Epistolary Novels and What’s Up with this Blog?!

I haven’t been posting to the Chimney much, recently.  Partly, I haven’t found any topics I found myself passionate enough and knowledgeable enough about to post on.  Partly I’ve just been busy with other things than literature, and I haven’t had the chance to read much lately.

But!  While I still don’t have much time for reading and really thinking about the state of literature, I am going to be posting here more often and more regularly.

What do I mean by that?

Well, literature posts will still be few and far between, but I am going to be posting excerpts from a work in progress for your delectation or frothing ridicule.  Normally, I don’t think it’s a good idea to post work publicly online that one hopes to someday maybe get published.  However, events have conspired to throw me in a new direction in my writing, and that direction meshes wonderfully with the blog format.

I’m talking about epistolary novels, people: my favorite new non-standard format for stories.  I think they are awesome and that we should have more of them.  So I’m going to write one (or a few), and share them with the whole internet in a serial format.  There’s going to be smoke coming out of this chimney again, and hopefully a roaring blaze of a novel to generate it for me.

Once a week–or more often if I feel like it, I am going to post a letter(chapter) from my current WIP, most brilliantly and creatively entitled: “Love Letters”.  It’s a secondary-world,  pseudo-historical, steampunk coming-of-age/YA novel with a complicated political backdrop written entirely as an exchange of letters between two male cousins of no great importance, separated by a war and an imperialist occupation, and containing no particular focus on romance.  First letter will probably be posted sometime before next Sunday.  I’m really curious to see how it pans out.

 

For research, I pulled together this list of the 25 best modern epistolary novels everyone should read:

1. The White Tiger
2. Love, Rosie/Where Rainbows End
3. Nothing but the Truth
4. So Long a Letter
5. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
6. House of Leaves
7. Up the Down Staircase
8. Last Days of Summer
9. Almost Like Being in Love
10. Eleven
11. Letters from the Inside
12. Letters of Insurgents
13. Super Sad True Love Story
14. The Key
15. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
16. Upstate
17. The Communist’s Daughter
18. Sorcery and Cecilia
19. The Nobodies Album
20. Which Brings Me To You
21. The Boy Next Door
22. Dear Everybody
23. Freedom and Necessity
24. Purple and Black

25. Voices of a Distant Star*

The last one is technically an animated short film, but it was the only real science fiction example I could find, and is also brilliant, especially for being created independently on a home computer.

 

Epistolary novels are those told all or in part as a series of documents, most commonly letters but also e-mails, news clippings, internal memos, IMs, social networking posts and message board threads, and many more.  They were most popular in the 1800s and have since died back, but this list tells me they are not dead yet, and I hope they never are.

 

Privilige and How it Affects Your Characters

I’ve been reading a lot about privilige lately, and I’ve always gotten that there are various kinds of privilige:  white privilige, class privilige, male privilige, heterosexual privilige.

But the concept of privilige is so much more wide-spread than that.

There are all sorts of little ways in which we judge people, and all of these involve privilige, sometimes they are tied into bigger chunks of privilige.  And sometimes it’s just this one little thing, and because you can’t tie it into a larger idea of privilige, you classify this person as less because of it.  There are all sorts of things that fall into this category.  Using a credit card at the store, writing a check, how to hug somebody properly.

And I know that if everyone in the world read my post, many of them would be saying:  “What do you mean ‘hugging somebody properly’?  You just hug them.  How could you not know how to hug someone?”  But hugging is a learned behavior.  You learned how to hug people during some period of time (if you have learned how to), likely when you were growing up.

And so when you go to hug your 21-year-old roommate, or girlfriend, or cousin, or friend, and they pull back, or are a limp fish, or manufacture some excuse not to hug you, just consider: maybe they don’t hate you, maybe they aren’t secretly angy, maybe they don’t not care about you, maybe they aren’t planning to break up with you, stop being friends, or whatever else.  Maybe they just didn’t grow up in a household where they learned how to hug.  Or maybe the reason they’ve never been in physical contact with you is because due to something in their life, they associate physical contact with negative feelings or treatment.

