davidrslayton

Historical Mysteries Out Among the Stars

2012-01-12T22:11:00.000-08:00

Big ideas are the foundation of a great Science Fiction story. Where fantasy enchants, science fiction inspires. I know I’ve enjoyed the read when I put down a Sci Fi book and find my brain spinning as I ponder the implication of a technology or social development.

Science Fiction isn’t an easy sell these days. Most agents won’t touch it and few publishers show interest. In a time when fantasy is thriving, largely due to the urban, Science Fiction is languishing. I suspect that a large part of the issue is that Sci Fi is often inaccessible. It isn’t easy on the brain, and stories based on science can be dull.

A good science fiction story needs neither aliens nor lasers (look at Battlestar Galactica) to work. Not that I’m opposed to aliens and lasers. I am after all, a devoted Farscape fan who never got over its cancellation, but it’s depth I’m seeking in a good science fiction novel. I want that feeling of my brain spinning, of big ideas looming on the horizon, and of course I want to be entertained.

Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict novels give me all of these things in a slick package. Alex isn’t the most highly regarded guy around: an antique dealer accused of damaging historical sites, he’s nevertheless very good at his profession. McDevitt made a good turn when he switched the point of view in the books from Alex to his partner Chase. She’s a more dynamic character and being out of the loop of Alex’s brilliant insights, is more relatable for the reader.

McDevitt places a juicy mystery at the heart of each novel, and it’s usually something Alex and Chase stumble into on their way to something else. The reveal is always bigger than life, though the victory is occasionally bittersweet.
My original intent in reading this series was to read one, review it, then read another; but I became so entranced that I ripped through the series in a couple of weeks.

I enjoyed Polaris, but find that the books get better with time.* Seeker, with its discussion of the role of history in contemporary life, captivated me. McDevitt seasons the plot with questions on government and politics. The place of religion in a cosmos where man has spread out among the stars is a major theme in all of the books, particular in Firebird, but I think my favorite so far has been the Devil’s Eye. It has everything I love in Science Fiction: the big idea, a terrible secret buried by authority, remote stellar outposts, and even an appearance by McDevitt’s one alien species, the telepathic mutes. The Devil’s Eye delves into the tensions we all face with our governments and our place in things. All of the books use quotes to start new chapters, usually these are from future books McDevitt has created. The Devil’s Eye draws heavily on a series of horror novels, and McDevitt uses them to inject some commentary on the art of writing into things.

*There’s a point I’d like to make on this, which is that mid-list authors are struggling these days. A lack of high sales is pushing a lot of writers out of writing and it’s unfortunate. McDevitt is a perfect example of a talent that needed time to mature, and he’s a great example of tenacity too.

Faith and Fantasy: Why You Should Read the Curse of Chalion

2012-01-02T13:58:00.000-08:00

I was raised with a strict ban on magic, during the 80s when people thought playing Dungeons and Dragons might cause you to kill yourself. Mike Warnke’s the Satan Seller was required reading in our house, and there lurked this terrible fear that Satanists and witches lurked around every corner, ready to maim or kill you. But by banning fantasy, my mother deprived us of a mirror that might have helped us think about good versus evil and our relationship to religion. Fantasy can open the mind, and theology, as it often arises in fantasy, can lead to deep discussions on the nature of faith.

It’s easy to ascribe a coincidence to divine intervention. You think of someone you haven’t seen for a while and run into them the next day, or the person you sit next to on a plane turns out to have been in your high school class. Coincidences often demonstrate that the world is truly a little place.

In fiction coincidences are common by necessity. A good plot relies on chance encounters, connections and events driven by nothing more than the need for them to happen. Connecting plot elements through coincidence can reduce the number of extra characters and help keep the reader interested.

In the Curse of Chalion, coincidence reflects the will of the gods and their limited ability to affect the actions of mankind. I’m going to try and discuss Lois McMaster Bujold’s technique without spoiling too much, but it may not be possible to avoid giving some key elements away. Bujold’s theology holds a logical depth that goes far behind the simplistic deus ex machina employed in so many stories. The gods struggle with their own goals, which might coincide with the goals of man, but in Chalion, the gods simply cannot work upon the world. They are barred by man’s free will. To effect a change upon the world, they must find an agent who’s willing to cast their own will aside. Most often this takes the form of characters who’ve been driven far beyond their limits. Their broken nature leaves them open to the gods’ use.

The Curse of Chalion ignores many of the typical fantasy devices: there are few action scenes or swordfights. Bujold could have chosen to tell the story of the handsome young prince new to his throne, or she could have focused on the Royess Iselle, a fascinating character who despite the limitations placed on her power by her gender, is a powerful young woman who finds ways of succeeding inside those limitations. Instead Bujold chooses for her protagonist Caz, a broken man in his thirties who’s middle-aged in his society. He arrives on the scene irrevocably changed by unfortunate circumstance, unable to lift pen or sword, poor and unrecognizable to even those few nobles who might remember him. From there Bujold weaves Caz into the politics of his day. Caz finds himself caring about more than mere survival again as his spirit heals from his terrible ordeals. Yet it’s not long before he’s once again pushed past his limits, and in that space, the broken man takes actions he never would have considered before.

The Curse of Chalion is a thoughtful fantasy, the sort of story that you ponder long after the book is closed. I put it down and immediately wanted to read more theology and philosophy.

The Magic in the Mundane: A Home at the End of the World

2011-12-16T22:22:00.000-08:00

Genre fiction offers escape, entertainment, and release from the boring. Reading it, we spend time with vampires and witches, sexy wizards, and complex villains. Genre fiction is often bigger than life, with an almost comic book feel. Regular life, and literary fiction, don’t usually involve the fate of the world.

Instead, the best literary books amplify. They hold a lens up to simple, common experiences, and if written well, encourage us to see them in another light. A good book can take a cliché event, polish it off, and find a new facet we haven’t seen before. That facet, often something universal, strikes a chord with us because it reflects our own lives and experiences.

Michael Cunningham’s a Home at the End of the World is such a book. Transformative, it’s a book that revels in events that could be sentimental but resists painting them with those colors. Four points of view cross and overlap at just the right intervals. Big events in the characters’ lives often occur off screen, between points of view that highlight more important, more intimate moments. What shapes these characters isn’t the death of a parent, at least not by the end. Rather, they grow through the tiniest bit of personal introspection and struggle to explain this to one another.

At its core a Home at the End of the World is dealing with a particular existential malady, one we all feel: the sense that we’re waiting for our lives to start, even as life passes us by. Yet it doesn’t try to remedy this feeling. The characters move through the decades without a resolution until the very end, when Cunningham conjures an ending for them that perfectly reflects much earlier moments while showing us that the characters have truly found a change in their internal landscape.

I read a lot of good books. A Home at the End of the World is a truly great one.

Failing to Fall in Love or "Just How Timelagged Are You?"

2011-12-11T11:14:00.001-08:00

We all love certain books a bit more than others. They might not be bestsellers, or they might be critically acclaimed, but we think of them as ours, like no one else knows they even exist.

My ex used to carry a copy of Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog around almost constantly. His copy was dog-eared and worn, yet he'd faithfully re-read it, annually. For perhaps that reason, like I felt that I'd be trespassing on his devotion, I didn't read the book until now.

What I found was a novel of comic misadventure and wonderful misdirection as two time travelers stumble about the Victorian era, trying to find a hideous piece of sculpture whose whereabouts are responsible for a possible melting of the continuum. No pressure. And yet, the contemporary Victorian characters, completely oblivious to the situation, thwart the travelers through all their eccentric meandering.

The book satisfied, particularly at the denouement. Pets, who I think don't get enough presence in fiction, are a large part of it all. Mysteries compound and resolve. As much as I enjoyed the story, I didn't love the book. I can analyze it to death: the tension took a bit too long. I was never as caught up in the circumstances as I wanted to be. Willis' characters are clever. The end really wrapped it all up nicely. I think this is what agents mean when they reject a manuscript with the confusing statement "I just didn't fall in love."

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a good book, one I'm glad I finally read. Yet it definitely didn't inspire in me the devotion it does in Brian. Conversely, I know that trying to explain my love of Gail Carriger or Margaret Atwood and convince people to read their books doesn't always go very well.

What drives us to fall in love with a book? What makes a book so important to one person but completely passable to another? I don't think there's a good answer, which is what makes that agent response so frustrating to the aspiring author. It's as an ineffable quality as what makes us love a person. Sometimes, to the outside observer, it's something only we can see.

Safe Flying, Anne McCaffrey

2011-12-04T08:22:00.000-08:00

Time flying, chronal refugees, eugenics, lost and found heirs to great houses, sexual politics, and of course, dragons. These were all elements of the Dragonriders of Pern, Anne McCaffrey’s wonderful series.

In the eighties science fiction and fantasy were dominated by women: McCaffrey’s books stood beside those of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mercedes Lackey, Andre Norton, C.J. Cherryh, Melanie Rawn, and Margaret Weiss (though I must fairly mention Tracy Hickman). Many of these writers discarded the tired retread of Tolkien’s conventions and mashed Sci-fi into their fantasy creations. Pern was such a world.

I haven’t been to Pern in a while, though I can picture the covers in my mind as though I were still a kid browsing my local Waldenbooks. I found out today McCaffrey had died at the age of 85. She had a long run, a long life, which I’d hope for anyone. She was a prolific author with a decorous career.

Safe flying, Anne. We’ll miss you. Thank you for the stories.

A Mirror Too Dark?

2011-11-24T20:28:00.000-08:00

I wasn’t too kind to Richard K. Morgan’s the Steel Remains when I read it, and yet I found myself eager for its sequel, the Cold Commands. What happened? The initial shock of Morgan’s brutal world wore off, and I saw past my expectations for his protagonists. I say protagonists, and not heroes, because there is often little about these characters that’s heroic. They don’t stride victoriously through Morgan’s world. They survive it, and what that takes out of them makes them often highly unlikeable people.

Morgan’s trio are war heroes who’ve seen better days. As in the first book, their separate plot lines eventually converge. Along the way the world gets built up from the foundations laid in the first volume. We learn history at the hands of a sentient, sarcastic, and possibly disingenuous machine. There’s raw sex and enough adult language to make the writers of Deadwood sit up and take notice. The gods multiply, remain enigmatic, and perplex with their deus ex machina intervention. Magic is madness-inducing, or possibly just madness on the part of its wielder; and the action is fierce and bloody. Morgan knows how to turn a phrase and some of the dialogue made me chuckle out loud.

Yet as I read the Cold Commands, I often found myself asking if a protagonist needs to be likable? The main doubt for me surrounds Ringil, the swordsman whose homosexuality makes him hated where he should be famed. Early in the book, Ringil pays a slaver back by allowing her repeated gang rape at the hands of the mercenaries under his command. This choice strongly overshadowed any pity I wanted to feel for Gil. Yet I still followed his story to the end.

I’ve often thought that good fantasy should hold a mirror up to life, provide us with questions we ask ourselves, and take us down roads that we’ll never follow in reality. Compelling characters cross lines, inside themselves, outside themselves, and we watch them do this out of admiration or shock.

Gil, and his companions, cross every line imaginable. While not likeable, Morgan’s trio are more proactive than many protagonists, and it makes them compelling. They make the hard choices, bleed for it, and most definitely don’t walk away unscathed.

I suspect I’ll ponder this book for a good while, just as I pondered its predecessor, and about the time third volume is ready for purchase, I’ll be ready for it.

In Keeping With the Theme of Birds: The Engines of a Story

2011-11-17T21:55:00.001-08:00

I recently finished Gordon Dahlquist’s the Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, and while I felt like it took a while for things to get moving, I was struck by the fundamental sense of change overcoming the protagonists.

Dahlquist is using three main characters. They overlap, interact, and separate. By volume two’s midpoint, I realize that what’s compelling me to keep reading is that the characters are changing. This far in, they aren’t who they started as, and the story isn’t leaving them any choice in the matter.

It’s led me to ponder that change is the engine of a story. In fantasy, the change is usually portrayed as a journey, the door that opens, the answered call to a quest. Home is left behind or outright destroyed.

Baby characters get a violent kick out of the nest of their comfort zone. That’s certainly where Dahlquist’s heroine, Miss Celeste Temple, starts. Her engagement to one Roger Bascombe ends without explanation, and with a determined behavior we’d call stalking in our century, she sets off to track down his unstated reason. Where this investigation takes her is far past the point of safe, into a world of intrigue and danger, where a powerful cabal threatens to upend Victorian society.

And all through it, Celeste and her compatriots change. When traumatized by her adventures, Celeste’s reaction isn’t to linger overly long about it. She reacts. She researches. She gets back into motion to discern exactly what it is she has uncovered. What occurred left a mark on her.

It seems like such a simple thing: but in fiction, characters can change so much more readily than we can in real life. You hear people say “he’s changed,” but how often is it true? Time and life can certainly make a difference in people, and definitely alter our perception or understanding of a person; but actual change doesn’t come naturally. In fiction, it’s entirely possible that a character become someone different. The story drives them to it, forces it on them. That’s the power and effect of fiction: something is possible that isn’t easy in real life.

When is a Beginning not a Beginning?

2011-11-15T19:53:00.000-08:00

You’re at a party. The hostess wants to tell you a story, but while the anecdote itself has a stellar punch line, she insists upon giving you a lot of tangential detail as set up. The story itself would have been funny, but by the time it really starts, you’re distracted. Why did she mention the pony if the pony doesn’t play a part?

A beginning is not a beginning when it feels like one for the reader and not the character. Put another way, if there’s going to be a pony, it really needs to matter.

I’ve always felt that a high fantasy writer has a bit more work to do than one writing urban fantasy: we’ve got to weave it all from whole cloth. Both writers have a particular challenge in that they must begin and explain without looking like they’re instructing you.

And I think this is why fantasy queries to agents fail so often: an elevator pitch is damn hard if the world intrudes upon the hook too much. Airships and dragons are familiar concepts. We can face those without too much explanation, but if gravity doesn’t work the same and the sky is pink, we’re going to need a little more to work with. So the world must intrude, and do you see where I’m going with this: balance, balance, balance…

That said, make no mistake, backstory can be the bane of any novel, and the amount of it required to get the story started is directly proportional to the risk of losing the reader’s interest.

The story should start when the hostess’ anecdote is getting good, not during the preamble. That’s when the tale starts for the character.

There’s always a door that’s not to be opened...

2011-10-19T16:26:00.000-07:00

There’s always a door that’s not to be opened.
A thing you promised you would not do.
A warning, unheeded, instinct ignored.
The person you said you wouldn’t become.
Not quite seen,
Chasing after you.

With autumn and the first snow looming over Colorado, I’m reading the Shining with a couple of friends. It’s my first exposure to Stephen King’s fiction, and I find myself looking over my shoulder and double checking the locks on the doors at night as he builds to the inevitable thing that’s coming for his characters.

I see now why King is considered a master of suspense: the three characters, a tight little family, struggle with their personal demons or limitations in the narrowing window of a looming external threat. What might be strengths in the outer world are turned against each character as they’re isolated and marooned amidst the deep mountain snowfields. Each is given multiple warnings as the plot advances, multiple hints that their course is unsafe, and each fails to heed the voice telling them not to go.

The son, Danny, has the strongest voice. Five years old, precocious and psychically gifted, he can’t read the warning signs as they’re presented to him. His age limits his vocabulary and understanding, preventing him from being able to communicate his dread or help his parents. Wendy, the mother, is haunted by the specter of her own hideous mother, and the fear of that woman overrides Wendy’s maternity and instinct for self-preservation. Jack, the father, a writer reminds me of the dark cave in the Empire Strikes Back: the demons he finds in the Overlook Hotel are the ones he brought with him, packed tight in the spacious hallways with his wife and son.

Bluebeard comes up more than once, and the reference is more than passing. There’s more than one door in the Overlook that should not be opened, whether it’s the hotel’s past, revealed in a morbid scrapbook Jack digs out of the hellish basement, the inner door to Danny’s burgeoning psychic powers in his own mind, or locked door to room 217: in which the question of whether the unreal things in the Overlook can truly harm you or not is answered.

King’s talent lies in a twisted form of magical realism where the mundane, and everyday things, can be deadly. I’ve never seen a better transformation of a simple thing, an old-fashioned fire hose, into something to fear. But this too, like Bluebeard’s tale, is something we can all remember when we were Danny’s age: things in the shadows that might be a lurking devil face. An item we first mistook for one thing that proved to be another. In reality, we always find the face was just a shirt hung to dry. In the Shining, it’s quite likely not a shirt at all. And that chill you felt, that sense that you can be hurt by something that first appeared quite innocuous? You should have listened to your instincts.

Saving the World One Parasol at a Time

2011-10-18T15:53:00.001-07:00

I took a long road to my Lit degree: four schools in two states over fifteen years to be exact. While I earned my History degree somewhere inside that, I never felt like I’d finished my undergraduate schooling until the Literature degree was in my hand.

Every school attended found a reason to consider my knowledge of British Literature inadequate. In the end I completed six Brit Lit and two Brit Drama courses. I am well acquainted with Austen, Donne, Shakespeare, Marvel, and many others.

Reading Gail Carriger’s Alexia Taraboti novels takes me back to my Brit Lit immersion. I laugh out loud as she weds comedies of manners and paranormal romance with bits of steampunk window dressing and snappy dialogue.

Alexia is an outcast in Victorian society: half Italian, too big, and a spinster at twenty-five. Soulless, the first book, starts in media res with a vampire slaying whose silent victim is a treacle tart the voracious Alexia had been eyeing.

While the romance elements in the first book dive into the sexual (an essential component of paranormal romance), they are a culmination after a novel’s worth of awkward flirting which isn’t recognized as flirting for a long while.

My favorite element is the language: Carriger captures the Victorian overspeak and neatly weaves in facts I’d forgotten, like novels being considered lowbrow, popular, entertainment. Soulless has a bit of a mystery to its plot, as the vampire Alexia dispatches is neither registered nor part of the regular, well-dressed supernatural community permeating and ruling London society. Soulless is a satisfying read.

While I felt like Changeless, the second book, loses some of the first’s steam in a journey to Scotland, it does introduce an excellent new character and delves nicely into Alexia’s nature. More mysteries are set up, some of which aren’t resolved until the end of the fourth book, Heartless.

The third book, Blameless, continues the second’s book travel theme. Alexia flees to Italy, getting deeper into her own history and that of her rakish father. The chase, adventure, and conflict resolution is quite satisfying.

Fourth, and as strong as the first in my opinion, is Heartless. Several long boiling mysteries come to fruition. Alexia has physical challenges to her goals of protecting kin and country that I’d rather not spoil; but she manages it with the intensely pragmatic nature of the Soulless.

The series has me hooked, and I’m quite ready for the fifth, which is out next year. If you’re looking for a charming read with quick wit and a fun take on the tired paranormal tropes of vampires and werewolves, bring a cup of tea, take a seat, and spend some time in the world of the Soulless.

Bone Shake, Rattle and Roll

2011-09-02T17:06:00.001-07:00

When her son takes off into the ruins of Civil War Seattle, Briar Wilkes packs up her father’s rifle, her gasmask, and her polarized goggles to go in search of the boy. But Seattle is walled off for a reason. A disaster brought the city low, infesting it with poison gas and the walking dead, a disaster caused by the husband Briar left for dead sixteen years ago. To get her son back, she’ll face all that and the specter of her past: a specter in the form of a man claiming to be her dead husband.

There’s an elegance in two points of view that tangle, overlap, and eventually converge. When it’s done correctly, you jump from train to train with a building sense that the two will soon collide. You wait with baited breath at every near miss. When the two finally come together, it feels organic, natural, and often explosive.

Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest, isn’t just a great steampunk read: it’s a well-oiled machine. Priest locks down every bolt as Briar and her son, Zeke, slide towards the conclusion. Secrets get dosed out in just the right amount, and Priest brings her alternate history alive without burying you in exposition or description. The first chapter, a little light on action and a bit heavy no backstory, get the necessities out of the way. From there Boneshaker hums along. We follow Briar’s desperate search for Zeke even as we’re treated to his perspective as he foolishly enters the ruined city. Priest slows things just right at the end, and the conclusion holds a few more surprises while feeling altogether natural.

Multiple Masks: Hero, by Perry Moore

2011-07-30T08:44:00.000-07:00

Thom Creed is keeping two secrets from his father, and it’s a toss up on which one’s revelation will cause the most disappointment: Thom is gay, and he has superpowers. His father’s past as a masked crime fighter is responsible for one being a problem, his desire for a family legacy, the other. Yet Thom can’t help either fact. When an aborted runaway attempt brings him to the attention of the League, the world’s premier superhero team, Thom is soon juggling his own dreams against his father’s. Family secrets, including the cause of his mother’s disappearance will get outed, and Thom will have to choose between doing the right thing and losing his anonymity along with his father’s love.

Perry Moore’s Hero is yet another book, highly recommended, award-winning, and endorsed by no less than Stan Lee, that I’ve meant to read for a long while. I finally pulled it off the shelf this week and found myself deeply engrossed. It’s not often I finish a book, put it down, and contemplate immediately cracking it open again.

Hero draws a lot on themes of romance, being an outsider, and the search for a parent’s love and approval; but they’re given a good twist in the protagonist’s dual secrets. Moore weaves a world deeply inspired by those drawn by DC and Marvel. He lets the super-hero motif come to life with all the camp that spandex and capes imply. Moore writes frankly, imbuing Thom with honest commentary on his sexuality while perfectly capturing many awkward young adult moments. I cringed at a lot of these, because they often felt so genuine and familiar. The romance, a slow burn, is touching and difficult, as only first love can be. Thom’s need to be his own person while keeping his father’s respect is the central conflict, and it’s that issue which resonates the most.

Hero was especially hard to read knowing that Moore recently died and that we won’t be getting a follow up to Thom’s adventures or see any other great stories. I’m sad to see such a voice silenced so young and with so much potential. I will re-read Hero. It’s earned a permanent place on the shelf. This, and a strong recommendation, are the best testaments I can give.

Our Ancestors Were Us, but They Also Weren’t

2011-07-29T06:26:00.001-07:00

“The past is a foreign country.” It’s a quote many of my History professors were fond of. What they meant of course is that the culture differences between us and say, the ancient Romans, are vast. Religious practices, sexual mores, familial relationships all might see familiar, but there’s a danger in ascribing modern perspectives to people who lived thousands or hundreds of years ago.

While accepting the differences, it’s also important to remember that they had the same minds, the same capacity for belief and treachery, love, and betrayal.

I’ve been a long time listener of Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast. It’s been a great way to remember details I’ve forgotten since my History degree and for filling in many blank spots. The audio book recommendations, couched in a plug for Audible.com, given at the start of each show have really rounded out my library. A recent fiction recommendation was the Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis, a Roman noir novel.

Marcus Didius Falco literally collides with a fresh case in the Forum. The girl he saves from a pair of thugs knows far less than the full plot, but Falco is soon protecting the lady while avoiding his landlord, an aggressive Aedile, and his overbearing mother. Despite her innocence, the girl is tangled up in a crime whose reach crosses the Roman empire.

Davis does a fun job of weaving the ancient with more modern detective conventions. Falco has a big case to solve, and the job will take him from Rome’s seedier districts to the emperor’s palace and across the sea to Britain, a place he hoped to never see again.

Written in 1989, the Silver Pigs is a bit older, but you can do far worse in a detective story. There’s a bittersweet flavor to the ending that I really enjoyed, and if I happened to learn a bit about ancient history, well, that’s just a bonus.

On Voice and Language: You say Les-tat. I say Les-tah.

2011-07-13T08:20:00.000-07:00

You know you’re a writer, or at least obsessive compulsive, when you wake up at 4 am with the thought: Did I use ‘sodden’ correctly in my Facebook wall post? Language is our biggest tool as writers. We study grammar and punctuation, knowing all the rules and following them before deciding when and where to break them. (Strict and proper comma usage is usually the first victim). But being able to spell or write a well-formed sentence doesn’t make one a good writer or create lucid prose. There’s a particular alchemy that occurs when you first write something that springs to life beneath your fingertips. Grammar provided the bones, but somehow you managed to tack on flesh and imbue the work with breath. It’s been compared to divine possession and called inspiration, but what you’ve done is feel the first stirrings of voice, the elusive, creative quality every writer seeks to find, retain, and master.

Language is the framework in which we play, and if we’re very good, we get to color outside the lines from time to time. In fantasy, there’s a strong tendency to twist language into lovely, unpronounceable forms. I’m guilty, and in all honesty, original names are one of my favorite elements of the genre. Yet at the same time, there’s a certain useful simplicity in naming your main character Will, Sally, or Brandon. Your reader isn’t thrown out of the story every time they see the name in print. Sometimes I listen to an audio book and when I see the protagonist’s name later. I can’t even recognize it, though I’ve heard it aloud a thousand times.

