I just had the opportunity to read Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, and Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein all in fairly quick succession. I’d recommend the same to any aspiring SF writer, and not just because they’re all good books in their own right. The three books are a triptych that illustrates how broadly a single subject can be approached, and shows how an author’s politics (or more broadly, an author’s beliefs about how the universe works) inform a narrative.This trio, when viewed from a distance, show a very similar story. A future cadet from planet earth joins a unified human military force as an infantryman. The military is embroiled in an interstellar war against alien forces and uses its starship-based high-tech infantry in a role roughly equivalent to armored cavalry units. The cadet starts in basic training/boot camp and sees fellow cadets screw up (sometimes fatally) but manages to squeak by training, entering the infantry as a private. The new private sees action, more people die in action, and he sees at least one major battle screwed up royally. He rises into the officer ranks and sees his last action (in the book at least) in a battle that ends as a qualified success (at least the important characters survived.)Of course, at ground level where the narrative meets the road, you’d be hard pressed to find three more divergent treatments of the same subject. Some examples that more than likely grow out of each author’s point of view:
From the “this surprises you why?” department:Random House was going to publish a book titled The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones, a historical novel that features one of Mohammad’s wives, and has decided “oops, bad idea.” Quoth Random House in the Washington Post Op-Ed, “after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received "from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.” Apparently one of those credible sources was an American academic named Denise Spellberg (sage advice from the Smart Bitches, do not let this woman blurb your book) who got an advance copy and apparently got her knickers in a prudish little twist (you see Muhammad had wives, and gasp, may have had sex with them) and made a “frantic” call to the editor of a popular Muslim website (this book made her frantic) and asked him to warn Muslims about this nasty, evil, book that “made fun of Muslims and their history.” And apparently, armed only with Spellberg’s description of this “very ugly, stupid piece of work,” not having read it himself, he did exactly what she asked, warning people of the coming literary apocalypse. And, of course, offense spreads like wildfire.But what seems to be the trigger that caused the book to be pulled was Spellberg’s own warning to her own editor at another imprint at Random House. According to Spellberg, if the book was released there was “a very real possibility of major danger for the building and staff and widespread violence.” Apparently she babbled on like an islamaphobic neocon frightened by Obama’s middle name. The Terrorists would kill them all if the book saw the light of day. Her warning was bounced around the email servers at Random House until the book was pulled less than a month later.Spellberg might count Random House’s withdrawl of the book as some sort of victory, but I wonder if she realizes that encouraging them to stomp this book by using threats of violence is casting Islam in a much more vile light before a much broader audience than the book’s publication ever would have.
The good news is that I got Valentine's Night polished up, printed out, and sent off to Eleanor today. This is the second spec manuscript I've written in as many years, in addition to finishing off Prophets for DAW. Here's hoping it does as well as Lilly's Song. This means, now that I got the rewrites done on three novels, I get to start on the next book in the Apotheosis Trilogy sometime before the end of the month. This means the counters will finally start moving again.Now, the reason I'm not starting the new book right now leads me to the bad news. . .You see, my mother-in-law has dementia and has moved into assisted living. This is a good thing, as she is, to put it kindly, obstinate and difficult to deal with. As in there was no way we would ever get her to agree to move, we had to check her into the ER after she wandered off and have her shipped directly from the hospital to the assisted living facility the following Monday. She's royally pissed at my wife, when she's coherent, but she now gets three meals a day, social interaction, and the occasional shower.The bad news is her house. I get to spend this weekend cleaning out a house that hasn't been vacuumed, dusted, tidied or otherwise cleaned out in nearly a decade. Parts of it are near collapse. There's mold, bugs, rats and things I don't even want to think about. I'm afraid I'm about to run out of dumpster. I'm exhausted, and I've barely started on what promises to be a very long weekend.The way I get through crap like this? I promise myself that it will make it into a story someday.
