Apr 26

Magic in the Gryphon Clerks

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Almost everyone who talks about Realmgolds (my first Gryphon Clerks novel, currently free on Amazon until Friday) or any of the short stories set in the same world mentions the setting. I did put a lot of work into creating it, over a long period of time, before I started writing the stories. There’s a great deal that I know that you don’t know yet, and in some cases never will know, at least not from reading the stories. (There are also some things I don’t know yet either, but we won’t talk about those.)

One thing people have asked about is the magic system. The people in Realmgolds are mostly in the political and administrative spheres, and therefore don’t know or care how the magic works. They only want to know what effects they can achieve with it. The next book, Hope and the Clever Man, on the other hand, has as its title characters two people who very much care how it works, so there will be a little more said about it. I’ll do my best to refrain from infodumping, though.

My editor, in particular, was unconvinced that I’d thought it all the way through at first. I had to write her a document to show her that I really had. In case this is the kind of thing that interests you, here is that document.

Magic in the Gryphon Clerks

There are a number of different forms of magic in the world of the Gryphon Clerks. What that number is depends on who you ask.

There are also several ranks of mage. Mages-minor can perform simple magic, make very basic magical devices, and operate more complex ones. A mage-minor is permitted to wear a bangle of a material that indicates the kind of magic he or she specializes in. A full mage, who can make complex magical devices and perform advanced magic, may wear a bracelet, again of different materials depending on the type of magic, and a master-magus wears a wider armlet or cuff.

Elvish Magic

The elves were the imperial power who brought humans to the world (as slaves) and, some evidence suggests, modified them so that they too were able to perform magic. The elves recognise three kinds of magic (three being their sacred number): mindmagic, lifemagic and a third category derisively called “the magic of dead things”, which takes in the whole of dwarvish magic.

Elvish magic tends to involve a lot of words, chanting, elegant gestures and ritual threes. Circles and triangles, organic-looking interweaving shapes, and geometric figures may also feature.

Mindmagic

The magic of the mind maps fairly well to the domain of psychology. It involves matters such as motivation, influence and perception.

The most common mindmagic, familiar to everyone, is the magic of oaths, vows and geasa, behavioural bindings which are very difficult, though not impossible, to break. They create a powerful mental pressure to keep them, comparable to an obsession, compulsion or addiction if you are trying to break them, or a very powerful positive motivation if you’re not. Marriage oaths are the most common – marriage is referred to as “oathbinding” and one’s spouse as one’s “oathmate” – but oaths are also taken between master and servant, liege and vassal, close friends, even members of military units. There is often a physical focus or token for the oath, typically a finger-ring, though the military use arm-rings on the upper arm. For oaths of alliance and allegiance the ring is worn on the right hand, for love and friendship on the left (the heart side).

A well-made oath, with the assistance of a competent mindmage, added to familiarity and genuine emotion, gives the participants in the oath an enhanced sense of each other. They can’t read each other’s thoughts, but providing they’re reasonably nearby they’re aware of each other’s strong emotions and physical location, even if they’re not able to see or hear each other.

Similar to an oath is a geis. The difference between the two is that an oath is between two people, mutually agreed on and binds both of them, while a geis is imposed by someone in authority on another person, and binds only the recipient. The person who receives the geis must acknowledge the authority of the one who imposes it, and must be able to perform the action of the geis, and consent to it, even if reluctantly. Geasa may include aversions or actions which are forbidden as well as actions which are required.

A vow is like a self-imposed geas. It is often, but not necessarily, witnessed by another person.

An oath is often recorded on a beautifully drawn and calligraphed piece of paper, with geometric figures corresponding to the magic of the oath and recording it. These papers are typically produced in triplicate, and the two parties to the oath and the witness each keep one. The parties and the witness sign them, mark them with their personal seals or the seals of their rank or position (if they have any – typically this is something only a Gold or a wealthy Silver will have, unless they are a Gryphon Clerk), and thumbprint them. The act of doing so, along with the oath itself, produces a record on the paper that can be read by anyone who has any skill in mindmagic to verify that the oath is a true oath. Among illiterate Coppers, oaths are usually verbal unless they go to a scribe and pay to have an oath recorded.

The seals (gold for a Gold, silver for a Silver) are themselves bespelled for this purpose.

Another form of mindmagic is parallel to charisma. All natural leaders and influencers possess an aptitude for it, and if trained can enhance it and so increase their authority. The elves did not reveal everything they knew about this form of mindmagic to their human subjects, and it is not as well understood, or as effective, as oaths and geasa.

The elves also possessed the knowledge of “glamour”, which is a form of mindmagic which influences the perceptions of those around the mage, in the mage’s favour. This art is considered lost.

The final category of mindmagic crosses over with lifemagic, and is the use of trance states to perceive the world differently or to control one’s body processes. This knowledge is mostly preserved among shamans of the peasants’ Earthist religion, though the upper classes have kept the knowledge of sleep induction and a form of learning trance.

University-trained practitioners of mindmagic wear bracelets (etc.) of black wood, often elaborately carved in the case of the more advanced mages. Shamans wear only a single piece of cloth and are marked with a magical picture of their beast totem and (for full shamans) their plant totem, received during an ordeal of meditation.

Lifemagic

Lifemagic maps to the domains of medicine and biology. Again, the old imperial elves were advanced practitioners, bioengineers who could create new species and combine human and animal traits into peoples like the beastheads and the centaurs, or combine different animals into creatures like the flying horses and the gryphons. Little of their ancient knowledge survives in the hands of humans, only enough for medical use.