So what’s the answer in my opinion? It’s the answer I always give: balance. Keep it accessible. Don’t send me scurrying to the Internet to look up Old Norse phonetics unless you’re clever enough to sneak in some clues along the way. If your character has a much clearer nickname, just make that their common name. You can tell me they have some meaningful, twisty name later. You might be sacrificing some of the depth, but your reader won’t notice because they’ll be more deeply engrossed in your story.

A Hel of a Ride: Hammered by Kevin Hearne

2011-07-12T18:03:00.000-07:00

Deicide is a serious affair. If you're going to take down a god, especially one on Thor's level, you're going to need a pretty big sword and some serious cojones. Kevin Hearne's Hammered, the third book in the Iron Druid Chronicles, takes things to a whole new threat level. Atticus O'Sullivan has a couple of promises to keep, and doing so will put his very long existence in danger as both commitments involve a trip to Asgard and a confrontation with the Norse pantheon. Worse, in Asgard, he's outside the protection of his own gods and things back on earth aren't going so well as the area of Arizona under his protection suffers a vampire invasion and attack from a group of Kabbalah practitioners out for his head.

Hammered is a great ride. We get some new companions for Atticus, a cameo from a major deity, and a clever recounting of backstories in a style reminiscent of Chaucer. Putting more pieces on the board serves Hearne well, because not everyone makes it out alive. Hearne isn't afraid to raise the body count and says goodbye to some supporting cast members, a trait other urban fantasy writers could study. My only complaint is that we have to wait for the fourth book, Tricked.

Death Takes a Holiday - Torchwood: Miracle Day

2011-07-10T09:37:00.000-07:00

Death is the simplest and most obvious threat your protagonist can face, but you generally can’t kill them. In some fantasy it’s possible to get them back with magic, but first person point of view isn’t going to work so well if your main character is taking a dirt nap. (I’m very anxious to see where the Dresden Files takes this in the next volume).

It’s easy to raise the stakes in a book or movie by killing off members of the supporting cast. I have a hard time thinking of many action movies where the hero’s girlfriend survives. Family members are usually a goner the moment they walk on screen. In television, an ensemble cast is relatively safe. Headliners don’t die unless the actors are leaving. Then you get one or two fatalities as the seasons drag on. One show where you get the sense that no one is safe is Torchwood.

By the end of the third series the cast had been whittled down to two headliners and a few second tier characters. Now Torchwood is back, in a partnering between BBC and Starz. They’re certainly giving it some solid promotion. Even Denver has billboards advertising it.

Torchwood benefits from being a British series. Its seasons, or series, are shorter, meaning we don’t get stuck with a lot of padding. Conflict can remain at the forefront. Whene an American series might stick in twenty episodes to create a season, the BBC format is fine with six to thirteen.

The first episode of the new series, Miracle Day, changes the rules of life and death on us. People cease to die, regardless of their injury. Complicating things further, the immortal Jack Harkness can suddenly be hurt, indicating that the writers aren’t afraid to sacrifice even him if the story calls for it. By offing the rest of the cast from the first two seasons, Torchwood let us know that anyone can be a target. Putting Jack’s mortality in play also helps to break up one of the problems of immortal characters in television (usually vampires): the current crisis is always related to some aspect of their past. If Jack is no longer immortal then the cycle of unfinished business always coming back to bite him can end. I’m glad Torchwood is back, but I suspect the body count is going to rise again, so I’ll be holding on to my seat.

Savants Make Me Nervous

2011-07-08T17:25:00.000-07:00

I’ve never quite trusted people for whom things come too easily. Anything I’ve ever found worth doing took patience, practice, and craft. When another writer asks about my work, they aren’t asking about my leisure. Granted, the effort of writing a book is mitigated by the sense of enjoyment it gives me and the love I hold for it, but the sweat still falls. The apprenticeship doesn’t end, regardless of your success. This holds true for most things: effort and struggle are not only the rule of life, but they bring results.

This sense of reward for effort, the goal achieved after endless practice, is what makes me leery of over-powered protagonists. We’ve all seen them: the unbeatable swordsman, the uncatchable rogue or the mage who effortlessly slays demons and binds gods with his spells. Sometimes a protagonist embodies all of these types. He’s so powerful that he might as well not bother with companions. After all, he’s smarter than anyone else in the party, stronger too. Companions are only there to reflect upon how powerful and perfect he is. No matter what conflict arises, you never truly believe that the super-protagonist will be defeated, and this makes his epic journey (and it’s always epic) a terribly hard read.

When I read about an unbeatable protagonist, I never buy his backstory of poverty or struggle. He’s a savant, a natural hero destined to save the day. I put the book down, and then I think about Frodo.

Lord of the Rings kicked off our genre with a protagonist whose very people were the weakest, slightest, and least warlike in the world. Tolkien didn’t just saddle Frodo himself with some serious handicaps, but the other hobbits share them. Gandalf, the most powerful member of the Fellowship of the Ring gets his ass kicked pretty early on, letting us know the odds against Frodo’s mission to the Cracks of Doom is no cake walk.

Tolkien might have really stacked the deck against Frodo, but you do need some sense that a protagonist is truly facing a challenge. The antagonist or adversary needs to feel like a real threat. That’s the essence of conflict, and without it you’ve got a very boring book.

Into the Deep: Learning to Swim by Sara J. Henry

2011-06-27T07:00:00.000-07:00

Troy Chance thinks she knows who she is. She’s got a comfortable life, with all the right people at just the right distance. She’s safe. When an impulsive act of good sends her diving off a moving ferry in search of what might be a child thrown overboard, her previous self is washed away. Troy is soon balancing this upheaval against the mystery of the child’s abandonment, but solving it threatens to take away the catalyst of her new life.

Sara J. Henry’s Learning to Swim is just my kind of thriller: an intense opening with a mystery complex enough to keep me guessing and a thinking protagonist I can relate to. Henry gives Troy a rational mind, and even when she goes off half-cocked, there’s calculation in her actions. It makes her a nice change from main characters who act without thinking or against their better judgment.

The door Troy opens when she takes that dive changes everything. She’s soon reevaluating relationships and choices while trying to protect a discarded five-year old. The who and what of the mystery are too good for me to spoil, so I recommend just picking up the book. I couldn’t put it down, and it’s rare I find an old-fashioned page turner this intriguing.

And Then All Fell Down: This Year's Hawthorne Moon Sneak Peek

2011-06-26T07:41:00.000-07:00

An assassination costs Tris Drayke a key pillar of support for his shaky rule and a member of his family. Things in the Winter Kingdoms are getting worse, An invasion force led by a Dark Summoner had landed, and Tris must forge new alliances to save his people, throne, and the lives of his friends, wife, and child.

Gail Martin’s Fallen Kings Cycle concludes with more ancient spirits, magic, and intrigue with the Dread. Just reading the excerpt she released on twitter (@gailmartin) tells me she’s upping the stakes. Evil has the good guys on the ropes, and things seem at their bleakest before the conclusion.

If you’re new to the series, you can catch up in time, as the Dread won’t be released until February.

And when you’re ready for a teaser, click below to hear Gail read from the first chapter:

You can download this excerpt here.

Here's a video of Gail describing her sneak peek event, the Hawthorne Moon, and how you can find excerpts, giveaways, and other goodies:

Visit Gail at her site, http://www.ascendantkingdoms.com to get started.

Plot as Engine: By the Hammer of …

2011-06-18T08:05:00.001-07:00

This post is going to be pretty spoiler-ridden regarding Thor comics over the last several years.

Let’s just skip the movie for a moment and talk about the revitalized Thor comic. J. Michael Straczynski brought Thor back a few years ago, deftly displaying that he gets what makes mythological characters tick.

After a few necessary developments to bring Asgard back from Ragnorak, and cleverly dropping it in my home state of Oklahoma, Straczynski got on with the nifty plot twists: Loki’s return, his clever means of getting the more dubious Asgardians back on their feet, and his manipulation of time and Thor to put Balder on the throne were great reading.

We’ve moved on to other writers (most notably the talented Kieron Gillen) and seen combat and horror as Marvel’s Siege crossover centered on Asgard. After Siege we had a great trip to hell and a battle for the dead Asgardians’ very souls. Then came the most recent volume, the Worldeaters, and I felt like the series lost some steam.
Odin’s return and his reclamation of the throne from Balder felt forced. The status quo was largely reset to how things were before Ragnorak, and yet some excellent new ground was cleared and seeds sown for fresh stories.

I’m still reading as Thor once again became Journey into Mystery, and back to loving the scale and scope of the stories, but let’s focus on the bad for a moment. To set up some conflict in the next crossover, Marvel needed Thor, Odin and Asgard in certain positions to race them towards the next big event. The result will no doubt be compelling, but for a moment, the hood came up and we saw the gears of the plot moving.

It happens often. Sometimes plot necessitates a loss of story. Characters make a decision that feels disingenuous or unnatural for them. I don’t mean an act that forces them to go against their nature, which can be an important moment in their development, I mean a choice freely made. When it happens you recognize that the writer is manipulating things to bring about a certain outcome. The best analogy I can think of is watching a play. Rather than having the curtain go down for the stage to be rearranged, you catch the stage workers in the act. They intrude into the scene and start moving furniture while the curtain is still up. Your focus shifts entirely to them. Plot is an essential mechanic. Even the most literary book needs motion, for something to happen, but at the same time, obvious rearrangement and changes for the sake of the plot can throw the reader out of the story. It takes a careful hand to shoehorn in a game changing plot event in so short a medium as comics.

Kevin Hearne: A Fresh Voice in Urban Fantasy

2011-06-17T08:03:00.000-07:00

"And the druids, they were into sex and death in an interesting night-time telly sort of way.” – Eddie Izzard

Atticus O’Sullivan is youthful in more than looks. A bit of a tree hugger and susceptible to the sexual charms of various Irish deities, Atticus is livelier than many urban heroes. Yet he’s also ancient, an immortal druid operating in modern Arizona. His magic is subtler than many urban heroes, giving him strong limitations that make his battles of a less certain outcome.

Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid Chronicles get off to a rousing start with the first two books, Hounded and Hexed. I’ve happily burned through both. The series gives us some of the genre’s exhausted elements: vampires and werewolves, but they play third string to his use of less common tropes and get blended into Atticus’s well-developed supporting cast.

Hearne puts fresh spins on witches and gods without making them seem silly, as often happens when you try to update a cliché. Some immortals are better at blending into the modern world than others, giving them a nice contrast to Atticus, who poses successfully as an early twenty-something.

Little missteps, like a werewolf surprised by Atticus’s nudity after shape-changing can get overlooked when Hearne uses the scene for effective comedy. The mix of serious with light-heartedness is probably my favorite element of the series. I know I’m in for a fun ride without the constant weight of dire consequences that looms over so much epic fantasy.

The stakes are very personal for Atticus: threats are aimed at him, not the world, and I actually like seeing things toned down from the epic threat level of so much fantasy, though I don’t doubt that the looming conflict with a certain thunder god in the third book, Hammered, will take things to a higher level.

Great Expectations - So that’s what the Fuss is about

2011-05-15T12:45:00.000-07:00

My experiment with audiobooks is paying dividends. Having gone through Treasure Island, I’ve turned to another classic I’ve long meant to read, Great Expectations. I finally understand why they assigned it in high school. I wasn’t a great student, something I still regret, and when they put Dickens on the lesson plan, I never saw the value in reading it. Mrs. Clark, wherever you are, I apologize. Great Expectations was boring. Too many details, too little story. I thought of the narrative as too stuffy and read Terry Pratchett and Roger Zelazny instead.

I’ve since learned that Great Expectations was a newspaper serial, which changes my perspective quite a bit. Some of the repetitive details and phrasing, for example, makes better sense when you know that readers may have gone a month without fresh material. I still don’t find that Dickens to work well in large blocks, like the hundred page weekly readings assigned in sophomore English. Taking it chapter by chapter, or in hour long listenings, creates a different experience. I’m even finding it funny, and I never expected that.

Lad Lit with Arrows

2011-05-06T09:01:00.000-07:00

When I was young, I read a lot of what I tend to call lad lit: books for boys that usually involve runaways and survival. I was never a boy scout, but a rural upbringing imparted a lot of the skills you might associate with them. I could make a fire, fish, nock a bow, and identify a number of edible things in the woods. In my too rare camping trips I tend to surprise my friends, who think of me as way too urban to set up a tent or own a gun. While I live an urban life, I sometimes itch for a bit more of the self-sufficiency those stories imparted.

John Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice series fully embraces the style of old-fashioned lad lit I grew up with. His main character, Will, gets out of tough scrapes with the use of his training and endless self-discipline. With the help of his friends, he performs feats of heroism often worthy of fully grown knights, and keeps to his principles while often making friends of his enemies. At its core, Flanagan’s narrative embraces the idea that Rangers are a mysterious, solitary bunch, needing years of practice to become good at their craft; and Will never fails to disappoint when given a choice between taking the easy route or keeping to his training. Will’s key relationship is with his mentor, the grim-faced Halt, and this relationship keenly affects both master and apprentice. While Will is the main character, he’s far from the only important one. Flanagan switches point of view often, sometimes too much.

Written for a young audience, the books are a quick read for adults, and I ripped through the first four fairly quickly. The first book is mostly set up, with Will entering Halt’s tutelage. The plot of the first book is a bit secondary to setting the stage for the series and introducing us to Will’s world. By book two things are ready to go and the next three books end on cliffhangers and can be read as one.
Like a good series for young adults, themes slowly advance towards the mature, but always with an old-fashioned morality that I found refreshing. Though I was ready for the shift to PG when it came, I didn’t mind spending time in a less complicated worldview. Flanagan’s is a low to no magic world. Men are knights and warriors while women are diplomats and princesses. I’m so used to the female action hero trope that it was a little refreshing to get a break from it, though I was glad the character of Evalyn showed resolve and courage at every turn instead of being portrayed as some kind of delicate flower. The Rangers succeed by guile and clever tactics in a neat display of brains over brawn. Flanagan thinks his battles through, and I saw some old tricks like the false retreat turned on their head.

If you’re looking for a good kid’s book with a strong, moral protagonist, I recommend the Ranger’s Apprentice series, and I’d like to find a series with as much heart written for girls if you can recommend one.

Giving It A Listen

2011-04-27T08:47:00.000-07:00

Despite my literature degree, there are plenty of classics I’ve never read. Some of them were never assigned. Many weren’t considered important, or they simply weren’t part of the canon. Often I found the same works assigned over and over. I’ve read Hamlet and the Iliad more often than I care to contemplate, while less serious books were never placed on the reading list. Worse still, I was a horrible high school student, so I glossed over Dickens and other books I should have read twenty years ago.

We can add to this problem that there’s a simple truth that education isn’t what it used to be. Nothing makes this plainer than opening my aged copy of the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Printed in the 1940s, it’s listed as a book for boys. It’s a problem that’s getting worse, as some curricula have dropped novels altogether.

It cannot be said often enough that reading widens the mind, and that the best means of becoming a better writer is to read. But knowing there’s a gap in my knowledge and filling it are two very different things. Sitting down with a classic book for an evening never makes my list of top priorities, so I’ve taken to audio books to try and make up some ground.

David Cordingly’s many references to Treasure Island put it at the top of my list to see if I can listen to a book and still analyze it. As I listen to the adventures of Jim Hawkins, I’m immediately struck by Stevenson’s approach to his narrative. Treasure Island has many of the traits and techniques of a good, modern young adult novel. First, there’s always action. We spend little time in unnecessary detail and much of it following Jim’s fight for his life. We’re dropped into the sailing vernacular without a glossary or explanation of terms. Stevenson avoids a pedantic approach. He’s not telling us a story to teach us about pirates, but instead lets events take their course at a quick pace. Jim, as a character, grows from cowering at a single pirate to boldly telling a roomful of them how he’s foiled their plots.

One inconsistency in the book is a brief point of view shift about halfway through. Stevenson needed this shift in order to fill us in on plot details Hawkins isn’t present for, but it does break up the overall flow of the narrative in a jarring way.

Listening to a book is a very different experience for me, but I find it does wonders for helping to tune my ear to pace and dialogue. Whenever I think things are slowing down, Stevenson inserts a plot twist, a betrayal or reversal of fortune. Like any book written in another age, the language is different. The pirates patois is coupled with outdated phrasing that makes a reader blink; but in a way this adds to the exotic air of the story as we’re not only looking at another culture but into another time as well.

The Pitfall of History

2011-04-26T08:22:00.000-07:00

Your town, your family, your country: these all have a greater history than you’re aware of, than you can be aware of. Even the most learned scholar couldn’t uncover it all. Even in America, where our cities are striplings compared those of Europe, there is a far deeper past than what we can unearth. We see it in snapshots and glimpses, bits, really. The larger portrait of the past is simply lost to us. The present occupies its space, bumps up against it, paves it over. Recovering the past might be possible, but at the loss of the present and the history we’re currently writing together.

After thinking a lot about backstories, I turned my attention to fantastic history: the background of the worlds we write in, and I find it a bigger pitfall than even character backstory. There is so much background to a place, so much a writer could convey about the kingdom or empire where events are occurring. How much should they bring into a story? What’s the cut-off point for history and tangents? When we work at the epic level, the massive cycle spanning continents, dynasties, and centuries, the danger widens. So often a series can spin out of control. We end up spending hundreds of pages with characters the readers aren’t as invested in, merely because we can; and this sort of over-writing can keep a new author from publishing.

Older fantasy, like Tolkien, reads a lot like good history. Events transpire in the present, but the ancient past lurks around every corner. At some point fantasy became more action oriented, and I think this is a positive change in the genre. When comparing a more detailed book, like Tolkien, with a more action-oriented one, say Mistborn, there’s no doubt which one is more concerned with telling an entertaining story. Not that Tolkien isn’t entertaining, or even a page-turner, but the writing style is so far apart that you can almost consider them different genres. Both stories rely on some very ancient history to drive them, but only one is invested in sharing more of that history than is necessary to resolve its plot.

Maybe it’s a bit mercenary, but it seems that a modern book requires authors to use only the most essential elements of their worlds. Side trips into unnecessary characters, detail, and history aren’t given much real estate in the current publishing market. Hook your readers, keep the tension high, and move the story along with every chapter or you risk losing them. I cannot say if this shift is good or bad, but it is more apparent as I read more current books.

When you’re writing fantasy, in a world of your own making, you can easily become entranced with your creation. Unlike the real world, where the full history of any place is denied to posterity, you have the opportunity to dig as far back as you want. Each forest and island opens itself to you, and it has a story to tell. This history enriches the fictional world, but not necessarily the story you’re telling. The art lies in knowing what to reveal and what to hide. Your characters may be hiking through a wood which was the site of a crucial battle three thousand years ago, but unless the spirits of the dead soldiers are going to menace your heroes, or their discarded gear and burial mounds are going to provide compelling atmosphere, there’s little point in bringing in that history.

The further I examine genre fiction, and fantasy specifically, the more I develop a philosophy of balance. For so many of the elements I’ve written about, there is a golden mean, a right amount. They give your story flavor and your world heft, but you never want to overdo them. History is the same sort of element. Keep refining your craft until you’ve learned the exact dose.

We All Come from Somewhere, but Does Anybody Care?

2011-04-12T20:54:00.000-07:00

Each of us carries a backstory. We share the details of our pasts with others. They pay attention depending on their investment in us, or how well we tell it. Or they don’t. Someone who wasn’t there, who didn’t share the experience, simply cannot feel it the way we did. The inherent challenge in sharing our history is to make it exciting. You can probably recall a time when someone told you a boring anecdote. Maybe they included too much detail or unnecessary tangents.

Fictional characters are much the same way: their background informs and shapes them. It helps to establish who they are. Often a characters’ past includes vital information, but writers can err and include backstory in large boring lumps that readers don’t want or need.

Fictional characters aren’t real people. Their psychological composition just isn’t as complex, no matter how well we write them. Yet this isn’t a lack. It actually gives writers an advantage. We can determine which parts of the character’s background aren’t yawn-inducing and which are compelling enough to be worth sharing. We can tweak a characters’ background to make it serve the story, and we can learn what to tell the reader or what to leave out.

Any piece written in third person narrative is a recount of the characters’ past. The narrator is looking back on events and telling us what happened. To the reader this recap seems to happen in real time. A sense of immediacy is crucial to pace and keeping things in motion. Backstory is important, but it should never be more compelling than the main tale. If the past is so juicy that it must interrupt the present action, then you’re probably starting the story in the wrong place.

This is one of those areas where a writer must be honest with their self. Much like that tale you’ve told on every first date, it might not be that funny or interesting to the other party. Look at the level of backstory you’re including. If an objective reading tells you it’s essential, consider if it deserves to be center stage. If it bores you, keep it to a minimum.

“The Book I’m Not Reading is Riveting” – Patty Larkin

2011-04-03T10:08:00.001-07:00

As I prepare for another move, it’s time once again to sort, pack, and hopefully reduce the library. It’s that last bit that’s hard. I own a lot of books. Two liberal arts degrees and a lifetime of reading adds up. I have antique reference books, highlighted textbooks, first edition Margaret Atwoods, tacky paperbacks, graphic novels, loose comics, and everything in between.

I have a whole shelf of loaners that need to get read and go home; and another of blank journals that I may never fill (having long ago succumbed to typing everything in). While it has been suggested that much of this content could be transferred to the Kindle, and my inner minimalist does like that idea, I struggle with disposing of books, particularly those I may never read.

Is there anything sadder than an unread book? Probably not for its author. Just writing two practice books I could not publish was a little heartbreaking. Publishing and having your book flop must be doubly so. This touches on why we write, or at least why I write: which is to share and connect. You do a very private body of work when writing, then share it with people in the hope they’ll read, enjoy, and respond by wanting more.

Even a textbook contributor wants her book read. Every review, negative or positive, must sting or lift, especially until you’re sure you have an audience. That makes every unread book on my shelf something of a promise: a commitment on my part to connect with that author. Dead or alive, they put something out there for me to read; and at some point I had a reason to read it. Maybe someone gifted it to me. Perhaps a professor was trying to instill some knowledge, or on a whim I thought the cover was well designed. So I’m packing up the unread books and bringing them along where they will rest on their shelf as I whittle down their numbers and they get replenished.

Green Shoots and Spring Fever

2011-04-02T11:06:00.001-07:00

Winter in Colorado comes and goes. We get storms, but the mountains usually do a great job of walling the snow away from the city. When storms do scale the Rockies, they’re often gentle. I woke Monday to a slushy snowfall that gave the city a much needed bath and hopefully doused the fires that have been threatening so many homes out on the plains.

I usually disdain talking about the weather, but I was struck by the contrast of soft snow on budding trees and fresh shoots poking up through the blanketing white. I love the way snow quiets the city, muting the sounds of cars and traffic. I just wish it inspired me.

Spring is a strange, contrasting time for my writing. While everything around me is budding with life, I tend to find myself withdrawing, curling up inside and waiting to work. Fall inspires me the most, and there are long stretches in that season when

I can’t break away from the keyboard; but spring makes me contemplative, a little depressed, and I have to force a balance between breaks and productivity if I’m going to write a good book I can sell.

I have a deadline I’ve set myself. It’s an important component of the self-discipline I’m developing for the day when I am published and my deadlines come from without.

It helps to remember that forcing myself to write when I don’t really want to has produced some of my best work. I have to push myself to be engaged, and it often pays off. I’ve delivered a nice chunk of my work in progress to my critique group, and their feedback gives me something to chew through while I wait for inspiration to light.

I’ve often written about the need for continual improvement, but not enough on the topic of continual work. The comparison that stands the strongest as I look back on my thoughts on the topic is the gym: once you’re out of the habit, it’s hard to get back to doing it every day; but it’s important for your writing health. Just like muscles, your craft can atrophy. So keep to it, even if you’d rather stare out the window at the coming spring.

A Lucky Coincidence Between Research and Exhibition

2011-03-26T09:11:00.000-07:00

A good brief history book is a gloss, covering a topic and referring to larger works. It’s excellent for getting you started and pointing you down further roads if you wish to take them. Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly is such a book.

Cordingly pinpoints a singular era in the vast history of piracy, focusing almost exclusively on the Golden Age, when the New World was sending gold back to the Old by the shipload in exchange for slaves from Africa. He draws on the texts that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe while also drawing extensively on naval records.

