Oct 04

Excerpt: The Trial from Realmgold

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Now that I’ve submitted The Gryphon Clerks for consideration to a small-press publisher, I’m concentrating on finishing the draft of Realmgold (formerly “the political book”). I like it. It might even become the “first” book, since both cover the same time period and it’s a little more mainstream – more conflict, for one thing.

Here’s an excerpt. Constance is a Countygold, a local ruler, who is acting as a magistrate here.

 

Constance’s official judicial table that she used in her usual courtroom had been moved to the platform of the hall. She stood up behind it, a slight, fiftyish, grey-haired woman who needed the reading glasses that she looked over at the gathered crowd.

Here we go, she thought.

“We are here,” she said, “to ascertain the facts about the incident which occurred night before last, just south of Boulder Bend, between a dwarf caravan and a group of local men. I will hear testimony from all who were present and survived, and I will render judgement based on the principles of justice and the law of Denning.” She paused and very deliberately tracked her gaze across the various groups. “Anyone who disrupts the proceedings will be ejected without appeal. Is that clear to everybody?”

There were nods from various parts of the hall. The grey-clad RBP men didn’t nod, just sat stiffly. There were mutterings among the dwarves, but she chose to assume they were translations being made for those who didn’t speak Pektal. The newswriters scribbled, and the Coppers shuffled their feet.

“Good,” she said, and sat. “I will have the participants in the incident come in one at a time and give testimony as to what occurred. Call…” she squinted at her notes… “Tree Stonecircle.”

The advocate for the Coppers popped to his feet as if on a spring. His appearance was against him – he was pop-eyed, with a receding chin and advancing teeth – but he was a highly skilled lawyer, too highly skilled for the Coppers to be paying him themselves, thought Constance.

“Advocate Trustworthy,” she said, acknowledging him. She thought: Trustworthy, what a name for a lawyer.

“May I inquire of the court why the first witness to be called is the principal accused?”

“One of the principal accused,” she pointed out. “And I am calling him first because, having read through the depositions made by the participants, I concluded that his account gives the fullest outline of the incident. That is not,” she said, as he opened his mouth, “a judgement of its accuracy, only of its level of detail.” She nodded to the corporal, who had been waiting for her ruling, and he hurried out the back to fetch the centaur.

There was some murmuring among the Coppers when Muscles appeared, which Constance hushed with her bell and a hard glare that said: Remember, I can throw you out. The RBP men sat silently, obviously determined to give her no excuse.

It was the magistrate’s prerogative to question the witness first, so she began, once he had been sworn in.

“You are Tree Stonecircle?”

“Yes, Countygold,” he said, in a surprisingly tenor voice. His head was about three dwarfpaces above the ground, and, seated, she had to look up at him.

“You can address me as Magistrate while we are in session. You were hired by the dwarf Pack of Sevenhills as a caravan guard?”

“Yes, Magistrate.”

She led him through the outline of events, which he recited calmly and clearly, like a military officer giving his report. His enormous hooves stayed planted foursquare on the platform, and he didn’t fidget, nor did his speech stumble. She handed him over, as was the tradition, to Trustworthy, who as far as Tree was concerned was acting as the opposing advocate.

Trustworthy leapt to his feet and leaned forward, gesturing up at the centaur (the advocates were not seated on the platform, since there wasn’t room). “Tree Stonecircle,” he said, “you have testified under oath that the humans you killed began the altercation. Is this true?”

“Yes, Advocate,” said Tree.

“And does the oath bind you?” he asked.

Tree blinked, at a loss for the first time. “I’m sorry, Advocate, I don’t understand,” he said.

“Are you bound by your oath in court?”

“Of course I am, Advocate.”

“But you’re more than half an animal.”

Murmurs began on both sides of the court, and Constance rang her bell sharply. “Advocate, I suggest that you desist from this line of questioning,” she said. “I am mindmage enough to confirm that the oath does bind the witness, as it does any other witness.”

Trustworthy bowed to her unctuously and continued.

“So what was it that led you to conclude that the humans concerned had attacked you?”

“One of them shouted ‘let’s get them’, and they all ran at us with weapons,” he said. More than one of the reporters smirked, and they all scribbled faster.

“And these so-called weapons, of what did they consist?”

“Sharp bits of metal on poles, mostly,” he said. One reporter laughed openly, though briefly, glanced at Constance and fell silent.

“They were, in fact, agricultural tools, were they not? Hayforks, mattocks, scythes and the like?”

“Yes, Advocate. Sharp bits of metal on poles,” said Tree.

“They were not, for example, spears and swords?”

“No, Advocate, they were not. I imagine that such items are difficult to obtain for civilians.”

“What you imagine is not evidence,” said Trustworthy sharply. “So you admit that they were not weapons?”

“No, Advocate, I admit that they were not spears and swords. They were capable of doing harm to us and I judged that that was the intent of the people holding them, which made them weapons. It is my job to make these determinations and act upon them.”

“So had they actually laid their implements on you when you fired your bow?”

“No, Advocate. That’s rather the point of a bow,” said Tree. “You can defend yourself from a distance.”

“So you shot – how many?”

“Three, Advocate. After that they were too close.”

“And what did you do next? Remind me?”

“I drew my sword and defended myself, my employer, and my fellow employees.”

“So you attacked a group of peasants, who had nothing but farm tools to defend themselves, with weapons of war.”

