Three early memories about stories

Twixt Love and Honor/The Duel, chromolithograph from a painting by Laslett John Pott.
Twixt Love and Honor/The Duel, chromolithograph from a painting by Laslett John Pott.
Credit: instappraisal.com.

The first story I remember writing was called “The Burglar and the Bear.” It was written with cherry-scented markers on notebook paper, and I was in second grade.

I’m pretty sure I remember the genesis of this story, too — a jar you could pull story prompts out of in my second-grade classroom. It might have been part of the ongoing project where we created our own “anthology” in a blank journal we were given — or maybe that was third grade. Either way, I kept at it even when I wasn’t getting graded on it.

At around the same time, I started playing a game with other girls in my class during recess; we would pretend we were dogs, living under a picnic bench, which happened to be in Alaska. (I don’t even know). We were each different breeds of dogs, most of which we knew of thanks to pages of full-color photographs of different breeds in the school library’s encyclopedias. I think I was a beagle. Someone else picked an Alaskan malamute, because I guess a Siberian husky wasn’t interesting enough?

Eventually I started writing them down, because if they were entertaining enough to play out once, they were entertaining enough to read about later, right?

When my dad was visiting recently, I spent a long time sitting in my car in the parking lot of the Home Depot, reading. Far from being unpleasant, it was a nostalgic feeling (and definitely preferable to spending an hour arguing with Matt and my father about cement).

Why was this so comfortable for me? It reminded me of the number of times I stayed behind in the car as a child.

Not through any neglect on the part my parents, understand. We traveled a lot by car, because plane tickets were often out of reach. My parents were also antique dealers, so we stopped at every garage, rummage, tag, yard, or estate sale we found, as well as every fleamarket and antique shop. When a ten-year-old nerdy girl gets bored of staring at Depression glass, she goes back to her books.

And my books were in the car.

And we lived in an era in which it wasn’t seen as vast neglect to do this. Dude, the windows (and doors) were open, I wasn’t suffocating. I was happy reading Marion Zimmer Bradley while my parents “invested” in boxes of heat-resistant chocolate bars from the first Gulf War.

This was one way in which I coped with the stuff my parents found interesting and I found boring.

(Another way was building stories from the paintings and knick-knacks and furniture that surrounded me–pretending I was a princess in a nebulous fantasy-land composed of netsuke, ruby flash souvenir glass, faux-ormolu clocks and cigar-box Romantic art. That’s the next anecdote).

It was also how I managed stuff which was too much, emotionally, for me to handle. I remember sitting in the car in a cemetery in Connecticut at the burial of one of my parents’ friends, for example.

Over my seldom-used writing desk, I still have a print that used to be hanging in my mom’s antique shop — called “Twixt Love and Honor,” it depicts two 18th-century gentlemen about to duel over a woman’s honor.

Recently, I researched the print, and found it was a chromolithograph based on an 1892 painting by Laslett Pott. (Which itself might have been a colorized version of an 1886 engraving called “The Duel”). In the late 19th century you could apparently send in 25 tobacco wrappers from the Wilson and McCalley Tobacco Company to purchase this or one of two other framed prints in the series. (I think they’re the ones who added the “TWIXT LOVE AND HONOR” text, as by all accounts that was not the name Pott gave the painting).

I realize by any aesthetic standard, this isn’t a beautiful picture. For all I know, Pott could have been the Thomas Kinkade of his day, and the artifact itself is mass-produced, its frame and backing falling apart, faded with years of sun exposure. But it’s beautiful to me.

It hangs over my writing desk because… this is where it all began. I distinctly remember walking around my mom’s antique shop before school one day (middle school), creating stories from the objects I found there. My story for this one was not quite the same as the one implied by the art; I was convinced it showed a couple being set upon by bandits at a crossroads. I didn’t even notice the print’s name; I only learned it when I asked my mom, “remember that print that used to hang in your shop…?” At that time, she told me she’d never sold it, and sent it on to me.

I’m not sure what the point of this post is, but these are three stories about stories, remnants of my youth, that I wanted to share.

What are your early memories of stories?

Crossover thoughts, or: the weightlessness of us as things around begin to shift

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Credit: crossfox.us (although they appear to no longer be selling this item on their site — I found it on Pinterest)

Crossover, a new Accelerant LARP starting in spring 2016, is now accepting character concepts.

I alluded else-web to having hesitations about playing, and I wanted to elaborate on that a bit.

To be clear, my hesitations have very little to do with the game itself. By all accounts the staff is experienced and talented, and this will be a great game.

What is — currently — keeping me from playing is a bevy of personal issues.

So here are my hesitations:

1. Do I even have time for another boffer larp?

Right now I only PC one boffer larp (5G Silverfire). Which, yes, is fewer games per year than most Accelerant larps.

But I have perm NPC commitments to Shadows of Amun and Cottington Woods. I also have promised to generally show up and NPC 5G Wrathborn games.

Shadows and Cottington are ending, but not until Crossover has already started. Which means that if I played XO, I’d have NO FREE WEEKENDS AT ALL OMG next spring.

I like free weekends. I like them a lot. I’d go so far as to say they are necessary to my physical and mental health. Last spring, I got very ill before I was supposed to NPC for Wrathborn 1, which was pretty much my body telling me “slow the fuck down, Lise.” Also I just begin to hate myself and the world and everybody else in it. So, you know. NBD.

