Big Brother is Watching You (Through Your Kindle)

From the Wall Street Journal again:

Your E-Book is Reading You

I just don't like this idea.  Granted, it doesn't apply to me since I don't read e-books.  And if anyone wants to know what I think of the books I read, well, I do post reviews and comments all the time on this blog.  (I've included a fair amount of demographic information if anyone cares to go digging through older posts.  Including my education, age, and gender.)

So I'm not comfortable with corporations checking up on me and how I interact with books (or other media).  Before you say, "but Facebook collects personal information," let me remind you that I don't have a Facebook account.  I don't mind Amazon so much, because they actually do a good job of recommending me books based on past purchases.  (You know, when they're not recommending me a Can Ram because I own the Hunger Games books.)

But there's another issue I have that comes up later in the WSJ article: the choose-your-own-adventure crap.  As a writer, there's a story that I want to tell.  People may love it, hate it, or be indifferent to it.  But I've created the world, and the characters.  I just don't like the idea of fan-directed fiction.  I think it will degenerate into fan fiction.  I am appalled at the woman who left a love interest for one of her characters in her story because 1/3 of the readers were rooting for the guy.  What about the story she had developed?

Another issue is consistency.  Fantasy works often span numerous volumes.  There are overall story arcs in addition to individual episodes.  And if we let the readers start influencing what happens in a particular series, the whole narrative is in danger of falling apart.  (Maybe you'll remember the episode from season one of Game of Thrones where Khal Drogo gets in a fight after Dany wants to save some of the slaves from rape after the Dothraki start pillaging in order to acquire ships to cross the Narrow Sea.  Turns out the guy he kills in that fight is important in later books in the series, and presumably in later seasons of the show.  Well, now they'll have to scramble to replace him with some other character.)

One last point, and then I'll go: I actually like it when books aren't predictable.  When I'm surprised by the endings.  (Not stupid M. Night Shyamalan-style twists, mind you.  And not abrupt reversals in character behavior that don't make any sense based on the characters' past actions.  Guy Gavriel Kay is good at doing this the right way; in some of his books, romances are built up and then the lovers end up going their separate ways at the end, for entirely logical reasons.)

Another Grammar Post

I have often complained (for over a decade, now...) about how the internet is making people stupid when it comes to grammar.  (Please note: this blog is not meant to be an example of exemplary writing.  I compose these entries and then post them without a lot of thought to sentence structure.  Rest assured that if I am doing something I mean to communicate professionally -- e.g. my novel manuscript, or my resumé -- I go over it again and again until it's perfect.  But I digress.)

Here are some stories about grammar and punctuation from the Wall Street Journal.  There's even a grammar quiz there; it includes some of the issues I frequently encounter with others' work (fewer/less, affect/effect, principal/principle, between/among) -- I don't make those mistakes myself, because I paid attention when I was in the 5th grade, you know?

• Grammar, a Victim in the Office
• Readers Respond: Oh, Grammar

Side note: I am guilty of verbal clutter such as peppering my sentences with "like."  I blame my 1980s childhood for that one.

Anyway, I figured it had been awhile since I'd had a grammar post, so here you go.

Good Fathers Again

So when I wrote my original Bad Fathers post, and the follow-up, I was generally thinking about bad fathers of daughters where there wasn't any mother around.  (Not exclusively, of course, as Craster of A Song of Ice and Fire had lots of daughters/wives.)

But, I realize those posts are awfully one-sided and make it sound like there are no good fathers in fantasy.  And that's not true.  So here is a story from CNN.com:

The best dad of fantasy fiction

(It's Arthur Weasley from the Harry Potter books, by the way.)

And this may be the one time that I actually think the comments on CNN.com are worth something (usually turns into liberal/conservative name-calling with neither side being particularly well-informed, but not in this case).  So read those, too.

Reading Outside of Genre Project - June 2012

It's a remarkable day when I actually finish my out-of-genre book and write the post about it, in the month I actually intended to.  Well, here goes.  This month was another random grab off the shelf, The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.  I'm not sure how I ended up with this book, as I didn't buy it for a class.  But, since I hadn't read it before, I figured I'd give it a shot.

I do have a little bit of a weakness for stories that take place at isolated manors (Rebecca is another one I happen to like) and English literature from the 19th century in general (I know, Henry James was born in America, but he ended up in England, according to Wikipedia, and Emma from the Jane Austen book can die in a fire, but I digress).

At any rate, these novellas were a fun diversion for me.  One thing that is always interesting to me is how writing conventions change over time.  For example: "said Miss Tina" and "cried Miss Tina" appear on one page of The Aspern Papers.  I criticize modern authors who do this, and in fact the self-editing advice I've read cautions against it (word order, that is).  Then there are the adverbs in speaker attributions: "she dismally sounded," or "she quite sincerely sighed," for example.  And the use of unconventional words in speaker attributions (including "sounded" and "sighed").  I've said this before, and I'm sure I'll say it again, but be careful about words you use to indicate speech.  Pepper your writing with too many odd ones, and soon you'll have people "grimacing" sentences.  And that doesn't even make sense.

All-in-all, though, the language was quite nice and I find I enjoy James's style.  Enough so that one day I may well pick up one of his longer works.  There were perhaps a few too many long monologues inside the head of the narrator of The Turn of the Screw.  Wait, I don't remember -- were these the most beautiful/wonderful/angelic children the governess had ever encountered?  I don't know, she's only said so about 50 times.  Maybe if she said it a 51st, I'd be convinced.

Other than the repetition, though, I thought the suspense built well in both novellas.  I actually think there probably would've been enough material for a full-length book with The Turn of the Screw; I am not so satisfied with the ending (the kid dies? why?).  At least, the premise is interesting and undoubtedly original for the time, though perhaps not so much now (kids, ghosts, horror movies, blah).

Side note: I probably shouldn't have been picturing Quint looking like Groundskeeper Willie (in nicer clothes), but, well, I couldn't help it.  Not sure what brought that association on (maybe it was the red hair?), but once it came to me, it never went away.

There's no point in reviewing classics like this.  Although there are only eight reviews on Amazon for this particular edition.  I'm sure that if you looked through all the editions, you'd come up with dozens more, if not hundreds or even a thousand.  At least this book doesn't suffer from the "class assignment" problem; what I mean is that instead of doing book reports, some teachers seem to assign writing Amazon reviews.  So you end up with a bunch of drivel from high school students ("this book was too hard because it had big words in it" and crap like that).

But getting back to what this project can help me with, with respect to the fantasy genre.  Once again, I've picked something with supernatural elements (at least in The Turn of the Screw, though it could be argued the governess was crazy).  But James is pretty solid at building suspense in both of these novellas, and at creating protagonists/narrators with whom the reader can identify, but who have flaws (e.g. breaking in and trying to steal the papers, moving into the mansion with false pretenses, going a bit crazy, etc.).  So from a story construction and character perspective, I think there's a lot to learn.  And, unlike last month's book (Foucault's Pendulum), I actually got through these quickly and didn't feel like I needed some kind of advanced degree to understand all the references.  (Actually, there were a lot of endnotes in my edition, informing me about things that I had already known or figured out through context -- for example, that "making love" didn't mean actual intercourse at the time these novellas were written.)

Anyway, I'm pleased for keeping this project up for six months so far, and that I finally picked something that didn't depress the hell out of me.  But it's back to the fantasy now, I've got a couple by Juliet McKenna that I'm going to read and review next.

Characters, Simplified

Sorry no source (other than School of Fail).  But I thought fantasy readers -- at least the ones with a sense of humor -- would appreciate this.
 

Back into the Groove

I lacked confidence when I started writing the second book in my series.  I thought the story wasn't as well-developed as my previous volume, I thought I didn't have enough material, etc.  I thought it would be difficult to, well, write after spending so long doing editing.

But, I developed an outline (well, a bulleted list) and on Saturday, I started writing again.  And I'm finding that I don't have writer's block, that I have plenty of material, and that it's not only easy to write, but that I enjoy it.  (Seems silly, but I'd forgotten that.  Editing and revising are not my favorite activities.)

I'm noticing that the writing is better this time around.  I think I learned a lot, last time.  I'm not saying it's perfect; there are definitely things I would change.  I'm never going to be above editing.  But practice does result in improvement.

I find myself looking forward to sitting down to write again.  This is great.  Maybe I'll be finished with the first draft by the time I hear back from the publisher about volume one.

Okay, despite the fact that I don't want to, I should make breakfast.  I have a fellowship interview in a couple of hours.

Don't Write Like This

Here's a terrible short fantasy story I found online.  Rumor has it that it repeatedly won a contest for worst fantasy story.  It's certainly a bad bit of prose:

The Eye of Argon

Read more about it at Wikipedia (seriously, there's an entry there for nearly everything).

