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Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

Sprint Sprint Sprint

I have an actual according-to-Hoyle vacation on deck, with no work on the docket. Absurd luxury? Yes! Meanwhile, I’m sprinting around like a decapitated chicken trying to finish everything as needs finishing. A preview!

Structural revisions for The Highway Kind. For what feels like the first time, I’m experimenting with substantially additive revision. Generally, no matter how much text I add to a book, wordcount for the n+1 draft will be the wordcount for draft n minus at least 10%, often closer to 20 or 30. This time I’ve added 15k, and feel deliciously transgressive. A lot of this book feels transgressive, actually—new rhetoric, new tools, new arguments. Of course, I’m feeling all the hesitation one generally feels using new tools, but there’s a lot of freedom here, too.
(Unrelated: I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a tabletop game system that reflected growing *used* to a tool. Learning a new blade takes me most of a night on the strip—and they make those to Olympic spec. Someone who swaps out their old 10gp beater for a +3 sword might spend a whole adventure figuring out how to use it. Granted, this is a bit simulationist for my current game preferences, but, hm.)
Reviewing copy edits for The City’s Thirst, which—I don’t know that I’ve actually mentioned this on the blog. Have I? The City’s Thirst is my second piece of Craft Sequence interactive fiction for Choice of Games. You are a troubleshooter working for Red King Consolidated in the first decade or so after the God Wars. Where’s the water coming from? Forget it, Jake, it’s fantasyland. It’s fun; weirder, too, darker, and probably a bit sexier, than CotD. I hope you like it!
Finalizing my next Bookburners episode—speaking of which, Episode 4, by Mur Lafferty, goes live today! It’s all about How to Serve Man, sort of. And the perils of surgical equipment. Give it a look—or a listen.
Undisclosed Labor for Seekret Projekt I’m working on with Cassie Clarke, Lindsay Smith, and Ian Tregellis, muahahahaha.
Ancillary video stuff for Uncanny Magazine.

Speaking of videos, if you’re a board gamer and haven’t already seen Shut Up & Sit Down’s “Tips for the 5 Problem Players,” go do so. The title aside, the video’s actually more about the ethics of gaming, and how to run a fun, inclusive night. (I’ve made most of the mistakes they mention in the video myself.) How to chill out and welcome people into a gaming space! I admire SUSD’s vision of board gaming—what it is, what it can be. Their team loves quality games, obviously, but they also care about the metanarrative of gaming, and I think that vision’s what makes them stand out.

On a not-entirely-related note, Amal El-Mohtar and Arkady Martine have great, deep thoughts about THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT. Worth a read!

And in the “Max is excited to read this” line: Ilana Myer’s Last Song Before Night hit stands yesterday. Definitely taking this one on the vacation. Poet magicians!

Okay, back to work for me. Rock on, friends.

Games People (Mostly My Friends and I) Play

Today I’m running around preparing for the Bookburners launch—the series run starts next Wednesday, so get ready to see me running around with my underwear on my head talking about how cool this thing we’ve all put together is! Basically with Margaret, Mur, and Brian I feel like I’m on some kind of Magnificent Seven style team designed to inject Good Stuff into your readin’ nerves. The pilot‘s just the beginning.

In the meantime, here are some games I’ve been playing on heavy rotation recently!

Codenames

Vlaada Chvatil’s CODENAMES is the party game you should own.

The concept’s simple: there are two teams of spies, red and blue, and two spymasters, also red and blue. All players see a grid of words on the table—the codenames of secret agents in the wild. The spymasters know which codenames are red agents and which are blue, thanks to a handy key. They have to communicate this information to their team, using only a clue, and the number of codenames that correspond to the clue. First team to contact all its agents, wins!

The red spymaster looks at the table and sees that “STAR” and “MOONLIGHT” are both red codenames; the red spymaster says, “Space: Two,” indicating that two clues on the board correspond to the clue “Space.” The red team looks at the board, hems and haws, and chooses the correct codenames. This is how it is supposed to work!

How it often works instead: the red team looks at the board, hems and haws, decides “STAR” is certainly one of the clues in question, almost goes for moonlight, but then one of the team sees “STATION” over in the corner. It has to be STATION, he says. “Space station, right? I mean, it’s so obvious.”

Meanwhile, red team spymaster is sitting there, doing her best to keep a poker face, thinking, goddammit, how did I not see Station?

