But Enough About Me!

Recently it has been brought to my attention that a number of novels have been released for free viewing/download/reading on the internets, some of which I haven't yet read and want to read, and I figure you may, too.

C. C. Finlay's new American Revolution urban fantasy (my description, not his!), The Patriot Witch.

Sean Williams' The Crooked Letter: Books of the Cataclysm One, which I've been wanting to read for ages (in part because it is part of a series, and I love me those series).

The launch of the Suvudu Free Library with interesting titles and more to come!

Season Two of Shadow Unit featuring our very own Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette.

And finally (updated as per comment below, because I meant to flag this when it first went live): BookView Cafe, a consortium of writers whose web offerings include free fiction.

If you have free fiction posted to the internets, please mention it here in comments if you'd like. Spread the word!

See, I don't have to go see films any more unless I'm really really sure I'll love them. I just send chibicharibdys who hits the main points of my problem with most of the films these days: it's all about the Man.

Read her review of The Dark Knight here.

In terms of films and books, my patience for watching films or reading stories in which only one or two women appear, who then have no agency and function only in terms of their (sexual or maternal) relationship with one or more of the men, has pretty much plunged to nothing.

I'm not talking about films like, say, Lawrence of Arabia in which, in the context of the story, there genuinely is no public space for women. I'm talking about epic fantasy or superhero movies or children's animated flicks or pretty much anything in which the writer/director/whatever cannot conceptually find space for females in a landscape that is more or less 50% women. I have the same lack of patience for film/stories that, in a similar intersectional vein, cannot find conceptual space for an ethnically, religiously, or culturally diverse cast in landscapes where, in fact, such diversity exists.

Yet time and again works so lacking conceptually may be described as cutting edge, ground breaking, provocative, and so on, when for me, from my perspective, it's just the same old same old styled up in fancier effects and clothing and with maybe a little more blood and gore. I have been around long enough now to state pretty categorically that, no, it's not new, it's just the same story. And I'm bored of it.

It seems we see certain relationships explored over and over again in our genre (I do not exempt myself from this observation), so I was intrigued when I read David B. Coe’s A Sorcerer's Plague to discover that the primary relationship explored in this book is between a man and his son-in-law. How often do you see that in sff? Pretty cool.

So I asked David:

Fantasy often seems full of the same old same old relationships: fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, lovers, comrades in arms, and so on, so much so that I think it's easy to forget how often these relationships are reprised until an unusual one comes along. What inspired you to make the central relationship in A Sorcerer's Plague the relationship between a man and his son-in-law? And to explore it and play it out in the way you did?


And David replied:

Interesting question with what I'm afraid might be a disappointing answer. When I first started planning the series and writing The Sorcerers' Plague, I thought that Besh would go off alone. But as soon as I got into the book, into the characters -- not only Besh, but also those around him -- I realized that this made no sense at all. In a way, the characters TOLD me that it made no sense. His friends and family wouldn't have allowed it. Well, at that point, Sirj became the obvious choice to be his companion, because I'd already introduced tension into their relationship, and I always enjoy throwing together characters who don't want to be together. (My characters torment me day and night with their stories, their faults, their crises -- this is one way in which I like to get my revenge.)

As to how the relationship emerged, I think in a sense it says much more about Besh as a character than it does about Sirj. Besh is wise, brave, strong, but he's also stubborn and opinionated, and he formed an opinion about Sirj early on that was off base and unfair. He is highly protective of his family -- that's really why he agrees to go on this quest (mission?) in the first place. Well, that same quality has a darker side as well, as do so many human qualities. In my opinion humans are creatures shaded in grey. Nothing is simply good or simply bad. Besh's pride and his love of his family give him strength, but they also are sources of darker sides of his personality. In a way, Sirj is an embodiment of all the personality flaws that hold Besh back. The development of their friendship is, thus, symbolic of Besh's growth as a character through the book and the series.

The other answer to all this is that I'm the father of two brilliant beautiful girls and no man they find (much, MUCH later in life -- they can start dating when they're 30) will ever be good enough for me. (Me being Besh.) But I also know that I married a brilliant, beautiful woman, and her father and I have a terrific friendship. Since my own father died, Nancy's Dad has come to fill a very special place in my emotional life. (Me being Sirj.) I have elements of both men inside me, as do, I believe, many fathers of girls. Writing the relationship between these two men was very much an internal dialog for me.