There are blurred boundaries between lifemagic and mindmagic, and between healers and mindhealers. A good healer will possess living insight, the ability to perceive the patient’s body processes, and the unseen touch, the ability to influence those processes (blood flow; cell division, growth and function; digestion; immune response; neurochemistry, to a degree, and glandular activity; and detoxification). Healers are also able to adjust their patients’ pain perception and initiate the Healer’s Sleep, a form of unconsciousness during which healing is accelerated.

Some of the elves’ creations, like the medicine cattle which give pharmaceutical milk, have been preserved and even improved (by selective breeding), while others, like the process for turning the sap of a certain tree into a useful polymer called hardlac, have been lost.

University-trained practitioners of lifemagic have bracelets of bone or ivory. Healers also wear a distinctive round hat.

Dwarvish Magic

Dwarves scorn mindmagic and lifemagic and don’t include them in their schema, which is based around their sacred number: four. They recognize magic relating to matter, energy, space and time, although the last two are largely theoretical.

Dwarven magic, though it often uses spoken words to trigger it, is mostly achieved through sigils created from the square Dwarvish alphabet. Any dwarven magical device will be engraved with sigils, a great many of them in the case of more complex magic, often worked into a larger diagram.

Matter Magic

The magic of matter is in shaping, refining, combining and transforming. The dwarves have an advanced materials science, though at this historical period they preserve ancient traditions rather than researching new techniques. Their materials are light and strong and exhibit other useful physical properties (insulation and conduction of light, sound, heat and other forms of energy, for example). They craft intricate devices and engines from these materials.

A university-trained human practitioner of matter magic wears a metal bracelet (silver or pewter) set with a yellow stone, such as a citrine or, for the wealthy, a yellow diamond or sapphire. Matter magic is not an especially common subject for human study, but there are practitioners.

Energy Magic

Energy, in dwarvish definition, includes anything nonmaterial which acts at a distance. Most energy magic is concerned with light and heat, but there is also the magic of sound, and forms of distant force which push and pull. Most energy magic except the very simplest movements of light and heat requires the use of crystals of various kinds.

The commonest form of energy magic involves moving energy to or from another, parallel space or dimension. Even largely untrained humans can summon a weak light and enough heat to start a fire, but advanced practitioners can create devices which draw in enough energy to heat water for steam (as a working fluid for vehicles and to power factories) or to smelt metals. Other applications include cooling (by moving heat away to a cooler space) and, of course, magical lights which are reliable, bright and cool.

The dwarf banks operate a network of paired tablets which, when one of the pair is written upon, reproduce the message on the other. This enables funds transfers across distances where it would be slow, tedious or dangerous to carry money. They guard this technology closely, and only meticulous dwarf craftsmanship allows the tablets to be sufficiently similar to work in this way. Recently, however, Realmgold Victory’s clever man Dignified Printer has used his background as a printer’s apprentice to create complex magical devices which are nearly identical and can be linked in sympathy across great distances to transmit either sound and vision, or sound alone.

An application of energy magic to sound is the privacy rug, which prevents words spoken within its bounds from being heard outside it.

A university-trained human practitioner of energy magic has a red stone (garnet or ruby, usually) set in his or her metal bracelet.

Space Magic

The main real-world applications of space magic are to change the direction of gravity or reduce its effects, to enlarge spaces so that they are bigger on the inside than their outer dimensions allow for, and to create portals which shorten the distance between two points. All of these applications require specific conditions, including, for portals and enlarged spaces, a large mass of stable granite (it’s something to do with the quartz). To maintain a portal or enlarged space consumes a lot of a resource known as “magical flux”, which is theorized to be the difference in magical potential between two adjacent dimensions. Magical flux varies geographically. This means that other magic may not work well, or may be harder to do, in the vicinity of a portal or enlarged space. Setting up such a structure is also a tricky engineering task.

The flying boats and ships of Victory’s military use the antigravity form of space magic, mediated by large flight crystals. These crystals are expensive and difficult to make. In fact, “expensive and difficult” is a phrase closely associated with space magic.

The few space mages among the human population have blue stones set in their bracelets (usually sapphires, since they are well paid).

Time Magic

Time magic is, if anything, more expensive and difficult than space magic, and is little used. Extremely valuable items that might deteriorate over time are sometimes put in stasis boxes, in which time passes more slowly. It’s theoretically possible to speed time up, as well, but considering how difficult it is to do so, there are no practical applications.

There are no human time mages.

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed that little look under the hood. I’m a big fan of wizard fantasy myself (Amazon recognise a subgenre of fantasy called “magic and wizards” now, so I’m clearly not the only one), and I’m having fun writing Hope and the Clever Man.

If you haven’t picked up Realmgolds yet, it’s free until midnight Friday, US Pacific time. The more downloads, the merrier!

Mar 27

How to Raise the Stakes (and Prevent Your Protagonist from Becoming a Tourist)

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I mentioned a couple of posts back that one of the best pieces of advice my editor, Kathleen Dale, gave me was to give my protagonist a problem that he’s trying to resolve right from Chapter 1.

Not only do we identify with someone who’s trying to solve a problem, they’re a lot more interesting to read about. I’ve read a few books lately in which the would-be protagonists are actually more like tourists. They get on the airship (literally, in at least one case) and watch out the window as what plot there is goes by. Other people do things, and the viewpoint character acts as a kind of mobile lens that observes without much participation. Sometimes, they seem to be there mainly to tour the author’s wonderful setting and exclaim over it.

