University of Fantasy

London Book Fair 2011, with bonus promotion for Erin Morgenstern’s THE NIGHT CIRCUS

2011-04-19T20:57:00.003+01:00

I have two excellent excuses for not blogging. Firstly, I have an internship at a publisher in central London. This is both exhausting and awesome. I come home and talk excitedly! with exclamation marks! about cool stuff I did today! And secondly, I went to the London Book Fair. I could try to sound chilled out here but I’ve been dying to go to the London Book Fair for freaking ever. Basically my life is complete.

You may be wondering what people actually do at the London Book Fair. In my case, I spent the whole time stalking Erin Morgenstern’s upcoming novel THE NIGHT CIRCUS. And here is the epic illustrated tale.

It's the morning of the London Book Fair. I register online and print out my pass so I can bring it with me.

I exit Earls Court tube station via the Earls Court exit, only to discover that the Earls Court convention centre is in fact via the other exit. Thanks to Google Map, I finally get to the Earls Court convention centre where the fair is being held. It is very shiny in the sun. There are lots of big London Book Fair posters (and more sun).

I lurk hopefully at the Random House booth, where a nice person gives me THE NIGHT CIRCUS swag! It is a glossy leaflet with a beautiful cover. Inside there is some cool text and some more cool text. And what is that on the back cover? It's the UK cover of THE NIGHT CIRCUS! (Also a six-foot-high poster inside the Random House booth, which I would also have snapped except I was afraid of being thrown out for trespassing.)

But the awesomeness is not finished. I stake out the Random House booth until 5pm. And then THE CIRCUS HAPPENS. There is a cute circus lady juggling what appear to be glass balls. There is a very distracting contortionist. There is a circus gentleman with a megaphone! Telling us all about Le Cirque des Rêves! And just to put a feather in our cap of joy, HERE IS THE VIDEO I TAKE ON MY IPHONE.

If you too are intrigued by the pretty, you can preorder THE NIGHT CIRCUS. :D

guillermo del toro and chuck hogan - the strain

2010-12-10T00:00:00.000Z

Horror is not normally my genre of choice. As I huddled under the bedcovers in gibbering terror, perversely compelled to keep turning the pages of Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s The Strain, I remembered why.

This is a petrifying book, packed with body horror, gruesome murders and general extreme creepiness. It also works superbly as a thriller; it’s tautly-written and the pages flick past at an impressive speed. There is some supreme badassery here, including UV light bombs and vampires getting decapitated with swords, and some great set-pieces like the dead plane at the beginning of the book or the eclipse in the middle.

The one aspect that disappointed me was, and I apologise for yet again banging the same old drum, the gender roles. All the badasses are male. All the main characters are male. All the characters present at the climax are male. There are only two female characters; one is a damsel distress who is kidnapped and later fridged, and the other was ordered by the men to stay at home and look after the children during the climax. I rolled my eyes pretty hard at that point, especially since that second female character was supposed to be the protagonist’s colleague and equal, her training every bit the match of his. But she’s a girl, so she stays sidelined.

If you can overlook the gender aspect, The Strain is a thoroughly satisfying and enjoyable read which is still giving me the creeps a month later. You may experience sleep deprivation and/or uncontrollable sobbing, is all I’m saying.

Verdict = 4 out of 5 stars. I'll definitely be picking up the sequel.

pc and kristen cast - marked

2010-12-05T21:46:00.003Z

Oh dear. I cracked open PC and Kristen Cast’s Marked hoping that House of Night would be another gem a la Richelle Mead or Rachel Caine. I ended the book feeling not just disappointed but bitter, and I feel the need to share my bitterness with the world.

Marked repeats all the worst flaws of Tamora Pierce’s Alanna series without the strength of character that makes Alanna (mostly) sympathetic. Like Alanna, the protagonist Zoey Redbird is designated by the author as special, and that point is hammered home so hard and so often I ended up with a slight concussion. A mere sampling of the ways in which we’re told Zoey is special:

She has a special tattoo. By the end of the book her tattoo is even specialer.
She has special magic powers.
She has a special unique bloodlust.
She has a special mentor who had a special vision of her.
She herself has special visions.
Everyone constantly reassures her that she's wonderful.
Goddesses literally intervene in person to tell her how amazing she is.
She has a special cat, which I assume was ripped directly from Tamora Pierce.
She has a special ability to just somehow know the right thing to do by instinct. (This is a trope I absolutely hate with a burning passion. If your character has no actual reason to make the next plot step, rethink your plot. Don’t just lazily give her special intuition.)
She’s being lined up to become the next high priestess, except super special because of her amazingly special magic powers.

That’s a truckload of special trinkets the author hands to her. What does Zoey actually do to deserve this universal admiration from the gods on down? Well, her world-shakingly epic achievement is ... wait for it ... she defeats some school bullies.

Yup. That’s the scale of the plot here -- gossip, backstabbing and dresses.

A key problem is the lack of an external antagonist posing a real threat to the protagonist and her comfortable world. In Richelle Mead’s excellent Vampire Academy series, protagonist Rose Hathaway has a driving purpose in life: to protect her charge Lissa Dragomir by fighting the evil Strigoi. That’s why Rose gets up in the morning. That’s why she fights, why she struggles, why she sacrifices. That threat, which cases a progressively longer shadow across the series, puts everything into perspective. Schoolgirl bitching is a minor irritant when your best friend could be murdered and your world crushed at any moment.

By contrast, Zoey has nothing to worry about. Her world contains no threat greater than another girl stealing the boy she’s crushing on, no purpose greater than earning queen-bee status among her classmates. The protagonist is innocent to the point of childishness; her worldview divides people into into slutty evil bitches and perfect beautiful people. (As you can probably imagine, this immaturity sits a little oddly with the dubiously-consensual public blowjobs -- it comes across slightly like an eight-year-old set loose on the set of a porn film.)

And that’s why this novel feels small and shallow to me. All the epic specialness and personal visits from goddesses are wasted on high-school bullies and slut-shaming.

Zoey Redbird needs to grow up.

Verdict = 2 out of 5 stars.

nanowrimo

2010-10-31T18:00:00.000Z

It’s the most glorious month of the year again! And I’ve been making preparations. Write-ins have been scheduled. Chocolate has been stockpiled. My spreadsheet is filling out. As our reading week (a week’s holiday) falls conveniently in November, I’ll be taking ten days off to do nothing but write. I’ve found that I need to build momentum in the first days of Nanowrimo to carry me through the rest, so as soon as the clock hits midnight tonight, I’ll open up my shiny new Word document and start writing.

This year I’m taking a second crack at my YA urban fantasy DREAD MACHINE. I’m aiming to kill this scarily huge project in 100k max. If I’m especially good, I might even beat last year’s total. I hope the tiramisu of victory is in my future!

Are you doing Nanowrimo this year? How have you been preparing?

lauren kate - fallen

2010-10-31T00:00:00.003+01:00

I picked up this novel despite (or perhaps because of) the strong suspicion that I wouldn’t be able to stand it, so I admit the bitter taste in my mouth right now is self-inflicted. But its stunning cover seduced me, and I wanted to test out my local digital lending library, so I took a deep breath and dove in.

First, the good. There’s a prevailing feeling of darkness thanks to the reform school the protagonist Luce attends, which I think is the first reform school I’ve ever seen in YA. I was pleased by Luce’s surprisingly complex relationship with her parents, who condemned her to reform school as a last resort after she possibly murdered someone in a fire; they love her and fear her and want to protect her all at once, and I’m glad that the protagonist sees their flaws and loves them nonetheless. I only wish that the other character relationships were as intriguing. Most of the writing is merely serviceable, but at times it touched on the beautiful. One line I particularly liked:

She spotted a lone dandelion, and it crossed her mind that a younger Luce would have pounced on it and then made a wish and blown. But this Luce’s wishes felt too heavy for something so light.

I did a little victory dance when, after 200 pages of the designated love interest Daniel showing nothing but contempt for her, Luce finally stands up for herself. She points out that far from being as stupid as he apparently thinks, she’s extremely academic. Full scholarship. 4.0 GPA. She speaks several languages. She does the Sunday crossword! And she’s going to be a psychiatrist! Immediately my love for Luce started to bloom like a previously stunted flower.

Unfortunately, as with the rest of the book, this flare of promise subsides into disappointment. The supposedly academic Luce never uses any of the skills she claims to have. Everything she learns is served up to her on a silver platter by a nosy friend. If she were as smart as all that, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t get into a strange car to go to an unknown place to meet her violent soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, without telling anyone where she’s going. The evilness of the evil characters is written in letters big enough to be visible from space, but somehow genius Luce misses it. People keep saying how special Luce is -- “Believe me. You have no idea how many strong and impossible things you are capable of” -- but it’s never actually backed up in the text.

I think the key failing here is that the author never gives her an opportunity to shine. The narrative is so in love with perfect beautiful Daniel and his beautiful perfection that Luce is an afterthought. She’s just a window through which the reader is invited to ogle those rippling muscles. In the entire book Luce is given nothing to do, so she accomplishes nothing -- her only action in the climax, and I use the word action loosely, is to lie on an altar while the antagonist attempts to sacrifice her, only to be saved at the last moment (of course) by the designated love interest.

It’s a shame, because this book could have been redeemed. I feel like I got a brief glimpse of the Luce who could have been -- a heroine who stormed through this book, kicking ass and taking names, using every bit of that intelligence -- but then the moment died.

Verdict = 3 out of 5 stars.

back from the dead

2010-10-30T18:00:00.000+01:00

Since my last post, I turned in my final-year research project, scraped through my final exams, graduated from university, scored a place at University College London to study MA Publishing, narrowly missed out on a scholarship, found a house in London, got a summer job and applied for a terrifyingly huge bank loan to afford all this, read a lot, wrote a lot, and somehow survived.

How about you? :)

theme song

2010-04-28T00:00:00.000+01:00

Frivolous post today. I often play music while I’m writing, but the aim is for the music to fade into the background, so I’ve never really thought of any one song as a theme song. The one exception is Within Temptation’s “Hand of Sorrow”. From the moment I first heard this, way back when IRONBANE was still coming together, I knew this was the perfect song for protagonist Anjen, the war she fought and the things she did to win.

Please forgive me for the sorrow
For leaving you in fear
For the dreams we had to silence
That's all they'll ever be
Still I'll be the hand that serves you
Though you'll not see that it is me

So many dreams were broken and so much was sacrificed
Was it worth the ones we loved and had to leave behind
So many years have past, who are the noble and the wise?
Will all our sins be justified?

power and adulthood in YA fiction

2010-04-26T00:00:00.002+01:00

As I outline my new YA project, I’ve been thinking about adults and adulthood.

Generally speaking, YA characters in real-world settings are part of a web of power relationships. They’re children, so they have parents. They’re students, so they have teachers. If disaster strikes they can have people to turn to. Even if everyone abandons them, society provides a safety net; they can go to the police, and in the long term social services will (or should) place them with a new family.

Other settings might have no police, no social services, no schools, no responsible adults at all. A teenage character can be abandoned in much more profound ways, with literally nobody looking out for them. That character would have to take care of everything themselves -- like an adult. I’m thinking here of something like The Hunger Games. Although technically she has a surviving parent, Katniss has taken on the role of parent and provider for her family, and when she goes into the arena, she’s utterly alone. Nobody is coming to help her.

But the vast majority of YA novels I can think of place the characters in a world of responsible adults and mentor characters. Is that because a teenage character in an adult role is in fact in a meaningful way an adult? Do YA readers enjoy and sympathise with characters in positions of adult responsibility? If a teenage character is 100% independent and in no way looked after by an adult, is the story still YA?

I’ve been pestering the wonderful Teens Writing for Teens for their views because of my new YA project. I’m still thrashing out the details of my mostly-depopulated setting, but I’m pretty sure that everything the teenage characters used to rely on has gone byebye. No parents. No teachers. No police. No safety net. This is way beyond the classic Harry Potter situation in which there are loving adults, but the adults can’t or won’t always help, forcing the YA character to face their demons alone -- there are literally no supportive adults in this setting, period. One character is looking for a mythical adult figure who’ll save them all, but she eventually realises that this figure is just a myth, and if she wants any saving done she'll have to do it herself.

In this borderline post-apocalyptic setting, the YA characters themselves are having to (re)build aspects of their former society -- redistributing food, policing the streets, etc. I see this as a Battlestar Galactica-esque struggle to reclaim some kind of normality, starting with basic governmental functions, as a last-ditch attempt to avoid sliding into Lord of the Flies territory. (I admit constitutional rights and separation of powers are not obviously YA issues, but they’re fascinating, I swear!)

All this is absolutely fascinating to me and I think would make a fun YA novel, but I still haven’t read enough YA to feel truly confident in my genre knowledge. The difficulty I’m having in naming similar YA titles worries me. All good ideas have already been done; if something is uncommon or even unique in a genre, that’s probably because it’s a terrible idea.

What do you think? Is age what defines a YA character, or is it the social role of a young adult? Would strong characterisation and a compelling plot (hypothetically speaking, as I still have a lot to learn in that respect) be enough to sell you on this concept?

beautiful imperfection

2010-04-24T16:17:00.002+01:00

I hated making revisions to THE INFERNAL FAMILY. Every mistake I found was another sign that I was a bad writer. If I was any good at this I would have written a better draft in the first place.

Now that I’m revising IRONBANE, I find I’m mellowing out. If I’m making changes, it’s not because I should have done better the first time around. It just means I’ve learned something: I see now what I couldn’t see then. Mistakes are just opportunities.

(Sparked by the realisation that when your two antagonists have one plot role, one master plan and one compelling motivation-providing backstory between them, you probably only have one antagonist.)