“Advocate, I defended myself and my group against an unprovoked attack with improvised weapons. It’s my job.”

“And you stick to this story.”

“I do, Advocate.”

“Yours to question,” said Trustworthy to the other advocate, a skinny man called Hopeful with a big blade of a nose, and sat down.

Hopeful stood, straightened his lawyer’s shoulder-width black poncho, and asked, “Mr Tree, how many of your opponents were killed in the encounter, do you know?”

“I believe it was three, Advocate.”

“And you base this on?”

“Rapid examination at the scene,” he replied. “It’s possible that one or two more may have died afterwards, after I left.”

“And how did they die, these three?”

“Two from my shots. The third man I shot, the big one with the pickaxe, looked as if he would live to me. Then one of them was kicked by one of the mules, and he hit pretty hard. Looked like he had internal injuries.”

“So the ones you fought with your sword…?”

“One I disarmed by cutting the head off his weapon. Two I knocked out with the flat of the blade. The last one I kicked, but he should have survived all right.”

“So you had a sword, but you didn’t stab anyone with it.”

“Broadsword, Advocate. Not really a stabbing weapon.”

“You didn’t cut anyone, then.”

“No, Advocate.”

“Why was that?”

“I try not to kill people if I can avoid it.”

“Thank you, Mr Tree,” said Hopeful, and sat down.

“Thank you, Mr Tree,” echoed Constance, “that will be all. The court,” she said to the room at large, “has sighted documentation which shows that the centaur Tree Stonering is a licensed caravan guard, permitted to carry and use weapons in defence of his employer and his employer’s goods.” She paused, looked down at her notes, and said, “Call Root Pinegrove.”

The corporal led Tree back into the back room on Constance’s left, emerged, ducked into the back room on her right and brought out a medium-sized Copper who walked rather carefully, as if in pain. His heavy breathing was clearly audible in the courtroom, silent except for the scribbling of the reporters.

Tree would probably have recognised him as the man with the mattock.

Constance moved through the formalities of confirming his identity and involvement in the incident as rapidly as she could, given his thick dialect.

“How many of you were in the group involved in the incident?”

“Eleven, Magistrate.”

“And what had you been doing previously?”

“We been at pub.”

“Drinking?”

“Yahs, Magistrate.”

“Why did you have your tools with you?”

The man’s mouth, which featured some truly hideous teeth – green and worn or missing – worked briefly as he tried not to answer, but the oath compelled him.

“We was lookin’ for shorties.”

“Do you mean you were looking for dwarves?”

“Yahs.”

“And what did you intend to do when you found them?”

Root muttered something.

“Speak clearly, Mr Root,” said Constance sternly.

“We was gonna do ‘em over.”

“You were going to attack them?”

“Yahs.” The man was sweating, trying not to answer.

“And did you attack the dwarf caravan in question when you found them?”

“Yahs.” Very reluctantly.

“In your statement given previously, you claimed that the dwarf caravan attacked you. Are you now saying that was untrue?”

“Yahs.”

“You lied in your statement?”

“Yahs.”

“Why did you lie, Mr Root?”

“Was sceered.”

“You were scared. What were you scared of, Mr Root?”

“Sceered of Localgold.”

“And why was that?”

The man struggled visibly, but didn’t answer.

“Are you under a compulsion not to answer that question, Mr Root?” she asked, knowing full well what the answer was.

“Yahs,” he said, with a mixture of fear and relief.

“Did the Localgold suggest that you go out after the dwarves, Mr Root?”

Trustworthy popped up on his spring, but she waved him down. Root’s eyes bulged as the conflicting oaths fought to force him in opposite directions.

“It’s all right, Mr Root,” Constance said after a few heartbeats, as the Copper’s face started to flush, “you don’t have to answer that question. Be it noted in the record that the witness was unable to answer.

“So you attacked the dwarf caravan. Another witness has told us that one of your group cried out, ‘Get them!’, or words to that effect. Did you hear those words, Mr Root?”

“Yahs.”

“Who said them?”

“Sky Tanner.” He added a tongue-click to the end of the name, as superstitious Coppers did to the names of the dead.

“And what happened then?”

“We run at the shorties and the horse-arse.”

“Mr Root, in my courtroom you will call things by their correct names. You will call dwarves dwarves, gnomes gnomes, and centaurs centaurs. Is that clear?”

“Yahs, Magistrate.”

“So what happened after Sky Tanner called out?”

“We run at the… the dwarves and the centaur.”

“To attack them?”

“Yahs.”

“With what object?”

“Magistrate?”

“What was your purpose? What did you hope to achieve by attacking them?”

“Beat ‘em up, take their stuff.”

“You were going to rob them?”

“Yahs,” quietly.

“Did you intend to kill them?”

“Nah.”

“Just to hurt them?”

“Yahs.”

“And what stopped you?”

“The hor… the centaur.”

“He stopped you from beating up the group any worse than you did, and from robbing them?”

“Yahs.”

“What did he do to you?”

“Kicked me in guts.” He touched the area in question and winced.

“Thank you, Mr Root. Yours to question,” she said to Trustworthy.

Sep 15

How to End a Story

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I’ve been thinking lately about how to end stories, not only because I’m finishing up the first Gryphon Clerks novel and I’m unhappy with how I ended it, but because I’ve read some stories recently that don’t finish. They just stop.