This is boring. Protagonists should protagonise.

Therefore, set your protagonist up with something they want that they’re going to have to work for.

Raising the Stakes

The next obvious question is “why does the protagonist care?” If the protagonist isn’t invested, the reader won’t be invested. They need to have some skin in the game.

This is where raising the stakes comes in.

You could not do better, at this point, than to head over to Writing Excuses and listen to their podcast episode on Raising the Stakes, because they do a great job. One of the things they emphasize is that it’s not necessary to use what I call the Alderaan Gambit in order to raise the stakes. Blowing things up, or threatening to blow things up, is not necessary. It’s not even sufficient. What you’re setting out to do is to give a compelling reason why the character is emotionally invested in a particular outcome (and then you put obstacles between the character and the outcome, and suddenly you have a story).

Here’s what I did, following Kathleen’s advice and the advice of the Writing Excuses crew. Kathleen noted that I didn’t need to make the Chapter 1 problem the main problem of the book, but as it happened that worked better than anything else I thought of, so my character’s problem is that the Human Purity movement is gaining in power and popularity in the realm he’s supposed to be ruling.

So why is that a problem? Well, he’s supposed to be in charge, but he’s feeling like he’s not in charge, so…

No. Stronger.

He’s educated in history, and he opposes their racist philosophy because he knows it’s built on a foundation of lies and distortion, and…

No. It needs to be much stronger than that. Make it personal.

Now, I knew that Determined, the protagonist, and Admirable, the antagonist, were around the same age and had both gone to the College of Ancient Turfrae. Could they have met there? Could there be history between them?

And then I thought about my own university experience of becoming involved with a (much less sinister) group which had a particular ideology, and how they trained me to see everything through that ideology, and to identify with their “in” group against the “out” group, and this is what I wrote. Determined is talking to his ally Victory.

…

“All right,” he said. “The Countygold of Upper Hills and I were at the College of Ancient Turfrae at the same time. Actually he was there first, he’s a couple of years older. By the time I started, he was already establishing himself as an important leader in the Human Purity movement, which had begun a few years before with a small group of professors and students. Simply a theoretical thing at first. Silverstones — as he was then, he hadn’t inherited the County yet — took it and made it a movement.”

He flushed, and rubbed the back of his neck. “There was a girl I wanted to get to know, and I heard her say to a friend of hers that she was going to one of his meetings, so I went along, hoping, you know… And I didn’t see her, but I listened to him speak. He was good. Brilliant, really. Inspirational. In those days he was more subtle, his arguments were more sophisticated, tuned, I suppose, to his audience. I started going regularly, and he took notice of me, cultivated me. In retrospect it was obviously because I was related to the Realmgold, but at the time he made it seem like it was for me, myself, that he respected me and valued me. He was good at that. He did it with everyone who he thought he could use, more or less, but I didn’t pay attention to that. I… I became a follower. A passionate one. I was looking for meaning in history, some overarching story, and Silverstones and his group provided it. And I was looking for a group to belong to, as well, one that made me feel like what I did and said and thought was important.

“At that time a lot of the history faculty were starting to come over to a Human Purity line. But there was one professor, an older man, near retirement. He was my favourite teacher, because he made everything so interesting and vivid. He would take us walking around Ancient Turfrae and describe things that had happened in the places where we stood, and you could almost imagine they were happening in front of you. I still remember his lecture in front of the Column of Willing practically word for word.

“Anyway, he had always stayed quiet on Human Purity, for or against. His great work was a translation of an old Elvish book. He’d spent twenty years on it. And one day I arrived in his office for a tutorial, and he was excited. He’d been working on his translation, and he’d found, he said, evidence that when the elves had brought us, humans, to this world, they’d changed us somehow so that we could do magic.”

“Interesting,” said Victory. “They would certainly have been capable of something like that, from all I’ve read.”

“Yes, they would. Both technically and morally. But of course the first thing I seized on was what that would mean for Human Purity. It would mean not only that we weren’t pure, but that nonhumans had shaped us, made us what we are.”

“I suppose I can see that. You argued?”

“I was an insufferable little snot, if you call that arguing. Ended up storming out and going straight to Silverstones.”

“What did he say?”

“Thanked me for drawing it to his attention.”

Determined shifted uncomfortably in his chair and ran his hands through his hair, then squeezed them together. “The next day, there was a fire in the professor’s rooms.”

“His translation?”

“Yes, and the Elvish original. But he came in unexpectedly, and somehow he hit his head, and… Well, between that and the smoke… He was an old man.”

…

Now there is a character who is not going to sit in the airship and watch things happen. (If you enjoyed it, it’s from Realmgolds, and you can get it from Amazon through that link.)

Mar 20

Realmgolds is Published

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Realmgolds, the first Gryphon Clerks novel, is now available in the Kindle Store.

Linda Dean, who reviewed it before publication, had this to say:

Realmgolds is one of those books that is an unexpected pleasure… The first chapter leaves you with a puzzled, intrigued sense of interest. These characters draw you in with their personable natures…

This first book of the Gryphon Clerks is a delightful peek into a new world by Mike Reeves-McMillan. I’ll be waiting for the next book. Don’t miss this!

I’m going to be approaching a lot more people for reviews in the next few weeks, and I hope their verdicts will be similar.

I’ve already done an interview for a book website (not out yet, so I can’t link to it) that’s made me think, once again, about the advantages of indie publishing, and how fortunate we are to be living in these times. One of the questions was about how long it took me from start to finish to publish the book. It was sixteen months, including a couple of months working with my editor, Kathleen Dale.