Where the book comes alive are the areas where Cordingly analyzes a pirate’s fictional depiction, such as in Treasure Island or Peter Pan, and compares it to the historical record. Cordingly navigates the differences between the two and notes how right fiction has often gotten it. He delves into the appeal of piracy, revealing why so many would gladly take to it. He also does not shy away from discussing piracy’s darker side: torture, the impacts of slavery, racial tensions, class, and economic motivations while dispelling a few myths about the romantic gentleman pirate along the way.

One wreck Cordingly references more than once is the Whydah, a slave ship captured by a North American pirate named Sam Bellamy and converted for his use. Its artifacts and history are beautifully assembled in the Real Pirates exhibition currently at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The combination of reading Cordingly’s book and touring the Whydah exhibition truly brought the research to life. There are many references to ships and places in the exhibition which Cordingly explores, and the exhibition provides a close up on the Whydah which Cordingly did not.

The exhibition is probably the best I’ve seen. The collection is assembled in such a way that you follow the history of various crew members through their careers and deaths, moving through set pieces that would make your local Renaissance Fair cry. I was impressed by the actors drifting through the exhibition. They provided a nice bit of unconsidered perspective, such as those of the wives left behind.

The ship’s own history is discussed, as are the modifications necessary to convert her from slaver to pirate vessel. The exhibition also helped by clarifying terms Cordingly used without definition. I can tell a pink from a sloop now, should the need ever arise. While the exhibition does not polish over the role of the slave trade in piracy, it perhaps takes the democracy of pirate crews to a bit of an idealized place.

It’s not often that I’m lucky enough to see a tactile display at the same time I’m reading a good book on a historical topic. If you can catch the exhibition when it comes to your area I recommend it, and I recommend Cordingly’s book even more highly.

The Point Might Be the Journey, but the Destination Still Matters

2011-03-26T07:26:00.001-07:00

A book’s ending has to satisfy. You want to close the door on your story in a way that lets the reader move on, knowing it’s finished. Maybe you conclude on a question or open a new door, but either way you turn out the lights and close up shop. Something has to indicate that a book is done. In a series you might leave with a cliffhanger or a new development, a wrinkle that will grow into the next book’s conflict.

Endings are tricky things. A good one leaves you with a positive remembrance of the book. Bad endings can make the entire exercise of reading the story unfulfilling, like a long meal capped with a flavorless dessert. When I look back on the books that really captured my attention, their endings are usually strong. They evoke emotion years later, such as in Three Junes when two major characters drive into New York. When I try to specifically think of books whose endings were weak, I have a harder time. The books themselves are less memorable. Some books, Smilla’s Sense of Snow comes to mind, do not seem to know where to end. They just come to an abrupt stop. Cliffhangers that are never resolved trouble me the most. Much like a television series which is suddenly canceled, you’re left wondering how the story ended.

In fantasy, the story is too often a showcase for the world, a vast travelogue for amazing places and robust vistas. Endings can become less important. The longer a series, the more epic the scope, the more weight gets placed on the climax and the subsequent conclusion. The payoff has to be worth the buildup, or the reader is let down. I often find that the climax isn’t the part that sticks with us. The villain is defeated, the world saved, but there’s always that little moment after that truly settles in as the bit we remember. The ending has the opportunity to sound a little quieter, The heroes retire. Luke joins his circle of friends at the campfire. Terry Brooks seems fond of marrying his heroes, giving them a reason to leave the adventuring life behind. Jim Grimsley, ended Dream Boy with a mystery that I still ponder to this day.

Beginnings are when you hook the reader, drawing them in. Middles are where you hold them. It’s crucial that you don’t lose them when the pace slows a little and the characters catch their breath. But every part of a story is important, so don’t forget the ending.

The Lost Works of You and Me

2011-02-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

When you get degrees in history and literature, there are some books you read over and over. I wrote paper after paper on Hamlet and King Lear, increasing my understanding each time, but probably no works crossed my path more often than the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer came up often in both disciplines, always with a different emphasis, but still reliably and repeatedly. Along the way I learned that the main reason Homer remains with us is the sheer number of copies available to us, usually preserved in Egypt’s dry dry sand.

The lens of history can be terribly foggy. We have to make a lot of assumptions, and it’s important to note that archaeology is still a relatively young field. Early archaeologists did a lot of damage to sites and artifacts, some of which we’re still trying to sort out. My favorite example was Heinrich Schliemann’s dynamiting of Mycenae. He leveled the city’s entrance ramp and many structures in his rush to find the bits of gold that must have been brought from Troy.

What will future civilizations think of our society? Will they exhume our houses, libraries, and used bookstores then decide that Harry Potter was our national epic? Will they think we considered wizards and witches mythological figures like gods and mistake super-hero action figures for idols?

Will our literature become so digitized that it fades away as the hard drives slowly decay? Will there be anything left of us for future civilizations to study, or will archaeology itself be entirely digital as computer scientists try to figure out how to read our books by decoding binary language as we’ve struggled with Linear A? It's a dire thought, the idea of everything we've committed to disk just fading away.

If I ever wrote a memoir it would be in winter. Winter makes me nostalgic. I’ve been looking online at book covers, movie trailers, and toys from my childhood. So much of what was important to us gets eroded. So much of what we consider immortal in our culture isn’t. I would love to think that the books I write will outlast me, that the books I have written but could not publish will be valued by someone later on; but I would guess that even when I do publish what will remain behind are the Dan Browns, J.K. Rowlings, and the Gideon Bibles. I’ve never written out of a desire for immortality, or with the idea that it would make me fabulously wealthy. I’m grateful to have the passion to do it and what I hope is a modest talent. That has to be enough for me today.

My Own Two Cents: Why I Hate My Kindle

2011-02-03T15:08:00.000-08:00

I love technology. I may write about fantastic societies without computers or electronics, but I still love my iPod, my netbook, and my Playstation. Despite this, I hate my Kindle.

It was a generous Christmas gift, and I’ve been trying to experiment and work around my initial impressions, but so far any attempt to find a more positive angle hasn’t worked.

Let’s start with the consumption problem. When I buy a latte in a disposable cup and drink it, it’s been consumed. I trash the cup, I notice the expense on my debit card statement, and I move on. I’ve consumed something, and it is wholly gone. Books on the Kindle feel the same way for me. I can’t give them to a friend, donate them to the Denver Children’s Home, sell , or trade them. The book I purchased for the Kindle was the same price as a paperback, and it’s gone. I’m never going to read it again. From an author’s standpoint, this is a good thing: a single copy for a single reader, so a book will have higher sales figures, but it also impacts the ability of a reader to spread the book’s popularity by word of mouth or loaning it out. If eBook’s cost were lower than a paperback it might appeal to me.

The second problem involves the portability: I can use the Kindle to load up on books so that say, on a two week trip to Europe, I’m not toting around as much weight. But I can’t use the Kindle during takeoff and landing, two periods when I’m most likely to read while everyone else watches the belt bit or braces for impact.

I thought perhaps the vocal feature would be useful: I could listen to any book I purchased, but that quickly proved grating. It was like being read to by Stephen Hawking, so I’m more likely to pay for an Audible book that I can stand to listen to.

A friend pointed out that pdfs can be transferred over, but this did not work very well either. I have a lot of reference books, mostly historical, that could be usefully stored in a digital form, but the Kindle doesn’t handle viewing them very well. You need to zoom in and around in order to see the pages. This kills the pdf’s ease of use completely, and I’m more likely to stick with my netbook. This problem might be solved by upgrading to the larger version, but that would further degrade the portability factor.

I am sure that the environmental impact of printing a book and shipping it to a store outweighs the cost of transmitting it wirelessly to the Kindle, but I’m also tired of having to charge the various devices in my life. A book is perfectly serviceable. It does not require a battery or one more cord in a drawer.

These are my own impressions, and two friends swear I’ll come around, that in no time the Kindle will be as indispensable to my life as my iPod, but so far I have to say that I’m going to stick with killing trees and browsing bookstores.

Shades of Grey Don't Always Look Good On Me

2011-01-30T09:26:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, I need my heroes to be heroic. They do the right thing not because it’s convenient, but because they’re driven to it by their morality and nature. Personally, I write reluctant heroes. They do the right thing, but they’re pushed there. They can see the shades of grey in the world and might resist the call to do the right thing, but they ultimately rise to the occasion.

After reading a lot of “realistic” fantasy, where innocence is brutally punished, and even the good guys struggle to take the right course of action, it’s good to spend some time with better people. I’m ripping my way through Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series and loving every minute of it. Sure, we lose some of the tension in the good guys being so good, as we know a fall from grace isn’t around the corner, and Butcher seems hesitant to kill his characters to raise the stakes, but it’s still a hell of a ride.

Like Mistborn, Alera’s world has a tightly defined magic system. Butcher gives us an elemental based magic that makes easy sense. A few of the good guys have god-like powers, but he balances this nicely by providing the same to the villains. He draws a bit too deeply on Roman history for me in the series, but I’ve only spotted one blatantly ripped off moment so far. Yet these books are page turners. After a strict diet of first person point of view in the Dresden Files, I’m happy to say that Butcher can work the third person limited with just as much skill.

What I like most about this series are the characters. They do the right thing. They are heroes, so while they are often tempted to compromise, I never doubt them. They’re also clever. They solve their problems using their heads more than their blades. It’s a refreshing change from stories where a hero can’t make a connection that the reader made fifty pages ago. Shades of grey, or doing the wrong thing for the right reason, are for the villains. It may not be realistic, and it can feel a little didactic at times, but it’s still a nice change.

I should also say that Butcher has done a great job of taking Roman military tactics and adding magic. He fully embraces what would change about a legion’s standard formation and attack when coupled with fliers and casters capable of tossing fireballs against the enemy. And the action scenes are lively, busy, but without becoming a slog of gore that I want to hurry past.

The Dark is Always Out There

2011-01-25T08:49:00.000-08:00

We live in amazing times. The level of our technology, health, sanitation, and literacy are unmatched in recorded human development. Sometimes, especially in the wake of tragedy, it’s hard to remember that. The current popularity of post-apocalyptic fiction tells me that on some level, we know how fleeting the light of civilization is. As we stock up on canned goods, we know that a Dark Age is not very hard to achieve, and a little social or economic decline can go a long way.
When we think about the Dark Ages, most of us reflect on the European medieval period: castles, knights, and ladies in towers. Fantasy has traditionally drawn on these elements, to the point that they can be considered cliché. Books like the Silver Phoenix try to branch out, and take other periods as influence, yet I’m still drawn to the European Middle Ages, to reading about them and writing about them, perhaps because of the day to day struggle for survival in those times.

We know that the period after the Fall of Rome’s western half was disastrous. The light of literacy largely went out, leaving us with scant records of the period.

What we do know about the early Middle Ages is that they weren’t easy. No element of modern life, clean running water, proper shelter for wars or the elements, was widely available. The smell alone might bowl you over. Disease was rampant, misunderstood, and largely untreatable. Work was constant, leisure rare, and privacy largely unknown.

In fantasy we romanticize an age of struggle, where human life was short and cheap. I think on these details and shudder at the notion of living in such a world, and I find myself grateful for what we’ve achieved in our era. Our world remains flawed and violent, with tragedies , crime, and intense disagreements which in of themselves are a luxury. It gets me down from time to time, but I can easily turn on my faucet, watch the water spiral out, and thank what I believe in that I live when and where I do.

The Kind of Book I Want to Write: Gushing Over Mistborn

2010-12-11T18:16:00.000-08:00

I read a lot of good books, and I’m fortunate to have people in my life with great taste. Sometimes I pick a book up at random, without any prior knowledge. I got lucky with my latest grab, though as usual, I’m the last to the party. It’s rare that I finish a book I like so much that I want to give it as a Christmas present, but I just finished Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, and I’m really anxious to open volume two. Mistborn is epic in scale, with the requisite world-threatening plot, magic, monsters, and some good action. There’s a nice balance of coming of age and political manipulations thrown against a relatively small setting. There’s also a romance plot that stays safely, sweetly, on the PG side. This is a long book, not quite at the eye-rending size of George R. R. Martin, but the paperback weighs in at 675 pages. Yet she’s a page turner. I was never bored with Mistborn. While there are points of view in Martin that I wish would just hurry along so I can get back to someone I care about more, the POV switches in Mistborn are just long enough.

Though there are relatively few points of view, the book does have more than one. It’s a nice change from my reading in urban fantasy or young adult, where a single point of view is the norm. I didn’t mind the switches in Mistborn: they’re well-timed, which brings me to the point that this book is well edited. Transitions are handled very well. Smooth breaks are achieved throughout, and I didn’t spot a single typo or spelling error.

Sanderson uses some techniques that really set the book apart for me. First, the narrative within a narrative works very well. These are journal vignettes, short paragraphs that start every chapter. They quickly come to have grave importance to the book’s plot as well as tie the reader into the characters’ lives: they’re reading the journal with you, and even more anxious for it to make sense as their lives depend on it. Generally these sorts of insertions into fantasy just serve to build the world and ultimately detract from the action. They don’t often reflect the plot so tightly.

The book has been praised for its magic system, though I must admit, despite its originality, that aspect never really grabbed me. How the magic is used works great, but the actual mechanics are a bit too cleanly defined for my taste. Things got a bit matrix-y in the action sequences, but I still enjoyed them. The characters get pushed to the limits of their power reserves, and often risk running out of fuel at the critical moment.

Epic fantasy is a genre that I often worry about. Does it have a future when urban fantasy has become so popular and fewer agents seem to be representing the epic side? I love epic fantasy, yet two of the three books I’ve put down in the last few years have been epic fantasies that were boring me to death. Mistborn renews my faith in the genre. It’s ultimately an underdog tale. I’ve never so clearly felt that the heroes are badly outmatched. They doubt their chance of success openly, yet as good heroes should, they keep climbing that hill. Sanderson gives his characters heart. Whereas Martin maintains a distance, letting you know that anyone can bite it anytime, Sanderson isn’t afraid to show us the charisma of the doomed. Great power doesn’t equal invincibility if you want your readers to stay hooked.

Go read Mistborn if you haven’t yet. I recommend just picking up the trilogy. You’re going to want to open book two the moment you put the first one down.

Cheating on Book Club: Monsters by the Sea

2010-12-11T18:06:00.000-08:00

I say without any intended irony that I think the Percy Jackson books are a thoroughly American series. Despite their emphasis on the Greek myths, the characters have a focus on American food and soda brands, but Percy also has a directness and mindset that impresses me more than a certain British boy wizard.

At a wedding in Mexico, with some time to lounge, I picked up book two in the series: the Sea of Monsters, and we got along quite well; so well that I wouldn’t have minded having the third book available while digging my toes into the sand and watching the sea roil.

While reading Atonement and other literary fiction works mental muscles that need developing, reading a good fantasy or two, even those for a younger audience, reminds me why I love my genre.

The second volume picks up the pace and pulls in the slack. It’s slimmer than the Lightning Thief and a better read. Rick Riordan draws on the Odyssey in funny ways, with a witty jab at Penelope’s adventures in weaving and an update to certain other bits that I won’t spoil. I appreciated a toning down of the sillier mythic reinventions, something that cluttered up the first book for me, though if you know the tales, you’ll quickly spot where chapters are going.

The main character, Percy, grows a bit. He’s not perfect, and his flaws are human and relatable. They fit a boy moving towards adulthood. His demi-god powers take a major leap forward, but Percy gets some setbacks too, which was a nice touch.
The Sea of Monsters is a breezy read. There’s not a lot else to say. I liked it, and it ended on a great twist which makes me anxious to see where things go. If I’ve a critique of the book it’s that the chapter headings often act as spoilers. Major developments are given away there. For the younger reader, to whom the book is written, this might not be the case; but I wouldn’t have minded if Riordan had stretched out the surprises. My other critique is copy editing. This book is slight, and I spotted two copy problems. The first was early, on page eight. It’s an area I’m working hard on in my own work so it really jumps out at me when such a best-selling book makes errors.

Flashbacks and Memories

2010-11-06T09:22:00.000-07:00

Memory is a deep component of our personal story. As writers, it’s a source of material and a means to add texture to our characters. While I fight nostalgia when writing, afraid to create something that is too sanitized or sentimental, when I become stuck on a scene or plot point, it helps to look back in my life and find how a younger self would have dealt with something. This a key quality in writing young adult fiction, imbuing it with senses and reactions appropriate to the protagonists’ age when everything was just a bit more intensely.

Characters arrive with memories of their own, and they can bring their memories to life in vivid detail. Writing allows for time travel in many ways, not the least being the use of flashbacks to explore the past.

For flashbacks to function, they have to deeply impact the current chronology without overwhelming its story. Like points of view, they need to possess both merit and resonance. I always think of Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye as the gold standard for flashbacks: the chronology in that book synchs past and present, with the present usually being the weaker of the two.

As I write the current work-in-progress, I’m struggling with the use of flashbacks. Fully half of the book is planned to occur in the main character’s past. But as I read through the current draft to find the rhythm, I find the pace slows when I hit the first memory. It soon picks up again, but any drag on the story is a problem. In genre fiction, pace can be everything. I want my readers turning the pages, into the night, over-sleeping and being late to work because they could not stop reading my books. Backstory is often boring and so often very unnecessary. If events in a character’s past are so important to their lives, shouldn’t those events be the plot of the book?

Some books, like the Steel Remains, limit the flashback sequences to either small vignettes or single scenes which reveal the key moments of a character’s history. This keeps the story moving and only derails the chronology to give you what is essential in the character’s past. Flashbacks can only hold so much tension: you already know the main character has survived. Death is not a potential. Perhaps he was greatly affected by those events, even shaped by them: but like all good fiction, the boring parts should be left out. An important part of making flashbacks work is to twist readers’ expectations one way in the present, but unfold events in an unexpected means in the past. You know he survived, but there are unknowns in the how or the things he had to do to keep himself alive.

Flashbacks are more than memories. They are scenes in a character’s life, and they should be given as much life as possible in order to keep them active and engaging. It’s just one more place where “show don’t tell” is the rule.

Book Club: Atonement

2010-10-12T18:53:00.001-07:00

In case you missed it in the comments, the novel for book club this month is Ian McEwan's Atonement. Sorry for the delay on this post. I'll work at being more prompt.

Book Club: Art and Memory

2010-10-12T18:40:00.000-07:00

There’s a theme in literature that explores the powerful connection between art and memory. The best example I know of is Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, otherwise known as my favorite book. But it’s something we all experience. I can’t always remember the fashion or music of a certain time in my life, but I can tell you want I was reading and how it affected me.

The Madonnas of Leningrad, by Debra Dean, takes the connection between art and memory and lets it casually supplant everything else in the characters’ lives. As Marina’s memory dissolves with age, she recalls her time in the Hermitage Museum of Leningrad during World War II. Flashback is tricky. It has to be used wisely, but like the best books that alternate points of view, the important trick is to make both time periods engaging enough that the reader gets a little anxious when you change the channel, then they find themselves captivated by the new chapter before you reverse course again. Dean manages Marina’s past with a delicate touch and a compelling perspective, but each time you find yourself in Marina’s present, you are anxious to get back to the past.

As with so many recent entries in literary fiction, Madonnas is a brief book, only an inch thick and 228 pages. Yet it captures important turning points in a human life. If good writing is “life with all the boring parts taken out,” then Dean accomplishes her goal. Not that the book is all action, plot, or event. Little touches run through the narrative, humanizing moments that reinforce the difference in the chronology. Unfortunately these grounding elements are also some of the weaker points in the narrative, though still they manage to help tease out the mystery. In a way, the chronological shifting also hurts the book’s plot, as you know certain outcomes are inevitable: Marina and her husband Dmitri will survive the war. They will be reunited. Still, Dean had my full attention for most of this novel. She drew me in with the vignettes on art, digressions into discussions of the museum’s missing treasures.

Madonnas is a touching, memorable little book, but I have to echo Alfred's comment that the daughter's point of view was a distraction. It made me wonder what history is slipping away from us as our grandparents pass. What learning techniques? What arts? A vast history of personal experience slips constantly away from us, ineffable, and ever eroded. It made me want to sit down with my grandfather and ask him to poor out his own memories of the War before they vanish.

The Power of Language

2010-10-11T20:54:00.001-07:00

As writers, language is our greatest tool and weapon. We wield it daily in our craft, but it is just as easily turned to hate. In the last few years I've backed off the "politically correct" censoring of certain terms. I now consider that a mistake.

My friend Laura doesn't blog too often, but her post today is a can't miss on the power of language and its effect upon us.

http://someblundersandabsurdities.blogspot.com/2010/10/thoughts-on-coming-out-day-2010.html

I encourage you to read Laura's post and leave her a supportive comment.

Can You Help a Betsy Out?

2010-10-06T17:34:00.000-07:00

Betsy Lerner has released an updated Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers. This is one of my top books on writing. It mixes the practical advice with some digestable inspiration for keeping at it.

I've bought more than one friend a copy over the years (you know who you are); but if you want to write, or publish, I'd recommend picking up a fresh copy to see what new insights she's brought to bear.

This is a book I reach for when I get bummed by the publishing process. Help Betsy get a bestseller and pay her back for all the help she's given aspiring writers.

Giving Death His Due

2010-10-04T19:40:00.000-07:00

Now our luck may have died and our love may be cold
But with you forever I'll stay
Were goin out where the sands turnin to gold
Put on your stockins baby, `cause the nights getting cold
And maybe evrything dies, baby, that's a fact
But maybe evrything that dies someday comes back

- Bruce Springsteen, Atlantic City

Halloween is coming, and everywhere I look, death seems to haunt popular culture. The undead have ruled supreme over genre fiction for a good while. Some of the hottest shows on television involve bloodsucking monsters. Even the X-men are fighting vampires in the Marvel universe, which tells me that vampires have definitely jumped the zombie were-shark.

With so many dead walking about, I’m starting to think Death hasn’t just taken a holiday. He’s moved to Maui and taken up residence in Margaritaville. Characters keep sneaking back in the door well after they’re properly dead and buried. Zombie apocalypses happen so often in fiction that Hades is close to empty and insurance companies raise your rates if you live near a cemetery.

The idea that death isn’t permanent in comic books has become enough of a cliché that whole crossovers, like DC’s Blackest Night, have been devoted to putting some power back into the Reaper’s hands. The dead walk, talk, and romance the living so often I’m surprised they haven’t unionized under a chant of “What do we want? Brains! When do we want them? Now!”

Heroes have a unique relationship to Death. They cheat him, beat him, often bringing their entire supporting cast along for the ride, at the cost of the story’s impact. When a series reaches a major turning point, or milestone, you need to see a price for the victory. Otherwise, it rings hollow. Heroes can descend to the underworld and return, they’re heroes after all, but doing so is a major effort.

Comics have third stringer death down. When a new creative team takes over a book, one of their first moves often involves killing off the supporting cast to make room for their own creations. Even then, return is always possible, should another writer see the need to bring a dead character back into play. Only the poor redshirts beaming down with Captain Kirk aren’t coming back. Usually nameless and indiscriminate, they’re convenient in their disposability. They stick out, like the sweet girl in the zombie flick, only there to die.

Sometimes heroes don’t return. They lose the fight or their victory is Pyrrhic. The good fall and stay down. Returning becomes the sole province of the villain, such as in Harry Potter, where resurrection is only made possible through black magic and wicked deeds. Great evils often re-arise in fantasy, putting themselves back together after long centuries, and a new group of misfit heroes must sally forth to save the day.

Whether it involves heroes or villains, when the gates to the underworld are a revolving door, it becomes difficult to create a world where death has meaning. The hard part is keeping the balance. I’ve read quite a few books where the stakes of the plot were high, but every hero and side character squeaks through. When you’re reading a series, and this pattern repeats book after book, you start to doubt that anyone can truly die. Fiction is strongest when it reflects reality, and the reality is that we must die. It is one of the incontrovertible truths of our lives, and it should be true for our characters as well.

Everyone Needs a Breather: A Little More on Pace

2010-09-18T10:10:00.000-07:00

We all have periods when it seems everything goes wrong: life enters cascade failure, and one crisis after another piles on. You’ve probably met someone who just seems cursed. A personal loss is followed by a car wreck, then a flooded house, then an illness. You start to wonder which god they pissed on to create such calamity. You pity them, but you fear them a bit too. Stand too close and lightning might strike. Conflict is a rule of life and fiction, but fortunately there are good times as well as bad. Even the bleakest existence is mercifully punctuated with a bit of hope.

In fiction, and in life, everyone needs a breather, a time out, or just a break. Sometimes we can’t control the pace of reality, but as writers we get to show our characters some mercy from time to time.

I return to the issue of pacing as I consume urban fantasy at a voracious rate. In Florida I tore through the rest of the Sookie Stackhouse catalog and started on Simon Green’s Nightside books. The first book in the Age of Misrule series is next. One book that came highly recommended, but that I can’t seem to complete, is Vickie Pettersson’s Scent of Shadows.

