words

Reviews, part 23

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1) Charles Stross gives both Child of Fire and Game of Cages a thumbs up. “More, dammit!”

2) LiveJournaler Zornhau liked Child of Fire very much. “Imagine James Elroy characters on a fast-paced, shit-kicking mission in a Stephen King small town horror scenario, underpinned by a cosmology so coldly alien that by comparison the Lovecraft Mythos seems anthropomorphic and anthropocentric…”

3) LiveJournaler Spartezda enjoyed Game of Cages a great deal. “Urban fantasy with smart interesting opposition for the MC, fast-paced action, a clear-eyed take on the issues it raises, and an intriguing magic system that we’re slowly learning more about.”

4) Game of Cages received a terrific review from Colleen R. Cahill for the Fast Forward Contemporary Science Fiction video podcast. “Fans of Jim Butcher and Dean Knootz will find Game of Cages a great book, with plenty of excitement and thrills; this is one worth ignoring the cover and diving in.” That’s a link to the direct transcript of the review, but there’s no video to watch. Apparently, this is from October, but I didn’t know about it until Google Alerts found the blog post announcing it last week. They do have an interview with Jane Linskold still, which is pretty cool.

5) Priscilla at Cult of Lincoln really enjoyed Child of Fire. “Superb. I love the costliness of the magic system–it brings a freshness into the urban fantasy genre.” But I had to turn to Google to find out who Kristin Chenowith is.

6) Former SFBC editor and current book-a-day blogger (among other things) Andrew Wheeler gave Game of Cages an excellent review a short while ago, and now, in his end-of-year roundup, he’s named that book best of September over some pretty stiff competition: “… an urban fantasy that short-circuts miles of the standard justifications and romanticizations of the genre.”

7) Rich Brassell calls Game of Cages “pretty decent stuff.” It’s another instance of a reader looking forward to the next book in a series when they only gave it three out of five stars. I wouldn’t follow any series that got fewer than four stars, but there you go.

This I Believe

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If you see a bank robber take your three-days-from-retirement partner hostage, he may order you to stand back.

If you see a squad of soldiers aiming their weapons at a newly-discovered ally, you can tell them to stand down.

If you win the high noon quick-draw shootout with the evil sheriff, you can stand over his corpse.

If you have to give a valedictorian speech, you can stand on a podium.

If your friend has been falsely accused of leaking state secrets to the super-terrorists, you can stand behind her.

However, if you’ve decided you no longer want to sit in that chair, you do not have to stand up. You can just stand. No direction needed.

That is all.

A brief interlude from work

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My wife and son have just left me here alone while he gets an eye check up. Wish we had vision insurance, but what can you do? The boy can’t see.

I just finished listening to Nancy Pearl on our local NPR affiliate, KUOW. She recommended Jo Walton’s new novel along with Gail Carriger’s SOULLESS. I sent them an email mentioning Cherie Priest’s BONESHAKER, but Nancy Pearl brought up her name before they had a chance to read it on air.

They didn’t mention my books.

Which disappointed my wife, but I didn’t expect it. I don’t think the Twenty Palaces books are quite up her alley, to steal a cliche. Too dark, I think. Even if she had read them (and as a fan of hers, I wrote a personal note for the folks at Del Rey to send with her review copy–I even have a Nancy Pearl Action Figure but it’s an older, less flashy version) I’m not sure I would have passed her Rule of 50. Which is fine; no writer should expect that their book be loved by every reader everywhere. In fact, god forbid.

Anyway, the fam is out and Warren Olney has been turned off (I like his show, but his voice has a quality that’s hard to ignore) so I can dig in to the copy edit of Circle of Enemies. I lost the whole day yesterday dealing with my blown knee, but I’m less than 60 pages from the end, and I’d like to finish tonight.

Then, finally, I’ll be able to write a post or two about some of the things that have come up lately, like putting a direction behind the word “stand” and on the need to figure theft of your product when setting price points.

Back to it.

Randomness for 1/6

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1) Woman laughing alone with salad.

2) “How’s Your Poor Feet!” Manly slang of the 19th century.

3) The year according to Tom Toles. Excellent.

4) Amazon.com pulls ebook that explains how to game its sales rankings. What? You mean Amazon’s sales rankings aren’t worth anything? Who could have known?

5) Are you a Comic Sans Criminal?

6) Countries winning the fight against poverty, in a way that’s so simple no one in the U.S. will believe it.