I won’t name the anthology I’m thinking of, but I’ve read partway through it and story after story just stops. It’s like I’m getting the first acts of these stories without the middle and the end. The characters and situation are introduced, there’s an inciting incident which hits on something important enough to the characters that they want to do something or change something, and then… scene. I actually said aloud when I got to the end of one of them, “Is that it?”

Story after story. By different people. It’s like the anthology call said, “Stories must stop abruptly,” or the editor cut off the last two acts to see if anyone would notice.

Anyway, that got me thinking about what does and doesn’t work as an ending to a story. (By “work” of course I mean “work for me”, but I think that, for a change, I may not be atypical in what I like here.)

Here are five ways to end a story. They’re not mutually exclusive, or exhaustive.

1. The situation is resolved

A classic story structure is (simplified): Act 1, we meet the characters, learn the situation, something changes that destabilizes the situation and makes the characters want to take action. Act 2, the characters strive for their goal against opposition. Act 3, the characters achieve whatever their goal was that arose from the inciting incident back in Act 1. The Ring is thrown into Mount Doom, the princess is rescued, the dragon is slain, the rightful king is restored, the traveller comes home, the real Seymour Skinner is sent away from Springfield and we never refer to this again.

It’s usually a restoration of the status quo, more or less, except that the characters have (hopefully) grown through the experience. It’s a conservative story structure: something disturbed the way things should be, now everything is, more or less, back to normal. But it also has its progressive aspect, if only on the micro level of the characters, who have moved from “unable to make a difference” to “able to make a difference”.

2. The characters’ relationships have changed

This is the classic romance plot, of course, and Pride and Prejudice is the exemplar. They start out hating one another or thinking they can’t be together, and at the end, inevitably, they marry and live happily ever after.

It doesn’t have to be a romance plot, though. I wrote a story recently in which an airship captain from a humble background starts out distinctly unimpressed with an aristocratic young pup who’s been foisted on her and ends up thinking he might make a decent officer. It doesn’t have to be about winning love. It can be winning friendship, respect, fealty, alliance.

I like stories in which relationships change for the better, but of course you can write the other sort, too, if that’s what you’re into.

3. We discover something

This is the mystery-story plot. At the end, we find out that the butler dunnit. But in the meantime we’ve discovered all kinds of other things, such as that Lady Celia drinks, and Lord Bertie is having an affair, and the housemaid’s brother just got out of prison. (Why anyone would ever invite a detective to a house party is beyond me. Not only will someone, more likely several people, inevitably get horribly murdered – because when a famous detective is right there is the ideal time to murder someone – but everyone’s nasty secrets will be exposed to everyone else, and nobody will ever be able to trust anyone again, except for the ingenue and the decent chap who end up together, hooray.)

Mysteries, though, are not the only “we discover something” stories. Characters discover things about themselves: that they’re not like their father, that they are like their father, that they do have magic, that not having magic isn’t important. (More about “not important” below.)

The twist ending (The Statue of Liberty is buried in the sand on the Planet of the Apes!) is another “we discover something” ending. An important feature of “we discover something” is that it can reflect back across the whole of the story and cast a new light on everything that happened before we discovered the something, which is one reason that it’s such a good ending.

4. Something new has come into being

This is an underrated and underexplored kind of ending, in my view. Often, the conservative ending, the restoration of the status quo, involves the destruction of whatever arose to threaten “the way things should be”. I’d like to see more stories about building and creating things. After all, for most of us – certainly for me, as someone who’s done project work of one kind or another for over 20 years – that’s how we experience life.

The relationship story has a bit of this. There’s a new relationship, a new family, a new alliance or whatever at the end. But I’d like to see more stories where the characters build something together and the ending is where they celebrate that, against the odds, it’s built. Fantasy is full of wonderful ancient artifacts and immense architectural wonders built by long-gone civilizations, many of which are destroyed in the course of the stories. How about the stories in which those amazing things are made in the first place?

5. It doesn’t matter any more

One overlooked form of personal growth is the kind where you’re able to say, along with Melody Beattie’s famous book Codependent No More: “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter!”

While that can be an utterance of despair, it can also be an expression of hope. The person who decides they can let go of their hurt and anger and not take revenge has grown. The young wizard who can say “No, Professor, I don’t need to follow your crazy agenda any more. This war is over, as it should have been when you were my age” (not an actual quote from any book) – this young wizard has grown.

If the character can look back on the inciting incident which started all the trouble and say “I made a big deal out of that, but it’s really not that important,” I think that can be a wonderful ending. I recently read the pulpy but enjoyable Mogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw, in which the viewpoint character decides at the end, “I don’t want to be a hero. I want to be a protagonist.” While it’s not a great book, that’s a great ending.

Debora Geary‘s Witches On Parole trilogy is, at its heart, about this realignment of priorities. And one of the things about the “it doesn’t matter any more” ending is this: the realization that your original priorities don’t matter is followed by the realization of what does matter.

It’s not about external circumstances being exactly as you would wish them, but about being true to yourself and those around you.

So, what kinds of endings work for you? How do you like to finish your stories?

Aug 26

Beta Feedback

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Well, I’ve had feedback from my wonderful beta readers. One hasn’t finished yet (just got a new job, so I let him off), but the other two have, and the feedback is consistent.

Consistent not only with each other, but also with my own suspicions about what didn’t work and what could be stronger. Although they did relieve my concerns about a couple of things, such as whether I’d been descriptive enough.

