Writers, what mad skills of other writers make you stand back and admire?
I’m not talking about the obvious stuff; I’m talking about the kinds of things you know are tricky from trying to do them, and leave you dumbstruck when you see them done well.
This question occurred to me by way of plotting for The Lantern Tower. Now that I’ve got down three opening chapters, I have a better handle on the problem that was holding me up while storyboarding. The emerging answer was one I had already gestured at in the outline, but I had been rather timid about raising the stakes in order to do it. As soon as I thought that, Sensible Me said, “Well, why?” Indeed, Sensible Me. I should listen to you more often. So I opened a chat window to a friend and nattered at her for half an hour, and found myself remarking: “This is the part where I really envy Julia Spencer Fleming her seemingly limitless capacity for orchestrating the psychological movements of a large cast.”
It’s been a while since I thought about JSF and her books, but damn. Yeah. The more characters you constellate in a situation, the more complex the emotional movements and realities grow, reflecting in counterpoint and building toward either disaster — or eucatastrophe. Keeping track of that many internal realities, timing climactic urges, making sure every beat strikes a realistic emotional note: this is not freaking easy. Rocket science is easier, sometimes. This is especially true when, as JSF often does, you’re writing a story with multiple POVs.
Now, this skill can’t carry a book all by itself. One of this series — I think it was To Darkness and to Death — focused on psychological orchestration to the exclusion of all else, and I got bored and asked S to spoil me so I could read the next one. But if a story needs this skill, and it isn’t there…well. The fact that JSF can create, maintain, and drive stories with a community full of breathing internal realities makes the series as a whole one of my benchmarks for writing a large cast.
So if you stand in awe of a mad skill of some fellow writer, I want to hear about it. I need some new recs anyway.
(And speaking of recs, have you read Ryswyck? Did you like it? By all means hit it up with a review! Let the good folks at Amazon know what they’ve got.)
Meanwhile, I am still basking in the afterness of a good day of goodness, having done my first (small) fencing tournament last weekend. I fenced to my standard, which is to get on the board in any bout and win as many winnable ones as I can, learned a lot about procedure, fenced some new and very interesting fencers, and picked up some new music from the fencing buddy I rode up to Des Moines with. All in all, a good time was had by me, 10/10 would fence a tournament again.
Honestly, as weekends in November go, this one wasn’t bad.
I got a scene finished in Chapter 3 of The Lantern Tower and started another. I’m introducing two new POV characters in this book, one of whom had a throwaway mention in Ryswyck which interested me enough to pull his thread, so now he’s in the story. I haven’t got round to the other one yet, but I’ve got lots of dialogue sketches socked away for when he appears.
This is not, as I may have mentioned, my optimum time of year, either creatively or mood-wise, so having produced two and a half chapters so far is rather a cause for cheer. Also, we’re off Daylight Saving Time, so getting into the last trough of time toward winter solstice is progress, of a sort.
Meanwhile, the new season has opened at the symphony, and I went on Saturday night with the usual suspects — three of us are coincidentally former senior wardens of our church, and perhaps less coincidentally, we have dinner beforehand at some place where we can drink well. I had a house Manhattan that was chalked up on their blackboard as “ABV = a lot” — so I only needed one.
And on the program this weekend was Bruckner’s Seventh. After Erica’s friend mentioned it as the background to her enjoyment of Ryswyck, I was curious to be in the same room with the piece. I think my main takeaways are: 1) yes, it’s long 2) if I am going to be hearing an extended restatement of several themes, I’m not sorry it’s these ones 3) Bruckner may have adulated Wagner but I know who I like better 4) it’s all still Very German, which is confusing to my Very Yorkshire genes 5) the program notes said that the third movement was based on the laendler and I was like, I don’t remember the Captain and Maria dancing to anything like this, are you sure? 6) I kind of like Wagner tubas however 7) the piece afforded some awesome opportunities for sections to play in a rich unison, showing off how well they blend, which means that 8) the KCS played it very well indeed. Someone yelled “BRA-VO” before the reverb of the last note cleared, and one of the violas bounced in her chair at the end, obviously having fun.