So, the red team chooses STATION. Maybe Codename STATION actually attaches to an innocent bystander, or an irrelevant asset! Maybe Codename STATION is one of the opposing team‘s agents—by identifying them, you’ve just handed your opponents an advantage. Or, just maybe, Codename STATION belongs to the dreaded Assassin—and you’ve just lost the game.

CODENAMES is great fun, takes fifteen minutes to play, explains in thirty seconds, and works for groups between two and $max_capacity_of_room. I’ve seen it take parties from dissolute to total good-natured competitive focus in a single exchange of play. It’s the kind of game that will make friends invite you over so you can bring it and play with them.

Give it a shot, is what I’m saying.

Also, it has my favorite mechanic ever: the jerk timer! If anyone’s taking too long to move, just upend this little sand timer, and they have to move by the time it runs out. I wish every game had one of these.

Forbidden Stars

If Codenames is minimalist competitive party fun, Forbidden Stars is the opposite: maximalist hyperaggro spacewar simulator! Set in the Grim Darkness of the Warhammer 40,000 Future Where There is Only War etc, Forbidden Stars is a surprisingly elegant platform for you and up to three of your friends to spend a large number of hours bashing each others’ faces in with spaceships and giant robots.

Forbidden Stars pits Vicious Space Orcs (WAAAUGH!), Chaos Space Marines (BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!), Space Elves (*creepy silence*), and Myke Cole I mean the glorious upstanding and noble Space Ultramarines in a struggle for control of the galaxy. So far, so 4x. But! There are some neat differences.

Most 4xen (that being a genre of game that relies on the four x’s of conquest: exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination) end up being about territorial control. All your space people want to become the largest space empire. Games divide neatly into an early expansionist stage, a later defensive stage in which you ponder your and your enemies’ fortifications in prep for the final assault, and then a final SUPERNOVA DOOM EXPLOSION.

In Forbidden Stars, you win not by holding territory, or building the strongest economy, but by acquiring all your faction’s objective tokens (which your opponents have seeded around the galaxy in hard-to-reach-for-you places) first. Strategic strikes are the name of the game: figure out how to bash in, seize your objective, and leave. It’s an enormous game of capture the flag, only with spaceships and killer robots, which obviates what I’ve heard Django Wexler, who’s better at this stuff than I am, call the SHOGUN problem: in 4x games, often the player with the strongest military loses, because people gang up on her.

Forbidden Stars also offers the most elegant order-issuing system I’ve ever seen: players take turns placing order tokens facedown to various star systems. You’ve issued an order to the Golbez Expanse, or whatever—is that an order to invade? Do you plan to build a factory there? Are you just engaged in some sort of internal reorganization? Your opponents don’t know—all they see is, you’re preparing to do something. But that information might be intended to bait them into a trap: they think you’re trying to occupy a system, so they try to occupy it first by placing an “advance” order on top of what they think is your “advance” order. Only for you to place an actual “advance” order on top of that. Since orders are resolved Last-in-first-out, you’ve just pre-empted their invasion with your own. SCHEMING!

Also combat is a joy, but this post is already too long for me to explain why.

That said and speaking of length—OH MY GOD THIS IS A LONG GAME. Especially—especially—if your friends are the sort of people who spend a lot of time thinking through their moves. There are lots of micro-choices, which means a lot of time waiting for a, shall we say, contemplative player to drop their order. If everyone knows what they’re doing, I can see it moving at a clip—there are fewer fiddly bits than in most 4x games. But my last game was a four-player run with two first-timers, and we called it after eight hours, with a turn left on the turn counter. I was hoping this would be more lightweight than Eclipse, which tends to run about an hour per player for our group, counting rules explanation; no such luck.

That said—while we were all guttering by the end of that run, we had fun the whole time, moving our space armies around the map and cackling about Blood for the Blood God, so and were able to call it with good feelings and laughter all around. This one’s been good for three or four days of fun space warfare so far, which more than justifies its expense in my opinion.

Weekends and Might Have Beens

Hello all! I’m fresh returned from a fantastic weekend at a friend’s wedding, full of joy in life, abuzz with reconfirmed friendships, new connections, and a bit sore from dancing and alcohol. People are wonderful, and so’s the physical world. They have sunsets and rivers there, and you’ll never find human beings like this anywhere else. They’re fantastic.