I just finished an advance copy of a neat book, (I’ll blog about it later— it’s due Feb 09 from Tor, so I have time.) and it got me thinking of a common narrative problem in speculative fiction. It is perhaps most obvious in superhero movies (I alluded to it in my Iron Man review) but it’s true for a broad class of speculative fiction, and for lack of a better term I’ll call it the “Origin Story Problem.” The problem is simple, the story itself concerns some ordinary person— at least “ordinary” in the fact that the character’s original status quo doesn’t include any paranormal/speculative elements— who through some means or other comes to grips with some kind of extraordinary knowledge/powers/abilities. This is a staple of superhero movies and comics, but it’s also recognizable across the broad swath of SF/Fantasy— normal guy becomes werewolf/vampire, stumbles on alternate universe, invents a zero-point power source, goes back in time, develops telekinesis.The “Origin Story Problem” comes from the fact that it is very easy to obsess too much about the discovery phase of the neat idea, whatever it is. It becomes tempting to spend half a book exploring all the ramifications about the black box, before realizing “hey, there needs to be a conflict here.” Then, suddenly out of nowhere, we get a whole series of new characters and plot developments to threaten our hero. The pattern is a staple of bad TV pilots.To address the “Origin Story Problem,” and make the story seem a cohesive whole, the main conflict of the story needs to become an integral part of all the story. i.e. The vampire hunters that are threatening to stake our newly-undead heroine need to be present before page 300. Or, more broadly, the story problems resolved in the climax need to be at least implicit in the beginning of the story.There are several ways to do this convincingly:
I turned in the editorial revisions for Prophets today, which means that I am officially done with it. It got a bit longer which is why all the counters moved around. Next task, is a second round of editorial edits on Lilly's Song, which are relatively minor and should only take a couple of days. Then I need to do a revision of Valentine's Night before I give it to Eleanor to shop around.Then I'll be writing new stuff. . .
I just got my contributor copy of Future Americas, the latest anthology by John Helfers and Martin H. Greenberg. My story within, "Family Photos," which I mentioned before, is probably one of the darkest things I've ever written in any genre. Dark enough that I still half believe that I scared away most of my writer's workshop when I ran it through the Hamsters.
No I didn't forget about them, it's just this little old thing called revision. See, when I finish a novel and turn it into an editor, it isn't really finished. Since you all saw those counters grind to a halt I've been stuck revising Lilly's Song for Bantam, and I'm currenly revising Prophets for DAW. I will also be spending the rest of this month revising Valentine's Night before I finally hand it off to Eleanor. Then I'll be doing new stuff, working on the second Apotheosis book.
I just finished watching the anime The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi in the original broadcast order, which renders it the most non-linear TV show I've ever seen outside of Lost. Only two pairs of shows in the 14-episode series follow each other chronologically. And it works, not just on a narrative level, but thematically with the low-key but extremely surreal nature of the show.It lead me to thinking about the nature of chronology in storytelling. It is something that beginning writers are often explicitly told not to screw around with. Everyone, I think, has been told by someone (usually they're trying to be helpful) to NEVER use a flashback. Of course, that's somewhat bogus information, akin to telling a three-year old to NEVER touch the stove. Right now they're only going to hurt themselves, but when they grow up, they'll have to cook themselves dinner.So the whole array of frame stories, flashbacks, braided narratives can be filed under "advanced techniques, use with caution" along with dialect, second person POV, unreliable narrators, and unsympathetic protagonists. Nothing wrong with them, they're just easy to screw up.However, both Lost and Suzumiya Haruhi show how to use the technique well. First thing, always ground your audience in space and time before commencing a narrative in a new time period. Lost does this both with a contrast in settings and a musical sting, Suzumiya Haruhi begins each episode with narration placing us in a specific time during the school year.Another good practice, if you're flipping back and forth, is to carry narrative threads from one sequence to the next sequence that follows chronologically. In almost every Lost episode we see this happening, both the Island narrative and the Off-Island narrative move forward in time as the episode progresses, and it also spans episodes such as this year's storyline showing Jack's disintegration after he leaves the Island. With Suzumiya Haruhi the narrative (in the broadcast sequence) often jumps across an episode, where a cliffhanger will be picked up after an intervening episode that happens later or earlier, the nature of a cliffhanger helping maintain the momentum of the suspended storyline— much as US TV uses season finales to carry over a summer hiatus.Most important, both use a non-linear chronology to build tension toward a climax. Both this season of Lost and Suzumiya Haruhi are narrative spirals, essentially circling around to a climactic event that happens, chronologically, in the middle of the narrative. This can be a very effective technique when used well, since the importance of the climax builds not only on our knowledge of what led to it, but our knowledge of its consequences.
At least according to our latest asshat, none other than Stephen King. I’ve never thought of him as having a big mouth, but apparently it is just large enough to hold a foot. Quoth King:
I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's, it's not as bright. So, that's my little commercial for that.