It’s not just the larp weekends themselves, even. There are all the other weekends and week nights where I sacrifice whatever else I want to do (writing, playing ESO, reading, dicking around on the internet, getting drunk, whatever) to prep for the games. Writing character histories. Making costuming. Reading rules docs and generating a character. Memorizing calls and incants. Sparring/fight practice. NPCing other games to get CP.

I realize time is wibbly-wobbly, and to some extent it’s a question of priority. But that’s something only I can decide.

2. I’m not sure how well my character concept fits in the world.

See, I do have a character concept. I even have an entire Pinterest board for a character who may never exist.

Almost a year ago now, I saw the Faithful of the Moon theme and zeroed in on it. I decided I wanted to make some sort of elvish rogue, inspired partially by Warcraft’s night elves, partially by the Elder Scrolls Dunmer. Like the Dunmer’s Morag Tong, she was going to be from a culture that practiced sanctioned, legal assassination… until suddenly it wasn’t acceptable, and she was left holding the bag, banished from her homeland to make an example for the benefit of outsiders.

I did talk to Kat D, one of the staff, about my concept yesterday, and she seemed to think this was an idea that can fit in well as a native of Ariath — there are elves, there is a region which is, at the start of game, basically a mass of small warring countries that would be perfect for her to be from, and the concept would not need to be as melee-dependent as I feared. (I suck at melee).

So that was encouraging.

Then I went home and had CRAZY IDEAS and suddenly I was awake at 2am writing a character history for her. (Feel free to read, if you don’t mind being spoiled if I do play. It is… very rough, and everything you would expect from my 2am brain).

I still have hesitations — I think I am too much the writer, and not sure this character and culture I’ve created have a place in Ariath. I don’t love the name I’ve given her — it is quite literally the name of the nelf rogue I used to play in WoW.

But.

In the process of writing this, I came up with a concept which could get around my hesitation #3:

3. Other people

L’enfer, c’est les autres, eh?

This is not a slight on any of my MANY friends who are playing. It’s just… they’re all way more into this than I am?

The folks who are playing the faun race, the Hindren, have literally been planning this for two years now. They have all their ties already set up, already know their builds, already have their team. This is true of other, less furry groups, too.

Crossover already feels very cliqueish to me — not that I want to be part of any particular group I know exists. But I’m worried I’m always going to be on the outside looking in.

But if I have a character who has given up everything she has ever known, and who must build her life all over again… well, then it makes sense starting game with no more than weak ties to other characters. It will be challenging, but instead of a social challenge for Lise-the-player, it becomes an RP challenge. How does she fit in here, how does she show her value?

Relatedly, I just read a book which mentioned the story of a Dutch trader in the 17th century who was shipwrecked in Korea, and was forced to spend the rest of his life there, by edict of the king at the time. Quite unpredictably, he thrived; he became a gunsmith for the royal armory, married a Korean woman, and had two sons. When other Dutch showed up thirty years later, he could barely speak his native tongue any more. That second batch were held to the same edict; most of them tried to escape and were generally pretty unhappy there.

Which got me to thinking: what is it like to never be able to go home? What makes some people thrive in that situation, and others founder?

Having lived abroad, I know exactly how bewildering that first month, three months, a year are. I remember thinking, in my first weeks in France, how different everything was; how it was like learning to live again.

That’s the kind of feeling I want to capture with Melesarla — a native of Ariath, but still an outsider.

If I play.

Which I still don’t know 🙁

How about you? Are you playing? Will you try to sway me one way or another? 😉

Links and Accomplishments, 8/23/15 to 8/29/15

Links

Steve Brust’s post about Who Really Runs the Hugo Awards gave me a chuckle. It’s not the cabal you thought it was!

The two sets of instructions I smooshed together to make the chemise mentioned below (not noted as finished, because I still need to hem it): one from Reconstructing History, and another from elizabethancostume.net. I used primarily the RH one, which was as confusing as I usually find their instructions to be; thankfully, it’s not that hard to figure out how to sew together a bunch of rectangles.

Aside from some tangles with making the casing for the drawstring (I should have heeded source #2’s advice on adding the casing before sewing on the arms), it went together fairly easily, which was a relief after all the annoyances I’ve had with sewing recently.

I See Your Preferences, Wendig by Foz Meadows. I like a lot of Chuck Wendig’s writing advice, but I thought this was a good critique of some unexamined bias and taste preferences. Loved the use of The Goblin Emperor for examples, too, since it does break a lot of storytelling rules, but garners a loyal following nonetheless.

Also Foz Meadows, but writing for A Dribble of Ink: Fight Like a Woman, which is ostensibly a review of Django Wexler’s The Shadow Throne, but actually talks about all the reasons the women in his series are awesome. Which I’ve been saying since 2011, but we can’t all have been his alpha readers.

Accomplishments

Writing
– Wrote 2,754 words on Lioness

Reading
(I have lots of stuff in progress right now, but nothing finished this week)

Other Media
– Played Claustrophobia
– Listened to Writing Excuses 10.33, “Q&A on Pacing”
– Listened to Happier with Gretchen Rubin, episodes 25 and 26
– Watched lecture 3 of Brandon Sanderson’s 2013 SFF writing class at BYU
– Finished the Shadowfen Angler achievement in ESO with Falanu

Crafts
– Bought linen for a chemise (to go under new velveteen gown)
– Cut out chemise pieces

Links and Accomplishments, 8/16/15 to 8/22/15 (plus bonus Hugo meditations)

This was a very unaccomplished week for me, for many reasons. Ah well. Hoping to go into this week feeling rested and relatively sane.

