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Author Archive

Back Cover Copy

Every time I write back cover copy, log lines, or any kind of summary of my work, I’m reminded of an old anime – I think it was Record of Lodoss War – that started out with a few minutes of exposition about the background.  That is, more than 10% of the 22-minute episode was storytime.

Over the course of the series, the opening monologue became shorter and shorter, more and more concentrated.  The joke among my friends at the time was that eventually the whole thing would boil down to “Good!  Evil!  Fight!  Bad – BOOOOOOOM!”

So I guess there is such a thing as over-condensing your book.  You don’t want the summary too dense for light to escape…

The Lunge

Since I came back from France, my fencing lessons have focused on the basics—mostly extension and lunge.  Extension is straightening your arm with your blade pointed toward the other fencer; most normal folks call that a ‘stab’, but stabbing is a violent motion, while a perfect extension wastes neither energy nor effort.  Your point floats out, and the other person happens to be in the way.

A lunge, on the other hand, is more or less exactly what it says on the tin: you start in the standard fencing ready stance (like a cat stance for those of you with more of a martial arts background), extend your arm, and spring forward, crossing a large distance in an eyeblink’s time.  A good lunge flows like water; mine tends to judder like boulders bouncing down a hill.

In my first lesson after returning to the States, my coach and I figured out what I was doing wrong (one of the many things I was doing wrong): I was getting in my own way.  Rather than kicking my front foot off the ground first, I was leaning forward and using that foot to spring forward, which telegraphed, slowed, and shortened my lunge.  Focusing on that one aspect of technique has really improved my lunge.  It’s faster now, smoother, longer.  I even stomp the floor less when my front foot lands.

Of course, now that I almost know how to lunge without making a fool out of myself, I lunge all the time during bouts—even when I shouldn’t.  Opponent is advancing?  Lunge!  Opponent is retreating?  Lunge!  Opponent is obviously baiting me into an attack?  Advance Lunge!

I should know better, but damn if that smooth feeling doesn’t tempt me into the next foolish move.  I have one cool new key, and I try it in every lock.  Time will fix this, though, and experience.  Learning a new technique, or a new aspect of old technique, is hard, but so much easier making that technique a part of you.  And losing because you’re excited by your own freedom is much better than losing because you can’t help stumbling over yourself.

Still, better to win.  But let’s take this one bout at a time.

Three Parts Dead Unboxing

I’ve received the first copy of Three Parts Dead from Tor!  In honor of Apple’s product launch today, and the new Kindles Amazon debuted on Monday, I decided to try my hand at the tantalizing genre of “unboxing.”

Warning: Awesome Images Ahoy!

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Goodreads Giveaway

Only 27 days until Three Parts Dead comes out!  But if you can’t wait to read a copy, we’re giving away a handful of ARCs on Goodreads: uncorrected proof copies, but very handsome all the same, and softcover to boot–slightly less effective for stunning burglars, but lighter to carry around, so there’s that.

If you have a Goodreads account, enter the giveaway here.

On Discovering Taste

My friend the composer Alex Temple wrote an excellent post on formal exploration, taste, and discovery in music, which deserves your attention.  I don’t have a great deal to add, since I’m still thinking through the implications of that post myself, but even though music and fiction are very different forms, there’s a lot to be learned in both cases from asking not “what should I like,” but “what do I like?”

Back from France

The Sainte Chapelle is heartbreakingly gorgeous…

…and / but I wonder if the architect ever told St Louis, “I heard you like churches, so I put a church on your church in your church, so you can pray while you pray while you pray.”

Surprisingly Pleasant Myths

I’m reading island mythology for Research on Seekrit Project.  The book currently in my satchel is Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, written by William Wyatt Gill, a missionary, and published in London in 1876.  The stories inside are great, and presented along with a decent amount of context from Gill’s informants.  Of course, since this is an old-school missionary book, the myths are flanked by captions about how the story demonstrates “primitive heathen materialism” and discussions of how formerly sacred spaces have now been turned to plantations, “to the profit of all.”  Problems ahoy.  But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

One of the stories in this book is that of Tinirau, a god of fish and ocean-creatures.  Tinirau’s son, Koro, doesn’t know that his dad is a god.  All Koro knows is that every week or two his father disappears in the dead of night, and comes back righteously drunk three days later bedecked in a pandanus seed necklace.  Koro decides to follow his dad, and one night goes to sleep on top of his father’s clothes.  Dad has to wake him up to get the clothes; when Tinirau then leaves the house, Koro follows.