Green, Harris, and Pettersson all work in the first person, the standard point of view for urban fantasy. This prevents the problem Kristin Nelson recently discussed, of having the action in the second chapter not flow directly from the action in the first. Doors get opened, characters are presented with a conflict, and work towards a resolution. All three share the nuts and bolt of a good read: the protagonists are compelling, the antagonist is stronger, and you want to know where the plot will go. In Harris’s series, Sookie takes regular breaks from the supernatural. I was surprised to note how much of the books deal with her domestic issues and money woes. Green uses his fantastic setting, the magical heart of London, to punctuate the action with colorful anecdotes and asides. But Pettersson never seems to come up for air. Tension in a book should build, driving the reader to keep turning the pages, but even the most action-oriented horror films have to insert quieter moments to bring things down before you reveal the next monster.

Pettersson hits her protagonist, Joanna Archer, with one shock after another. She’s brutally attacked, then reunited with her lost first love. She’s disowned by her father. She suffers a brutal personal loss. She’s dropped into a confusing supernatural battle. All of this is perhaps in the first hundred pages. With these revelations out of the way, I thought things would slow for a moment; but the revelations continue. Joanna is given the need to struggle with a legacy inherited from the mother who abandoned her, her new allies don’t trust her, she destroys a life. She’s not what they expected. Her love thinks she’s dead. He’s been targeted. She’s . . . and I put the book down.

Reading Scent of Shadows is rather like lunch with that perpetually unlucky friend. You’re obligated to go (and it is the rare book I don’t finish), but you scheduled the meeting as a lunch because you’re not sure how much more tragedy you can absorb. Hearing about his endless travails, time after time, start to wear you out.

Is Scent of Shadows a bad book? I don’t think so. There are a lot of good ideas here, including one great twist I never saw coming and thought was genius. Pettersson just hits Joanna with too much at once, without enough time for any of the revelations to really connect to the reader’s consciousness. There are enough major life events, changes, and thresholds crossed for three books in the first half of Scent of Shadows, and the compression is a problem of pacing. A little downtime here and there would help the book a lot. At least it would help keep me caught up in the story. The characters might be super human and able to absorb endless punishment, but as a reader, I’m not. I need the protagonist to catch her breath. Lesley, who recommended it, has good taste and assures me the series improves dramatically. The story has been compelling enough for Pettersson to put five of them out there, so I’m hoping to return to the story when I’m ready for more.

September's Book Club Book: The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean

2010-08-28T10:52:00.000-07:00

This is the first book of literary fiction recommended by Jo Dunn. The goal is to have it read by the end of September.

Experience is Research

2010-08-28T09:57:00.000-07:00

Florida isn’t my usual comfort zone, but here I am, sitting on the little patio at my hotel suite, coffee in hand, laptop on lap, watching a lizard (I think it’s an anole) try to sneak up on me. He’s not terribly subtle, being the color of a fresh leaf and flaring the little flap on the underside of his neck. The Florida air couldn’t be less like Colorado: it’s not even nine am and I’m already steaming. I always feel a bit greasy here, despite the best efforts of the ubiquitous air conditioning. I can’t believe I need to iron anything. I would think the air itself would flatten the crease in my work shirts.

There’s a lot of swagger in Tampa. Men are bulkier than in Denver, where we all bike, run, hike, something. Women seem thinner, more inclined to wearing as little as possible (and I couldn’t blame them if they went full-on nudist in this climate). My former impressions of this place led me to think of it as monolithic: polluted, traditional, and unhealthy. I’m seeing that there’s more to it than that. There’s a strata of progressive culture and diversity mixed in. I’ve been to Whole Foods and found a yoga studio. The food, which I’d thought of as solidly corporate chain, has proven to have a mix of diversity. Today I’m trying a divey little Greek place and last night I sampled an off the map Thai place next to a head shop.

I’m down here for the day job, but I’ve stolen this morning to do a little writing and catch up with my personal email. When I travel I get a lot of ideas, but few of them are immediately useful. They get stored away, put into the notebook, tucked into the eaves, and hopefully when I draw them out later, I’ll find them useful. They’re research, fodder for the creative compost, and when I need to bring a scene to life, they serve me well. I write a lot of about my theory of craft, and one thing I want to stress again is that experience is research.

Getting out of our comfort zones can be so hard, and unfortunately, it’s often not by choice. The person with the tragic life can share experiences we hope to never have. Yet we crave reading about them. We get a thrill from the vicarious experience. We imbibe a sip of what happens to another, never really able to fully experience what they did. Isn’t this the heart of fiction, possibly of reading? The vicarious experience drives it all. We feel the danger faced by heroes, we empathize with tragedy, feel a twinge of our own romantic longing when we read a good love story. It’s an incredibly powerful contrast: we need the safety of the distance reading gives us to judge or evaluate a story. Yet we also need connection in order to empathize with the character. A fully unlikeable protagonist can’t lure us back for a series’ worth of reading.

Imbuing a story with real experiences can be tricky: after all, so much of what we experience may connect us as people, but it’s also usually pretty boring. Some of the first advice you get in writing is to avoid staring with characters waking up, brushing their teeth, or doing anything too mundane or regular. Yet all of us have unique experiences, witness interesting anecdotes as they happen, get a peek into human nature day by day. These are just experiences that relate to character. As I sit here, in the sun, I feel the air warm. I’m sweating. I never sweat in Colorado. There’s a vegetable smell, like something in sweet decay, lacing the air. Just this contrast with the Denver air is an experience I can use for setting. If I wrote about a tropical heat without having felt it myself, it would likely come across as stilted. Obviously, we can’t experience the bite of a vampire or the prick of a killer’s knife (and we wanted to), but we can fill in the gaps. One reason I think the Sookie Stackhouse novels work so well is that they’re firmly grounded in Sookie’s financial troubles. Not a book goes by without her expending a little energy on domestic issues like cleaning. These experiences are universal and help anchor a story. There’s a balance to using these experiences in your work, as there seems to be so often in writing. You want to anchor without boring, captivate without droning on or worse, taking your readers off track. I’ll work on blogging some more while I’m here, but for now I’m off to the beach.

Writing to the Critic: Mr. Angry and the Workshop from Hell

2010-08-02T21:17:00.001-07:00

I once took a writing workshop with an incredibly angry, aggressive man. His idea of poetry was a stream of expletives and rage. He’d start every class by loading himself up on sugar and caffeine before unleashing a wave of criticism in our workshop groups. There was quite literally a point or two when I worried about my safety. He was the exact personification of the reluctance I’d always had in taking a writing class.

Mr. Angry was eventually kicked out of the class, which was a relief to us all, but at the same time my writing suffered. Knowing I was going to face him every Tuesday and Thursday meant I’d been steeling my nerves, but I was also polishing my material. I began to adjust my short stories to withstand his critiques. I anticipated his attacks, and my writing was ready for him. How was such a negative presence in workshop helping me write better? I had given my internal editor a more aggressive face, a more bombastic personality, and a more critical eye. The supportive voices in class were helpful in some ways, but they never forced the same polish as Mr. Angry. I’ve since incorporated him as my internal critic and editor. He’s a frightening presence, not really a friend, and an important weapon in my arsenal in the battle for getting published.

To start writing we need a softer touch, a lot of encouragement, practice. We take baby steps into the craft, open our minds, discover our voice. Nurturing this stage of things is crucial, but if we’re going to publish we need a brutal reality check. Your mother might tell you she likes your work, but any critique that’s pure gush and not truly critical isn’t getting you where you need to be. So a crucial trick is knowing when to turn the internal Mr. Angry on and off. If he’s there from go you may never get a project started. He’s busy telling you that you suck, and listening may cost you your confidence. When you’re stuck, face down on the mat, you’ve got to shut that critic off or you won’t pull yourself up and get back to work. When you’re truly down is a good time to rely on your support network, get a little encouragement, go back to the well for some nurturing. Read a really good book, remember why you love a great read and why you want to contribute to the conversation. Get back to work.

But when the draft is done and you need to make your work into something that might actually sell, take Mr. Angry out of his box and start asking him questions. Let him pelt your writing with useful critique. Separate issues of confidence from issues of craft. In studying Philosophy you learn to counter argue, to question assumptions and keep digging until you break an argument. The person will invariably strengthen their position or abandon it. And sometimes you’ve got to abandon a bit of your writing. A story or worse, a novel, just isn’t publishable. It might be too derivative, too poorly written, or too predictable. A good way to avoid ending up with such a piece of writing is to critique it. Put it in front of Mr. Angry and let him rip. When he’s done, and you’ve plugged those holes, let him have another go. This is how counter-arguing works: you keep attacking the weak spots until they’re gone. When Mr. Angry is exhausted, and you’ve successfully revised away everything he spotted, get a critique group. Exchange your writing with other writers. Get their input. If you’ve honestly listened to your internal critic you’re going to find that you’ve hit the issues already. And if not, don’t despair, you need to refine your inner critic as well as your craft. He’ll grow as you do, adding new attacks as you add new techniques. The process will always be there, iterative, and evolving. Balance your inner editor/critic with the flow of your work. It can be tricky. You need to always improve, but you also need to always be working and striving. If Mr. Angry gets out of control and is stifling your work, kick him out for a while.

Book Club Review: Winterlong - I Can Feel the Cold

2010-08-01T14:44:00.001-07:00

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

- Emily Dickinson

What makes a good science fiction or fantasy book is what makes any good book: conflict, character, and strong writing. Yet with science fiction in particular, I find the more compelling books need to do more. They have to draw me into an alien world, present a changed or future Earth. Sometimes, as in Star Trek, they offer us a more ideal version of ourselves. World peace is achieved, we’re reaching for the stars, and the conflict comes from our contact with alien societies. Sometimes, as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, we look into a dystopian future where all is wrong with the world. We had it far better than we knew, and we let it slip away through greed or arrogance. Good fantasy sweeps me up in a world of magic. Good science fiction can chill me to the core.

Winterlong, the first book chosen for our book club, certainly puts a bit of ice in my spine. It’s as lush as a One Hundred Years of Solitude, but like that book, every garden holds a deadly human danger. Being a bit hopeful about our future, I tend to shy from post-apocalyptic novels, but Elizabeth Hand crafts a world so far removed from us that our past is jumbled together with the society’s idea of us: religion, history, sexuality, mythology, even our museums are transformed, often beautifully, often horrifically, but rarely in a way we’d truly recognize. Children, particularly, meet terrible fates in this book. Innocence is either anathema to survival in Winterlong’s world or it is the key to unlocking far more terrible horrors. Doorways are opened and things we’ve always carried inside us are let loose.

Not for the faint of heart, Winterlong could be further compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude in that it shares traits with magical realism, though Hand’s world has science and the acts of mankind as cause for the terrible changes that descend without warning onto the landscape. At the novel’s center is a fairytale trait, a “garden within a garden,” a mythic archetype lurking in the mutated flowers. Death haunts these characters, at first from without, then soon from within, the scariest place it can dwell. Two tangling point of views come together. Distinct shards of a broken society are deeply explored, and Hand lets her characters’ Todestrieb, their death-instinct, out to play in an already terrible world.

I choose Winterlong for our inaugural book because it’s long been on my list. I suspect it will haunt me far longer. It’s a book I will read again, without enjoyment, but with a desire to untangle its puzzles and revisit its warnings.

Some Characters are Timeless

2010-08-01T08:27:00.000-07:00

Lately I’ve taken to examining television series, how they’re constructed, how they arc, and how so many writers and producers can keep track of a story and push it forward. Comic books are a great resource for such analysis: Superman, Spiderman, and Wonder Woman have all been with us for years. Dozens of writers have touched their story, added to its framework, sometimes radically and sometimes by embracing the status quo. Supporting cast members get killed off. New characters arrive to offer a fresh point of view. At the heart of the lifelong series is the timeless character, someone we can relate to and touches us enough that new generations discover them and their appeal does not wane. But they can’t survive on nostalgia alone. That much is clear when an imprint tries to bring back a classic character without giving them enough connection to current times. A timeless character has to find relevance in the world of their audience.

As a kid, in Guthrie, Oklahoma, I’d try to wait up for my dad to get home. He’d make it in just after 10 pm, wake me, and we’d meet me in the living room to watch Doctor Who on PBS. That was my first timeless character, the first time my head filled with ideas about other worlds and histories long forgotten. Sure there was a lot of running and screaming, but there was a robot dog, and I came to love the series and stuck with it on public television through much of my childhood.

I’ve kept up with the current version, updated and straining to be more adult, but weighed down by sentiment and the vast history of the series. The acting could be very strong, with some good doses of just over the top. David Tennant and Catherine Tate especially brought a great interplay, but the sense of wonder had largely gone out of it for me. Still, I decided to follow the current season from the beginning, driven mostly by my affection for Steven Moffat.

I knew he’d written some of the strongest episodes of the last few years, and I knew he could write razor dialogue from his work on Coupling. I knew from his creation of River Song, that he could create strong characters who really embraced the concept of time travel and what it would entail for disjointed meetings and lost moments.

What I didn’t expect was to find him getting to the heart of the Doctor and his relationship to his companions and audience. In season five, Moffat takes the Doctor back into a childhood context, the place where I met him, and brings him forward into our adulthood. The companion this year, Amy Pond, acts as a surrogate for all of us who grew up with Doctor Who. Companions have always been a point of view character, a way for us to get our questions about the Doctor’s world answered and feel like we’re not the only ones looking into a strange new universe, but Amy meets the Doctor in her childhood. When he vanishes, she has to remember him anew, matching her fantasies to her reality.

A character with no sense of adventure gains it, a character running from the inevitability of growing up embraces it, and the Doctor begins to show an awareness of the vastness of his life. He starts to show a maturity and the uncertainty that comes with it as he learns that there are things even he does not know.

While Moffat reduces the show’s sentimentality, the weakest moments still come when it gets center stage (the third episode, with Winston Churchill, being the clearest example). The hints and nods to past continuity are for the most part, well placed Easter eggs that remind us of the show’s long history, but don’t bog us down in obscure lore. The plots work without a trip to Wikipedia, which isn’t always the case with long-standing comic book heroes.

I was deeply impressed by the finale, which moved me in ways I hadn’t expected. Doctor Who grew up a little and a childhood hero has managed to stay with me through the years.

Announcing the Fantasy and Fiction Book Club!

2010-07-03T08:07:00.000-07:00

To write, you must read. Okay, sure, you’ve also got to write, and sometimes that seems like a serious uphill battle, but what are we churning out all this stuff for if there’s no audience? I read whenever I can, usually in desperate marathons of sleep deprived consumption, but then I get out of the regular habit and slack off again. Come to think of it, I have a very similar relationship to the gym.

After letting good books pile up around the house, I know they're good because my friend Jo gave most of them to me, I'm starting a book club to motivate myself to keep a more regular schedule and share good books with friends.

I'll post polls here so we vote on which book to read for which month. As I believe that writing takes a lot of diversity in reading, I'll be keeping it open in regards to genre or age. Once we’ve moved through the unread stack on my desk I’ll start taking suggestions. Please invite anyone you think would like to join. Our first book will be Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand. It's been on my list for a while and I'm excited to finally get to it. I should point out that the Rejectionist reminded me to read this book this week, and I’m grateful for the prod to get reading it. The goal is to have Winterlong read by August 1st.

Staring Into Space: the Work Before

2010-07-02T16:59:00.000-07:00

There’s that weird aspect to writing, which isn’t writing. Writing is surgery, confidently wielding words and getting them out by pixel or pen. That’s the fun part, especially when you’re working on something new. I love virgin territory, diving into a new scene and bringing it to life. I love getting a bit of inspiration that helps me twist things around and surprise a reader. But before the fun part comes the planning, thinking things like plot and conflict through, sorting ideas, remembering a character’s motivations, and generally meditating on what I want to do in a scene. I call it the staring into space phase.

I usually write twice a day, once in the morning before work, and once at night, after. The times between can often stretch on depending on the stress level of the day job. I can lose the rhythm and tone of the work in progress. I try to leave myself on a cliffhanger with the scene, the moment before a big action or change. If time runs out I leave a little note for myself preceded by an asterisk. Carving out the time to write is simple for me: I force myself to commute by bus and it puts my butt in a chair without the distractions of home, Internet, or hungry cats. If I’m in a good spot when I get home I can sit down and stretch out the work (after the cats have had their dinner). It’s finding time to stare into space and contemplate that’s hard for me.

Part of that is the nature of thinking about the work. Like yoga or meditation, you have to discipline yourself to the task at hand. Driving out other thoughts, especially stressful concerns like “did I leave the gas on?” can be particularly tough. But putting it all aside and focusing on the work at hand is essential. Plot holes start to emerge as you counter argue the strengths of your story. New solutions and angles spring to mind to answer those arguments. Most importantly, you keep your story on the rails and avoid any crashes off track.

Failing to frame my writing and prepare for it can cost me valuable time. I’ll take a scene or section in the wrong direction. Then I’ve got to retrace my steps, possibly delete work, and start over. I’ve never been a solid outliner. I like to figure things out as I go, but I do strongly believe in milestones. Certain unalterable events have to happen in the plot for the story to function: villains have to show up, doors have to be opened, and changes have to occur. I don’t keep an outline but find a roadmap is handy. So I start my planning sessions with a quick review of my story’s path. Staring off into space, I try to put myself as closely in tune with the story as possible. I pour a cup of coffee and make sure the cats are fed. Then I get to work at staring into space.

"To the Man With a Hammer Everything Looks Like a Nail."

2010-06-27T10:48:00.000-07:00

Google attributes this quote to Mark Twain, but I first encountered it in regards to writing in my Introduction to Literary Studies course during my Literature BA. Dr. So was referring to semicolon usage, something he'd picked up on in our papers. Once we'd learned how to properly use a semicolon, we were putting them everywhere. The point he was making was that just because you have a tool doesn't mean you always have to use it. It's something to watch for in your writing, and it extends to many things, not just punctuation. When we write there's a certain level of comfort with what we know. We might embrace certain stylistic constructs or punctuation uses because they're familiar, and we risk overusing them and giving our prose a flat, repetitive quality.

Eastlight's first draft contained an insane amount of nodding. I was overusing that beat constantly. That was a problem easily solved once it was picked up on, but other repetitions were subtler. My history degree trained me to write more academically, more passively, and I still cling to weak phrasing like seemed as in it seemed darker versus it grew darker. One of the biggest patterns I've faced is making my verbs more active, and that took investing into the Oxford Writer's Thesaurus* and using it daily. It's fortunate that I enjoy word-smithing, though it's easy to get lost in the weeds if you're not careful and while away precious writing hours by picking sentences apart. The old adage of putting a manuscript away for a while is crucial here. You often don't recognize a repetitive pattern while you're in the middle of performing it. A little distance is a good cure. Reading back through a manuscript a few months later will definitely help you spot patterns both good and bad. All of this thought on process is teaching me that multiple drafts are never going to fade away. When I set out to write my first novel, I knew there would be lots of drafts, and there were. But I thought Eastlight would have fewer. It didn't. It had the same number. It all goes back to that continual process of improvement: you stop making some mistakes, but you learn you're making others. You grow in your craft and take bolder risks, introducing new patterns you need to work on. Widen your toolbox and use everything you've got on hand.

*I recommend the investment, though don't stop there. The Thesaurus is strong, but I've found it to be incomplete. I supplement a lot with www.dictionary.com's thesaurus, and that resource is free.

Had to Share

2010-06-23T09:14:00.001-07:00

Laura Miller's Salon piece on self publishing. The section on slush was what I found the most interesting:

It seriously messes with your head to read slush. Being bombarded with inept prose, shoddy ideas, incoherent grammar, boring plots and insubstantial characters -- not to mention ton after metric ton of clichés -- for hours on end induces a state of existential despair that's almost impossible to communicate to anyone who hasn't been there themselves: Call it slush fatigue. You walk in the door pledging your soul to literature, and you walk out with a crazed glint in your eyes, thinking that the Hitler Youth guy who said, "Whenever I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my revolver" might have had a point after all. Recovery is possible, but it'll take a while (apply liberal doses of F. Scott Fitzgerald). In the meantime, instead of picking up every new manuscript with an open mind and a tiny nibbling hope, you learn to expect the worst. Because almost every time, the worst is exactly what you'll get.

I'm sure Miller's article will be getting a lot of discussion on the publishing blogs, and I'm very interested in seeing how it's received. I obviously have a stake in this matter, and I'm one of the partial. But I also know that my book under the bed was rightfully rejected. Does the query process truly act as quality control, or is it stiffing good books? All the reading I'm doing is beginning to hint to both.

Trick, Treat, and Maybe Twitter

2010-06-16T21:36:00.000-07:00

I’ve always had a little taste for the macabre or the spooky. While I went through my Goth phase post high school and fell deeply in love with Anne Rice’s vampire series, I left the supernatural behind for a good while. Probably it was college. Entering an English Lit program drove me to read “serious” books, and I had to slake my thirst on the ghost scene in Hamlet or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. While I didn’t really return to the supernatural until recently, my love for it was always there. I’ve especially always enjoyed a good intersection of epic fantasy and the paranormal.

In recent years I’ve been getting my fix through Gail Z. Martin’s Chronicles of the Necromancer. I’m excited to see where she takes the new arc. Gail has been kind enough to provide us with a sneak peek of her new book, The Sworn, coming in February next year:

As plague and famine scourge the winter kingdoms, a vast invasion force is mustering from beyond the northern seas. And at its heart, a dark spirit mage wields the blood magic of ancient, vanquished gods. Summoner-King Martris Drayke must attempt to meet this great threat, gathering an army from a country ravaged by civil war. Drayke must seek new allies from among the living – and the dead –- as an untested generation of rulers face their first battle. Then someone disturbs the legendary Dread as they rest in a millennia-long slumber beneath sacred barrows. Their warrior guardians, the Sworn, know the Dread could be pivotal as a force for great good or evil. But if it’s the latter, could even the Summoner-King’s sorcery prevail?

Gail Z. Martin is the author of The Summoner, The Blood King and Dark Haven in the Chronicles of the Necromancer series, published by Solaris Books. The Sworn marks her move to Orbit Books. The books have garnered praise from reviewers as well as strong sales and spots on several bestseller lists. Learn more at www.ChroniclesOfTheNecromancer.com

Gail might finally be the reason I get dragged onto Twitter, as she’s going to twitter the first chapter of The Sworn on June 21st (www.Twitter.com/GailZMartin). I’m hoping we’ll see more Tris’s power set, and see wider application of his summoning abilities.

One place Gail really shines is settings: she’s created a great religious division based on various aspects of a single goddess. With her exploring various kingdoms in the world of the Summoner, I’m anxious to see how the goddess takes to these vanquished gods infringing on her territory. Martin is upping the stakes, which can only be a good thing for a series. Hope you join us for the ride!

The Delicate Balance of Setting and Detail

2010-06-13T17:51:00.000-07:00

It’s a rainy, humid weekend in Denver, which makes me a little homesick for Oklahoma. After my last post’s suggestion to slow down and listen, I wanted to focus on another bit of advice that got pushed to the side: which is to observe. Growing up in Oklahoma, I was certainly exposed to severe weather. The distinct flatness made you feel like the sky went on forever while the land just floated beneath the clouds. But these aren’t the only elements to Oklahoma as a setting. There’s the red mud, which smells a bit sulfurous and clings to everything, especially after an autumn rain has kicked it up to the car hoods or the middle trunk of the blackjack oaks. There are fields of switch grass, sometimes flooded, with dilapidated barns falling to bits, and catfish-infested lakes, blue and shining, but full of gritty water that becomes truly purple at sunset. The smells of Oklahoma are dusty, verdant, and always a little a damp in flavor. I remember a classic car, model T era, just lying on a ravine slope near a lake and rusting slowly to death. I recall miles of weathered cattle fencing often displaying rusted signs for stores and brands long out of business. Such imagery makes it easy to paint the poverty and decay I saw in Oklahoma growing up, but it also generalizes a setting which has malls, rock climbing gyms set in old grain silos, incredible botanic gardens, and a sprawling zoo. When I tell people I’m from Oklahoma I usually get a refrain from the musical or some question like “did you ride horses to school?”

