Bob trope going on, with Maximilian, Isaiah, Salome, and Garth on one side and StarDrifter, Axis, Vorstus, and Ishbel on the other.  It's not the worst I've ever seen of this, though -- that distinction probably belongs to Terry Goodkind -- so I'll let it pass for now.

The cover art is hokey.  It clearly pictures Maximilian, King of Escator, which is, by all appearances, a poor, small, rather inconsequential kingdom, Isaiah, Tyrant of Isembaard, a southern, Egyptian sort of land, and Ishbel, a priestess who disembowels living victims and tries to get messages from her god through their entrails.  Ishbel is a love interest (and wife, of a sort) to both Maximilian and Isaiah and her beauty is often remarked upon, but she looks like a tough biker chick in a dress on the cover.  Like someone in her 40s with bleached hair who smokes and tans too much, trying to look younger.  That has nothing to do with Douglass's skill as a writer, it's just something I noticed.  Although I will admit that if the cover art for a book is too hokey, I often walk right by it in the bookstore.

I've said a lot of negative things so far, so let me outline a few of the book's strong points -- mostly centered on characters.  Ishbel is pretty weak, as a character, in this book, but don't despair, she grows a pair (not literally, of course, though she looks like a biker chick on the cover she doesn't look like a man in a dress) early in the sequel, The Twisted Citadel, which I am currently reading.  A lot happens to her -- she has to deal with her entire family dying of a plague and being locked inside the house with their rotting bodies, when she's a child.  Then, she's taken in by the Coil, the order of priests who do all the disemboweling, and raised to become their archpriestess.  She receives a message that she must marry Maximilian and she doesn't really want to.  It isn't part of her world view to have a family and children.  So there's a paradigm shift required, and she never quite gets where she needs to be, mentally, to make it work with Maxel, which is the diminutive of Maximilian used in this book.  Unfortunately, Ishbel gets kidnapped by Ba'al'uz, and horribly mistreated, and her fetus (Maxel's daughter) is malnourished.  She's kind of a nonentity for the rest of the book, except for some fighting with Maxel later.  But, considering her resurgence in the second volume, she's a suitably complex character and Douglass does a pretty good job of conveying Ishbel's discomfort at being exposed to the outside world for the first time in years.  (Ishbel's disembowelments are not all evil, we later find -- people either volunteer themselves, and are sedated during the process, or are condemned prisoners.  I think it would've been more interesting if that wasn't the case, but I guess it was done to make Ishbel more sympathetic and not just a murderer.)

Maxel, meanwhile, has spent seventeen years of his life as a prisoner in some kind of mines and this has given him the ability to hide in the darkness better than most, and to travel unseen in a lot of cases.  He wants desperately to marry and have a family, but something like a dozen marriage arrangements have fallen through before he finally marries Ishbel.  He goes all out when she is kidnapped, takes an ever-growing party halfway across the world to find her.  Is devastated when he finds she's taken up with Isaiah.  He also suspects her to be a priestess of the Coil, which he is dead set against although he first isn't even sure what it is, but which he quickly decides is evil.  This makes things very uncomfortable for Ishbel, who is forced to lie.

Isaiah is a god in human form, which is better than a distant god warring with another god, I suppose.  One thing which is supremely irritating about him is that he plans this great "invasion" of the north, and refuses to stop it, despite pleas from Ishbel and Axis and others, and refuses to tell anyone his motivations.  It's a classic case of "you wouldn't understand it right now, but I'll tell you later" -- something that happens in fantasy novels all too often.  Come to find out, though, he's not all crazy or selfish, but is really evacuating his people in the face of a threat, and making it look like an invasion to maintain his reputation and his hold on power.  He's got a number of generals itching to take his place; one wrong more and they will.  He has some strange quirks thrown in -- he has eighty-odd wives but can't stand to be with them when they're pregnant, for example -- and he likes to go sit in DarkGlass mountain, not because he enjoys it, but as a test of himself.  He's supposed to be a god in human form, and sometimes he acts like it, but sometimes he doesn't, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

But look, I've written three long paragraphs about the main characters, and that says something for Douglass.  They have flaws, and complex personalities, and histories, and they're definitely not stock characters although they might seem like that at first glance.  Their relationships are complex.  So Douglass does a great job with that.