What about you? How do you feel during revisions?

halfway

2010-04-22T16:33:00.001+01:00

Halfway through revising IRONBANE. The last few chapters have been hard work. I had to restructure a 30,000-word sequence around my new antagonist, reshuffling half a dozen chapters and cutting about a third of the wordcount. But my critique partner Dystophil has given her unofficial seal of approval, so I’m happy. :)

weekend adventures in YA urban fantasy, plus rachel caine - glass houses

2010-04-16T00:00:00.002+01:00

Spent the weekend hunting through bookshops in Weymouth for YA urban fantasies with strong heroines. I barely escaped with my sanity, because every single YA urban fantasy seems to have the exact same cover. Black. Pale cover model. Gothic text in vivid colour. Examples: Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely series; PC and Kristin Cast’s House of Night series; Rachel Caine’s Morganville Vampires series. It was like browsing a shelf of identical octuplets. Maybe it’s done with mirrors, and there’s only one real book cover -- the iconic apple cover of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight -- and its millions of reflections.

Anyway, once I fought off the identical octuplets, I looked at two books, Aprilynne Pike’s Wings and Rachel Caine’s Glass Houses. One I put down, one I bought.

I gave Aprilynne Pike’s Wings ten pages to hook me. Like every YA urban fantasy ever written, it opens with the protagonist meeting a hot guy in biology class. What is it about biology class? I assume this and the identical scene in Becca Fitzpatrick’s Hush, Hush are deliberate homages to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, but even so, it’s such an unimaginative way to introduce a character. Nobody ever seems to meet during a burglary, or whitewater rafting, or anything outside a classroom.

But the biology class wasn’t a deal-breaker. The deal-breaker was that I learned plenty about the protagonist’s physical appearance (so supermodel-stunning that everybody is jealous) and nothing about the protagonist’s personality (um ... she’s a vegan). Classic blank page heroine. No thank you.

Then I flicked through Rachel Caine’s Glass Houses, the first in her Morganville Vampires series, and 16-year-old heroine Claire Danvers won my heart instantly. She’s smart, brave and vulnerable, describing herself as “small” and “average”, struggling to deal with the scary new world of college. Unlike Stephenie Meyer’s Bella Swan, whose only ambition is to marry Edward and have his little vampiric babies, Claire dreams of Yale, Caltech, MIT. Her textbooks love her when nobody in her cut-throat dorm does. She values studying so much she’s willing to brave vampires and murderous cheerleaders just to get to class. Heck yes, I bought that.

Glass Houses is a fast-paced and fun read. The real strength of this book is the characterisation. The four inhabitants of the titular Glass House are so close they’re practically a Nakama, and each of them is beautifully drawn. (For bonus points, Claire’s friendship with kickass goth Eve aces the Bechdel test). I want to move in there, but since I can’t, I’ll be picking up the next.

Verdict = 4 out of 5 stars. Glass Houses is enjoyable with an adorable heroine and an unexpectedly shocking ending.

rob thurman - nightlife

2010-04-14T11:25:00.004+01:00

This week I’ve been reading the first book in Rob Thurman’s Cal Leandros urban fantasy series, Nightlife. While I found it an overall enjoyable read, I also have mixed feelings, not least about the gender roles. I recommended it to my friend and fellow gritty urban fantasy fan Dystophil, but not without reservations.

I picked up this book because I have a good track record with urban fantasies about two brothers pursued by the forces of evil: I love the TV show Supernatural, and I’m a huge fan of Sarah Rees Brennan’s YA debut The Demon’s Lexicon. On that front, Nightlife did not disappoint. The two Leandros brothers are well-drawn and sympathetic; much as in The Demon’s Lexicon, a younger brother for whom evil is in the blood is saved by his older brother’s redemptive love, a trope I adore. The world is dark, there’s plenty of violence and the dialogue is amusingly snarky.

Unfortunately, the author has a serious case of overwriting. No good line goes uncluttered. Dialogue tags drip with adverbs and adjectives. At times I wanted to take a red pen to the novel. The novel could lose a good 10,000 words and come out leaner and tighter.

About two-thirds of the way through comes a story decision that dropped my jaw: the protagonist Cal is taken over mind and body by a third party. For nearly the entire rest of the novel, including the climax, Cal is just completely gone. Not only does he not make an appearance onscreen, in a metaphysical sense he doesn’t even exist! He doesn’t reappear until the resolution. I can’t understand what the author was thinking here. What kind of protagonist is entirely absent during the climax of the novel? I’m coming to think that maybe the first-person viewpoint is a ruse, and older brother Niko is the real protagonist. Niko is present while Cal is absent. Niko is suffering while Cal is not. Niko makes the decisions while Cal doesn’t even exist. Cal isn’t even there when Niko heroically saves the world. I found that extremely disappointing.

And then there are the gender roles. Yikes.

All the main characters are male. 95% of the screentime is devoted to male characters. All the important relationships are between male characters. Everybody present at the climax is male. Everybody present in the resolution is male. The book’s primary relationship is between two brothers, but that’s neither cause nor excuse for the complete exclusion of female characters. Look at The Demon’s Lexicon: there’s kickass Mae Crawford, demon-summoning dancer Sin and Goblin Market matriarch Morris, and that’s not even mentioning the protagonist’s crazy mother.

But most worryingly, the only female characters featured in Nightlife are all either virgins or whores, and the whores are made to suffer.

Georgina, the virgin, is the personification of innocence. She’s “truth and faith ... hope and warmth ... Everything about George was gentle”. Despite being only two years younger than Cal, she’s treated as being much younger. (Disturbingly, Cal’s romantic interest sees it as her role to “be a child for [him]”.) Not gruesomely killed.
Meredith, the whore, is heavily sexualised. She wears revealing outfits, her breasts get enough screentime that they should have their own credit in the ending sequence, and her flirtation is both a manipulation technique and a nuisance the male characters have to tolerate. She’s presented as artificial -- hair dye, plastic surgery, breast augmentation. Gruesomely killed.
Sophia is a literal whore, as in Cal’s father paid her to have sex with him. She’s also physically and emotionally abusive, a liar, thief and drunk, who extorts money from her own sons. Gruesomely killed.
Promise, the whore, marries old men for their money and then they die shortly afterward. Cal thinks of her as the “human version of a succubus”, before he discovers that she isn’t actually human at all. She’s a vampire who takes supplements to avoid having to drain blood. (Pity there isn’t a supplement she can take to avoid having to drain money.) Gruesomely k -- sorry, that was a reflex: Promise is the only sexually active female character who is not gruesomely killed.

I think I need to repeat that with more emphasis. Every sexually active female character but one is gruesomely killed.

Verdict = 3 out of 5 stars. Like fast food, Nightlife is tasty. Enjoy it, and don’t look too closely at what went into it.

hush hush, the designated love interest and gender relations in YA

2010-03-23T18:17:00.002Z

NB: Potentially triggering discussion of why one character is a rapist.

This week I read Aja’s LJ post Bad Romance (or, YA & Rape Culture). Aja argues that Becca Fitzpatrick’s debut YA paranormal romance Hush, Hush “repeatedly and systematically reinforces rape culture”: the protagonist is “both a victim of rape culture and a perpetuation of it”. I scored a copy of Hush, Hush to see if it was as bad as Aja said.

It’s worse.

First the good. Hush, Hush is a fast read. The dialogue zings. I liked the protagonist much more than I thought I would, and her best friend was tons of fun. And the cover is breathtaking. I could stare at that image all day.

Isn’t that gorgeous?

It’s a shame the designated love interest is a creepy sexual predator.

In a cast full of stalkers, designated love interest Patch is absolutely the worst. His his ideal woman is “vulnerable”. He zeroes in on Nora because he can intimidate her. Patch enjoys threatening her. That’s why he keeps asking her if he scares him - because he gets a thrill out of it. He puts his hands all over her, he invades her personal space, he makes unwanted sexual comments, he leers at her, he follows her around, he isolates her, he scares her. That is not sexual tension but sexual threat - the threat of rape. When Patch corners her alone in a deserted tunnel, Nora explicitly wonders if he's going to rape her. While Patch may not physically rape her, his actions constitute psychological (invading her thoughts) and metaphorical (entering her mind, taking over her body, and physically restraining her from calling the authorities so they can protect her) rapes. He is a continual threat to Nora’s independence, self-respect and even survival.

In one particularly horrifying scene, Nora is stranded with Patch with no cell phone and no way of calling for help. Over her repeated objections, Patch forces her to spend the night with him in a motel room with a single bed. He tells her to strip and get in the shower. Then he pins her down on the bed, straddles her and warns her that nobody will come help her if she screams.

Ladies and gentleman, behold the hero of this paranormal romance.

Nobody worthy of Nora’s love would ever, ever, ever do this. A worthy person would respect her wishes. A worthy person would recognise that she feels threatened and help her to feel safe. A worthy person would support her, encourage her, empower her. Patch is the diametric opposite of that person.

When I talked to the twifties about this novel, the wonderful Becca Cooper commented:

“Now that everyone's talking about it I'm sitting here going, "Hey, yah, how did I miss that?" And I think it's because I read the book with the understanding that Patch was the love interest and I was pretty sure he and Nora got together at the end. Therefore, when Patch did these creepy things I sort of dismissed it/tried to justify it/assumed he had good motivations, and so on.”

Patch gets away with it because he is the designated love interest.

I use this term “designated love interest” to try to express how very artificial the supposed romance is. Nora isn’t drawn to Patch because of his humour, warmth or respect for her: he has none. Nor because they have fun together: they don’t. Nor because he empowers her to become a fuller, better person: he doesn’t. In fact, she finds him so repulsive she spends nearly the entire book rejecting and fleeing him. (If someone forced me into a motel room, told me he wanted to kill me, shoved me up against a wall and put his hands round my throat, I’d reject him too.)

Patch has two things going for him. One, he’s physically attractive. Two, the author designated him as the story’s official love interest. You can tell that not because of anything he does, but because he’s on the front cover, and in the back cover copy, and is an attractive yet brooding boy the protagonist meets in class.

That’s it. Those are the only two reasons Nora has to like him. Those are the only two reasons the reader has to like him. However appalling his behaviour, a love interest (by definition) must be a likeable character, and the protagonist must love him (and have good reasons for loving him), and he must deserve the reader’s sympathy. Patch must be all these things, otherwise he wouldn’t be the love interest ... right?

The lesson Hush, Hush teaches is this. Whatever a boy does to you is out of love. He scares you because he likes you that way. He ignores your wishes because he wants to spend time with you. He invades your personal space because he wants you. So if you find yourself pinned down on a bed, trapped and helpless, just remember that he’s doing this to you because he loves you.

I know YA paranormal romance in general has a problem with gender roles. Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight is notorious for this - it’s the archetypal example, the model that Hush, Hush follows closely. Aja suggests other offenders: Claudia Gray’s Evernight, Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy, Nina Malkin’s Swoon. My friend Hope commented that “it sounds as though YA might be going through the same need to reject rape-as-love dynamic that the romance world went through about fifteen years ago”. But before YA can reject the bad-boy archetype that gave us Patch and Edward, the romantic hero whose obsessive, dangerous love is expressed through threatening and controlling and overriding the heroine, it first needs to recognise that archetype for what it is: Aja’s “perpetuation of rape culture”.

I’d like to finish up by recommending two YA novels whose handling of love, sex and gender put Hush, Hush to shame.

In Kristin Cashore’s Graceling, the protagonist Katsa lives in a male-dominated world in which the easiest way of escaping the control of one man is often to take shelter in the protection of another. Katsa rejects that with a vengeance. Katsa challenges the many contexts in which men have power over her: direct feudal hierarchy, offers to protect her, telepathic understanding of her thoughts and feelings, marriage proposals. Unusually for a YA heroine, Katsa explicitly prizes her own autonomy and independence. Her love interest is sweet and warm: he respects and loves Katsa's strength of character. He allows and encourages Katsa to be a strong, independent woman.
In Sarah Rees Brennan’s The Demon’s Lexicon, the character of Nick Ryves is a deconstruction of the classic YA supernatural bad boy. He's scary and dangerous and smoking hot. He possesses many forms of power - physical, sexual, magical. He's the Edward, the Patch, of this story. The twist? Nick is the protagonist of the story, not the designated love interest who dominates a weak heroine. And when we're in his viewpoint, we see how much of a freaking psychopath he is. We see his callousness, his violence, his total lack of empathy. Frankly, he's Chaotic Evil. We see clearly that the YA bad-boy stereotype of Hush, Hush is incapable of real love for another person, only dangerous, controlling obsession. (And the girl who is initially attracted to Nick for his bad-boyness comes to realise that he's a psychopath and kicks his ass to the kerb.) In a way, I perceive The Demon’s Lexicon as a critique of the YA paranormal romance subgenre, and I love it all the more for that.

Further reading: Choco, “Why YA Romance Needs to Change”.

leaping into the shark tank

2010-03-04T11:34:00.000Z

Today I had an attack of boldness and decided to submit a first chapter to a writing forum I belong to. (No, not that forum. Early drafts require gentle critique.) Confusingly, I have two contradictory feelings about this:

I am an unparalleled genius whose latest masterpiece will send readers into ecstasy.
I am a hack. Readers will laugh. Tomatoes may be thrown.

I suspect the truth, as always, will be somewhere in the middle.

frustration

2010-02-26T12:52:00.004Z

Frustration is producing nothing worth showing to a professional in seven years.

Fear is not knowing if I ever will.

black moment fail

2010-02-21T02:17:00.002Z

How can you tell when you’re an idiot? You make the same mistake twice.