Accomplishments

Writing
– Submitted “Powder of Sympathy” to Interfictions
– Wrote 397 words on Lioness
– Attended writing group meeting

Reading
– Read “ReMemories,” by (fellow VP17er!) Nancy S.M. Waldeman, in FantasyScroll magazine

Other Media
– Played Caverna for the first time (and won!)
– Played four games of Mansions of Madness
– Watched The Imitation Game
– Watched the livestream of the 2015 Hugo Awards (technically much of this happened on 8/23 East Coast time, but OH WELL)
– Listened to Writing Excuses 10.32, “Combat, with Marie Brennan”

Social
– Hosted a visit from my dad
– Drinks with Kevin

Rejection Log

If I’m going to be submitting stuff regularly, I think keeping track of this as part of the L&A is probably a good idea.

– “Remember to Die,” DSF, Aug 21st. Need to find my next market for this. Dark magic realism with cake and death, 700 words… any idea who would like this?

Links (Hugos edition!)

It was well past midnight, East Coast time, when the Hugos even started being awarded, but in case you are curious — it went well, from my perspective. Puppies got closed out in five categories (best related work, short story, novella, editor – long form, and editor – short form), where it was decided that No Award was better than any of the dreck they had nominated. I will for a long time remember the satisfied smile on Tananarive Due’s face when she read “The Hugo voters have decided that in this category there will be no award,” and the applause that went up in the auditorium when she did. (David Gerrold looked less happy about it — at one point he said, “Applause is acceptable; booing is not”).

Sadly, my beloved The Goblin Emperor did not win Best Novel, but from all I can tell, The Three Body Problem is a worthy choice. (I did not vote myself — I did not feel well-enough informed about the various options).

I know there are people on both sides of the controversy who are all like, “None of this matters, it’s just a stupid rocket.”

But, you know. That stupid rocket matters a lot to a lot of people, including me.

When I was just a young girl trolling the library for the (at the time, rare) SFF books, it mattered.

When I first started writing SFF, it mattered.

When I went to my first WorldCon (2004, in Boston), and saw Lois McMaster Bujold accept the Best Novel Hugo for Paladin of Souls, and give the shortest, most eloquent acceptance speech I’ve ever heard, it mattered.

It mattered when I first voted (2005, in LA), and it broke my heart that Kelly Link’s “Magic for Beginners” lost Best Novella to Connie Willis’ “The Inside Job” — though I knew they were both works of great value.

I’ll probably never win a Hugo (let alone get published), but it still matters to me. It’s something to aspire to. It’s something to believe in, as a symbol that our genre is more than just ephemeral stories we tell ourselves around campfires — more than just the flickering shadows of unicorns and rockets on cave walls.

Anyway. Next year I resolve to buy a supporting membership and nominate, in my small effort to make sure the system isn’t gamed again. Of course that means reading a lot of stuff that comes out this year, but that seems like a small price to pay.

* Which is kind of hilarious, because his Shadow Campaigns books are everything the Puppies (the sad variety, at least) pretend to like — military fantasy, a rip-roaring good story, etc. Except it has lesbians (and straight women, too) making effective choices and being badass in various ways — so you can tell where the Pups’ real priorities lie.

Links and Accomplishments, 8/9/15 to 8/15/15

Links

You should read the first three chapters of The Traitor Baru Cormorant on tor.com and the B&N website. I knew I’d like this book, and I knew I’d feel thematic similarities with Lioness, but… well, see for yourself:

And he looked at her with open eyes, the bone of his heavy brow a bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth. She saw this not merely in the shape of his eyes and the flatness of his regard, but in what they recalled — things he had said and done suddenly understood. And she knew that Farrier had let her see this, as a warning, as a promise.

I love this and will pre-order this book and yet gah, I feel like what I wanted to say has now been said, much better.

This is a beautiful rebuttal of a certain Pup’s screaming at clouds

Doesn’t everyone need Nerevar’s Moon-and-Star ring? Guaranteed not to kill you instantly! (Powers of persuasion not included)

Accomplishments

Writing
– Wrote 1891 words on Lioness
– Submitted “Powder of Sympathy” to Nightmare magazine
– Wrote two blog posts: Review of The Goblin Emperor, and On Writing, Rejection, and Pitch Wars

Reading
– Finished Sarah Monette’s The Bone Key
– Read Yoon Ha Lee’s “Snakes” (Clarkesworld July 2015)
– Read Pan Haitian’s “The Hunger Tower (Clarkesworld July 2015)
– Read Keith Brooke’s “The Accord” (Clarkesworld July 2015)
– Read Martin L Shoemaker’s “Today I Am Paul” (Clarkesworld August 2015)
– Read “Road Test” by KJ Kabza (DSF)
– Read “Encounter with a Dorian” by Steven Mathes (DSF)
– Read the first three chapters of The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

LARP/Social
– Had RP day with other folks from my warband in 5G
– Hosted a visit from Mel & Will

Other Media
– Listened to Writing Excuses 10.32, “How Do I Control the Speed of the Story”
– Listened to Happier with Gretchen Rubin, episodes 23 and 24
– Watched the RiffTrax of The Magic Sword
– Played two games of Tragedy Looper
– Played Race For the Galaxy

On writing, rejection, and Pitch Wars (warning: maudlin)

I’ve been writing a lot more lately. You probably noticed.

A funny thing has happened — I’ve turned into one of those people whose happiness seems to be dependent on how well their writing is going. To be fair, I’ve always had a bit of this; it’s just that in the past, there were three states: “not writing,” “writing going well,” and “writing going poorly.” I seem to have collapsed the waveform since VP, for better or worse.