As the whole Cassie Edwards story pointed out, it is hard to be a plagiarist these days. Anyone with just a little suspicion can use the internet to correctly attribute just about anything, so it is a stupid, stupid, thing to do. The kind of thing you really only expect from people who never had the proper academic grounding, or a good English teacher flunking them for appropriating someone's words. . .Then again, if your English teacher was James Twitchell, I expect that flunking his students for plagiarism was not all that high on his priority list. Seems he's owned up to plagiarizing sections of his book for Simon & Schuster, Shopping for God. (via GalleyCat)In his own words (we hope):
It's my responsibility to make sure that the words and ideas are my own and, if not, that they are properly credited. In many cases, I have not done this. [...] I have used the words of others and not properly attributed them. I am always in a hurry to get past descriptions to make my points, a hurry that has now rightly resulted in much shame and embarrassment. I have cheated by using pieces of descriptions written by others.
My existential title crisis is over!And and the winner is: *drumroll*Lilly's SongNow we just need to decide if it's "A Wolfbreed Novel" or "A Novel of the Wolfbreed"
ADDENDUM: Charlie Stross gets in on the act.God do I love Scalzi's posts sometimes. Before I get into details, I should point out the origin of this meme in the actions of one asshat extrordinaire, Deborah MacGillivray who engaged in gaming the Amazon.com review system, mobilizing internet stormtroopers to vote down and report negative reviews as abuse and, in the height of insanity, precipitated a pile-on victimizing a single poor reviewer who complained about her tactics, to the tune of collecting personal information, making threats and generally behaving like a stalker a few pages short of a copy of Catcher in the Rye. Punchline? The reviewer so abused had dared to post a three-star review.Scalzi's response to this insanity seemed highly appropriate and psychologically healthy. He posted a selection of his own one-star reviews, and provided the following challenge:
[...] [T]o other authors with blogs, LiveJournals and etc: Post your one-star (or otherwise negative) Amazon reviews, if you have them, and you probably do. Oh, go on. Own your one-star reviews, man. And then, you know. Get past them. If you’re lucky, some of them might actually be fun to read.
It's a mystery with any real conclusions. It moves from accusations of one group to accusations of another. The conclusion of the book is not supported by any facts in the story. It was merely conclusions that could have been taken any number of ways.The authors writing left something to be desired. The use of big words added nothing to the story and did nothing but slow me down. It was as if the author was trying to show off his intelligence.The use of profanity was unnecessary. The use of profanity by characters added nothing to the character development. There was no point to having it in the book.Finally the book has very little to do with dragons. The first dragon dies in the prologue and the only other dragon in the story adds nothing to the story line. The title of the book is misleading.
It's sad to be excited about a book beacause of all the good reviews here on Amazon, and then to find it is filled with racial stereotypes. I suppose this book is fine for people of European descent, but people of color like myself might be put off by the use racial slurs like "Japs" and "wetbacks" which are used by the main character. Am I supposed to like this character? The dipiction of black people also left me saddened. This book wasn't written in the 50's, was it? And here I thought he was going to be using the concept of the moreau as a critique of rasicism as opposed to more of the same old, same old.
This book is not a new concept. Stephen King and Dean Koontz have written about telekinesis and evil organizations attempting to control and experiment upon those with telekinesis before. It's not a crime not to start out with an original concept: authors do it all the time. But what Krane failed to do was to provide an original slant and original characters. I couldn't look at any of the characters and think of someone they reminded me of or that one of them might be someone I'd like to meet. They weren't believable. Especially not Chuck. What teenager talks like that? He was full of annoying anachronisms.
This is one of the worst books I've ever read. Very difficult for the reader to keep track of the twenty-odd characters in "The Game." The characterizations are poor and no reason is given for the reader to care about these people. The plot is so tenuous and obscure that it is an effort to maintain interest. By the time you find out what has been happening and why - you just don't give a d---. This writer knows very little about writing - at least in this genre - and I will not read anything else he writes. Save your time and money. If I could have rated it lower than one star, I would have.
"Irreconcilable editorial differences."That's the word as Signet and Cassie Edwards part ways.Thanks to the Smart Bitches for the tip. (Or, if you're the AP, the Smart B------)
I wrote an earlier post about starting a story off, and today (via Lynn Viehl's blog) I discovered the One Sentence website that "is about telling your story, briefly. Insignificant stories, everyday stories, or turning-point-in-your-life stories, boiled down to their bare essentials." In other words, one sentence long short stories. The site is like literary crack, but I think it offers more than extreme ADD story fixes. Most all the sentences published share an interesting thing in common, they would make excellent hooks for a longer work. Now, don't go swiping anyone's sentence without permission, but if you look at the site, it seems that thinking in terms of "story in one sentence" is an excellent way to begin. Go there and see if you wouldn't be interested in continuing reading if these had a second sentence. . . or a hundredth.