Also the Hugos happened this weekend! There have been full roundups of the event—I’m a particular fan of Chuck Wendig‘s for reasons that transcend but include the fact that he curses more freely than I tend to online. Tobias Buckell figured out what the Hugo ballot would have looked like had a small angry cabal not organized a voting bloc in an attempt to drown out the broader conversation of fandom. It’s a cool list, with good writers on it.

One of those writers is me! (Sort of, maybe, depending on the 5% rule.) Which, it’s really flattering that people liked my short story A Kiss with Teeth, but I’m not at all bent out of shape, save that it would have been an honor to be on that all-star list—Aliette de Bodard, Amal El-Mohtar, Ursula Vernon, and Eugie Foster! Foster’s not being nominated is a special tragedy, since she passed away this last year.

I feel particularly wistful for the Campbell shortlist that might have been—Wes Chu ended up on the final ballot in spite of the slate, but the rest of the nominees would have been Andy Weir, Alyssa Wong, Carmen Machado, and Django Wexler, which, god, what a group! All these people have fantastic careers already, not to mention ahead of them. Wong’s fiction has been burning up the award shortlists this year, as has Machado’s—not to mention her New Yorker by-lines—Wexler’s writing not one but two fantastic fantasy series, bro do you even sleep, and Weir has, in case you hadn’t heard, a movie starring Matt Damon due out in a few weeks (not to mention a great, long-defunct webcomic). An award nomination would have confirmed what’s already obvious—that they’re the future of SFF.

I’m mostly sad for that counterfactual world because meeting my fellow Campbell nominees was such a huge part of WorldCons 2013 and 2014. We came from all over the genre spectrum, with wildly divergent backgrounds, we wrote very different stuff, and in the years since we’ve taken different paths—but we brought a strong bond away from WorldCon, and it’s a shame the alt nominees didn’t get that chance. So, at the risk of advice-giving, because I guess that’s what this is, um, Django, Alyssa, Wes, Carmen, Andy—say hi to one another next time you’re at the same con, okay?

Introducing Bookburners & Serial Box!

Hi, friends! Let me share something cool with you. Come into my secret lair.

Yep. A little further back. Around the iron maiden. Just be careful about the—

… trap door. Sorry, I really should get better lighting in here, hold on, let me lower you a rope. Just chill for a second. The gators are drawn to movement.

Towel?

While you glare at me in silent rage, let me tell you about this Cool New Thing!

People-are-awesome pitch: Bookburners is Margaret Dunlap (The Middleman, Lizzie Bennet Diaries), Mur Lafferty (Shambling Guide to New York, Ghost Train to New Orleans), Brian Francis Slatterly (The Family Hightower, Lost Everything, The Slick Six), and yours truly writing an episodic supernatural procedural series for your reading pleasure.

Worlds-are-awesome pitch: Bookburners is about cop working with a team of Vatican secret agents who hunt down magic and demons and stuff from around the world, stick them in a box, and then never open the box, because that always works so very very well. (This is the bit where I nod my head and mouth “no” in an exaggerated fashion.) Miss The X-Files or Warehouse 13? Like The Librarians? This is a bit like that, only with significantly more Cronenberg. (If you read Shadow Unit, odds are you’ll also like this!)

Formal-innovation-is-awesome pitch: Bookburners is a series of sixteen episodes of monster hunting, magic, intrigue, and team shenanigans, each of which takes about fifty minutes to read. Each episode’s a complete story from start to finish, but they tie together in sequence. I wrote the pilot! And you can read it for free here, right now. The rest of the series will be available episode by episode, or as a subscription, in ebook and audio and on the Serial Box website, once a week, starting with the series’ formal launch in September. Here’s a page with all those details.

Formal-innovation-is-awesome corollary because this is the internet and internetters gonna net-pick: Yes, serial fiction has been around for a long time—but our main historical comps aren’t actually Dickens or Tolstoy, who published successive chapters of larger works rarely designed to stand alone. Dickens et. al. wrote serialized novels. IANA literary historian but I doubt one would think of what we’re doing as a novel; it’s much closer to older serial works like The Tale of Genji or Journey to the West, which are… tricky to claim as novels. (Not impossible! But that’s another dissertation.) In the modern era, author-publishers have been building serialized stories for a while, but the writer’s room model gives us more flexibility—Bookburners draws off every writer’s strengths, and lets us challenge one another. Shadow Unit is the closest thing out there to what we’re doing, as far as I can tell.

Don’t-believe-me-trust-the-internet pitch: Here’s io9 on Serial Box! And here’s SF Signal! And also, it brings my fannish heart glee to report that some really cool people like the series.