It’s easy to reduce setting to a repetitive stereotype, and such generalizations occur to us because they are convenient. We use them to summarize someone or somewhere quickly and in doing so we often misconstrue. Yet a writer can go too far in the other direction: we can describe a setting to death. This is a particular pitfall in epic fantasy, where writers strive to bring a world alive. There’s a fine line between injecting realism and over-burdening or over-sharing. The less like our world the fantasy is, the harder the job of conveying the setting to the reader in a concise fashion. All of the Oklahoma details above are things I’ve pulled from memory, and I could easily continue in this vein for a long while, but it’s important to know when to pull back from setting. Setting is a character, an essential element to your story, and an important tool in your writing kit; but setting alone is devoid of purpose. The further I take my writing, the more I see it as systemic: each element is crucial and interrelated to the others. Setting must be connected to character, to plot, and conflict in order for it to purpose. No element of your work should be static unless its static quality drives the tension. For example, a small town kid who desperately wants a change in her life and feels strangled by the unchanging environment. As you observe the world around you and craft setting for your stories, it’s important to include details that bring the setting alive and surpass the easy stereotype. It is equally important that the characters inhabit the setting in a relatable way: engage all five senses with critical details. Balance this with the level of detail. Don’t overwhelm the reader with non-essential information but engage them. So much of writing is a delicate balancing act and learning to use your voice to walk the very fine line that’s right for your work.

Slow Down: Pace, Plot, and Observation

2010-06-11T19:28:00.001-07:00

I used to take walks with my ex, before we were exes, wandering the city, street to street, alley to alley. I found it utterly boring. I needed a destination, somewhere to go, a point to it all. It's one more thing I should apologize for. I've since learned to meander, ambulate, and drift. I'll take turns down new streets because I like the house on the corner or into an alley based on the graffiti. This tactic is a great way to think, to plot, to turn ideas over and let them rise like bread. It's not a bad method of warming up my brain and slipping into my character's skin.

It's also become one of my favorite ways of capturing unique details, images and snippets that I file away for later use. You observe more at the slower pace of walking. You hear more without the muting of car windows or the rush of the wind. Landscape and setting don’t pass you by. As I'm often reminded when a fox crosses my path in the park, cities are full of unexpected wildlife, people, and details. Things jump out at you more clearly, but most importantly you learn to slow your mind down. When I'm writing I tend to get very excited about ideas, many of which aren't bad, but they don't fit the scene or piece. It's important to check ideas before I just start altering a work; and I often find the idea isn't going to work and file it away for later. Rewriting a scene without thinking it through can be disastrous. A story is a tapestry. Once you start pulling threads or introducing new images you may create problems that ripple through the entire work. I realized in my latest edit that I was putting all of the revelations at the climax, and while this effectively brought the plot to a tightly written end, it created a desert of meaningful events in the preceding section. An edit later and I’ve moved things around a little. The pace of the novel is less like a sudden crescendo, where all of the secrets unravel at once, and more like a gradual ascent, with peaks and valleys of revelation until the most major secret stand exposed. You need little rests along the way, accomplishments, and respite from whatever is hounding you.

The trick to understanding that I needed to make the change was feeling the novel’s tempo and knowing where to speed up or slow down. When I looked at the points in the book where the story crawled I often found a lot of slack, extra writing that while not bad, didn’t contribute to moving the story forward. Cutting these pieces and repurposing their strongest lines at other points went a long ways to speeding the book up. I had to get go of a pre-determined word count and give the story what it needed most.

Each story has its own pace: a cross-country chase will feel very different than a cozy murder mystery. The best trick I’ve found for learning my story’s pace is to read it aloud to myself, which certainly earns me a few interesting glances on the bus. I’m fortunate that I studied poetry so long. It helps me a lot with understanding the iambic rhythms of English and if I’m lucky, avoiding staccato beats.

I guess if there’s any advice in this post it’s to listen: to your work, to your environment. Try to get a feel for the world around you with a pointless walk, unplugged from technology. Leave your phone behind, your iPod, and your laptop. Bring nothing but your eyes, your feet, a notebook and a pen. When you’ve got a story finished, take it with you. Find somewhere quiet to sit and read it aloud.

On Writing a Series: Conflict and Endings

2010-06-03T20:49:00.000-07:00

Last night I had one of those stressful dreams, the kind where you need to be in two places at once as the universe throws up every possible obstacle to your goal. In this case I needed a haircut to avoid looking like Shaggy Peter, but it was my barber’s birthday and I wasn’t going to get any service without bringing a bottle of wine. But the downtown liquor store was closed, and it was raining, increasing my bedraggled state. I overcame the obstacle by ducking into a restaurant and ordering a bottle of wine, remembering that Denver allows you to take your bottle to go, but the victory came with a call from my boss. I was supposed to be somewhere else, a crucial meeting for my day job, while simultaneously realizing that I needed to get to my writing class, which started in a few minutes. I woke with a flood of relief that it had only been a dream. Yet the conflict and frustration I’d felt were very real. The possibility for the dilemma was realistic, as was the setback after a little victory. The tension inherent in the need to be in two places at once is common enough in a modern life.

I’ve been trying for a while to find a microsm of conflict, something that embodies the tension that fuels a story’s forward motion. The dream did a great job of that. It also pointed me to an obvious truth: conflict isn’t just a factor in engaging fiction. It’s a constant in our lives. A character with an ideal existence, without a compelling conflict, isn’t someone we can relate to. One reason serial characters work is that reality is always messy, always full of strife, so the protagonist in a series is never going to run out of issues needing resolution. A good series will keep a few conflicts bubbling, issues that must be dealt with sometime but aren’t going to be addressed right now because a more immediate problem is draining the main character’s attention. Isn’t that like life? We have so much to handle and only so much time or so many resources to do it. Good conflict is Sisyphean. You get the stone up the hill a little farther each day, but it rolls back down. A strong series lets its protagonist win, make some gains in where the stone ends up, but there’s always going to be more pushing. Simultaneously, your hero needs a victory now and then. Without it, your readers will despair. The story has to satisfy and yet ring true.

This brings us to the ending and the topic of wish fulfillment, which is a problem I think largely inherent in my genre. You commonly encounter “super characters” in fantasy, and the problem in being superhuman, in having a vast well of power which comes without a cost, is that such a character is above us, and again, isn’t relatable.

The ultimate victory, getting the rock to the summit or a milestone, needs a price. We seldom achieve anything important in life that’s not costly: the time we put into a degree, the loss of our idealism as we grow up, the stress of planning a wedding, or the pain of giving birth. Good stories have a bittersweet ending. If everybody lives, if everyone makes it out of the trap, the conflict is revealed as artificial and the ending rings false. There is a good reason why only fairy tales regularly end with happily ever after. It’s no coincidence that many of Shakespeare’s tragedies begin with a wedding while many of his comedies end with one. Life gets in the way of happily ever after. The wedding may end the conflict between two rival families, but now the couple must negotiate the difficulties in producing an heir, changing diapers, managing their money, and dealing with treachery in the household. Happily ever after is a pleasant dream, but you’ve got to wake to reality sometime, and that means conflict.

The Cycle and Struggle of Writing

2010-05-22T19:08:00.000-07:00

There's been a wave of blog posts lately regarding rejection in writing, reiterating how hard it is get published and succeed. I don't feel the need to beat that horse, but I do want to talk a bit about what we learn when we start writing and aspire to publication. First, let me give credit to the wonderful Betsy Lerner, whose post put the bug in my head.

I had an idea early on that writing a book was only the first step. Having watched my aunt struggle to publish in my teens, I used to say that writing the book was only half the battle. Now I'm pretty convinced that the initial writing is closer to ten percent. There's querying (which in of itself is not a simple process), coming up with a marketing plan, networking, learning to write a strong synopsis and elevator pitch, avoiding scammers, and thickening your skin till it has the consistency of concrete. You need to be actively reading all the while to keep the rhythms of English close at hand. There are a lot of decision points mixed throughout this process: is a critique group right for you? Should you blog, use social network sites like Facebook, invest in a website, joins local associations, and invest the money to attend conferences? Then there is the writing itself, revisions, polishing, and growing in your craft.

One of the biggest misconceptions I face in telling people I write is that it's an automatic sign of success, having written a book. Just explaining the idea of a practice manuscript can be a bit draining.

So why write and persist when the process is so hard? The easiest answer is that I love it. It defines me. The few times in my life when I'm put it away, tried to walk away, have been the most depressing I've had. Each step in the process of writing and publishing is a lesson, a learning experience, and a struggle. When it all gets me down, especially the notion that I might never publish in an industry undergoing seismic upheaval, I turn to my computer, fire up Word, and start a new project. I try to find that spark that first drove me to want to write down a story. The best answer to getting frustrated with writing, perhaps ironically, is to write.

A Dark Musicbox - Sssh, I'm Listening

2010-05-22T08:24:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday I was introduced to a Japanese accoustic band named Mono. They played the local Bluebird Theatre, and I was given a ticket by a friend. What an excellent little present, perfectly wrapped in surprise and scant expectation since I knew nothing about their sound before walking in the door.

Labeled post-rock by my friends*, Mono uses no vocals. I would have been carried away into the music, except for the strange Denver habit of choosing to hold complex personal conversations at concerts. (This may be true for other cities, but I seem to experience especially here). Good acoustic music builds from quiet to crescendo, something Mono does with a delicate, almost tinny, skill. Unfortuantely the quiet parts of songs are where people decide it's an excellent time to discuss anything from their redecoration to what breed of dog they think is the ugliest. It's something that's been bugging me for a long time, and I usually attempt to avoid such Internet rants: but seriously, people, if you want to have these conversations in a public venue, why don't you go to a coffee shop instead of paying upwards of $50 for a concert ticket?

I've found a new sound to brainstorm to, and I've happily ripped the cds into my iPod, where thankfully my earbuds will let me be alone with the music. Give Mono a listen, and if you get the chance, see them live. It's impressive that they maintain such a complex sound in a live environment.

*I have no idea what that means, but Geoff's comparison to Sigur Ros helped.

Roma: A Week in the Eternal City was just what I needed.

2010-05-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

I’m an unabashed philhellene. I focused heavily on ancient Greece during my history degree and wrote my senior thesis on another fan of the culture, the Emperor Hadrian. I’m fully aware of the permanent mark he left on Greece. Many of the ancient monuments still extant in Athens were commissioned by Hadrian. What I hadn’t realized was how deeply he’d also left his mark on Rome, the city he ruled but spent so little time in. I knew the Pantheon would be a sight to behold, the last standing pagan temple which survived through its conversion to a Christian church, but without even taking a trip to Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, his stamp is permanently etched onto Rome. He showed up in so many spots I felt he was haunting me: his bust was a constant presence, his name often arose in museums. One of the first impressive pieces in the Vatican Museum is a great pinecone from Hadrian’s Villa, and the Antinous of the Vatican is the largest and most detailed of the several I’ve seen.

If you’ve guessed that I’ve just returned from a week in Rome, you’re right. It was an incredible trip, and went smoothly up until the very end, when the volcanic ash cloud and some other incidents delayed our return. I also had a last minute confrontation in the rainy pre-dawn morning waiting on our cab to the airport, one of the only times in my eight trips to Europe when I thought I may come under physical assault. These misadventures aside, the journey was a feast of art, history, and some of the most incredible food I’ve ever eaten. My good friend Sara Meyer, celebrating her own graduation from her Master’s program, was a phenomenal traveling companion, ferreting out little churches and teaching me a ton about competitive commissions in the Renaissance. I’ve been assembling a full Facebook gallery of the pictures and I’ll keep captioning and editing over the next few weeks. Friend me if you’ve any interest.

Rome is a dizzying blend of food, architecture, art, and culture. I’d been warned again and again about pickpockets, beggars, and that my companion was going to suffer some serious male harassment. None of these warnings proved true, though I was half-hoping Jenny’s story about women throwing their babies at you so they could pick your pocket when you caught the infant was more than just a colorful urban myth.

On the final day of the trip I got to visit the Protestant Cemetery where John Keats, a major subject during my English degree, is buried. His tombstone, set beside his friend Joseph Severn, was a quiet pinnacle to a great adventure. A week wasn’t enough, so I’m hoping to return in the next two years.

A couple of tips for Rome:

The Roma Pass purchase was 26 Euro each and paid for itself quickly: It let us skip all the lines to the big sights like the Coliseum. It also served as a Metro and Bus pass, though we only used the Metro to reach the Vatican one rainy morning and preferred long walks with constant side trips. Its only cons were that it was only good for three days, it only gets you into two sites free (the rest are merely discounted), so use it for the big ticket items like the Forum and save the discount for cheaper events like the Castle of Angels (Hadrian’s Mausoleum). We ended up buying two to get through the whole week but I’ve no regrets there.

Getting there on May 1st meant we missed the American student press, but there were still a lot of student groups, mostly French, and this means the Vatican was extremely crowded. We tacked onto a tour group, largely for the advantage of skipping lines, but the group pushed past all the antiquities in the Museum in order to rush to the Sistine Chapel. Our tour guide, Angelo, had an American mother so his English was perfect and he happily pointed out details that dispelled or confirmed bits of Dan Brown lore (for you haters or lovers). The company was www.livitaly.com, and I’m a fan.

I’ve got to mention our bed and breakfast, the Residenza Ki. They treated us great. My tripadvisor review is here.

For food we piggybacked on Elizabeth’s Gilbert’s technique of asking locals where to eat, though we also had some great meals by choosing places at random. I can definitely say that we didn't have a bad meal, and our dinner the last night was certainly delivered with a bit of flare as the manager brought out the pig's head to show the patrons.

Everyone Wants Something

2010-04-27T18:24:00.000-07:00

In good fiction, it's clearly true: Dexter wants to kill his victims; Emma Woodhouse wants to avoid marriage; and Tom Builder wants to build a cathedral. A key aspect of a fictional character’s life is their driving desire: it’s almost Platonic. They’ve a purpose to fulfill and often approach it with singular drive that borders on obsession. Tension and conflict arise in their setbacks, but with turn of the story’s cycle, they move a bit closer to their goal.

Lately I’ve been diving into books that have long needed reading. Ken Follett’s the Pillars of the Earth finally came to the top of the stack, and like Wonder Boys, it’s another book I wish I’d read years ago. Follett has one of the strongest voices I’ve encountered, and as I continue to read through George R.R. Martin’s catalog, I find myself comparing them. Follett fully distills his characters down to their desires, and the wheel of the story turns, with the characters achieving a milestone towards their goal before getting subjected to a hard knockdown with a long recovery period.

Tom Builder, the book’s first point of view character, reminded me of Howard Roark, the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s the Fountainhead: one individual struggling against a world of chaos which works in concert to pull him down. But Follett doesn’t limit our point of view (POV) to Tom. He slips from one POV to another with the deftest handling I’ve seen. One character spies another on the road and we transition with a clean break to the second character. Where Martin has drawn his story out to an inevitable seven volumes, Follett’s tale is self-contained, and I have to admire the neat wrap up. While they are two different genres, I feel any author can pick up some good mechanical tips from Follett. One advantage of the self-contained book is that I didn’t grow weary of the story cycle. Even a little time spent in the antagonist’s head was interesting, whereas with Martin I feel that his fourth book in the series, a Feast for Crows, is largely spent with individuals who I’m less interested in. Martin remains a master, but I lack the grudging admiration for Queen Cersei that I felt for Tyrion, an antagonist in previous volumes. Follett puts us in the head of his antagonist and while it’s a vile place, I was immediately struck but the clear lack of intelligence and self-awareness of the villain. There’s never any confusion about whose head we’re in. In writing about master craftsmen, Follett displays some remarkable skill of his own.

Fatal Footprints: Comments on Donovan Webster's Aftermath

2010-03-25T17:59:00.000-07:00

Getting a degree in History was one of the most edifying things I’ve done. Even the most boring of classes, taught by the most burned-out professor, gave me insight into something new. My history degree taught me to research, made me a better academic writer, a more critical thinker, and helped me see patterns in human progress.

In fantasy, we often write history. If you look at Tolkien, Martin, Brooks, or other authors in the epic style, they’re largely constructing a fictional history, often with a little inspiration from actual events. Our characters inhabit worlds filled with the ruins of former civilizations, which they explore, contend with, and struggle to understand. History informs us, shapes our cities and prejudices, and in some cases, gets us killed.

Aftermath: the Remnants of War is a journalistic travel-book, but Donovan Webster, is far from your average tourist. His purpose was to explore sites left affected by war. I first heard of the book through Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast, and I’m glad I took Carlin’s advice and ordered the book. While Carlin discusses Donovan's account of the bodies and bones still scattered for miles by the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, I found the discussion on Verdun’s shell-laden forest to be the most compelling. A first hand account of the topic, with the author handling the shells and following them to their eventual demolition, put me to work looking at maps of the two World Wars and the areas still affected by them, usually to the point of being off limits. Webster’s analysis of landmines, where they come from and who deploys them to infect their borders was bone-chilling. It is so easy for us to think of war as a fictional thing, to look at its glories and rewards, but to forget its detrius and the effects it has over the long term. We’ve left the century of the two world wars behind, but still it leaves a lethal legacy as shells work their way to the surface.

In fantasy, we work for realistic accounts of fantastic warfare: dragons swoop from the sky raining fire on infantry; spells are slung like so much artillery across magically-scarred battlefields; but it’s very easy to lose sight of the human aspect of these events. Books like Aftermath help me keep my grounding when I describe large-scale violence, and they help me remember that unlike my pen and paper creations, real war affects flesh and blood people, often for far longer than we ever intended.

I'm highly recommending this book to you. It has great stats to back up the well-written descriptions, and Donovan kept me riveted as he circled the globe. Any student of modern history should read this, as well as any world traveler, if only so you'll know where to step.

A Lifetime of Pointed Silliness: Terry Pratchett’s Making Money

2010-03-21T10:30:00.000-07:00

When it comes to beloved authors, I hoard and conserve. An author only writes so many works, and I live with an unread copy of their latest book on my shelf, for when I really need it. I’m that way with Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, and Terry Pratchett. I first encountered his wonderfully ridiculous Discworld as a freshman in high school. My English teacher had a copy of the Colour of Magic on her lending shelf, and after reading it, I used funds from my first job to join a Science Fiction book club. I soon had little hardback copies of Sourcery, the Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, and Mort.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve read Terry Pratchett’s books, always keeping one unread on the shelf. He’s been a constant presence in my adult life, and I can map it by his work. Witches Abroad remains my favorite, and if you have a hard time finding it in Denver, that’s because I snatch up any copies I see in the stores and give them away. When I’m going through a bad spot, I call in sick to work, and read Terry Pratchett, so I’m hardly able to write an unbiased review. Fortunately, Making Money is his best in years. It taps into the current global financial crisis and finds a satirical vein in the dichotomy between the upper and lower classes. I had expected, with the news of Pratchett’s Alzheimer’s struggle that he might be off his game, but Making Money is literally laugh out loud funny and perfectly balances humor, intrigue, and social commentary.

Pratchett draws on the slew of characters he’s built up over the years, the scheming denizens of Ankh-Morpork, but we’re never taken too far off track by the cameos. Making Money is tightly written, and the few asides are worth the Easter egg connections they make to other books. While the book is technically a sequel to Going Postal, and draws a lot on characters developed in the Watch series, you don’t need them to jump in here. The denouement is typical Pratchett: for a moment he indicates that he could write a bad ass ending, bring it all down in fire and glory, but he chooses irony and humor instead. I hope Making Money is far from the last Pratchett, because he’s only getting better with time.

An Interesting Article I Thought I'd Share

2010-02-28T11:20:00.001-08:00

Laura Miller on Salon has posted a Reader's Advice to Writers. It's a great read, and I found it helpful as I line up my next project. There's some overlap here with books I've read on writing, but reinforcing core concepts is never a bad idea.

It's here.

I'm still delving into the comments on the article, but don't miss her link to the Guardian's article on rules by 28 writers.

A Discussion of Urban Fantasy and Talk of True Blood

2010-02-27T07:32:00.000-08:00

What’s in the backpack today: Hester by Paula Reed.

I’ve finally gotten around to watching through the first season of True Blood, which led me to read Charlaine Harris's Dead until Dark (the first book in the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries). I’d been avoiding the show due to its adult nature, and I finally decided to see what all the fuss is about. What I’ve found is a tightly scripted, small-town murder mystery. Oh yeah, and there are vampires, but so far I’m finding them to be somewhat incidental and less interesting than the other goings on.

I’ve come to think that a lot of urban fantasy’s appeal is derived from its ease of access. In epic fantasy we have to weave a world for the reader, and in that weaving we have to work hard to not bore you with exposition while also telling you the rules of how the world works. Urban fantasy gives the reader an immediate access point: you know the world. It’s yours. The writer can then layer in the supernatural aspects. The hook is more immediate and relatable. The urban fantasy writer has other challenges though. They have to take the mundane and more it extraordinary, whereas as the epic writer can work backwards from making the extraordinary relatable. Neither is easier. Writing is never easy, but I think there’s less chance for an urban fantasy writer to get lot in world-building, a problem inherent in epic fantasy.

Comparing genres is much easier than comparing mediums. True Blood, as a show, works largely on the strength of its secondary characters: Tara, Lafayette, and Sam; all of whom have much smaller parts in the first book. The show has to take one book’s murder plot and cut it into multiple scenes and episodes, changing point of view. The book, which as seems to be the standard in urban fantasy, only gives us Sookie’s first person point of view. Both the show and novel benefit from tight scripting. One thing I noticed immediately was that there are no “use its or lose its” in either one. Every element that’s introduced has a purpose. Description in the novel is cut to a minimum and the show is shot without lingering shots on landscape. The show definitely ups the adult nature of things to an almost extreme level. It seems some days to be HBO’s trademark, but even then the sex scenes have a point. They reflect on the plot and tie into the mystery. The vampires, when they come, when they’re described, in many ways aren’t all that interesting. They just add a layer to an already interesting world. The book of course explains things a bit better, and since it is first person, you gain a much stronger understanding of what Sookie goes through being telepathic. (I would normally have just invoked a spoiler alert, but all my sources tell me I’m the last person on the planet to watch the show or read the book).

A quick word about Charlaine Harris. She writes without any slack. Dead until Dark is tightly scripted, tightly wound. Every character has a point, as does every scene. I raced through the book in a satisfying way without any unnecessary stops to a satisfying destination.

Use it or Lose it

2010-02-26T07:54:00.000-08:00

So in my work, I have a really bad habit that was pointed out to me when I had Eastlight edited by Carol Gaskin: I like to toss every little idea that pops into my head right down onto the page. Most of these are good ideas, but they often change the direction of the story at a time when it doesn’t warrant changing. They insert a detail that catches the reader’s attention, but then I never bring it back or wrap it up and the reader is left wondering what happened to that magical amulet in chapter fifteen?

Use Its, as I’m calling them, are details I considered important enough to describe at the time, but never come back. They’re little floating threads that never get snipped out of the tapestry or woven back in. The fix is pretty simple of course: lose them. Unless the thread is going to come back (in this book or another in the series), cut them out. Loose ends frustrate readers. I know I’ve personally put down many a book and found myself trying to remember if things got dealt with. Avoid Use Its by marking them when you write them in either the novel (I use programming syntax /** since it’s easy to search on in Word) or keep them in a separate file. Just make sure that the threads get used later, get snipped out, or you don’t leave your comment markers.

Stephen King mentioned in On Writing that no character considers themselves secondary. In our minds, we're the center of the universe. So it is with characters. "Use It or Lose It" also applies to characters. Too many people vying for the spotlight can slow the story or take your work off into a tangent. This is a major problem for me: I want to show you everyone in a city, a village, a world. But no character should be given the spotlight unless they've got a crucial role, and it's cheating to try and shoehorn them in by upping their role in the plot.

The Need to Believe in Yourself: in Defense of the Writer’s Ego

2010-02-25T07:56:00.000-08:00

I’ve encountered the arrogant writer a few times. A few times, it’s been me who was arrogant. Many of us can be obnoxious about our work and our belief in it, which often blinds us to its faults and gaps in quality. What’s going on with that?

Simply put, I think it’s the fact that making it as a writer is no easy feat, and it’s often a great defense mechanism from the rejection we feel. But like all defense mechanisms, it has to come down sometime, particularly when its usefulness has passed. We like to shield ourselves from uncomfortable truths. In my case, a good one is that I really need to cut back on the world-building exposition. I find myself slipping into Professor Slayton mode, where I start lecturing the reader about a neat little bit of history or mythology I’ve worked into the world. I love this mode, because I love showing off and hearing the sound of my own voice (like many English majors), and I truly want to share my knowledge with the reader (like many History majors).

Keeping your ego at the fore of your work is problematic because it blinds you to feedback. When criticism comes, and criticism is a necessary part of the process, you need to be open to it. I often find the most scarring criticism is the kind that is spot on: someone points out something I already knew deep down, but did not want to accept. In this position you have two options. You can either choose to ignore the criticism and hold up your ego like a shield, demonstrating a variation on the “I’m an artist and you just don’t understand me” slash “I’m just too smart for you to understand my work” defense; or you can accept the uncomfortable truth that yes, maybe that character in chapter three is a little too Yoda-like to pass muster, doesn’t serve a point, and should probably go.