The same thing goes for writing a check, or making an appointment with a doctor, or anything else.  Maybe they didn’t get a bank account when they were sixteen to keep their birthday money, or their trustfund.  Maybe they don’t know how to call a doctor because they didn’t have money for medical care.  This person is probably already feeling awkward, or scared, or like shit, because they know they don’t know how to do this thing.  And they know how people are going to react.  I’m sure most people have seen this happen.  “How do you not know how to use a computer?”  “Anybody knows the “A” button means “yes”.  “How can you not work a dish-washer?”  “Dude, how hard is it to order a drink at the bar?”  “What?  You can’t read?  Are you stupid or something?”  “You can’t ride a horse?  What the fuck have you been doing with your life?”

Some of these things we already associate with privilige.  Some of them we feel are bigger problems, and desverve more sympathy.  But what they have in common is they are all learned behaviors.  Do you know why this person doesn’t know how to do that thing?  Because they didn’t have someone to teach them how.  You know how to do it because someone taught you, or you learned yourself.  But even if you did learn yourself, guess what?  This person is going through exactly what you went through:  watching other people do this thing while trying not to be too obvious, covering up the fact that they don’t know how and hoping they won’t be found out, feeling like shit because how dumb must they be to not be able to do something everyone else seems to know how to do, and knowing that if they are found out, that’s exactly the question other people are going to ask about them.

Now, I’m only here to preach at you a little bit.  I do actually have a writing-related point to this.  When you’re trying to figure out how a character would act in a given situation, or what they might reasonably know how to do, consider:  What skills would they be in a position to learn?  Did they cook the dinner in their house as a kid?  Did they have spending money?  Are they familiar with physical forms of affection?  If their parents don’t trust them with money, there’s a good chance they won’t know how to write a check or use a credit card.

Perhaps more relevant: How might they react to what other people can do?  What do they see as common life skills?  What do they see as a common reaction to a situation?  Someone who butchers their own animals for meat might see being scared of blood as weak and a personal failing.  Someone with rich parents and a trust fund might be surprised to find a friend doesn’t know how to pay with a credit card, or order in a fancy restaurant.  Someone with an old hand-me-down for a car might be curl their lip at a rich kid who needs a mechanic to check their oil.

All of those are pretty obvious examples.  But your characters will have specific set of prejudices and abilties, based on their background and social group and living situation.  And if these factors don’t match up with what your character actually knows or can do, I’m going to be very suspicious.  The same for if they are mysteriously blind to various forms of privilige when they shouldn’t be, or aware of them when their background doesn’t explain why.  And I’m going to wonder if maybe you as the author are blind to this privilige.  I’m unlikely to judge you personally for this, but I’m not going to have any sympathy when someone else calls you out.  Because as a writer, this is something I expect you to know.  Writers research all kinds of things during the course of writing a book, and privilige in all its forms is something you damn well better be aware of if you want to portray the real world accurately and fairly.

 

Links Rock

I love linking to people, and I love getting linked to.  Pageviews are cool, comments are awesome, but what really makes me feel validated is when other bloggers link to the Chimney.  Not just because it drives tons of traffic to my blog, but because someone else who feels the need to speak about something feels the need to point other people to my site.  They found it useful, useful enough that they want others to see it, too.  And, aside from inflating my ego and pretending I am more important than I really am, the main reason I started this blog was because I wanted to help people improve their writing.  There’s so much variety of good writing out there, but we can always use more.  I do have a big ego, but I don’t assume that anything I say will automatically be useful to someone, and so when a link comes in, saying “Your stuff was useful to me and I think it will be useful to others”, that really improves my mood.  As you may have guessed from the last post, I’ve been ina pretty bad mood lately, and so when I popped in to check my stats and saw I was getting linkage from a blog I have never heard of before–and round-up linkage, at that–it really perked me up.  Thanks, Fuzzy Mango. You really made my day.

 

I Am A Terrible Person

You are about to read a big long rant about how much I hate the world and all the people in it.  I will sound like a terrible person.  Because I am a terrible person.  I do not act how I really want to act, or do what I really want to do, or say what I really want to say.  Why?  Because I care what other people think about me.