Assuaging-your-fears pitch: If you’re worried about my writing schedule, you’re too kind, but don’t sweat it. Really. I turned in next year’s Craft Sequence book back in December, and in the next couple months I’ll turn in *another* novel, then focus on my planned Craft book for 2017. And The City’s Thirst, another Choice of Game in the Craft Universe, will launch this fall. I’ve been writing like a crazy person, yes, and I probably will scale back my project pace next year, but fingers crossed, knock on wood, I’ll be fine.

Now: go forth! Read!

And sorry about the gators.

A Triumphant Return!

I’m back!

Sorry, everyone, for my absence the last few weeks. I’ve been on the road—throughout the Northeast, and then to GenCon in Indianapolis! It’s been an amazing run, but without the time I’d needed to keep up with blog posting. I’m back now, though, just dealing with an enormous pile of work and email and the like.

Tomorrow evening I’ll be dropping by Reddit’s Fantasy community for an Ask Me Anything Q&A session—visit r/fantasy tomorrow and you’ll see my post at the page. Come! Ask questions! Chat! I’ll be there at 8pm, beverage in hand, to answer.

Some stuff that happened while I was away:

Animator and fan artist par excellence Glinda Chen produced this amazing trailer for Two Serpents Rise! I have no words for how amazingly cool this is. If you like it, be sure to check out her tumblr, which is full of great Craft Sequence fan art.

(Two Serpents Rise from Glinda Chen on Vimeo.)

Seriously, I think I’ve watched this trailer about forty or fifty times by now.

Other video! Google NYC was kind enough to host us Tor Books Summer Road Trip folks for a Talk at Google, which you can see here and now thanks to the marvel of modern technology:

While I was on the road, I stopped by Bryant Park to talk about Hamlet! I had a great time, and Tor.com wrote up the event.

Also relevant: the SFF Readalongs group over on Goodreads is hosting a readalong of Full Fathom Five. If you’re interested, drop by—there’s been some great discussion over the last couple weeks.

Speaking, also, of the last couple weeks—LAST FIRST SNOW has been doing very well. Thanks to all of your support we had a great first two weeks. Brilliant reviews, too! If you haven’t grabbed the book yet, on tour I took to describing it as “a novel about zoning politics and human sacrifice,” which about sums it up.

If you have read the book, and liked it, please do take a minute to write a review at the online bookseller or review board of your personal preference. Some libraries also have review boards the days!

Also! If you’re interested in signed copies, contact Porter Square Books or Pandemonium and they’ll be able to hook you up.

That’s all for this week—I’ll have a more sensible post next week, promise. Peace, y’all!

Last First Reviews & Updates

Hi friends! The book launch went really well! We had an amazing crowd at Harvard Book Store last night—and we didn’t even boil anyone for their skin!

Yesterday was pretty wild: four excellent reviews of Last First Snow hit at once, all glowing—and that’s not even counting Seth Dickinson’s Goodreads review, posted earlier (and if you don’t know Seth’s work yet, go forth and preorder a copy of his debut novel The Traitor Baru Cormorant—it’s an awesome book).

From Liz Bourke on Tor.com: “In his Craft sequence, Gladstone is writing a fantasy of modernity, deeply engaged with the issues of our time: the power of capital, the potential tyranny of corporations, the value of the individual, the tension between romanticised pasts and lived-in presents, and the aftermaths of conflict. Last First Snow epitomises his approach. It’s the kind of book that inclines me to use phrases like tour de force.

Max Gladstone just keeps getting better. It doesn’t quite seem fair. If you’re not reading his Craft sequence? Start.

Read Last First Snow. Seriously. Read it.”

From Paul Weimer on SF Signal: “The Craft Sequence novels are ultimately about people and how they strive for change in their world, but the actual plot and themes of the novel, which revolve around the redevelopment project, are a twisting labyrinth of ideas and concepts. We see the consequences of power, the stirring of old ideas and resistance to new ones, and how class distinctions can lead to disproportionate effects of change. All of these come through clearly in the Gladstone’s writing, which is the best in the series so far. It shows multiple sides and viewpoints of the characters and lets readers judge them by their beliefs and actions.”

From Reading Reality: “The Craft Sequence is an urban fantasy series that is guaranteed to leave readers with a terrible book hangover. Each volume immerses you further into this world, and makes it that much more difficult to let go.”

