2012 was a rough year for me. No details, just a hard slog for a number of reasons.

For those of you who also had a hard slog, my sympathies and let us hope for a kinder, more joyous, and excitingly challenging 2013 (the good kind of excitement, not the other kind).

For those who had a great 2012: Excellent! And I wish for you another great year ahead.

It took me a long time to finish the third Spiritwalker novel, COLD STEEL (for my long road through the novel and if you are interested in process, you can check all my Cold Steel tags on this blog). But as most if not all of you reading this know, it is finished, revised, copy edited, and making its way through the production process toward publication in June 2013.

I’m planning to continue my Spiritwalker Monday posts from now until publication. Because I’ve realized that posting once a week is about all I can reliably manage (without cutting deeply into my novel writing energy), some of those posts will be more general posts about world building, writing, culture, reading, and so on. However, at least two posts per month should focus specifically on the Spiritwalker world and/or the writing of the books. I hope to complete at least one prequel short story (the one I am working on right now is about Andevai). Upcoming posts will discuss the creole used in COLD FIRE, some reflections on how I developed the love story in the first two books (in February), the use of place names in a world without Germanic-derived place names, and whatever else I can produce between working on Other Projects. I can’t talk about Other Projects yet. I will when I can.

Some of my favorite posts I read this year (heavily weighted to the end of the year as I do not keep good track):

The amazing tag team of Tansy Raynor Roberts (Historically Authentic Sexism in Fantasy: Let’s Unpack That) and Foz Meadows (Your Default Narrative Settings are Not Apolitical) both tackle the issue of the excuse some writers and readers make that they can’t have women (or women with agency) in their fantasy novels because of what amounts to their lack of understanding of history. This subject has been batted around a lot this year (and in previous years) and perhaps some day it will be put to rest, but I’m not holding my breath yet. Tansy also wrote a guest post on this blog on women of Rome.

In this vein, my favorite of my Spiritwalker Monday posts so far is Why Cat Sews, about the importance of depicting all the kinds of work that underpin human society.

Over at Book Smugglers, N. K. Jemisin wrote The Unexotic Exotic on using details of ordinary life to de-exotify the “exotic” in fantasy worlds.

In Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s Identity and the Indigenous Spirit she talks about allowing herself “to be true to the place that gave birth to and shaped me.” On this blog, her guest post Decolonizing as an SF Writer discusses (among other things) histories of the Philippines and her own relationship with SF.

Seanan McGuire wrote a searing post on Things I Will Not Do To My Characters. Ever. in response to a reader who asked her when certain of her female characters were finally going to get raped. (Imagine! Asking that!)

I have some posts I wrote this year which I particularly value, and one of those touches on another aspect of the use of sexual violence in fiction (although from a different perspective): The narrative of women in fear and pain. (In my recent guest post on Book Smugglers I talk about quite the opposite: positive depictions of sex in fiction.)(There’s also a giveaway open until January 6.)

Sherwood Smith writes brilliantly about writing and reading: You can find her at Book View Cafe. Really everything she writes is well worth reading, but I wanted to highlight a post from earlier this year on Process Narration, what she defines as writers “writing their own experience of writing fiction into the text.” I read this post nodding my head and wincing in fierce agreement; I do this and I need to be more aware of it. Great stuff.

Here on this blog, Paul Weimer wrote about his own experiences reviewing in The Stress of Their Regard: Book Reviews and the Reactions to Them.

Understanding history in its fullest and most complex sense as opposed to the narrow range of history that is normally taught is, for me, a crucial enterprise, a process that never ends.

This post by cosmic yoruba talks about African sexualities and colonialism. She also wrote a post on sex work in pre-colonial Igboland.

Malinda Lo wrote a two part post about same-sex relationships in fantasy and the question “Is it believable to have same-sex relationships in a medieval-esque fantasy world?” in Heteronormativity, Fantasy & Bitterblue Part One and Part Two.

D. B. Jackson wrote on “the history that isn’t taught” and what he learned about colonial era Boston while researching for his Thieftaker series.

In the science department, how about this fascinating article about redrawing the “tree of life”: It is just so cool! And Athena Andreadis has a lovely post on human evolution and The Grandmother Hypothesis: “that the presence of grandmothers allowed more children to reach adulthood.”

I’ve not yet touched on architecture and fashion so here, via tumblr, a Fashion Timeline History of Vietnamese Clothing.

Meanwhile, Helen Lowe discussed the essential element of mystery in On World building.

Okay, that’s surely enough. Except for this link to an article on Early Medieval Science: The evidence of Bede. Because there can never be enough Venerable Bede.