Here’s a very incomplete list of why I am a terrible person:

1.  I am a hypocrite.  I do not stand up for what I believe in.  I let people say racist things, and sexist things, and just plain terrible things.  I laugh when people say these things.  I say these things.  I have told racist jokes, and sexist jokes, and Hellen Keller jokes.  Even though I knew they were wrong.  Because if I held to every principle I believe in, I would be very alone.  Most of my friends would not be friends with me anymore.  Most of my family would refuse to talk to me.  Many of the people I stood up for would blame me for making their lives harder.  And it is very easy to say that maybe I should find different friends.  Well, I have an excuse for that, too:

2.  I am pathetic.  I don’t make friends easily.  I am shy, I have severe social anxiety, and most of the time I can’t understand for the life of me why anyone would want to talk to me at all, much less be friends with me.  And so I am willing to bend my rules quite a bit to keep from losing a friend.

I once had a huge fight with a friend of mine.  It was one of many such fights.  He made a comment about me on Facebook in response to a status that had exactly zero to do with him.  It was rude, and irrelevant, and I still don’t really understand why he said it.  And he had been following me around facebook making similar comments in similar contexts for several days before.  That comment struck a nerve like a planet-killing asteroid, and so I called him on it.  But I didn’t want to ruffle feathers.  Not everything he says is like that.  Not everything he says makes me want to break his nose with a violin case.  So, I pretended like it wasn’t a huge deal.  I called him out with a joke.  And so of course he refused to listen.  So I called him out again, more strongly.  And he got mad.  We started trading shots back in forth and he ended up, in complete seriousness, threatening to beat the shit out of me the next time we met.  And he could.  He could drop me on the floor in three seconds flat.  He gets in lots of fights, and there’s usually broken bones involved.

I am never completely innocent.  I have done things I believe are wrong, I have trapped myself.  If I tell someone I think they have done something wrong, they can point to all of the times I have done that thing, and no matter what excuse I have, and I have many, it is never enough, and so I shut my mouth and agree that I am wrong and that I have no right to criticize, and I apologize for calling them out for their words and actions, and I tell them that what they have done is okay.

I’m still not sure I wouldn’t deserve it if he beat the shit out of me.  I said some pretty bad things to him in the course of that argument.  But, what I was sure of, was that I didn’t want to lose this person as a friend.  And so, even though I believed that he was at fault, and I still would have clocked him if we had been face-to-face and he said one more thing, I apologized, and I let him work me around until I ended up taking all the blame, and he had only responded as any sane person would.  And I felt it was completely worth it, and I would do it again in a second.  Because if our friendship got trashed, it would have caused major damage to several other relationships, which I also didn’t want to lose, even if he chose not to be vindictive about it.

3.  I am selfish.  The status quo sucks, but because I am a white, hetero-sexual, American male, I can look at all of the acts which violate my beliefs and say: “This does not affect me.  It does not make my life harder.  But opposing it would; and because I am selfish, and I like having friends, and not being treated like a freak, I will put up with and even participate in these things in order to maintain my current position.

4.  I am a coward.  My position is not perfect.  I have money problems, and I get bullied, and I have no idea what the fuck I am doing, and I feel like shit every day for giving in to peer pressure, and sometimes I wish I could just go to sleep and not wake up in the morning.  But things could be worse.  They could be a lot worse.  And one of the things that would make them worse is standing up for what I believe is right.  And so I will not do it.  Because I am afraid of what would happen if I did.

And all of those things make me hate myself.  But clearly not enough to do anything about it.  And that’s why I say I am a terrible person.

Now, this is a writing blog.  I said it was a writing blog.  You expect it to be a writing blog.  The obvious connection to writing here is flawed but symapthetic but realistic characters.  A realistic character will not have a good reason for everything they do.  They will do things that conflict with their beliefs.  They will do things that conflict their society’s beliefs.  And they must absolutely do something that conflicts with the readers’ beliefs–because otherwise their flaw is no flaw.  Their reasons for doing these things will range from righteous to deplorable.  People will disagree over whether their actions are justified.  But if you want the character to be sympathetic, these actions must be understandable.  And in much of the fiction I have read, whether speculative, or mainstream, or YA, I don’t see people doing these things, and it really takes the tension out of the story.  Your hero does some horrible thing and I am about to have a fascinating moral debate with myself–but wait!  A god revives all the people he killed, or it turns out that things were not as they seemed and the hero is completely justified, or maybe he got so far as picking the lesser of two objective evils.  And so I can’t possibly fault his decision, and all that angst you built up on the way to this climax falls flatter than a week-old glass of coke.  And all the sympathy for the character and the terrible choice they had to make vanishes, and I want to throw your book against the wall, or maybe smack you in the back of the head with it.  Bad Aurthor!  And then I will go leave a scathing review on Goodreads or Amazon, because the one thing I do have the guts to stick up for is protecting readers from a shitty book.