From Rob Bedford at SFFWorld.com: “If Max Gladstone gave readers a story whose strength was the nuanced characters he created and developed, Last First Snow would be a perfectly acceptable novel. If he simply did half of the world-building in the Craft Sequence and featured it as the backdrop for those aforementioned nuanced characters, then Last First Snow would be more than that, an excellent novel. Those elements, combined with the twisty plot and balanced tension make Last First Snow a gem of a novel. If you’ve read previous novels in the Craft Sequence and can’t wait for the next one, then you should be very satisfied with Last First Snow as it features Max’s strengths and provides some added depth to both the world and characters who are familiar. If you haven’t read anything by Max Gladstone, then Last First Snow is a great place to jump into his fictional world and discover a smart, engaging, captivating, and imaginative storyteller.”

Oh, and I wrote a Guest Post for SF Signal, which went live yesterday as well!: “But the public story isn’t always the true one. Memories distort and spin. What seems a grim inevitability twenty years later, at the time, looked anything but. The layers of myth painted over the actual events of the Skittersill Rising tell a story the people who were there, then, would recognize as a distortion. The original protests of the Rising protected their homes, their jobs, their families; religion was involved involved but was not a central issue. Cultures clashed. Negotiations succeeded and failed. People tried, desperately, to hold their lives together.”

[EDIT OF AWESOMENESS AT FRAN’S SUGGESTION] If y’all didn’t see it when I posted it previously—plenty of reasons you might not have—check out this interview Fran Wilde did of me for SF Signal! I had an immensely fun time talking with Fran, and some of this stuff even sounds kind of smart, like:

“FW: Elayne (who we saw in Three Parts Dead) is wrapped up in her job, in the middle of a book that speaks much about the importance of family and home, and what people are willing to fight for. Still, she’s one of my favorite characters. How much has she given up for her Craft skills?

MG: A lot—not always willingly. She was a young Craftswoman in the God Wars when practitioners of the Craft were hunted and killed before they could grow strong; she had to run to escape her own people. She threw herself into the study of the Craft out of a desire first for protection, and then for naked power. To become a Craftswoman you have to learn to think the way Craftsfolk think—recasting the world in terms of trades, exchanges, obligations. That opens up huge possibilities, but it also places an immense amount of strain on normal human relationships. She survived the Wars, and she’s become a Craftswoman of immense power, but she’s not precisely mortal any more.”

I’m sprinting around like the proverbial headless chicken for the next twenty-four hours until the FURY ROAD adventure starts in earnest, but I wanted to check in to wave and thank you all for your support and help and good wishes in this very exciting time. If you read the book and like it, please do drop a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or one of the related sites—and if you don’t have a copy, the hardcover discount’s almost 50% on some e-retailers!

That order of business aside, though—thank you.

Rock on, people. You’re excellent.

LAST FIRST SNOW, Out Today!

With apologies to Danny Elfman, Jack Skellington, and Tor Publicity:

My book! My book!

A box of my new book!

It’s out!

Please get it on your Nook.

Or bound!

Use a reader of your choice it doesn’t matter

I hope you will take a look!

My book!

My book! It’s cool!

Protests and backroom deals

My book!

It’s tense—and somewhat real

My book!

The skies are filled with

Feathered lizards flying

Everyone seems on the edge

Read about it on the web!

Or read my book!

I’m going on a tour this week

Harvard Book Store hosts tonight

With Bear Staveley and Cambias

We’ll Fury Road all right!

There are copies on the shelves today

My heart has grown another size

And with your support I feel a joy

Unseemly to describe….

Do you want it, do you want it

I’m so glad that you can has

I can’t wait, I hope you like it,

This strange tale you don’t yet know—

Read my book:

Last First Snow!

Last Week Before LAST FIRST SNOW, so here’s a trailer

Friends and neighbors, I have a book out next Tuesday. Less than a week from today! If you can’t wait, as is my custom, I offer you: the LAST FIRST SNOW book trailer, powered by the cinema of your imagination, in its full surround-sound screenplay format glory.

LFS Trailer

Last week, a not-so-mysterious package from Tor landed on my doorstep. I believe it contains copies of Last First Snow. I have not opened it yet, for the package itself filled me with deep supernatural dread.

That might be because I’ve been catching up on Nightvale.

But that’s another blog post. I’m out and about at the moment, but I will update with pictures from that box, and whatever I find therein, later this afternoon.

Other news: Fran Wilde, whose book Updraft should really be on your radars, interviewed me about Last First Snow at SF Signal! Check it out!