When we write we put forth our inner selves. We’re out to entertain sure, but we’re also trying to tell a story that means something to us. You have to believe in your work to finish a novel. You have to really believe in it when you query it to agents. But you can’t skip the middle part, which means getting feedback, getting it critiqued, and improving the quality of the work. Your ego is a valuable tool in this process. It’s a partner in getting you back to the keyboard every day; but don’t let it be bruised too easily by critique, and don’t let it blind you to things you don’t want to accept about your work. Your ego is a part of you, but keep it in its place.

David’s Review of Three Junes by Julia Glass

2010-01-10T08:20:00.000-08:00

Three Junes is one of those books that should be a lot longer: three narratives, three points of views, with decades passing in the lives of the characters. Yet Glass takes the family saga and boils it down to three snapshots, three important periods, and uses the time constraint of three months to keep the book brief. It was recommended to me by my friend Jo Dunn for this reason: that I could see how Glass keeps things short while still juggling a lot of time and spatial difference. She employs a great economy of word: not drawing things out, but still managing to handle the same depth of larger family sagas such as House of Spirits or One Hundred Years of Solitude. Glass’s method for brevity is partly achieved in that the three sections are wholly distinct. Point of view doesn’t alternate between or within chapters so in each section, we get one strong voice.

These clear delineations do not affect its power. Three Junes keeps a resonance, with mysteries and bubbling secrets threading throughout. I feel like the book lost a lot of steam in the denouement, that the final section lacked the power of the first two, but that things still tied up neatly.

When I tried to describe the book to someone yesterday, I found myself unable to sum it up in a way that gave it justice. The book’s plot is so simple, that trying to describe it in those terms sells it short. Much like Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, that’s a sign to me that Glass has created something very internal and powerful. Thank you Jo for recommending it.

George R.R. Martin has Epic Fantasy Covered: David’s Review of a Game of Thrones

2009-10-01T19:47:00.000-07:00

I have to confess, I’ve been backing off of reading epic fantasy for a while now. I’ve started a few series, only to put them aside in favor of something more accessible that isn’t going to lead me to too many sunrises as I obsessively read. And a number of the books I’ve tried in the last few years couldn’t capture my attention. A slow start that doesn’t draw me in by page 50 usually means I’m going to look at the looming volumes as a daunting task and put it aside. Sometimes the sheer size of a paperback means I’ll pass it over when reaching for the next thing to read.

On my flight back from Munich last week I finally cracked open a book I’ve been putting off for about ten years: George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. The news that HBO is making it into a television series bumped it up my list, but I’m certainly glad I brought it along to Europe. There’s nothing quite like the German pageantry of Oktoberfest to set your mind on the Medieval.

Martin reaches the apex of the genre. The multiple points of view interweave beautifully, and the very effective technique of titling chapters with the name of the POV character made it easy to keep things straight. Despite the many characters, Martin keeps their voices distinct, and their thoughts or commentary on one another help keep you siding with various factions. The mystery of the piece, the revealing of state secrets that prompt a war, is nicely spun.

One thing I noticed right away was that Martin keeps a hard emotional distance from his characters. You find yourself cheering for a character who then meets a rather hard end, and Martin executes these fates without a hint of sentimentality. He balances his characters on the edge and shows absolutely no hesitation in pushing them into freefall. In this sense, the book reads a bit like a history. Only the immediacy of the characters’ emotions ties you into the narrative. Martin largely follows the show not tell rule, though I found myself wishing he’d break it a bit more often. As good as the book is, it’s burdened by its sheer length of 800 pages. A few characters could have been eliminated without detracting from the themes or narrative. This might have helped bring the book into a more manageable size, though I suspect that with the scope of the series, he’ll make use of these players later. As the genre goes, Martin definitely starts with action, draws you in with relatable characters, and neatly breaks the book into clear cut scenes. He’s created a fantasy world with the usual western European flavor, and he does it with style. Magical swords, beasts, jousts, battle, and intrigue all fill the pages. The story is compelling, and I’ll certainly be picking up the other volumes, saving them for snowy weekends or another transcontinental flight.

Back to Basics: The Zen Circle of Writing

2009-09-24T13:29:00.000-07:00

One of the things I've picked up in Yoga is that even advanced practioners need to get back to the basics sometimes. As I work on my next project, while still querying on Eastlight, I'm looking at writing as a craft in a whole new light.

The new project (working title Ghost Town), is in the early stages and this gives me the chance to be better organized from the start. I'm back at the start of the development cycle, and I'm fortunate that I'm bringing more experience to my game.

What does that mean exactly? I'm breaking my work into tighter scenes. I'm rambling less when I write. I'm writing stronger sentences out the gate and hopefully with more clarity. I've also learned (and this is a big one for me) that not every idea which springs to mind needs to go into every chapter or book. Sometimes, my first idea for a scene isn't the best, so I take the time to refocus setting before writing.

I'm at the start of the project, but I'm looking at my writing with a lot more confidence and a lot more skill than what I brought to Eastlight and Neophyte. I'm hoping the eventual payoff will be the need for less rewrite this time. I know rewrites are a natural part of the project lifecycle, but I'd like to shorten the number to get projects out to market faster.

Queries and Confidence: Rules for the Query Process

2009-08-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

You may have sensed a little radio silence on the blog lately, and I'll admit I've been busy. My next two projects are coming together, and I'll soon have to choose which one to devote myself to for the rest of the year. I've also taken the time to join the Rocky Mountain Writers Association to expand my contacts and critique circle.

Publishing continues to be a scary game right now, as Jenny Rappaport relays, and more than a few agents are closed to queries, particularly from debut authors. It's not a good time for trying to break in. The query process can be intimidating, and it requires just the right grip on your work: you have to believe in your book, but also you have to know when editing is required.

Despite all the doom and gloom, I'm optimistic about my writing. I'm hopeful about Eastlight's chances, and weirdly enough, I get excited when I'm researching my queries.

Rejection is a powerful motivator, if you take it right. You can choose to go hide from the process (and I'll confess that starting my day by reading up on the state of Publishing is a powerful motivator to fire up the Playstation and avoid reality), or you can rally and use the frustration as fuel to get more queries out there.

All this engagement with the query process has led me to some personal rules:

1. It only takes one yes: don't give up and query widely.
2. Rejections are normal and the nature of the game.
3. The sooner you query, the sooner you sign (don't let the process get you down).

The one caveat as always, is the balance: your work has to be ready. You have to have it in the most polished, professional state you can. With few exceptions, regardless of genre, you can only query an agent once for a book.

Masks: a Review of Elizabeth Bear's Carnival

2009-08-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

Writing political fiction is difficult. It’s easy to reduce debate to liberal and conservative, large or small government, progress or status quo. It’s also tempting to beat the reader over the head with your own views and use the bully pulpit of the story to attack the opposition. Humanizing two factions and giving the reader sympathy for both perspectives takes a deft hand. Elizabeth Bear manages this quite well in Carnival, a sci-fi trip to a future when humanity is greatly changed, and spread out over the stars, but where too many of our sad divisions remain. Even in futurist, fictional societies, it’s easy for an author to take sides and Bear wisely creates characters at conflict with their respective societies, making it hard to know whose side they, and she, are on. Every one in this novel is wearing at least one mask. It’s high intrigue with astronomical and very personal stakes for the point of view characters.

Carnival’s plot builds slowly, and I didn’t mind the simmer as Bear's conflict came to a boil on the jungle world of New Amazonia. Two diplomats from the Old Earth Coalition find themselves on a world where women have inverted the power structure. Women rule and men are a lesser caste. Sinead O’Connor once said that the “opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy, but fraternity,” and Bear reinforces this idea by clearly demonstrating that the society of New Amazonia has as many flaws as the patriarchy the separatist women left behind.

One of the first things I noticed was the complexity of Bear’s universe. It took me a while to sort through the factions, characters, and loyalties. The technological vocabulary of the Coalition diplomats slowed me down. This was part of the fun, being a tourist in an alien society, but it made Carnival a book you can’t just casually read. This one takes some focus, but it is well worth the time. The book is thoughtful, and it turned my mind towards a number of topics I don’t regularly consider. Bear invests the conflict with a good amount of gender study, and I was impressed by the time she took to work out how a matriarchal warrior society would handle issues of reproduction, the rights of males, and status. I had questions as I read, and her characters addressed most of them over the course of the novel.

Once the plot heats up, the philosophical consideration gets pushed aside and things move very quickly. In this sense, it was like reading two books, one with a more considered tempo and a second with a strong action beat. I personally preferred the first part, though I can’t deny that the latter section was more of a page turner. The only real difficulty in reading was the exposure to two cultures, not simply one. The reader is transported with the diplomats into the world of New Amazonia, but it took the course of the novel for me to understand where the diplomats were coming from and for the opposing viewpoints to become clear.

Bear’s use of technology, both Amazon and Coalition, was well-conceived. These are interesting and more colorful than the average space opera. The relationship of the technology to the character fit their background and loyalty. She imbues her characters with appropriate prejudices, based upon their side in the conflict, and these come through, enriching the characters and the story world.

In many ways, Carnival isn’t an easy journey. You’re being exposed to a confusing foreign culture, and you don’t speak the language, but if you’re up for a little adventure outside the normal light reading, it’s well worth the trip.

Practice Makes Perfect

2009-07-24T12:51:00.001-07:00

If there’s one thing to be said about writing, it’s that you get better with practice. A lot of writers have a number of books under the bed, in the closest, somewhere, which will never see the light of day. I’ve collected one of these skeleton books so far, and I don’t regret writing it. My first book taught me more about writing than anything I’d done before, just as Eastlight taught me even more. I truly believe that Eastlight isn’t due for that pile. Why do I believe in my book so much? I’ve followed all the steps, read all the blogs, paid the dues, and done everything I can to make it the strongest book possible. I’ve gotten critique from honest parties and rewritten it over and over, hammering it into the book it is now. And if I can’t find representation, or it doesn’t sell, then I’ll just finish the next book and keep the process going until one catches an agent’s eye. With practice, I improve, and each book I write teaches me more about my craft.

I’m definitely seeing an upwards progression in quality as I read through the Dresden files series. I enjoyed the first two books, but the third really hooked me, and the fourth, Summer Knight, really seemed to bring all the elements to just the right boil. Characters reach a maturity in the fourth volume, the world gets fleshed out, and Jim Butcher does a superb job of overlaying the supernatural onto the material. He’s got me anxious for the rest of the series, and I’d start the fifth tonight if I had it in hand. There’s not a lot to say here that I didn’t put forward in my review of the first three, but I’ll say that I highly recommend the series, particularly if you’re wanting to see urban fantasy done right. Butcher clips off some of the elements I found a bit silly in the first two volumes, like potions made from mundane items such as coffee, and plunges full hilt into his take on the faerie mythos. The stakes get upped for Harry Dresden and his world. Butcher adds a ticking clock to the mix, nicely increasing the tension and forging a real page turner. Old allies return and Harry solves his mystery with a deft combination of magic and mental gymnastics.

Late to the Party: Some Comments on Trying to Publish and Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys

2009-07-16T20:02:00.000-07:00

You might notice that the list of links on the blog is growing. This will keep happening as I keep finding new sites that help with my understanding of the publishing process and business. If you're an aspiring writer, I recommend any of them, as they'll help you get the lay of the land. They most certainly should be read and carefully studied before you start the query process. I especially recommend Kristin Nelson, Nathan Bradsford, and Janet Reid for this.

As a whole, the process of publishing can really get you down. Writing and publishing are two very different things. When I was writing my first book, I heard a lot of comments that made me scratch my head. Most were usually along the lines of: “Won’t that be nice? To write a book and make a ton of money?” I knew these weren’t comments on my talent, but rather a supposition that writing a book leads to fame and fortune. Let’s be clear: I’m getting more savvy about the state of publishing every day, and it’s an uphill battle to make it out of the trenches, publish a book, and see it succeed. Even if you reach this point, continued success is not guaranteed. You have to continually evolve, continually market yourself and your work, and continually improve. Frankly, the whole process of breaking into commercial fiction can get me down. Quitting isn’t an option, but taking a breather isn’t a bad idea either. For me, a breather is a book or movie that reminds me why I love writing, and the English language, so much.

Nearly eleven years ago, my friend Alan gave me a copy of Wonder Boys. It’s even autographed. And for eleven years it sat on my shelf, unread. I wish I’d cracked it open years ago. Wonder Boys is that rare book about books, like A.S. Byatt’s Possession, that brings out my love of the written word. Chabon nails his characters so well, so cleverly, and sums up the crazy things writers do to find material to work with. He also captures a lot of the pretension and manic energy that surround them, and I have to say, I can spot myself or some people from my college program in his pages. Here I am, reading a book that most of you probably discovered a decade ago. But I think we’ve established I tend to move at my own pace when it comes to reading, though I’m quickly trying to better synch myself with the state of the market and adjust my reading list accordingly.

When reading a book as good as Wonder Boys, you have two directions you can take your feelings: jealousy that you may never write anything nearly that good, or you can be inspired to write more, write better, and fall back in love with your craft. I’m sure there are some people out there who would have a third reaction, which would be “I can do better than that,” but I’m not among them. I choose to be inspired, to let books this good drive me to write better and push myself out of my comfort zone. I could give you a solid critique of Wonder Boys, break it down for you, but I wouldn’t want to spoil your fun. It’s worth reading if only for Chabon’s fantastic phrasing, which turns over and over to make me laugh or catch my eye on some delicious detail in his wording. If you trust me on these matters, just read the book.

The Delicate Art of the Serial II: The Dresden Files

2009-07-11T10:38:00.000-07:00

The Modern Language Association (MLA) is the style manual I cut my college teeth on. It’s the preferred manual for English papers and so I first learned to underline book titles rather than italicize them. I’ll confess a dirty secret: I started italicizing a while back, unless I was writing a paper, since it just looks cleaner to me, and when dealing with electronic formats, avoids confusing the title with a URL. Here’s another one Daily Writing Tips reports that the MLA has finally caught up and decided that italics with titles are the way to go. This should give a few million English majors an easier time as well as help resolve conflict with the Chicago Manual of Style, which other majors such as my History degree, use. I highly recommend subscribing to Daily Writing Tips. They’re doing a lot of great work and keeping me up to date.

The second book series I’m examining is the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. I’m going to start with two disclaimers: I completely missed the television series, so I won’t be discussing it to any degree. Second, I read the first book a while ago and the second more recently. I’m revisiting them for critique, but I’m already a fan and likely a bit biased towards them. I know there are several more, and I am behind, but they’re in the stack and I hope to get to them very soon.

In Butcher’s first book, Storm Front, he set up a stand alone adventure with a few threads he could build on for subsequent plots. This looks typical for the business (and is the model I’ve used for Eastlight). You don’t want to torture your readers with unresolved issues if you don’t get a longer publishing deal. Harry Dresden as a character is established and his basic traits are put up there for us to see: technology doesn’t work well around this urban wizard, and money is usually an issue for his business. Butcher will revisit these traits at the start of the next two books as an anchor for us to remember but also maintain conflict. The second book, Fool Moon, immediately reminds us of Dresden’s money problems while the third, Grave Peril, instantly brings up the technology problem in a life and death situation.

As characterization goes, Harry is fairly vague in the first book. We get to know him, but a lot of his history (and the potential conflicts it brings) are left out. As a good serial character, he shouldn’t grow or change too fast, and Butcher keeps to the core of who Harry is. He’s brash, has a strong streak of chivalry that is often a weakness, and his aforementioned liabilities surrounding money and technology are a concrete portion of his character. What does get expanded nicely are Harry’s contacts with the spirit world. As the series progresses, we see more of his allies and enemies past the mundane. We’re introduced to some of his old associations, and Harry’s world widens for us. Handling things this way, Butcher wisely doesn’t throw the whole world at us in the first few books: he lets it widen as he goes. By handling it this way, he avoids the typical fantasy trap of over-describing and laying out all the groundwork in advance of the story. Instead, he lets the world serve the story and grow organically. It also means that the reader doesn’t have to remember a million little details about how Harry’s world works. We can just get on with the story and let the world catch up.

Butcher gave the first two books a fairly strong self-contained nature. Characters from them return, but again, he doesn’t wallow in backstory, so the plot gets moving right away. The third book seems to lay the groundwork for a longer series, setting up some pretty important events (which I won’t spoil). The Dresden Files works effectively as a series for a number of reasons, but I think the strongest are that Butcher doesn’t bog us down with unnecessary detail. He repeats critical information but not too often, and he links the books together with details that while important, aren’t essential so you don’t feel as though you’re missing something if you read say, the second book before the first. One warning though: you may get a little hooked. I finished the third book and immediately cracked open the fourth. I'll let you know how it goes.

The Delicate Art of the Serial I: Balancing Conflict and Resolution in a Series

2009-07-10T16:06:00.000-07:00

Instead of a personal note on mood or what’s on my ipod, from now on I’ll be dropping a note on style or grammar into the blog. As my intended readers for this blog are largely fellow aspiring authors, I want to share my findings as I scour the Internet for tips:

Thanks to Daily Writing Tips, I know that the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) has finally dissolved my tradition of using two spaces after a period. It has been a factor in writing as we transition from print to electronic media. Since I was trained to type in the business manner, I’ve had a hard time letting go of that second space: but I learned in my History and CIS degrees to treat the CMS as definitive so one space it will be from now on.

I don’t think it will shock you much to learn that I was something of a nerd in high school. A bit anti-social, extremely awkward and shy, I spent a lot of time in the company of paperbacks, many of them in a connecting series. This was a great escape, running off into vast landscapes of books where characters grew in slow arcs, defeated foes who’d come back to haunt them, and eventually marry the man or woman they’d been fighting alongside for hundreds of pages. As I intend Eastlight to be a series, I want to spend some time analyzing successful series and what makes them tick. This will be the first of three blog posts looking at series as I read and analyze them.

In high school, I first read long serials, before moving on to comics. I wish somebody had explained that Dickens wrote in serials and should be read as such. We had to read vast chunks of Great Expectations all in one go, and I utterly hated it. I’ve since learned to appreciate Dickens by reading him the way his original readers did: bit by bit, week by week. In this manner I can sip at his prose, slowly taking it in, without feeling buried by his language. Instead of stressing to complete a big block of reading in time to write a terrible paper about it, I have time to enjoy Dickens and look forward to the next chapter.

Back in my awkward teen years, the series that kept my attention the most were Star Trek novels. They were a great way to spend infinite time with characters I loved. I went on to read a lot of comic books. One author who crosses between the two mediums with deft, prolific, effectiveness is Peter David. I think the man must sleep very little. His X-Factor comics have a consistent high quality in a bloated landscape, and his Star Trek: New Frontier books demonstrate a well plotted, character-focused serial.

I took about a twenty year break from Star Trek novels so I’m still surveying the landscape, but as far as I can tell, David was the first to try something of this type: he took a number of B characters in the Next Generation Universe, stirred up his own funky aliens, and dropped them into a ship in an uncharted region of space. Remember when I said he’s deft? David’s strength in writing characters he didn’t create is that he picks vaguely-defined figures and brings them to vivid life.

The short length of the books means I can breeze through one in an evening, though I quickly find that I need a few on hand as I’ll reach for the next as soon as I put one down. In this manner, he’s constructed his series to work just like episodes of a television show, and it works really well. Part of why the series succeeds is that threads aren’t left to dangle: he tracks unresolved elements over the course of many books and gets the conflict resolved. He’s shown a similar talent with X-Factor, where I’ve been happily surprised to see him pick up threads other writers dropped fifteen years ago and wrap them up. His way of writing comics, in self-contained chapters which culminate and collect well into larger books, serves him well in his novels. He likes to leave you with a cliffhanger or an ominous portent. Both serials benefit from a large cast, which aside from cannon fodder, also provides him with many smaller arcs to stretch the narrative over a larger canvas.

One weakness in the serial is that the suspense can be tiring if threads don’t get wrapped up. You want to see things resolved at some point. If an author stretches things out for too long you get anxious. There’s a delicate balance to this that many authors struggle with. In comics, where short attention span reigns, writers only have so long to wrap it up (or we get those annoying dropped threads when the writer changes guard). In the novel these open ended moments can bring you back for more, but only if the payoff is worth the wait. An easy out for a conflict that has stretched over three books leaves a bitter taste. David doesn’t suffer from this problem.

David’s second strength is that he doesn’t lose track of his characters. He keeps them in mind when he returns for the next episode. We get surprised by new facets of a personality, but he doesn’t radically alter a character’s nature. They grow, and our understanding of them grows too. Using this technique, he lets characters resolve their individual conflicts. In the New Frontier series, he seems to have started things with each individual coming on board with a different secret or desire. Each episode clears up one or two of these, so the reader is satisfied while they wait for some of the larger mysteries to simmer. I think David intimately knows his characters, and while they surprise us, I get the feeling he knows exactly what they’re hiding before he began writing the first episode. I’ve long been a fan, but I’m really beginning to admire Peter David’s craftsmanship as well.

An Interview with Gail Martin, author of the Chronicles of the Necromancer series

2009-06-17T22:08:00.000-07:00

For this post, I'm doing something exciting: an interview with Gail Martin. Gail is promoting her series, Chronicles of the Necromancer, and she kindly agreed to let me interview her for the blog. Read on below for more about Gail's series and find the sneak peek she's offering for the fourth volumne: Dark Lady's Chosen.

In the Summoner, you introduced us to a hero, Martris Drake, who as a necromancer, would normally be evil. While Tris uses his spirit magic for good, you have hinted at a dark side to Tris’s powers. Will we see more of this explored in further volumes?

I really wanted to question the assumption that a necromancer is necessarily evil. I don’t think that being dead makes someone a bad person, and just because a spirit is brought back from the dead, why should it change the moral compass the person had throughout life? I realized this when my grandmother died when I was just a girl. At first, the whole ghost thing spooked me, and then I realized that if my grandmother were to come back (to my knowledge, she hasn’t), it would still be my grandmother and she wouldn’t hurt me.

So the ghosts and the power itself are morally neutral. But spirit magic is very powerful and rare, and it carries a real temptation to use it for selfish ends or to say that the ends justify the means. Tris sees what this seduction costs the Obsidian King and the mage Lemuel, whose body was possessed by the Obsidian King’s spirit. As he ventures further into the moral quandaries of being a king and the battlefield issues where right and wrong become murky, it will be harder and harder for Tris to avoid making compromises. So yes, you’ll see more of this struggle, especially in Dark Lady’s Chosen.

You're blending a lot of genres together: fantasy with light horror and most recently quite a bit of romance. What brought you to writing fantasy? What inspired you to write in this genre?

I really just started by writing the stories I wanted to read. I’ve loved fantasy and the paranormal since I was a kid, as well as vampires, ghosts, magic and haunted houses. So it’s inevitable, I guess, for all those elements to end up in my novels. As for the romance—the books are first and foremost action/adventure, but I’ve always enjoyed deeper characterizations and a hint of romance, so there it is. It’s not the most important element or the focus of the book, but when you’re dealing with a cast of characters that are young men and women in their 20s and early 30s it seems like it would be remiss to leave it out. I want to make the characters very real as well as their setting and adventures. My favorite books are the ones where I feel like I’ve really gotten to know the characters as people.

I have to ask about your inspiration for your character naming conventions. Can I ask where you get your names from? They have a great old Europe or Romany sound but also a consistent texture.

Good question! I will admit to having a stack of baby name books by my computer, and I use the online sources as well. Since the setting is quasi-northwestern European, many of the names are variants of Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, Celtic and Gaelic names, with some Bulgarian, Slovenian, Romanian influences as well. It depends on the character I’m naming.

I’m really excited for the fourth book in the series, Dark Lady's Chosen. You’ve certainly left us with a couple of cliffhangers and done a great job in splitting focus onto various characters. How long do you expect the series to go, and will we see more of the other characters in main storylines?

Thank you! I’m hoping the series will go on in various forms for a long time. By ‘various forms’ I mean duologies and maybe trilogies that are contemporary to the first 4 books and that also go backwards or forwards in the chronology, as well as some completely unrelated storylines. I think I’ve identified at least 20 story arcs so far I’d like to work on in the Winter Kingdoms, so we’ll see!

Yes, as the books unfold I do plan to show readers more of the Winter Kingdoms and more of characters who may have just had a minor role in other books. There will be new characters as well. It’s a big world—there are lots of interesting people and plenty of stories to tell!