For myself, I worked long and hard on my article The Omniscient Breasts because I wanted to define and describe how the male gaze affects how people write without them necessarily being aware of it, and I wanted to express it in a constructive way that might possibly get through to a few people and make them think about through what default lens they might be “seeing” in their fiction. [You should go check it out if only to make sure it reaches the top ten (in page views) of SFSignal's posts for the year--right?]

These are just a few of the many wonderful, illuminating, and thoughtful things I read online this past year. There were so many more.

Last, if I can encourage you (and I know I encouraged some of you already) to check out one album this year it would be Fatoumata Diawara’s FATOU.

What links do you have for me? What great posts from 2012 on . . . anything, really . . . got you thinking or laughing or pissed off or excited or learning or asking questions?

And, as always, thank you for reading.

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

Merry Christmas to all those who observe, and a Happy Solstice (a little belated) and Happy Hannukah as well although I'm quite a bit late on that! May there be good feasting and good cheer in your immediate vicinity.

For this week's Spiritwalker Monday I have posted a small holiday gift of an excerpt from Cold Steel which will be up for one week only, but I'm going to try to keep it in one place, so here right here is the link to the page if you want to go see.

Twenty thousand years ago Earth was in the grip of an Ice Age (technically we are still in an Ice Age, in one of the interglacial warming periods). Massive sheets of ice covered much of North America, northern Europe, and parts of north Asia and locked up so much water that the contours of the continents were different because the sea levels were lower. As  temperatures began to rise, the ice began to melt and the oceans to rise.

Back in the day, the island we call Britain was not an island but part of Europe. The English Channel did not exist, the Rhine River flowed a lot further south before it reached the Atlantic Ocean, and people lived and probably often thrived on what was then an expanse of land that now lies beneath the North Sea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image from ScienceDirect.

Coincidentally, the December 2012 National Geographic includes an article about this region, called Doggerland after the Dogger Banks, a shallow area in the North Sea well known to fishermen.

There is a fabulous map at the NatGeo site which I can’t post here, but you totally should go there and look at it (scroll up, for some reason the link deposits you at the end of the page). The graphic clearly displays how the expanse of land changes across time as the ice shrinks and the oceans rise. The shoreline in Spiritwalker falls somewhat close to what is shown here as the year 8000 B.C.E (Before the Common Era), although of course this mapping is educated guesswork.

When I “built” the landscape of Spiritwalker, I wanted enough ice that Britain would be attached to the continent but not so much that most of Europe would be too cold for extensive human habitation.

Europe’s Lost World: The rediscovery of Doggerland by V Gaffney, S Fitch and D Smith (CBA Research Report 160, 2009) provided a great deal of information by some of the scientists at the forefront of this research.

The book also provided a crucial set of figures depicting “Isopollen maps showing changes in vegetation over the postglacial” (in Europe). I needed to know how a late glacial landscape would differ from today’s European landscape in terms of climate zones and vegetation, not just shorelines. For instance, how far north could people farm? Would there be other geographical variations in vegetation zones? What could farmers grow? Some grains can grow in harsher conditions with shorter growing seasons; others need warmer, longer seasons. I never go into detail about issues like this although they are alluded to, and specifically if briefly mentioned in Cold Steel.

The city of Adurnam is actually in what is now the English Channel, south of Portsmouth, on the old paleolithic watercourse of the Solent River, more or less (despite being named after Portus Adurni, the Roman fort at what is now Portchester, a suburb of Portsmouth). The land controlled by Four Moons House lies east of London and Canturbury, in what is now the southern part of the North Sea but which in Spiritwalker is all land. For these landscapes I consulted references like the Journal of Quaternary Science, which has an entire journal volume dedicated to the Quaternary history of the English Channel.

I also wanted to know how melting would occur, how quickly vegetation could “migrate” north, and by what “mechanism” the trolls (the feathered people, that is, the intelligent descendents of troodons) might have survived into the “present day” of the novel while at the same time allowing for human migration into the Americas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image from USGS.

The land bridge between Asia and the Americas was generally ice free during the Ice Age due to climate variables. Called Berengia, this land bridge had a significant population of mammoths and other now extinct mammals. Meanwhile, however, the massive North American ice sheet for a long time cut off Berengia from the ice free southern part of the North American continent.

E.C. Pielou’s excellent After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America (The University of Chicago Press, 1991) is a superb resource for a fantasy writer. It taught me about Berengia’s ice free corridor, conditions in newly deglaciated landscapes, and how plants return to those zones, which they can do remarkably quickly under the right circumstances.

It also taught me about refugia, which are ice free areas, large ones like Berengia and then also small ones: nunataks are ice free zones at high elevations like mountaintops and coastal refugia are small ice free sections of “coastal plain in the lee of high mountains” (Pielou). Some plant and animal species survived in refugia, surrounded by ice and thus cut off from other populations for long periods.