The total cost of publishing Realmgolds was in the region of $1000 (New Zealand dollars; less in USD). That covered getting a professional editor to work with me on development, and having the cover created (to my specifications). Now, I was fortunate to work with the cover illustrator before he became popular – he’s put his prices up now, and even so they’re very cheap for how good he is – but even so, that’s a reasonable figure to have in mind. A thousand dollars. I paid more than that for a sea kayak and some associated gear. If you’re just scraping by, finding a thousand dollars is a big ask, but if you’re in a well-paid job it’s not an enormous amount of money for something you care about.

So working with two other people, on a budget that’s barely four figures, in a timeframe of less than a year and a half, I’ve published a novel.

Bear in mind that if you’re going the traditional publishing path, it can easily take that long (or longer) to find an agent. And then that long (or longer) to find a publisher. And then that long (or longer) for the publisher to actually publish the book. And with all their staff, and all that delay, at least one traditional publisher (coughHarperCollinscough) still manages to produce poorly-edited books with crappy covers. For which their authors receive a small proportion of the cover price, not the 70-odd percent that I’ll be getting. And they don’t get to influence the cover design.

The price we pay for this wonderful new world, of course, is that a lot of crap gets published. Any yahoo can slap the unedited first draft of their NaNoWriMo “novel” up on Amazon without spending a cent: free word processor, free stock photos, free photomanipulation software, no upfront costs to publish. When there’s no filter, you get all kinds of crud coming through the pipe.

We have met the filter, though, and they are us.

As well as being a writer, I’m also a reviewer. I review indie books. So do lots of other people, and I’ll be approaching many of them and asking them to review mine. These are genuine reviewers, as I am, who don’t accept any inducement apart from, possibly, a free book in exchange for their reviews. (I buy most of mine, in fact.)

Yes, there are “review farms” that will give you a five-star review for a price. Yes, you can “sock puppet” reviews under a fake name and say how wonderful a work of genius your own book is, and what crap your competitors’ books are. In the end, though, people who do that get found out, one way or another. They get found out by, among others, honest reviewers who call it like they see it.

If you’re a regular reviewer and would like to review Realmgolds, leave a comment. That’ll give me your email address, and I’ll send you a free copy (and no other inducement), and you can say whatever you think about it. I don’t hold back from saying publicly, under my own name, what I think about other people’s books. I expect no less from people who review mine.

(That link again: Realmgolds in the Kindle store.)

Mar 02

The Unspoiled Protagonist

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This is a follow-up to my post on the Spoiled Protagonist, which seems to be resonating with a few people. Since I wrote that post, I’ve read another book with a seriously spoiled protagonist. How spoiled? Would you believe, the villain has his minion rescue her from certain death, reunite her with the only weapons that can stop his evil plan, and help her get to where he is – and all he seems to get out of it is a brief villain-gloat?

Characters like that are what I call “plot puppets”. They do things, not for reasons that make rational sense within the world of the story, but in order to advance the author’s preordained plot. Plot-puppetry is a particular risk if you’re writing to a formula, like the Monomyth or Hero’s Journey.

How not to spoil your protagonists

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. I recently read and very much enjoyed Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon (the link is to my review on Goodreads).  His plot is as old as the hills: kill the monster. We’ve been reading that plot since Marduk and Tiamat. But what he does to make it interesting and fresh is that he gives each of his characters something they desperately want but can’t have, and something they must do even though they don’t want to. These elements are almost completely apart from the main plot, but they upstage it because he does it so well.

There’s the secret to avoiding plot puppets: Give each character a clear agenda. If everyone, definitely including your villain, is acting out of obvious, understandable motives that are consistent with who they are, your protagonist won’t get the chance to be spoiled, either. The grim, duty-bound, important people she meets in the course of her adventures won’t neglect their responsibilities in order to help her, for example.

Some of the best advice Kathleen Dale, my editor for Realmgolds, has given me is to give my main character a clear goal right from the outset. I’ll write another post soon about how I raised the stakes for that character and made his goal more personal, but as soon as I did so, the book picked up momentum. A pressing goal that’s emotionally important to a character is one of the best gifts a writer can give them to help make them a strong protagonist.

It’s not all about you

Here’s the other part of not spoiling your protagonist, and I owe it to Robertson Davies.

Robertson Davies was a Canadian academic and novelist. He wrote literary fiction with a weird twist, sometimes, though not always, supernatural. But to me, the most interesting thing about his writing is the way he wrote his trilogies.

As specfic readers, we’re used to trilogies that tell one long story. Davies’ ones don’t, or at least, it’s not that simple. What he tends to do is take minor characters from his first book and put them at the centre of the next book, relegating the main characters from the first book to relative or complete obscurity. Or he tells the second book from the perspective of someone who doesn’t even appear in the first.

The extreme example is his incomplete “Toronto Trilogy”, his last work, of which only two books were written. In the second book, The Cunning Man, the narrator obsesses over the son of his mistress, speculating (despite her denials) that he is also his son. The young man is tremendously important to him, and yet when you read the first book, Murther and Walking Spirits, which is narrated by that same young man, he never mentions The Cunning Man‘s narrator even once. The older man apparently has no significance in his life at all.

What reading Robertson Davies taught me is that everyone is at the centre of their own story. When I’m walking down the street, I often look around at the people I pass and think about that fact. Each one of them has their own story, as important to them as mine is to me, and I don’t know, and will never know, what that story is.