I think your use of a rather singular religion in the series is very interesting. You've got different factions fighting over it anyway, which I think reflects human nature. The Goddess has already made a few cameos. Can you tell us a little bit more about how religion affects your story world? Will we see more of Her and the Sisterhood in the following volumes?

Fantasy often either ignores religion, gives it a superficial nod and then moves on, or makes it the uber-bad guy. I wanted to have it be a part of my world and my characters’ lives in realistic ways, because it does shape the history and the culture of the world, even for agnostics and atheists. As you read the books, I think you’ll see that the Aspect of the Lady a particular individual or kingdom is drawn to colors the world view and even self image of that person/kingdom, and the choice of Aspect often tells you more about the individual/kingdom than it does about the nature of the Goddess herself!

In the real world, whether or not someone is observant or not, religion or the lack thereof is an element of culture, just like geography, social structure, economics, plague, invasion, famine, historical rivalries, politics and personality. I love playing with the texture of the 8 different major practices, and as you’ll see in Dark Haven and Dark Lady’s Chosen, there are older, partially forgotten gods and goddesses who aren’t really gone as well as a wide variety of observances for holidays and life events such as weddings, funerals, births and coming-of-age. And of course, the vayash moru and vyrkin have their own observances and perspectives shaped from their unique situations and for the vayash moru, their long lives. So yes, you’ll see more of both the Goddess and the Sisterhood as the books move forward.

Finally, any tips for the unpublished fantasy authors out there? What do you think aspiring authors can do to succeed?

To succeed, you have to keep trying. Write what you enjoy reading. Don’t write to impress other people or because someone tells you a certain type of book sells well. Write what you enjoy. Then find a couple of trusted friends who like to read the same types of books you do and try your stuff out on them. Pick people who are kind but honest: you don’t want people who enjoy shredding other people’s work for their own amusement. Then write. The more you write, the better you get. It’s ok to start with fan fiction. Many famous writers did. Eventually you’ll find a story of your own and then you’ll find the fire inside to tell it. Learn everything you can about the business of writing by reading books about publishing and going to conventions or conferences where you can talk to real writers. Some of the best books on the subject are published by Writers’ Digest Books. I think I’ve read all of them. They are very helpful.

For more about Gail's dynamic series, visit her site: www.chroniclesofthenecromancer.com. She's got some great content, including podcasts and a calendar of upcoming appearances. You can also read the first chapter of Dark Lady's Chosen here.

Off the Beaten Path: David’s Review of Eat, Pray, Love

2009-06-10T20:50:00.000-07:00

Finishing my “practical” Master’s in Computer Information Systems sort of knocked me offline for the month of May. I was staring at a computer for most of it, but I’m afraid my writing and blogging got mightily ignored. Whenever this happens, whether from a dry creative period or life just keeping me away, I find I’ve lost focus. It’s not very different from working out: you ignore your muscles and they atrophy. Going back to the gym means finding your place and building them back up again. Completing the degree meant that my brain was very, very tired. It was quite strange, but I realized that I had little ability for meaningful output directly after. Instead I switched to input and started tackling the stack of books piled up beside my desk.

I just finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir piece Eat, Pray, Love, stepping far outside my genre. It was a great read and I got a lot out of tagging along for her global adventure of rediscovering her self. I don’t think I was one hundred pages in before I’d made a mental list of six people, not all of them women, to recommend it to. Gilbert’s journey to explore pleasure and devotion gets kicked off with a brutal divorce, something too many of the people on my list can relate to. I have to admit a lot of the appeal to me was getting into her head, feeling how she experienced her journey. By the end I felt like I’d connected with her as a voice, made another friend “through the pages” as an old saying goes. The book is intensely personal.

In many ways, Gilbert’s journey is mythic and that connects it well to fantasy. After all, our characters in fantasy are usually on a journey. Their experiences and encounters change them, evolve them, and shake them up. The whole concept of the mythic journey is just that: a call to leave an ordinary life. Gilbert is lucky enough to have experienced this in reality, but she touches on why I read fantasy and why I fell enough in love with it to write it: by escaping for a bit, we get the chance to change our perspective. Maybe we learn something, maybe not, but just the experience affects us. Gilbert set out with a mission and a plan, the benefits of which unknowing characters rarely have. Escape can be avoidance, but it does not have to be. Escape, when you’re trapped, is exactly what you need. By traveling with characters on their journeys, we ride along, and hopefully empathize with their plight. When they experience something, maybe we experience too. I’d highly recommend Eat, Pray, Love for anyone in your life who needs a change.

Everything Old is New Again

2009-06-06T12:35:00.000-07:00

The summer movie season came faster than I expected. It will be dating myself to say that when I was in high school, Terminator 2 was the big action flick. This summer feels like a nostalgia wave: Star Trek, Transformers, and a new Terminator are all hitting the screen.

I find it interesting that we cling to serials and timeless characters, though I’ll have to do a lot more in depth analysis to grasp what I think makes a character last like that. In fantasy, the trilogy seems to be the norm, but the series is another standard. I think some series go on a bit too long, sometimes when the author has simply run out of things for the characters to do. (I’m thinking here of R.A. Salvatore’s action-packed Drizzt series, which I loved for the first eight books or so). Or an author leaves too many threads dangling, and I finish the books feeling like some important plot points were left unresolved.

But we seem drawn to everlasting characters, ones we eventually call classic. I can easily tick off a list of attempts to bring older characters forward: the upcoming Sherlock Holmes film immediately springs to mind. Some of these characters are actually immortal, drawn back from death after their creators have tried to let them go time and time again.

So how do we get from blank stock character to one we want to spend a number of books with? It’s a question I’ll be putting a lot of thought into as I think about Eastlight’s future. I’d certainly like to see it go to series and last at least as long as a trilogy. I’ve started with the idea that characters need to evolve over time, but not too quickly, so they have somewhere to go. While my two main characters certainly grow in the course of the first novel, I’ve left them a lot of room to mature and sprawl out in time. Certainly a character should be unique, original enough the reader wants to spend many books with them, but not too unique. I think of the typical romantic heroine, who shouldn’t be so offbeat or alien that your reader cannot identify with her getting the hero. Genres such as fantasy and science fiction give us the chance to work with characters radically different in culture, history, and even biology. All of these things can help to give a character flavor and a distinct background, but even strongly defining traits shouldn’t override our ability to relate to a character.

On Tech: The Site Relaunch is Complete!

2009-05-09T13:52:00.000-07:00

Eastlight’s trailer is up, along with a brand new home page for www.davidrslayton.com.

I had thought to hire someone for either the site or the trailer, but I have some fantastic expertise in my world. The site design has been brewing for a while, and I’m happy with the Web 2.0 touches I added. My experts and friends will be quite happy to see me turn my obsessive energy to my next project. The trailer could not have come together better for the budget and I’m very grateful for all the help I got in tweaking the Flash. After fighting the video embed code for a while, I went with Vimeo.com, a quieter and artful YouTube. It has the added bonus of not currently being blocked by a lot of work filters, so I'm pleased to see that the audience shouldn't be affected by that.

A little research tells me that posting the first chapters of Eastlight online could cause problems for various agents or publishers, depending on where they’re at with electronic rights. Rather than risk any fouls in this area, I’ve pulled the chapters offline. The primary source for this decision is here: http://editorialass.blogspot.com/2009/05/whats-safe-to-syndicate-online.html if you’re wanting some advice for your own work.

As I’m certain that my query process will come down to agents requesting material based on my query letters - what agent has free time to surf the net for my chapters? - I’ll be keeping them down. Instead I’m trying to work up a few short stories set in Eastlight’s world. These strike me as a great way to round out the scope of things a bit and give away a little content. If you are an agent wanting the first few chapters, please drop me an email at author@davidrslayton.com. I’ll also be looking at other “safe” content to post and keep the site fresh over the coming months.

Writes of Spring II: The Query Process

2009-05-09T08:27:00.000-07:00

Mood: Still up, but trying to refocus now on my next project.
Music: Byzantine chants, perfect for writing fantasy on a Saturday morning.
Backpack: Just finished Fool Moon by Jim Butcher, turning back to some Rilke.

In my last post, I alluded to the idea that shopping for an agent is like dating. I’m not the first person to make this analogy, but I can take it a step farther: it’s a lot like Internet dating. You craft a query letter, you hope to intrigue a stranger, not look too desperate for representation, and most of all, create a life long relationship that will benefit you both. When I first crafted my query letter, it was pretty bare bones. As I visit more and more sites, I realize different agents want different levels of detail. So the letter has spawned many, many versions. Just like an online profile, I keep testing what to share, what to hold back, and where to hint that I might have a bit more up my sleeve than a cliché opening line.

Things have changed a lot since I shopped my last book. More agents are working through email. This is great for the cost savings, the faster turnaround time, and of course the paper we’re all saving. It also means I can craft a letter on the bus and then fire it off once I get to my day job. It also gives me the chance to reference materials on my web site without bogging down the query letter. Who wants to type a URL from a snail letter into a browser?

The query letter shifts a bit to reflect different agents’ needs. The bare bones is the same, but the more research I do into an agent’s client list, the more likely I am to see if I’m going to align with what they’re looking for. The key to improving the letter is the key to improving any writing: editing and time. The pitfalls are also the same: know how and when to let it go and stop fussing with it. I’ve dropped my kid off for his first day of school. Let’s see if I’ve given him the skills to survive rejection, grow through adversity, and the wits to avoid having his lunch money stolen by scammers. The query also means taking a bit more time for research: the agent has to represent young adult fantasy and hopefully have a track record with the genre. It’s an extra plus when I see they rep an author I love, but like dating, it can also make me more nervous about the introduction.

Then there are the criteria. Some agents go off the letter alone, no pages wanted. This means they’ve got to be intrigued by the blurb alone. Fair enough, think of them as browsers in a bookstore, looking at the back of books. If that’s enough to get them to read five pages, I’ve written the right blurb. Some agents linger a bit longer. They want the first few pages. Always the first few, so make them count. This is the second impression, the first actual date. Try not to blow it. Dress appropriately - is your copy error-proof? Write down the directions – did you include the right contact information, the right format, the right number of pages. Be a gentleman – Be careful to make sure you’ve got the agent’s name and other letter details right. So far, so good. You’ve made it through dinner.

This brings me to the delicate art of the synopsis. A little reading online tells me I’m not alone in finding synopsis writing a challenge. I think one reason is that it’s reversing everything we’ve learned about showing and telling. You have to tell in a synopsis. How else are you going to get the details of your story out in a few pages? That doesn’t mean it can be boring. Even the synopsis has to be punched up to intrigue. My first synopsis draft was too short. It made no sense because I was trying to get the entire story crammed into two pages. My second draft was five pages and way too long. The current, and hopefully final, form is three pages. With each draft I’ve gotten great input from my support network and the language has become more active. It’s not the whole story by any means. I had to leave out a lot of great secondary characters and interesting side-trips, but the meat of the conflict is there. This is the version of the story you’d tell your date over dinner. Don’t bore them with detail but don’t leave out anything critical that’s going to cause her to lose interest. Try to imagine at what point I’d lose my friend or she would start yawning. Really, this is the same process the book should have: at what point was someone able to put it down? When did they get bored? Those are the parts to edit or take out.

Like dating, querying agents means a lot of rejection and a lot of practice. Some people may get lucky and connect with the right agent on the first go, but I’m willing to bet that for most of is, it’s a longer process.

The last bit of leg I can get out of this analogy is that the rejection can get you down. You can feel down about your work and worn out from your efforts here. Taking a short break, working on your next project or even putting writing away for a few days altogether can recharge your batteries. The one piece of advice that won’t hold up is to stop looking. You have to query many, many agents in a wide pool. You have to put yourself out there and stay in the game. Hold me to that as the rejections come in.

The Writes of Spring

2009-04-29T06:20:00.000-07:00

Mood: Bouncy. Spring is here, though we’re still seeing a bit of snow. The lilacs are just starting to bud, and a young man’s fancy turns to querying agents.

Music: Franz Ferdinand, Tonight

Backpack: Forest for the Trees: an Editor’s Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner

Your eyes do not deceive you, I’ve been reformatting the blog to apply some of the stuff I’ve learned about message design and merge its theme to the changes over at davidrslayton.com.

It has been a really productive season. I’ve put a lot of myself into Eastlight, getting it to a place where I want to share it and start getting input. I’ve polished the book to the point where I’m ready to query. I’ve been pumping a lot of energy into those materials: the hook, the letter, and the synopsis. I’ve come a long ways on updating my website. We had the photo shoot Sunday and the pictures came out better than I’d hoped:

There, doesn't that look more writerly?

I also took a break last week to catch the Franz Ferdinand concert and catch up with friends. There is nothing as renewing for me as watching my friend Marnie dance, red hair washing back and forth as I feel the music coming up through my feet.

Sometimes you have to take a break, mix up your routine, get out of your book cavern, and see what the rest of the world (who isn’t obsessing about scene transitions and dialogue choices) are up to. I have to plug my friends here and praise them. They are my critique group, my first readers, and above all my support system. They listen to my ideas, and I trust them to give me honest input without the sugar coating. Most important of all, they keep me grounded so I don’t descend into my little cave of books and loose leaf paper. To Marnie, Jo, Alfred, Justine, Alan, and everyone else who has been there lately, thank you! Hopefully we’ll soon have cause to celebrate seeing Eastlight in print.

Interactive Map of Eastlight's World

2009-04-19T17:49:00.000-07:00

As I give my website a much needed upgrade, I've put together an interactive map of Eastlight's world to help promote the book. Here's a link:
http://www.davidrslayton.com/eastlight/map.html
Look for some good changes at davidrslayton.com by May 7th.
I'll be posting the first three chapters of Eastlight soon.

Lessons Learned so Far

2009-04-17T16:24:00.000-07:00

Status: Eastlight is complete! First query letters are off. The first rejection is in. Now we play the waiting game.

I was really flattered yesterday when someone asked me what he should do to start writing a book. I felt a bit like an imposter, as I haven’t published my novel, but I do think I have figured a few things out. Here are the things I am applying to my own work.

Write. This one is standard advice. You’ll read it anywhere. To write well, you need to write as often as you can. I’d take it a step farther and say that you need to write with a structured approach. Be free form to get it down, but try to keep it in my mind that the work has to make sense to other people. In fantasy we have a tendency to spin out worlds that to us are intricately detailed, with lots of juicy side-trips, but that same book needs to translate into something a reader can engage. My friend Alan says that I “have a hard time seeing the trees for the forest, and my forest is deep and lush.” He’s referring to my tendency to build an entire world, when the reader only needs the part they’re exploring. So I’ve been cutting a lot of these details out and saving them for later journeys.

Grammar. This is one I’ve seen pushed aside in a lot of the creative writing courses I’ve taken. The idea is that writing is intimidating, and grammar more so, therefore it’s important to just write and not worry about grammar, which is something you can bolt in later. I think of grammar and the language itself as the operating system. You might create an incredible video game, but if it won’t run on any computer’s operating system, then you’ve made something that will never sell. So again, write freely, but study grammar and language. Writing truly is a craft and becoming good at it means constant practice and applied study. If you’re writing fantasy, think of it as your own wizardly studies. Mastery takes expertise and training. The beauty of it is that you can always learn more, go farther, and reach a new level in the craft. The next level will always be there. Reach for it, and never stop growing in skill.

Read. Annie Dillard says that the payoff in writing is being a better reader. Actively read, not just in your genre, but in others. See what’s happening in Literary Fiction, Horror, Suspense, etc. Even Romance may have a few things to teach you. This is one piece of advice I see over and over, but the part that I don’t see as often is that you need to read actively. By this I mean that you need to analyze books as you read them. Think about point of view, exposition, plot elements, characterization. Try to grasp what’s working and not working in the books you read or even the movies you watch. I’ll warn you though, this might kind of ruin reading for you. I know I’ve learned to shut off my writer self when discussing a movie with friends. Dissecting a creature does after all kill it.

Share. I wrote my first book in a vacuum. I thought of it as a great opus, a piece of art, and didn’t get any input until it was finally finished. And then, it didn’t sell. The book was bloated, with too much description, too much exposition, not enough dialogue. The book came out just like it was being written: solitarily, with little review. When you’ve got a draft together, carefully select people you trust to share it with. They need to be readers or writers, but it’s hard to find just the right critique circle. I chose readers who have a lot of experience with books but not so much with writing. I felt the writers I worked with were too close to their work or ideas to objectively critique mine. Even then, my readers had very different tastes. I found their feedback to often be helpful not for fixing problems, but for telling me what wasn’t working. Regardless of the feedback, be gracious. Somebody took the time to read a less than perfect version of your book. I really could not have written this book without them.

Open-mindedness. Holding your work too close to you is a sure way to strangle it. Some of the best sentences I framed for Eastlight were the ones I had to cut. They were pretty, but they didn’t fit into the flow. I find that I suffer from too many ideas, too many random directions. I had to cut a lot of these side-trips and segues in order to make the book work as a whole tapestry. Be open to the feedback you receive, and be prepared to make changes. Define which items you’re not willing to budge on, but be sure they’re worth the fight. I may revise this lesson once Eastlight is published, as I suspect that publishers and agents will have some suggestions of their own. The important thing is that I am open to them. I’m not married to the work, and as long as the changes don’t compromise the heart of the story I wanted to tell, I am willing to make them. Get a thick skin. It’s a tough market, and thousands of books are written every year that will never be published.

Editing. You’ve got to be brutally objective when you edit. Stephen King suggests putting a manuscript away for six months before editing. I’m too impatient for that, but I do recommend getting some distance. In my case, I sent the book out for critique and got to work on my next project. I started writing something completely different, so that when Eastlight came back covered in blood red ink, I was ready to see it with fresh eyes. It really helped. I integrated the feedback that I felt enhanced the book, starting with the line by line typo corrections, then turned my attention to items of larger or vaguer note: “This character doesn’t have a big enough part;” “There are too many religious factions to keep track of,” etc. Some of this feedback was a matter of the reader’s taste. Some of them agreed on weak points, and after having taken six weeks off from it, so did I. I cut a lot of factions, speeding things up considerably, and making it easier for the reader to jump into the story. In some places I combined factions, removing partitions, and in one, I changed an important faction that showed up at the end to match one from the beginning, giving the story some nice parallelism. A friend asked why I worried so much about editing, that wouldn’t the agents or publishers take care of that, which brings us to my next lesson learned.

Professionalism. Be in it to win it. Be objective and on. Write the best book you can and try to avoid obsessing about publishing. When you’re ready, and the book is as good as you can make it, start studying the publishing and querying process. Do not just start sending your book out. Read up on agents, what they represent, what they’re looking for. Follow the instructions on their website or in Writer’s Market, or on Publisher’s Marketplace. Never assume you’re the exception to the rule. Be prepared to see your work objectively and take critique. Get real on the chances and on the process. Don’t assume the book you’ve labored on as an act of love is the next big seller. Be kind to the agents that request partials and gracious to those who don’t.

I’m sure as the process progresses that I’ll have a fresh list or a few refinements, but the list above is a good start.

The Question of Veterans - David's Review of The Steel Remains

2009-04-07T15:08:00.000-07:00

There is a question that societies and empires must deal with when wars end: what to do with the displaced veterans. Often they return home as heroes, but that can fade. Just as often, they are left on society’s borders, dejected, with lethal combat skills. How do heroes protect a society that despises them? Do they even know why? How do they live peacefully when killing is all they’re good at? Richard K. Morgan’s the Steel Remains asks these questions brutally, with a challenging approach to adult material. Let me start by saying that is one is most definitely not young adult. It’s full on adult. Rated R adult. In some places it might be NC-17, but that’s a whole other debate that I’m not here for.

Let me also say that I’m not here to discuss “writing the other.” More influential bloggers and accomplished writers have discussed this in depth, to strong effect. There’s a lot of discussion swirling around this book’s main protagonist and since we find out he’s homosexual in the first few pages, I won’t consider telling you this a spoiler. He’s certainly a type we don’t see much in fantasy where homosexual men are portrayed as effeminate bards or predatory pederasts. A lot of the content surrounding the main protagonists is a challenging read, which seems to be Morgan’s main point: the book has been lauded for challenging fantasy conventions, but I found its plot to be comfortably familiar. There’s even a bit of deus ex machina at work as gods move their chess pieces about. It uses a lot of the regular trappings of fantasy: dual knife wielding dark “elves,” mysterious, miraculous blades with great names, religious zealots, other worlds or states of being reached through magic, and accomplished heroes. These elements get woven into a more embittered world, where good and evil don’t exist. Everything, and everyone, has a shade of gray to them. Slavery, drug use, hedonistic sexuality, and language I would not use on a regular basis are all on full display. The world is still reeling from a war, and in this the protagonists stumble. The world itself is a good one, well worth a side trip, but I’m not sure I’m ready to spend a full series there.

The ultimate question is of course, is the Steel Remains a good book? The story had me gripped at points, but the clear, open-ended threads left dangling signaled a trilogy or series. After Robert Jordan, I’m a little nervous about loose threads. A lot of build up was done without a payoff. Some important events were told and not shown. There are a few good twists, so the plot carried me, but I had a hard time accepting the characters’ motivations. I like what Morgan is trying to do, which is stretch the genre, but I think that aside from a few adult trappings, the book fails to do anything new.

David’s Review of Dark Haven by Gail Martin

2009-03-26T16:53:00.000-07:00

iPod: Yaov. Good stuff!
Backpack: Finally continuing to read R. A. Salvatore’s Cleric Quintet.

I like where she’s going with this. Gail Martin’s third book in the Chronicles of the Necromancer series is out, and she’s chosen to answer a question: what happens in a fantasy world after the big bad is destroyed? A black and white world of moral absolutes can get a lot greyer. Martin has upped the politics and intrigue, setting up factions, each wanting the new king of Margolan dead for their own reasons. A lot of the factions are being opportunistic, taking advantage of the fallout. The protagonists won their war, only to now face a situation where they can’t easily name the enemy attacking them. She’s dealt them a pyrrhic victory. They won their last war but are they too weak to survive the next round?

There’s a bit more romance to this volume, but it’s no detriment. Martin connects her characters on something other than mere appearance, a problem I have with a lot of fantasy. She escapes this cliché. I wouldn’t mind seeing the romance having a bit more conflict, a bit more challenge, but with everything else she’s throwing at them, a little happiness isn’t a bad thing.

I really liked Dark Haven’s battle scenes. I felt like that Martin capitalized on the potential of her characters a bit more, especially Tris Drayke, the Summoner king. The spirits came into play in ways I didn’t expect. This was my only real complaint about the second volume was that she didn’t play as far and wide with the toys she’d crafted as I’d felt she could. She’s making up for it now. One warning, she left it on a cliffhanger, and I’m anxious to continue the story.

Aspiration and Inspiration

2009-03-17T12:48:00.000-07:00

I was asked this week to name a book that had profoundedly affected me and inspired me to write. There are a lot, all demonstrating the power of language, but I choose to focus on Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye.

I am not entirely certain that I will fully "get" this book until I'm a middle aged woman, otherwise, never.
When I was eighteen, living in Dallas and trying to find my footing as someone on the verge of adulthood and responsibility, a friend recommended that I read Cat's Eye. I had to seek it out used, misfiled under Science Fiction, and I think I paid 80 cents for it.

It's a story about a lot of things, but at the same time it's not easy to sum up. It starts with a myth, of how when we kill something, that thing becomes a part of us. In the plot, it's a girl's spirit which is crushed and she forms a symbiotic relationship with her primary tormentor. Art and memory are two very important themes. What we lose in life as we age, and what we get back in lucky moments of rediscovering ourselves powers the plot, which leaps around in time as different incidents and facts surface in the mind of the main character. The book shuffles the main character's memory like a deck of cards and you have to stay with it to put all of the pieces together. It's certainly too uneventful and internal to ever be a movie.

The book profoundly affected me at the time, like a sip of wine at a very young age: it didn't quite taste right but I knew that if I gave it time there was a world of experience and subtle variations that would open up to me as I matured.

I skipped class, sat in my car, and read the book in a day. I had to reread it again, several times, annually, before I think I fully managed to crack open Atwood's thoughts. I recommended it to everyone I knew, and they all just shook their head at me. They'd heard of the Handmaid's Tale, or read that book in high school, but Cat's Eye was unknown to them.

I'm not big on first editions, believing that books should be distributed and read, not collected; but I have a copy of this one. Every time I go into a used bookstore, if they have a copy on hand I buy it and give it away, sometimes at random.