 

Raging Reader Round-up (08/05/11)

Maybe I should just officially change the date for this to Sunday. XD

1.  Is responding to a review ever a good idea?

2.  Are you happy when you’re not writing?

3.  Epic Fantasy is what?

4.  Things You Should Learn From Writing

5.  How Selling a Book Really Is

6.  FanFic is fun, whether you’re writing it or arguing about it.

7.  How Good Writing Can Still Make a Bad Book

8.  Starting a Book?  It Might Help to Know the Endgame

9.  Your Agent Rocks, but She Isn’t Wonder Woman

10.  If I Had a Jam Jar as Big as #8, I’d probably go ahead and fill a swimming pool with jam.

11.  If you wanna get a record deal, you gotta do coke.

12.  Distractions, baby.  I love ‘em.

13.  How Do You Feel the World?

14.  Writers and readers are characters, too.  Don’t let anyone tell you they aren’t.

15.  Why One Character is Never Enough

16.  Revise, Rinse, and Repeat

17.  Good descriptions, but I’ve never been a fan of mixing genres and age categories.

18.  Samuel’s Real Skinny on Self-Publishing

19.  A Path to Publishing with Bookends, LLC

20.  Life doesn’t happen to us, we happen to life.  And it isn’t always pretty.

21.  Sex, Genetic Determinism, and James Tiptree Jr

22.  Men read romance, too.  Considering her blog, I’m considering buying this book.  Internet marketing works, people.

23.  If only SFF authors wrote posts like this, they would sell a lot more books.

24.  Still don’t like it.

25.  I love my state.

26.  More bullshit about social networking.

27.  Literary writing is still literary.

28.  Young authors are great, and I’d love to see more.  But old folks still got game.

29.  Chick lit is still lit people.  Deal with it.

30.  How long will books and movies stay on their own sides of the line?  Alternate endings are…?

31.  Inciting incidents and authorial experience.  Do established authors get more slack?  Do they deserve to?

32.  Can you be a dummy and write YA?  That’s what the title of a book by this lovely lady says.

33.  Writing Tips from a Dark Future.

34.  Short Story Submission

35.  A link to a list of Marketing Links I stole from Sierra Godfrey.

36.  Short stories are not novels, Mr. Martin.  But otherwise good advice.

37.  Other authors are awesome, but you are, too.

38.  Never say that hard work doesn’t get you anywhere.

39.  Push some paper, publishers.  We know you can do it.

I never set out to be an aggregator blog, but it’s almost all I can do to keep up with these round-ups in-between the cracks of “real life.”  That will change eventually, I hope, once my schedule settles down.  Hope y’all find this links useful in the mean-time.

 

Raging Reader Round-up Part 2 (07/29/11)

17.  What You Can Learn from the Submissions Process

18.  You Can Get Back in the Game

19.  Cons, Panels, and Big Names vs. You

20.  How Not To Prop an Agent

21.  What Readers Want/What Blog Readers Want.  Reaching A Broader Blog Audience.  Why Writing Blogs Don’t Help Writers, or do they?

22.  I don’t know if pets are people, too; but we can certainly learn people-related lessons from them.

23.  People-watching ans Story Inspiration

24.  More on Self-publishing.  And more.

25.  More on the Digital Transformation

26.  How To Handle a Critique

27.  Writers are Hypochondriacs

28.  Conlangs are one of my favorite topics.  For a long time, I’ve considered building a language on the blog, posting once a week.  Unfortunately, the incredibly awesome Chris Doty over on the Clarion Foundation blog beat me to it.

29.  Jim Butcher on Writing over at Clarion Foundation

32.  Selling Books is Not a Bonus

33.  I have a book problem.  Thankfully, I am not alone.

34.  Social media has become a powerful force.  Even anonymous social media.  Like FML.  Or LikeALittle, which allows users to flirt anonymously.  Own your flirts, people.  Or better yet, just walk up to him and say something!