I will be at Readercon this weekend! If you are there, come say hello!

And on Tuesday July 14, I’ll be launching LAST FIRST SNOW at the Harvard Square Bookstore, as part of an event which will also feature Elizabeth Bear, Brian Staveley, and James Cambias! You want to come buy books for yourself and all your friends! Yessssss, you dooooooo. Staaaaaare into my eyeeeeees.

After that: ROAD TRIP WORLD TOUR FOR VALUES OF WORLD EQUAL TO NEW ENGLAND. I posted about this earlier, but I’ll update my Events page with the proper schedule later this afternoon.

After that, though, I’ll back in New York on the 28th of July to deliver a talk on Hamlet as part of the Word for Word in Bryant Park program! Hamlet is, well, Hamlet, so come watch me embarrass myself trying to say true things about it.

And, after that, I’ll be swinging west to Gen Con for the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium! Here’s my Gen Con schedule. I’m given to understand that events at the Writer’s Symposium run on a ticketing system, so if any of these seems especially awesome to you, and you’re bound to Gen Con, register ASAP!

Thursday Jul 30

9:00 am — The Business of Writing 101

7:00 pm — Craft: Novel Outlines and Synopsis

Friday, Jul 31

11:00 am — Craft: Rewrites and Second Drafts

2:00 am — Craft: Interactive Fiction

Saturday, Aug 1

1:oo pm — Gaming the Novel: How Tabletop Gaming Informs Worldbuilding

3:00 pm — Craft: Magic in the Modern World

Sunday, Aug 2

11:00 am — Read & Critique

Have a good week! Happy waiting!

NPR Reviews the Craft Sequence! And I Have a Readercon Schedule!

I, um, wow—so, NPR reviewed the Craft Sequence.

I love seeing the developing mosaic of Gladstone’s world, the hard questions it asks at every turn, the uncertainty of its answers. These are books I long to talk about with people, so faceted and fierce are they, so dangerously aslant our own day-to-day grinds and so full of grace. Sharp, original, passionate — this series is everything I want urban fantasy to be.

I must have a gif around here somewhere for this. Maybe…

I mean, that’s sort of right, but it fails to capture the sort of…

But that’s a bit too, I don’t know, competent and controlled for what I’m feeling now. Though I suppose there’s always the traditional:

Also: time to post some con schedules! I’ll be at Readercon in just over a week (!!) and here’s what I’ll be doing!

Thursday July 10

9:00 PM G If Magic Has Always Been Real. Karen Burnham, Lila Garrott (leader), Max Gladstone, Romie Stott, Walt Williams. Regarding the challenges of “the world we know, but with magic!”, Monique Poirier wrote, “If magic has always been real, why did colonialism and genocide roll the way it did?… It couldn’t possibly be the world we know without all the painful, fucked up history. And what good is magic if it can’t have altered that?” Naomi Novik’s Temeraire books address this by keeping many elements of history familiar but dramatically changing others. In Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries, paranormal entities have always been there, but they hid from ordinary humans for safety and therefore lacked the ability to influence the course of history. How do other authors of historical fantasy and urban fantasy balance the inherently world-changing nature of magic with the desire to layer it on top of the world we have?

Friday July 11

11:00 AM ENL When Toxic Masculinity Is the Villain. Erik Amundsen, Max Gladstone, Josh Jasper (leader), Daniel José Older. In the “New Visions of Masculinity” panel at Readercon 25, we discussed the characters in Supernatural dying repeatedly because of toxic masculinity. Fighting demons is clearly easier than fighting the cultural narrative of men as arrogant, emotionally repressed aggressors who refuse to accept advice or reconsider poor decisions. What would it look like if a male character became aware of that narrative and decided to take a stand against it? Instead of toxic masculinity traits being used to generate repetitive conflict, how can authors build the tension between what the culture wants a man to be and who he wants himself to be?

12:00 PM F Writing in the Anthropocene: SF and the Challenge of Climate Change. Gwendolyn Clare, Michael J. Daley, Michael J. Deluca (leader), Max Gladstone, Vandana Singh. Science fiction and fantasy have often dealt with fictional apocalyptic scenarios, but what about the real-world scenario unfolding right now? Climate change, or climate disruption, is the most challenging problem faced by humankind, and some have called it a problem of the imagination, as much as economics and environment. In the wake of the latest scientific reports on what is happening and what might be in store for us, we’ll examine how imaginative fiction conveys the reality, the immediacy, and the alternative scenarios of the climate problem.