Refugia and nunataks gave me a rationale for the survival of my intelligent descendents of troodons. Also, the existence of coastal refugia made it possible to suggest that humans, after crossing ice-free Berengia either on foot or by boat along the coast, had coast hopped down a string of coastal refugia to the ice-free lower portion of North America (as they may have done in our world). Meanwhile, the ice would have kept the two populations, the small but expanding feathered people population in the north and east and the small but expanding human population in the west and south, from meeting until rather late in this prehistory at which point contact between outlying groups would have brought caution, conflict, cooperation, trade, and eventually yet more complex interaction.

It was easy to find information on Europe and North America–the above referenced books and articles are not the only resources I used–and far more difficult to find information on how the Ice Age affected, for instance, the climate of the Caribbean, something I needed to know for Cold Fire. I did what I could with maps of the sea floor in the Caribbean to consider how the ocean currents would work since the islands of the Caribbean Basin are larger in this alternate landscape, I posited that the hurricane season would be shorter due to water temperature changes, and I winged it a bit.

 

 

Image from Nature

I dredged around to find what I could about world regional climate variation–for instance, although my map of the Eastern Hemisphere doesn’t extend that far south, I posit that Lake Chad in the West and Central Sahel is huge because of the climate making west and central Africa wetter–but mostly I focused on areas I knew I was going to visit in the story.

 

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

(Note for the spoiler-wary: I have done my best to eschew spoilers, so if you haven’t read the books, there are vague references to plot herein, but I have tried to make this post basically spoiler-free except in the mildest way. If you have read the books, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.)

 

In chapter 1 of Cold Magic, our heroine Cat Barahal sneaks downstairs at dawn to return a book she’s not been given permission to remove from her uncle’s library. It’s clear she is well educated and from a family with a high degree of education for girls as well as boys.

While in the parlor, Cat notes that

(a)ll eight mending baskets were set neatly in a row on the narrow side table, for the women of the house–Aunt Tilly, me, Beatrice, her little sisters, our governess, Cook, and Callie–would sit in the parlor in the evening and sew while Uncle or Evved read aloud from a book and Pompey trimmed the candle wicks.

This sentence is meant mostly to describe the poverty of the household. I don’t go into detail about the arrangements, but the reader may guess that the family does not have enough money to heat and light more than one room in the evening.

Another way to show their straitened circumstances is to show that they sew almost all of their own clothing because they can’t afford to have their clothes made by others (the book is set before the era of inexpensive ready-to-wear clothing that can be bought off the rack in clothing stores). Mending is also a crucial part of economy, as well as refurbishing older clothes, re-purposing worn garments, and re-fitting them for a different person.

The mention of sewing, and how the family mostly makes their own clothes, also tells us something about the world, a time in which sewing, knitting, weaving, and other fabric crafts are not a luxury or a hobby but a necessity. People who could not afford bespoke clothing (made to measure by a tailor or dressmaker) had either to sew their own, buy used clothing at markets, or hope to obtain cast-off or stolen items by other means.

Sewing is mentioned in a second context as well:

Our governness, Shiffa, had been imported all the way from the Barahal motherhouse in Gadir to teach us girls deportment, fencing, dancing, sewing, and how to memorize large blocks of text so we could write them down or repeat them later.

Cat is portrayed as a sensible, practical girl who has learned a number of skills, some of which are specifically tailored to the role all children of the extended Hassi Barahal clan are expected to take up in service of the clan’s business, which is that of mercenaries, spies, and couriers. Fencing and memorizing text are skills clearly useful for spies and couriers. Fighting and spying are also skills that adventure novels highlight.

In book two, Cold Fire, Cat is thrown out into the wide world alone and far afield from the place she grew up. Basically, she finds herself with the clothes on her back and her sword as her only possessions. It would have been easy for me at this point to focus on Cat’s sword-craft.

Being confident with a sword is a useful competency for a young woman unexpectedly out on her own in an insecure and often dangerous world. Her ability to use the sword could become the most important and most visible of her skills as she continues her adventures.

But I did not want to imply that the skills most important to her ability to adapt to her new circumstances were solely or chiefly the skills that have long been culturally identified as “masculine,” such as fencing (fighting). I wanted to depict skills identified (in American society but by no means in all societies) as “feminine” as equally important to her survival.

Why? Because as a society we often tend to value the “masculine” over the “feminine.” “Masculine” is public and strong, “feminine” is private and (often) sexual, and frequently “feminine” concerns are defined as trivial and unimportant. Such definitions are cultural constructs, as is the relative value assigned to various skills and experiences.

For instance, is reading a “masculine” skill? In places and times when the literacy rate of men far outpaced that of women, or when boys were far more likely to be given an education than girls, reading was considered a masculine pursuit. It’s easy to forget that today, when one of the common assumptions in the USA today (again, this will be different in different places) is that girls somehow naturally tend to be better at reading than boys. This idea is pervasive now but in other times and places would have been considered radical or ridiculous.