During the first draft of my urban fantasy THE INFERNAL FAMILY, I nearly blew the third act by copping out. Failing to make things bad enough for my protagonist. Then I stumbled over the concept of the black moment, the lowest possible point at which all seems lost, and had a little epiphany. I ended up writing some of my favourite and most violent scenes -- a rampage of vengeful destruction that carved up most of the cast.

Guess what I did to IRONBANE? Yep. Blew the black moment.

In fairness, there is a black moment. The antagonists come together to cause a huge cascading series of disasters, which the protagonist has to fix alone thanks to what she did to her devoted companion. She comes up with a plan, but it’s horrific even by her standards. She’s terrified of what the antagonists will do to her, what she’ll have to do to her friends, what she’s becoming. There’s supposed to be a real danger of not being able to go through with it.

At this point, I apparently decided that we needed a flashback to a much scarier situation in which she successfully overcame her fear. Thus murdering any tension and burying it in a shallow grave. I mean, this black moment is bad, but at least it’s not that bad, right? If she faced that, she can face this.

Yeah, I’m a structure genius all right.

Happily, I think I can fix this. But I’m thinking carefully about how I can avoid black moment fail in the future, and I’m coming up with some rules of thumb. The black moment is only black enough (for my taste) if:

The protagonist is totally alone. Everyone they relied on must be dead, alienated or gone in some way. It should seem like the protagonist may never regain those close friendships.
The protagonist should be facing certain death.
The protagonist has to doubt themselves. You can be a hero in the face of certain death, but during a real black moment the protagonist can’t be a hero -- they can’t be proud of themselves at this moment. They have to be afraid, ashamed, despairing.
The black moment should be the worst the protagonist can remember. Period. If the protagonist has been in worse situations, the black moment isn’t black enough.

Maybe if I consult these rules when planning my next novel, I can avoid ruining the third black moment in a row.

What do you think, team? Is the black moment important to you? Do you structure black moments into your novel? Do you stumble across them by accident? Can you improve on my rules of thumb?

seven years

2010-02-21T01:02:00.001Z

Lately I’ve been thinking about my history as a writer. Past novels, past writing groups, past critique partners. What kicked me off was a comment on last week’s teaser from my old friend John Zeleznik, better known to me as Ebenstone.

"Your writing has gotten so good. This was beautiful and so well written. I'm blown away!"

I’ve been lucky enough to stay in touch with many of my old writing friends. I’m still swapping chapters with Dystophil the way we did three years ago. But Ebenstone is hands down the oldest writing friend I’m still in touch with. How old? I joined our then writing group in late 2002, when I’d just turned fourteen. So -- seven years and counting.

In those seven years, I wrote:

Some embarrassingly terrible stuff ripped off from Tamora Pierce.
Some embarrassingly terrible stuff ripped off from Robert Jordan.
Some embarrassingly terrible stuff ripped off from George RR Martin.
Three hundred pages of world-building for a projected multiple-book series I had to tear up.
Fanfiction in several fandoms.
My first novel, an epic fantasy I have since thankfully lost.
My second novel, a monster novel I have unfortunately not lost, because it is saved on my writing LJ.
My third novel, an urban fantasy I often wished I’d lost.
My fourth novel, an epic fantasy I love too much to lose.

Objectively I think, and Dystophil often tells me, that my writing has improved a metric truckload since the early days. But only Ebenstone knows the truth.

So I’m glad to hear that I’ve learned something in those seven years. :)

teaser tuesday leaves a rose for the dead

2010-02-16T20:29:00.002Z

Second last scene in IRONBANE. Anjen has now picked up a new title: Kingkiller.

It rained during the funeral. Black carriages rattled through Summerholt under a sky the colour of iron. Crowds threw leaves and flowers under the wheels and braved spatters of mud.

Anjen watched from the crowd, jostled by elbows, the rain wet on her cheeks. The dead man’s kin rode up front in the place of honour. She ought to be up there; she was his true family, his right hand, the only one who would never have betrayed him. But she had to trudge through the mud and the rain to get even a glimpse of the man she’d loved.

It took her a glare and some sharp elbow work to squeeze into the back of the cathedral. There wasn’t room to breathe; she forced down the memory of fingers digging into her throat. She could barely hear the church father above the crowd. He spoke at length about the evil Kingkiller and her crimes, assured everyone that the Summer King had died a hero, and wrapped up by painting a picture of the dead man Anjen couldn’t recognise. The real picture was beyond a crowd of mourners to appreciate. They hadn’t fought with him. They couldn’t know him.

Afterward Anjen queued for hours to see the grave. It was nothing, just a patch of freshly-turned earth, guarded by grim-faced Summerholt troops. She could have told them not to bother. If even a spark of him had survived he would never have lain so still; he would have clawed his way out fighting before now.

The white rose in her hands seemed such a small thing. She’d given him a kingdom; she would have given him the world. She crushed the stupid rose in a sudden savage gesture and flung the petals away. They scattered across the bare earth like snow.

A hundred times she’d killed for him. What she’d failed to do was die for him. Once again, the only thing she could do for him was butcher people.

She was going to have to kill the Winter Queen. Again. And then destroy the body so that nobody else could ever resurrect her again.

A better person wouldn’t have a clue how to do that. But she was the master of doing horrifying things nobody else would even consider, and she had a plan.

The last white petals fell through her fingers and tumbled to the earth.

Other teasers: Dystophil, firedrake, Amna ...

burn notice

2010-02-15T22:34:00.002Z

“Guns make you stupid. Better to fight your wars with duct tape. Duct tape makes you smart.”
- from Burn Notice 1x01, “Pilot”

I’m crazy about Burn Notice. Apart from the smart storytelling, sympathetic characterisation and all-around kickassery, I love its mastery of sneakiness. Cover stories. Frame jobs. Double-crosses. Most spy protagonists spend the whole series shooting at people: Michael Westen prefers to persuade his enemies to shoot each other. It’s good television, and it’s great fuel for a writer’s imagination. Thanks to Burn Notice, I think I’ve finally figured out how a character earns the bad guys’ trust.

He’s going to need a cheap disposable phone, half a pound of plasticine, coloured wires ... and some duct tape. :D

interview!

2010-02-11T23:47:00.004Z

Fellow AbsoluteWrite member Kirsten Rice, better known to me as Madison, has been asking me some fascinating questions this week as part of her interview series. We discussed YA, the One-Pass Method and world-building advice for the terminally lazy, and apparently I was suffering from a little zombie obsession at the time. (A baby zombie featured in a recent IRONBANE teaser.) And if that wasn't tempting enough, my twiftie friends Bailey, Emilia and Amna (my ninja apprentice) are enlivening the comments section. Intrigued? You can find my crazy-person ramblings here. Thanks, Madison! :)

teaser tuesday is a bad guy

2010-02-09T20:28:00.013Z

Today’s Teaser Tuesday is a scene from IRONBANE, in which Anjen demonstrates her amazing ability to turn everyone around her into bad guys.

(Context: Anjen is leading a train of refugees out of the marches one step ahead of the Winterfolk. In every village Anjen recruits whoever she can, seizes all the supplies and abandons anyone who won't come with her to die. Not everyone is enthralled with her tactics.)

*
Anjen needed a quiet place to plan, so she headed to a deserted fire on the outskirts of camp, a red gleam of embers. The warmth soaked into her bones; she could have cried for joy. She sketched a map in the dirt with the tip of her stick. Here lay the village, here the high ground, this slope was so thickly wooded as to be impassable ...

Footsteps crunched in the snow behind her. She’d thought she was alone here. She started to turn.

A branch smashed across her skull. Lights burst inside her head. She collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Her fingers twitched in the dirt. Embers glowed brilliant red in front of her; the pain in her head was so huge she couldn’t seem to focus on anything else.

Someone dragged her up by the back of her coat. Her knee locked when she tried to stand, she yelped and fell back. The stranger picked up her stick. Anjen clutched at a log but the frosted bark slid slippery under her fingers and she couldn’t haul herself upright.

The stick cracked down. Her fingers broke. Pain jolted through her; she strangled off a scream. She snatched her hand back, fingers throbbing, and the slightest move made the broken bones grind. Fuck.

The tip of the stick lifted her chin. She shrank, kicked herself for shrinking, made herself look up the length of the stick. For an instant she knew, heart-skittering breath-stopping certainty, that it was --

Kellen towered over her, red hair wild, face white and gaunt. “Remember me?”

Having her bones broken encouraged her to think back. Night. Snow. Panic. A sword point bursting out of a man’s belly, a woman who screamed when she saw Summer’s disfigured face, trinkets shattering on the frozen ground.

“You robbed us and left us to die. You remember that, right? Taking all our weapons, our iron and salt, abandoning us?” Kellen slashed down. The stick caught her upflung arm instead of her skull; something cracked, numbness shot up the bone. “You led the Winterfolk to us,” Kellen spat, and hit her again. Stupidly, Anjen tried to defend herself with the same arm. The stick hurt worse the second time: she gritted her teeth and couldn’t quite lock the cry in her throat, tears stinging her eyes, pain red and shocking. “You led the Winterfolk straight to us. They were looking for you. They killed everyone, they killed my -- I could have saved her, I could have defended her, if you hadn’t robbed us and left us to die.”

Couldn’t get up, her knee was shot. Couldn’t fight back. On the edge of camp, with all her men making as merry as they could, nobody would hear. Kellen was just going to break every bone in her body. Nothing she could do but take it. “Screw you,” Anjen croaked.

Kellen braced the stick across her throat and leaned.

The words strangled off in her throat. Anjen panicked. She choked and struggled and Kellen leaned harder, watching her face and enjoying this. She scrabbled in the dirt, clawed herself halfway up with her good fingers digging into a tree, fell back. Her foot kicked a scatter of fiery embers everywhere. “My daughter was seven,” Kellen murmured, methodically choking her. “Just seven. They killed her. Because of you.”

Everything was a red blur.

Distantly she heard the sounds of footsteps and voices. She tried to warn them, tell them to run, but it just came out a broken sound in her throat.

It was Summer, saying “Absolutely, I’m easy,” in that lazy, warm voice he used to talk to girls. The girl laughed. She sounded happy. “Whatever you want. I’m not -- ah, fuck.”

The pressure ripped away. Anjen choked and found she could breathe, drew in a rush of sweet air through her burning throat. Her fingers hurt, her wrist hurt, her ribs felt dented from being knelt on. She coughed and sputtered and just lay there panting for a while letting the world slide back into focus.

Kellen lay in the dirt, mouth bleeding, sword point at her throat. Summer pinned her with one foot. “Anjen,” Summer said through his teeth, never taking his eyes off his captive. “Anjen, say something, tell me you’re --“

Kellen spat out blood. “Hope I’ve killed her.”

His jaw clenched and his hands tightened on the hilt. Surely he of all people wouldn’t hurt an unarmed woman, a prisoner, not Summer with his ridiculous urge to be as good as his heroic father. “M’ fine,” Anjen croaked, trying to soothe him. Her throat was on fire. She swallowed, and regretted it.

“I know hurting prisoners isn’t very heroic.” Summer spoke in a low even voice that was not at all reassuring. He leaned on the sword. The point bit in. Kellen froze; blood leaked into the hollow of her throat. “And I don’t care any more. Understand? I’d throw all that away. If you so much as look at her, I will rip out your spine.”

Kellen swallowed against the tip of the blade, eyes wide, and didn’t look at her.

*

Other teasers: Dystophil, Kristin Briana, houndrat, ChristaCarol, sunna, inkwench, Leigh, jy'lenn, firedrake, Kathleen42, Gretchen, Horserider, Ugawa, Kyrie ...

third draft, this time with 100% more snarkiness

2010-02-05T21:21:00.003Z

Lately I’ve needed some time away from my urban fantasy THE INFERNAL FAMILY, so I’ve been focusing on revisions to IRONBANE. I feel like I need more time to prepare for the second most dramatic change in my urban fantasy’s history: adding a new point of view character.

Currently the story is shaped by the fact that the only viewpoint character is a trigger-happy borderline psychopath whose preferred method of communication is violence. Most of the other characters don’t trust him, so he’s excluded from key plot developments. Plus he’s not human and that limits who he can interact with. So I’m planning to supplement his story with a truckload of new scenes from the viewpoint of his smarter, sneakier, snarkier human partner. This is going to be a metric ton of work, but I hope it will solve a lot of problems:

I always dreamed of having the protagonist’s partner infiltrate the bad guys using his evil devious mind. That wasn’t possible when the only viewpoint character was excluded. Now I can try that.
My bad guys will have some much-needed screen time. I can show more hunters with names and faces and motivations. I can suggest what they’re doing when they’re offscreen. I can make things a little more complicated. I’m also going to add a new antagonist.
A whole ton of plot I always imagined was happening offscreen never got onscreen due to viewpoint limitations. One late-stage revelation will no longer be at all surprising, but apparently it wasn’t surprising anyway -- one beta reader called it 40,000 words in advance!
I’m looking forward to showing that the protagonist is as mystifying to his partner as the partner is to the protagonist. Neither has a clue what the other is thinking.
The partner is clued-up in several key places where the protagonist is clueless. For example, the protagonist doesn't know the true story behind how everyone first met.
I also want the two viewpoint characters to interfere with each other. The partner is prone to carefully-laid plans. The protagonist is prone to sudden explosive violence. The two should not mix.
The second half of the novel is derailed by romance stuff. I’m hoping to add more plot.
The novel has always been short -- the beta version is under 70,000 words. I'd feel more comfortable around 90,000 words.

The reason I’m thinking about this right now when I should be working on IRONBANE? I finally figured out something going on behind the scenes that the protagonist doesn’t know about, and it’s awesome.