While I work on the last edits of Realmgolds, I’ve started the next book, currently called Hope and the Clever Man. It’s set during the same time as Realmgolds, not far away, and some of the events in each book very much impact the other, but the main character isn’t even mentioned in Realmgolds. And yet her story is very important to her and the people around her, and without her the events of Realmgolds would have gone very differently.

She lives in a Robertson Davies world. Despite her considerable talents, I hope that will help keep her from becoming a spoiled protagonist.

Feb 18

The Spoiled Protagonist

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I’ve read a couple of books lately which have what I’ve started to think of as “spoiled protagonists”.

“Spoiled” in the sense that everyone treats them like a princess (or a prince – one is male), even though they’re very ordinary people. When they come on the scene, people with serious responsibilities will neglect them in order to help with whatever the spoiled protagonist is doing. Villains go out of their way to give them grief, but it’s all right, because everyone else is their humble servant. Their relatively small successes are treated as world-saving  triumphs and the cause for endless gratitude. They break the rules, or even the law, and are blithely forgiven by the toughest authorities when they explain their reasons.

If they want to go stupidly and unnecessarily into a dangerous situation (and they do), they only need to whine a little and stamp their feet for people who should know better to let them do so. Nameless spearcarriers or even minor characters will then be sacrificed to protect them, without a cross word being spoken to the precious spoiled protagonist.

It didn’t take me long to work out a theory of why this is happening. The authors have been reading too many Chosen One stories. The spoiled protagonist is the Chosen One by stealth.

See, a Chosen One is typically of humble origins, but everyone in the world wants to either oppose them or help them. They’re destined to save the world, but first they have to grow up, and that involves making stupid decisions that have a cost mainly to other people. Because they’re the focus of the Prophecy, it’s literally all about them.

The spoiled protagonist is the Chosen One without the justification of the prophecy. They’re a person who actually is ordinary, injudicious and inexperienced who’s stumbling around, doing a poor job of dealing with a situation that they weren’t prepared for. The unrealistic part is that everyone is downing tools and either helping or hindering them as if they were the most important person in the world.

To the author, of course, the main character is the most important person in the world. The world exists because of the character. But the other people in the world shouldn’t act as if they know that.

Stop spoiling your protagonists, authors. If they’re whiny, headstrong and inept, drop the consequences on them, not on hapless, uncomplaining minions around them. Better still, don’t make them whiny, headstrong and inept in the first place.

Jan 26

On Book Cover Design

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One of the reasons I self-publish is for greater control.

Nowhere is this more significant than in cover design. Traditionally-published authors, even the very popular ones, have little if any control over the cover art for their books. A process of Chinese whispers between the editorial, marketing and production departments leads to a poorly-briefed artist producing a cover that often has little to do with the content of the book.

Classic example: Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden doesn’t wear a hat, but the cover artist was told early on that he did, and painted him with one. (It’s now become a standing joke, which Butcher has referenced in the books, and the character on the cover art continues to have the hat, while the character in the text doesn’t.)

The other thing that the commercial publishing process produces is covers that are much the same as each other. You can generally spot the genre of a book from across the room. Romance: muscular guy with no shirt. Urban fantasy: shapely tattooed girl in clothing that shows a lot of skin. Dark fantasy: mysterious hooded figure. Because traditional publishing treats books as interchangeable commodities, they end up packaging them the same way.

And then there are the covers that are not just cliched, but outright objectionable. Jim C. Hines has been drawing attention to these by attempting to reproduce some of the poses that women are put in on urban fantasy covers, with hilarious results. He and several other authors recently did this cover pose (warning: more pale male flesh than you probably wanted to see) to point up the sexism of some fantasy and SF covers. His point in all of this is that women are often portrayed exploitatively and in ways that, while purportedly showing their power (they’re posing with weapons!), really don’t. And often, these are the covers of books by women.

All of which was in my mind when I commissioned the cover of Realmgolds.

All too often, you can tell an indie book by its cover because the cover is really bad. I wanted to commission a cover that you could tell was an indie book, not based on lack of quality, but because no major publishing house would ever commission this cover. They wouldn’t have the imagination.

I found an artist who had done a cover for someone I know on Google+, and sent him detailed art direction. Here are extracts:

The cover shows the two main characters, Victory on the viewer’s left and Determined on the right, sitting talking at a table. They are equals in terms of their rank, but Determined is younger, less confident and less competent. Both are of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern appearance… Definitely not Northern European. No whitewashing.

VICTORY is in her early to mid thirties. She is a small woman, but has such a dominant personality that people usually don’t notice this….

She isn’t beautiful. That’s very important. She’s not unpleasant to look at, but she’s not conventionally attractive. Kind of nerdy, if you can imagine a nerd girl who is extremely confident.

DETERMINED is a bookish young man of about 25, who really wanted to be a historian… he has a slightly scruffy, academic look to him…

Even with this brief, I had to say things like, “She’s too pretty. Make her nose bigger.” But I got what I wanted:

My artist, Chris Howard, did an amazing job, and I’m very happy with the cover. Much more so than I would have been had I not been able to brief him and engage in back-and-forth with him.

The book is with the editor right now, and I’m still planning for publication in March. Stay tuned!

If you’re not already signed up for my mailing list, doing so will make sure you know when books come out, and also give you free access to short fiction set in the world of the Gryphon Clerks. Just enter your email address in the sidebar to the right on any page of the website.

Jan 13

Beautiful language and good stories

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I was reading this post about period language on Wondermark this morning, and it got me thinking about language in fiction.