The bad guys, on the other hand, are pretty one-sided.  Ba'al'uz is not only evil and crazy and a servant of a dark god, but he goes around causing mayhem and he kills a newborn baby by cutting off its head with a sword.  (And promptly gets his own head cut off in retaliation.)  Kanubai, the dark god of chaos, is rising, and by all the main characters' reactions to him, he's pretty evil too, although he doesn't do much other than through his chosen agents (like Ba'al'uz) in this book.

Ravenna is another character who appears to Maxel out of nowhere; she lives in the world of dreams or something like that, that I don't really understand.  Maybe it was better explained in a previous novel of Douglass's.  She seems to have some purpose but she's an incredibly unsympathetic character; she just sets herself against Ishbel and pursues Maxel, to the point of being inappropriate and causing Maxel a lot of angst.  She's the daughter of a witch-woman, which is also not really well explained.  I don't really see the point of her, other than to cause discord between Maxel and Ishbel.  I think she could've been introduced in a way other than just appearing out of nowhere, and it would've been much better.  Also, if she had some redeeming qualities, it would've been nice.  But I was really just left not liking her at all.

Salome's story is one of the more troubling aspects of this book.  She's a powerful Duchess in Coroleas, one of the most unrealistic societies I've ever seen in a fantasy novel.  (The link takes you to a recent post of mine on the subject, where Coroleas is described in more detail.)  StarDrifter takes her down by outing her as an Icarii, which is a non-human winged race.  (She had her wings removed as a child.)  People of status in Coroleas must be of a certain lineage, and so when she is outed, she is humiliated, repeatedly raped, her son is killed in front of her, etc.  It's a little over-the-top.  She's rescued by some Icarii who can't bear to see this happen to one of their kind, and she goes after StarDrifter.  And with hardly any fanfare, she...marries him?  Really?  There's some bogus-sounding detail about her being pregnant with his child and if he's not there for the birth, the birth will kill her, or some such.  My thought is, Salome is not going to turn into a nice person after all this has happened to her...but she does.  This storyline was poorly done.

While the relationships between the characters are suitably complex, they sometimes have a soap opera feel to them -- being accused of murders you didn't commit, the jilted wife who takes up with another man, etc.  I think some features of these relationships are just a little too extreme and still would've been interesting, toned down.  You never know what the hell is going to happen with Ishbel and Maxel.  (I find myself thinking about Karigan and Zachary in the Green Rider books by Kristen Britain -- you know they want to be together, but things keep getting in their way, and you really don't know what will happen there either.  Every time you think it's over, there's some glimmer of hope.  Honestly, though, I prefer Britain's approach to Douglass's.  Though I'm not usually into the romantic stuff, Britain does a good job here.  Douglass's approach turns me off and makes me hate the characters sometimes.)

As for plot, there are hints of bigger things happening, and I think the ground is laid pretty well for future books.  But it seems like most of The Serpent Bride is centered around Ishbel's relationships with Isaiah and Maxel, or at least, what I remember about this book is the characters.  There's some hinting at an ancient evil rising again, and I think this will become more prominent in future volumes, but that's not really what this book is about.

Side note: the Skraelings are the evil monsters in this book, with an army MILLIONS strong.  I hate it whenever I see armies of millions in fantasy novels.  Even today, the US military consists of approximately 1.5 million active personnel and 1.5 million reserve personnel.  And this is one of the biggest armies in the modern world.  It just doesn't make sense to have armies that big in fantasy settings.  (And Douglass had a PhD in early modern European history, which makes me think she ought to have studied something about wars...)  Jagang's empire in Terry Goodkind's books is similarly way too freaking large to be realistic.  At the end of The Serpent Bride we hadn't seen too much of the Skraelings yet, but they will probably irritate me the same way the Vord did in the Codex Alera books by Jim Butcher -- the enemy that is described as just too massive and too strong for anyone to ever defeat, and oh, the situation is utterly hopeless, and yet somehow they get defeated anyway.