Still not ready to resume working on THE INFERNAL FAMILY, but I’m getting there.

days six to nine of holly lisle’s one-pass revision method

2010-02-05T01:40:00.000Z

The revision train has hit a wall. Two walls, in fact. Firstly, the backstory has gaping holes and secondly, there is a giant 4000-word derailment in the middle of my battle sequence which requires major plot rewiring.

I’m actually kind of relieved. When everything was running smoothly I was imagining all sorts of ninja stealth disasters lying in wait for me. These are completely fixable.

Still madly in love with this kickass novel.

teaser tuesday rises from the dead

2010-02-02T14:54:00.007Z

This week’s teaser is another early scene from IRONBANE. Last week Anjen rescued a child, who survived long enough for new friend and fan of thematic naming Summer to dub her Winter, then died and resurrected as a zombie.

(Here be violence against children, zombie and human.)

*
They faced the dead child across a canvas of snow spattered with footsteps. Anjen clutched Summer’s arm, heart hammering against her ribs, fear and horror rising in her throat. He drew God’s threefold sign in a reflexive ward against evil.

“If you panic I will strangle you.” Frankly she could have done some panicking herself.

Summer said “Is this,” cleared his throat and had a second go at casualness. “Is rising from the dead a marcher tradition?”

“Must have forgotten to mention it.”

The child shambled toward them, tiny and intent. Please God, not this again. Anjen lifted a shaking hand and -- of course her throat was bare, he’d stolen the damn talisman. And she’d given her iron knife to him. And she’d run out of salt fighting the White Hunt. “Iron.” It was a croak. She swallowed. “The knife.”

“What?”

“Cut it up. So we can burn it.”

“You want me to kill her?”

“It’s already dead!”

The child stumbled and fell. Snow hissed beneath it; steam curled up from under the edges of its body. It twitched and curled in the snow, like a puppet whose strings had tangled.

“Bollocks to your marcher customs,” Summer growled, took two quick steps toward it and bent to pick it up.

A hand shot out. Blackened fingers dug into the snow like a five-legged spider.

Anjen started: “What in God’s sweet name are you --“

It erupted out of the snow.

It crashed into him. He staggered. It locked one tiny arm around his neck, unhinged its jaw and bit into his throat; his yelp strangled off. Summer dug his fingers under its face and clawed it away. The child clung to him, spattering blood, the rune hissing in the ruin of its stomach. Summer tried to peel it off him, cursing and shaking, feet sliding in the snow, the child a squirming, bloody demon in his hands.

Anjen slapped her pockets, remembered she had no weapons and snarled “Iron, you fool!” He pried Winter off him and threw it away. It hit the ground and skidded, bones cracking. Frost feathered outward from the point of impact. “Iron,” Anjen shouted again. The child peeled itself off the ground in a sinuous slither.

“I don’t kill children,” Summer said through his teeth.

“It’s just wearing her skin!”

“I don’t care why, I’m not doing it!”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Anjen snarled, stalked the two steps to her house and kicked the door open. She leaned in and reached above the door. Cold metal met her fingertips. She curled one hand round the hilt and drew the iron sword, the marcher’s friend, the last defence against evil.

It felt heavy in her unskilled hand. Sunlight glanced off its never-used shine. She remembered covering bloody hands with hers as together they drove a sword through -- No. She was never going back there.

The child fell back from the iron blade. Anjen levelled the point on its face. She’d killed more things of winter than she could even remember, she could add one more.

Summer yelped “What are you doing?” and stepped between them. Winter peeped around him, twinkling frostily.

“My job.” Cold stung her hot face. She could do this. This was what she was for.

The ironwar child had been born too early, a tiny thing Anjen could hold in her cupped hands. It had cried and cried, and she’d cradled it against the warmth of her body, taken up her knife and --

“Are you insane?” Summer demanded. “Do you have a secret thing for killing children? Because I’d like to suggest that we not butcher her in the street!”

“You idiot.” Her voice shook -- even the point of her sword shook, which was stupid. She tightened her grip. “It’ll kill and keep killing, and everyone who dies will rise again, unless we cut it down with iron. Get out of my way.”

Summer crossed his arms, colour high in his cheekbones. “Let me think. No.”

“Move,” Anjen snarled, and he took the tip of her sword delicately between two fingers and pushed it down. For some stupid reason it completely undid her: she couldn’t seem to think past his serious face.

She didn’t want to do this, God, she didn’t. Maybe he was right, maybe there was another way.

Summer held her eyes. “We’ll find some way to save her, I promise. We can --“

Winter pulled the iron knife from his belt.

Its fingers melted to the hilt. It shrieked. Steam hissed. When that knife flashed out in a searing arc Summer caught its arm, hooked its legs out from under it and dumped it in the snow with a crunch. It snarled at him, the rune hissing and spitting, ice melting and God it could have killed him.

Nobody else would do it. It always happened this way.

Anjen drove the iron sword through the child’s heart.

Sword point hit frozen ground in an impact that jarred her to the elbow. Winter thrashed and screamed and spattered blood that burned, and finally went still.

Anjen took a steadying breath and for a second the air tasted of smoke and blood, of the failed rune in the choking confines of her house. Her hands were shaking. Summer looked at her as if she were the inhuman thing, the one in need of killing. Maybe she was.

She wrenched the sword free and wiped the blade with a handful of snow. She’d nicked it. If this kept up it’d be as battered as she was.

“Congratulations,” Summer said bitterly behind her. “Good work. Still time to kill more children before lunch.”

She was going to punch him in the face.

*

Other teasers: Dystophil, firedrake, Mad Hatter, pixydust ...

day five of holly lisle’s one-pass revision method

2010-02-01T01:00:00.001Z

Several chapters later, I’ve figured out why I’m not finding any huge mistakes: I wrote a badass novel. For serious. I want to write a list of all the things I love in the story so far, but (a) it would spoil the surprise for future betas and (b) the list would be ridiculously long.

Two things I noticed today:

Printing double-spaced and single-sided was a mistake. There’s tons of white space at the top and bottom of each page, around the margins, between paragraphs, at the end of chapters. Next time I’ll kill fewer trees.
My notebook is lopsided. I have a stack of world-building notes, mainly for consistency; a good few plot notes, to ensure continuity and plot logic and proper payoffs; a handful of backstory notes, for key scenes I ought to work into the novel somewhere; and absolutely zero characterisation notes. Puzzling. Perhaps when I’m scribbling notes all over the printouts I’m not remembering to write up big-picture characterisation issues in my notebook.

Tomorrow my protagonist gets crippled and her partner gets his pretty face ruined. It’s time for the act one climax battle! :D

day four of holly lisle’s one-pass revision method

2010-01-31T02:35:00.004Z

The secret purpose of these daily reports is to make me feel guilty about lack of progress. I was planning to pack it in and go to bed at midnight, with one pathetic chapter under my belt, but then I realised I would have to confess my failure. Again. So I got back to work.

Once again, I’m feeling a little wary. I’m just not finding that many problems. Places to tighten, absolutely. Continuity errors, often. Stuff I mentioned once and never again, sometimes. (I’m enjoying rediscovering elements I planned to make much more of but forgot.) But I’m currently editing the seventh chapter, and I still haven’t had to rip out this novel’s entire skeleton and wire in a new one. The dialogue is spiky, the conflict is tense, my protagonist is snarky and frequently horrifying, backstory is arriving bit by bit -- the Winter Queen just got her first mention. It’s mostly fine. And that in itself is bizarre.

By the time I got to this stage with THE INFERNAL FAMILY, I’d already done a spectacularly huge rethink -- characters, setting, genre, antagonist, entire species -- twice. I bled. I cried. I tore my hair out. Most of the novel was scrapped and rewritten from scratch.

I can’t shake the suspicion that by hunting piddling little continuity errors I’m rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. There must be an iceberg lurking under the surface. I can’t imagine a revision voyage without one.

Keeping the lifejacket at hand.

day three of holly lisle's one-pass revision method

2010-01-29T23:23:00.002Z

I'm a failure.

day two of holly lisle’s one-pass revision method

2010-01-28T22:15:00.002Z

Today I ran out of procrastination options and cracked on with editing my first chapter. It’s been both scary and fun.

It’s surprisingly satisfying to edit on paper. Unlike editing onscreen, where however hard you work nothing seems to change, this way I can see my own writing spidering all over the page: crossed-out words and scribbled notes. I like that.

On the other hand, I fear that I’m misapplying the One-Pass Method. Holly Lisle’s introduction led me to think that the purpose is to slash chapters at a time, drastically change plotlines, strike out entire characters, etc. But I’m finding myself primarily cutting excess wordcount. I’ve taken about 10% out of my first chapter just by cutting words and clauses. That’s disconcerting, because I think of myself as a short writer: I broke the long writing habit after my 220k monster novel and both my recent novels came in around 80k. Apparently I still have fat to lose.

I’m glad I found that out, but I’m also kind of scared that I’m not finding major game-changing big-picture problems. Am I going too easy? Are there problems I’m not seeing?

It’s possible that this first chapter is just totally awesome, since my other critique group liked it. I might be so traumatised by editing THE INFERNAL FAMILY that I won’t be satisfied until I’m bleeding from the eyes and ripping out key elements of the story.

I could be learning to write cleaner first drafts. I like that idea.

publish or perish

2010-01-28T19:49:00.003Z

Most of my friends are much smarter and better-informed than I am, mainly thanks to from AbsoluteWrite, but on the off-chance that anyone is looking for publishing information, I'm now moderating a publication usergroup over at the Young Writers' Society.

When I started hanging out at the Young Writers' Society I realised that a lot of members were both desperate to get published and scarily clueless about publication. So I've been sharing basic information (and links to better sources) on topics such as how to tell good agents and publishers from bad, how to target the right agents, the basics of submitting to agents, query letter theory, etc. Now I'm starting in on the fascinating and sometimes counter-intuitive stuff: for example, I'm hoping to post soon about why publishers and agents who say they're "seeking new writers" are generally bad news.

I've been lucky to have helpful and informative friends, and I'd like to pay that good luck forward. :)

holly lisle’s one-pass revision method

2010-01-27T15:46:00.003Z

As you might have guessed from the teasers, the first draft of my epic fantasy IRONBANE is banging on the inside of its drawer screaming to be revised. I’m still traumatised from revising THE INFERNAL FAMILY, so this time I thought I’d do something a little different: Holly Lisle’s One-Pass Revision Method.

I've always loved the concept of the One-Pass Revision Method. The discovery stage is particularly helpful -- you have to establish in only a handful of words key aspects of the story, such as the theme, one-line summary, protagonist's character arc, etc. Every time I start a novel I use these tricks to keep my first draft focused. Also, my friend Amy Bai used the One-Pass Revision Method for her brilliant fantasy novel SONG. I'm secretly hoping that my IRONBANE will be a tiny bit as awesome as SONG by the time I'm done.

So I've assembled:

Three coloured pens.
One fresh notebook, now adorned with pretty stickers, because I am secretly a three-year-old.
My printed first draft, a monstrous stack of paper that cannot possibly be only 85k.

The discovery section doesn’t hold too many fears for me, since I've already written a one-line summary, a one-paragraph summary and a query long before now, so I’m just going to note down some key ideas, themes and storylines and move straight into the hacking and slashing.

Wish me luck!

teaser tuesday is doomed

2010-01-26T12:01:00.015Z

For today's Teaser Tuesday I wanted to post a fondly-remembered scene from THE INFERNAL FAMILY, only to realise upon rereading it that it was not good at all. Happily, one of my novels always comes through for me. So here's a scene from the first chapter of my epic fantasy IRONBANE. It's the first teaser to feature my favourite character Summer -- in the other teasers Anjen is carrying the sword she gave him as a memento of him.

NB: Iron and salt and symbols of God are the traditional weapons against supernatural evil.

Something flitted through the woods. Anjen looked around wildly, caught it, lost it. The child burrowed into her coat; her arms were burning, she shifted her burden. Summer wiped his bloody hand on his coat and took a less slippery grip on the iron knife. Ahead she glimpsed daylight and open space.

“Hear that?” Summer brightened. “Horses! People! That’s good, right?”

She stopped in her tracks. Then she caught it too: hoofbeats like distant thunder.

Pale shades slipped through the woods. Moving toward them. Fast. She felt their advance in a wash of bitter cold.

Panic dug its icy claws into her. She cleared her throat; her voice was abnormally calm. “It’s the White Hunt. The Winterfolk.”

“Is that bad?” said Summer, blissfully oblivious.

God she was an idiot. She should have snatched the child and run the instant she recognised the white arrow. “You’re faster. Take the child and run. If you cross all seven chains of stones you’ll be safe. Go to the church father, he’ll --“

“No.”

“What?”

“I said no, and please stop making plans, they’re terrible. I have a better idea.” He turned her firmly by the shoulders. “Run.”

The shove got her moving. She hitched up her skirts one-handed and ran. Branches clawed at her with bony fingers, ice and snow skidded underfoot. Thunder rose all around them as the pale horses charged them down, sweeping a killing frost ahead of them, and the riders’ laughter hissed in the air.

They broke into open air. Frosted grass crunched underfoot like glass. Her arms were on fire, the little girl squirming. Ahead icy roofs glittered under the sun.

A lone hunter swept in from the left to cut them off.

Both of them skidded to a halt. Anjen went for the salt with her free hand.

The pale horse picked a leisurely path through the snow, placing each hoof with care. Sunlight danced on its icy coat. The rider shone translucent. She felt the murderous cold contract like a fist; pain and thunder and ice sang in her bones.

She put her back against Summer’s. He was shivering even harder than she was. Should have stayed in his summerlands.