I love the English language, for all its quirks. My long-ago master’s degree is in that field, after all. I love to see it well and skillfully used, something which is becoming sadly rare. Perhaps it always was.

I’ve recently left a popular writers’ community on Google+, only partly because of the high volume of posts. What really drove me out was the high volume of posts that were along these lines: “So im wanna be a writer lol any advise?” I exaggerate only a little.

And to weave in another thread to my thinking, I was reading i09’s best science fiction and fantasy books of 2012 post today, having got there from a comment on N.K. Jemisin’s blog, and read this comment:

Is there anyone out there who is unimpressed by NK Jemisin? I keep reading these glowing reviews of her novels and how they’re destined to be classics, but all I could think when I read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was that it read like mediocre fanfiction, especially the interactions between the protagonist and the scary love interest dude.

I mulled that over, and what I realized was that I enjoyed that book mainly because of the skill of the language, and not so much because of the story, which is largely made up of tropes. (Apparently her later books get better.)

I loved Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, too, and was surprised to read reviews on Goodreads from people who just didn’t get what the fuss was about. They were bored by the 80s music references and all the band stuff, they said (honestly, that didn’t do much for me, either), and disliked the main character. Again, I loved it mostly because of the language.

Language by itself, though, isn’t enough for me. In both The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and War for the Oaks, the central characters have a strong moral core, which they act upon. They are actually strong women, not the fake “strong women” that you get in so much contemporary writing who are actually headstrong women, and cause most of their own problems, while relying on others, usually men, to solve them.

I think the character issue is why I can’t stand Gene Wolfe’s books, and have a love-hate relationship with Neil Gaiman’s work, although both are generally admired for their prose by people who love the more literary end of speculative fiction. Gene Wolfe’s protagonists are so emotionally alienated that I can’t even understand them, let alone identify with them, and Gaiman’s are often far too dark for my taste. I enjoyed American Gods, but I stay well clear of Sandman. It’s brilliant, but emotionally it’s too much for me.

What I’m teasing out here, I think, is that there are several different ways in which a book, or a writer, can be “good”. There’s language, facility with prose, which the authors I’ve already mentioned do well. There’s story, which includes things like pacing, suspense, the right mix of foreshadowing and surprise, as well as the structural elements of plot. There’s setting or worldbuilding, coming up with a world of wonder that has a believability to it, or at least a majesty or a richness to it. And there’s character and its close cousin situation.

Alongside these multiple ways to be skilled, there are matters of taste.

I don’t mind a little period language, since I’m well-read in English literature back to Beowulf (with a gap, I’ll admit, in the 18th century), but some people struggle with it. Those people shouldn’t read my book City of Masks, which has a “period” style taken from no actual period, and nor should people who obsess about historical accuracy. And for me, period language done ineptly is a complete turnoff, whereas for some people it won’t matter at all. Likewise, some people will give a book four or five stars even if it is full of incorrect homonyms and punctuated on the Jackson Pollock principle, but for me, that’s tiresome and distracting.

I personally don’t mind a story that’s constructed mostly of tropes, if it’s done well and the book has other merits. I also can enjoy a book that’s well-plotted even if the other elements are weak. J.K. Rowling, whose prose is often held up as an example of what not to do, whose worldbuilding is ridiculous and whose characters are thin, still holds my attention by weaving intricate plots, even if they have big holes in them. Personally, I like neat, happy endings that still leave the possibility of future problems open, but other people want their endings to be more ambiguous.

A wonderfully imagined world full of possibilities will seize my interest, but only if those possibilities are explored with characters who appeal to me (which is why I don’t read much hard SF, or China Mieville). This is actually one of the hardest things to do, and there aren’t many worldbuilding writers who come to mind. Tolkien, of course, is one. Part of the problem is that richly imagined worlds are hard to convey without either bogging down the story in exposition or leaving your readers confused for the first third of the book. I’m reading, or trying to read, Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi at the moment, and it has the latter problem. I’m a worldbuilder, and I can tell you it isn’t easy.

You don’t need a completely original world to get a good review from me, but on the other hand, mashing up Jules Verne and Indiana Jones and hotgluing brass gears over the joins is not going to grab me. I like to see some effort.

There are kinds of worlds I don’t like and kinds of worlds I do like, too. Cruel empires, post-apocalyptic wastelands, and oppressive dystopias, however well done, have an uphill struggle to appeal to me.

Finally, I have strong and definite tastes in characters. I don’t like antiheroes, though unlikely heroes I’m all for, and I love a good rogue with a heart. Passive or silly women, Gene Wolfe’s alienated people with no recognisable human emotions, anyone cruel or over-the-top villainous, casual adulterers, these will not get my vote.

What I’m saying, as both a writer and a reviewer, is that there can be many reasons why a book may or may not appeal to me or you. There are matters of craft and skill. At the moment, there are a huge number of first-time authors putting books out. Those who persevere and improve their craft will rise, and if I see an author whose craft is a mess but who shows imaginative flair and originality, I will write them an encouraging review and urge them to get some editing and coaching.

And then there are matters of taste. I’ve written lukewarm reviews of books I thought were well done, because despite that they weren’t quite my thing. I’ve abandoned, partially read, books that are critically or popularly acclaimed, because they contain elements that I personally dislike. I try to distinguish in my reviews between “it’s not good” and “it’s not for me”.

