GoodReads Review: Between The Lines - Master The Subtle Elements of Fiction Writing by Jessica Page Morrell

Between the Lines: Master the Subtle Elements of Fiction Writing by Jessica Page Morrell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book has a lot of insight to offer for editing fiction and filling in the blanks that we sometimes take for granted. It's great in particular about pacing, tension, and how to handle that on a micro and plot-based level. However, overall, the quality of the advice is uneven. Some of it is sharp and clear; some bits were (to me!) too basic or too generic / unexplained to be very helpful. The author also clearly doesn't have much experience with SF/F; some of the recommendations she makes to genre writers are actually don'ts for those of who know the field. I also found that a lot of the example excerpts don't necessarily do a good job illustrating what they're intended to.

Overall, I think this book is excellent as food for thought, a starting point, but it won't give you a blueprint for editing.

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Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need by Blake Snyder
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

So ... I feel as if I should preface this by stating I'm not really the audience for this book. I am a novelist, not a screenwriter, but I've heard novelists sing the praises of this book's ability to translate into written fiction, so I thought I would give it a try. (I'm also not really an outliner - I do heavy planning, but in other arenas.)

All that said ... I was kind of let down by this book. The first section, the discussion of how to distill the logline, was excellent, and then ... all I could think was following this method would be a) frustrating; and b) consistently produce formulaic, same-ish works ... good, but never great, and always predictable. Then when it comes to the final chapter and how to sell what you've written, Snyder doesn't seem to have much concrete or helpful to say.

That said, there are interesting tricks and trips I could cherry-pick, and it's an easy, entertaining read. It's also instructional to see him pick apart films and the devices used in particular spots. Not enough to convince me I want to do it, but it's good craft critique.

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GoodReads Review: The Spirit Ring -- Lois McMaster Bujold

The Spirit Ring by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Set in a small Italian town in the Renaissance era (there are references to Lorenzo de Medici, so let's call it late 1400s), but a version where magic and metallurgy run together, The Spirit Ring follows Fiametta, the rebellious daughter of a mage, and Thur, the good-hearted miner who would be the mage's apprentice ... before their small world falls apart.

This novel is intimate - it's a story intricately bound to its place and people, where the acceleration of events grows naturally from those before, and where the two main characters get drawn up into the affairs of politics and war ... but always with a tight focus on the place where Fiametta grew up. The first forty or fifty pages are fairly low on conflict but still interesting enough to hold the attention, and the pay-off is more than worth it: the unraveling is all the more horrifying for how deeply I experienced Fiametta's world, and a lot of the little elements that seemed simply like worldbuilding or character introduction prove unexpectedly relevant later.

The stakes are visceral and personal here, and the two narrators both intensely likeable and very different. If I have any critique, I'm not really satisfied by the way the love story plays out. I'm glad that they don't waste time mooning or being distracted at inappropriate moments (ohhh, I hate that in SFF/romance crosses), but this goes a bit far in the other direction to make it feel a bit pragmatic and not wholly convincing. There's also a few confusing turns in the denouement that felt a bit like, "one more thing, really?"

All that said, this is a wonderful book. The details are absorbing and the cross between history and magic perfect.

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Anatomy Of An Idea: Hunting Fire

 Grimbold anthology "Lost Gods" comes out tomorrow - order it here! - and contains one of my rare reprints, Hunting Fire.  This began as a writing prompt / freewrite on the theme of unseasonable weather.  As is my usual habit, I decided to tackle it a bit backwards:  I wrote about a warm spell in cold terrain, but from the perspective that this was a bad thing, even catastrophic.  I love to write about hospitable wintry environments, places where the cold is a refuge, not an enemy.

Of course, such environments can still be challenging for humanity, so I created a nonhuman race - the Glaciads - to live there.  With that decision came a few nonhuman mores and social structure, not enough to render them truly alien, but to separate them from humanity.  The choice to give the main character a daughter was a bit of a whim, but it turned out to be integral to the resolution.

As to the lost god ... you'll have to read the story and find out.

Anatomy of an Idea: Waterways

My story Waterways was recently published in Storyhack, Issue 6, available here.  The catalyst of the story is a sacred pool that bestows upon the people the skills of ancestors.  When the city is conquered, the youngest of those who were immersed in the pool have no opportunity to train and hone their abilities.  The result?  A truly random skill set.

In the brainstorming phases for the story, I decided to choose the skills quite literally at random, so I went for an old resource:  GURPS Compendium.  GURPS is the Generic Universal RolePlaying System, a detail-heavy roleplaying system that is designed to encompass everything from space cowboys to time travelers to high fantasy.  It has its flaws, but having that exhaustive skill list was perfect purposes.  I rolled randomly to pick a page, then a column, then a specific entry.  I had to discard some results, of course, as I couldn't really work Starship Navigation into my story ...