Atwood's career has blossomed since then. She won the Booker prize and has written some incredible books (Lady Oracle is fantastic), but Cat's Eye remains my favorite of hers, probably my favorite book of all time. I had a professor once say that you have to love people to be a writer, but I disagreed. I don't think Margaret Atwood loves people. In fact, I think she's a bit misanthrophic. She's challenging to read and her characters can be hard to root for. I don't think I could ever be as good a writer as Atwood, but reading Cat's Eye certainly made me want to try.

Beauty and the Nine Volt Battery

2009-03-08T17:17:00.000-07:00

Mood: Up. My move is complete and I found the coffee pot. All my hard drives survived.
On the iPod: Gabriel Yared’s rejected Troy soundtrack.
In the Backpack: Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.

The construction of beauty, particularly as it pertains to woman, is an old topic. The myth of Pygmalion revolves around just that: a sculptor who creates the perfect woman from stone. Hitchcock covered the topic with surreal, analytical depth in Vertigo. The Stepford Wives was Ira Levine’s sci-fi/horror analysis of the myth: man’s quest to control woman by building her better, if more limited. I think Levine’s take was powerful, just avoid the recent terrible remake of the movie. And you can’t really go wrong with Vertigo, though the animation sequence dates the movie terribly. The latest person to consider this topic, of constructed woman, is Joss Whedon, in his Fox series Dollhouse.

I know Dollhouse is taking a lot of flack in the press, but I’ve decided to look at it without the filter of Firefly (which let’s face it, was pretty damn good television). Dollhouse is looking beyond just the construction of a man’s physical ideal. In Dollhouse, people can ask for the perfect anything and have it custom created for the right price.

It’s a premise with a lot of potential, as well as a horrifying possibility. We look at a future of designer genes, designer babies and the ability to alter our traits rather quickly. Plastic surgery alone offers a field ripe with story potential. Sci-fi certainly is filled with examples of the custom person, built to order. The genre is also filled with examples of the idea gone horribly wrong (Whedon used the concept in Serenity and it came up occasionally in Buffy).

But is Dollhouse any good? I’d say yes. A nice twist this week took me by surprise. A little more intrigue and a little less of the fun personality/costume changes would go a long ways to increasing the concept, but I think I can see where Whedon is aiming and I trust him enough to let him run with it.

Suspense television these last few years, particularly of the Sci-fi variety, has had some incredible examples to work with. Lost and Battlestar Galactica have both kept us on the edge of our seats. Dollhouse is hardly that level of intensity, but frankly, I need a bit more lightness. I can only handle so much of Battlestar’s weight before I want to turn to something smart but dopey looking. I’m giving Dollhouse a B, but I’m keeping with it for a while. After all, the first few episodes of Buffy were hardly instant classics.

The Passing of a Friend

2009-03-04T18:03:00.000-08:00

We deal with mentors a lot in fantasy. Thanks to the mythic cycle, we also deal a lot with their passing. Many a good story gets a solid kick when the mentor dies and the student must avenge his master. Moving past the mentor is an important rite of passage for a hero, but in real life, our mentors are people who teach us and believe in us. Then they are gone, and we’re often left a bit more alone and thrust into the unknown without their experience to guide us.

One of my own mentors died recently. Though I only just found out, I have to admit that it’s affecting me more than I thought it would.

Dr. Paul Farkas of Metropolitan State College was my advisor in my English Literature degree. As I stretched my two degrees out over many years, he was also someone I had a lot of contact with. In my first semester as Metro in 2000, I took his course on James Joyce. In my last semester of 2007, I took his Literary Criticism course. His course on Myth, Symbol, and Allusion helped shape my thoughts on the myths and archetypes I wanted to work with in my writing. Further, he did a lot of work with me on myth and popular culture. We analyzed modern myths like Buffy or Xena, often finding humor in how mythic archetypes get replayed in . We shared a love of Margaret Atwood, and I never visited his office without remarking how we owned many of the same books and same editions. One of the things I’ll always remember about Dr. Farkas was his support of me in my writing and aspirations for graduate school. He wore these rather outdated sweater vests and khakis that marked him in my mind as the consummate English professor. He loved Joyce and Auden. Finally, he introduced me to Rilke, a gift for which I will always be grateful. I don’t know where his spirit has gone, but I wish him good journeys. I don’t know where he will be, but I hope he is surrounded by books he loves. Literature was his life, he said once. Analyzing it was a constant process and work of love for him. It was a gift he helped nurture in me.

What We Carry On Our Tongues

2009-02-21T08:59:00.000-08:00

I read this article today with a bit of sadness mixed with deep interest. As a native English speaker, who has only taken other languages for fun, I find the topic of endangered languages very interesting. After all, English is rapidly becoming the singular language in many places. Linguistic studies indicate that speakers of other languages soon lose their original tongue after immigration (usually by the third generation).

So what’s the problem? What does losing an obscure language cost all of us? The article spells it out: culture. Poetry, literature (usually oral), traditions, and beliefs, these are all lost to us once a language dies out. Of course, in some cases, we’re able to translate documents or eventually unlock what’s left behind, as in the case of Linear B, but the intrinsic native meaning of so much is lost forever.

Anthropology 101 was a long time ago, so long in fact that we had 101s, but I was fascinated by the potential of other, primitive cultures. One fact I carried away was the study of oral literature and memory “hooks,” those oft repeated phrases in the Iliad or Odyssey, which help the poets catch a moment of mental breath in order to remember more of the epic poem. What epics are lost when a culture vanishes?

In fantasy, there are always ruins. Our characters inhabit a world that they don’t often well understand. Whether they are the remnants of our own technological age, an alien civilization, or simply other cultures, ruins are wonderful doorways into the imagination. We often project our own cultural expectations onto them, which is definitely made easier when we cannot read what literature might be available. It took Archeology and Anthropology (both fairly young sciences) a while to understand that a clinical removal of perspective is necessary, but even then, Anthropologists realized that a studied people react differently than an unstudied one. It all comes back to “show not tell.” We can read a story, we can translate it, but it will never be the same as what the initial culture experienced, and that’s the tragedy of a lost language.

I Really Wasn’t Trying to Complain About the Family Friendly

2009-02-17T12:27:00.000-08:00

Just watched the second season episode of Torchwood called Adam. (Yeah, I’m quite behind on Television). That was most definitely not a Doctor Who episode. The writers seem to be doing a good job of building up the sense that Torchwood = loss. Characters have to give up a lot of themselves to live in the world they do. They resolve conflict, save the world while looking good doing it, but they pay a dark and heavy price.

At the center of the conflict is our Point of View character, Gwen Cooper. Her relationship with her boyfriend (first season) / fiancé (second season) is the crux of her character. Rhys is Gwen’s anchor to the world outside Torchwood’s bizarre investigations.

I don’t have to tell you that I’m buying it, as obviously I’m into the second season. Still, the sheer darkness of the story world had me wince a few times last night. One thing I’m enjoying about these BBC shows is the short seasons. There isn’t a lot of room for fluff or irrelevant story, though I do find it a bit light on the character development angle. While it’s comparable to other monster of the week shows, I think Torchwood so far has shown a bit more willingness to risk characters’ lives and vary from formula. This definitely isn’t Doctor Who, and it isn’t Buffy, though both of those series are clearly strong influences.

The BBC is about to air Season Three. By the time we get it over here I should be all caught up and quite ready for more.

Lean and Mean

2009-02-17T10:28:00.000-08:00

In the backpack: Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell
On the IPod: Lisa Gerrard, Ichi Soundtrack

I finished my whole draft of Eastlight in the fall. It had evolved so far from its original shape that looking back over the original scraps, I found it almost unrecognizable. And to be honest, I'm a bit embarrassed by them. So now I've finished another novel, but I had to ask myself the hard question: is it any good?

I’d like to think so, but at 85,000 words, I kept feeling like the book was a bit bloated. There was more description than I needed, particularly in the first, crucial, section. I gave the book to Alan (from over at RandomTope) and his input reflected what I already knew: we needed to do some pruning.

World-building is a key element in fantasy, but it has to be balanced against action. Alan was right on the money when he told me I’d put so much thought into all the factions and politics that the action was taking a backseat.

By the time I finished editing the first half of the book, I’d cut out 5,000 words. A full edit brought the cut to 8,000, though I decided to add a few scenes and the whole thing ended at 79,000. Why all the details on the word count? First, it’s what agents and editors work with, not page counts.

If you analyze a few paperbacks at random, you’ll notice that the word per page count varies wildly. Eastlight is meant to be a first novel, sure, I hope to make it a series, but for now it needs to be as brief and tightly written as possible. All those extra political factions were adding color, but so much that the main conflict wasn’t clear.

The second reason I focused on word count is that Stephen King’s advice in his excellent On Writing, is that an edit should reduce the word count by about 10 percent.

A final note on the importance of the first section: it’s the first thing a reader sees. I imagine at the bookstore, picking Eastlight off the shelf. They read the first line. Does it grab them? They read the first few pages, does it make them want to read more? That’s my goal, to grab them early and hold onto them till the end.

I think I can safely delete those old drafts of Eastlight. A little comparison shows me how much I’ve grown as a writer. The second half of the book needed a lot less cutting than the first. I’ve still got a ways to go, and I never want to stop improving; but I feel like I’m getting it, advancing in a craft and truly seeing a marked improvement in what I write.

Studying the Craft and Other Updates

2009-02-16T21:18:00.000-08:00

I haven’t been much for the blogging lately, instead having thrown myself so deeply into editing with whatever free time I get; but Eastlight is out for a fresh pair of eyes, so it’s time to catch up a bit on the virtual side.

Unfortunately my reading has slowed a bit as well, but I’m happy to say that I’m taking the time to get a few books in on writing. I’ve returned to a habit of keeping one on me at all times. Ten minutes here, fifteen there, it adds up. And I’m grateful to have wonderful friends, who for Christmas stocked me up on great books from my Amazon wishlist. I’ll be reading through them and reviewing them here over the course of the year. I’ve already read two, so look for those soon.

I’m also getting close to graduating. My final quarter of courses in my “practical” CIS degree is about to end and from there I’ve only got the project. For that I’ll be giving my actual website a badly needed makeover and expansion, just in time to start the submission process for Eastlight. It’s nice to be able to tie things together.

Finally, I’ve discovered another great resource on writing better query letters. Query Shark has reinforced the great advice provided by Kristin Nelson, Miss Snark, Evil Editor, and well, just about everybody else.

Some Heroes are Timeless. Some just won’t die.

2009-02-16T16:38:00.000-08:00

What’s on the ipod right now? Darren Hayes How to Build a Time Machine.
In the backpack: Ursula K Le Guin Steering the Craft.

As a child in Oklahoma, I had an open love of Science Fiction Television. Every night at 6 pm Star Trek reruns would play on Channel 34. I didn’t yet understand that it had been off the air for years. It was all new to me. Even when the cycle of reruns would repeat, it was okay. I reveled in the characters and the adventures. The bright colors of alien worlds, green women, and bizarre outfits (what was it with Gene Rodenberry and pink faux fur anyway?) added a nightly dose of color to my drab rural world.

My father was working nights at the time, and he’d come home after 10, wake me up, and put me in front of the TV to watch Doctor Who with him at 10:30. In that sleepy state, I’d travel time and space with the Doctor. This was the Tom Baker period and I couldn’t tell you how far off our syndication on PBS Channel 13 was from the original British airdate. I wanted a TARDIS. I wanted a robot dog. I wanted to be Adric (he made math cool in my adolescent eyes).

At some point Doctor Who decayed for me. PBS stopped airing it or I stopped watching. I knew it was still out there, getting lower budgets and a bit weirder. (I remember tuning in once to see ice monsters made of cellophane wrap and plastic party ware). So the Doctor and his adventures slipped into my past, a nice hazy memory of watching TV with my dad.

It took me a while to check out the BBC’s recent revival. I knew Russell T. Davies could write witty dialogue. I knew he’d update it for a twenty-first century world. I knew I also liked Steven Moffat’s writing, but in my brain it remained kid’s stuff, something I’d left behind.

I gave it another shot recently, brought in by the tricky bit of marketing they used to bring back Sarah Jane Smith and K-9, the robot dog I so remembered. Sarah Jane was a vaguer memory, but she’d been part of the mythos when I was little, so off I went on another trip with the Doctor.

The Sarah Jane episode really brought home the sense of lost first loves and closure. She had to move on, let go. In doing so, she got a new life, new purpose, and got her dog back.

Yeah, it’s still kind of kid’s stuff: family friendly and a bit adolescent, but it’s grown up enough to play with themes of loss and growth. I’m all caught up, through Season Four, and while David Tennant’s departure saddens me, I’m going to stick with it for a bit. Maybe someday I’ll have a son and we’ll be dragging out the DVDs. Maybe I’ll even name him Adric.

Final Fantasy: Distant Worlds

2008-10-12T13:03:00.000-07:00

In the backpack right now: Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market
On the ipod: The Frames, Keepsake

We live in a strange and ever interesting world. Wednesday night, my friend invited me to the symphony, whom were performing the music of the Final Fantasy video games. I was curious to hear it, as the series has been a part of my life since high school, since the first game was released on the original NES. I stopped playing at some point, when I realized that the games were taking ever more hours to beat, and that was time I could be spending reading or writing. Still, I kept up on the series.

Wednesday’s concert included giant video screens showing footage from the games. What surprised me was how much I remembered of the footage they showed, and how good some of the music was once it was taken out of its 16, 32, and even 64 bit context.

Each game, and its cut scene movies or music evoked a very specific memory: escaping away into combat and exploration of continents when high school had me depressed. They showed the trailer for FF 8, whose main character, in the form of a giant face, followed me through Dublin the first time I went to Ireland. Strangely, I never played FF 7, the one most people seem to best remember, but I saw the movie Advent Children this summer when I went to see Colorado’s Black Canyon, an amazing piece of landscape I’ve always wanted to explore.

I was surprised how excited the crowd was to hear the guest conductor name each track. I’ve always known video games had music, it just never occurred to me that it could have such fans.

The symphony did an amazing job, bringing a full chorus to handle the vocals on the more operatic pieces, and I’ll confess that hearing the opera sequence from FF 5 made me break out in a huge grin. I’m sure that a few of the classically minded musicians resented playing material from such a source, but it speaks to the uniqueness of our age when a genre as young as video games can be translated through a media as old as classical music.

History and the Family Epic: David’s Review of Dragon Prince

2008-04-19T09:18:00.000-07:00

Album I'm listening to today: Lisa Gerrard's Immortal Memory
In the backpack: Sunrunner's Fire by Melanie Rawn and The Splendour that was Egypt by Margaret A. Murray

I got to Melanie Rawn along a strange path. My first exposure to her books was through the cover art: particularly the cover to Sunrunner’s Fire. That Michael Whelan painting is still nicely etched in my memory. I wish I had read Dragon Prince, the first book in this trilogy, in high school (and I hereby date myself by letting you know that’s when it was published). Though I’d already started working with some of the characters and ideas that would become my first still unpublished book, Neophyte, I wasn’t reading much fantasy in 1989.

I wish I had. This book definitely seems to be from a different age of writing: it has a lot description and detail, particularly in the realm of colors. I was struck by her detailing of the clothing and colors, which is nearly overdone at points. I think she veers into romance territory often, but a lot of the darkness I find (okay, and write) in fantasy, isn’t to be found here. The most brutal acts in this book didn’t resonate for me. I didn’t shudder with concern for the characters, and well, maybe I’m being a little too harsh.

If you have read Isabelle Allende’s House of Spirits, you know epic family history can be a powerful device in fiction (though to be fair, House of Spirits is magical realism, and down the street a ways from traditional fantasy). My friend Brian, who recommended Dragon Prince, hinted that the first book is a large amount of buildup, that a lot of its events won’t bear fruit until the second novel. After nearly 600 pages, I’m not sure the payoff is going to be worth it.

Front loading is a big issue for me in books lately. I need to get my review of Blood King up, but it turned my attention to this problem that I hope I can avoid. Dragon Prince follows an older style of epic, whereby all the players are set in position and slowly introduced before any action comes to bear. Summoner did a good job of getting right into the thick of it, while its sequel, Blood King really takes a while to execute its plot.

Dragon Prince makes one other crucial mistake: it tells a lot of important deaths and details, rather than showing them. To cover such a wide range of time and so many characters, this was probably necessary, but it definitely robs the book of a lot of impact. I’m glad I read it, and it was compelling enough that I’m working my way through the other two books in the trilogy, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’ve already been drawn to it.

Sultry Fairytale: David’s Review of Thief with no Shadow by Emily Gee

2008-04-08T20:22:00.000-07:00

Album Playing tonight: Twilight as Sung by the Twilight Singers.

I bought this book a while ago. It’s the third book by Hyperion that I’ve read, and so far I’m impressed. While Summoner was a good little ghost story, Thief with no Shadow is fairly less epic in its aim, though I think it is better written. Gee’s sentences are simple in style but with good color and depth. She spins a fairly simple plot that drew me in to its depths.

It reminded me of Caroline Stevermer’s When the King Comes Home, which was another simple book that had a lot of thought put into it. Thief is definitely more adult. I wouldn’t pass it along to my teenage daughter, though I was pleased with the distinct voice of the main character. The sexuality is still pretty minimal but not easy to digest. One of the things I think Gee did best was essentialist world-crafting: I got the right amount of detail to envision her locales but not so much that I got lost in boring details of customs or travelogue.

If you’ve noticed that I haven’t given you a plot summary, I should tell you that it’s on purpose. Pick this one up and discover by chance, like I did. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. Like its main character, it will sneak up on you.

No Future in Sight

2008-04-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

Today's Ipod song? Nothing. The chaos wave affecting my technology finally hit the pod.

S.M. Stirling’s Dies the Fire is exactly the type of fantasy that I try to avoid. I have it on good authority that it’s well written and fascinating. What would happen if all of our much vaunted technology was suddenly zapped and ceased to function? In Stirling’s view, it would be interesting chaos: some social conventions would completely die out, others would thrive. The idea that we’re so close to a complete and utter collapse of society sends all too familiar shivers up my spine not because I necessarily believe it, but because I’ve heard it all too often, and it echoes against something drilled into me for many years.

My mother and stepfather are apocalyptic Christians, which means they strongly believe strongly that at any moment the world will unravel, the Rapture will happen, the United Nations will come over the hills seeking our guns and put us all into concentration camps. Hearing this nearly every day in high school didn’t do much for my sense of futurism. It fed in me a distinct fatalism. What was the point of college? Striving for a better career? Any effort you put forth to improve yourself was soon to be wiped out by a cataclysmic change. The best you could do is remain pure in thought or deed, remain as static as possible, in case today was the day when all hell would break loose.

I rejected this teaching in time. I had something in me far too Humanist, far too curious, to do nothing with my life. Having a job flipping burgers could have contributed to it, but I wanted more.

When I first began reading the Enlightenment thinkers, I understood where they were coming from. They were trying to reason on logic while also updating their methodology. I won’t say they hit their mark, but I found in Voltaire and Franklin sympathetic minds. I strive for the rational, though sometimes the superstitious still lurks at the edge of my mind. When I see people being injected with RFID tags for security purposes my mind immediately leaps to the Mark of the Beast. The more I see our privacy violated the more I worry that the world could teeter in that destructive direction. Maybe it will. Maybe my mother was right all those years ago when she told me the tales of the tortures we’d all face at the hands of a world government.

I believe this world is worth living in, that for every terror the nightly news shows us, there is a sublime beauty in nature or in the arts. By endlessly contemplating the horrors awaiting those left behind, my mother fails to edify those she could help: instead of remaining static, she could be feeding the poor, educating the illiterate, improving the world a little bit at a time.

There is only so much time in a life. At thirty-four I know I’m at the halfway mark. It doesn’t make me dread the mystery of the end; it makes me want to do more, faster. If we’re all doomed by some asteroid the government isn’t telling us about or by the work of the devil, I’d still rather get what good done that I can, rather than waste time contemplating the inevitable end.

Writing from the Cave

2008-03-27T09:33:00.000-07:00

My writing sometimes feels very distant from me, like a thing I’m looking for but cannot locate in a cluttered closet. That is how it feels right now: like Eastlight is a world spinning out there on its own, and I can’t connect with it. One thing I’ve always struggled with and need to master, is the ability to just pick up a book I’m writing and be able to work on it regardless of what’s happening in my outer life. It’s not quite the same as inspiration. If I feel uninspired, I can always edit. In fact, that’s the best time for me to edit: when I can read it without wanting to take an idea off in a dozen directions. Right now if feels like going to the gym: a good habit that I’ve gotten out of.

In defense of my laziness, it’s been a hell of a year so far. I do not know if it’s the leap year effect, as some have suggested, the stress of the impending election, the economy, or a dozen other things, but 2008 so far felt very chaotic, like a lot of changes are happening very quickly.

Of course that turns my mind to fantasy. Change can happen so quickly, on such a large scale, that a kingdom can turn from peaceful to oppressive nearly overnight. Coups and political machinations are slowly plotted but often quickly executed. Keeping the people fed and in shelter requires a delicate balance between order and nature. Our world is filled with political strife and starving people. Fantasy mirrors these problems.

Conflict is essential when writing. You don’t want to read a story where everything is idyllic and your main character is completely unchallenged. How can they possibly grow if they don’t experience change? How can we? Change can come quickly, without warning. That is true in life or in fiction.

Meth

2008-03-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

I’ve seen addiction portrayed in fantasy. Fred Saberhagen used it to great effect in his Song of the Swords series, and I will never forget his image of people letting worms loop through their skin to get the narcotic effect of the chemicals the worms left behind. Let’s leave Herbert out of it for now. The strongest example of addiction I can name in truly popular fantasy was Willow’s use of magic in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I didn’t care for the angle personally, the metaphor felt forced, but if it helped someone out there, then I am grateful for it.

Have you seen the skeletal face of someone strung out on crystal methamphetamine? I’ve seen mummies with more flesh. I’ve seen healthier corpses. As a Family Guy episode quipped, “it’s a hell of a drug.” Addiction comes up in fantasy a lot, usually in response to power, but as I’ve watched meth melt the brain of someone I once cared deeply for, I’m grateful that it doesn’t exist in my fantasy worlds. Now here’s the hard part: do I wish it didn’t exist in the real world either? One of the reasons I write fantasy is to hold a mirror up to reality, not to moralize, but to question. When we escape into fantasy, we get caught up in the adventure and the universe a writer has crafted for us. I read fantasy to escape, to leave earth for a while, but I’ve found that the best fantasy sends something back with me: I return to reality with something to consider, something to think about. By editing out addiction, I run the risk of editing out something to think on, an issue someone might want or need to consider. If I make my worlds too idealized, I run the risk of separating them too far from reality, and losing the reader if they don’t have enough points of connection.

Is meth right for me? Um, hell no. Have a look at the ruined face of a long time user. Have a conversation with them. I think you’ll find it isn’t right for you either, but it’s a question you have to answer for yourself. The issue of addiction is something that permeates our society. In fantasy we might find a healthy way to confront it.

Secret Gardens

2008-03-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

One of the things always strikes me in my trips to Greece is the use of public space for growing food. Orange trees are the most common thing, ringing town squares in Kalamanta and Argos. Even near the Acropolis in Athens, herbs grow. Coming home to Denver, I walk the streets and wonder why we don’t plant more fruit trees. (I am not counting crab-apples here). At the least, they’d give the homeless something to eat.

The NYTimes posted an article today on people using their backyards as mini-orchards, which frankly just strikes me as a good idea. They even cited Meyer’s lemons, two of which I grow in my living room. While my “harvest” isn’t exactly going to provide a foodstuff, it’s a neat party trick to ask a guest to pick a lemon.

In fantasy, we deal a lot with medieval traditions and medieval lifestyles. While I try not to write too much about a character bathing or brushing her teeth, I do think about the differences in hygiene. Food sources are a principal concern in a medieval society, so I’m becoming entranced by the idea of urban gardens, walled away and struggling for sunlight.

In our generation we have gotten away from some of the more practical construction and land uses of the pre-War generation. It’s regrettable that our office buildings never get a blast of fresh air, that we don’t use more natural lighting, and particularly that we don’t maintain our connection to the earth by growing some of our own food. As power becomes scarcer, we turn to solar, but why not skylights as well? Don’t get me started on grey water, why aren’t we doing this in every house (particularly here in the west, where water rights are a growing concern). Okay, I’m a tree-hugging dirt-worshipper as my friend Jacinta has said, but I find it interesting that as times get a little harder, we start looking back as well as forward. The medieval period was the dirtiest in history, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a few practical things about life from it.

We’ve separated our urban selves from the natural cycles of life and death. What we might give back to the land, we flush away. What we take from the land is delivered to us from far away. But a fantasy character, even an urban one, doesn’t have such a strong separation from the food cycle. Then again, she may not have a toothbrush either.