35.  Maintaining Tension Makes Better Books

36.  Contemporary Fiction is Not Boring

37.  How To Keep Your Short Stories Short by Lydia Sharp

38.  Unfinished Manuscripts Can Be Avoided

39.  Plotting, Pansting, and Writing Rituals

40.  Fast Writing and Writing Software

41.  What Do Yoour Books Say About You?

42.  More on Branding

43.  I’ve resisted using writing software for so long.  I’ve tried a few programs, and they always seemed more stifling than supportive.  But I keep hearing authors singing the praises of Scrivener.  I might have to give it a shot.

44.  More Agents As Publishers  Something I’m still on the fence about, assuming there are safeguards involved.

45.  Murphy’s Law of Agenting

46.  Anecdotes aren’t evidence, and reviews aren’t sales.

47.  Genres are descriptions.

48.  Emotional Truth in Fiction

49.  Giving Your Reader a Happy Ending

50.  Five Ways to Improve Your Writing with Janice Hardy

51.  How To Keep Up Online.  Ironically, it mentions the value of round-up posts.

52.  Choosing Narrative Distance

53.  What Juliette Wade Looks For in Critique Partners

54.  Making Your Characters Cry Is Not Enough

55.  Start With A World or Start With A Story?

56.  Levels of Revision

Whenever I’ve read blogging round-ups in the past, they’ve always been relatively short.  Maybe 15 or 20 links at the most.  When I look at my two round-up posts, 32 and 56 links respectively, I can’t understand why there’s such a difference.  I’ve mentioned before that I read a lot of posts a week.  Usually 200 or more.  That’s from about 30 or 40 blogs.  Which means about 4-5 posts a week on average.  In fact, you’ll notice if you go to all the links that I’ve linked to several blogs multiple times.  Because I have a bit of layman’s OCD, I read every single one of these posts.  I also do it because each of these blogs offers me something I can’t get from any of the other blogs I read.

And there are many more blogs out there that I don’t read.  But I assume many of them are blogs that could provide their own value to me.  I don’t think anyone will disagree that there’s a glut of blogs out there.  There are probably more blogs that could provide value to a person than they could keep up with reading 24/7.    But are bloggers overloading their blogs with content?  Many blog readers are loyal, meaning they read posts even if they don’t end up giving value.  Does this do a disservice to blog readers?  Could cutting down on the posts actually increase page views by giving readers more time to read a variety of blogs?  And finally, should a blogger be selfish and do whatever they can to increase their own pageviews, or is there a benefit to directiing some of that traffic somewhere else?

 

Raging Reader Round-up Part 1 (07/29/11)

I’m late, I know it!  But stuff was going down IRL.  Like arm issues that are still making large amounts of typing a bit painful.  So, here’s my belated round-up for last week:

1.  Not sure they put enough sugar in this lemonade.

2.  Still not sure about this whole agent as publisher thing, but at least the Knight Agency seems to have some safeguards in place.

3.  Fear is the mindkiller.

4.  Prologues, Again

5.  How to Break into Reading Fantasy

6.  Everything you have ever read in an “edgy” YA book is just the tip of the iceberg.

7.  Being a published poet is hard.

8.  Follow the rules.  Writing is work.  You wouldn’t ignore the rules to apply for a scholarship or a research grant, why should queries be any different?

9.  How to Build a Villain by Jim Butcher

10.  Writing speed matters.  Writing is like a raffle.  The more entries you have in the hat, the better chance you’ll win the prize–in this case a fan of your work rather than a one-time reader.  And here’s how you can max out your wordcount.

11.  You Can’t Always Be the Star.

12.  A In this day and age, writers are often told they need a website, a blog, a twitter, a facebook, anything to connect to fans and find new readers.  But a lot of people aren’t seeing this for what it really is.  As an author, you are a product line, and like any product, you need to establish your brand.  If you start out writing Paranormal Romances, and seven books in you throw in a near-future syberpunk novel, it’s going to confuse your reader base.  Everything you do contributes to your brand, so make sure you keep on top of how it will affect your career.

13.  Nobody knows the numbers you need.

14.  Reading this article makes me realize I am screwed.  I love to write about future generations on the same world.  Damn.