“I always thought a valiant last stand sounded fun.” Summer’s voice was sharp with strain.

Her laugh broke down into coughing, lungs burning, air frozen. “Didn’t you say you were too pretty to die?”

“I’m prepared to make a heroic sacrifice. There could be songs. Possibly even legends.”

The hunter leaned down from its horse, blinding bright in the sun, and reached out -- delicate frost feathered its fingers.

Anjen stayed frozen. The little one yelped and grabbed a tiny handful of Anjen’s coat.

“This is definitely the worst plan you have ever --”

“Get ready,” Anjen said through her teeth.

Pale fingers brushed the child’s pale skin.

Anjen threw salt in the hunter’s face. It jerked back with a hiss and its face started to melt. Water ran down its armour in glittering lines. She shoved the child at Summer -- he caught her, a reflex movement -- “Now run, idiot!” -- and advanced on the hunter, snarling, throwing salt after salt.

Its hiss rose to a shriek as she drove it back. The ice horse reared above her; the sun set every edge on fire, it burned as if lit from within. She snatched up an arm. One hoof carved a line of white fire across her forearm -- an instant earlier it would have been her face. Numbing cold leapt up her arm. The horse hit her with its shoulder, her foot slipped and she crashed to the snow. Impact slammed the breath from her lungs. Thunder reverberated through the iron-hard ground. She rolled over, gasping and clawing in the snow, fingers frozen, and threw another shower of salt upward at the horse. Most of it fell back on her. Both horse and rider were melting fast. She spat snow and salt and scrabbled for something, anything to --

Its hoof smashed down an inch from her skull and the melted leg snapped like an icicle. It lurched. Its other leg snapped. The ice horse fell on its face.

Anjen levered herself upright, clutching her bag of salt, hand wrapped round the talisman at her throat. The ring burned; she felt its heat even through her glove.

The hunter slid down from horseback and drew its sword, a long sliver of ice. It staggered toward her dragging a melted leg. Its half a face turned to follow her.

Anjen tried to douse it with salt. The last crystals rattled sadly in the bottom of the bag.

Shit.

Other teasers: ChristaCarol, Karla, LynKay, Firedrake, Dystophil, JustLaurie, sunna, KBridges, WritingDemons, Kristin Briana, M Austin, Bryn Greenwood, paranormalchick, Mad Hatter ... and more as I read.

in-joke

2010-01-25T22:15:00.002Z

Several years ago, in what I can only assume was a bored moment, I named an archer character Anguy.

I should probably change the name when I revise IRONBANE. ;)

the challenge

2010-01-22T19:38:00.002Z

Between November 05 and August 06, I wrote my apocalyptically terrible 220k second novel. (I was seventeen. Don’t judge me.) It was fun to write but a total trainwreck: redundancy problems and my inability to handle multiple viewpoints contributed to the ridiculous wordcount. I made a half-hearted attempt at revising it and then gave up. It was the last novel I ever wrote without an outline, and the last with multiple viewpoints. I didn’t complete another novel until March 09.

Now I’m going to rewrite it. From scratch. Without looking at the previous draft. Here’s what I’m planning to do:

Aim for a wordcount of under 100k. I don’t have a length problem any more, and my last two novels both ended up around 80k, so I’m expecting this to be easy.
Finish the outline. Then actually follow it. Outlines love me and want to be my friend.
Tweak the setting.
Keep characters and factions to a minimum. I have a redundancy problem, and the best fix is not to introduce unnecessary stuff in the first place.
Switch the cast to all female. (Dystophil could have stopped this madness, but instead she encouraged me. Apparently there will have to be lots of girl-on-girl action.)

My new baby is called GLORY HUNTERS, and it’s full of attractive and terrifyingly unscrupulous women - one of whom has a master plan.

revenge of teaser tuesday

2010-01-19T17:38:00.005Z

Today I've taken off my jade-coloured glasses and turned the volume on the you-suck soundtrack down far enough to find at least one teaser-quality scene.

This week's teaser is from my YA urban fantasy DREAD MACHINE, opening line: "Every time I started at a new school I made myself a new person." It stars my favourite pathological liar, who will eventually be called Fox. This novel is my first attempt at first person and my first attempt at YA, so please feel free to critique.

Secondary character Daniel is (a) nice, (b) cute and (c) normal, which makes him both attractive and forbidden, like a stolen cookie. Om nom nom. :D

*

When I saw the smiley face painted on our red door I knew someone was going to get hurt.

Seeing it burned my throat like a gulp of tequila. I stopped so fast Daniel bumped into me.

The face on the door winked at me in a scrawl of cheerful yellow. The Smiling Woman was here. In my house. With my mother.

Terraced houses towered on either side. A street market coiled round us, a big colourful dragon covering movement and drowning sound. People shoved past me; any of them could be hers. Some old man picked up his cat and scuttled back into his house. My heart banged against my ribs and for a crazy moment I wanted to bolt too -- under a stall or something, anywhere tight enough to hide.

But the red door smiled at me. Mum was inside.

I stamped on a rising bubble of panic, tore my eyes off the smiley face and turned into a random stall, hitching my bag higher to hide my face. Racks of dolls stared back at me. My sleeve caught on an amulet of thorns hanging from the roof; when I tried to pull free I dragged a chain of them sideways, jangling chimes and tangling feathers. I fumbled with them one-handed.

“Here.” Daniel reached past me to untangle me, fingers warm and gentle. Poor stupid Daniel still thought everything was fine, I was some normal girl he could be sweet to, like anything good ever came of talking to me. Shouldn’t have let him hang around.

A stallkeeper glowered at us from behind a wall of blank doll faces. Obviously we were thieves, what else would school kids be doing around here. Screw him.

I shoved Daniel into the nearest wall. “Hey,” Daniel yelped, and then cut off when I leaned right into him -- so close our eyelashes tangled, his heart a skitter beneath my palm, breath hitching in his throat.

“Daniel,” I said in his ear. “Do something for me.”

“Er,” Daniel squeaked. “Okay. Sure?”

“Go home. Back to school. Wherever. You’ve walked me home, so -- we’re done here. Right?” I smoothed his shirt front and adjusted his tie, which seemed to rivet his attention. “Catch you tomorrow.” If I survived breaking into my own house and trying to kill the Smiling Woman.

“Right,” Daniel murmured back, hypnotised.

Score one for being a girl.

*

Other teasers: Jy'lenn, WritingDemons, Firedrake

ego defence, or: where can I get me a case of special snowflake syndrome?

2010-01-18T00:36:00.001Z

Via the wonderful Beth Bernobich, I’ve been thinking about Ann Leckie’s idea of the ego defence. She suggests that the writer’s typical defensive reaction to criticism -- what I think of as special snowflake syndrome, the assertion that your work is perfect and the critic is wrong or mean or stupid to say otherwise -- is an ego defence. Interestingly, while I think of special snowflake syndrome as exclusively negative, Ann Leckie calls this ego defence useful:

you don't want to succumb to despair right off the bat. You want to keep plugging away, and getting better [...] and sometimes the only way to do that and keep your sanity is to not have an entirely accurate view of the quality of your work ...

I find this fascinating, because I don’t have an ego defence as I understand it: all I have is the you-suck soundtrack, and it’s playing particularly loudly at the moment. It’s tricky to write anything when some Tuesdays you can’t come up with a single scene worth reading across the entire spectrum of your several novels. Not one. (That stings.)

Special snowflakes are armoured in the conviction that they’re awesome. They don’t have criticism written on the inside of their skull in letters of fire. They can write easily, because everything they write will of course be genius.

Must be nice.

I’d quite like to be a little more of a snowflake. My ego could use defences.

the psychology of bullying scenes, or: hug a bully today

2010-01-08T17:10:00.011Z

Someone behind Alanna grabbed her. She spun. A tall, gangling boy of nearly fourteen looked her over, a sneer on his thick mouth. He had cold blue eyes and sandy-blond hair that flopped over his forehead.

"I wonder what this is." His crooked teeth made him spit his s's. Alanna wiped a drop of saliva from her cheek. "Probably some back-country boy who thinks he's a noble."

- from Tamora Pierce’s Alanna: The First Adventure, first book in the Song of the Lioness Quartet

Bullies. They’re everywhere. They insult Tamora Pierce’s Alanna of Trebond, they gang up on George RR Martin’s Jon Snow, they appear in at least half the works posted on the Young Writers’ Society. Whenever I read a bullying scene, I get a surge of indignation. Not for the victims -- for the bullies.

Victims are protagonists, they get names, faces and personalities, the reader is intended to sympathise with them. Bullies are stock characters imported straight from the Department of Manufactured Conflict: cardboard cut-outs, often unnamed, rarely characterised. Victims are lone heroes; bullies are cowards, so they hunt in packs. Victims get snappy comebacks; bullies whine and sneer. (Note how the bully in the Tamora Pierce scene is described as ugly. Remember, kids: ugliness = evil!) If victims don’t triumph now, winning over spectators in the process, they’ll get public and humiliating revenge later. Bullies remain despicable characters throughout the narrative, despised by the readers, the author and the other characters, unless the victim wins even them over with their awesomeness.

Poor bullies, they never win.

The classic lone victim vs multiple bullies scenario has power because it taps into a ton of underlying assumptions, myths and values:

We admire the loner. Loners are powerful as individuals; only weak people and cowards, like bullies, have to co-operate.
Bullies invariably provoke the conflict. They attack out of the blue, without provocation. This taps into the classic victim complex, the feeling of being unjustly treated. Real-world conflicts are much more nuanced; the victim in a bullying scene, and by extension the reader, doesn’t need to feel any guilt or reservations about their part in a conflict, because they’re clearly in the right.
We see standing up against others as courageous. I wonder if this reflects a hostility to authority. Do bullies represent a tyrannical force the everyman hero has to resist?
Faceless, nameless, characterless bullies are easy to read. They’re bad. They’re not like us. We can hate them without any reservations. Well-drawn bullies with genuine motivations for their actions are more challenging because they’re more like us. Could we be bullies? If we were in their situation, what would we do?
Bullying justifies the victim’s retaliation. Under normal circumstances you can’t punch somebody who annoys you, but retaliatory violence by the victim against the bully is seen as fair, even where the violence seems disproportionate. I recently critiqued a story in which the protagonist permanently crippled a bully, ripping out his magic while he begged for mercy. The author and all the characters seemed to think that maiming is a justified response to bullying.
Readers of the fantasy novels I’m talking about tend to be bookish people and/or geeks who were bullied for real as children. There’s a reason Snacky’s Law is so commonly invoked -- the same reason I noted so many bullying scenes posted on the Young Writers' Society forums. Bullying scenes are a way to safely re-enact the trauma of being bullied, with ourselves as sympathetic victims, leading to our retaliation against the bullies and our ultimate triumph. Fantasy ranter Limyaael, whose awesomeness I can only hope to emulate, complained in her “Author’s Darling” rant:

I often feel faintly sick when, reading through a fantasy story, I realize that the author is ... taunting the bullies who tormented her in high school. She doesn't want to actually talk to these people, or perhaps they're in the past, dead or out of contact, and she can't. So she takes the chance to create a character who's her, put her through the same situation, and say, "Nah-nah-nah-boo-boo!"

So I can see why writers resort to bullying scenes. It’s a cheap and easy way of building reader sympathy, and your typical reader is disposed to like and sympathise with victims of bullying. But I hate the lack of motivation. Why do bullies never have a legitimate reason to bully the protagonist? Forget legitimate, any reason would be a plus. Has the protagonist never done anything, accidentally or deliberately, or been thought to do something, that might make the bully want to get their own back? Does the protagonist always have to be 100% squeaky-clean and the bully 100% randomly malicious to ensure reader sympathy falls into its proper place? (God forbid that the reader should ever rethink who deserves their sympathy.)

In the George RR Martin example I mentioned above, teenage viewpoint character Jon Snow is the bastard son of a noble, despised by commoners and nobles alike. Thanks to his privileged upbringing in his father’s castle, Jon is an excellent swordsman and mercilessly thrashes his opponents in training, humiliating them to the point that four of them ambush him in an armoury to get their own back. Jon is working through the justified retaliation part of the bullying cliche when -- I love Martin so much -- somebody actually calls Jon out on his behaviour: Jon is using his privilege to unfairly and unnecessarily humiliate his peers, and if he keeps harbouring a raging victim complex, none of them are ever going to learn to work together. And it will be entirely his fault.

I was so thrilled I nearly cried.

Another example of effective bullying: the pilot episode of the TV series Merlin. The pilot episode features teenage Merlin interfering to protect a servant from a bullying lord. Merlin is promptly thrown in jail, then in the stocks. What saves this scene? The bully is Arthur freaking Pendragon. The hero is a bully. Arthur is handsome, snarky, ridiculously heroic -- and a self-centred ass. I love Arthur, and I love that they had the nerve to make their hero bully someone in his opening scene.

Suggestions for writing bullying scenes?

The purpose should not be to glorify the protagonist. Nor to make him look good in comparison to the evil bully.
Bullies need a good reason to bully. Stereotypically evil motivations like “He’s just jealous of the protagonist” aren’t good enough.
It is not open season on bullies. If someone makes insulting comments about the protagonist’s mother, the protagonist cannot legitimately chainsaw him to death.
It’s okay for the protagonist not to be squeaky-clean all the time.
Do not resort to making your victims beautiful and your bullies ugly as a cheap shorthand for good and evil. I swear, if I read another bullying scene in which the bully’s ugliness is lovingly described (like that Tamora Pierce scene) as a symbol of their nastiness, I will hunt someone down.
Therapy for the writer =/= effective fiction for the reader.
Don’t despise your own characters. It always shows.