Read a Mystery Science Theater 3000 style take on the story here.  (Side note: this appears to have its origin in a Usenet group.  Anyone remember Usenet?  I do.  But then I'm 34 years old.)

So, you might ask, what's wrong with this story.  Here are just a few of the worst aspects.  Feel free to add your own in the comments:

• too many freaking thesaurus words -- makes it way too hard to read (and remember, I have an Ivy League education...I know the meanings of the words, but the sentences sure as hell don't flow naturally off the page)
• impossible verbs in speaker attributions
• not sure how well it would work to enamel a hide shield
• no proofreading (the person who posted this noted s/he tried to preserve the original typos)
• referring to a woman as a "complexion"
• unpronounceable names (Mifrk, Grignr, Agafnd)
• too much description (why use one word when three phrases will do, must have been the author's philosophy)

Well, I can't actually bear to read the whole thing.  But you have the link above if you want it.  Don't say I haven't warned you.

Review - The Black Swan

The Black Swan marks a milestone in my fantasy reading pastime -- it is the last Mercedes Lackey book I will ever read.  In fact, the only reason I bothered to pick it up at all is because I had already bought it.

Sometimes I want to take Mercedes Lackey by the collar and shake her and say:



But seriously, the last couple of Mercedes Lackey books I have read have been just awful.  And I've been digging pretty deeply into her catalog; The Black Swan is copyright 1999.

Here are some problems I had with the book; every time I had an issue -- and it could've been stylistic, plot, grammar, or something else -- I dog-eared a page.  I don't even know how many dog-eared pages I have in this book.  It's so many, I may not list them all.

• Page 25: "Bring me Uwe, the minstrel."  So this guy has been around the castle for a long time.  And has been quite close to the queen.  So why is she telling the servants, who presumably also know him, to bring her "Uwe, the minstrel?"  There's no other character named Uwe in this book, so there's no confusion as to whom the queen is referring.  And it becomes obvious later from his actions that Uwe is, in fact, a minstrel.  So "the minstrel" is extraneous here.  (I believe he's referred to as Uwe the minstrel another time within a page or two of this instance, as well.)
• Page 31: Multiple inappropriate verbs in speaker attributions: "admonished," "complained," "broke in," and "grumbled."  A couple of adverbs after "said."  And a raised eyebrow.  (Seriously, how many people do you know who can actually raise only one eyebrow?)
• Pages 54-55: We're treated to a description of Wolfgang's room.  Even though Siegfried and Benno spend every single evening there having idiotic discussions abut things like the rules of courtly love.  Which must have been included just so Lackey could show she'd done her research about the rules of courtly love.  (If you're interested in that, read A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay instead.)  Seriously, if you've been in a room dozens of times, unless something is dramatically different, you're not going to remark on the bit of stone that's holding the desk up or how the bed has been overtaken by books.  Now, if Wolfgang had cleaned his room, that would've been worth a remark.
• Page 79: A lot of boring and irrelevant information about the weavers the queen has employed.  This adds absolutely nothing to the story.  I don't give a damn that the servants get a suit of clothes each year, especially since none of the servants are major characters.  None of this stuff matters.
• Page 93: Again, I don't give a crap that the queen's servants sleep three to a bed.  Sure, this may have been a common arrangement in medieval Europe.  But you're telling us an awful lot, and showing us nothing.  And the whole point of this scene to begin with was that it was difficult for lovers to find a private spot -- though this is not true of Siegfried, who has his own room.  So the discussion is pointless.  (If you are interested in authentic medieval history being incorporated into a novel, try The Devil's Diadem by Sara Douglass, which gets these details right without boring you by long digressions.)
• Page 160: The queen is trying to get Siegfried to do something reckless so he'll have an accident and die.  Uwe suggests he can make up an ancient pagan tradition such as hunting a stag with a dagger.  But Siegfried is supposed to be bookish and learned, and should know about such things.  He isn't supposed to be stupid enough to be fooled by tactics like this.  (He may not know how to rule, but he's well-versed in the pagan literature.)
• Page 208: Odile takes way too long to brush her hair.  I've posted about this before.  It simply does not take that long to brush even tangled long hair.  I know this because I have long hair which frequently gets tangled.
• Page 223: "God's teeth, but it's good to have a simple repast for a change!"  (Emphasis is Lackey's, not mine.)  Seriously, people rarely use the word "repast" in casual conversation.  This doesn't sound like something someone would actually say.  (While we're on the subject of inappropriate terms, I wish Lackey would come up with something other than "leman" for mistress.  Sure, technically it's appropriate, but it's just odd.  My dictionary says it's archaic.  It's out of place with the rest of the language of this book, too.)
• Page 239: The words "dance," "dancer," and "dancers" are used 10 times.  On a single page.

Apparently I gave up after page 239 with the dog-earing, though the book goes on through page 402.

On to more analysis and less nitpicking.  Despite all the complaints above, The Black Swan was not nearly as irritating as the latest elemental masters book, oh, what was it called...Unnatural Issue, yeah, that's it.  There weren't as many errors in The Black Swan.  But this book was basically the same book as The Fire Rose (from Odile's perspective) and Firebird (from Siegfried's perspective).  We have a scholarly but isolated woman with some magical talents and invisible servants who shares a house with an angry sorcerer and then we have a prince who fucks everything that moves.  Oh yeah, and von Rothbart from this book is kind of like the sorcerer in Firebird whom Ilya sets himself up against -- he keeps a harem of women though he never has sex with any of them.  (Though unlike Ilya, Siegfried was an actual rapist.  It's kind of unbalanced, by the way, that Odette has to confess her betrayal of her father and others to Siegfried, but Siegfried never comes clean to any of his lovers about the gypsy girl he raped.)

I'm not even going to talk about the rape; the Amazon reviewers do that justice (basically, none of them think Siegfried has done enough to repent afterwards -- his change of heart isn't believable).

So apparently this book shares a plot with Swan Lake and I'll admit it, I don't know the plot of that ballet but the Amazon reviewers seem to think Lackey is pretty true to the story.  Fine.  But Lackey has this problem of taking a fairy tale and expanding it to fill a whole book.  Only, there isn't enough material for a whole book.  So Lackey inserts a philandering prince who thinks all the time about which maid he'll screw next and where he'll do it, but oh, he falls in love and changes his ways, and then there are a bunch of boring details about the world (e.g. how servants get their clothes, how swans don't feel the cold in the water) and long descriptions of rooms that our characters have been in dozens -- if not hundreds -- of times before.  And long lists of all the people who have showed up for a hunt and what kind of birds they have and how well-trained they (the birds) are, and it's just ON AND ON about things that don't matter one bit to the story.

Another thing this book suffered from is the choice of perspective.  Odile is the POV character for a good part of the book, but she's not the one intended for the prince -- Odette is.  And we know virtually nothing about Odette, because we've never been inside her mind.  It's an odd choice, and not, I think, the best one, as far as storytelling effect goes.  Also, oddly, while we often see into Lackey's villains' minds, and we see Clothilde's plans here, we never once understand von Rothbart's motives, because Lackey notably stays away from him as a POV character.  And I'm really not sure why.  It's remarkable for being so different from everything else she's written.  (Though sometimes all Lackey's one-dimensional villains seem to do is think of more and more evil things to inflict upon their adversaries.  At least Clothilde isn't as comical and one-dimensional as Susanne's father from Unnatural Issue or du Mond from The Fire Rose.)

What else...Lackey is oddly fixated on being able to read Greek and Latin and being familiar with ancient pagan literature as marks of learning.  Doesn't matter whether the setting is San Francisco during the heyday of the railroads, or medieval Europe.  The characters like to brag to themselves about how they've read Sappho or Aristophanes or whatever, and about how other people should recognize them for their great minds, and all this junk.  It would be like me sitting around thinking, "OMG, I've read Plato and Aristotle.  I'm so smart.  I deserve a cookie and a pat on the head."  (Full disclosure: I have read Plato and Aristotle -- in English translations.  I remember very little of either.  But Aristotle's The Politics is good reading if I have insomnia.  Puts me right out.  I keep a copy by my bedside for that very purpose.)

Lackey's characters are also oddly fixated with class, including the nobles thinking they're better than everyone else.  Now, maybe this was a realistic attitude for the time.  But it makes her characters much less sympathetic to the contemporary reader than if they were a little more egalitarian in their leanings.

If you want to know more about the story, just take some of the names I've included here and insert them into this poem: Write Your Own Mercedes Lackey Book.

In the end, I don't really have anything nice to say about this book.  Did I finish it?  Yes.  Would I recommend it?  Most definitely not.  I will never read anything by Mercedes Lackey again, in fact.

For me, thankfully, it's on to something better -- my out-of-genre project for June.  But more on that later.

Fun Twitter Trend

Go to Twitter and look up #BadWritingTips.  It should make you laugh and give you some good advice (i.e., do the opposite of what the people are saying).