All three of them (and my other reader who gave feedback on an early partial draft) disliked the parentheses. Having almost eliminated semicolons from my writing, I think parentheses may be next. They all felt the parenthetical explanations of background facts broke the flow, and I need to find a better way of communicating the worldbuilding aspects of the story.

I’m gearing up now for a major rewrite. I’ve not done this with my previous books, but they were less ambitious and not surrounded by dozens of other stories begging to be told. I need to streamline the story, focussing on Berry as the main character and viewpoint character. If Berry didn’t know about it directly or from someone who was there, it doesn’t go in this book.

It may well go in another book, though, or stand on its own as a short story. I don’t regret writing the backstories of so many characters. I think it was a good exercise, and they won’t be lost – except for one.

Tranquil the statistician defied my attempts to make him interesting, and he’s going to be cut altogether. I’m going to have a smaller, more focussed group of characters with a clearer purpose and better-thought-through character arcs. Some of the characters will drop into the background, while others will take on new significance. Originally, I thought this would be an ensemble-cast book, but it really is Berry’s story.

Most of this is subtraction, but there will be addition as well. I want to spend a bit more time on the three secondary characters (Rain the ex-gang enforcer, Breeze the werewolf and Vigilant the spiritually-inclined lawyer), and I’ve come up with a major change to one relatively minor character which gives her more depth and sets up for one of the other books. Here’s a hint: when you have a character who’s already kind of a badass, how can you make her even more so? Answer: take away her legs.

It’ll be a lot of work, but I think I’ll come out of it with a very marketable book. My betas think the same.

Aug 15

First draft finished! What’s next?

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Well, I finally got my first draft done on The Gryphon Clerks.

I started writing at the beginning of November last year, so that’s eight and a half months – not bad. The manuscript is at 108,000 words, but that doesn’t count the more than 30,000 words I’ve chopped out and put into two other projects.

One of them doesn’t have a title yet. It’s all the political stuff that’s going on during the story of The Gryphon Clerks. I wanted to keep the focus on the clerks, and particularly Berry, and that whole secondary plot wasn’t really interacting much with the main story, so I pulled it out as a separate book. It’s 28,000 words, so that’s a good start on a novel in its own right.

The other story that I’ve hived off from the main one is called Agents of Victory at the moment. I realized near the end of the first draft that I had this secondary character who, again, wasn’t interacting with Berry at all, and so probably didn’t belong in the book. She’s Grace, the niece of the Countygold Patience, and she’s involved in a sting on a crooked charity fundraiser which goes so well that she achieves her ambition of being admitted to the Realmgold’s Agents.

The Realmgold’s Agents are kind of an FBI-style organization who, under Realmgold Victory’s predecessor, were instruments of state oppression. But Victory has purged the psychos and stormtroopers, staffed the Agents with Gryphon Clerks, and made them into an elite force who work to bring down organized crime and corruption. This sets them against the wealthy and powerful, with Victory’s full backing (it’s part of her program of social reform).

Rain, the former street fighter, is going to join the very aristocratic (and very smart) Grace, and they’ll be an odd-couple partnership going undercover as fluffy, flighty mistress and incompetent maid. I think it could be a lot of fun.

I’ve also been writing some short stories in the world of the Gryphon Clerks, a couple of which I’ve submitted for publication (haven’t heard back on either of them yet). One is a 5000-worder set on a skyfrigate, which I hope will form part of an eventual novel. I’m planning to have a plot point in the political-maneuverings novel where a skyfrigate is sent off to get more mercenaries from a free city to the south which specializes in providing them, and does a bit of a tour of the southern countries in the process. That book, if it eventuates, will probably be called Unconquerable, after the ship.

I’ve also written a 6000-word short story for a competition called “Gnome Day”, based off a single moment in a minor scene in The Gryphon Clerks. Since there were (if I recall right) over 1700 entries received for that competition and only six will get published, I’m not holding my breath, but you never know.

If it isn’t selected, I’ll submit it elsewhere. It’s a standalone, although I’ve also done another 3,400-word story also set around the events surrounding Gnome Day (when Victory frees the gnomes). I suppose I could do a few more and have my own little theme anthology.

So that’s about 154,000 words, by my count, in the world of the Gryphon Clerks. I have a couple more ideas, too, including an actual sequel (not just exploring the same time period from different viewpoints) called Underground Railroad. The dwarves, reacting to Victory’s emancipation of the gnomes, build underground tunnels between their holds and take their trade under the mountains to the south, so that they can continue their slaveholding ways. Victory’s response is to build airships to trade the products of free gnomes with the same southern realms. I have one character already, Amethyst, a dwarf woman who poses as a gnome in order to be able to leave the dwarf hold (which is forbidden to dwarf women normally), and works with the gnome underground to get enslaved gnomes to freedom.

Before all this, though, I need to get feedback from my beta readers to tell me if I’m totally missing the boat with The Gryphon Clerks. I’m sure the book has issues, I’m just not certain what they are yet. Hopefully my lovely beta readers will tell me.

If you want to join the beta readers, there are places available – just comment here. I’ll need feedback within a month, so that I can start looking for a publisher. Thanks!

Jul 09

How to Review a Book You Didn’t Love

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I’m both a writer and a reviewer. I read a lot, and I’m opinionated, and that’s the basic formula for a reviewer. Most of my reviews are on Goodreads, but I also review on Amazon.