What is Cat’s most important “possession?” What does she see it as? When Cat washes up in Expedition, she acts to secure the good will of the woman who has shown her hospitality by describing the skills she thinks would interest her host.

“Can I help in some way? I’m a good worker. I know how to sew, cook, read, and write. I must tell you, I have nothing, no coin, no possessions, nothing but my labor to offer you.”

Competency and willingness to work matter when it comes time for a character to adapt to new situations. Competent characters are more likely to adapt successfully regardless of whether their skills are culturally identified as masculine or feminine, of course, but as a society we tend to depict stereotypically “masculine” skills as more valuable or just tend to depict those skills at all, as if they are the only ones “people” will be willing to or interested in reading about.

In fact, a wide range of skills are necessary for societies to hold together, and in a fully realized world it is important to acknowledge more than a limited few.

In Cold Fire, Cat’s skill at sewing gives her a way to make a place for herself in her new circumstances. It gives her a bit of status and respect, and as well creates an interesting contrast to her old life because in the city of Expedition, sewing (as well as tailoring for both men and women) is a predominantly male profession. Additionally, she mends while conversing with other women (because hand-work like sewing is a job that can be done while listening and talking), and the ties she builds with other people are crucial to her success in being accepted in a new place.

Sewing helps her to survive.

As a character, Cat sews because in the cultural landscape and time she grew up, she would have learned how to sew. She sews well because sewing well is a challenge she relishes. Because she likes fashionable clothes that flatter her figure, sewing is the only way she has to fit herself in such clothing.

As a writer, I emphasize Cat’s sewing because it is true to the character and the time and  because it works well within the plot.

I emphasize her sewing because it allows me to give life to the world through details of daily life that intersect with the character and the plot rather than simply using discrete details pinned on like photos or backdrops. Sewing is a detail that helps to illuminate Cat: She is a very physical character, very active, and of course very talkative, but her facility at sewing also reveals that she is painstaking, likes to do things well, and that despite her talkative nature she is also a good listener.

Finally, I emphasize her sewing because I want to make a statement about the importance of all the different kinds of work that underpin human society, especially those that, in my experience, are too often brushed aside in the science and fantasy fiction that I love to both read and write.

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

A quick additional post today to ask you all a question. Two questions, actually.

 

1. I’m finishing up my read-through of the copy-edited manuscript (the copy editor did a very good job overall). I’ll be sending it back to Orbit in a week and therefore will be making any final changes to the manuscript in the new few days.

In COLD FIRE I included an Author’s Note in the front matter of the book that briefly touches on the basic world-setting of the Spiritwalker Trilogy, lists the days of the week and the cross-quarter days used by Cat in order to clear up any calendrical confusion, and talks a little bit about the creole used in Expedition.

For COLD STEEL I’m cutting the discussion of the creole (although I will be writing a post about it that I will also post in the Extras portion of this site discussing the Antilles creole  of my alternate Earth).

Technically, because of the way the layout works, I have a little bit of space remaining in the Author’s Note (because of what I have cut). I don’t have to add anything, but I can add another paragraph or two if need be.

So I wanted to know if you had any specific (world-setting and thus non-spoiler type) question you wish was answered in the Author’s Note that will be found at the front of the book, a short paragraph or two that can be read before starting the novel.

Anyone?

 

2. I have a number of weeks to fill in for the forthcoming Spiritwalker Mondays. A few posts are complete or almost complete and I have as well a list of posts/excerpts I would like to write. Plus a short story or two.

But let me ask you: Is there a particular question about the Spiritwalker trilogy you would like to ask me? If so, do so here, and I will answer it as one of the Monday posts.

On that same vein, as a reader of these Monday posts, are you most interested in posts that directly relate to the Spiritwalker books or are you also interested in more general posts about writing and worldbuilding that may only tangentially reference the Spiritwalker books, such as the one I posted today?

I appreciate your input.

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

This is a post about the writing process. It contains spoilers for Cold Magic and Cold Fire. In it, I discuss choices I made and ways in which I changed my mind throughout the drafting process. If you don’t want spoilers (and you’ve not read the books) or if you prefer to interact with only the final product and not see into a writer’s head as she discusses the process or if you’re not interested in reading about the writing process, READ NO FARTHER.

If you’ve read the books (or don’t care about spoilers), and if you find process interesting, read on. iow, this is a post for those who like the commentary on DVDs. Me, I never listen to that commentary. I like to see the final product in its pristine state. However, I’m happy to offer the commentary for those who are interested.