So, clearly I owe N. a Belfry Manhattan (ABV = a lot), not just for adding enjoyment to my musical calendar, but also for reccing Ryswyck in multiple venues. She’s responsible for more of my recent sales than I am, I’d judge!
Tune in next time for…I don’t know what. Probably I should wrap up the Alter series before the year ends. We’ll see how many brain cells I can scare up before solstice.
It’s Saturday, nothing in particular is required of me, and though I certainly have a good deal of housework to do before the book club shows up here next Thursday, I have spent the morning puttering, going out only briefly to get an everything bagel with a garlic-herb schmear and a coffee.
I’ve also gone down the rabbit hole looking up music on Youtube. Seriously, sometimes I love living in the future. When I was a kid, if I wanted to sample a composer’s music, I had to walk uphill both ways to the library to put a hold on a CD. Now I can just click through to the next sample ad libitum. Which is precisely what I’ve been doing.
It all started when my friend Erica relayed the compliments of a friend who had bought and read Ryswyck on her recommendation. She mentioned rehearsing for a performance of Bruckner’s 7th symphony while she was reading it and thought they went well together. Now till yesterday, I had never heard any Bruckner; I have a sneaking affection for the Late Romantics, but my tastes tend toward the Slavs and the English rather than the Germans. So to the internets I went. On a cursory listen I can see why someone might find the symphony a good running background for Ryswyck, although (at a glance) I notice that the most salient feature of Bruckner’s 7th is that it is rather long, which I suppose is no more than I deserve, heh. It sounds like an interesting piece to play, which is something I would not say about Brahms or, God forbid, Mahler.
But naturally my thoughts turned to what music was/is in my mental background when I was writing or thinking about Ryswyck. Unfortunately, it’s rather like asking myself what I had for dinner two weeks ago: the fact is I just don’t recall listening to anything in particular while writing, and if any particular piece recommended itself to my mood, or to my concept of the atmosphere of the book, I can’t recall that either. Many years ago now I went ahead with the very bad idea of listening to Holst’s Hammersmith on repeat while writing a traumatic scene of a now-abandoned project; the experience rather soured me on the concept of composing under the influence, so to speak.
But, I finally recalled, I did put myself in the writing mood on at least one occasion with Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antarctica, at least the first movement anyway. So I listened to that again yesterday, and because that opening two minutes just fascinates the hell out of me, I googled for commentary on it (three cheers for the future!) and found someone’s music theory dissertation of nonatonic collections in Vaughan Williams and Bax. A lot of music theory is over my head; for a while I labored under the mistaken idea that “nonatonic” meant “non-atonic” before realizing it meant “nine tones.” Anyway it certainly satisfied my curiosity (and then some) about the chord structure of the opening theme, with its application of opposing forces and the way it takes what could have been a straight harmonic minor scale and makes a parallelogram of it.
And that in a nutshell is the problem I have trying to summon musical quotations for a Ryswyckian playlist. The ‘verse is not our world; it doesn’t have the same religious history, for example, and though the ethnicities are coded (in longstanding tradition) to groups we recognize as vaguely Anglo/Scots/Breton/Alsatian, the peoples in the ‘verse aren’t really those things. Yet music is very important in the story, as a cultural matrix and a motive (in many senses of the word) for the characters; if I had the facility for musical genius that Tolkien had for languages, I would be highly tempted to write the kind of music I imagine my characters singing. (I wonder if Howard Shore does pro bono work?)
As it is, I put some thought into assembling some of the eclectic flavors that go into the mood and outlook of Ryswyck. Besides the Vaughan Williams, a contemporary piece I’ve linked before by Sarah Kirkland Snider, Something for the Dark, moved me when I heard it in performance. I am not very enamored with the opening statement, but the fragile persistence of the second theme made me think right away of Speir, and the overall eclecticism seems fitting to me for a post-nuclear age.