So I ended up with a list of skills for each of the secondary characters that were a deliberate mismatch.  I then had the fun of working these skills into the plot without shoehorning the characters into far-fetched situations.  It was particularly fun because my narrator was the new girl in this group, so some of those skills came out of nowhere.

This is not the first place where I've used deliberate randomness to generate a character, but I really enjoyed using the conceit of the pool to justify the strange combinations.  It let me range more widely.  Who knows, maybe I'll return to this city and setting with another skillset gone wrong.

Goodreads Review: Shades of Milk and Honey - by Mary Robinette Kowal

Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In a setting that pays homage to Jane Austen, young women of quality weave glamour, the delicate powers of illusion. This is the gift of the plain narrator, her only hope at finding a husband ... though she often finds herself in the shadow of her beautiful sister Melody. This is a beautiful book, deliberately written and both intricate and sparse. The lean prose carries the atmosphere perfectly, while leaving enough room for the reader to picture even those things not described. For instance, there's never any indication what Mr. Dunkirk, the love interest, even looks like. (I thought this was a particularly odd omission, but let that pass.)

The plot is strong and well paced, though I felt some of the antagonist's actions came unraveled near the end, and a few ends were left loose - such as the fate of Beth - that I would have rather seen tied up. Sometimes, the plot twists were predictable because of the faithfulness to the specific style of story, but to be honest, I'm not sure whether that detracts or adds to the appeal. Overall, it's a delightful read.

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Wednesday Wanderings

So I've just started submissions on a story entitled "Different Drummer," and I know - I just know - that this one is going to give me trouble with editors.  It was written for a challenge to write about a character who isn't a hero, which I interpreted as someone who has neither the talent nor the inclination for adventure ... but since he's well-meaning, with a good heart, his actions end up having consequences that propel the story along.  It was a fine balance to walk, to make him resistant to heroics without making him passive.  

I think I achieved that, and I'm very satisfied with the story overall, but it's not a popular way to shape a narrative.  Editors have little patience for characters who don't know what they want.  To me, though, that's sometimes the appeal of a short story:  it's possible to encapsulate that discovery of self, that flash of understanding, of realizing what path one needs to take, within those few pages - in a way that would be tired and overly drawn out in a novel.

Wednesday Wanderings

Like many others, I've been sucked into the phenomenon that is Stranger Things.  Not everyone is a fan, and I've heard complaints both from people who find the horror elements dull and would rather just watch the kids interact, and people who are sick of the budding young love and want the plot to get a move on.  For me, it is the intersection of the two that makes the show tick ...

(It's been over a month since S3 aired, so possible spoilers implicit, certainly for the first two seasons.)

The setting certainly isn't particularly unique, a mashup of familiar horror and urban fantasy tropes.  (The psionic children imprisoned and experimented upon is a prime example of the latter.)  The broad strokes are well-worn enough that even I, who doesn't read or even watch horror, recognize them.  Some of the small details are rather clever and intriguing, especially in the visual design arena.  I was charmed by the life cycle of the baby demogorgon in S2.

I'm not even that charmed by the '80s setting.  I think I'm just a bit too young to really remember much of it, and since I was homeschooled, I didn't have a lot of the context the central characters do, anyhow.  (Though there are a few things that I recognize here and there.)  What I do appreciate as a worldbuilder, however, is how immersive this setting is.  It bolsters and strengthens the supernatural aspects. 

As an aside, I was pretty shocked by the newspaper office in S3.  Wait, are you sure this isn't the '50s?

The strength of Stranger Things is the characters, taking familiar stereotypes - the king of high school, the prim older sister, the obnoxious journalist - and turning them on their ear.  Each of these stereotypes has a stereotypical arc, an expected direction, and it's very satisfying to see them turn over, revealing another side.  The reveal about Robin near the end of the season is another great example.

It's that subversion of the expected character which makes the standard setting so effective.  Introduce an unfamiliar or unexpected setting, character and plot all at once, and the viewer / reader becomes unmoored.  There is no context, nothing to compare and contrast.  We all need some grounding in the familiar to appreciate the unfamiliar.

I also appreciate that the series has been able to build genuine suspense without knocking off main characters.  (Game of Thrones, I'm looking at you.)  This is probably much to account for by the decisions in the first season:  if you watched it without any spoilers, you spent most of the season guessing about Will, and they made the good choice *not* to let Barbara off the hook.  If she had come back, we wouldn't have trusted any death.  Not even a certain one in this most recent season ...