In the original conception of Cold Magic, a mage comes to the house with a legal claim to marry the girl. This story has always had the “forced marriage” trope as part of the plot. A “forced marriage” is any story in which two people have to get married because of outside forces. One might have to marry to secure an inheritance while the partner needs to marry because because she or he is destitute. An accidental encounter might impel them to marry because of societal strictures or for convenience’s sake. A fraud marriage might turn into a real marriage. Or they might both be required to accept a marriage arranged by others for reasons of political or economic or family alliance. And so on.

Cat was always going to have to marry a strange man who walked into her house with an unshakeable claim to her.

And the man was always of higher social status than Cat and her household.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

I once flippantly said that I would never ever write a novel in first person.

As a narrative style, first person is heavily and primarily dependent on voice. The narrator is right there, talking to the reader directly, and it has always seemed to me that there must be something distinctive in the voice which necessitates it being told in first person rather than third. That distinctiveness is there in addition to whatever unique circumstances within the narrative make it a story best told in first person.

◊

I interrupt this discussion to give a quick and simplistic definition of different types of point of view:

• First person I walked down the street. When I turned around, I saw a tiger walking behind me.
• Second person: You walk down the street and when you turn, you see the tiger walking behind you.
• Third person limited point of view: She walked down the street. When she turned to look behind, she saw a tiger following her.
• Third omniscient. She walked down the street and a tiger was walking behind her. (she hasn’t turned to see it yet, but the narrator can see it)

In first person, the “I” is the narrator. In second, the narrator is speaking to the “you.” In third person limited there is a (usually hidden) narrator but the story is being told solely through the eyes of the point of view character, who can only see and observe what she would naturally see and observe. In third omniscient, the narrator can see all.

◊

When I wrote the very first pieces of narrative that would eventually become the Spiritwalker Trilogy, I had trouble finding a voice that worked. My first attempts, all in third person, didn’t catch; they did not feel right.

I finally tried first person. The voice flowed far more smoothly in first than it had in third.

Here is the original first page of the novel. This is from the earliest draft, unrevised and (you’ll note) a different opening point than the novel has now. Also, notably, I changed Bee’s name from Bianca to Beatrice.

Bee and I sat in the window-seat with a blanket tucked over us to keep off the chill and the heavy curtains closed over our backs to hide us from anyone who might wander into the sitting room.  Our breath made steam flowers on the windowpanes.  Winter’s cold had come early; it was still a week away from year’s end.  Outside, snow glittered in the square and on the crowns of trees, although the streets had been swept clean.

“What did he say?” Bee whispered.  By the light of the street lamps lining the square outside, I could see her bat her eyelashes in that truly obnoxious way she had, the one that never failed to demolish the objections and reproaches of any adult caught in the beat of those dark wings.  “Cat,” she added breathlessly, “you have to tell me.”

“I swore I wouldn’t tell.”

She punched me on the shoulder.  Though she might look like a dainty little thing, Bee was a bruiser, really mean when she got roused.

“Ouch!”

“You earned it!  I’ve been in love with him forever – ”

“Two weeks!”

“Two months!”  She pressed a hand to her ample bosom, which was heaving under her tightly-laced, high-collared dress.  “I kept the truth of my desperate feelings to myself for fear – ”

“For fear we’d wonder why you’d so suddenly left off being in love with and destined to wed Maester Lukas of the lovely dark curly hair and turned your stalwart heart to the beauty of Maester David of the handsome black eyes.”

“Which you yourself admit are handsome.”

“Yes, he’s almost as pretty as you are, and well aware of it.  He’s the vainest boy I’ve ever met.”

“How can you say so?  The story of how his family escaped from the assault on Sawili by murderous ghouls is heart-breaking.”

“If it’s true.  Anyone can say what they like when there are no witnesses.“

“You just have no heart, Cat.  You’re heartless.”

“Thank the Lady!  The family is well-to-do, that’s certain.  A point in his favor.”

“You’re going to tell me what he said because otherwise I will pour a handful of salt into your breakfast porridge for the next month – ”

“Hush.”

I have good hearing.  I could hear footsteps coming from a mile away, or at least from the landing.  Bee froze with the hand to her chest and face raised – she was still glowering at me – posed unmoving like one of the living re-creations of the honored ancestors in a tableaux at the New Year’s Festival.

“Bianca?  Catherine?”  The voice of Servestra Artistina rose in volume as she entered the room behind us.  We had carefully turned down all the lamps to make it gloomy.  “Darlings?  It’s time to leave for the lecture.”

Although first person felt like a better fit for the story, I nevertheless I worried that first person wouldn’t be effective, that I couldn’t keep it up for an entire novel much less a trilogy, that the “voice” would become tired. I hadn’t yet learned that Cat, in fact, never gets tired of talking.

So I rewrote the scene in third person limited past tense because all my novels until then had been in third person limited past and thus it is the point of view I’m most comfortable with.