Matt has always pointed out that I have a lot of self-worth tied up in my writing, and it’s true. Probably too much. I don’t feel like I have much value if I’m not writing.

So I end up in these maudlin states where I’ve just gotten the fifth form rejection in as many days and everyone on Twitter is selling stuff except for me, and my non-writer friends are just looking at me like I’m this strange beast who doesn’t want to spend time with them.

I feel alienated from non-writers, and shabby next to writers, and universally unheard. Staring at social media only reminds me of this.

Up until now all my writing struggles have been internal — believing in my ability to tell a story, finishing a novel, editing a novel, etc. Now I am facing external obstacles, and positive attitude can only do so much.

I know I need to keep submitting if I ever want to be published. I know it’s largely a numbers game. I know (thanks, Kameron Hurley), that writing is “persisting in the game after you know what it’s really all about.” I know there are a million reasons why your story might not be accepted, even if it’s good.

And yet every time I wake up to a form rejection sent at 1am, probably from a first reader, I feel like I’m being punched in the gut. I feel like maybe my writing sucks, and no one will tell me straight up.

That’s the acute pain. The chronic, gnawing pain — or worry — is that I’m trying to sell stuff that’s not ready. That I should stop trying to sell it and do more revisions, instead.

I feel this most with Gods & Fathers. (The short stories I have out there, while certainly flawed, are basically to the point where I don’t know what or how to fix — truly they’ve escaped more than being released). I don’t query it much any more, because when you’ve queried something like 25 agents without even a single request for more pages, you begin to feel it has no worth. I know there are things I would do differently if I were writing this novel today; the beginning probably could benefit from some editing along these lines. Hell, it could be completely rewritten.

So I’m stymied, torn between sending out something that I am 90% certain won’t get a response vs. holding onto it for edits/rewrites I might never do. That, honestly, I don’t want to do. I kind of want to trunk it and move on.

And yet… I’m pretty sure that’s fear talking. And the stage of being a writer I’m at is all about feeling the fear and submitting anyways.

Which brings me to Pitch Wars.

You might remember I participated in this last year. My experience was… mixed. I met a lot of really, really cool writers, who I traded critiques with, and thus it was valuable in terms of creating community.

But honestly? I think the mentors didn’t give my MS a fair shake. (To be fair, I really only had about six mentors to pick from who accepted adult SFF; there might have been more appropriate choices if the field were larger). I only received comments from one mentor, and it was pretty clear they didn’t read more than the first page, and misunderstood what I was doing.

And yeah, mentors are busy volunteers, they don’t have to give comments, agents won’t give your MS a second glance, etc, etc. But it rankled. Once again my words had no value, and if they have no value, I have no value.

So Pitch Wars is here again. Despite my qualms, if Lioness were ready, I’d be trying with that, but it’s about 25k from being done. Maybe next year with that one.

A lot more adult mentors have been added this year, though, including at least one who might be a better fit for G&F. It’s tempting to try to go over that first chapter yet again, make it better, and submit.

But. Eh. I feel the same malaise here as when I think about querying. Why should I spend time on this when writing Lioness is so much more pleasurable and rewarding?

At least for now. At least until I try to sell it. At which point I’ll probably also encounter radio silence and realize that this isn’t going to be my breakout piece. I’m probably going to have to do this X more times, where X is a number between 1 and never.

Part of the reason this hurts so badly is because I keep hoping. Hope is a hell of a drug.

Look, I’m going to keep writing. I can’t not. But I often feel like being a successful writer is a game where the house always wins.

Review: The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

Or: this book should win the Best Novel Hugo.

Or: I bought this book twice and I don’t even care.

Or: I wish I could go back in time and read this book again for the first time.

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Ahem. So. The Goblin Emperor is a 2014 fantasy of manners by Katherine Addison, who you may know better as Sarah Monette. From the Goodreads blurb:

The youngest, half-goblin son of the Emperor has lived his entire life in exile, distant from the Imperial Court and the deadly intrigue that suffuses it. But when his father and three sons in line for the throne are killed in an “accident,” he has no choice but to take his place as the only surviving rightful heir.

Entirely unschooled in the art of court politics, he has no friends, no advisors, and the sure knowledge that whoever assassinated his father and brothers could make an attempt on his life at any moment.

Surrounded by sycophants eager to curry favor with the naïve new emperor, and overwhelmed by the burdens of his new life, he can trust nobody. Amid the swirl of plots to depose him, offers of arranged marriages, and the specter of the unknown conspirators who lurk in the shadows, he must quickly adjust to life as the Goblin Emperor. All the while, he is alone, and trying to find even a single friend… and hoping for the possibility of romance, yet also vigilant against the unseen enemies that threaten him, lest he lose his throne – or his life.

I first heard about this book due to Scott Lynch’s blog, where he raved about it. Since then, it has reached critical fan mass in my circle of writerly friends, and I finally decided that I needed to get in on the lovefest.

I was not even a little disappointed.

Things you need to know about this book:

It is entirely composed of intense conversations in small rooms with subtle body language — and that is the beauty of it.

I’ve heard negative reviews that complain that nothing really happens and… well, it’s kind of true. Don’t expect a three-act structure, or cliffhangers, or action that flies off the page. The first half of the book is nearly an hour-by-hour recounting of Maia’s (the title character’s) first days as Emperor of the Elflands. Who is his steward? What will he do with his hated guardian? Who will his bodyguards be? What the heck is the Lord Chancellor up to? What will he have for luncheon?