15.  Notes on Writing

16.  Have You Met Your Blogging Goals?

There are only seventeen links here.  Why?  Because 211 posts to read through this week, with these sixteen being culled from the first 100.  Part 2 will be up tomorrow, likely with 16 more links from the second hundred posts.  There’s a reason for the ragin’.

 

Raging Reader Round-up (7/22/2011)

Because having to read 100 posts in a week to pick out the gems makes me rage.  But now you won’t have to.

1. I wish I was a Lannister.

2. You have a million excuses.

3. You remember that awesome post I did on where writers get our ideas?  Well, it was a lie.  We really steal them from teenagers on the bus.

4.  You know that theory about how every choice we make creates a branch in the timeline?  Well, it would certainly explain all the contradictory posts about the future of publishing.

5. Neil Gaiman’s Guide to Writing

6. If you don’t love agents, they won’t love you.

7. Bad Pick-up Lines for Snagging an Agent.  And worse ones.  Also, drunken beagles?

8. Alien planets are great.  But how ’bout something a little more exotic?

9. Why you might not wanna leave a drawer full of crap for relatives to find.

10. Don’t trust the word “average” in publishing too much…

11. Even being a published writer these days can suck.  Especially if your agent thinks they should be your publisher, too.  That’ll probably look something like this.  At least not everyone is doing it.  And agents and editors are out to get you, or at least, the people they work for are.  That said, if you do get an editor, you can be pretty sure they love your book.    Of course, even if your publisher is still your publisher, you might find your contract amended automatically by e-mail.  And it’s more than one publisher.  Which might be good or bad for you as an individual, but says a lot about how well publishers are treating their authors.  Not much of it good. The book industry is in more trouble than you though, huh?  And the booksellers are in worse.   But we can save it!

12. The above links talk a lot about how writers should know the business side as well.  Tawna Fenske prefers not to.  What about you?

13.  The first week of sales matters.  You probably knew that.  Did you this?

14. Is your character boring?  Passive?  Perhaps even a bit wimpy?  That’s okay.  YA Historical Fiction author Katy Longshore has devised an 8-Step Program for Crappy Characters.  You can save everybody.

15.  Motivation is important.  But just how obvious should you be about it?  Janice Hardy has some suggestions.

16.  Establishing your character’s, er… character, is very important.  But studies show that circumstances can have a much more powerful effect on behavior than your underlying personality.  Janice Hardy has some tips on how to incorporate this into your stories.

17. The Intern (is she really an intern, still?) dissects a book that readers couldn’t put down:  Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.  And goes on to explain how it’s like a video game, and why that makes it so appealing.  Being a gamer myself, I have to agree with most of her analysis.

18. The first thirty pages of your novel are probably boring.  Cut ‘em.

19. What to do when an agent says no to your new project

20. How to Manage Your TIme as a Writer by Mindy Klasky.

21.  When you’re a fantas or science fiction writer, you often deal with world-building, and creating new cultures.  One way to make this easier is to learn ore about cultures on Earth.  Here are some interesting stories from Juliette Wade.

22. An interesting discussion on the origins of various cultural structures and metaphors courtesy of Google + Hangouts.

23. How cosplaying can teach us about world-building.  You know who you can ask about various types of clothing in different historical periods, or just about clothing in general?  Cosplayers.  Just because they may happen to be dressed up as pichu in high heels, that doesn’t mean they won’t know how to cut a Japanese yukata, or how to sew a Fauntleroy suit.  The take-away:  Even the craziest hobbies have unexpected value.

24. Is language completely arbitrary?  Many studies say not.  And you can use that in your writing and your world-building.

25. On the construction of story endings and tying shit up.

26.  On hooking.  Because all the best writers are doing it.

27.  Kids are the future, and they know it.  So how come you don’t hear about it much in YA?

28.  Lots of cons and conferences tout manuscript evaluations as a feature.  John Gilstrap over at The Kill Zone give us his Ten Rules for Manuscript Evaluation and how to get the most out of it.

29.  Meg Gardiner on drafting a novel.  No lie, brainstorming is the best part.  Writing the thing out is… somewhere in the top 10.