If it doesn't make you laugh, or if you actually required my parenthetical explanation above, and you say that there's nothing wrong with some of them (using "huffed" or "snorted" or "sighed" as speaker attributions, for example), trust me, it's a problem with you and not with the tips.  Go take a class or work with a writers' group or at least read a freaking book about self-editing.

Female Pursuits

Okay, here is a reality check for fantasy authors.  When a female character has long hair -- and I'm assuming your female character is white/Asian/etc. and has a smooth hair texture, as this would not be true for someone of African descent -- it DOES NOT take one hour to comb out your hair.  Even if you have gone for two or three days without brushing it, and have exercised, slept, showered, and done housework in the meantime, it DOES NOT take one hour to comb out your hair.

How do I know?  Personal experience.

So stop writing this crap.  Yeah, it's fine for your characters to have hair down to their waists.  Mine is that long.  But if I take more than 2-3 minutes to brush my hair in the morning, that's too long for me.

While we're at it, consider a hobby for your upper class female characters other than embroidery.  Maybe noble women 800 years ago spent a lot of time doing embroidery.  I do cross-stitch on occasion, myself.  But it is so effing boring to read about embroidery all the time.  And I think your hands would become arthritic and your eyesight would fail if you actually spent that much time indoors doing fine needlework.

I Started Writing Book Two

The title of this post pretty much says it all.  I did a little pre-writing this week, realized I had a lot more material than I thought I did, and today I actually took the plunge and started writing my second novel.  I'll probably be done with the first draft before I hear (good news or bad) from the publisher I submitted the first novel to.

It's a weird feeling.  I've accomplished a lot in the last week.  Not only did I turn in all my paperwork to graduate (with a PhD), but I submitted my first novel and snagged an interview for a fellowship that seems perfect for me (a fellowship which will allow me to delay paying back my Stafford loans for a few more years, by the way, so I will not be forced into financial ruin just yet).

Anyway, I've got four handwritten pages and another half hour to write.  My pace is a little slow but I am resisting the temptation to edit for now, and the writing really is better than the first time I wrote a novel.  Never actually thought I'd say I was working on my SECOND book.

Write Your Own Mercedes Lackey Book

This poem is pretty old (17 years now?) but she's still writing the same damn books.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Valdemar

(FYI, right now I'm reading what will be the last Mercedes Lackey book I ever pick up.  I'm only even reading it because I already had it on the shelf.  I'll never purchase another.  I'm sick of this crap.  Review coming sometime next week.)

Review - Throne of the Crescent Moon

So I was particularly interested to read Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed after I read Ahmed's essay on racism in Game of Thrones and, later, Razib Khan's review of the book.  Honestly, I don't have a big argument with Khan's take on the book, though my opinion is not exactly the same.  (Khan was nicer than I thought he'd be, actually, after his response to Ahmed's racism essay.)

Spoilers below, as always.  That's just how we do things around here.  Get used to it.

Anyway, the first point I want to make is the opposite of something Khan says.  I felt like (and I saw this in some of the Amazon reviews for this book) not that Ahmed was trying to do too much in 273 pages (that's how many my edition has), but that he had too little to work with and it was stretched too thin.  At least, the first part of the book felt this way.  (Maybe this is what Khan means when he says the first 2/3 isn't all that engaging.)  It almost felt like I was reading a short story that someone decided to expand to novel length by inserting long descriptions of things in the city of Dhamsawaat (where most of the action takes place).

Then, at the end, lots of stuff happened pretty fast. So I guess my first real issue is with pacing.  My second issue is that there were too many convenient coincidences.  Need information on an obscure historical name?  Ask the madam at the local whorehouse, who not only remembers the name, but has a copy of the VERY SCROLL that could be translated to give more information.  Need the scroll translated in a flash, even though it has multiple ciphers/encodings?  One of our heroines has an old flame who has JUST THE SPELL to do it.  I think what I'm trying to say is that the difficulties faced by the characters don't often seem all that, well, difficult.  Sure, our characters are in danger at the end, and they have some tough decisions to make, but I never feared for their safety.  I wasn't terribly emotionally engaged because of that.

Now, Razib Khan thinks the editors were too heavy-handed and made Ahmed trim the book down to a svelte <300 pages.  If Khan's read about the book online and heard this, well, then I defer to him.  But I think there ought to have been more editing.  A couple of places, I'd see the same word used three times in as many lines (e.g. "learn" early in chapter 13).  There was an over-reliance on ellipses when indicating pauses (they're supposed to mean omitted words, which is something different), a bit too much shrugging, sighing, and nodding (this is an easy trap to fall into, as I had to eliminate many instances of these actions in my own manuscript), a couple of places where there were too many adverbs (this was an irregular occurrence), and while I understand the desire to insert a religion into the society of Throne of the Crescent Moon, the word "God" is employed far too frequently (14 times on pages 168-169 alone).  The characters frequently quote passages from their holy book at one another; these passages don't always seem to be part of a cohesive whole but instead seem designed to emphasize whatever points the characters are making at the time (though if the document was long enough, you could get some contradictory and downright weird stuff...you can easily do that with the Bible, for example).  Oh yeah, and internal monologue in italics has always irritated me.  It's on pretty much every page, here.

I guess I'd like to see more copy editing, whereas the type of editing Khan's talking about is more of a substantive thing.  If there was a heavy-handed substantive editor, then I too hope he/she backs off in the second volume.

So what did I like about the book?  Well, it was definitely a change to see the younger characters taking a backburner to the older ones.  The main character, Adoulla, is over sixty.  He's fat and bald (at least according to the cover art) and he grunts and farts and eats a lot and he wants to retire from ghul hunting.  He's not dashingly handsome, he tires easily when fighting ghuls, he's opinionated, and sometimes he says things that hurt people's feelings.  I also like that a lot of the description we get about Adoulla is not of the infodumping variety (he does infodump about Dhamsawaat sometimes, though).

The setting is non-pseudo-European, which is also nice for a change.  I've been seeing more of this in fantasy lately, and I'm glad for that (I could put the obligatory list here of authors who are doing this: N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Howard Andrew Jones, maybe David Anthony Durham).  And in the end, the man who ends up sitting on the title object does something which is not very nice (OK, he drinks the blood of the young prince after someone else cuts the boy) to gain power.  Adoulla has to decide whether to reveal this to others or not, and in the end, he decides to keep it quiet.  So it's not all neat and tidy and morally right.  (That's a good thing.)

I felt like the book did have and ending, though.  I had heard this was the first volume of a series, and that appears to be the case based on the things I've read online, but I was kind of surprised that that was true as I felt the ending was pretty firm.  What I guess I'm trying to say is that this novel could work as a standalone.  It's short, and if you don't want to commit much time, or commit to reading all the volumes of a series, those are factors that might recommend this book to you.  (I'm honestly not sure why Razib Khan says he doesn't have time to read the sequels but he does have time to read and recommend Brandon Sanderson, whose The Way of Kings is easily three times as long...)

I wasn't bothered by the lack of female presence overmuch.  This was really Adoulla's book.  Litaz and Zamia (and to a lesser extent, Miri) do some things to move the plot forward.  Litaz is maybe a little more fleshed out that Dawoud, but I feel like we know about the same amount about Zamia and Raseed.  So it's not that female characters are pushed to the side, but that none of Adoulla's companions are as well-developed as he is.  At least, that's my take on the whole thing.

I think the political situation (the mysterious Falcon Prince is a Robin Hood type who sets himself up against the Khalif, who is a rather unsympathetic individual whom many want to overthrow) is an interesting backdrop.  I'll admit, I wasn't sure about the Falcon Prince's intentions for much of the book, and I liked that I was kept guessing and couldn't predict what he would do.  I'm not saying I would've done the politics the same way, as the Khalif is especially one-dimensional and trope-ish, but I liked that by the end of the book, this storyline had been merged with the ghul hunters' storyline.  I'm not saying it was expertly handled, but the intention was there.

As for the other characters, Litaz and Dawoud are also old -- in fact, they have retired from ghul hunting.  She's an alchemist (Ahmed spells it differently but I'm not going to) and he's a sorcerer.  But they're willing to help out their friend Adoulla one last time, because of the scope of the threat.  Raseed is one of the two main young characters; he's a dervish, which in this book is a sort of holy order where the devotees eschew a lot of worldly comforts and strive to live upstanding, moral lives while also training in fighting.  Raseed is pretty much a badass, overcoming in seconds a drug that would've knocked someone else out for an hour, etc.  There's also Zamia, a tribeswoman (girl, really) Raseed and Adoulla encounter one one of their ghul-slaying missions.  There's a budding romance between Raseed and Zamia, and it's awkward and not entirely believable.  The romance between Adoulla and Miri, the madam with the scroll, also seems forced.  It's entirely possible that their relationship had been developing for decades before this book, but over those decades, they never married (Adoulla's prohibited by his order from doing so).  So when Adoulla is suddenly willing to give it all up at the end, I'm still left wondering "why now?"  After all those years?  And this is especially confusing because Adoulla is so much more well-developed as a character than Raseed and Zamia, who don't share his depth and breadth of life experience.  We should understand his motivations better.