A song I do remember listening to, though it doesn’t speak directly to anything in the book, is Agnes Obel’s “The Curse.” The collection needs an elegiac ostinato in there, and this one strikes a very appropriate note.
The “chants” described in the book are, to some extent, inspired by plainsong tones such as can be found in the Plainsong Psalter, particularly the Tonus Peregrinus, except that Ilonian chant supports both polyphony and drones, the latter of which would set it apart from Anglican chant. At its most sublime it would strike a note much like Ola Gjeilo’s “The Spheres,” from the Sunrise Mass.
In more martial contexts, and in the seasonal songbooks, the effect is similar to shape-note tunes like “Clamanda” and “Tender Thought.” (For the former I’m indebted to Ann Leckie; it’s not the only time I have progressed in my labors only to discover later that AL had broken the ground before me.) This is one example of the many ways in which I decided to put my own American eclecticism to use delineating a world in which cultures have painstakingly put themselves back together like the fractures of a bone. It’s more invocation than description.
The more playful songs, along with the reels, owe a lot to anything in our world played with the bodhran, the fiddle, the Celtic flute, and the pipes. But do you know just how much Session music there is to trawl through? I’d be reduced to a cobweb-draped skeleton before I could find the perfect tune to evoke the sense of it without indebting myself too much to the history built up behind so many of these tunes. I did find the fiddle virtuoso Liz Carroll, however; a representative track (though sans bodhran) gets near the kind of thing that’s in my head.
And because it’s July and my friend K has got Summerfest tickets again, I have chamber music on tap every Sunday of the month. Till I started going to these concerts I did not realize just how much of the charm of chamber music depends on being in the same room with it — and that too is a part of the ‘verse. Recorded music is not a popular means of consumption in Ilona, nor do people go to large concerts unless they live in the capital. Music is very much a cottage industry, made by people whose names you know because you grew up with them, or the next town over; it’s the only form of corporate worship there is, and thus is oriented to the community rather than the individual. That’s one way in which eclecticism plays us false, I think: we have so much to choose from that it’s hard to get past thinking about what one likes and dislikes, about one’s own empirical autobiographical experiences, to the context of the people knitted in with us. A poised engagement: that is the ethic I’m reaching for here.
So, there you have it: an off-the-cuff playlist for the Ryswyck ‘verse. Probably ten minutes after I post this I’ll be slapping my brow at what I forgot, but it can’t be helped. Happy Saturday!
Good morning, cats and kittens! The summer solstice (or winter solstice, for those of you in the Antipodes) has come upon us, and if you’re not being burnt or drowned or jackbooted by Nazi thugs, you’re probably headed for the beach (or similar cozy spot of your choice). In which case you’ll want to nourish your soul with a radical, epic tale of postdystopic courtesy.
And you’re in luck: Ryswyck will be listed in this year’s Summer/Winter Sale at Smashwords. From July 1 to July 31, you can get Ryswyck for 50% off (that’s $1.50, folks), along with other great e-book titles that will be on sale all month. This automatic coupon applies at the Smashwords site only; for other distributors, the price remains the same. You should definitely take advantage of the sale at Smashwords, but if for some reason you’re committed to buying your e-books elsewhere, you can still benefit: I’ve extended the promotional launch price of $2.99 for another month. After July 31, the regular price of $3.99 will kick in across the board.
Why am I doing this? Well, let’s be real, I like it when people buy my book. Money is nice. I like money. And getting a return on my investment, on all its levels, is a worthy goal and firmly in my sights. But the reader who buys the book gets something even better than that: they get, at the least, a pleasurable reading experience they can repeat any time they like. And possibly they even get food for the soul, in a magic jar that never runs out. You can’t really put a price on that.
That’s the artistic endeavor in a nutshell: to brighten reality for as many people as possible. And don’t we all need our realities brightened?
