First of all, I’m glad for him. I don’t know the dude and to be frank I bounced off the first Mistborn book. But his books have been selling very well, and this is a happy thing for him.
But I have the envy, too. The deep, deep envy.
Ah well. It’s not something I can control, but I can go back to my own WIP. Here’s more details:
Mistborn: Birthright announced for XBOX, PS3, and PC — A Dribble of Ink.
Last Thursday I posted a snippet of the story I sold to Tales of the Emerald Serpent, a mosaic anthology currently on Kickstarter.
Well, novelist Juliet McKenna has posted a snippet of her own along with a bit of world-building on her blog.
Lynn Flewelling has done the same thing.
There’s also artwork and additional world-building material in the updates section of the Kickstarter.
Check them out, if you’re interested.
Kelsier defeated him 3 to 1 in the voting, just about, which is perfectly cool by me. I didn’t expect him to get this far in a popularity contest, so thanks to everyone who voted. Thanks also to David Pomerico and the Suvudu staff for all the work they put into it.
Now that he’s out, I wanted to comment on the attitude of a lot of the cage match commenters… but Pat Rothfuss already did it and he did it better.
One thing I’ll add to his comments about the slaying of dragons: I’m a writer. If you ask me “Who would win in a fight, Cthulhu or Godzilla?” to me the only logical answer is “Whichever makes a better story.”
Tallying up super-powers and arguing I don’t know this character but [personal fave] is the most awesome-est! entirely misses the point. Sometimes the “weaker” character has to/must win. That’s part of the fun (and it is supposed to be fun).
If the cage matches are a place where the underdogs can never “win” then it isn’t fun. That’s why I had Ray use his ghost knife on GRRM’s readers. That’s why I had Tyrion taunt him for not being lovable enough. Because Tyrion was the underdog and I love underdogs. (People who’ve read my books will know this).
Even worse, how powerful the characters are is orthogonal to the appeal of the work in question, and when people go all munchkin on their favorite characters they turn off potential readers.
Anyway, read Pat’s post. He’s a smart guy.
(BTW, Godzilla would totally kick Cthulhu’s ass. That’s SCIENCE.)
As I mentioned a few days ago, I have a story in a mosaic anthology called Tales of the Emerald Serpent, which is having a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to pay for the printing (my understanding is that it will have quite a bit of artwork in it).
There are other authors involved: Lynn Flewelling, Juliet McKenna, Martha Wells, and Julie Czerneda to name just a few, and you can see some of the artwork at the Kickstarter site or the publisher’s Facebook page.
My own modest contribution is a short story called “The One Thing You Can Never Trust.” For folks who are interested, I thought I’d post the first couple of pages of my story. If you like it and want to read the rest, along with the stories from these other excellent authors, please consider pledging. The way Kickstarter works, you pledge whatever amount you want (larger pledges bring more/fancier swag) but if the project doesn’t meet its target, no money will be collected at all.
So! Without further blather, here’s the opening to my story. I hope you like it.
THE ONE THING YOU CAN NEVER TRUST
by Harry Connolly
Emil Lacosta did not expect his new prices to please Mama Serene, but he did not expect her to actually swear at him. She did. Being Mama Serene, she did it startlingly well. “I am terribly sorry,” he said, carefully keeping his voice mild. “Acquiring the materials I require has become quite difficult and…”
“Spare me the apologies of a Zimbolay scholar,” she interrupted. “Every learned word makes my purse lighter.” She wrote out a bank note, signed it, and handed it to him. It was for the old price. “Next time, I will pay your new, even more outrageous, fee.”
Emil nodded and handed the note to Mariella. He turned to the three young consorts sitting on Mama Serene’s ornate couch. “Do you accept this spell without coercion, of your own will?”
The consorts said “Yes,” in deeply bored tones. One of them added: “because it’s making me rich!” They all laughed at him. He had asked them last time, too, and would ask next time. It didn’t matter if they thought him fussy. He held out a small vial to the first consort and, after she had spit into the golden liquid, allowed her to take it. He did the same for the others.
They were love potions all. A select few of Mama Serene’s clients paid a high premium to be genuinely (or at least magically) adored, even if it was just for a few days.