Idea Anatomy

I've had two stories published lately, Traveling By Starlight:  A Journey of Two Ways, and Before Their Time, and I wanted to talk about where the ideas came from.  Since the respective magazines are both for-purchase, and Outposts of Beyond - where the latter story can be found - is in print and it would take a few days to get to you, I'll keep this post spoiler-free.

So Traveling By Starlight:  A Journey of Two Ways was originally written for a fantasy-writers.org monthly challenge.  The prompt was one I suggested, to write a story with alternate endings, so of course I felt obliged to jump in.  Just because I'm me, I always feel obliged to add an additional challenge.  In this case, I wanted to design the endings so they changed elements of the preceding story.  That meant including details which could be interpreted in two different ways ... and led to me Googling "foods aliens eat."  Which wasn't terribly helpful.

Before Their Time was also written from a prompt on a different site, though I no longer remember what it was.  I'm sure, though, that I interpreted it in the most convoluted way possible.  The story follows a time mage and her bodyguard who travel back in time to find the cure for a plague and end up in the wrong era.  I took a bit to mull over what kind of magic her companion specialized in, settling on fire and light.  Flame is perhaps a cliche choice for a battle mage, but the possibilities of light gave me some more unusual options.

I had so much fun with these characters, I went on to write other stories about them.  In grand tradition of time travel, I wrote them out of sequence, everything from the moment they met to later adventures.  I made a point of establishing the two as firm friends with no sexual tension; one or the other is usually in a relationship.  I also set up some of the rules of time travel, including the fact that any time spent in the past is "lost" - a week in the past becomes a week in the future - and that the future can't be changed, or the consequences could unmake the world ... or is that true?

Hopefully, more of these tales will see print.

Wednesday Wanderings

So I've been working on the query and synopsis for Unnatural Causes, which I've asked a few folks to read and critique, and that's made me realize that one of my natural tendencies as a person causes problems when it comes to my writing.

I've mentioned before on this blog that, while some people label with words or visuals - for instance, "my house" or visualizing that building - I tend to store and access information by feel.  My memory hooks are visceral.

How that plays into my writing is that I often have a clear sense of character behavior, plot arc, or story mood, and can maintain it consistently throughout.  This serves me in good stead when I'm editing, too, as even if I can't put my finger on why I should change something, I can feel that it's necessary and it works. 

Ask me to describe what I've created, though, and I dissolve into gibbering.  It's not a matter of distilling thousands of words into a few; it's a matter of translating a physical murmur into a completely different language.  It's one of the things, I think, that makes me particularly frustrated by the querying process.  Many of the tools I use for writing stories are useless for queries.  So why should one depend on the other?

Familiar complaints for any writer, of course.  I can take some consolation in knowing a source of difficulty for me personally, though.  ... some.

Traveling By Starlight: A Journey of Two Ways ... now available!

It's out!  The Summer issue of The Colored Lens is now available, containing my "Traveling By Starlight:  A Journey of Two Ways."  Check it out.

This story involves alternate endings.  Watch closely ...

Wednesday Wanderings

I recently watched the Amazon Prime series Good Omens, an adaptation of the brilliantly funny book by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.  I very much enjoyed it, but I felt as if it would be much less enjoyable if I weren't familiar with the book.  It is very faithful, even to the point of sometimes missing some of the advantages of television translation.

For instance, I think the series would have been stronger if they had removed the "God" narration and interwoven scenes to fill in the same information with less voice-over info-dump and more character interaction.  Some of the jokes probably would have been lost, but others could have been placed into the mouths of characters and been the better for timing and facial expression.  This might have required some change in the beats and pacing, but making the series an episode longer wouldn't have outlived its welcome.

I would also have loved to see a bit more of the Four Horsemen, though I know that none of their scenes advanced the plot as such.  It would have strengthened the scene where they faced off with the four children (which could have played out a little longer).  I also feel as if there might have been a way to  better integrate Shadwell's presence.  It was kooky even in the novel, but in the TV series, it feels somewhat off-sides and random, not fully part of the main narrative.

The show also may represent a taxing entry point for a mainstream viewer, someone who doesn't have the suspension of disbelief required by regular SF/F consumption.  That bit, though, I wouldn't change in the slightest.  Good Omens is delightfully wacky, and diluting that craziness would have been a crime.

Wednesday Wanderings

It's no secret that I have problems with brevity.  The sweet spot lengthwise for short stories, for me, is usually between six to eight thousand words, over the word count limit for many markets.  I do well with flash fiction, but that's a different way of thinking.  If anything, I expand one liners into a story.  Jokes where the punchline isn't necessarily funny.