(I enjoyed playing a little with bullying in THE INFERNAL FAMILY. My protagonist is continually harassed by his partner slash love interest, who thinks he’s a violent psychopath and kind of dumb as well -- all of which is absolutely true.)

What do you think? Have you noticed trends in bullying scenes in books or unpublished work? Can you improve on my analysis or my suggestions?

Further reading: Limyaael, “Breathing life into bullies”.

revision blues

2010-01-07T12:58:00.002Z

"You’re a poser. You talk the talk but you can’t walk the walk. Thinking isn’t writing, editing isn’t writing, only writing is writing. If you’re not making 1000+ words a day you’re not even trying. You get so little work done it’s embarrassing. A real writer would be finished already: you'll still be messing around this time next year. How are you ever going to be a professional? Nobody wants to work with losers like you. Why do you even call yourself a writer?"

Welcome back, revision blues. :(

revenge of the prologue rant

2010-01-07T10:37:00.003Z

I hate prologues. Out of the hundreds (perhaps more) of prologues I've read, I only remember two of them fondly: Scott Lynch and Joe Abercrombie are the authors who stole my heart. The vast, vast majority of them suffer from some or all of the following problems:

Are used as an excuse for appalling infodumps. Huge quantities of information are crammed in with very little attempt to craft an actual story.
Depict a long-ago historical event the author wrongly thinks we need to see up-front to understand the story.
Feature a generic evil overlord being generically evil. He burns villages, he tortures people, he kicks the dog. Yawn.
Attempt to be ominous yet unspecific by using painfully cliched language of foreboding: "Something terrible is coming." / "Yes, and a hero must rise to deal with it, but I fear he will succumb to the madness in his soul." (I don't understand why people ever bother with ominous vagueness when it's so obvious they're referring to the protagonist.)
Show the special events of the special protagonist's special birth. Apart from the cliche, this supports the tired idea that everything special about a person is inherited from their equally special daddy. Alas, poor meritocracy, we knew ye well.
Are completely unnecessary.
Try to persuade us to get emotionally invested in the characters, even though we all know that prologue characters won't recur - whether they die at the end or are historical characters or aren't important at all except for the special baby.
Don't even bother trying to persuade us that there's something here worth investing in emotionally.
Tell us things that don't become relevant for another 80,000 words, by which time we've forgotten what happened.
Are obvious ripoffs of other stories.
At the end, rip the reader out of that scene and dump them into chapter one, frequently with absolutely zero continuity of time, place, plot or character. (I complained about this in my review of the pilot of TV series Sanctuary.)

If I could write the One Law to Rule them All, I'd probably rule that:

Prologues cannot contain more than 50 words of exposition at a time. Period.
Special protagonist's special birth prologues are banned.
Generic evil overlord prologues are banned.
Prophecies? Totally banned.
Ominous vaguery is not interesting.
Readers need some continuity. The prologue and first chapter should be obviously linked: the same characters, or the same setting, or the same subjects, etc.
At least one named character with an actual personality must feature.
Thinking, feeling, angsting, expositing, world-building, reflecting on backstory and navel-gazing of all types must be balanced with dialogue, action and character interaction.

Nearly all prologues I've read have been disastrous.

But when I reread the prologue of Best Served Cold, I remember how enormously I love it. :)

is she really 40?

2010-01-05T15:34:00.002Z

When I first posted a teaser for my epic fantasy IRONBANE, describing the protagonist as a “forty-something war criminal with a walking stick and a master plan”, the scarily gifted Angie asked in the comments: “Is she really 40?”

Hell yes, she’s forty. And crippled. And a drunk and a murderer and a figure of terror.

Epic fantasy loves its Rand al’Thors: its heroic, good-looking young men with big swords, bigger magic and mysterious royal heritage. IRONBANE has one of those, and he’s pretty to look at. But that short, dumpy woman who can’t walk without a stick? That’s Ironbane, the Queenkiller, the victor of the War of the Two Terrors. She’s snarky. She’s ruthless. She’s notorious for conquering half the setting and killing the Winter Queen and getting exiled in disgrace. Her idea of a cover story is to impersonate her dead nemesis.

And she doesn’t want redemption.

I’m crazy in love. :)

teaser tuesday strikes back

2010-01-05T00:01:00.011Z

Another teaser from my epic fantasy IRONBANE. Anjen is masquerading as the back-from-the-dead Winter Queen; Robben is a smitten friend and follower.

*

Anjen was brooding on the walls when gentle hands drew her coat more tightly around her; Anjen nearly fell off the wall. Of course it was Robben, a warm presence at her elbow. “Mistress Anjen?”

The sword bumped against her leg every time she moved. She couldn’t understand how Summer put up with it, it was a huge clumsy thing. “Yes?”

“You’re not afraid.” He made it a question at first, then forced a smile. “Burned God, of course you’re not. What would ever scare you?”

She couldn’t understand him sometimes. Did she look like she had ice instead of blood, like she was some inhuman thing that felt no fear, like she was the bloody Winter Queen?

She reached into the warmth trapped inside her coat and pulled out her bottle. Robben made a disapproving face. She ignored him and drank deep; the liquid coursed hot and fierce down her throat, lighting a trail of fire down into her belly. There. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

Of course he wanted her to be the Winter Queen. That was what he needed from her: coldness in the face of danger. She couldn’t allow him to see her hands shaking on the bottle. Probably shouldn’t let him see her drinking at all.

She aimed the bottle at him. “You know why we could never, ever be together?”

Robben flinched. A dark part of her liked that.

“Because you’re weak.” Anjen spaced each word out deliberately. “You jump at every shadow, and you thin everyone must be scared like you.” She drank again. It gave her such a rush, like she could bring anyone down. “But you know who isn’t and has never been scared?” She leaned in until the sword hilt dug painfully into her hip, holding his eyes. “Me. I’m the goddamn Winter Queen. I kill everyone who crosses me, I invade countries, I come back from the dead. So don’t you think that you can taint me with your fear, that you can crack this mask, because it’s not a fucking mask. It’s real. I’m real. And I’m not afraid.”

Robben looked painfully small.

Success.

“I’m going to win this.” Anjen made it a promise. “It won’t be pretty. But I will. Not. Lose. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Robben said in a tiny voice. “Your Majesty.”

That had a sweet sound to it. Like she was something greater and more terrible than just a woman getting old. “Get back to your post.”

Other teasers: vroth, Jamie, Liz, ChristaCarol, Rosey, JennW, firedrake, Véro, Bee, sunna, inkwench, Kathy, becki, dudette, Stella Thomas, Snoink, dystophil ...

new year's resolutions for 2010

2010-01-03T12:20:00.000Z

Graduate.
Start a publishing masters course.
Query THE INFERNAL FAMILY.
Revise IRONBANE.
Finish the first draft of DREAD MACHINE.
Panic less.

2009 writing year in review

2010-01-02T20:44:00.004Z

I feel like a humiliating failure, so it’s surprising to look back on everything I’ve done in the last twelve months and say: 2009 has been a kickass writing year.

A year ago I was desperate. I hadn’t finished a novel in two and a half years. I’d put eighteen months, many bitter tears and at least 50k into my third novel, then titled EMPIRE OF HEAVEN, by the time I realised it was irreparably broken. Real writers knocked out a novel a year: I was a loser, a poser and a failure. I had a month’s Easter holiday in March, and if I couldn’t finish my novel in an entire month of writing full-time, I might as well give up.

Happily for my continued self-esteem, I ripped out the genre, setting and antagonist, rewired with new stuff, hammered out about 30k in less than a fortnight and finished what was recognisably THE INFERNAL FAMILY at the beginning of April. Narrow escape there.

Since my writing career consists of short bursts of writing interspersed with long stretches of doom, I spent the next six months ripping my hair out over revisions. I also wrote a query that everyone loved, workshopped the first chapter until it begged for mercy, and worked on my sweet and well-behaved epic fantasy IRONBANE. But mainly I whined a lot.

As Nanowrimo bore down on me like a freight train, I scrabbled to get a beta draft of THE INFERNAL FAMILY done and out to beta readers. I think I emailed it out with shaking hands at one minute to midnight on the last day of October. I even made the tiramisu of glory, my long-promised reward! Then I kicked Nanowrimo’s ass: hammering out over 75,000 words, finishing IRONBANE and kicking off my YA urban fantasy, DREAD MACHINE.

This story would threaten to have a happy ending were it not for realising that everything I’ve written needs to be insulted, ripped up and then burned.

So I guess I ended the year exactly where I started: swimming in a lake of despair near Mount Doom. Except this year I’m two first drafts, a second draft and a query to the good. I call that a win. :)

teaser tuesday

2009-12-29T19:03:00.012Z

Still pretty burned about the novel from hell, so I'd like to post a teaser from a story that still excites me. This is part of the climax of my epic fantasy IRONBANE. Protagonist Anjen, better known as Ironbane, is a forty-something war criminal with a walking stick and a master plan.

(Here be violence and swearing.)

*

The Winter King stumbled toward her, still melting. It towered over her. "Sss." Snow steamed beneath its feet. Its white cloak smouldered, and curled up and blackened at the edges, and finally caught fire; the fire rose around it like a halo.

Anjen licked her lips. Her jaw ached from gritting her teeth, her bruised mouth stung, but she dragged out words. "You forgot something."

"Sss!" the Winter King hissed, burning, and drew its sword of black ice. Around it the Court of Winter smouldered and burned and died.

"Go ahead," Anjen croaked, smiling more and more through the pain. "Kill me. If you can."

She found she didn't care all that much. She'd done her duty: she'd faced the Winter King and beaten it and kept her pride, for all that it tried to scare her and shame her into submission. Dying didn’t matter any more.

The Winter King took two lurching steps.

Anjen reached for something the Winterknight had discarded in its death throes. It was a stupid clumsy thing she normally had no need for, and yet when she curled her fingers round the hilt the iron weight of Valiant in her hands reassured her. Pain pulsed through her in time with her heartbeat. She stiffened her spine and forced herself to her feet, ignoring the creaking of her beaten body.

She braced her feet squarely in the snow. It would be over one way or another in a single exchange. If she moved, she'd fall. If she ran, she’d die. She had to stand and face it.

"What you forgot," Anjen told it, lifting Valiant's point, the distant starlight dancing pale on the iron blade, "is that I'm fucking Ironbane."

The Winter King staggered toward her on fire. Its burning cloak stuck to it and melted it. The flames curled around it brightly, making a second, hotter crown, and when it snarled the flames escaped from its open mouth and burst through its eye sockets.

It lifted the black sword high above its head.

Fuck that. Anjen jammed the point of Valiant up into its belly.

*

Other teasers: Karla, Lia, Raven, Lavender, Becca, Amna, Angie

radio silence

2009-12-13T17:10:00.004Z

I wrote off my novel. Bad investment, fit only for the trunk, no point throwing good time after bad. Right now I don't even want to see that pile of trash again.

So if I spend another week hiding in my room, watching TV marathons and feeling miserable, please forgive me. At the moment I can't remember why I ever enjoyed writing.

nanowrimo roundup: tastes like victory

2009-11-16T11:42:00.008Z

So - I finished Nanowrimo.

November is known and feared by writers as National Novel Writing Month, a challenge to write 50,000 words during the thirty days of November. It's the month your caffeine and/or sugar intake spikes as you stay up until 4am every night cranking out wordcount: a month in which your life is ruled by the inexorable march of the target line on your wordcount graph.

Some smart friends of mine introduced me to Nanowrimo back in 2004. Nothing is more useful to a beginning writer than a track record of finishing novels, and I finished my first one on the 21st of November 2004, less than a week after I turned sixteen. Had to trunk that novel (and the next), and I crashed out of most of the following Nanowrimos, but I've had a ton of fun and met a truckload of people through Nanowrimo - starting with my dearly beloved writing group. So I scrambled to finish and send out my beta draft of THE INFERNAL FAMILY, dug out my stalled-at-30k epic fantasy IRONBANE, and hit the trail on the 1st of November.

On the fourteenth night I finished Nanowrimo, and on the fifteenth I finished my novel. So I'm distressingly smug right now, and also grateful to:

All the friends who cheered me on, especially the Bristol and Bath Nanowrimo team who kindly tolerated my gloating at the write-ins.
Auburn, who kicked my ass with her massive wordcounts, taunted me when I fell behind and took my eleventh-hour victory with grace.
My wonderful betas, such as Amy Bai, who sent me brilliant feedback during the most insanely busy month of the year for writers.

And a final roundup with lots of lovely numbers:

Hit 50,000 words on day 14.
Total wordcount on day 15 = 53166 ...
... of which 27294 words were written between day 11 and day 15.
Total wordcount for the entire novel = 86680.
Daily average = 3544.

I've pictured my wordcount graph here for your amusement. Blue line is daily wordcount, yellow line is cumulative target, red line is running total.

The pretty colours in my wordcount graph are suggesting to me that I've built up a lot of momentum that it would be a shame if I wasted. So I plan to start a project that's been waiting patiently for over a year for me to find time and confidence - my YA urban fantasy, DREAD MACHINE. I have time, I have confidence, and I also have a secret weapon: the twifties. I know I'll be in good hands as I flail around with my first YA novel.

I can only hope that my fifth novel will be as easy as my fourth. :)

congratulations!

2009-11-09T21:02:00.003Z

Congratulations to the amazing Kody Keplinger, teenage novelist and twiftie, who just sold film rights to her YA debut novel The Duff! :D

robert jordan and brandon sanderson - the gathering storm

2009-11-07T22:43:00.007Z

The Gathering Storm is the twelfth in the Wheel of Time series, part written by Robert Jordan and completed by Brandon Sanderson after his death.