2:00 PM CL Kaffeeklatsch. Max Gladstone, Charles Oberndorf.

4:00 PM G Dhalgren at 40. Jim Freund, Max Gladstone, Elizabeth Hand (leader), Shira Lipkin, John Stevens. Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren was first published in 1975. It is now widely considered a classic, yet there is also the perception that it is a “difficult” book. How much has it influenced other authors and works? Does its dream-city serve as a predecessor for more recent fantastical places such as Ambergris or New Crobuzon? How have its experiments with the form of the narrative inspired more recent works? And how might a reader approach it for the first time from the vantage point of 2015?

5:00 PM F Subverting, Parodying, and Critiquing Cultures from Within and Without. Phenderson Clark, Max Gladstone, Mikki Kendall (leader), Malinda Lo, Walt Williams. On a 2014 Wiscon panel on cross-cultural writing, Daniel José Older noted that representing the rituals of another culture with factual accuracy isn’t sufficient; writers also need to understand what those rituals mean to that culture. In response, Nalo Hopkinson tweeted, “And if u have that knowledge, then is it ok 2 subvert the tradition? Beginning 2 think that may be the core question… not so much who gets 2 appropriate a traditional cultural artifact as who gets to subvert it?” Older responded, “We rarely even get to talk about subversion in this context but it’s a huge part of the story.” This panel will move beyond basic questions about cultural appropriation to discuss the power dynamics and moral nuances of cultural subversion, parody, and critique by insiders and outsiders.

8:00 PM F Revealing the Past, Inspiring the Future. Amal El-Mohtar (leader), Max Gladstone, Alena McNamara, Sarah Pinsker, Julia Rios. When writing Hild, Nicola Griffith was aiming for historical accuracy where possible, including in her depictions of women, queer characters, people of color, and slavery in seventh-century Britain. She writes, “Readers who commit to Hild might see the early middle ages differently now: they see what might have been possible, instead of the old master story about the place of women and the non-existence of POC and QUILTBAG people 1400 years ago. And if it was possible then, what might be possible today and in the future?” What other books and stories expand our notion of the possible by revealing the truth of history? How can creators of future settings learn from the suppressed or hidden past?

Saturday July 12

12:00 PM CO The Animate Universe. Judith Berman, Max Gladstone, Mikki Kendall (leader), James Morrow. In Western post-Enlightenment thought, the universe is seen as inanimate, acted upon by other forces. In some cultures, however, the universe is an actor with agency. What is the role of the universe in our stories, and in the worlds we create to house them? How does an animate universe inform or subvert the author’s and reader’s understanding of meddling gods, dead gods, prophesies, fate, Chosen Ones, and quests?2:00 PM ENV Reading: Max Gladstone. Max Gladstone. Max Gladstone reads The beginning of Last First Snow, my next novel—due out on July 14. Or maybe the first chapter of the book after that, depending on what people are in the mood for.

Sunday July 13

11:00 AM E Autographs. Max Gladstone, John Langan.

1:00 PM G Transformative Works and the Law and You. Max Gladstone, Toni Kelner, Adam Lipkin, Sarah Smith. Let’s discuss the state of transformative works today. Copyright law and case law in this area is changing rapidly, as is the way big publishing treats transformative works. Remix culture is the cutting edge of 21st-century creativity, and we are all postmodernists. Is the law finally catching up with that, or lagging far behind? Will the fate of copyright and transformative works ultimately be decided by the whims of corporations and powerful literary estates?

So: come see!

Glengarry Glenn Editor

If you’re a cinema person, or if you’ve ever worked in or near a sales office, you’ve seen the Glengarry Glenn Ross speech. You know the one I mean. This one. (Warning: NSFW / language)

I once worked with a sales team that could recite this speech from memory. One guy told me, voice swollen with pride, that his four-year-old walked into the kitchen while he was pouring coffee one morning, glared at him, and said: “Daddy, coffee is for closers!”