7) A new white person complaint, daily.

Books!

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Following the LiveJournal poll I posted, I brought a handful of books on my train trip east. Here’s a quick write up of them:

Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers I’m going to be reading more of these, but I wish I’d saved this one for later. It’s the book where the two leads finally marry, and while reading the beginning I was very aware that it was paying off a long setup that I had barely touched. Still, it was a terrific book, surprisingly layered, with an interesting portrayal of the British class system of the time.

It was also the strangest cozy ever. Where most mysteries end with the killer discovered and everything set right, this one took a close look at the cost of setting things right. Terrific book.

With a Single Spell by Lawrence Watt-Evans This one got the most votes in the poll and it was great fun (and a bit of a pick-me-up after the end of Busman’s Honeymoon. An elderly wizard dies after having only taught his apprentice to cast one spell: how to start a fire. Too old to be taken on by another wizard, and with no local ties, he sets off into the wider world.

Which sorta sounds like the plot to a whole bunch of other fantasies, but this is an lwe book: misunderstandings between characters build until they have a sensible conversation to clear the air, high adventure is something to be avoided if at all possible, crimes are something that make you look out a window wondering what all the ruckus is about, and people generally act like the regular folk you encounter in real life. Oh, and there’s no secret “Chosen One” powers to solve the plot at the end. It was a fun book and a nice antidote to a few overblown fantasy novels I can think of.

The Outfit by Richard Stark Zoom, this book races right by. Parker is an armed robber who has been targeted by the mob. This ticks him off, and he gets himself a little revenge with a gun and… a letter-writing campaign.

Which sounds nuts, but the independent criminals he’s been partnered with have always left mob-owned businesses alone. They have a truce of sorts. Parker lets word get out that the Outfit is leaning on him, so if any of his old partners see a mob joint ripe for robbing, now is the time to hit it.

Which means this is a Parker book without a lot of Parker in it. That turns out to be fine by me, since Parker is a bit of a pill on the best of days, and I sometimes have a problem with the way he kills a whole bunch of people for the sort of payday that would cover Joe the Plumber’s bills for a few months.

A good book, solid and exciting.

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris At first I found the voice of Sookie Stackhouse difficult to believe in, and the generic nature of Sam and Bill’s names confused me sometimes, but before I knew it I was sucked in by the story and racing along with the plot. Yeah I guessed the killer early, and I had a hard time believing that anyone would believe a “vampire virus” would let sufferers levitate, but Sookie’s relationship with her brother was wonderfully complicated, and she’s an engaging character.

I hated the TV show, but I enjoyed this.

Halting State by Charles Stross I’m only half-way through this sf high thriller, but it’s pretty damn good so far.

So long, Borders

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According to PW, Borders has suspended payments to some publishers.

At this point it looks as though Borders has no way to avoid bankruptcy, and the big question is whether they will take a bunch of publishers down with them. Small presses are especially vulnerable here, and Borders has been very hard on the whole small press scene for years, using credit from returns to order books on a much faster schedule than they actually paid for books sold.

As for Borders itself, it was once a great place to buy books–the staff were knowledgeable and the selection excellent, and while Joshua Bilmes offers a clear narrative of Borders’s descent into crappiness (quick warning about that link: very interesting), he doesn’t mention that the stores tried to control sky-rocketing rents by locking in long-term leases… right before the economy collapsed. Now their expenses are high and the revenues are low, and who’s going to suffer?

Well, authors for one. And publishers for another. Readers, too, because if we have one major chain store, as Joshua Bilmes points out, there will be certain books that readers won’t even get to see. Months and months ago, James Nicoll asked who was the most powerful but unrecognized person in sf/f, and the answer was the sf/f buyer at B&N. Without Borders, his decisions will sustain or destroy even more writers’ careers.

Hey, I know people like to see this stuff as the “Death of Traditional Publishing.” Isn’t B&N also closing stores (in high-rent areas, during a strained economic recovery)? But that’s just not the case here. Borders has been struggling for years, mainly because their upper echelons have no idea that selling books isn’t like selling other products. The economic crash simply exposed these long-term problems.

What does that mean for you? Well, if Borders isn’t paying publishers for the books they sell, you might want to stop shopping there. I know I will.