And for my potential readers: I’m still learning the craft (of course I am, everyone is, but I’m early on in the process). I know I’m an above-average writer of sentences, and I’m working hard to become at least an average teller of stories. My books have highly inventive settings, simple plots, and main characters who are fundamentally moral, adult and in reasonable mental and emotional health, though they also tend to be socially awkward and unpopular. If that’s your thing, I hope you’ll read them.

Oh, I should mention here: I recently set it up so that, if you sign up for my mailing list to be notified when I put out new releases, you also get access to free short fiction and permanent discounts on my older books. You can also be notified when I review a new indie book that I liked, and get these blog posts emailed to you (both of those things are opt-in). Just go to the right-hand sidebar on any page of the site and put in your email address, and software I spent far too many hours tinkering with will do the rest.

Jan 06

On Writing Strong Protagonists

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I grew up in a family with a lot of strong women: my mother, my grandmother, and my two sisters. Perhaps inevitably, I married a strong woman too. I often work with strong women, and get on very well with them. I have a number of women friends whose strength impresses me every time I talk to them. I’ll talk about what I mean by “strong” in a minute.

I’ve recently completed the fourth, and second-to-last, draft of Realmgolds, as the first Gryphon Clerks novel is now known. Most of what I did in that draft involved incorporating beta feedback, and the biggest changes had to do with strengthening the protagonist.

Determined (that’s his name) is a bookish young man who wanted to be an historian, but ended up in a position to make history instead. In my earlier drafts, he leaned a lot on Victory, his female counterpart. She made the decisions and solved the problems.

My betas didn’t like it. Now, I should point out that the beta who particularly didn’t like it is another strong woman, a self-described Jewish mother, so this isn’t about unevolved males reading it and saying “The dude needs to not listen to the girl so much, that’s weak.” Not at all. This is about who the protagonist is.

The word “protagonist” means “someone who struggles for something”. If you have a main character who’s mostly observing the action, who’s yielding to other people to make the decisions, or who’s relying on someone else to solve the problems, that’s not a protagonist in the true sense of the word.

Unfortunately, that’s a type of main character I often see in genre fiction. Actually, what I commonly see is this: the “protagonist” is a young woman who says “I’m strong and independent, I can make my own decisions”, makes incredibly poor decisions that get her in trouble, and has to be rescued by a man.

I see that most often in urban fantasy, but urban-fantasy tropes are appearing more and more in steampunk and secondary-world fantasy these days too. Including, unfortunately, that one.

Sorry, but that’s not what I think of when I say “strong woman”. Or “good story”, either. The protagonist needs to solve their own problems, at least once they get past the early part of the book where they’re mainly reacting to what’s thrown at them. To refer to Dan Wells’ seven-point structure, the “midpoint” is where the protagonist makes a decision that they need to do something active to solve the problems, and in my mind, that so-called midpoint needs to come within the first 30% of the book if it’s to keep my interest in the character. Even before the midpoint, when they’re reacting, they have to be trying to do something. Even if it’s only “stay alive”.

They don’t have to succeed at what they’re trying to do all the time, of course – that’s what a try-fail cycle is all about. But the point of a try-fail cycle is that it’s a cycle. They keep trying, even when they fail. This makes them a protagonist. They’re trying to solve the problem.

I’ve messed up a couple of short stories by having a viewpoint character who isn’t the protagonist, so when my beta reader pointed out the issue, I jumped on it. It turned out not to be that hard to rewrite the scenes so that Determined, who’s very intelligent, was the one solving the problems.

My worry was that, in making Determined a more active character, I would take away from Victory. She’s a very powerful and capable woman, respected, if not necessarily liked, even by her opponents. I tell the reader this early on through the mouth of a minor character. I was concerned that she would be one of those awful woman who the author tells us are strong, but who don’t do anything to show it. I didn’t want to be guilty of strong-woman tokenism.

I needn’t have worried, as I discovered when I did my complete read-through on a printout. As soon as Victory walked, elegantly and confidently, into a scene and started ordering people around just by looking at them, my concerns evaporated.

I read a quote from Joss Whedon recently to the effect that strong men are those who are comfortable around strong women. I like that. It makes my protagonist Determined a very strong man, because he can respect Victory without wanting to take away her power, and at the same time call her out when she becomes imperious and high-handed.

So when will the book be out? Currently, I’m waiting for my cover guy, who’s heavily booked because he’s good. I’m also talking with a heavily-booked editor about whether I should work with her or someone else. So the answer at the moment seems to be “March-ish”. I’ll keep you posted.

Dec 16

Dan Wells’ Seven-Point Story Structure

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Dan Wells has an excellent set of YouTube videos on story structure, made at a conference in 2010. I don’t necessarily remember information very well from videos, though, so I decided to take notes and publish them here. Since he got the idea from a roleplaying game book, and I’m giving full credit to him, I assume he won’t mind.

The first video is here:

There’s also an episode of the Writing Excuses podcast that Dan does with Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal and Howard Tayler in which he explains the seven-point structure. I haven’t re-listened to that to add to my notes; they’re solely taken from the videos.

Whether you are an “outline” writer and do the seven points upfront and then write the story, or a “discovery” writer who writes first and then incorporates the seven points during revision, the system is still useful.

Start at the end, with the resolution – the final state of the characters/plot – and move back to the hook, then the midpoint, the two plot turns in order, then the two pinches in order.

Here are the seven points.

1. Hook

In the hook, the character is in the opposite state from the state they will be in eventually. For example, if they are going to end up strong, start them out weak.

(Harry Potter lives in a cupboard under the stairs.)