Mamet wrote this speech for the film adaption of GGR—but it proved so popular he grafted it back onto the stage show, even though it’s a pain to stage, since you have to cast a whole actor for one scene. Common reactions on first exposure to the scene include rage, horror, frustration, scorn, all the emotions we read from Baldwin’s audience of broken-down real estate salesmen. But the speech is also, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize this, selling something; Baldwin’s character wants to sell these salesmen on being a salesman of a particular sort. He grabs attention with rhetoric, bluster, and status. (“This watch cost more than your car.”) He promises them, implicitly, that good salesmen get rich, that good salesmen get respect, that good salesmen get that greatest (macho) privilege, the right to shout at people and know they have to listen. It’s effective as it is gross. By the end of that scene, every man in that room wants to murder Baldwin—but since that’s not legal, they’ll settle for beating him at his own game. He’s sold them through their anger. They want to win, or at least to defend themselves. Attention. Interest. Decision. Action.

Last night, as the Attorney and I chatted about the differences between legal writing and fiction, I found myself thinking about this scene in a new light. Writers—writers of fiction especially—always have to be closing.

People are busy, and they live in a world filled with art. (I mean, in its loosest sense: any intentional work that captures the mind. Games obviously qualify, as do sports, either the kind you watch or the kind you play. So does the social web—Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. etc. etc., are all built to make you pay attention.) Writers come to people saying, “read this story!” And the people answer: why? I mean, really, why?

Readers do want to engage with stories—they want to be swept away, they want to be enlightened, they want to forget their lives or have their mind blown, they want to escape either in the flighty sense or the LeGuinian sense of liberation from a prison camp. But readers also want, or need, to (watch the latest episode of $Cool_TV_Show_All_Their_Friends_Watch | finish their essay | go to the gym | cook dinner | pick up the kids | answer email | plan their wedding | do $pressing_chore | play a Batman video game). Time is real estate. No one’s making any more of it. A storyteller has to convince readers that her story is worth the time it takes to hear.

And by “convince,” I mean “sell.”

This is where AIDA comes in—the Attention, Interest, Decision, Action cycle, it seems to me, holds for reader and character alike. We’re used to thinking about character motivation on a beat-by-beat level. Attention: how did the character get to this scene? Interest: why does the character care about these events? Decision: what decision does she make? Action: how does she carry out that decision? So far, so good—we’re solidly in Robert McKee territory.

But the reader goes through a similar cycle. So, when editing or breaking story, seems to me we can ask ourselves a similar list of questions about the reader. Attention: why would a reader pay attention to this? (Possible answers: because the book’s funny; because it scared the crap out of her; because it’s wise; because she wants to puzzle out some tangled prose; because the book offers an escape; because she’s angry; because she’s bemused.) Interest: why would a reader continue? (Will the villain get a comeuppance? Will Our Heroine’s scheme collapse around her? Does the reader see an echo of her own struggle? Are you fulfilling wishes, realizing nightmares, offering a laugh or a shoulder to cry on? Is your writing just that good on a line by line level?) Decision: will the reader keep going? (Yes; no; yes, but the next time you fuck up, she’s gone; yes, ecstatically; yes, but she’ll skim through each scene of endless clunky unrealistic politicical argument; yes, but only so she can rant about the book afterward) And action: the page turn. The closing book. The book, hurled with great force over Niagra Falls. The book, in a blender.

This would be a dangerous way for, e.g., me to think during composition, since my first drafts involve a lot of telling the story to myself, complete with false starts and stops, tics, and coffee breaks. First drafts are that night before a speech, pacing in my hotel room, stammering through the roughest shape of what I mean to say. Composition is about selling myself on the story. (If I worked more to Hollywood spec, I’d do this at the breaking / pitch stage.)

But once composition’s done, and I’m editing a draft—well. Time to sell the reader. Time to be the best kind of scum: fearless and inventive. Time to go through the manuscript and ask, at every turn: am I always closing? What does this line do for me? This word? This exchange?

The great thing about these AIDA questions, to my mind, is that there are many different good answers, especially to the first two. Often story structure advice boils down to “DO THIS OR ELSE YOUR BOOK WILL CATCH ON FIRE AND YOUR READERS DESERT YOU,” with implied scorn for hard writing, quiet scenes, or anything “literary.” (For a good example, see the Screenplay Seminar scene in Adaptation.) But different things interest different readers—hell, different things interest the same reader. I love Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and I love Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown, and I love Ryu Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies, but these are, to put it mildly, different books, deploying a broad range of techniques to hold the reader’s mind. Is the reader interested in your swordfight? In your prose? In your Kantian ruminations? In all of the above? What reason have you given her, in this beat, to turn the page?

Maybe this helps you. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, I’m interested. I’ll use this angle as I revise the first draft I finished yesterday; you’ll see how it goes.

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