Jake Lake Controls his Span

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Check out this article about Span of Control by Jay Lake. The term refers to the size and shape of the story he can hold in his head at one time, to make it a coherent single entity, esp in first draft form

Me, I don’t have that. Or maybe I should say I don’t use that. I tend to create a situation for the characters to solve, add multiple antagonists, then begin working through the conflicts. I don’t try to hold a part of it in my head as a coherent story idea, because I feel more like I’m riding a wave of whatever goal/setting/resource/conflict is ongoing at the moment.

Eventually, I realize that the story has been running long enough and needs to be wrapped up. All I do then is continue the conflicts, but the conflicts begin to resolve themselves. Sometimes that means it’s time for people to stop surviving the dangers they face. Sometimes it means they need to break down emotionally and surrender. In any event, stuff starts to resolve.

So, everything is outside my span of control, and maybe that’s why I find writing such a painful, laborious process.

Also, I loved Rocket Science.

My early Christmas present

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In a few weeks, Black Gate #15, which includes my story “Eating Venom”, goes to press. Here’s the artwork that accompanies it (and since you’re online, you get to see it in color–it’ll be B&W in the magazine):

eating venomclr

Cool, huh? It’s by Malcolm McClinton. I’d never have thought to imagine the characters that way which is why I’d be a terrible artist, but I love it! Click the link to see more of his work.

About that story: I sold it over three years ago, so it’s a bit of a time capsule of my writing style and technique. I’ll be interested to reread it when it comes out.

How it came about: Some folks will remember a few years back when Janine Cross’s Touched by Venom came out, there was an online row about the writing style, and the way the style was criticized in an offline gathering.

While all that was going on, I thought There has to be a story idea in this somewhere. Not that I’d read the book in question: all I knew of it was that it’s erotic, boundary-pushing second-world fantasy. But a real writer would be able to generate a story or twelve out of it, right?

Some folks know that I don’t get story ideas easily or often–I’m just not that sort of writer. Still, I was sure there was something worthwhile there, and after a bit of work (and more than one false start) I came up with the idea of a sort of basilisk fugu and wrote “Eating Venom”.

It’s full of my usual obsessions: outright bastards, flagrant lies and manipulation, decent people trapped by honor and expectation, magical elements that are largely backgrounded for human conflicts, screwed-up social/political structures, bitter resentments, and much stabbing with sharp pieces of metal. I’m proud of it.

You guys are reading Black Gate magazine, aren’t you? It’s full of adventure-oriented fantasy of the kind I love.

Anyway, I’m off to have Xmas Eve lunch with my in-laws (and the holidays have me way behind on all my online reading). Best wishes to everyone reading this, whether you celebrate Christmas or not.

Apropos of a Twitter speech

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Writer/Director Kevin Smith left a long… rant? Let’s call it a speech–on Twitter about being what you want to be, rather than wanting to be it. He talked about spending time–years in many cases–believing in yourself and pushing until you reach your goals.

He makes a good point. There was a study in creativity not too long ago (Google won’t turn up the actual study) that asked people to exercise their creativity. Many folks who had boring jobs and didn’t think much of their own creativity scored quite low. Not a surprise, right?

But then the people giving the study asked them to answer the questions as though they were someone else. Someone creative, like a sculptor or other artist.

Once instructed to respond the way a creative person would, they began to give very creative answers. It wasn’t a lack of creativity, it was that they didn’t think of themselves as creative people, and so didn’t try hard to think creatively.

And this is true of many aspects of writing. One of the tricks I use all the time when I’m stuck is to ask myself “How would a professional writer fix this sentence?” (I know, don’t tell me, I know). Or “What would a best-selling/award-winning author have these characters do?”

You can substitute the name of an author you already admire, it can be some sort of platonic ideal, or you can picture yourself in some advanced, evolved state. I usually choose option 3. The fact is, this trick really helps. It opens me up to solutions that weren’t accessible before, because I was all wrapped up in who I think I am and what I think I’m capable of.

So, go Kevin Smith.

Randomness for 12/18

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1) Oh no, it’s the Daleks!

2) The Gawker Media security breach gives us a chance to see the 13 most common passwords.

3) Ten building converted to bookstores. Very cool photos. via @victoriastrauss

4) Wikileaks cables turned into comics.

5) Eleven weird D&D questions from The Dragon’s “Sage Advice” column.

6) Why you should never fry gnocci. Video.

7) Yogi Bear is like District 9 but way more depressing. A really interesting review of a really uninteresting movie.