2. Plot Turn 1

Something changes that puts things into motion. New ideas, new people, a Call to Adventure or inciting incident, starts the movement from the situation of the Hook to the situation of the Resolution.

(Harry Potter learns he’s a wizard, enters the wizarding world.)

3. Pinch 1

Something goes wrong that forces the character to step up and solve a problem.

(Harry Potter and friends fight the troll.)

4. Midpoint

This is the point at which the character moves from reaction to action, decides to move towards the end state (knowingly or otherwise). It doesn’t need to be in the middle of the story. In a mystery story, for example, where the midpoint is deciding to take the case, it can come very early on.

(Harry Potter decides that people who suck blood from unicorns must be opposed.)

5. Pinch 2

Something goes very wrong, much more so than in Pinch 1. These are the jaws of defeat from which victory must be grasped. Mentors die or vanish, allies prove unreliable, plans fail.

(Ron and Hermione fall to the magical traps on the way to the Stone and leave Harry Potter to go on alone.)

6. Plot Turn 2

The character receives the last piece needed to create the resolution. “The power is in you!” is a classic Plot Turn 2. Grasping victory from the jaws of defeat.

(Harry Potter looks in the Mirror of Erised, and because his motives are pure the stone goes into his pocket and he knows that if Voldemort touches him it will harm Voldemort, not him.)

7. Resolution

This the climax, what you’re leading up to, what the story’s about.

This can be plot or character. For example, the character makes a moral decision and becomes a different person from the person they were when they started. The problem of the plot is resolved.

This can be a state rather than an action (example of Poe’s “The Telltale Heart”, where the resolution is that the narrator is insane).

(Harry Potter defeats Voldemort.)

A tragedy plot reverses the order of “all is well” and “all is terrible”. The former is the hook, the latter the resolution.

This is the bare skeleton. Round characters, rich environments, try-fail cycles, subplots flesh it out.

The Ice Monster Prologue

The name of this is taken from Game of Thrones. Because the magic and action don’t appear for a long time in the book, there’s a prologue to introduce the promise that they will eventually arrive. (The hook itself isn’t necessarily exciting, because it’s the opposite of the final powerful state of the character.)

Try-Fail Cycle

Before heroes succeed at anything important, they should earn their victory by trying and failing multiple times. A problem that can be solved first go isn’t big enough to be interesting.

A try-fail can show the consequences of failure (Indiana Jones, the guy who drinks from the wrong chalice). It can look like a victory (Princess Bride, where defeating the swordsman, the giant and the Sicilian brings the Man in Black closer to his goal but he doesn’t reach it yet.) It can be an actual failure (Inigo Montoya trying to avenge his father.)

Plots and Subplots

Plots, subplots and character arcs can each be mapped out with the Seven-Point System. Spread out the events to create good pacing; line them up (have more than one advancing in the same scene) to create powerful moments, e.g. the resolution of one is the pinch of another. Character and action resolutions can come in the same powerful scene.

I hope that’s as useful to you as it will be to me. Thanks to Dan Wells for laying it all out.

Nov 23

The State of Science Fiction

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A lot of people are sounding off about the state of SF lately. It’s too dystopian! It’s too old-school! It’s lost its way! It’s dying! (Apparently this last has been happening for decades.)

I don’t normally join in on trends, but as it happens I have a couple of thoughts.

I’m partway through listening to Mike Resnik’s short story “The Homecoming” on the StarShipSofa podcast. This is the second time I’ve heard it (Escape Pod used it a few episodes back), and listening to it again I was struck by something.

Resnik started his career in the 1960s. Apart from the fact that he’s been writing incredibly prolifically for the intervening 50 years and, therefore, is presumably a much better writer now, there’s not a word in this story that couldn’t have been written at the start of his career. It even features a holochannel which has “stopped broadcasting for the night”, which as far as I’m aware is something no TV station has done for, what, 20 or 30 years?

Now, it’s an excellent story that thoroughly deserved its 2012 Hugo nomination. It’s moving. It’s beautifully observed. The SF elements are absolutely essential to the story, too. But there’s not a single thing in it that reflects anything that’s happened in science, or for that matter society, in the past half-century.

Does this mean it’s timelessly classic? Perhaps it does. I don’t want to knock Mike Resnik’s wonderful story in any way at all. But to me it also reflects the fact that the stories that get published in some of the leading prozines, like Asimov’s (which, I was unsurprised to discover, is where “The Homecoming” was published), are often stories which could easily have been published there back when Asimov himself was alive. Which is kind of funny in a genre that’s all about the future.

Asimov was no great prose stylist, and he never approached the emotional breadth and depth of Resnik’s story. What he was, though, was a bold explorer of ideas. It’s as if the magazine named for him is now a kind of memorial ideas park for the great explorer, in which visitors stroll along well-worn paths.

Now, I’m not advocating dropping the standards of craft, of course. Pretentious, confusing, plotless stories and unappealing, passive characters can stay in literary fiction, as far as I’m concerned. (ZING!) But surely we can incorporate current science into our science fiction and still tell well-constructed stories about relatable characters who do interesting things? Charles Stross does it, after all.

In an attempt to be the change I want to see, I’ve started a notification circle on Google+ called SpecFicQuestion (the link gets you to the hashtag, which will show you all my posts so far). We discuss “what-if” scenarios drawn from up-to-date science, like: what if you could print meat? And then what if you could print human meat?

If you’re on G+, just comment on any of the posts or contact me directly to ask to be added to the circle. The posts are all public, so anyone can read them, but if you’re in the circle  you’ll be notified when I do each post.