I didn't find this answer disappointing in the least, so you may *whap* David as you wish.

Meanwhile, what unusual relationships have you read or written? Why?

This is not a review. I am not particularly good at writing reviews of books, nor do I like doing so (I don't mind writing up very short reviews of films and tv shows, though--go figure).

What I have been meaning to do for months now--better late than never--is post very short interviews with authors of books I've read within the last year or, uh, so. Those interviews, in my conception, would deal specifically with one aspect of the work that I thought particularly well done. (This is not to say that other aspects of the work weren't well done, just that I want to and can focus on one thing.)

My first foray into this exploration was meant to be Scott Westerfeld's The Midnighters Trilogy, in which I discussed his use of the trilogy form here, only I never followed up with an interview question.

Today I bring you Sherwood Smith.

Why? you may ask. As if the answer is not self evident, since I think sartorias is a fine writer.

But I wanted to ask Smith about world-building, something she does particularly well in general, and exceptionally well in this series (the third book, King's Shield, is due to be published in Summer 2008, I believe).

Herewith, my self explanatory questions and Smith's answers:


When I read Inda and The Fox, I felt that you, the author, could at any point in the story, at any location, describe that location in physical and social detail--that is, in the very same way you could describe any other place you have really been in the real world. How thoroughly do you actually know the world of Inda? Is the seeming depth an illusion managed by careful deployment of stage sets that merely seem three dimensional, or have you really thought it all through to that level?

Well, I realized, when I was nineteen and having trouble (with zero skills) figuring what time it was where, I needed a globe. And the perfect idea came to me: a beach ball! It was cheap, collapsible so I could take it along when traveling, and it had the time zones already painted on it! I do need to make a new one, and will probably do that this year, now that I'm semi-retired, but that beach ball globe has served me well since 1970. I also have an atlas, on which I drew detailed local maps on one side of the page, and on the facing page, notes of geographic, economic, environmental, and political details. I began that in the seventies, and have worked on it ever since. So...yeah there's a lot of detail, but I'm always learning more. I think of it as like visiting Google Earth. You think you know a region, but when you focus in, there's always something new to be discovered.

As to the implied question, I'd been thinking for decades about what lay behind many cultural, political, and familial traditions and idiosyncracies of the main storyline, which I've been working on the bulk of my life. It seemed time to delve into the history, to [uncover] at least one layer of ruins, mysteries, etc. If I do it right, there will be resonance farther up the timeline.



How many years have you been working in this world?

Since 1959. (I was eight years old.)



How many versions of Inda's story have you written? What draft is this, that finally saw publication?

I don't know. Call it three 'version' if 'draft' is what you have when you go over a ms tweaking, cutting, expanding, clarifying. Since the context here is writing, I'll be a bit more detailed: In the first version, the one you beta-read several years ago, I crammed the entire story into one massive book. The first part of what is now INDA changed somewhat, but the later parts were mostly the highlight or dramatic scenes. Betsy Wollheim, on buying it, asked for it to be two books, which meant unpacking scenes I'd truncated or referred to obliquely, hoping that velocity would whiz the reader right along. The structure broke naturally at what is now the end of part one of THE FOX. It's a fairly climactic sequence. But it wasn't practical to issue two books of that size. So the story got broken into three, Since I'd seen the breakdown as six parts all along (three per book) it seemed all right to break that into three books of two parts each, except that the end of the first book was an awful cliffhanger, without much vestige of resolution.

Within those three versions, many, many, many drafts. Not enough, of course--not if one is a visual writer who 'sees' the story so clearly that one doesn't really 'see' the words one is dashing down. My rewrites are a constant battle against my own cinema brain, in an effort to see what words I actually got down, and attempt to make them more effective. That means going back over time after time. I think I passed thirty on the end of part one in Fox--I know I'm well past thirty in the first two thirds of the last book, being done right now.

I've been putting holds and requests on books, and remembered that I need to catch up on a series that I had started but not yet continued. Here's the catalog subject list - can you guess what this is?

Subjects
# Women journalists -- Fiction.
# Family-owned business enterprises -- Fiction.
# Merchants -- Family relationships -- Fiction.
# Boston (Mass.) -- Fiction.


( answer behind the cut )

I've posted on SFNovelists on the elevator pitch, or, what can one say when people ask what the new book is about?

Remember Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown, that I mentioned some days ago?

Here's a fabulous review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review section (10/14). (This link should skip the login portal; it does for me, anyway.)