30.  Kathleen Pickering on on-site reasearch.

31.  What typos cost you. Courtesy of the NYT.

32. Three Ways to Publish from Anne R. Allen.  Of course, there are more than three ways to publish.  Plenty of folks are successful with web serializations.  I’m gonna be publishing a manga a page at a time on Deviant Art.  But Anne does tackle the three main methods of publishing a book-length work.

33. Jennifer Archer on selling her debut novel. Three times.

34.  Genre vs. Literary: Why the hate?  Thanks, Roni.

35. Best-selling vs. Best-writing from Meghan Ward.

36. Making Old Thoughts New Again

You know how I mentioned I read over 100 posts this week?  That was a lie.  That’s just the number in my blog reader.  But blogs love to link, and I can’t help but follow.  It was really something like 200.  Which may explain my lack of novel-writing this week. XD

So why only 36 points?  Well, keep in mind that some of them had more than 1 post.  And some of the posts just weren’t worth passing on.  Just be glad I read those ones for you.

 

Scalded by Steampunk

So I dropped into my blog reader today, and the number one topic of conversation seemed to be that steampunk sucks, is boring, is shallow, is revisionism(fictional revisionism, the horror!), is a commercial sell-out, is crap, is shit, is tiresome, is over-hyped, is racist, is colonialist, is adventurist, has not one really powerful story to its name, etc.

And then I saw that one of the people saying this was Charlie Stross, and I almost cried.  Because I love the books Charlie Stross writes.

And then I stopped and thought:  “People are getting worked up over a fucking sub-genre of fiction.”  Why?  What’s the point?  You don’t like steampunk?  Great.  Enjoy whatever it is you enjoy, but why attack a genre that’s never done anything to you?  Either write something better or move on.  Isn’t there some new Tolkien clone somewhere to bash?  Horrendous glorification of the middle ages and all that?

If speculative fiction was a house, steampunk would be the leaky boiler pipe in the basement.  Don’t stand in front of it and you won’t get burned.  Maybe you find it annoying.  Well, I find it annoying when people turn down the high while wearing a jacket indoors.  Tolkienesque fantasy could fit that metaphor very well.  But there are four other people in the house who agree, so I suck it up and move on with my day.  I don’t accuse them of oppressing the working class.

I’ve read some great steampunk, some good steampunk, and some shitty steampunk.  The latter category is much larger than I would prefer, but 90% of every genre is crap, so why the need to jump on one poor little sub-genre over having a few shity books, or books that disagreed with your politics by having a few noblemen protrayed in a positive light?  Nobody is making you read this, and I don’t know very many other readers or writers who would prefer to live in the 19th century because they loved the last steampunk story they read.

 

The (Real) Cost of Magic Part 1

You may have guessed this quite a while ago, but one of my favorite things in fantasy fiction is the magic.  And I don’t just mean I think magic is cool.  I love to study the way magic is constructed and used in fiction, and I think I’ve learned a lot of useful things by doing so.  One thing that I keep coming back to is the idea of a cost for magic.

Everything has a cost.  You pay in calories to stay alive, you pay money to get things you want, and you pay in fuel to keep a fire going.  The cost of most things is pretty clear.  But the cost of magic is different.  Because magic breaks the laws of the real world by definition, the cost for using it is only limited by the imagination of the writer who creates the system.  I’ve seen almost everything used to pay for magic: blood, energy, sanity, physical objects, sacrifice…  Another common cost is time spent in gaining knowledge and preparing spells.

All of these can be effective or ineffective costs for magic.  And by effective, I mean that readers accept them as reasonable repayment for breaking the rules of our world.  Before I get to my main point, I think it’s a good idea to look at why these various things might be considered effective costs.  For this  post, we’ll stick with the oft-used and well-accepted “magic makes you tired” magic system:

The costs of a great many things in the real world are paid in energy.  Shoot a bow?  It takes energy to draw and hold that bow before release.  By a very simple process of transference, that energy is also what kills the poor creature that you’re aiming at.  Same is true for starting a fire, whether you strike a match or rub sticks together. 

So why wouldn’t this be an effective cost for magic?  Well, it often is.  But reasons why a reader might not find this form of magic attractive are many–we’ll deal with two, for now:

1.  It’s often not at all clear how this energy is used to create the spells effect.  Pulling back the bow string creates tension in the bow, which is resolved when the ends snap back into place upon release.  This pulls the string forward, pushing the arrow away at a good clip.  Makes perfect sense, right?  This use of a tool is what allows us to get a projectile moving at a much greater speed than we could with our bare hands.