Let me preface this review by saying that I'm a Wheel of Time hater of the vitriolic kind. Back in the day, when I was young and uncritical, I burned through the entire series and loved it from the beginning. Unfortunately, I started to develop critical reading skills right around the time that the series took a dive into terribleness. I was seriously burned on the tenth book, Crossroads of Twilight, and became an outright hater. I hated the padding, the repetition, the ridiculous excess of minor characters. Hated the plotlines that took four books to resolve. Hated having to use the Wheel of Time Concordance to keep up. Most of all, I hated the disappointment - I hated that a series I'd loved so much had become a travesty.

I had moderate hopes that Brandon Sanderson would turn it around with The Gathering Storm, but when I read the first chapter, Tears from Steel (available to members of Tor.com), I was horrified. It was exactly as I'd feared: Nothing happened. Six thousand words of throat-clearing, incorporating only (a) scenery description, (b) recap of the previous novels, and (c) the protagonist doing nothing. So I promised myself I was done with The Wheel of Time.

Well, I take it back.

The Gathering Storm is not perfect. The opening chapters in particular suffer from the classic Wheel of Time problems. Several storylines seem completely unnecessary, although Mat "where did my plot go" Cauthon has the benefit of being hilarious. (I don't remember him being this funny.)

But as the book progresses you get more and more crowning moments of awesome. There are scenes I've been waiting forever to read, which were every bit as badass as I expected, and scenes that hit me totally out of the blue. A huge amount of ground is covered plot-wise, especially focusing on Rand and Egwene. If you were to say, "All this time, I've really been looking forward to ..." odds are that scene is in The Gathering Storm.

Some moments made me laugh. A lot made me wince. A few made me go "Holy sh**!" This is a really freaking dark book, and Rand in particular hits the rockiest of rock bottoms, kicking the dog with such enthusiasm that he crosses the moral event horizon. He's armed with damn near absolute power, and he's not even trying to control it any more: he blows people and entire settlements away with breathtaking callousness, and his endgame plan is horrific, leading to many heart-stopping scenes of win.

Stuff happens. And it's awesome.

Verdict = 4 out of 5 stars. Against all the odds, The Gathering Storm is a genuinely good novel - good enough that I'm planning to buy the hardcover for my mother. I'm back on board the Wheel of Time train, ready to pull into Last Battle station. :D

the sunk cost dilemma, the concorde effect and the economics of trunking novels

2009-11-06T12:44:00.010Z

Let's say, hypothetically, that you wrote a novel.

And let's also say that hypothetical you is a slow writer and took about two years to write and edit the novel. Unfortunately, your hypothetical novel is an unreadable pile of garbage which you may or may not be able to fix, and even more unfortunately, you don't realise that until now.

Should you trunk the novel?

Welcome to the sunk cost dilemma. If you trunk the novel, you write off all your time and effort. If you keep working on it, hoping to somehow turn it around, you're pouring yet more resources into the project which may also have to be written off.

People are naturally loss-averse. That is, they value not making a loss of £100 more than they value gaining £100. This leads to the sunk cost fallacy, wherein people commit ever more resources to a failing project in the futile hope of saving their initial investment. (See also: Concorde.)

That's why my gut instinct tells me not to trunk the hypothetical novel: I think of all the hours of work, and I hate to write them off as a bad investment. Perhaps if I just put in more hours of work, I can rescue the project. But thanks to the sunk cost fallacy, I realise that that's irrational - just a stupid instinct interfering with logic.

The hypothetical investment is a writeoff. It's time to move on.

Winners never quit, and quitters never win, but those who never quit and never win are idiots.

meeting new beta readers

2009-11-04T21:25:00.006Z

Stages of meeting new beta readers:

1. Elation! Somebody's read my first chapter and wants to read on! I am God!
2. Excitement! Thank you so much for volunteering. I want to build statues to your awesomeness.
3. Nervousness. You're such a nice person, I don't want to disappoint you. I'm worried the rest of my novel might not be any good.
4. Panic. Oh my God, I can't send you this piece of trash, do I have time to rewrite from scratch?
5. Resignation. I am a fraud. Everyone will find out: it is inevitable. The quicker I hit the send button, the quicker I can end my inevitable humiliation.
6. Attempt to drown self in alcohol and After Eights.

I think I need to reread what I told myself when I sent my beta draft to readers for the first time.

the infernal family: now terrorising beta readers

2009-10-31T23:57:00.002Z

Today I finally finished a beta draft of THE INFERNAL FAMILY.

I’ve revised from start to finish. Axed storylines. Added characters. Rewritten huge sections from scratch. And when I read through a final time and found myself changing only the punctuation, I knew I was done.

I suffer from writers’ fear. I fear that my work isn’t good enough. I fear that if I think it’s good, I’ll be disappointed. I fear showing my work to people that I respect in case it causes them to realise I’m an idiot. But I’m learning to ignore those fears - and I hit that button and mailed out the beta version to the first of my wonderful beta readers, my amazing writer friend Amy. And I’m glad I did.

In the meantime, as always in the terrifying gap between submitting work and receiving feedback, I’m remembering my five commandments for scared writers:

1. Good enough is fine. Perfect is for later.
2. Everything can be fixed.
3. This is the millionth draft. There will be a millionth-and-one.
4. People still love me even if they don't love my work.
5. At least it's spelled correctly.

(Dear beta version of THE INFERNAL FAMILY,

Hi there. I’ve waited a long time to meet you.

I know you’re not perfect. There are things I wanted to do with you that I couldn’t pull off, and scenes that still clunk after a million revisions. But there are things about you I love - things that made you worth working on. And if I wait for you to be perfect, I’ll be waiting forever.

So I’m declaring you officially ... good enough.

Go play with your beta readers.

Love,
your writer)

the problem with prologues, as illustrated by the tv show sanctuary

2009-10-30T22:10:00.004Z

I enjoy a lot of science fiction and fantasy TV shows: Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who and Darker And Edgier spinoff Torchwood, Supernatural, Flash Forward and Dollhouse, to name but a few. So I popped the pilot episode of Sanctuary on with high hopes.

I’d like those fifteen minutes of my life back, please.

(SPOILERS for Sanctuary 1x01.)

Our pilot opens with a woman facing off against a prostitute-killing vampire in 1880s Whitechapel, the inference being that he’s Jack the Ripper, in a scene apparently ripped directly from Angel. As far as I could tell, these characters disappear and the storyline is never brought up again.
Giant time, location and scene change. Present-day cops burst into a murder scene and find a kid hiding under a bed. The kid bursts out tentacles and eats them or something. All these characters drop off the radar.
Another time, location and scene change. In a hospital, a delusional criminal is being interrogated about the murdered bodies of a bunch of people he claims he didn’t kill ...

At this point, I’m fifteen minutes in, and I hit the exit button of disgust.

When I start watching a pilot (or open a book to the first page), I’m ready to get excited. Give me something -- a compelling character, a unique voice, conflict that gets my heart racing -- and I’ll keep turning pages.

But if you don’t give me time and incentive to engage, and you rip me out of that scene and stick me in another and expect me to try and engage with that scene too, and then you rip me out of that scene ... then I’m done.

And that’s my problem with prologues. You get one shot at hooking me as a reader. It’s a fair shot: I’ll keep turning pages to give you time to get into your stride. But if you can’t hook me with your opening scene, throwing a scene change at me doesn’t help. And if you did hook me with your opening scene -- shoving me into another, completely different scene, often with no continuity of character or plot at all? Also doesn’t help.

Honourable exceptions to my prologue hate include Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora. This prologue is so snappy and pacy and caustic, I loved it instantly: I counted down the days until I could rush out and buy the novel, which I also loved. So they can work. You just need to be brilliant like Scott Lynch.

ironbane, or: what's your nanowrimo?

2009-10-30T21:19:00.004Z

I'm gearing up to resume my stalled-at-30k epic fantasy for Nanowrimo. Say hello to IRONBANE.

Cranky fortysomething fugitive Anjen is better known as Ironbane: the war legend who took out the evil Winter Queen but left scorched earth, slaughtered generations and a trail of destruction behind her. She's lost her friends, her rank and her magic as punishment for war crimes, and she’s fleeing legions of vengeful enemies. So she desperately needs to stay undercover as a nobody - especially after the charming Summer blackmails her (with a smile) into helping him hunt and execute Ironbane.

Then she accidentally pitches herself and two hundred innocent people into a hopeless battle only Ironbane can get them out of.

If she’s to save her people, Anjen must unleash her inner Ironbane and face everything she fled. Starting with the enemies hunting her. And ending with the toxic magical prison built to hold her, where her nemesis the Winter Queen will rise from the dead.

Ironbane - traitor, butcher and professional villain - is back.

What's your Nanowrimo novel?

you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, or: not being a teenage author any more

2009-10-28T00:47:00.004Z

Following a discussion Amna is hosting about young writers, I've been reflecting on Choco's fascinating comments about realising that she wasn't going to be a published teenage author.

I chased that dream too. I finished my first novel just after I turned sixteen, and my second before my eighteenth birthday, and I wrote every night for years. That dream bit the dust somewhere along the road, and so did a succession of smaller dreams - I'd query agents before I hit eighteen, I'd at least have a complete, polished manuscript by then, I'd I'd I'd ...

Number of dreams hit: 0.

Ultimately, I think I was hooked on specialness. As a teenage writer with two novels under my belt, I was exceptional. ("You're how old?") Once I got kicked out into adulthood, I wasn't an exception any more: I was just one among millions of adult writers.

The train has now pulled in to grown-up station, and I'm happy to report that my destination is not as scary as it once seemed.

Lessons I've learned about and since the teenage writing years:

Being a young writer is only meaningful as a way to get to being a good writer. You don't need to be young to be good.
Not having reached my dream doesn't mean I didn't work hard enough: it certainly doesn't mean I'm a failure.
There are other kinds of specialness.
Keep dreaming. If you don't make it, update your dream to something more possible.

What about you? Have you missed out on any dreams and had to reframe them? Are you dealing with not being special any more?

the evolution of a story question

2009-10-26T16:26:00.002Z

Story question: the key question, set up by the inciting incident, that keeps the reader turning the page to find out the answer. I think this post by Annette Lyon at Writing on the Wall, and this post by Jordan McCollum, explain better than I could.

When I started revisions for THE INFERNAL FAMILY, I defined the story question as, "Will Johann rescue his friend's daughter?" But as I revised, I realised that saving the friend's daughter was actually symbolic of a larger question.

Having ditched his biological family (demon) and legal family (abusive), protagonist Johann believes that real family is something you choose with people you love: like the kid he raised and thinks of as his son, his close friend, and her daughter. This is the stable, loving family he's always dreamed of.

In the first 4000 words the antagonist kills his son and steals his friend's daughter, and the friend is so outraged by his part in her daughter's kidnap that she bails out. Bang. No family. If he saves his friend's daughter, maybe he can get his friend back as well, and then he can reassemble a family worth having.

So a better question is, "Will Johann put what's left of his family back together?"

Then I realised that that was too simplistic. 99% of fiction has a happy ending, and while I'm a fan of the apocalyptic tragedy endings, unfortunately the thematic elements of this novel constrained me to a happy ending. So you can confidently answer "Yes", to the story question. And I don't want the conflict to feel predictable. If you can answer the story question before you even pick up the novel, I think something may be wrong.

When I looked a little deeper - especially at how much at fault he is, or feels he is, for everything that happens in those first 4000 words (not to mention torturing people and being a borderline sociopath) - I realised a better question was, "Does Johann deserve to put his family back together?"

Not so predictable. (I hope.)

stages of competence, the dunning-kruger effect, and what they mean for writers

2009-10-25T11:56:00.004Z

Struggling today, so I'll cheer myself up with one of my favourite topics: stages of competence and the Dunning-Kruger effect. (I like this topic because it tells me that the worse I feel about my writing, the more awesome I secretly am.)

The stages of competence theory states that when you try to learn a new skill, you progress through four predictable stages:

Unconscious incompetence. You're bad at the new skill, but because you're so new, you lack appreciation of just how bad you are.
Conscious incompetence. You're starting to learn the new skill, and you're beginning to appreciate that you're not very good at it.
Conscious competence. You've learned to be good at the new skill if you work very hard.
Unconscious competence. You've internalised your new skill to the point where it's second nature.

Let's apply this theory to a skill we might be learning ... like, say, writing.

You start out as a wide-eyed newbie. You've banged out a first draft and you think it's the best thing since sliced bread. Because you don't understand the mechanics of writing, you can't see why your work is bad (unconscious incompetence). In your puppy-like enthusiasm, you join a bunch of critique groups and throw your work up, expecting everyone to see awesomeness - just like you do.

Except nobody thinks it's awesome. You have the sobering experience of realising that your work may not be very good at all (conscious incompetence). Actually, it's terrible.

How do you get better? What is better, exactly? Will you ever get to stage 3, conscious competence? How long will it take?

You've entered the yawning chasm of stage 2.

Similarly, the Dunning-Kruger effect states that the unskilled lack the awareness to know just how bad they are - so they consistently and strongly overrate themselves in that skill. Conversely, the highly skilled underrate themselves. They know how much they have still to learn.

Morals of the story:

If a harsh light has dawned and you now see that your work is terrible, you've moved up a stage of competence. Yes, it hurts.
If you lack confidence in your work, you're in a better position to improve than someone who thinks their work is perfect.
When I tear my hair out and swear never to write again, it secretly means I'm awesome. Really.

things I'll never win prizes for

2009-10-20T23:23:00.003+01:00

Things I'll never win prizes for:

Beautiful prose.
Literary merit.
Originality.
Plot.