So, there have been a lot of Amazon reviewers (and others) who say that Ahmed is giving a nod to sword and sorcery.  And to be honest, I did get this feel a lot of the time as I was reading.  But other times, I felt like I was reading a more traditional fantasy.  I couldn't decide what kind of book it was supposed to be, I guess.  I think I'd have preferred a book which was firmly in one camp or the other, though.  (Sorry no examples here, it's more of a change in flow from one passage to the next and sometimes it took me awhile to figure out what was bothering me about the prose.)

One Amazon reviewer mentioned that Ahmed is not afraid to kill off characters, and that is true, but the person's comparison to George R.R. Martin is probably not valid -- Ahmed doesn't kill off his main characters, only side characters (a palace guard, a teahouse proprietor, a prince whose existence we've only known of for a couple of pages).  Sure, there's blood and violence, but don't expect any Eddard Stark beheading moments here.  Adoulla makes it out alive.

Wow, this was not as positive as I thought it would be.  And even the things I liked, were just about all mentioned by Amazon reviewers (who are actually a decent bunch, so I probably won't do a "reviewing the reviewers" post).  Will I read the sequel, though?  Sure.  (I got the hardcover at a pretty low price from the Science Fiction Book Club -- as long as we're being honest.)  This is Ahmed's first full-length novel, and hopefully since he's gotten a lot of press and a decent (for fantasy) sales rank on Amazon, he'll be given a little freer rein next time.

Gyre Madness

This post is rather off-topic for this blog, but I have written about bad science before -- bad science in fiction, that is.  Here is an example of bad science in real life:

Theory of the Origin, Nature, and Evolution of Life

Unfortunately, this is the kind of stuff that gives chemical evolution, as a scientific discipline, a bad name.  The author, Erik Andrulis, has a legitimate faculty appointment at a real university, and apparently has produced actual science in the past.  But then he goes a little crazy (I've heard rumors of drugs being involved, which would not surprise me in the least), grows out his hair and a Jesus beard, and walks around at conferences either in Birkenstocks or barefoot.  (This is all secondhand information, by the way, reported to me by my friends in the lab.  I haven't seen it myself.)

It's over 100 pages of kooky, if you want to read it.  Even includes 800 references.  But people, it's not science.

Here's some blog/web commentary on that paper:

• From Retraction Watch
• From PZ Myers
• From Ars Technica
• From LiveScience

Moral of the story: if a publication in a "scientific" journal gets the kind of reaction seen in the links above, don't go around saying scientists believe it.  We are actually going to great pains to distance ourselves from it.  And please don't use it as the basis of something in your science fiction or fantasy novel.

OK, off my soapbox.  Back to fantasy in tonight's post.

Point of View in Fiction

So...back to commenting on things I see on Book Country (even though I haven't had time to actually read anything on the site for more than a week).  This is sometimes a problem in published novels, as well, though I see it much less often in published novels as opposed to unpublished manuscripts from aspiring writers.

Anyway, point of view.  You can use a first-person narrative, like in The Hunger Games books.  Katniss is the narrator, you see "I" in non-dialogue sections of the text, etc.  This can be done well, and is certainly an acceptable choice, but you really have to think about what kind of information the character divulges.  There's an early part where Katniss flips her "long, dark braid" over her shoulder.  Stop and think about this for a moment...unless you have recently changed your appearance rather dramatically (e.g. the first time I dyed my own hair black, something like 18 years ago), do you actually think about what your hair looks like?  I brush strands of hair out of my face all the time, but I don't say I brushed a strand of waist-length black hair out of my face.  I just call it my hair.  Anyway, my point is that you need to get inside your characters' heads and actually think about what they would say.  You very well might have developed detailed descriptions of your characters.  You might know them inside and out.  But they still don't seem like real people, if they don't think like real people.

This is also a problem if you choose third-person limited, where you're in one character's head, and the person is thinking thoughts that he or she wouldn't.  I saw some of this in The King's Blood by Daniel Abraham.  Dawson visits the Kingspire and describes it in his head, down to the last detail.  But he was best friends with the old king as a child.  He's been to the Kingspire dozens of times.  Unless something has changed, he's not going to make note of stuff he's seen many times before.  This was also sometimes a problem in the Riyria Revelations series by Michael J. Sullivan -- every time a character rode into a new town, there was an infodump -- even if the character had visited the town before.

I get it, there are things that authors want to communicate about setting, about character appearance, etc.  You're proud of the world you've created.  Consider that people don't care so much about some of these details, first of all.  (Count me in that camp, most of the time.)  Second, consider other ways to incorporate the details, without infodumping or putting improbable thoughts in people's heads.  If you have an ethnic group whose members have red hair, for example, one character from that group can be called "Red."  Or, when introducing a new character who is from that ethnic group, have your viewpoint character look at the person, internally remark upon the appearance -- for example, "the woman had the pale skin and red hair of an X, something not usually seen in an army officer."  (That's not necessarily a well-written sentence, this is just off-the-cuff writing here.  I'd be more careful in an actual manuscript.)  The trading of insults and jibes in Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed helps us figure out what Adoulla looks like (though the cover art for this one is appropriate and probably influences our decisions, as well).  That's another option.

I like to think this is something I've done well in my own manuscript (hope so, since I sent it off on Monday).  When I describe buildings or cities, the people are seeing them FOR THE FIRST TIME (or in one case, after significant changes).  So these are things they might be remarking upon.

You can do third-person omniscient point of view, but I'd argue against this option.  Most attempts I've seen, at least from amateur writers (and I don't mean that as a slight, I consider myself a member of that group as I am not yet published), stay in one character's head for 95% of the scene, making me think I'm reading third-person limited, until I'll hear some other random character has a headache and I'll think, "well how does the viewpoint character know that?"

Technically, my own manuscript could've been third-person omniscient, because (and this is not necessarily obvious in volume one, but will become apparent later) one character is reconstructing the story after having talked to everyone else.  So he knows what they were thinking.  But because it's not obvious in the first volume, I elected for third-person limited with some first-person sections where the narrator himself is present.  (This actually wasn't planned, it just worked out this way.  And I did have to go through and consider POV in every scene, and change a few things that appeared in my earliest drafts.)

Anyway, if you want some more definitions of terms or some such, here are a few links (honestly just the top couple from Google):

• Narrative mode (from Wikipedia)
• Point of View in Fiction (these load kind of slow but have good information)
• Fiction: Point of View (from Writer's Digest)

Great Amazon Reviewer

I hate fake Amazon reviews (I'm talking about you, Harriet Klausner and Midwest Book Review), but I like to read a snarky or humorous one once in a while.  I stumbled across Herschel McLeod's reviews yesterday and thought I would share.

I particularly enjoy the review of the Limp Bizkit album.  I'm completely puzzled by the existence of the gift set; if you click the link for that one, you'll see that pretty much no one gave that a serious review.

Time to Write

So I'm struggling lately.  I gave myself a little bit of a break last week, figuring that if I left the synopsis alone for awhile, I'd be able to look at it with fresh eyes.  And, over the weekend, I declared it done.  Mailed off the sample chapters yesterday.

Now it's time to get started with volume two of my series.  So I was hoping to do some planning and pre-writing yesterday.  And I just ran out of time.  I've got a lot of demands on my time.  While I no longer have the cat with the feeding tube (sadly, I had to have her euthanized last week, she got too weak to lift her head and her liver was starting to fail), I am trying to finish up a project at school, trying to find a job, trying to exercise (started P90X last week, it's not as killer as I thought it would be but I have exercised quite a bit in the past and I think if I keep increasing the weight I'm using, eventually I'll get to the right place...but I digress), trying to clean my condo a little (kind of gave up on that while writing the dissertation and preparing for my defense), trying to get back into doing kundalini yoga.  The thing is, when I actually get a job, I'll have even less free time.  So I've got to figure out how to work the writing in.

Unfortunately, that usually ends up being in the evening.  And I am not at the top of my game in the evening.  I get sleepy.  If I call my boyfriend, I start to say things that don't make sense, or else just sit there without saying anything and not even realizing how quiet I'm being.  Much as I hate to admit it, I've become a morning person.  I was definitely not like this when I was in my teens (and even twenties), but not in my (gasp) mid-30s, my brain is at its best before noon.  And I can usually push my way through afternoon work.  But at 9PM?  I might be able to read in the bathtub.  I'm not good for much else.

So...do I switch, and do writing in the morning and yoga in the evening?  That's one possibility.  I'd be better at writing earlier in the day, and more flexible and warmed up for yoga in the evening.  I haven't figured it all out, but I know that if I want to be a writer, it's up to me to fit writing into my schedule.