There are some pitfalls to wearing both hats. The writing community, especially the indie writing community, is very connected, and there’s some expectation (even if it’s only in my head) that I’ll review my friends’ stuff positively.

I don’t always do that. I say what I think. So far I haven’t hit anyone like the guy described in this post on Making Light, who responded to a negative review from another author by trashing her book in revenge. (Pro tip: don’t do that.) The people I choose to hang out with are sensible adult human beings and they will take a less-than-raving review in their stride. But I try to make it easier for them (and for authors I don’t know) by following a few important principles.

Actually, of course, reviews are not primarily for the authors’ consumption. They’re for other readers. I know I appreciate reading a review that warns me about the weaknesses of a book, so that I can assess whether they are likely to spoil my enjoyment or not, and alerts me to its strengths, so that I can decide whether that’s a thing I like or not. And this is why I write reviews the way I do.

Here are the principles I try to follow. They’re a work in process and I don’t guarantee that every review I’ve written, or even every review I’ve written recently, follows them perfectly. But this is what I’m trying for.

(This post, incidentally, was partly triggered by Lindsay Buroker’s Tips for Dealing with Bad Book Reviews. One of the commentators suggested that someone should do a post on “Tips for Writing Reviews Where the Books Weren’t Totally Awesome”. Challenge accepted.)

1. Objectivity: Say specifically what you saw on the page

I get no value from a review that says “this is a badly-written book” or “this is my favourite author” or “I loved this so much” or “I hated every page”, any more than I get value from reviews that copy and paste the publisher’s synopsis at the beginning. I want to know what I will see on the page that is, potentially, good or bad.

I was a book editor for a while (nearly 20 years ago now, but I still have the mindset), so I will often highlight the author’s competence with punctuation, or use of words that don’t mean what they think they mean. Some people don’t care about this at all (since they don’t know or follow the rules themselves). The fact that the author gets these things wrong won’t interfere with their enjoyment of the book. But if you do care, it will interfere with that enjoyment, and I for one would appreciate knowing that about a book in advance.

It’s also, unlike most other feedback, useful to the author, since it may help to motivate them to get a better editor next time (or get one at all).

I also talk about anachronisms in books with historical settings, for much the same reason.

2. Subjectivity: Acknowledge that tastes differ

Sometimes, what I hate about a book may be someone else’s favourite thing. So I phrase my opinions as opinions. I talk about what the author did (objectivity) and how I feel about it (subjectivity).

For example, I recently reviewed a book that had no antagonist and very little of what could be traditionally called “conflict” or “action”. People sat around and ate ice cream together a lot. Many, many readers would hate this, but (because of some other aspects of the book, which I also mentioned) I liked it.

There are also things that annoy me that don’t annoy other people. I’m fussy about names, for example. I like the non-fantasy parts of fantasy worlds to work like the real world, so having a full moon and a new moon in the sky at the same time is a big black mark. If this kind of thing is what I didn’t like about the book, again, I say so (rather than a vague “the worldbuilding is sloppy”), and usually mention that it may be a thing that only bothers me, so that if someone else doesn’t care they can discount my rating.

3. It’s not about the author

I try (again, I may not always succeed) to avoid making the review about the author’s competence, let alone their personal qualities. “I don’t see X on the page” is a much more emotionally neutral statement than “the author is no good at doing X” or “this is a lazy, bad author” (though I’ve been guilty of saying something not too different from that last one).

“I didn’t enjoy it because Y” doesn’t need to become “I hate this author and his little dog too”.

4. Allow for the possibility of improvement

Just as I rarely give five stars, I rarely give one star. To me, five stars means “it would be difficult or impossible to improve this book”, and I rarely think that. And one star, in my personal rating system, means “this is a complete waste of time with no redeeming qualities and I don’t even see any potential in this author”, and that’s even more rare. I always try to talk about things that worked, and if I finished the book there must have been something that worked. (Sometimes I don’t finish the book because, for me, not enough is working.)

I recently reviewed a second book in a series, and took pains to point out the ways in which it was an improvement over the first, even though I still felt it had significant flaws.

5. Say something fresh

Again, this is something I do that other people may not. Some reviewers read other reviews of the book before writing theirs, and enter into a kind of dialogue with them, disagreeing or agreeing. I don’t do that, in part so that my review will be a fresh perspective specific to me.

If I’m writing for other readers, rather than just to relieve my feelings, that will best be served if I say something that other people aren’t saying, with specific reference to what’s on the page, acknowledging my personal taste and avoiding attacks on the author.

In my opinion.

Jun 28

Telling Extra, Ordinary Stories

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There’s an advantage I didn’t anticipate to writing a fantasy novel without a Chosen One.

I mean, obviously it means that I’m not telling the same old tired story that’s already been done to death. I knew that. What I didn’t anticipate was that if nobody is the Chosen One, then anybody’s story can be interesting.

Can be interesting in itself, even if it’s tangential to the main story. Even if it’s completely unrelated.

For example, I’m currently polishing a short story for a competition. It’s about the young man in the last paragraph of this excerpt from the novel.

Yes, the one with no name and no lines. He nods his head and looks keen, and that’s his whole appearance. (I decided that Keen was his name, when I went to write more about him.)