If you've read Douglass's other books, including Wayfarer Redemption, you'll probably want to pick The Serpent Bride up to follow the fates of the carryover characters.  (Amazon reviewers say the DarkGlass mountain series is not Douglass's best work.)  If you're new to Douglass, this book does provide an adequate starting point for getting into her writing.  For the most part, never having read anything of hers before, I could follow what was going on, though some details of the Icarii race were a little difficult.  The series is finished, so you don't have to worry about being left hanging.  And as I said before, I'll read the other two novels in this trilogy.  But I probably won't pick up any more of her work unless I'm really running low on things to read.

Books on the Shelf, Revisited

Here's a link to an essay in the New York Times Sunday Book Review:

The Subconscious Shelf

Someday I will post photos of my bookshelves.  For now, you'll have to be satisfied with descriptions:

Right when you walk in the door, I have a bookcase which contains mostly science and philosophy books.  The ones I've had since my first and/or second stints in college (I have bachelor's degrees in 3 subjects).  A little farther into the living room are my yoga books.  There are some exercise books around the TV stand; this is where I exercise and so it makes sense to me to keep them there.  Nearer the kitchen are more often used science textbooks, and cookbooks.

Then there's the bedroom; I have five floor-to-nearly-ceiling bookcases in there, crammed full.  Three of them are completely filled with fantasy novels with only the barest minimum of extra room left.  Two shelves of another bookcase are also fantasy novels.  The remainder are more college books on everything from Japanese history and politics to feminist political theory to anthropology to political opinion polls, lobbying groups, and presidential power.  Solidly social sciences, I guess.  There are a few random novels thrown in there, mostly things my mom left down here when she visited, and a small collection on folklore and mythology.

Yeah, I guess I do keep the books that make me look "smart" in the front room.  But then, I like to keep all my fantasy novels in the same area.  With the rate at which I've been purchasing them lately, though, I may have to buy more shelving units soon.

Anyway, read the essay I linked to, it's interesting -- and another reason to avoid e-books.

Another Salon Post

I wrote a couple of posts back about a post on Salon.com about NaNoWriMo.  I found another post there recently that I thought I would also share, as it is something I've also written about.  (Click here or here for past posts about it.)

If Tolkien were black

It's about two authors with whose books I am familiar, N.K. Jemisin and David Anthony Durham.  I think a lot of the people who are leaving comments are missing the point.  I'm happy that I've discovered these two authors, one -- Durham -- from an online list of books to check out and one -- Jemisin -- a random purchase from the sci-fi/fantasy section.

Side note: why do so many people decide to write fantasy novels while they're in graduate school?  Jemisin, Rachel Neumeier, R. Scott Bakker, myself if I ever manage to publish?  (In my case, I need a break from integrating chromatograms...)

For what it's worth, my manuscript has black characters, white characters, characters who'd be South Asian if that, as a place, existed in the fantasy world, and East Asian.  Arab-types to appear in the next one.  (But hopefully somewhat different and more positively portrayed than a lot of stereotypes of this group in other fantasy novels.)

NaNoWriMo - Pros (Sort of...well, not really)

Here's a response to the Salon.com post advising people not to participate in National Novel Writing Month:

12 reasons to ignore the naysayers

I think this post is somewhat contradictory.  A quote: "The only thing 'writing a lot of crap' can genuinely be said to be less fruitful than is writing well."

Another quote: "Miller writes: 'The last thing the world needs is more bad books.'  The last thing the world needs? We have war and disease and greed and hunger.  Books, even bad books, are hardly our biggest problem."

So early in the post, we are expected to only consider the pursuit of writing when we make our comparison (writing crap versus writing well).  But in a response to the Salon.com post, we are required to broaden our horizons and consider war and disease and so forth, and not just writing.  You can't have it both ways and still make your point.  (I can think of a lot of things that are more fruitful than "writing a lot of crap.")

I suppose I can see both sides of the issue.  Maybe some people who really do have good stories to tell, lack the motivation to get started on their own.  Maybe the NaNoWriMo community really does foster creativity and a shared base of support.  And sure, the NaNoWriMo people say you should edit.  But here's another case where Carolyn Kellogg (the author of the blog post I'm critiquing) wants to have it both ways.  Celebrate NaNoWriMo participants, she says.  Encourage them.  But, she cautions us, don't blame the organizers if the participants don't want to edit their work.