I'm sure you're all tired of hearing about me and my life and my struggles with writing and submission of my manuscript.  And just as soon as I can come up with something else to write about, you'll read it here.

In the meantime, how about an attempt to make this more interactive?  If you write, when do you do it?

Switching Gears

So as I mentioned yesterday, my manuscript (well, a couple of chapters, plus cover letter and synopsis) is ready to be mailed.  Assuming I don't leave it on the table this morning, which is the kind of thing I often do, purely by accident.  (My dad'll get his Father's Day card sometime this week...)

Today I start working on volume two.  I'll be dealing with the same characters, adding a few, and I have an idea of what the first couple of scenes will be like, and of where I need to be by the end of the book.  But I haven't spent nearly as much time thinking about this one as I did thinking about the previous one.  So I'm not sure how long the pre-writing will take.

I used the preparation time almost as a crutch last time; I kept thinking "just a little more" outlining, or character development, or whatever.  It was really difficult to get myself into gear to actually WRITE.  And even then, there were quite a few false starts.  On the one hand, I DO need to prepare, or I'll end up with something I have to throw in the trash (OK, the recycling).  On the other hand, I've got a completed manuscript that I'm proud of, under my belt.  I've got that experience that I didn't have before.  And actually, I'm a better writer because of it.  (When I had to add scenes to the manuscript, I found that they required much less editing than some of the earliest scenes I wrote.)

Anyway, lots to do this morning.  Guess I'd better get to it.  I'd like to turn in all my dissertation documents before it gets blazing hot outside.  (Hell, I'm probably already too late for that and it'll easily be an hour and a half before I get to school.)

It's in the Envelope, Ready to Mail

So I decided to call my synopsis and cover letter finished.  I added some headers to my manuscript, printed out a couple of chapters (as requested by my first-choice publisher) and stuffed it all in a big manila envelope which I will drop in the mail tomorrow.  If I'm lucky, I'll hear something in mid-December (so the Christmas stamps on my SASE will be particularly appropriate).

Time for a break, then planning for volume two starts tomorrow.

I'm also turning in all my dissertation documents tomorrow.  Kind of a big day for me, I guess.

WSJ's Take on Fan Fiction

I am so out of ideas for posts right now.  I'm writing as I go instead of posting previously-written pieces.  On the one hand, this means my posts are more current, but on the other hand, I don't like not knowing what to write about.  I'm committed to 10 posts a week, though.  So today, I'm looking in the news for things to post and I come across two stories on the Wall Street Journal website about fan fiction:

• The Fan Fiction Roots of "Fifty Shades of Grey"
• Fan Fiction: A User's Guide

It's kind of like when the New York Times had a how-to on rage comics a couple of weeks ago.  It just doesn't seem like the audience matches up with the topic.  (Well, in all fairness, I like rage comics and I read the NY Times.  But I suspect I'm in the minority there.)

This is especially true of the WSJ which I think of as providing information to businesspeople, investors, etc.  Since most fan fiction isn't commercial (and shouldn't be, unless you want copyright lawsuits), I mean, I guess it provides an understanding of a cultural phenomenon, but I don't know that it should be the basis of investment decisions.  But then, what the hell do I know about investing?  (My investment strategy is lottery tickets because that's all I can afford at the moment.  Won $4 in the Powerball drawing last night...)

Anyway, time to get back to the cover letter and synopsis.  I've set a goal to submit the damned manuscript this week.  (You know, then wait 4-6 months to hear back.)

Cover Letters

I've put aside my synopsis for awhile to work on the cover letter.  I'll include some links at the end of this post to good advice sites I found.  Bear in mind, the advice contained therein is sometimes not exactly in line with what specific publishers want, so please visit your chosen agent's or publisher's website and read the submission instructions carefully.

One issue I'm having is identifying the target audience for my novel.  It is most definitely adults, but many advice sites suggest listing a few similar novels.  So here's the dilemma I was having: do I only list similar novels from the publisher I'm submitting to?  Or do I list similar novels from other publishers, as well?  I'm guessing the editor who sees this will be familiar with the genre, but it's like, why am I submitting it to Publisher X if the book is more like these titles from Publisher Y?

Then, if I list only titles/series from Publisher X (which is what I opted to do), but I list some of their bestselling series, is that viewed as complete and utter hubris?  I'm as good as these three New York Times bestselling authors?  I don't want to come off like a complete ass.  In the end, I decided the best approach was to compare aspects of my novel to aspects of some other novels, but to make it clear that I was trying to come up with something original while paying homage to some of my favorite authors (who just happen to be published by company X -- well, I didn't mention this last part).  Honestly, unless and until I get published and the reviews start coming in, I don't know what people will think my book is like.  (I've tried to make it UNLIKE a lot of other things out there, while retaining a few familiar elements so I don't totally alienate the readers.)

Anyway, here are some links:

• Hints for a Great Cover Letter
• The Cover Letter: Your Ticket in or the Kiss of Death?
• I Am Your Editor: Submitting Your Novel

And if you were wondering if any of the examples of things NOT to send, actually get sent?  Well, I worked for four years at the Harvard Admissions Office.  Much of that time, I opened mail.  And yeah, people send a lot of quirky, irrelevant, and unasked-for stuff.  That doesn't help their chances.  So yeah, I believe the stories -- I've seen the evidence firsthand, albeit in a different context.

Review - Ison of the Isles

So Carolyn Ives Gilman's Isles of the Forsaken was one of my favorite books of 2011. I was therefore excited to find out that the sequel, Ison of the Isles, was out.

It's not a bad book -- I'd recommend it, and read to the end of this review to find out why -- but I'm not nearly as enthused about Ison as I was about Isles.

Part of the problem may be something that stems from my own personal taste.  There are a lot of naval battles in this book, or at least there seem to be.  Now, Gilman is a historian, and I have no doubt she wrote accurate descriptions of naval warfare.  But I am just not interested in accurate descriptions of naval warfare.  I tended to gloss over these sections.  If you like that kind of thing, well, then this book might be for you.

But let me back up a bit.  The first couple of chapters were about Spaeth and Nathaway, and I was really interested in what was going to happen with them.  Then we moved to Harg's chapters, and while I was interested in him as a character, unfortunately his chapters in the early part of the book were all naval battles.  I put the book down for awhile because I just didn't want to read more about that.

If you don't remember who these people are, by the way, refer to my review of Isles where I describe them more thoroughly.  I just don't feel like doing a lot of rehashing of characters or plot and I have enough else to say to fill up the space.

Technically, the writing was fine almost everywhere.  It seems an editor actually did his or her work in this instance, or else Gilman was careful (a few adverbs in speaker attributions, but not many).  I'm glad I don't have to complain about that.

As far as the narrative goes, I feel some aspects were confusing and some questions were left unanswered, though it is my understanding that this is a duology and there will not be a sequel.  (Correct me if I'm wrong...)

First of all, in the midst of Harg's chapters, we hear Joffrey and Tiarch considering returning to the Inning side of things.  I think the story would've been better if we hadn't expected Joffrey to betray the islanders the whole time.  If it had come to us as a surprise, as it did to Harg, the sense of desperation would've been stronger.

Another thing I don't feel was fully explained was the emerald tablet.  This was given to Nathaway by Goth in the previous volume.  Apparently the Heir of Gilgen (Goth's role in the previous book and maybe in this one) uses the emerald tablet in the ceremony to make a person the Ison (leader of the islanders, but more complicated than that).  But the tablet is supposed to be freely given, and Spaeth knows this when she drugs Nathaway and steals the tablet to use in the ceremony where she deceives everyone into thinking she's made Harg the Ison.  I get that it had to not be freely given for the ceremony to be a sham.  What I don't get is why Goth gave it to Nathaway in the first place.  Did he not want Spaeth to form a bond with Harg?  (Also, there's a bit of an incest undertone...if Spaeth is Goth's daughter, or was created from his flesh, and Harg is Goth's biological son, well, if not explicitly described, it sounds like they might have had sex with each other, and there's at least a possibility that the child Spaeth is pregnant with, at the end, could be Harg's.  I know the point is that the islanders don't see it the same way, but biology is biology.  Or maybe not, since Spaeth wasn't born in the natural way.  Thankfully Gilman doesn't try to tell us the intricacies of Spaeth's creation, as I'm not sure there would ever be any explanation that didn't fall flat.  She does give just the right amount of detail on that.)

Corbin Talley's change of heart at the end, of letting Harg go free and facing charges himself, doesn't make sense to me either.  I can believe such a transformation would be possible, but not literally overnight.  Corbin is an ass as a judge, and has been a horrible person the whole book, and now he's suddenly willing to allow his arch-enemy to go free.  I know Spaeth says to Corbin that Nathaway got the life that Corbin wanted (Corbin was sent to the military for political reasons involving his and Nathaway's father).  And I know Spaeth cared for and had bonds with Harg, Corbin, and Nathaway.  But I just don't feel this was developed enough.  It felt like Gilman was in a hurry to end the book.  (And it was a pretty short book at 297 pages.)