He’s one small step up from a face in the crowd, and yet I wrote a 6000-word short story about the next 26 years of his life. One of my beta readers commented that it could easily be expanded and still remain interesting.

As it happens, I was listening to the latest Galley Table podcast from Flying Island Press this morning, in which the crew interview Nathan Lowell. Nathan is the champion of what some people have called “blue-collar spec fic”, about people who aren’t rulers or commanders just going about their daily lives and heroically doing what they have to do in order to get by. I’ve been very inspired by him and what he does. I’m not sure that the idea of a novel about heroic civil servants would have made it into my consciousness if I hadn’t listened to his work (thanks to Podiobooks.com).

The truth is, while the Chosen One story appeals to something in us that longs to be taken out of our everyday lives and be heroes and have adventures, because unbeknown to us we’re significant, the reality is that we can be heroes in the way we live our everyday lives. Because we actually are significant already.

Jun 18

Progress Update

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I passed the milestone of 100,000 words for The Gryphon Clerks on the weekend.

That doesn’t count several spinoff short stories that I’m writing and submitting to various places, to practice my writing skills (and get my name out there, and develop some interesting bits of the world and the story that aren’t central enough to go in the novel).

I haven’t mentioned this here on the blog, but my thinking at the moment is that this is one big book rather than several smaller ones. That’s subject to revision, of course, like everything else. It neatly solves the title question, though. One thick book, The Gryphon Clerks.

I’ve reached a difficult point, in terms of motivation. About a third of the way through I did an outline, which I’m now working to. It has its plusses and minuses. On the plus side, it’s relatively easy to think of what to write about, because I already thought about that. I just have to sit down and do it.

On the downside, that isn’t as much fun as just wandering about discovering things.

Also, I’m now in the part of the book with a lot of conflict, and I don’t really like writing conflict that much. I’m very soft-hearted towards my characters, to the detriment of my writing. A character who I like quite a lot is about to go through some tough times, and even though it’s going to lead to good things for him, and I know that, he doesn’t know it and I hate to do that to him (and to other people who aren’t going to be as fortunate).

Another plus of the outline, though, is that when I’m stuck on one bit I can write another bit instead.

I do feel like I’m kind of ploughing through at the moment, not knowing if it’s any good, sometimes resorting to “rich outlining” (my term for telling the story rather than showing it – I’ll go back later and replace the bare narrative of events with dialogue and action). I estimate that I’ll probably hit about 150K by the time I’ve got through the whole outline and expanded it up.

That’s long for a novel, though I’m told that Patrick Rothfuss’s novels are about 400K (they don’t seem like it, they’re so involving). I may need to trim some stuff that doesn’t contribute to the main story. (It can potentially become short stories, of course, or a novella occurring parallel to the main novel.) Maybe even combine a couple of characters, because so far some of them haven’t done very much, though again they can have their own stories off to the side later on.

After I get through the whole outline, and expand my “rich outlines” into proper storytelling, comes revision. I think of this as the process of getting from the “pig draft” to the “goat draft”: it still stinks, but it’s not as ugly.

Somewhere either before or after the goat draft stage, I want to submit it to a small press I have my eye on. They ask for the first 15,000 words as a sample, which (I worked out) goes up to the end of Berry’s story, before anyone else tells their backstory. I’m already reasonably happy with that, so it may go out while a lot of the rest of the book is still in pig draft, or even before I finish expanding the rich outlines.

I suppose I could even do it now. I don’t think I will, though. Events later on will affect the characterization of Victory, who’s one of the first two characters we meet, and I want to loop back round and sow the seeds of continuity back in those early chapters once the end is written.

Plus I’m nervous about submitting, of course.

Jun 13

How to Succeed at Steampunk Without Really Trying

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So, the market for urban fantasy is looking pretty saturated – hard to break into. And you’ve been eyeing up this steampunk thing, but it looks like it might involve work. Fear not! Steampunk is selling, and as a former employee of a large publisher I can exclusively reveal that large publishers don’t give a fat rat’s for quality, because they make their money on quantity.

And, having read a bunch of the results of this policy, I can now impart to you the never-fail, paint-by-numbers formula by which you, you lazy, talentless hack, can also get a publishing contract (and a legion of diehard fans in funny costumes).