So if you haven’t read Ryswyck yet, by all means take advantage of the opportunity this summer. And if you have read it, be sure and put up a review at Goodreads or Amazon or Apple or wherever you bought it. That way, my characters’ future readership won’t have to take my word for it!
Musing this evening on the perils of self-censorship. People I know have started to read Ryswyck and are telling me where they are in the story. They make brief comments or ask me questions: “I’ll be interested to see how you develop the concept of undefendedness,” said one, and, “Am I right that this takes place in a sort of hypothetical Britain-like country?” another buttonholed me at church to ask. “I’m two-thirds of the way through,” said a friend last night, and proceeded to tell me what was happening with each of the characters as if they were people we both knew.
This is an ongoing source of quiet amazement for me. When I first thought up the story that would become this novel, I was convinced I couldn’t write it — and more than that, I was convinced I shouldn’t. A snippet from the first blog post about it:
Spring has definitely sprung around here. There is a profusion of daffodils everywhere, we’ve cut pink-blooming boughs from the peach tree for the chapel, and the mint patch has begun to sprout. And, I’ve been making myself up stories again. I won’t write the one I’ve been dreaming out, because it is just too idtastic: it follows two characters through a co-ed military school that has a reputation for turning out brilliant officers but has the air of a mystery cult, and for good reason. There’s lots of courtesy and kindness, and also a great deal of sex and violence. This poses a problem, not for me, but for the Sir William — now Lord — Rees-Mogg in my head who prefers that we keep up our standards.
Still and all, I reflect that most of the stories I’ve made up over the years come from my id originally. I think I’m supposed to be ashamed of this, but I really just can’t manage it: it seems more to me like the id-origins of my stories are the grubby roots and the stories rise from them aboveground as plants.
But one does prefer the aboveground plant to be what’s noticed, I must say.
(March 15, 2012)
Fortunately for the book, I only needed the slightest encouragement to write it anyway, which my friends were only too happy to provide. It’s one thing to know Joanna Russ’s list of ways women’s writing is suppressed: it’s quite another to realize that you’re doing most of the suppressing for them. And still another to stop doing it.
That’s the miracle of art, though: a divine stubbornness that doesn’t feel miraculous in the least. A cussedness, a grubby stamping on the shovel’s shoulder, digging up that flowerbed. From a dreamed-out story outline in the rough, to a finished project one is proud of: that is worth all the slogging in the middle.
I suppose the reverse benefit of such difficulty is that when you’ve finished the project, you can enjoy the result and stick it to The Man in one move.
One of the questions I got from my beta readers when editing the manuscript of Ryswyck, and one which I expect to get from readers from time to time now the book is in the wild, is a theme with variations: what are the sexualities of the characters, and how are they understood in the ‘verse? Are the questionable choices of — well, Barklay in particular — a function of sexuality, or of something else? Where does Douglas land on the spectrum, if there is one? Where does Speir? Just how friendly is your worldbuilding to non-het points of view?
Since it’s Pride month, I might as well address the topic now. And comment, incidentally, on the reactionary situation that has developed since I first conceived Ryswyck about seven years ago. And if I’m going to talk about the worldbuilding of my ‘verse, I’ll want to talk about the backstory of our own. (Those of you who don’t need the history lesson, bear with me for a couple paragraphs.)
Until 150 years ago, we didn’t have any descriptive words for what it meant to have non-heterosexual desires and experiences. We had a handful of extremely ethnically specific words, and we had a host of pejoratives. Western society, for hundreds of years, had nothing but a reified concept of human sexuality that excluded all but a certain range of heterosexual points of view. Anything in reality outside that range fell short of being human: it was bent, twisted, wicked, sick, or broken.