If I want to keep a short story in a more limited word count, I have a specific strategy.  I conceptualize around a single scene:  one point of view, a specific unit of time and either the same setting or a continuous progression - for instance, someone walking around a city.  If I narrow my focus to that range, I find it much easier to kept the story succinct.

Not to say that it always works.  Occasionally, I've formed the broad outlines of a tale, only to find that it spins deeper and wider, even within that snapshot of a moment.  My brain thinks in big tangents and tangles, and I can't always rein them in ... at least not and end up with a complete story.

Wednesday Wanderings

I've been debating if I want to start writing a new short story, to flex those muscles while I'm working up to my next novel project.  From a business standpoint, I'm not sure if it makes sense; I currently have a sizable backlog of unsold stories, and the markets seem to be closed more often, overbooked, on indefinite hiatus, or running brief submissions periods throughout the year.  On the other hand, I'm in a headspace right now where a bit of "play" might be welcome.

So here are some tidbits I've been tossing around:

Two women whose minds are trapped in the same body return to seek revenge on the monarch who banished them.  This whole one-body-many-minds trope is something of an obsession of mine; I've approached it numerous times from different angles.  My retired novel Journal of the Dead used the concept that whenever someone killed another person, the victim's mind leapt into their body.

Listening to the Sophie Ellis-Bextor song "The Walls Keep Saying Your Name," I thought about taking this literally.  There are two ways this could go; they're mutually exclusive, but I could always write both takes.  The first is a woman who can speak to residences, shops, any building, but the walls have no sense of time:  they may speak from the perspective of the present, or the past, or even the distant future.  The second is a city of sentient buildings, bound together in a hive mind.

And not so much a concept as two little sparks bouncing around, courtesy of the stock-needed whiteboard at work:  red dragon and rice wine vinegar.

End of a Chapter

Yesterday, I finished my final editing pass on Unnatural Causes, my fantasy novel.  Just a few days ago, a memory came up in my Facebook feed announcing I had finished the first draft ... four years ago.  There's been a lot of water under the bridge in that time, and as far as the book, multiple passes and a beta read.  I wasn't planning on doing this final pass, but after an illuminating edit on a short story, I felt I had some new tools for tightening my prose.  I also wanted to smooth out any rough edges on the new material I added on the advice of (wonderful, lovely, sagely wise) beta readers.

This was actually my first time having beta readers for the whole book (though I've had people critique sections before), and I thought I would be a lot more nervous than I was.  Not to say I was chill, but something about considering the book as a whole was much easier for me.  I think Unnatural Causes is a much stronger book for their comments.

The first draft was 86 thousand words - shorter than I wanted, putting me in the unusual position of wanting to add content, and more particularly *not* to cut words.  This is much of why I ended up doing the final pass.  I typically write in an exceedingly verbose fashion and end up trimming quite a bit.  Since the original low word count of this novel discouraged cutting, I didn't do much of it until that point.\

Next step is the torture of the query letter and synopsis, and then ... Unnatural Causes is off to see if my next victim is an unsuspecting agent.

GoodReads Review: The Dragon's Touchstone - by Irene Radford

The Dragon's Touchstone by Irene Radford
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

War dominates Coronnan, trampling the common folk under the feet of its lords, and fueled by the service of Battlemages. Racked by grief and guilt after he is forced to slay a former student in combat, Battlemage Nimbulan sets out to find a better way (with middling success until it drops into his lap - more on that later). The secondary protagonist, Myrilandel, is a witchwoman with amnesia, tossed into events by her need to heal and a mysterious compulsion.

This book is dated in many of the ways you would expect, and it hasn't aged well. There's a lot of reliance on fate, prophecy and - as just mentioned - inexplicable forces nudging the characters along. Myrilandel in particular doesn't seem to have much agency or motivation of her own; she just obeys the plot machine, thinly disguised as voices in her head. When she finally discovers the reason she was being compelled, it solves much of the story's problems, but it feels too convenient.

There follows, in the last pages of the book, a fast succession of revelations that feel as if they came out of nowhere. These come across as mysteries I should have been able to solve, but wasn't given enough evidence for. Maybe it wouldn't if I had read the "first" series (this is the beginning of a prequel series), but coming at it as a new reader, I was nonplussed by a lot of it.