If this sounds boring to you… well, it’s possible this book might not be your cup of tea, but let me explain why it worked for me. Monette manages to makes the stakes clear for even the most trivial decision. If Maia doesn’t choose correctly, he might offend somebody, or lose an alliance, and that could have dire consequences for his future as an emperor, or his lifespan.

For example, one of the issues Maia must decide in his first days on the throne is the issue of his half-sister’s marriage. It would be advantageous to make a political alliance, but she would rather “study the stars.” In navigating this, Maia has to choose between forging relationships with his family members vs. making alliances with outsiders. It’s also a struggle between what he feels is right — that his half-sister should do what she wants with her life — and what is politically necessary. The results of this seemingly boring decision end up having life-threatening consequences for Maia by the end of the book.

It is the anti-Game of Thrones

Okay, let’s be more general and say, “the anti-grimdark.” But I have GoT specifically in mind because a friend who is a GRRM fan asked me if she would like this. I wasn’t sure what to tell her. It has some things in common — political intrigue, primarily — but its outlook is much less pessimistic than GRRM’s. A policy impasse which might be solved by murder and poison is solved by a tipsy dinner conversation instead. One of the members of the privy council steps forward to offer to educate Maia on the political currents, and has no ulterior motive.

Mostly, Maia succeeds in his role by being a genuinely good, earnest person, and I felt like that was refreshing, especially against the trend towards dark or morally ambiguous characters in SFF.

You need the text of this book.

I love audiobooks. I loved this audiobook — Kyle McCarley infuses a challenging text with emotion and color. But listening to this book without a reference is like trying to read Tolstoy without knowing how Russian names are constructed.

There are hundreds of characters, some only mentioned once, all with complex names with non-intuitive spellings. Plus everyone has a title, which of course is an Elvish word rather than “lord” or “lady.” Plus there are a lot of five-syllable words used for unique cultural concepts.

Without the text, I got as far as the scene where a mess o’ Drazhada (the ruling family, to which Maia belongs) swear fealty to him at his coronation — and was so confused I promptly went out and purchased the ebook, and spent the next hour poring over the glossary.

Once I had the text in hand, I could listen to the audio without endlessly referring to it, but it was helpful for knowing how things were spelled and who was related to whom.

What I Liked About This Book:

The characters. Maia is fascinating as a character. The most common descriptor I hear of him is “adorable,” and it’s true. I kind of want to smoosh his cheeks. As the hated child of the hated fourth wife of the former emperor, he has a history full of neglect and abuse, and we just desperately want him to be happy. Some of the sweetest moments are the highs and lows he feels — saying “I love thee still” at his mother’s tomb, or expressing amazement that anybody would acknowledge his birthday.

Maia is the only viewpoint character, so there’s a lot to love there, but he’s not the only character to pay attention to. Csevet, Cala and Beshelar, Thara Celehar, Csethiro, Vedero… they’re all fabulous characters, painted deeply with only a few brush-strokes. I think equally fondly of Csevet’s impatient throat-clearing, the deliberateness with which Celehar treats the dead, and Csethiro’s comments about dueling.

I also liked seeing that being an emperor is a lot of emotional labor, some aspects of which Maia excels at, and some of which he is rubbish at. The amount of importance put on small talk — and the direness of Maia’s social awkwardness — paints a picture of a world where being a good ruler involves more than just making policy decisions. This idea of leadership as involving relationship maintenance feels rare in fantasy. Even the decision to talk about the clothes Maia wears feels important in this light — it’s not excessive description, and it’s clear these are not trivial choices.

(It matters that Maia’s jacket has tiny pearl buttons if what you’re trying to show is how he’s so anxious he can’t button them, in other words).

The world-building. This is a rich, steampunk-y world, where airships and factories and gaslights and pneumatic post are all things that exist.

The main characters may be elves and goblins, but this is no stereotypical fantasy world where the elves are all beautiful and enigmatic and the goblins are ugly and barbaric. Sure, the elves might think that, but it goes both ways (Maia describes your typical elf as “ferret-faced”). Instead of outright war between the two factions, we have complex political negotiations, diasporas, and intersections of race and class.

There’s also a complex east vs. west dynamic to the Elflands, and a muddled, neverending war with a people called the Evressai to the north. There are gods with fuzzy spheres of influence. There is magic — but a very roughly-defined sort of magic, which works only because it’s never called on to do much of real importance. Both elves and goblins have a subtle body language based on ear positions which I never quite worked out.

In brief, it’s the kind of world that requires a glossary — and I’m okay with that, because those are the sorts of books that taught me to love fantasy.

And the language! Well — that deserves its own bullet point.

The language. Okay, I’m a language geek, so of course I’d say this. I suspect Monette is, too, considering the dinner conversation which becomes a discussion of philology.

First, I was absolutely blown away by the (bold!) choice to use English’ archaic informal second-person (thou/thee) for pretty much its original purpose. The elves tend to be a little bit more selective about who they can tutoyent than your average speaker of a Romance language, however — it seems reserved for oneself, family, very close friends (which, as Maia reminds us again and again, an emperor doesn’t have), and people you want to actively disdain. Even children and servants get the more formal “you.”

“We” also gets used as a formal first-person, rather like the “royal we” (except it’s used to the emperor as well as by the emperor). Sometimes this necessitates tagging dialog as “using the plural, not the formal,” but it’s generally well-handled.