Their business concluded, Emil and Mama Serene nodded politely to each other. Mariella opened the office door and led Emil swiftly and quietly down the side stair and through the lounge. Emil hated coming to the House of the Silk Purse, hated delivering his product in person, hated knowing the consorts would drink the potion when he was not there to watch over them. But the money was good. Very, very good. With luck, he–
Two men rose out of their chairs and moved toward him. They seemed to have been waiting for him, and Emil stopped immediately and drew back. Mariella stepped around him, her hand on the ribbon tying down her sword. There was an odd expression on her face.
“No no!” the taller man said, his empty hands raised. “We mean only to talk.” Continue reading
Effective immediately, I’m turning off my online store. Since Shopp updated their software, it hasn’t worked correctly and I need to figure out (in my Copious Free Time) why.
Sorry folks. I’ll get it fixed as quickly as possible.
I got to spend some time with A Blessing of Monsters today. I wrote about 1200 words, then wrote 100 anti-words. I wanted to do more at the end of the day but the scene I was working on had gone all wrong and my kid wouldn’t give me the space to think about it.
At some point in the day I even came up with a decentish title, but I didn’t write it down and now I’ve forgotten it. Ah well. It was probably brilliant.
Anyway, it felt good to take hold of the book again, even it wasn’t a firm hold. We’ll see what comes tomorrow.
We didn’t have a thoat, so a camel had to stand in.
It was a tiny display, but my son did a great job with it.
Continuing my examination of my own creative process through an examination of this article: Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking, I’ll touch on points 4-6 here and get to the halfway point.
4. Your brain is not a computer.
This is probably the most confusing part of the article. It’s starts with the truism above then starts talking about imagining things and synthesizing experience?
The first thing I’ll say is that comparing a brain to a computer is not a very interesting way to think about this. No, your brain is not a computer. Other things your brain is not: a loaf of bread, a set of dishes, an FBI file on a U.S. peace activist, a package of Alka-Seltzer.
A good rule for brains and computers both is Garbage In, Garbage Out, but I covered that in my last post. But let me address the little point that the article writer covers: Our brains can create false experiences and treat them as real.
To which I say: yes, that is the whole point of writing a novel. You create a false experience in the mind of the reader. The entire art and craft of creating a novel involves a) imagining this experience yourself and b) recording it effectively through text.
But it’s important not to make the experience solely a visual/auditory one. Personally (and these posts are about my own processes, remember) I do imagine scenes visually but there isn’t a lot of detail in them. I certainly don’t see faces as such. If you’ve ever read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, (and you should) you’ll know what I mean when I say that the faces are “iconic.”
But I also experience the story in a different way that’s hard to describe. I also experience the character’s feelings as though they were tidal forces, pulling me one way or another. If there’s one thing that slows down my productivity, it’s translating those feelings into text without using cliche.
And it has nothing to do with my brain being a computer.
5. There is no one right answer
This one’s sort of important. You can make bad choices, creatively speaking. You can choose cliches, or story beats that ruin the tone, or that don’t make sense for the characters, or that open the story setting to questions/implications you aren’t ready or willing to address.
But there can also be numerous “correct” choices that will work within the story on one level or another. The important thing is to look at them and judge their effect on the story’s tone, the questions it raises about the setting, etc etc.
So, while you can have several correct choices, each should still be evaluated in terms of the effect it will have.
(I’m ignoring the article for this point for fear of annoying people with lay-physicist woo woo about creativity.
6. Never stop with your first good idea.
The temptation to do this is powerful–really really powerful, especially if you’ve been struggling with a particular question for a while–but don’t do it. If you do, you miss out on the chance to do the evaluations I talked about in number 5 above.
More in part four, including allowing other people to influence you in a negative way.
As I mentioned on Twitter, I’ve written a story for a shared-world mosaic anthology which is being funded via Kickstarter. The title is Tales of the Emerald Serpent and the title of my story is “The One Thing You Can Never Trust.”
This has nothing to do with Twenty Palaces; it’s a high fantasy co-created by editor R. Scott Taylor with writers like Julie Czerneda, Lynn Flewelling, Martha Wells, Robert Mancebo, and Juliet McKenna, along with artists like Todd Lockwood.
You can read more at the site above. Check it out.
And here they are:
Not sure what this is about? Last fall I posted a novelette called “Lord of Reavers” in my online store and let folks know that proceeds from the sale would help cover the costs of my kid’s new goggles. Here’s the cover I made.
Love that public domain art.
It was also an experiment, of course. I wanted to see how well it would do, and now I know. In the future I’ll know it makes more sense to try to sell my short fiction to magazines before publishing them myself. But no matter. The story is there, you bought it, and it helped. Thank you.