  1. Setting. In practice you can probably set steampunk anywhere from the Renaissance to about World War II, but its heartland is the Victorian era. Even if you’re setting your story in a secondary fantasy world, you should stick in some kind of Victorian reference.
    You might think that this will involve research, even if it’s only spending a few minutes browsing Wikipedia. Don’t worry. Whatever vague impression you have of the Victorian era is fine. Most of your audience won’t know any more than you, and they will defend you against any nitpicker who does (or has spent a few minutes browsing Wikipedia) by chorusing, “It’s only fiction! Get over yourself!”
  2. Set dressing. Steampunk is all about the set dressing. No, really, if you get this right you can screw everything else up completely. Memorize these words: Brass. Steam. Gears. Airship. Goggles. Clockwork. Punched cards. Corset. Automaton. Use several of them on every page, and you’re golden.
    Of these, you would think “steam” was the most important, but actually it’s “brass”. Brass is shiny, and distracts your readers from the fact that you’re a crappy writer. Make everything you can out of brass.
    Don’t worry in the least about whether making that thing out of brass (or powering it with steam, or clockwork, or using punched cards with it) makes any sense whatsoever.
  3. Characters. You can just order these from stock. You’ll want a square-jawed hero, probably, a plucky gel (that’s important), a mad scientist or two, some minions, you know the drill.
    Your villain should be so villainously villainous that he hardly has time to plot, between kicking dogs, killing incompetent henchmen and innocent bystanders, and twirling his moustache. He should always seem like he’s on the point of tying a girl to some railway tracks while saying, “Aha! My proud beauty!”
    Give your main character something they’re afraid of, or that they dislike intensely, that makes no difference to their actual behaviour in situations where they encounter it. This establishes their iron will and their unshakeable badassness, and your fans will praise this as “deep characterization”.
    Be hard on your characters, by the way. There should be a high body count of nameless mooks and bystanders. Beat your main characters up, have them tied up and imprisoned as frequently as possible. Remember: steampunk fans like to dress up in corsets. I trust I don’t have to draw you a picture.
  4. Language. Your characters don’t have to talk like a 19th-century newspaper, but some fans will expect it. Don’t worry if you don’t write this terribly well, nobody expects you to. And it helps to hide the plot holes if your fans are spending all their brainpower on parsing your sentences.
    Speaking of which:
  5. Plot. You do need one, but any pulp plot from the 1930s will do. Some guy wrote a book with all of the pulp plots in, but I can’t be bothered to Google for it, so I’m guessing nor can you. Just watch any of the Indiana Jones movies (doesn’t matter which, the plot’s much the same) and steal that one.
    Lots of travelling about in different vehicles (but call them “conveyances”) and getting in fights is absolutely essential.

Follow those five simple steps, and steampunk success is yours (or your money back). You can write any old crap, as long as you stick to the formula, and you don’t even need to spell or punctuate correctly.

TL;DR:

Victoria had an automaton,
Its clockwork was of brass.
And everywhere her airship steamed
The villain kicked her arse.

May 23

Emotional Impact Without Exploding Planets

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This post arises from a few things I’ve read or seen recently that have got me thinking about how emotional impact in stories is often done badly, or at least very coarsely. It’s kind of like the difference between being a fry cook and being a chef.

For example, there’s the Alderaan Ploy.

Rocks fall, everybody dies, nobody cares

Early on in Star Wars: A New Hope, as I’m sure you remember, Darth Vader blows up the entire planet Alderaan and its population of millions, simply to show Princess Leia that he’s a hardass and doesn’t make empty threats. (Of course, he then has no further leverage against her and she’s less likely to cooperate with him than ever, but we’re not talking about that.)

What is the emotional impact, for the audience, of the blowing up of Alderaan? To put it another way, what was George Lucas setting out to achieve in this scene (because every scene should achieve something), and did he in fact achieve it?

Well, he establishes that Darth Vader is a really evil, evil, really evil person. Which we’d kind of picked up from the costume and the music, actually, George.

And I suppose he establishes that Princess Leia is incredibly loyal and determined and doesn’t bow to threats.

But what he doesn’t achieve, in my view, is much emotional impact.

You’d think that blowing up a planet would be as much impact as you could possibly have. But no.

See, we don’t know anyone from Alderaan, except Leia, and we just met her. And apart from briefly registering “You fiend!”, she doesn’t seem that emotionally impacted herself by the death of everyone she knows and the destruction of the place she grew up. Millions of people, we are told, died, but they don’t have names. They don’t have faces. They don’t, therefore, have impact.

Child sponsorship organisations are onto this. They don’t just recite statistics in their TV ads. They show us a face. They give us a name. They tell us a story that gets us to relate to the child as a child, not as one of a large number of nameless, faceless people we’re being told are having tough times somewhere we’ve never seen and can’t imagine.

Bonus points for showing the child’s mother, because here is someone who is emotionally impacted by the child’s plight, and in seeing that, we share it. It’s how we’re wired. People who are close to us or who are like us in some way, or who we feel we know, even just because we know their name and have seen their face, gain more empathy from us, and if we see them having emotion we share that emotion. It’s just the way the human brain works.

I recently read E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Triplanetary, the lead-up to his Lensman series. (Links in this post are not affiliate links, they’re to my reviews on Goodreads, by the way.) It’s Alderaan ploy all the way around. No actual complete planets are blown up, but large bits of them are. Pittsburgh is destroyed by aliens. The entire human fleet, almost, is annihilated. Millions of aliens are also killed. But as far as I recall, none of the named characters come to harm. Everyone who dies is nameless and faceless, and the characters have such stiff upper lips it’s a wonder they can pronounce the letter “P”, so despite the vast scale of the destruction I didn’t find myself caring.

Nobody that the author had made matter died (again, as far as I can recall), and those who did have names and faces took all the tragedy so well that we didn’t get a second-hand emotional impact off them either.

The spy who didn’t care about me much, and vice versa

Thrillers in the James Bond mould usually achieve their emotional impact through the Alderaan Ploy. There are lots of big explosions. But I recently read a technothriller, Deep State by Walter John Williams, which started out referencing Bond and then proceeded to systematically subvert him.

See, Bond is a cynical character (especially in the books). He doesn’t get close to people, except in a physical sense, of course. In Bond, sex means little, violence means little, and death means little. But in Deep State, the main character, Dagmar, is suffering PTSD from the events in the previous book, This Is Not a Game, because she does care. She’s lost people close to her, friends and lovers, and she’s terrified of it happening again because it was awful, she felt a real sense of loss – and so do we. And so when people die in Deep State, people who have names and faces, it means something – to Dagmar, and to us. It has impact. And when she takes a lover, it has impact, because we know that means something to her too.