Another issue I had was that during training maneuvers, Harg disciplined Katri for arguing with him after she and another ship's captain fired at a target from opposite sides of the target -- too much of a danger of damage by friendly fire.  But then a few pages later, Harg advocates coming at the Inning ships from both sides (so basically the same thing he just told Katri not to do).

Goth wasn't well-used in this book either.  Gilman clearly had a purpose for him, and he fulfilled it in the end, but she kept having scenes with him where he was wandering in some kind of drug-induced dream world and then in the waking world, he would have a conversation with Corbin.  These scenes didn't end up being so important to the book's conclusion, they seemed mostly to serve to remind the readers that Goth was still around.  He's looking more and more haggard every time he's dragged out, but he manages to survive to sacrifice himself at the end by taking on all Harg's pain (indirectly, through Spaeth).  I guess Goth's scenes were just too repetitive for my taste.

So, this was not Gilman's best book.  It felt rushed, and not as well-developed as it could have been.  But, there are some areas where Gilman really shines.  One of these is the whole issue of "primitive" natives versus the civilizing influence of the Innings.  The values and morality of each civilization are just different, and people from each culture act for widely different reasons.  The actions the different groups think will be efficacious, are completely different actions.  (Sorry for the repeated use of the word "different," by the way.)  Now, maybe this is because I come from a place that's more like the Inning civilization than the island civilization, I don't see how the things the islanders do (suffering and mora and all of that) are going to have any effect whatsoever.  And maybe that's why the Innings win, in the end.  And it makes you think about what values could be lost in the march of civilization across the globe.

But my favorite part of the natives versus civilizers conflict was when Spaeth goes out in a boat and seeks spiritual intervention.  She sends a lightning storm and Corbin builds lightning rods.  She sends change to the water which looks at first like blood but is revealed to be a bloom of microorganisms, by Corbin.  I just thought this whole exchange was really done well, and in a way gets at the heart of the anthropological distinction between magic and science and how different cultures treat natural phenomena.

I enjoyed the scenes with the attorney and in the court; it was a way to give Harg his moment and to inject a bit of levity when we knew Harg didn't have a chance of actually being exonerated.

Anyway, this book has NO reviews on Amazon as of yet.  It's possible Gilman's publisher hurried her through it.  (It's a small press, which undoubtedly hurts sales...sales ranks on Amazon for this book and for the previous volume are not that great.)  The fact that her current project is a history and not more fiction shows the perils of publishing with small presses.  On the one hand, you get your book out when major publishers may not give you the time of day.  On the other hand, you apparently have to do all your own marketing and you probably don't make a lot of money.

Read Isles first.  If you then want to find out what happens to the characters (I haven't spoiled EVERYTHING here, though I have given away a lot), continue with Ison.  I know I didn't like everything about the narrative structure of the book, but so many authors are so terrible in their treatment of native peoples (e.g. Terry Goodkind's Mud People) that I really feel the need to say something when an author gets it right.

Fan-Directed Fiction

So I've written about Wattpad before.  People can post fiction there, which members can then read and comment upon.  Wattpad has just raised quite a lot of money, so I'm thinking about them again.

If you click the link about Wattpad raising money, you'll see a venture capitalist's comments on Wattpad.  I'll reserve judgment on the financial aspects of the investment, as that is really something I know nothing about.  But I totally don't agree with the guy who's quoted.

1. I'm not at all interested, I've decided, in participating in a site where fan fiction is promoted.  I tried reading at fanfiction.net for awhile, and I just didn't like it.  (What I'm saying is, I've given fan fiction a chance.  And I still rejected it.  I just don't find it compelling.  But search "fan fiction" in the search box on this blog, and you'll see plenty of writing about that.)
2. Here's a quote from the piece: "You’re able to upload a story chapter by chapter, folks are able to comment on that chapter, and they can provide encouragement to the writer and actually signal where they’d like want the story to go, which creates a type of engagement that’s impossible in an offline context."  First of all, I don't write chapter-by-chapter.  I plot the whole story in advance and divide into chapters later.  I also have no interest in going where my readers want me to, I'd prefer to tell the story I came up with.  (Game of Thrones would've been more of a feel-good story if Eddard Stark hadn't been killed, and I'm sure no one was weeping for Joffrey, but I, for one, am glad that GRRM didn't write to fulfill his fans' desires.)  If the fans signal where the story goes, it turns into fan fiction, with Mary Sues and improbable romances and all the rest of that crap.
3. Wattpad comments are useless.  Here's a sampling, from the first chapter of a story that can't quite decide whether it wants to use sophisticated language ("eschew") or colloquialisms ("tummy," "all ironic about it") or whether it's using an omniscient narrator or a third-person narrator (a character is described as brushing "long, straight, coffee-colored hair out of her face" but then debates herself about how to irritate her father -- a person would think the second of those things, but not the first) or even what word to use to refer to a character (we have "highness," "father," and "Bryn," all in the same chapter).  But the praise is effusive and not literate or constructive: "Wow! I only read 1st chapter and I know this story will be amazing :D Btw I hate her dad xP" and "Wow. I can't stop reading...my eyes are glue to the screen! XD" and "How in the world are you able to write such magnificent words? Please enlighten us!" and "Plz upload next chapter."  (I guess Dolan Duck is getting in on the commenting with that last one there.)

Anyway, yeah, Wattpad isn't for me.  Because I like real books.  Or at least, people who are seeking to eventually become published authors, and who are serious about constructive criticism and not just seeking praise.

Now I'm going to go brush my waist-length straight black hair.

World Building

So my time on Book Country has provided me with a lot of ideas for this blog.  Guess I'm taking a turn towards writing advice, here.  Which is fine, I mean it does say "this is a blog about reading and writing fantasy literature," so it's not as much of a digression as some of the things I've posted.

Anyway, sometimes authors use real societies as models for their fantasy worlds.  A lot of fantasy is pseudo medieval European, although as Saladin Ahmed points out frequently, people don't really know what medieval Europe was like.  The historical information is out there, sure, but the average person hasn't read it.  Probably historians cringe when they read fantasy, like I cringe when I read science fiction with gross errors in biology and chemistry.

Anyway, sometimes authors do their research, and it shows (click here for another related post).  Guy Gavriel Kay does a good job, and Carolyn Ives Gilman is an actual historian.  I'd argue that some of the societies Glen Cook wrote about in the later Black Company books and/or in the Instrumentalities of the Night Books are also based on real historical societies.

But then sometimes authors just start writing, and end up with societies that are a weird conglomeration of time periods and geographical locations.  And this just doesn't work.  You can't have a strong, centralized church in the same place you have gladiator fights.  It sounds like the author read two books, one about the Roman Empire and one about Catholic Rome, and said, "well, hey, they're both Rome" and went with it.  It's like giving people in the Tokugawa Shogunate soda machines you can hug to get a soda (hey, they're both Japan) or having the ancient Greek city-states suffer through today's collective European debt crisis.

Why is this a problem?  (Full disclosure, I'm not a historian, I'm a chemist.)  Lots of different human societies have existed in the last couple of thousand years.  But customs, languages, and cultures -- and values -- develop as coherent groups.  Sure, there's exchange of ideas through travel and trade.  (The Japanese written language makes use of Chinese characters, for example.)  But there's no sense in throwing a bunch of ideas from a random group of human societies into a hat and then drawing out a few.  And when you read, for example, about a polygamous society that has a woman in the line of succession, it's just strange.  That's not the way the world works.  It makes the reader think you didn't really develop a consistent set of details for your world.  It confuses the reader.  It makes someone like me pick apart every little aspect of your setting until there's no enjoyment left.  It makes me overlook what might otherwise have been a brilliant plot, makes me think you were careless.  And if you were careless when you wrote it, why should I care when I read it?

How to Not Procrastinate

Kind of an awkward title to this post, I know.  I found this on the LA Times blogs a couple of days ago:

Not writing?  There's an app for that

It's about an app, now available for iPad, called "Write or Die."  Depending on which setting you choose, things happen if you don't keep typing...from annoying noises to your words disappearing.  Or apparently plays the Nyan Cat theme.  (I wonder if it's the 24 hour version...)

That's one strategy.  The author of the blog post suggests that the reason for not writing is being too distracted by other things online.  I suppose this is a problem for some people.  It's not for me.  (By the way, why would you write on an iPad?  Would be a pain without an external keyboard, and then, you've basically recreated a less powerful laptop.)