That said, when I reread THE INFERNAL FAMILY today, I liked it. In a clunkily written, non-literary, unoriginal, poorly plotted way. :)

choices

2009-10-20T17:07:00.004+01:00

"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we are, far more than our abilities." - Dumbledore to Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

I enjoy the TV crime series Castle. It's glossy, amusing and ultimately heart-warming. But they just blew it big time.

(SPOILERS for Castle 2x05.)

In last night's episode, bestselling writer Castle is offered the opportunity of a lifetime - a lucrative deal writing James Bond novels. The catch is, it means abandoning his partner and love interest, NYPD detective Beckett. It's a character-defining, career-defining choice between untold fame and riches and his romantic and personal attachment to Beckett. He has to choose. Either ditch the riches or lose the girl.

Everyone knows how this scene goes. The protagonist is supposed to realise that his relationship with the female lead is more important than fame and wealth. He'll turn down the money and stay in his current role.

Except at that key moment ... Castle is offered a major deal which allows him to stay with Beckett.

Moral of the story: You can have both riches and the girl of your dreams. Actually you can have everything you've ever wanted. And you won't have to choose between them, because that would be dangerously like drama, and would require something awkward like consequences.

teaser tuesday

2009-10-06T16:53:00.002+01:00

Teaser from my urban fantasy, THE INFERNAL FAMILY. Protagonist Johann is back in the wreckage of his home to pick up the body of his murdered son.

(Here be bad language.)

By night the hall glittered with broken glass, smeared with blood gone black, the carpet stiff underfoot. It looked unreal enough that he could pretend not to recognise it. Must have been somebody else who’d let his son die here.

A trail of black footprints led upstairs.

“You put him to bed?” Nicholas said.

“I couldn’t leave him there.” His voice cracked for some stupid reason. “Not on the floor.” Like an unwanted thing, a toy Johann’d ditched when it broke.

He went upstairs. If he didn’t touch the footprints it wouldn’t be the same as before, as the weight of his son curled in his arms, fingers slipping from his shirt. So he could look into Marcus’ room and not see --

Johann stopped, feet stuck, couldn’t take another step. Nicholas said “What?” and looked over his shoulder, and went silent.

The body lay curled under the duvet, hair fair against the pillow. Johann couldn’t look at it, but it kept dragging his eyes back, displacing his memory of cradling his warm living son. Marcus couldn’t be a huddled thing under a duvet, dead long enough to stiffen, he’d been bright and brave and alive and this wasn’t real, Johann refused to let it be. He wanted Marcus back.

“When I first took Marcus in he, he wouldn’t sleep in the room I gave him.” The words spilled out, even though it was a stupid story and Nicholas hated personal stuff. “I’d find him curled up in a chair in the morning looking miserable. I thought maybe I was doing something wrong, maybe he was scared of me or something -- But later I found out his dad walked out on him. Just left one night and never came back. So he only wanted to sleep somewhere where I’d wake him if I left.”

God, Johann’d been so scared back then. Scared of hurting him. Scared of him leaving. Scared of this fierce need to protect him. It didn’t make any sense that Marcus would want to stay, and every time Marcus crept sleepily under his arm and tucked his fair head under his chin Johann thought it’d be the last.

“He never does that any more. Did. And I left him today. I left him while he was sleeping. What if he wasn’t really dead yet, what if he woke up and I was gone, and he thought I walked out on him, I didn’t want him any more --“

The words were running down into useless babble, so he stopped. It wasn’t right that he’d survived.

“Stark,” Nicholas said awkwardly behind him. Johann reached out and took hold of his arm without looking, grip too tight but not caring about hurting him, and just -- focused on what was real. What mattered. Not this thing that wasn’t his son.

“Let’s just get this over with,” Johann said.

Something moved downstairs.

Both of them froze. Streetlights poured between the open curtains, a tide of orange creeping across the bedcovers, Johann felt trapped in amber.

The silence resounded. Maybe he’d imagined the sound. He was already losing his mind, it wouldn’t be a big leap from there to hearing things --

A door shut.

Hunters. In his home. Where they’d murdered his son.

Everything else slipped through his fingers. Fury fired up, hot and savage, settling in the pounding of his blood and the curling of his hands into fists.

When he went for the stairs Nicholas barred his way, knife already drawn, light jumping along the edge. “Could be anyone. Neighbour. Police. Drunk idiots who --“

Johann slammed him aside and took the stairs three at a time. Empty of people, the skeleton of the house passed by in a blur, the walls its bones, doorways gaping like sockets. A shadow moved in the kitchen -- Johann burst into the kitchen feeling alive and full of fire, smashed aside the hunter’s pathetic attempts to defend himself and threw him into a kitchen cabinet.

Wood splintered. Glass rattled in its frames. The hunter fell onto the counter in a cascade of cabinet wreckage, rolled off the counter clutching his ribs, slid to the floor. Johann flexed his hands and the fresh cuts on his knuckles stung; he liked that, proof that he could still hurt people.

The kitchen was a mystery now, shadowed and streetlit, no longer home. “Marcus and I used to cook here,” Johann told the hunter conversationally, hauling him off the floor. “I was never any good at it, but Marcus enjoyed it. Flour everywhere.” Marcus used to sit at the kitchen table and reread the recipe with furrowed brow, ticking off with mathematical precision things he’d already added. For a moment Johann pictured him there, real enough to reach out and touch.

Johann slammed the hunter onto that table so hard something broke, wood or bone, he didn’t care. The hunter choked and couldn’t scrabble out of his grip. “Doesn’t happen any more. Since you killed him.” He flung the pathetic human down with a snarl. “My boy was smart. Aced all his exams, he liked studying, he wanted to go to university. He could’ve done, I would’ve figured something out, I -- He used to sit right here.” Johann broke that chair with his hands, sudden bunch of muscles, satisfying smash. Another memory broken.

The hunter gripped the counter and pulled himself off the floor. His other hand skittered out for a kitchen knife.

Johann didn’t care. “Go ahead. You should have killed me instead, I would’ve let you, why would I care, he was just a kid, he was my son --“

The hunter smashed a jar in his face. It spilled white, the stuff got in his eyes and burned. Salt. Then the hunter slashed him across the ribs -- shocking cold at first, then the cut burned, warmth seeping through his shirt.

Johann hit the bastard in the face and rocked him back against the counter. The bloody knife Johann ripped out of his hand; he wanted to stab and stab but that would be too quick, Marcus had suffered before he died. Johann slashed him instead, going for his face but catching his upflung arm, cutting and cutting, red lines running down and blood smearing everywhere, the taste of salt in his mouth and stinging his eyes --

“Stark, what the fuck are you doing?”

He spun and Nicholas stood in the doorway, cold and stern and out of reach, and for a second Johann choked on the red urge to hurt him.

“What is wrong with you?” Nicholas demanded, his accent sliding into a vicious extreme. “You can hear him screaming from outside the house. So can all the neighbours you just woke up, and so will all the police they just called, who will find us in a ruined house with a corpse!”

His heart hammered, the knife slash stinging, hands slippery with blood. Nicholas always talked too much, stupid words that meant nothing. “Scared?” Johann threw back at him.

Nicholas narrowed his eyes. “Give me that knife.”

The hunter slipped as he tried to get up. Johann stamped him down, fury hot and blind, wanting to smash him into a red pulp he could squeeze through his fingers. “No.”

“Then I’m taking it off you.”

“This is what you do to things that scare you, isn’t it.” Johann lifted the knife, liking his sudden tenseness, not quite a flinch. “You get in their faces and dare them to hurt you. Like you did to the angel.”

“Go ahead.” Nicholas stepped right in, startlingly close. “Dare you.”

in fantasy men fight and women surrender

2009-10-01T13:58:00.009+01:00

In my review of Heroes Die, I commented on gender roles:

"I got a twitchy feeling of gender stereotyping from [the heroine’s] sweet, nurturing, protect-the-innocents nature versus [the hero’s] rampant destruction. This feeling increased when the heroine has to surrender to and channel a greater, external force in order to match the (male) antagonist, which is just weirdly sexualised."

Then I got to thinking about women in fantasy, and all the surrendering they seem to do.

Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time features a type of magic called the One Power, which is split into male and female halves. This sounds equitable. Except “touching [the female half] saidar is like an embrace, touching [the male half] saidin is like a war without mercy. (V: 66)” (Wheel of Time Concordance)

the female half, saidar, is "gentle, but infinitely powerful; a force which will do what you wish it to, but requires patience and submission to guide its power. Surrender is necessary to gain it, and women universally speak of it as 'embracing' the Power." (Wheel of Time Wiki) ... “cannot be forced for women, they just lose hold of it. To control the Power, a woman must surrender to it. (II: 208)”
the male half, saidin, is a “raging torrent of the Power which must be subdued and dominated” (Wheel of Time Wiki) ... “must be fought against and controlled. (IV: 152)”

I’m seeing a common theme here in both Heroes Die and the Wheel of Time. Men fight, women surrender.

It taps into a greater gender distinction that I see in a lot of fantasy. Men are warriors, women healers. Men are aggressive, women nurturing. Men are the heroes, women their damsels in distress. But more of that later.

Are there other examples of this fighting vs surrendering dichotomy in fantasy? Can you suggest authors and novels which subvert this idea?

matthew woodring stover - heroes die

2009-10-01T13:31:00.007+01:00

Heroes Die is the first in the Acts of Caine series by Matthew Woodring Stover. Protagonist Hari Michaelson is better known by his stage name Caine - he's an Actor who travels to a medieval alternate dimension and participates in spectacular derring-do to entertain sheeplike Earth viewers. When his estranged wife is kidnapped by the bad guys, Caine lines 'em all up for one gory takedown mission: his studio bosses, an oppressive government and an amusing range of competitive bad guys are all standing between him and his girl. Hilarity ensues. And violence. And profanity. ("**** me like a virgin goat!" = new favourite epithet.)

This is a good book. My jaw dropped on several occasions. There are great set-piece battles, especially the climax, which functioned on so many different levels it broke my mind - I swear the plot could only be followed with a flow chart: I had to talk it out with my brother afterward. (Unfortunately, Caine's actual plan was a little disappointing compared to the head-exploding inspiring brilliance of his fake plan.)

I enjoyed the mixture of D&D-esque magic and real-world military tactics. I think the appeal is that it perfectly captures the D&D and MMO gaming experience. You interact with fake-medieval people in a fake-medieval world, using fake-medieval magic, but you bring modern ideas and tactics. Also, the politics of both settings within the book, plus the interrelation thereof, were pure gold.

Sociopathic protagonist Caine rocked. He's not quite Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs, but he'll do fine. I also liked the sociopathic antagonist Berne. Conversely, the lead female character was flat and cardboard. I got a twitchy feeling of gender stereotyping from her sweet, nurturing, protect-the-innocents nature versus Caine's rampant destruction. This feeling increased when the heroine has to surrender to and channel a greater, external force in order to match the (male) antagonist, which is just weirdly sexualised. Then I realised the only other female characters of importance are:

who hero-worships Caine;
a whoremistress; and
her, uh ... miniature lesbian sex pet.

I feel much better about the gender roles now.

The constant homoerotic tension between the antagonists Ma'elKoth, Toa-Sytell and Berne (don't even try and figure out the naming patterns, there is no logic) was pure hilarity. Add all the jealousy re: who liked Caine better than who and I was holding my breath expecting a hot foursome of evil.

It was sweet deliciousness, and I have authorised the purchase of the second book. (Book-buying in the household of us is a complicated affair of figuring out which book will appeal to the most readers.)

Verdict = 4 out of 5 stars. If you enjoy Richard Morgan, especially if you enjoy both his SF and the fantasy, I suspect you'll like this. Just be prepared for the violence, swearing and gruesome torture scenes.

prophecy, or: how to rob your protagonist of agency

2009-09-30T16:07:00.004+01:00

Prophecy: I hate it.

Hero’s Journey fantasies love this trope. The young protagonist discovers he’s prophesied to bring down the Dark Lord. Unfortunately, the Dark Lord now knows about him too, and unleashes his +2 Storm of Wrath on our luckless protagonist. Standing in the smouldering ruins of his home village, ideally on the graves of his parents, the protagonist vows vengeance. He’ll take down that dastardly Dark Lord or die trying!

This is also the reason why half the Hero’s Journey fantasies on my shelf have dented corners -- I threw them against the wall.

Here are my problems with the traditional use of prophecy in fantasy:

Prophecy makes the story predictable. If it’s prophesied that the protagonist will overcome the Dark Lord, we know that’s exactly what will happen. No suspense, no surprise, no excitement.
Since we’ve been told how the story will go, we’re ahead of the plot and waiting impatiently while the reluctant hero tries to refuse the call. It’s obvious to everyone except the protagonist that that’s not going to happen. He’s going to be railroaded into his prophesied role whether he likes it or not.
It’s a not-very-veiled form of authorial intrusion. Consider where prophecy comes from: the gods, fate or destiny -- ie. authorial intent.
We read fiction for compelling characters who must take drastic action to overcome conflict. If their actions are dictated by prophecy, not choices that they themselves make, they’re just a puppet.

Soon: uses of prophecy I’ve enjoyed reading; things I’d like to see done with prophecy.

week zero: freshers' week

2009-09-30T15:12:00.003+01:00

It's week zero, and as I head back to real-life university, I'll also be studying my real passion - how to create a good fantasy novel.

The bibliography: authors from Abercrombie to Zelazny. The schedule: three times a week I'll blog about what I'm reading, writing and learning. The final project: my ongoing novel, which is languishing at a 3rd when it needs to climb the dizzy heights of a 1st.

I have a lot to learn. ;)