This enables Monette to do some very clever storytelling with in/formality — like when Maia stops addressing Setheris, his abusive former guardian, as “thee,” as a way of making their new relationship clear. Or when he drops formality to tell his bodyguards how much they mean to him.

Secondly, we get glimpses of an Elvish language that extends beyond the page. We see recurring morphemes (“death,” “magic,” etc), word endings that indicate part of speech and gender (-is/-o), and words that have become archaic (“morhath,” brought up in the philology discussion).

Finally, there are just some beautiful turns of phrase. Arbelan Drazharan describing the previous emperor as “a killing frost” still sticks in my mind.

Overall, the wordplay is impressive, but also a little intimidating, and I can see how some readers might not like it. But for me, it worked really, really well.

An escape from toxic masculinity. Maybe this is strange to talk about, but it’s something I don’t see enough of in SFF — we can imagine anything, and yet we often still imagine men who aren’t allowed to cry.

Maia is delightfully free of all this. As emperor, he isn’t allowed to give vent to his emotions; but from inside his head, we see he is plagued with grief and self-doubt. We are allowed to feel it along with him — along with his frustration at being unable to deal with it through his usual coping mechanism of meditation.

On this note, I really like how the plot with Min Vechin was resolved — he’s clearly attracted to her, but turns her down when she propositions him, mostly because he’s a virgin and terrified of the prospect of bedding her. It’s rare (and vulnerable) that a male character is portrayed as having those kinds of fears.

LGBT characters. Casually so — Maia just happens to have an aunt who ran off to become a pirate and married a woman. A nobleman and his courier turn out to be lovers. Celehar has a sad past involving a man he loved. And, else-page, Monette has suggested some interesting things about the courier system…

This is handled well, although I would have liked some of the major characters to have been included in this diversity.

Resonance and theme. I love the recurring bridge-building imagery, and Maia’s evident joy at both the mechanics and the politics of it.

Near the end, the decision to describe the person responsible for the airship crash that brought Maia to power as looking almost exactly like him — half-goblin, with blue eyes, black curly hair, and slate-grey skin — is just perfect.

The cover art. Not Monette’s doing, but look at that cover art. Maia, with the weight of the entire Elflands on his head. Look at his shifty and suspicious eyes. Look at the bridge! Look at the airship! It’s symbolic and beautiful.

What I Didn’t Like:

Really, this book is amazing, but there are a few things that would have made it even better.

For all that there is this deep and diverse world-building, gender roles are still pretty staid — Maia inherits, after all, thanks to our old friend agnatic primogeniture succession, which disallows women from inheriting noble titles. Like in many traditional feudal societies, women of noble birth are valued primarily for their ability to forge marriage alliances and make babies. Going to university is seen as “devaluing” women for this purpose. It’s also unlikely in this setting for women to serve in military roles (like the emperor’s bodyguard).

Maia is clearly a progressive dude, given his actions towards the women in his life — but that is still the milieu he inhabits. And while I really can’t argue with that, since I don’t think I’ve ever written a fantasy world with total gender equality, it is the old problem of “you can imagine anything and this is what you imagine?”

While I very much love the language aspect of the world-building, I feel like it could be an obstacle for some readers. In many instances I feel it could have been used more selectively for maximum impact. There’s nothing untranslatable about common terms from monarchy like “gentlemen of the bedchamber” or “privy council” or “bodyguards” that needs to get special Elvish words like edocharei, Corazhas, and nohecharai.

Overall, I gave this book five stars on Goodreads, and added it to my favorites list. It was a rare book where the sadness that it was over eclipsed the feeling of accomplishment at having finished it.

(To somewhat allay that sadness, I went and read fanfic. I highly recommend “Give My Hands True Purpose” if you want more about Maia and Csethiro).

Have you read this delightful book yet? What did you think of it? Will it be getting your Hugo vote?

Links and accomplishments, 8/2/15 to 8/8/15

Links

Most of these links are about writing. HOPE THAT’S COOL WITH YOU.

100 Random Storytelling Thoughts and Tips, Starting Now. Some quotes I liked:

You’re a stage magician. Practiced in the art of illusion… One of your greatest skills is misdirection. You seed the truth of the magic trick early on in the story. Then you convince the reader that the truth isn’t the truth at all — until the time comes to reveal.

Reminds me very much of Uncle Jim’s enigmatic lectures at VP, exhorting us to read books on stage magic.

Pretend while writing that your job isn’t to tell a story but it’s to manipulate and emotionally injure the audience. Because that actually kinda is your job. You monster.

How to Write Your Character’s Thoughts. Seems simple, right? But I’ve been trying to shake up how I do this, because for me italicizing thoughts is the lazy path to over-explaining. I’ve been experimenting with Hillerich’s methods, and… in the immortal words of the MST3K movie: “I’m feeling a sensation that’s entirely new to me. And frankly, I like it!”

How to Choose What to Write Next. A neat little trick, in which you rate story ideas based on their potential for joy, growth, and marketability.

The Future of Work is Here and It Sucks. Yes. So much yes. Also makes me glad I don’t work in marketing any more.

Videos of a 2013 class on writing SFF that Brandon Sanderson taught at BYU. My first reaction to these videos was, “I know all this stuff.” But I find myself coming back to them, and thinking of how I’ll use them for future work, so I venture my initial assessment was wrong.

Fantasy of Manners list on Goodreads. It took seeing that I had read eleven books on this list (and loved many of them) to realize that, gee, Lise, maybe fantasy of manners is a Thing, and furthermore maybe that’s actually what you’re writing.