This is why I love Jim Butcher and Lois McMaster Bujold, too. Their main characters care about things, care deeply, and are able to be deeply hurt – and hurting them deeply is exactly what the authors do (as a deliberate policy, in both cases – they’ve both talked explicitly about it).

But they don’t do it by blowing up planets. Bujold is able to give me more emotional impact out of a failed dinner party (which is also completely hilarious) than most authors can achieve by wiping out an entire sentient species. Sure, people die in their books, too, but it always matters. It matters deeply. It affects the people left behind. They feel the loss, like you or I would, like a friend I worked with whose son died in a car crash did. It has emotional impact that resonates for years.

So, are you setting out to be a literary fry cook, or a chef? You can establish the evil evilness of your evil villainous villain by having him murder a few people, or a lot of people, out of hand, sure. You can make people go “Wow!” by giving them big explosions.

But if you want real emotional impact, show me a character being human and vulnerable and caring about something, and then take that thing away. I’ll feel the loss, even as I see the character doing the same.

Apr 19

Review Swap

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OK, fellow writers, let’s talk about swapping reviews.

I write a lot of reviews on both Goodreads and Amazon. I read a lot (I’ll talk about what I read in a minute), and I used to be a book editor years ago. I also have a couple of books up in the Kindle Store that could do with more reviews.

So my proposal, O Fellow Writer, is that we review each other’s books.

There are terms and conditions, of course, and they are these:

  1. If one of us isn’t really interested in what the other one writes, then no deal. See below for what I read and write.
  2. We each have a month to read the other’s book and write a review.
  3. When we’ve each informed the other that we’ve written the review, we both publish on Amazon and Goodreads.
  4. It doesn’t have to be a positive review, and neither one of us gets to see the other’s review before publication.
  5. It does have to be substantial, and if one of us doesn’t like the other’s book we will say why (it may be someone else’s favourite thing ever).
  6. If your book is poorly proofread, poorly punctuated or full of Inigo Montoya moments (“You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means”), I will call you on it. Remember, I was a professional editor for a large publishing house.
  7. I’ll do my best to read charitably and find things I like to mention, and so will you.
  8. We’ll both disclose in our reviews that we did the swap.

What I read

I read mostly fantasy, urban and rural. But I’m not into:

  • “dark” fantasy
  • retread epics in which the Chosen One quests after the lost McGuffin of Whozis (while empires clash) in order to defeat the Dark Lord, and it’s basically a phone book – long, boring and full of names
  • super-gritty urban fantasy, or erotica with a thin urban fantasy veneer (some contextual sex or violence is fine).

I much prefer werewolves to vampires, and I have a strong aversion to long descriptions of cruelty.

I do not zomb.

I read some SF if it’s about how technology affects people (individually or collectively) rather than being all cold and hard (with the people being there mainly to point at the tech).

Post-apocalyptic anything is a turn-off for me, and so is putting the apocalypse in partway through. I’ve abandoned two series which I was, up until then, enjoying when the nuclear bombs went off.

Space opera is absolutely fine and dandy, and I will happily accept genre tropes in place of actual science if you don’t push it too hard. 

I love superhero novels.

Lately, I’ve been reading more and more steampunk, too. What I’ve noticed is that some steampunk authors (I name no names here, but read my Goodreads reviews) think that a 1930s-style pulp plot, a veneer of Victoriana, and liberal use of the words “brass”, “steam”, “crystals”, “airships” and “punch cards” make a good steampunk novel. They do not.

What I write

My work in progress, which I’m not soliciting reviews for yet, is a steampunkish secondary-world fantasy with a sci-fi skeleton. It’s about heroic civil servants.

I have two (fiction) books up on Amazon at the moment. City of Masks is a nonmagical fantasy – it’s in a secondary world, but the spec-fic aspect is sociological, not magical or technological. It’s told in the form of diary entries, with a “period language” feel, though it’s not the language of any actual historical period. Here’s the teaser:

In the city-state of Bonvidaeo, by custom and law everyone must wear a mask and act in character with it, or face civil, social and religious penalties.

Gregorius Bass is sent to Bonvidaeo as the Envoy of Calaria, mainly to get him out from underfoot. Masked as the Innocent Man, and in the company of his radical young Bonvidaoan servant, Bass stumbles into mystery, intrigue, heresy and murder.

(Imagine if G.K. Chesterton and Alexandre Dumas adapted Pepys’ diary into a serial killer mystery set in a mad version of Shakespeare’s Italy. With wasps.)

Gu is an SF novella set on Earth in an unspecified part of the 21st century, but probably at least 30 years from now. It’s told in the second person, in the form of a documentary. (Yes, I do like to experiment, why do you ask?)

Teaser:

Gu is the last industrial product, the substance that can be anything – programmable matter for the masses. Fifteen years after its launch, follow documentary filmmaker Susan Halwaz as she interviews the creators, users and opponents of Gu about how it’s changed society.

A Charles Stross-esque novella of future technology and its discontents.  

How to proceed

If, having read all that, you want to participate in the review swap, get in touch with me and we can swap ebooks. Either leave a comment (which will give me your email address), contact me on Google+, or just email masks at csidemedia.com.

Excelsior!