To make a long story short, Tinirau performs this complicated ritual involving gathering coconuts and pandanus seeds, making a necklace out of the seeds, shredding the coconut meat into food, and then carrying that food to the seashore, where, under the stars, he performs a wild dance and sings to the heavens.  When Tinirau sings, fish rise up from the depths, take on human form, and sing and dance with him.  Still dancing, Tinirau and the fish disappear into the waves; three days later, as per usual, Tinirau returns.

Koro follows his Dad three more times, memorizing the incantation, learning the ritual and the dance.  At last, one night when Tinirau is off partying with his fish-friends, Koro performs the ritual–and the fish rise from the waves, dancing, and his father is among them.  Tinirau recognizes his son, and embraces him, and congratulates him on his cleverness in discovering the secret of the song and dance.  And they dance together under the moonlight, father and son and fish-people, glorying on the waves.

This is a wonderful, sweet story, and surprising to someone used to reading more Western myths and fairy tales.  The parts of me that grew up on Greek myths expects the ending to feature Koro’s face getting burned off by Zeus, Semele-style, or his being sentenced to 9 superhuman labors.  What a joyful surprise, to find the father well pleased in his son, and the two of them together rejoicing in their initiation into a larger world.

 

The Audience Will Kill You

I’ve been noticing Audience stand-ins in science fiction and fantasy recently.  I don’t mean characters who are explicitly “the reader” in some kind of self-aware way, though those exist.  Nor characters with whom the reader identifies–in general, that’s the role of the protagonist.  I’m talking about characters which stand in for the Audience’s expectations of the main characters and the story in which they live–readers as a faceless mass, readers as an imposition.

In The Hunger Games (the first book in the series, at least), residents of the Capitol fill this role.  They’re basically the readers of a YA novel: they pay good money to watch kids suffer through toil, pain, and death.  They develop affection for some characters, antipathy toward others.  They reward their child “main characters” with accolades for displays of emotional growth that fit their (the audience’s) desires for how the story fits together.  And, ultimately, the only way Katniss can buck the audience’s lust for pathos and blood is to threaten to deny them their expected ending.   (I really like young adult books, by the way–that’s part of the reason why I’m tickled by the notion that the Hunger Games edges around a critique of the genre.)

The Consu in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War fill a similar role, only for the military SF audience.  For those of you who haven’t read Old Man’s War, the Consu are sorta-insectoid Elder Race type aliens, with better technology and more firepower than anyone else in the galaxy.  But they fight very limited wars with younger races, because they think such wars consecrate the planets on which they take place, and improve the souls of the races that they fight.  In the scene where the Consu are introduced, we meet a human soldier who’s a bit of a loser; the Consu, during their attack, shoot him in the face and as he dies they scream “REDEEMED!  REDEEMED!”  (I didn’t realize how on-the-nose this ways until I wrote that sentence.)  For the Consu, battle is an opportunity to display nobility, to ascend the Great Chain of Being, and the more these battles involve wicked cool SF space marines, the better.  At least in this book (the first in the series), the Consu present as a nearly-omnipotent Audience fascinated with the kinds of stories that can be told in Military SF–stories about duty, honor, bloodshed, courage, love in dangerous times, and all the rest.  They’re such fans that they only accept ambassadors from lesser races who have proven themselves Main Character material.

I’m scratching my head trying to parcel out the significance of this, and wondering if I’m just imagining it all.  Could presentations like the ones I’m describing arise from the fact that, due to the internet, the audience is more of a presence in creators’ minds?  Are there further examples beyond these two?  (The machines in the Matrix are one possibility…)