But what about with magic?  How do we convert the energy in our muscles into a giant fireball?  In reality, we can’t.  But let’s say that we decide it takes as much energy to create a fireball as it does to shoot an arrow.  That’s quite a few fireballs, and since fireballs are generally portrayed as stronger than arrows, we’re getting quite a bit more bang for our calorie.  Which is fine; mages are often considered to be more powerful than your average person, so more efficient use of their energy is not a big leap.

But what about for bigger spells?  Mages are often shown to have the power to level cities with a single word.  No matter how efficient our fictitious conversion of energy, it’s rather much to say destroying a city of 10,000 should be as easy for a mage as killing one man is for an archer.  And, it’s not even possible for one man to hit 10,000 targets with 10,000 arrows in the time it takes our mage hero to level a city (or a region).  So now we’re in a bit of trouble.  Our energy example doesn’t have a simple explanation for our city-busting protagonist.

Unless perhaps we decide that a mage can kill 100 men with his magic as easily as an archer kills one with his arrow(whichitself  is not as easy as it would seem).  Or, maybe magic is a much more efficient tool than a bow.  Combine that with it’s utility in the great many areas in which it is usually shown to be useful, we’ve got a fairly ridiculous tool on our hands.  A bow is made for one thing, to hurl arrows at targets as fast as possible.  Yes, it’s much better at it than a human arm, but that arm can do a great many more things than just hurl an arrow.  Jack of all trades and whatnot.  So why should magic be so priviliged?  Casting fireballs, healing wounds, calling lightning, bringing rain, telling the future…  The list goes on forever.

At this point, we might add one of the other common hobbles on magic, a limit.  Perhaps magic only has a few areas in which it can function: scrying, weather magic, calling fire.  But right now we’re talking about cost.  There are magic systems that allow a mage to do all the things I’ve listed and more, so there should be a way to use costs to make such a system reasonable.  Clearly, paying with physical energy cannot handle this task on its own.  At least, not without a lot of contortions and outside limitations.

2.  Now, there are still other reasons why physical energy is not always an effective cost for magic.  One can do great things, and even if they become exhausted, why, all they need is a bite of food and a bit of rest, and they’re ready to do it again.  All it takes to level a city is an apple?  I find it hard to countenence.  What was the creator of this system thinking?

If we were making a trading card game or an rpg, that could be fine.  Once the game–or even just the battle– is done, everything can be reset, both the energy paid and also the damage done with it.  But every action in a story has consequences that last until the story is finished–or at least they should.  Reseting after one battle destroys the point of that scene; the hero is no further along in the story.  The consequence of a magical battle doesn’t have to result from magic, but if it does, being tired for a day and nothing else doesn’t cut it.  Even suffering great pain means nothing if it goes away and never bothers the mage again.  If the result of a scene is benefit to the characters, they need to have paid a fair price for it, and if the result is that they are hurt, it must be a hurt that can continue to affect their progress as the story moves forward.  Every scene needs to have that effect (or those effects), and in a fantasy, magic has a very good chance of being the cause.  So, it’s important to consider how your magic system might be able to incorporate that purpose.

None of that is to say that a form of magic which is paid for in physical energy cannot generate the long-lasting effects a good story requires.  If your character is bone-tired from hurling magical acid the day before, they may miss the signs of their pursuers, or not have the energy to save the peasant girl in the next village when she is captured by slavers. 

But there is a difference between a direct cost that hits hard now, and an indirect cost that hits hard later.  Depending on the story and its themes, it’s possible to lean more toward one than the other.  Perhaps that is the risk of using magic: you can do more now, but you don’t know if that will be worth the suffering you will undergo later, because you are no longer capable of doing anything.  You might gain twice as much money in the short term, but in the long run, you will end up with less than if you had been satisfied the first time.  But in general you will need a combination of short-term and long-term costs.

Most mages who pay for their magic with physical energy are seem to be able to achieve a great deal before the cost becomes even close to endangering their overall position in the plot.  Personally, I feel this is a bug rather than a feature.  Does anyone have some ways in which magic based around physical energy could still be effective in the eyes of a reader?