Then in 1869 the word homosexual was coined. It was intended to be a scientific/medical description of a certain pathology. But this had consequences. The word and concept of heterosexuality then needed to be invented. With that duality it was possible to talk about sexualities on academic terms and in public forums. People who identified themselves as homosexual began to have a way to talk about themselves without mirroring a reflex of disgust. They started reclaiming the pejoratives for their own use; more and more experiences and identities came into the light and were named, so that by the end of the 20th century we had what we call alphabet soup, and more descriptive terms for sexual and gender identity are coined and put into circulation all the time.
Some people have started to scoff at this. “This is ridiculous, we have L, G, B, T, Q, A, I, WTF, BBQ — where is this going to end?” I’m glad you asked that question, Imaginary Scoffer. It seems to me that the most reasonable and moral trajectory of this process would be to re-reify the concept of “human” sexuality, this time to include the increasingly obvious multiplicity of ways to experience love and desire. People could use descriptive terms for themselves without also having to press those terms into service as polemic, to defend themselves against the backlash of the heteronormative point of view.
But what’s happening instead right now is something I think very sad and short-sighted. There are some non-het groups who can’t or won’t conceive of a reunified human sexuality, and have turned on those whose identities resist definite labels. “You Bs, you Ts, you Is, whatever you are — you aces and aros, take your queer umbrella and get out! You belong with the enemy: the straights!”
None of this was on my radar when I was worldbuilding for Ryswyck. All I wanted, as Kameron Hurley saw, was to write a story without having to say, “Well, as you know, Bob, Douglas is pansexual and homoromantic!” So I invented context for him, and for Speir, and for Barklay and Stevens and Cameron and Rose and Corda and Darnel and Orla: context in which my characters were free of the pressure to see their identities as essentially polemic. The society they live in isn’t perfect, but it has advanced in this one area in part because the communities are small and everyone needs each other; needs to be able to trust one another, whatever their identity might be. The people who get to know Douglas come to know that he might like to go to bed with a wide variety of people, but the person he falls in love with is overwhelmingly likely to be male. Nothing else is needed. Everyone gets to say who they are. Everyone gets to rest.
But our interaction with such a story is unfortunately not simple. There are some authors and showrunners and creators who resist using labels for the reasons I sketch above, because they want to upgrade the whole context in which characters relate to one another. And then there are the authors and showrunners and creators who resist using labels because they want plausible deniability in case straight people get…het up about “forced” representation.
Nobody forced me to write from a non-het-centric point of view; I just did. I have enough age and experience now that I don’t feel my own identity as inherently polemic. I’ve done myself the same courtesy I deeply believe in doing others: letting them say who they are. Even if I think they’re wrong, or problematic (a word that covers a host of sins), or merely tiresome.
Everything doesn’t have to be a fucking polemic.
I know, I know: the battle lines being drawn right now are not imaginary. The Nazis have crawled out from under their rocks, and brazen cruelties march across every television chiron, and it’s hotter in Alaska right now than it is in Kansas City, and I-29 opened for five minutes before going under again.
But what is speculative fiction for if not for featuring to ourselves a way of being that is recontextualized, recentered, reimagined — while still being ourselves? All this noise may cover it up from time to time. But people are always people. And courtesy is still a thing.
Guess what! I found out this morning that Ryswyck has been included in the Summer’s Most Anticipated reads on Apple Books! You can check out the iTunes link on apple.co/summerbooks!
(I admit when I saw the email from the nice man at Smashwords I did a little cursory checking before I clicked any links. Indie author, sophistication in phishing, Occam’s Razor, &c. But it’s legit. O.O)
I will probably make a more festive post later, but first, a meditation. There are special reasons why I chose to set the release date of Ryswyck to Memorial Day. Quite apart from the logistical convenience of launching my book on a, well, memorable date that dovetailed with my project schedule, the theme of bearing witness to the loss of comrades and loved ones in war is a significant thread in this story.
For those who have given “the last full measure of devotion,” the moment has already been folded and purled under the current of the river of time. But for us who bear witness, the moment demands ongoing recognition and respect. To lay down a token offering, to strike a light, to gather up prayers: these seemingly futile acts are the breath of our humanity. If we have forgotten to breathe, they revive us.