Well, I might be behind the curve here, but I didn't realize how deeply Google had been stepping up to contribute to ultimate universal omniscience. Last I paid attention to their "street view" feature it was still in beta, then today I was playing around with it and noticed they got most of Cleveland mapped out. Above is the house where I spent a good part of my adolescence, below is the house I owned before my current residence. While my current house is visible in the satellite view at high enough resolution to see a red Ford F150, it hasn't made it into the street view yet. While this is great as a writer (the last chase scene I wrote was done with the help of the overhead satellite imagery) it is sort of creepy having the world as first-person shooter. . .
Just saw an interesting post on The Feminist SF Blog that draws attention to one of those little cultural blind spots that are really useful in worldbuilding. You know, the kind of thing everyone takes for granted, so when they read about another culture (real or fictional) that does it differently they're all like "whoa."In this particular case, it starts off by noting that female reproductive parts et al. tend to be named after male doctors, scientists and so on. It got me thinking less about the patriarchy of it all (since, one presumes, as gender becomes more equitably represented in the sciences, the number of female eponyms will likewise increase) but about the narcissism of it all. The fact that science is rife with terms originating with individual people seems an interesting quirk, and it would imply something very "other" about a society that doesn't do so.
Well, since I finished up the Wolfbreed rewrite, I haven't done much writing. I guess I just needed to rest the old story muscle for a bit. Also, the next thing I'm working on is Heretic, the second book in the Apotheosis Trilogy. This means going straight from a rewrite of a medieval historical dark fantasy-cum-romance into a full-blown post-singular space opera. If I didn't take a bit of a break, I'd probably pull something from the cognitive whiplash. I plan to get going on that next week, but in the meantime I've been playing with the Title Scorer on Lulu.com.As any reader of this blog knows, I've been racking my brain for a title for Wolfbreed #1 now that we've decided that will be a series title. I have been playing with titles (most of which suck) and now I have at lest some objective measure of how "good" they are.Here's some examples with prospective titles I've been kicking around:
Well, I've gotten through most of the editorial rewrite of Wolfbreed #1 (Yeah, I know, but I just e-mailed Anne a bunch of title ideas) and I'm going to go over copy-editing type stuff this weekend and hopefully send out the final draft to her and Eleanor by Monday. Most all the changes were due to genre considerations. I was fortunately expecting this, as I didn't really know what genre I was writing until I finished the book. It was a horror/fantasy/historical/romance mashup, and the final rewrite was toning down a little (ok a lot) of the horror, and ramping up the romance. 90% of this was all a matter of tone and emphasis, the only events in the novel that changed were the ending and some additional scenes of backstory. Most of what I did was crank the viscera meter down from 11. (Actual critique quote from draft 1.5: "You have quite a dismemberment theme going here.")
Now that I finished the unscheduled spec novel (the first draft anyway) I am now in the throes of doing an editorial rewrite on Wolfbreed #1 (did I mention I need titles?) which will probably take me through mid-April (tax day, wheee). After that's done the plan is now to attack the second book of Apotheosis, and then Wolfbreed #2 (Did I mention, yeah, I think I did.) and then finish off Apotheosis.Since what I laid out there is about 18 months work, and a lot can happen in a year and a half, this probably only has a marginal relation to reality. But the upshot is, I'm in re-write land, so we won't have any counters moving for a month or so.
The first line is always a bitch. Every story needs a hook to draw the reader into it, and your primary tool is those first few words on the first page. Intimidating to think that the entire weight of thousands and thousands of words can be sitting on the shoulders of, at most, a few dozen. Now there are no rues about openings, and there are as many ways to begin as there are novels. My own personal impulse is to compress as many story elements as I can into the first couple of sentences. I want a character doing something, a setting, a sense of conflict or some problem the character is dealing with, some emotion, and a feeling of the tone of the piece. Yes, that's asking a lot of a sentence or two, but it can be done. Here's the first paragraph of Valentine's Night:
“Happy birthday to me,” Toni muttered, toasting the empty chair across from her. She drained the remnants of her cosmopolitan and set the cocktail glass clinking next to a pair of its older, deceased siblings.
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