Cat and Bee sat in the window-seat with a blanket tucked over their skirts to keep off the chill and the heavy curtains closed over their backs to hide them from anyone who might wander into the sitting room.  Cat’s breath made steam flowers on the windowpanes.  Winter’s cold had come early; it was still a week away from year’s end.  Outside, snow glittered in the square and on the crowns of trees, although the streets had been swept clean.

“What did he say?” Bee whispered.

By the light of the street lamps lining the square outside, Cat could see her cousin flutter her eyelashes in that truly obnoxious way she had, the one that never failed to demolish the objections and reproaches of any adult caught in the beat of those dark wings.  “Cat,” she added breathlessly, “you have to tell me.”

“I swore I wouldn’t tell.”

Bee punched Cat on the shoulder.

“Ouch!”

Though she might look like a dainty little thing, Bee was a bruiser, really mean when she got roused.  “You earned it!  I’ve been in love with him forever – ”

“Two weeks!”

“Two months!  Ever since I had that dream of walking with him through the golden palace undersea – ”  She pressed a hand to her ample bosom, which was heaving under her tightly-laced, high-collared dress.  “ – I have kept the truth of my desperate feelings to myself for fear – ”

“For fear we’d wonder why you’d so suddenly left off being in love with and destined to wed Maester Lukas of the lovely dark hair and turned your stalwart heart to the beauty of Maester David of the handsome black eyes.”

“Which you yourself admit are handsome.”

“Yes, he’s prettier than you are, and well aware of it.  He’s the vainest boy I ever met.”

“How can you say so?  The story of how his family escaped from the assault on Sawili by murderous ghouls is heart-breaking.”

“If it’s true.  Anyone can say what they like when there are no witnesses.“

“You just have no heart, Cat.  You’re heartless.”

“Thank the Lady!  The family is well-to-do, that’s certain.  And his sisters are known to be very clever and maybe touched with a breath of magery .  All points in his favor.”

“You’re going to tell me what he said because otherwise I will pour a handful of salt into your breakfast porridge every morning for the next month – ”

“Hush.”

Cat had good hearing.  She could hear footsteps coming from a mile away, or at least from the landing.  Bee froze with the hand to her chest and face raised – still glowering at Cat – posed unmoving like one of the living re-creations of the honored ancestors in a tableaux at the New Year’s Festival.

“Bianca?  Catherine?”  The voice of Servestra Artistina rose in volume as she entered the dark room. “Darlings?  It’s time to leave for the lecture.”

Two things jumped out at me when I switched point of view.

First, third person had no “pop.” For me, it read flat.

Second, and more importantly, my attempt to write in third person limited felt and read (to me) as if I was instead writing in third person omniscient. I couldn’t get the voice into third person limited because, as I realized, the story had a narrator who was speaking, and that narrator is Cat. So I had to switch back to first person and trust that I would be able to fully “get” her voice right and hold on to it for three volumes.

In the end, writing a trilogy in Cat’s voice proved easy, especially as I discovered the “sound” of her voice. The rhythm of her speech is distinctive, she observes and speaks with a flavor all her own, and she is funny, often on purpose and sometimes inadvertently. That she loves to talk matters to the plot. Better yet, I enjoyed the challenge of filtering the story through her eyes and her words while leaving a little space for the reader to maybe see some things and some characters a little differently than Cat does.

The other thing I learned? Never say never.

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

Three really interesting links today;

Mysterious seasonal black flecks on Mars. If you haven’t read this, do. It’s fascinating, and the photos are stunning.

 

Sex work in pre colonial Nigeria (Igboland):

Sex work as we know it today, in modern Africa, is a vestige of colonialism. As Luise White, who wrote about sex work in colonial Nairobi put it “sex work as a full-time form of labour was invented during the colonial period”. This is not to say that there was no sex work in the pre-colonial period, only that it was entirely different from how we know it today.

Sex work existed in Africa in the pre-colonial era. Back in the day, the female sex worker worked out of the house she was born in. She was a single woman, a woman who was never going to marry, and her clients were usually men who wanted to have affairs (as in most communities, and all but a few situations, it was taboo for a man to have sex with a married woman).

 

Finally, this illustrated time line of Vietnamese Clothing (women’s).

She’s also done Hats and Hair Fashion History of Vietnam.

Which reminds me I need to collate my photo-essay Hairstyles of Angkor Wat from my trip of oh so long ago.

If anyone has links/references to historical clothing timelines and/or just good links for historical clothing, please feel free to share. I can really never get enough illustrations of clothing in an historical perspective and just in a general sense.

 

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

A conversation on Twitter a few weeks ago about the challenges of reviewing books in the new social media got me to thinking about what it must be like to be a book-blogger and/or online reviewer who ends up interacting not just with other readers but with writers and other people in the publishing industry in a way that could not really have happened quite so extensively before.