Anyway, here's how I avoid procrastinating and/or writer's block:

1. Plot and outline in advance.  Then, I've already decided what happens next, and I just need to create the scene.  I've finally overcome my fear of writing poorly, knowing that I can fix things in revision (when it's often easier).
2. For first drafts, write on paper.  You actually make progress because it's not as easy to edit as you go.  And the computer is OFF.
3. For subsequent revisions, only have my word processor open, no Firefox (which happens to be my browser of choice), no iTunes, etc.  If this is difficult for you, unplug your router so you have no internet connection.  Turn your AirPort (or whatever it's called on PCs) off.
4. Eliminate distractions.  No television, no radio, no music.  If you must have music, pick something that's not distracting and/or that doesn't even have words.  I'm a fan of the all-quiet approach (well, all quiet except the dog licking stuff).
5. Set aside a time to write each day.  Only pick something you can commit to.  For me, it was 30 minutes a day on weekdays and 60 minutes on weekends and/or holidays.

I will admit, I haven't been doing so well with the synopsis, despite basically adhering to the rules above.  It's been a difficult week, for me, though.  I started P90X and I finally had to have one of my cats euthanized (not the one in the profile picture here or on Twitter).  She (the cat) got to the point where she couldn't even lift her head to vomit, it was a long decline but particularly steep this week.  I think her liver had finally started failing.  It was still the hardest decision I've ever had to make, and I'm still crying about it a day later.

Since I don't want to end on a downer, here's the 100 hour edition of Nyan Cat:

The Infodump

So you've come up with a fantasy world.  You've thought of every last detail -- the histories of each city, the physical appearances of each character, the intricacies of various religions coexisting in one place.  You're proud of the work you've done.  But here's the thing...

You don't have to share it all with the reader.

In fact, please don't.  It interrupts the narrative structure, and it doesn't seem natural.  If you, yourself, were traveling to a place where you'd been a dozen times before, would you have an internal monologue going on where you describe the geography, the politics, the appearances of buildings you've seen multiple times before?  No.  If something was different, you might remark upon it.

On top of that, it's not all that interesting for the reader.  Unless someone's appearance is quite unusual, it's unlikely that I'll even remember that the person has shoulder-length blond curls.  Don't waste my time.  I'm not going to remember what color someone's dresses are (nor do I care).  I am not going to remember the geography you so painstakingly describe (and that you've taken a major detour from the plot to insert) and if that's really important, put a map in the front of the book.  Then the people who care, can spend all the time they want on it.

Daniel Abraham's The King's Blood has a couple of spots where there are pretty bad infodumps (one where Dawson visits the Kingspire and one when -- as I remember it, he's out in the field -- there are just a couple of pages about the geography of the land).  Michael J. Sullivan's Riyria Revelations are pretty bad about this, whenever characters ride into towns.  I mean, I still like Abraham's books, and Sullivan's, generally speaking, but this is a weakness they have.

I'm not saying that you should avoid thinking about these things.  I thought about these things.  But I only included details about hair and such, when they were important to the story (e.g. recognizing someone from afar if he/she has a distinctive look).

Don't go the other way, either, though.  If you are going to have two characters with whom you're familiar, and they're discussing a third you haven't yet introduced, don't just name drop like we're supposed to know what's going on.  You lose the reader, and if you do it often enough, you might not gain the reader's interest and attention back again.  This seems to be more of a novice mistake, based on my Book Country experiences (whereas the infodump plagues novices and established writers, alike).

Character Names Revisited

As I've been reading on Book Country, I've been thinking about character names again.  I complained in my previous post on this topic about names that are too consistent and not realistic.  This is usually a problem when someone chooses some class of word (colors, types of stone, etc.) and applies it across the board as character names.

The problem I have with Book Country names is rather the opposite -- no consistency.  I won't name names, but go to TV Tropes and read Aerith and Bob and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about.  (It's apparently a HUGE problem in fantasy, judging by all the examples in the "literature" section.)  It's not just that people tend to use fantastic names (e.g. Aerith) alongside regular ones (e.g. Bob), but that they use a whole bunch of names with different origins for people who are all supposed to have come from the same place.  It's like telling me there are five people named Lakshmi, Ahmed, Yiqun, Pablo, and Françoise, and they all hail from the same little village.

People fall into traps of really LIKING certain names, and using them for characters.  Perhaps they're confused by the modern world, where you really might have people born (or living) in the same town in America called Kameha, Shalin, and Bryan.  And sure, there were always foreigners who traveled far and wide; the ancient Roman empire was cosmopolitan.

But I maintain that it's weird for one third of characters to have French names, one third to have Roman/Latin names, and the rest to be a mixture of German and made-up fantasy names.

For my own manuscript, I separated names into racial and ethnic groups.  So one group has French names, one Indian, one Arabic, one Celtic, and so on.  There are a few characters outside of this convention, but it's not happenstance.  There's a reason for it, and that will become apparent over the course of the series.  This was a deliberate choice I made; I actually used a dictionary of first names to choose when I started running out.

Sort of Fell into My Lap

I've been bitching and moaning about my synopsis; I think it's been more than a week now and I'm still not happy with it.  (I did cut four pages off yesterday, so I'm down to six.  I suppose that's progress.)

Mostly what I wanted was to see some examples of synopses of books I've actually read.  (I found a lot of synopses for romance novels online, of all things, but I'm just not familiar with the genre so the posts are not as much help as you might think.

Then, last night I started reading Ison of the Isles by Carolyn Ives Gilman, and the book started with a 2-3 page "what has gone before" kind of piece.  I thought about it, and I probably have a couple of dozen books that begin in a similar manner.  Now, those are plot summary synopses, and are designed to be so, because they have a different purpose than enticing someone to read further.  But, if I pay attention to what characters and events were left out, what the main threads are, what non-plot points (e.g. magic) are discussed, etc., I might start to get somewhere.

All right, time to get to work.  I'm going to finish this damned dissertation this week if it kills me.  (Already approved, for what it's worth.  Just doing last-minute formatting now.)

Review - The King's Blood

I was excited when The King's Blood by Daniel Abraham (second in his The Dagger and the Coin series) arrived; the preceding volume, The Dragon's Path, was one of my favorite books of 2011.

I think the story told in The King's Blood was quite good, and I'll get to it in a moment, but the shoddy editing really detracted from my enjoyment of this book.  I took an index card and marked a passage that bothered me, and by the end of the book, I'd ripped the index card into little pieces to mark all of the editing/grammar/usage issues I had.  Some examples:

• Not grammar or usage, exactly, but infodumping: when Dawson first visits the Kingspire, a place he's been presumably dozens of times, he feels the need to describe it down to the last detail.  I would guess that unless there are some particularly unusual architectural details, the interiors of most buildings don't need to be described; the readers won't remember them (and in my case, I don't care, as they usually have nothing to do with the story).  An exception might be made for a character entering a building for the first time.
• Same chapter, subject-verb disagreement: "Somewhere deep down...WAS the first Kingspire and the bones of the first kings."  Should be WERE because it's a compound subject (Kingspire AND bones).
• Also, Abraham uses the word "rose" at least three times on the first page of this chapter and the next.
• The chapter where Cithrin is looking at the statue of the last Dragon Emperor: "Komme Medean's son was a year older than HER..."  I've been over this time and time again in this blog, but it's "a year older than SHE..."
• There's a weird tendency in a couple of scenes for a character to ask another character a question, or sometimes make a statement, and the second character to answer with a single verb.  For example: Marcus says "Is it theological?" and Yardem answers "Is."  I don't know anyone who talks like this in real life.  If it was just one character, maybe I'd buy that it was a peculiarity of his or hers.  But many characters do it, and not consistently.
• One of Cithrin's chapters: "The little courtyard was laid out in squares now.  A bit over two dozen of them."  First sentence is fine.  Second sentence is just ungrammatical.  You could say "A few more than two dozen of them."  "Bit over" only works for mass or uncountable nouns; "squares," which is the noun here, is definitely countable (as evidenced by the "two dozen" part).
• Discussing whether to open a bank branch in Antea, talking about Geder: "He's weakened his own support among the noble classes.  He wasn't precisely one of them to begin with."  "Them" in the second sentence is ambiguous.  Geder wasn't a highly-ranking noble to begin with, true, but them would properly refer to the "noble classes."  And sure, Geder was fat at one point, but I don't think he was a noble class unto himself.

So this review is turning into one long grammar bitch.  I haven't even listed everything, just some examples.  The thing is, it detracts from my enjoyment of a book when I keep wanting to take a red pen to the pages.  So the actual technical aspect of the writing in The King's Blood?  Not the best.

I would, however, still recommend the book.  The story didn't turn out at all how I expected it to, and there were some nice tie-ins from the previous volume.  It's not a feel-good book, by any means, although some of the sympathetic characters enjoy minor triumphs (Cithrin being one of them).