And then there are the comments...there are a LOT of people who seem to have taken offense at Laura Miller's Salon post.  I am guessing these are people who have written a "lot of crap" and get upset upon hearing any suggestion that their work isn't publication-worthy.  The same sorts of people who give negative reviews on Amazon.com to books like Self-Editing for Fiction Writers.  They can't handle the truth.  They get indignant, or else they just ignore what they don't want to hear.

Anyone who calls Miller's post "offensive" or "disgusting" or "ludicrous" is way too sensitive to actually submit a novel for publication.  You will get rejections.  And criticisms, of both the constructive and non-constructive varieties.  And you had goddamn well better be able to handle them without sulking in a corner.  (And anyone who thinks "shovinistic" is the correct spelling of any word in the English language needs to stay the hell away from writing in the first place -- that's too far off to be a typo.)

If my post offended you, well, you need a thicker skin.  I'm cranky right now and it's my blog and I'll write whatever I goddamn well please.

NaNoWriMo - Cons

Here are a couple of pieces I recently found on the web, arguing, perhaps, that NaNoWriMo is not a good idea:

How hard can it be to write a novel? from The Economist
Better yet, DON'T write that novel from Salon.com

I never participated in National Novel Writing Month because I didn't think I could finish writing a novel in a month.  The more I think about it, the more I doubt most people can.  At least, not one worth reading.  And say what you will about using your creativity, understanding the fiction writing process, doing something other than watching reruns, etc...but if a novel's not going to get read, I don't see the point in writing it.  (A few people actually DO read this blog, so I continue writing.)

Word count is one thing.  Writing by hand, for 30 minutes on weekdays and an hour on weekends and holidays, I can easily turn out 25,000 words in a month.  I know, because I DID it.  Doubling my effort would not have been impossible.  But here's the thing -- I planned for months.  Years even.  Meticulously.  While there were a few surprises along the way, and a few more in the revision I've done so far, I knew where I was going from the moment I first touched pen to paper.  I knew what needed to happen, who needed to be where, when, etc.  I knew the names of every major character, and most of the minor ones.  (Making names up on the spot is a disaster waiting to happen.  They end up being really stupid.  Here is a post I wrote about it a little while back.)  I knew the names of the major cities, their governments, the characteristics of the races that populate them.

Side note on word count: I really don't understand people who stay up all night to get 50,000 words.  You don't need that much time.  Especially not if you're typing.  (Unless you're totally unprepared.)  But if you're participating in NaNoWriMo and you're writing while on the job, using company time, that is absolutely unacceptable.  You are not getting paid by your company to write your manuscript.

Here's another thing about spending a long time in preparation...you don't get writer's block.  I have literally never suffered from it.  And it's because I plan.  So even if I'm not feeling particularly inspired, I can at least put words down on the page that get the story going in the direction it needs to.  They say a lot of NaNoWriMo first drafts are crap.  I'm not saying my first draft was perfect, but it did give me something to work with further.  It definitely wasn't crap.

I'm frequently impressed by people who can do things I can't. Performing surgery, serving in the military, spending time at the International Space Station, fixing HVAC systems, designing electronic equipment, etc.  (I'm not impressed by people who can do things I can do or have done...Harvard was just college to me, not some unattainable ivory tower.)  I'm indifferent to people who need poking and prodding to do things I can motivate myself to do on my own (getting up at 6:30 AM to do yoga, losing weight without professional help, writing a 100K+ word manuscript for a novel).  NaNoWriMo participants fall in the "indifferent" category.  Mostly.  I'm concerned about the proliferation of crappy self-published e-books and ringers in Amazon forums who are really authors of said self-published e-books pretending to be unassociated fans making recommendations.

Anyway, I know this post is down on NaNoWriMo.  Sure, there are some people who have successfully published their novels from this venture.  Including at least one that I enjoyed (The Whitefire Crossing by Courtney Schafer.)  More power to them.  I guess it's just not my thing.