So I asked reviewer Paul Weimer to write a guest post about his experiences and thoughts. Here it is!  (KE)

 

+++

 

The Stress of their Regard: Book Reviews and the Reactions to them.

by Paul Weimer

 

Like Thomas Jefferson, I cannot live without books. Reading books, be it fiction or nonfiction, an epic fantasy or the life of Cicero, makes up a substantial amount of my recreational time. And like anyone, I form opinions about the book, as I am reading (electronic books are wonderful for this), and after I have read the book.

I am a writer, and so my opinions, observations and perspectives about a book inevitably find themselves committed to words. As an active member of the genre community, these thoughts on books and authors inevitably find publication in a number of online venues.

However, publishing book reviews, especially in a hothouse environment that the world of genre fiction can be, comes with a set of challenges and stresses that threaten to corrode my will and desire to share my opinions. It is those challenges and stresses that I would like to elucidate for you.

It is a tightrope act, for me as a reviewer, to write a book review, whether a book exceeded my expectations, or fell vastly short of them. On the one hand, my personal ethics as a reviewer, and the role I play, mandate honesty in my reviews for books. The currency of respect I earn is only valid if my reviews are an honest assessment of the book I have read, presented in a clear and concise manner. If I am dishonest in my reviews, it will quickly come across the page, and my reviews will be at best unread, and worst, denigrated and shunned.

On the other hand, my place in the genre community means that I am often extremely chatty, virtually and otherwise, with the writers I am reading. Some of them I consider friends. When a book of theirs doesn’t meet all of my expectations, or even worse, falls flat for me, there is a real problem for me as a reviewer and as a person. I don’t have illusions that I move the meter on sales for a writer, much. However, slagging their novel baby or being perceived as having done so, makes me a bad social actor, and a bad friend.

I recently quailed over writing a review of a book that simply fell far short of expectations for me. I like the author. The author likes me. With reservations, I liked the author’s debut effort, but this second effort did not meet my expectations and hopes. Writing a review that is honest and fair, and yet does not cause unintended mental anguish in the friend has been extremely difficult.

On the other hand, when I am confronted with a book I absolutely adore and want to tell the world about, the reverse problem applies. Did I really like the book that much, or am I being too much of a promoter for the author and her work? Am I allowing the friendship and respect I have for the writer and her work to cloud my judgement of flaws and problems with a book? How much of a glowing review is me wishing the author well? How do I convey to the reader genuine enthusiasm and elucidate the real quality of the author’s work? How do I avoid looking like I am fawning over a writer’s work? How do I avoid unknowingly fawning over a book?

These tensions form a conundrum that I continually am confronted with. Keep reviews fair and honest, and remain a responsible social actor with the friends and acquaintances I have made, in readers, fellow reviewers, and authors.  Every book I read, every review I write is a re-assessment of this fundamental problem. Every review is a new change to grapple with these issues. It causes me stress every time I start on a review. It even starts as I am reading a book, wondering what I am going to write about it, how I am going to handle these issues this time out.

So why do I persist? Why do I put myself through this wringer? Why don’t I simply trunk my reviews?  There are two main reasons.

First, any writer, and I am no exception, wants their work to be seen by others. A trunked review is little better than just composing it in my own mind, save for the chance to work on my craft. A writer wants their work to be seen, to be read, to have life beyond their computer screen. I am no exception to this rule. Until my reviews started being published in higher visibility online locales, they languished for lack of attention and feedback. Now, I have people who look forward to my next review, and the reviews have given me offers and opportunities to write other things, in a variety of venues.

Second, I feel like I am providing a useful service. If I can walk that tightrope, and provide fair, balanced, ethical and honest reviews of books, I am providing useful information and feedback out there about books, for readers and authors alike. There are a swath of book review sites which are nothing but glowing reviews of the books they receive, read and review. the reviews at aggregate sites like Amazon are often worse than useless in trying to determine if a book is worth reading, given the propensity for people to use reviews as a way to grind their ax, be it complaints about the cost, jihads against an author, or even stranger obsessions. I like to think my review is far more valuable than that white noise.

So what have I learned? I’ve been reviewing for years, but only in the last year and a half have my reviews had any large amount of visibility due to the venues they have been published in. I have noticed an evolution in my style, improvement in my writing, and an increased readership. I firmly believe that readers and writers reading my work, commenting and talking about my reviews, and in general the greater visibility of my work makes me a better reviewer. I’ve learned from reading my fellow reviewers, as well, studying what they do, what they eschew, and how people react to their work. I have flourished under the pressure.

And so I persist in staying in the stress of their regard as I read and review books.