Accomplishments

I got a lot of reading done this week, as you’ll see — but to be fair, it was mostly finishing a bunch of books I had in progress.

Writing
– Wrote 2,487 words on Lioness
– Prepped and sent chapters 6 and 7 of Lioness to my writing group
– Imported Lioness (and notes) into Scrivener
– Wrote one blog post, a review of Sheepfarmer’s Daughter

Reading
– Finished Elizabeth Moon’s Sheepfarmer’s Daughter
– Finished Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor (this book is amazing, and a review will follow once I get past fannish squee)
– Finished Holly West’s Mistress of Fortune
– Finished Rachel Aaron’s 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love

Other Media
– Watched Columbo S2E3, “The Most Crucial Game”
– Listened to Writing Excuses 10.31, “How Do I Control the Reader’s Sense of Progress?”
– Watched lectures 1 and 2 of Brandon Sanderson’s 2013 SFF writing class at BYU

Front-end dev
– Used a developer self-directed day to teach myself Flexbox, and wrote up a Flexbox developer challenge for my coworkers

(I don’t usually put day job stuff in here, but I might share the developer challenge on my blog later on)

Social
– Had book club get-together with Jess at Solea in Waltham

Review: Sheepfarmer’s Daughter (Deed of Paksenarrion, book 1) by Elizabeth Moon

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Last month I visited my friend Jess, whom I had not seen for almost a year. Luckily we have that great kind of friendship where you can be out of contact for a long time and then pick up like no time has passed at all.

One of the things we discussed is how we missed having a book club. We used to belong to an SFF book club in Salem, NH, which is a) no longer convenient to either of us, and b) always had very different tastes than ours, anyway.

So we decided we were going to start our own book club. With blackjack! And hookers! It’d be a little bit different, though — each month we would each pick a book for the other to read, and then get together to discuss them.

For her, I picked Scott Lynch’s Red Seas Under Red Skies, because I knew she’d liked The Lies of Locke Lamora and had read it four times, and yet somehow had not read the second or third books. (Strangely, our get-together is on the same day Lynch has announced that book four is going to be delayed until 2016 for health reasons).

For me, she picked the book I am reviewing in this article, which is a favorite of hers. She loaned me her well-worn paperback of the book — so well-worn she had to tape it back together before giving it to me.

Regrettably, I cannot say that I share Jess’ fond opinion of the book.

First, here’s what Goodreads has to say about it:

Paksenarrion — Paks for short — is somebody special. She knows it, even if nobody else does yet. No way will she follow her father’s orders to marry the pig farmer down the road. She’s off to join the army, even if it means she can never see her family again.
And so her adventure begins . . . the adventure that transforms her into a hero remembered in songs, chosen by the gods to restore a lost ruler to his throne.

Here is her tale as she lived it.

What I Liked:

The prologue. Prologues are generally despised in modern fantasy, and for good reason — they have been wildly overused and abused. But I actually really liked this one. It’s of Paks’ family, years later, receiving a mysterious visitor who delivers her sword, with the equally mysterious message that she doesn’t need it any more. (Which of course leaves them wondering why). Overall, it sets the tone for rousing adventure. Reading it was comforting, like I was saying to myself, “Now here’s that good old epic fantasy I like.”

The details of military life and strategy/tactics. Y’all know I’m a fan of stuff like Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels and Django Wexler’s flintlock fantasy series The Shadow Campaigns, so it should be no surprise I liked this aspect of it. Admittedly, the tech level is pretty generic high fantasy — say 1300s or so? — and this is not an era I know a ton about, so it’s possible there are inaccuracies. But it all seemed plausible to me, and moreover, mentally stimulating. (I’m weird, shut up). I enjoyed reading about the importance of mercenaries in combat, or tactics for short sword and shield in small cohorts, or how sieges work.

Paks’ asexuality. I doubt Moon had this word in mind when she wrote the book, but Paks vocally has no interest in sex or romance, and it’s refreshing in a female character.

What I Didn’t Like

everything eeeeeeeelse

Okay, let’s lay it out:

The worldbuilding. The world feels like a D&D or a Tolkien ripoff. There is magic, and it is divided into priest magic and wizard magic. There are elves and dwarves from central casting — beautiful and enigmatic elves, stocky, fighty dwarves who love treasure (who we only see from a distance). I’m told there is this whole elaborate world, laid out… in future books? On the wiki page? but it’s decidedly not in the pages of this book.

The characters. “Wooden” is often too generous for them. There are hundreds of names, and barely any of them matter, because they die and (with a few notable exceptions) Paks doesn’t give a second thought for them. (In fact one of them dies and comes back twenty pages later, through an unfixed continuity error).

Even Paks herself is wooden; we don’t feel close to her at all. Sure, she wants to be a soldier! She’s really good at it! She doesn’t want romance! She’s loyal to the Duke’s company! But… there’s not much more. She spends the first half of the book completely flat, not really feeling anything for anyone, even when people from her cohort die. She does later seem to grieve for a few close friends she loses, but she has no self-awareness about it. “Oh… I felt bad for a minute. I guess it could have been worse!” is the most we get.

The “head-hopping.” This is very much a style preference, I admit; modern fantasy tends to favor a close third- or first-person viewpoint. Mostly we’re in Paks’ head, but Moon occasionally decides we’re going to follow some other character, because they’re more interesting.