There are some enjoyable aspects to this book. The state of the kingdom is nicely drawn, and many of the background events and the motivation of secondary characters feels grounded and realistic. The attitude towards sex, in particular, is refreshing in its pragmatism. In a lot of ways, I liked the movement of secondary characters such as Quinnalt and Kalen better than the main narrative. Apart from the grand forces that give this book its main arc, so much of what shapes the individual scenes is human pettiness and the smallness of fear, greed and jealousy. Those are the most compelling parts of The Dragon's Touchstone.

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Wednesday Wanderings

 Brace yourselves:  like so many others, I'm going to talk about Game of Thrones (the show) - the most recent episode and beyond into this final season.

People have complained that after all the buildup about the Night King and the armies of the dead, he was defeated in a single episode.  I don't have a problem with this or feel it was anticlimactic.  The buildup to this most recent episode made it clear that there was no retreat.  Lose one battle, and the armies of the dead would swell past the point of no return.  As in the greater game of thrones, you win or you die.

Could they have the battle multiple episodes?  I don't think so, for two reasons.  First of all, it's only possible to maintain that kind of intense tension for so long before the viewer becomes fatigued.  The viewer becomes worn out, even bored, and future moments lose their impact.  Second, an episode break would have killed the momentum.

What did bother me in the episode was Theon's death.  Not the fact of it, but the manner.  Sacrificing himself was fitting to his arc, but I would have preferred if there was some kind of combat between him and the Night King / his lieutenants.  That specific choice have at least bought time.  As it was, it seemed meaningless; he delayed the Night King only long enough for that notable to wipe blood off his weapon.

So who sits on the Iron Throne at the end of this?  I hope ... it's not who we expect.  Tyrion, perhaps - his intellect would make him a formidable king.  (And if we put stock in certain glimmers, with Sansa by his side?)  Perhaps Gendry will seize the day.  Or in the tradition of war not determining who is right, but rather who is left, what if Jaime is left to rise above his family's twisted legacy?

Or picture this:  next episode, Daenerys announces her intention to march on Cersei.  Arya's all, "I just have to go do a thing."  Dany arrives, demands an audience with the queen, who ... pulls off her own face to reveal everyone's favorite assassin.  Story's over, folks, two whole episodes of follow-up and epilogue. 

You might detect from the thread of these musings that I'm not that fond of Jon Snow.  I don't dislike him, but as a character, he's such a bundle of well-worn tropes:  honorable to a fault, plain spoken, doesn't like politics, illegitimate son who turns out to be heir to the throne ... he's very much the expected winner of this saga, and that's a good part of why I hope it turns out otherwise.  Game of Thrones has succeeded in part by (sometimes) taking the unexpected turn.  Let's not end on the oldest plot in the book.

Wednesday Wanderings

So as I continue to do planning for my next novel, I've come to realize I will probably need to build a glossary for both point of view characters.  The magic system involves synesthesia, and both characters are magic-users.  Their forms of synesthesia, however, are very different, which means that given the same scene, both would perceive it with unique aspects.  That said, synesthesia is consistent within the individual, which means that to save my sanity, I have to keep track of the links I create without constantly having to search back through the manuscript.  I also have a couple other magic using characters in the storyline, which may mean making notes on how they "see" (or otherwise) things.

I am planning to have a few conversations revolving around the narrators seeing another character through different lenses.  I also might make a point of describing a significant landmark or two, but I haven't decided yet.  Certainly I want to make sure that I do pay attention to the synesthesia and not just brush it off as an intermittent special effect, and I think setting up a glossary will help keep me focused.

Story sale!

I've just sold my fantasy story "Waterways" (which has a particularly entertaining backstory that I'll share ... some day) to StoryHack Action and Adventure, due out in Issue #6 (probably near the end of the year).

Wednesday Wanderings

Happy (slightly belated) book birthday to Scylla and Charybdis!  My sprawling, epic science fiction novel came out in April of 2018.  It garnered some lovely reviews, and I'm still terribly proud of it ... especially as I never thought of scifi as my wheelhouse.  It was a book I didn't really want to write at first:  it started as a short story which editors kept saying needed to be a novel, and oh, I fought that.  I also never expected, when I started writing, how important the homebase of the story would be.  When I started writing Scylla and Charybdis (as a book), I envisioned it as a milieu novel, an exploration of a universe undertaken by an outsider.  But as I wrote the opening sequences, I realized how important Anaea's home was to her, and how it would inform the whole rest of the story.

So much happened in the writing of that book I never pictured.  I had no idea the character of Flick would pop into existence, all but fully formed from the first sentences.  I didn't realize how deeply I would end up delving into the politics of the warlords and the matriarchs.  I didn't know where Anaea would finally find her place, only that we would discover it together.