 

 

Not really a Prince of Amber, but rather an ex-pat New Yorker that has
found himself living in Minnesota for the last 10 years, Paul
“PrinceJvstin” Weimer has been reading SF and Fantasy long before
there was a World Wide Web. He and his book reviews, columns and other
contributions to genre can be found at his own blog, Blog Jvstin
Style,[http://www.skyseastone.net/jvstin ] SF
Signal[http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/author/paulweimer/ ]  the
Functional Nerds[
http://functionalnerds.com/category/book-review/paul-weimer/] ,
Twitter[http://twitter.com/#!/PrinceJvstin ] , Livejournal[
http://princejvstin.livejournal.com/]  and many other places on the
Internet.

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

In my experience both as a writer and as a writer who reads, the writer has a story in their head that is quite vivid. A less experienced writer often does not yet have the tools to fully bring the story fully to life on the page, to express and translate all the vivid emotion and imagery and idea so that another person can experience some measure of what the writer feels for the story.

So, two things:

 

Thing One:

I reckon the reader will never read exactly the story the writer has in mind because the reader brings their own experiences, thoughts, and reactions to the material. In other words, I maintain that it is impossible for any reader to read exactly the book the writer is doing their best to tell. That’s a topic for another post.

Why I make the point is to remind writers that their goal is to bring the story, the ideas, the emotions (whatever element matters most to the writer) to the reader in the strongest way possible, in a way that to the best of their ability and the limits of language makes a connection between the text and the reader.

Techniques that help create and strengthen that bridge between the writer’s construct which lives in the head of the writer and the reader’s interaction with the story are an important aspect of writing craft.

Thing Two:

Most often the biggest problem I see with manuscripts is that the writer has an interesting story to tell but the word choice, pacing, and deployment of plot and details hamper the story. They get in the way of the story rather than bringing the story into focus.

In my opinion, revision is the hardest part of the process to learn and to teach.

The process of learning to find the right words in the right order is so complex that, yes, I still struggle with it all the time. I am, I hope, still getting more proficient, getting better, learning from my mistakes — because I still make mistakes. Every novel I’ve published so far has mistakes in it that I haven’t been able to recognize until after it has been published and sometimes not for several years when I have left it far enough behind that I can finally get a decent sense of perspective about it.

A Way To Revise: Thinking About Necessary Words

The key to an effective scene is to use the words you need, in the order you need them in. This is a truism that is far easier to say than to do.

Probably your early draft uses words you don’t need, or lacks some words you do need. The more words you use which you don’t need, the more those unneeded words diffuse the intensity of the experience of the words and story. Additionally, in some places it may be the story could use intensifiers to highlight and clarify the emotion and emotion. That lack at certain crucial spots makes it harder for the reader to connect.

So how do you figure out which words you need and which are unnecessary?

There are many strategies for doing this. Mine is AN answer, not THE answer.

Let me repeat that. This is a way to think about revising. It is not the only way, the best way, or anything except one possible way out of many.

Here are some ways to think about the words.

1.    What is this scene about? What does the scene do both as a discrete scene and in the context of the entire story? If necessary, you can outline a scene or do a bullet points breakdown of what must be in the scene in order for the scene to have the impact you want it to have.
2.    Once you have figured out what is absolutely necessary, carefully consider every word and sentence and paragraph you use, every detail mentioned, every aside, thought, comment, and action.
3.    Identify which are necessary to allow the scene to do its rightful work.
4.    Beware of asides and tangents that are important to you, the writer, and which may contain information that you, the writer, know and which is important for you to know but which is not necessary for the reader to know. Cut those.
5.    Especially at the beginning of a novel, the reader has to process every piece of information you give her. Every piece. Those elements of the story which are familiar are easier to process. Those elements of story which are presented in ways that are familiar are easier to process. Elements of the story which are unfamiliar–and this can include literary devices, unfamiliar settings and words, each new character not to mention any necessary backstory–slow down and/or weigh down the reader’s intake and can cause the pacing to seem slow or the material to seem difficult. This is not a good or bad thing depending on the type of story you’re writing; some stories are meant to be dense and chewy. Just be sure your text fits the kind of story and pacing you are aiming for.
6.    The flip side of too much information is too little. Is there enough context? Are the characters faceless, personality-less stick figures who do nothing but say dialogue and take actions that have no emotional or situational context? Context is part of what allows the reader to identify with the story, the setting, the characters, the plot.
7.    Seek the balance: The reader needs to know enough to get involved and to figure out the basic context of the story but not so much that she bogs down or gets confused or overwhelmed by information dump or overload or just plain ordinary digression and unnecessary details (see 4 above).

Take a scene or a first chapter or several scenes and break them down in this way, then see what you have left (or what you need to add).

There’s far more to revision than this, obviously, but this is one way to start.

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.