Among other things, I wanted to bear witness to the necessity of bearing witness. I wanted to show how indispensable each person is to both the waging of war and the making of peace. It’s no accident that the one character whose sacrifice provides the turning point in the darkest hour is the most ordinary person in the cast.
This and other sacrifices are irreparable losses. But they are not irredeemable gifts. I’ve excerpted a moment of bearing witness from a moment just after the midpoint of the novel, in which Douglas lights a prayer for a lost comrade.
He’d promised Speir he would do this. Not that he knew what he was doing. His mother was no contemplative, and his siblings had scarcely had time to teach him anything but the rudiments of keeping a household light burning. All offerings are acceptable, said the sage. Douglas hoped that was true. There was a saying that paired with that: Only offerings are acceptable. That left out displays for others, gifts secretly intended to be temporary, and counters for negotiation, Douglas supposed. His hands were empty, even of the means to negotiate…
Douglas took his light to an empty cleft in the undressed rock. He tipped a few hot, clear drops onto the rock and the crusts of older prayers, and held his light in the cleft until it was anchored.
“He died as a soldier,” he said quietly to his flame. “But he wasn’t killed as a soldier. I’m bearing witness to that.” A crushing pressure, hardly an emotion, gripped him; he drew a breath against it.
“Their names are eternally spoken,” he finished. Then he bowed and left his offering of defiance before the burning lights.
A fully-bloomed catalpa tree always starts with one bud.
Though, as promised, the paperback has been launched a few days early. Thank you to the folks who participated in my little marketing research survey; but even with advance planning it turns out I underestimated the amount of time it would take author copies to ship. If you order your paperback now, you will probably still get it faster than I will get the order I placed three days ago.
For my readers’ added convenience I’ve placed quick links to distributors on the home page; for now, Amazon is the only venue where a paper copy is available, but for those who read their books in pixels, there are several choices. Ryswyck is now also up at Overdrive (and other library purchasing channels!) — so my posse of librarians, you know what to do — !
There’s also a Goodreads link for those of you who are members there. While you wait for your copy to arrive, you can mark Ryswyck “Want to Read” — and when you’ve read it, please do leave a review either there or at the venue of your choice. Remember, this is for posterity, so please be honest. (I’ll give a donut to the first person to identify that reference!)
As for me: while I’m definitely excited about launching the result of my labors so that others can read it, one very satisfying box has already been checked. As I’ve mentioned before, getting to read this book was a prime motivator for writing it, and since my proof copy arrived, it’s traveled from my bedside table to my livingroom couch to my patio to the bar at my local pub — all favorite places of mine to read (although at the latter I do tend to divide my attention between reading material and Royals games). And since generating the proof, I have tweaked the book to be even more like the product I envisioned. It pleases me, and I’m proud of it, and all the branding work I’ve done basically boils down to that.
In preparation for the Memorial Day festivities, your intrepid author is making a list and checking it twice planning for the softcover launch ahead of time. I’ve talked to any number of folks who’ve mentioned wanting to purchase a paperback copy of Ryswyck, including those who were all ready to roll up and put their names on the proverbial Girl Scout cookie order sheet.
So here it is. In fact this is better than ordering Girl Scout cookies, because you won’t be reaching into an empty sleeve and wondering where the hell all your Thin Mints went. With a book, you can read it more than once!
So, if you’re one of those people who wants a paperback, please use the form below to order 5 boxes of Caramel Dee-Lites — no, give the author 5 boxes of Caramel Dee-Lites — no, hang it, I mean let the author know your intentions so she can plan accordingly. (The author is certainly not going to promise that a gift of cookies will expedite a local distribution order. Nope, no indeed.)
All facetiousness aside, I promise not to make nefarious (or possibly even noticeable) use of your email, or expose it to spammers, or put you on my newsletter subscription list — I’d have to start producing a newsletter first. (Which I may do in the future, with a separate signup.)