We follow basically all the same viewpoint characters as in The Dragon's Path.  Cithrin is not happy in Porte Oliva because the bank has sent an auditor to run things until she (Cithrin) reaches the age of majority.  She jumps at the chance to take the Porte Oliva branch's records to Carse; she thinks she'll be able to make her case to Komme Medean for running her own branch.  She goes with a bank delegation to Camnipol, the capital city of Antea, where she encounters Geder after there's been attempt on his life.  She helps him (and his ward, more on that later) escape harm.  They hide underground, and Cithrin finds herself oddly attracted to Geder.  She ends up having sex with him.  This part, I don't like so much.  I never would've pegged them as a couple.  At least it doesn't end up working out, though I'm not sure Geder realizes that.  What he does to Dawson (see below) turns her off.

Marcus has stayed on as bank security out of some protective feeling for Cithrin; perhaps she reminds him of his daughter (in the previous book, I got the feeling he was at least a little attracted to her, but I didn't get that vibe this time).  When she leaves, and doesn't take him along, he does a couple of stupid things.  Master Kit (the leader of the troupe of players from the previous volume) bails Marcus out and takes him on a journey to find a weapon that can destroy the spider goddess (whose acolyte he once was).  Marcus hasn't changed much at all; his desire to protect and/or rescue Cithrin borders on obsessive now, and he's willing to take stupid risks, but the events he's famous for (happened before the first book, but we're reminded of them here) suggest that he has always been a bit impulsive when under stress.

Dawson is suspicious of Geder's reliance on Basrahip, the priest of the spider goddess, but when Geder asks Dawson to lead an army into a neighboring kingdom to answer for a threat to the dead King Simeon's young son Prince Aster, Dawson is honored.  When Geder tells Dawson to kill all the nobles of said kingdom, Dawson lies and says an agreement had already been reached to spare the nobility.  Dawson then decides to lead a revolt against Geder but ends up getting caught.  Geder, in a fit of rage, eventually kills Dawson.  Dawson is MUCH more sympathetic in this volume than in the last one.  I really didn't like to read his chapters in the last book, but I'm actually rooting for him here.

Dawson's wife Clara is left to pick up the pieces after her husband's death.  She finds herself down and out, and the huntsman Vincen Coe, who has always been in love with her, takes her in and cares for her when even her own son turns her away.  Her chapters don't seem all that important to me until after Dawson's death, though.  Dawson's and Clara's sons also turn up here and there; one of them swears fealty to Geder, another is a priest and thus removed from the conflict, and a third leaves Antea in anger.

And now Geder.  I've already talked about him a lot, from the other characters' perspectives.  At times, he is completely sympathetic.  His relationship with Prince Aster, his ward, is one such aspect of the story.  They relate to one another, they genuinely enjoy each other's company.  Now, there have been several fantasy novels where a bumbling scholar type ends up on the throne.  Where usually he becomes a great king.  Geder, not so much.  He's violent and impulsive, and he doesn't really have any idea what he's doing as regent (since Aster is underage).  Geder brought Basrahip and some of the other priests of the spider goddess back to Antea after his journey in the previous novel, and he relies on them to tell him when someone is lying or not.  He agrees to build temples to the goddess in every city he conquers.  He ends the book by interrogating lots of people to determine their loyalty; the priests tell him whether or not they're lying.

Anyway, the characters are complicated.  No Mary Sues here.  Sometimes you love them and other times you hate them.  But that just makes them seem so much more real.  (Geder was borderline for me; whenever he ordered an act of violence, in this book or the last, I had a hard time really understanding why he did it.  Cithrin's analysis of him in the end helps a little bit, in retrospect.)  So Abraham gets definite points for the characters.  Don't know if I mentioned this already or not, but they're also memorable.  While I had some trouble with the Antean nobles, the major characters were clear and distinct and I didn't stumble through the book wondering who they were (as sometimes happens when I go a long time between reading a book and its sequel).

The plot was a little fractured; while, say, Cithrin and Dawson were in the same room a few times, they didn't have much (well, anything) to do with each other, and Marcus was removed from just about everyone, for the latter half of the book.  I'd say this was a book where the characters needed to get from point A to point B, but that's not really it.  Geder doesn't go too far; he starts out fostering Aster and ends up regent for Aster.  Dawson ends up dead, and Clara battered down (I guess that was a transformation, though Clara's personality honestly doesn't change all that much, only her circumstances).  Cithrin gains some experience and some concessions from Komme Medean, but she wasn't in charge of her own branch at the end of the last book, and she's still not.  The political situation has changed; Antea has conquered a neighboring kingdom and is anything but stable (disrupted harvests and all).

The priests of the spider goddess really deserve their own paragraph.  They've insinuated themselves even further into Antean political life.  They ask Geder to build temples, they help him win battles.  They have a sort of psychological power to change people's minds, but it takes lots of repetition and time to truly work.  They can tell if someone is telling the truth or not.  In short, they don't seem that bad.  (Which is actually a nice change from evil cults in other books.  The Death Eaters and their Muggle torture, etc.  Not really a religious cult, sure.)  Kit's quest to destroy the spider goddess suggests there's more to the story than anyone is admitting -- including a certain degree of fallibility on the parts of the priests, and I'm definitely interested in seeing where that goes.

And we mustn't forget about the dragons, the ancient masters of civilization who created the thirteen races of humanity but who are long gone now (we think).  I am not sure how many books Abraham has planned for this series (Wikipedia says five, okay, guess that clears that up).  Anyway, he could go a couple of different routes.  I think the spider cult is going to become more insidious, I think there's going to be another attempt at overthrowing Geder (coming from Clara this time).  I hope the dragons don't come back to life.  That's a fantasy trope that needs to die if ever I've seen one.  WAY overused.  But Abraham hasn't gone that way yet, and maybe he won't.  I'll give him the benefit of the doubt for now.  (Side note: one day I'm going to write a book with evil dragon overlords.  There'll be an uprising which the dragons crush.  Hope is defeated.  End of story.  Still got to figure out a way to make people want to read something like that.  But it's on my mind now.)

Speaking of the thirteen races, I'm not sure what I think of them just yet.  Seems they're rather like races we actually have today, just with more dramatic physical differences (than skin color, eye or nose shape, hair texture, etc.) -- like scales, glowing eyes, tusks, and so forth.  I can't keep most of them straight, to be honest.  The Drowned are easy, and the Cinnae not so bad (probably because Cithrin is half Cinnae).  The Dartinae I remember have glowing eyes.  The Firstbloods, of course, I understand.  The rest?  Not so much.  There are some furry otter people who can swim, I remember that.  I could look in the back of the book to see what they're called, but it doesn't really matter.  It could be interesting if Abraham takes this further, but I'll reserve judgment on that until it happens -- if it happens.

Anyway, I've complained about grammar, I've done some plot summary, I've predicted where I think the story is going to go, I've said what I liked and what I didn't, and I've been writing for a long time.  In the end, yes, I'd say read this book, although start with The Dragon's Path first.

To Plot, or Not to Plot

So as I've been finishing up my manuscript and writing my synopsis (which is moving along, albeit painfully slowly), I've been thinking about volume two.  Gotta do something during the 6 months I wait to hear from the first publisher I submit to.

And, of course, I've been reading lots on Book Country.  It's hard to tell where someone intends to take a story when only a couple of chapters are posted.  It's also hard to tell whether events that occur are going to be important later, or will be dropped/forgotten about, etc.  Sometimes when I think a story has been carefully plotted, it turns out that in fact, the author was winging it.

Some writers are big believers in outlining before writing.  Others (Glen Cook and Stephen King among them) start out with merely an idea and let it go from there.

Me, I'm a believer in pretty detailed outlines.  The manuscript I've just finished, is not the first novel-length project I've ever worked on.  But the first one is no longer in existence, because I didn't plot and it ended up meandering everywhere.  This is the second, and in addition to lots of time daydreaming about what would happen, I wrote it all down.

That's not to say that what I ended up with in the seventh draft is what I originally thought I would write.  The overarching story is the same, but a lot of the details have changed.  Some of this was for consistency's sake.  Some of this was to avoid using the same plot device too many times (e.g. gaining vital information after overhearing a conversation in a restaurant once is fine, but three times in the same book borders on ridiculous).  Some of this was to avoid obvious tropes (e.g. hunting accident).  Sometimes, I even let the characters wander off on their own, although that was usually with minor characters and usually also minor plot threads.  I didn't change the big things all that much.

In the end, I come out pretty firmly on the side of the outliners.  Not that doing it the other way is wrong, it's just not something I find myself to be particularly good at.

Once again, by the way, I don't have any posts stored up.  If I can manage, I'll post a review of The King's Blood by Daniel Abraham in a day or two.  (Reviews always take a long time for me to write.)  I'm using my participation in Book Country to fuel a lot of my posts lately -- if I catch tropes employed or mistakes made by novice writers, I figure I'll post them here and hopefully bring some educational value to this blog (yeah, right).  I have given up on fanfiction.net all together, I just never wanted to go read that crap so I stopped making myself.