It makes some sense when, in the midst of the investigation that takes up much of the early book, we jump into Paks’ sergeant’s head — he’s the one with the freedom to act in that situation. It makes a lot less sense later on in the book when suddenly we’re in the head of some random dude we’ve never met before who exists only to get castrated and motivate Paks’ superiors. (I suppose that’s a refreshing alternative to the women in refrigerators trope…. okay, no, really it’s not).

The rapeyness. The investigation I alluded to in the first part of the book involves an assault and attempted rape on Paks, for which she is imprisoned due to a misunderstanding of the situation. I mean… I guess it’s tactfully handled, as far as these things go — I’d much rather have Moon writing about this than GRRM. It serves to show us both the way in which things are still tough for Paks as a female soldier, as well as the bureaucracy around proving her innocence. It reminds me of various military sex scandals, in this way, which couldn’t have been far from Moon’s mind.

But then at the end of the book, we get this castration thing with J. Random Dude we don’t even care about and it’s like… really? Really? It seems to exist primarily to tell us that the villain Siniava is a Bad Dude, and… we kind of knew that, since at that point we’ve seen him kill entire towns and sacrifice children on altars to some god of torture.

All of this, I could have forgiven, but the book committed the cardinal sin of fiction: being boring.

Let’s be honest. There were a few parts where I was able to enter that happy reader trance (Paks and friends’ wild overland journey; the stuff with the paladins of Gird; the final twenty-five pages or so), but on the whole the book was a slog. So many of the descriptions are just… ridiculously tedious. Five pages devoted to walking through one town (i.e. “We saw a wall and they looked like this and then we passed a woman holding a jar by a well and then we walked into a side street…”) Pages devoted to conversations that tell us nothing about the world (i.e. why some random mercenary captain isn’t here — it’s because his friend is getting married!)

I mean, if Moon was trying to convey that military life is a lot of boredom interspersed with occasional moments of all-too-interesting peril… she succeeded? It’s just not compelling to read.

By the end of the book, while Paks had changed and grown as a character, it wasn’t enough to be interesting to me. It’s hinted that she has this future ahead of her as a paladin, but in the final pages of the book she declines the chance to go that route, which felt a lot like walking away from the most compelling story.

Overall, I gave this book two stars — it deserved at least that for the stuff I did like. But on the whole this was a good example of a book that might have been revolutionary in its time, but which I am reading waaaaay too late to really appreciate. (Other books in that category include Raymond Feist’s Magician: Apprentice, from 1982, which I felt shades of). I might have also appreciated this more if I read it when I was younger.

Sorry, Jess. I tried to like this one, but it just wasn’t for the Lise of Today. I doubt I will be reading more of this series, unless you strong-arm me into it 😉

Links and accomplishments, 7/26/15 to 8/1/15

I’ve decided to start keeping track of my weekly accomplishments, like my pal Phoebe does — she owes some of her incredible productivity to that metric, I fancy.

To temper it with something that’s not all about me me me (because no one but Phoebe wants to read that much about me), I’ll add some links to stuff I’ve found interesting throughout the week.

Accomplishments

Writing

– Wrote 1796 new words on Lioness
– Submitted “Remember to Die” to DSF

LARP
– Signed up for Silverfire game 2, and got in!

Media
– Finished watching season 7 of Psych (ugh. I hate the trope of “create conflict with a completely unlikeable character who makes the protagonists’ lives miserable.” I hated it in House, and I hate it here, with the Trout plotline).
– Watched the RiffTrax of Megaforce (the ascots! the uniforms!)
– Read “The Litany of Earth” by Ruthanna Emrys (highly recommended, as a subversion of the othering in HPL, overlaid on WWII paranoia)
– Finished the main quest in ESO with my character Falanu
– Listened to Writing Excuses 10.30, “Q&A on Middles with Marie Brennan”
– Listened to Happier with Gretchen Rubin ep. 22, “Creative Habits with guest Rosanne Cash”

Crafts
– Cut out the paper pattern and selected material for the mockup of a second Ianthe underdress

Cooking/Household
– Made SO MANY FRIDGE PICKLES
– Made beet, toasted walnut, and bleu cheese salad

Links

A lot of people have been talking about emotional labor lately — what it is, how it disproportionately falls to women, and what to do about that.

Surprising no one, I find this absolutely true and utterly fascinating. It reminds me of my recent post–I would argue, more eloquently today, that most of the things taking women away from creativity are emotional labor.

I’ve also realized that my defense of small talk, and its importance in human conversation, is a defense of emotional labor, too. Small talk is hard — it’s literally finding stuff to talk about with people you don’t know well enough to suggest topics of mutual interest — and many geeks (male geeks in particular) have never learned to do it.

(I’m currently reading the fabulous fantasy novel The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison, and it’s telling that the title character, having grown up in obscurity, never learned how to make small talk, and suffers for it when he rises to power. I consider this lack as great as his ignorance of the political current, and as narratively interesting).

Despite all this, I’m actually kind of rubbish at emotional labor myself, so many of the reminders about how are good for me, too.

On a lighter note, The Man’s Guide on How to Smell Better. Please, please, please take this to heart, oh nerd guys. It will improve your life to not smell like dirty laundry.

On my VPeep Beth T’s recommendation, I’ve been browsing 16th-17th century household guides — I thought I would find interesting stuff for Lioness in there. The Good Huswife’s Jewell is particularly intriguing. Mostly it has suggested terrible, wonderful things to put on the various Lucern tables we see. (Not lamprey pie, though. I’m leaving that all to GRRM).