I have a new story, Out of the Rose Hills, in today’s issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Go, read, enjoy!
I like a Gershwin tune; how about you?
So it turns out there’s a lot of stuff I like. I like our new dishwasher and how it sings a happy song when it’s done–oh, I am unreasonably gleeful about that dishwasher. I like the fact that strawberries are in season. But that’s not why I’m doing these round-up posts–I’m doing an every-so-often post of short stories I’ve read and liked, that you might like too. Or you can link things you’ve liked in the comments! Up to you.
Two of these are not short stories. One is a project–my friend Hanne is doing a crowdfunded food and domestic thought project that should be interesting. I subscribed to the last round of A Girl’s Gotta Eat, and it was full of recipe and food essay goodness. The other is a poem: a May poem my friend Peg wrote.
Okay, but on with the short stories:
Monkey King, Faerie Queen, by Zen Cho (in Kaleidotrope)
The Snake-Oil Salesman and the Prophet’s Head, by Shannon Peavey (in BCS)
Remembery Day, by Sarah Pinsker (in Apex)
Sun’s East, Moon’s West, by Merrie Haskell (in Lightspeed)
Puzzle pieces
I am in that lovely stage of writing a book when everything is a piece that might fit. It’s the stage where there is still room for some large elements (like the infestation of naiads and dryads that occurred a few weeks ago; it remains) and a ton of small elements, and so everything is examined for whether it’s the right element.
So when I read a book as background for a future project, I found stuff in that book for three other projects, including the one I’m working on. The one I’m working on is not really a surprise: it’s what my brain is obsessively turning over, as above. But I think I’ve figured out why I keep getting so many ideas for other projects in this stage. Usually I try to approach everything with the attitude of, “How can this be awesome?” And in this stage, it’s a very specific and heightened kind of awesome. It’s not just “that’s a cool thing to know,” but “that fits into narrative in the following known way.”
It’s not that books I read out of this stage won’t contribute to other projects in similar unpredictable ways. It’s that the penny can take much longer to drop. When a book is accreting material like a literary gas giant, it all happens so fast, so I notice it more. That’s all.
Dragons Beware! By Rafael Rosado and Jorge Aguirre
Review copy provided by First Second Books.
Dragons Beware! has strong messages of teamwork, loyalty, and self-acceptance. Sometimes they’re strong enough to overwhelm the actual story, which doesn’t do very much that’s new with its team of varied dragon-slayers. The art is cute, there are some cute asides, and generally…yep, cute. I think this is one of the graphic novels that probably has a strong age component to its audience, because people who haven’t read a quest tale of this type before are more likely to find it interesting/less predictable. And the age this series is aimed it is the age that can’t have read much of anything before, because they haven’t been on the planet long.
A note: this is the second book in a series, apparently, but I haven’t read the first one and did not find that I was missing much. All of the backstory was filled in quite clearly.
Please consider using our link to buy Dragons Beware! from Amazon.
Books read, late April
Christopher Benfey, A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Johnson Heade. There is less Twain than a person might hope if they were partial to Twain, but there is quite a lot of Mark Johnson Heade, and if you’re partial to obscure bird artists–which frankly I kind of am–that works out all for the best.
Jennifer Coopersmith, Energy: The Subtle Concept. A history of how we have thought about energy (in a physics context, not a colloquial one). Worthwhile even for the physicists among us for how it covers dead ends and experiments that reinforced wrong notions as well as covering progress towards decent approximations of understanding. I love mad scientists and wrong science. They are the messy way the world works.
Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard. Reread. The thing that struck me on this reread is how astonishingly filmable this story is. I am completely boggled that it has not become a movie yet. There are aspects that fall away as the series deepens, and it gets much, much better from here, and yet the basic elements are there, Kit and Nita starting to work as a team, personality from unusual places starting with Fred the white hole but also including the cabs in the dark universe, and always always placing oneself squarely against entropy. I’m going to keep rereading this series. This was a good reminder of why I love it–and how simply complex things can start successfully.
William Gibson, The Peripheral. I respect this book a great deal. A friend suggested that it might be the best thing Gibson has done, and she may well be right. The science fictional thing he’s doing with information traveling through time but not matter–that’s not something I’ve seen much before if at all, and he does it very well. I did not, however, find it particularly well-characterized. I had difficulty caring about the characters. So I respected but didn’t enjoy this book. Ah well; these things happen.
J. N. B. Hewitt, Iroquois Cosmology. Kindle. Highly archaic language, retelling origin stories from more than one Iroquois group. Somewhat repetitive and not very good quality prose, but beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to recognizing diversity/variation of Native American/First Nations pre-Columbian thought.
Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism. Kindle. Very weirdly structured. Because this was on my Kindle, I couldn’t tell that fully 40% of it was endnotes, and that therefore it was going to stop once two of the sisters were married. Their careers and interesting behaviors did not stop at that point, nor did they sink into obscurity (one married Nathaniel Hawthorne, the other Horace Mann), so I’m not at all clear why Marshall decided that this was all the Peabody we got. Other than that it was quite good, digressing in a most engaging way into the history of canals and Unitarianism in the US and all sorts of stuff, just the right amount to be sparkly and interesting but not enough to lose coherence. I also added to my list of “women Bronson Alcott screwed over; reasons Bronson Alcott should have been shaken until his teeth rattled,” which latter act I would not even have thought of without Louisa May Alcott, so…appropriate I guess. But Bronson Alcott did not take over the book, and I have hopes that he will not take over Marshall’s bio of Margaret Fuller.
E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. This is the book with which my ability to read nonfiction ran aground in March when I got sick. There’s a lot of dense chewy stuff about poaching and commonly held lands in English history. Worthwhile, but not for when your brain is not at full capacity.
Jo Walton, Lifelode. Reread. I still love how this all fits together, how the worldbuilding works with something this complicated. Before it came out, I was saying that there weren’t many people other than Jo I would trust not to make something like this a hot mess, and that’s still true. For those who haven’t read it: the main characters are a complex family, and time runs differently depending on where you are geographically. And it’s substantially domestic. It’s lovely, and I love it, but I can’t think who else could have written anything even with a similar setting, much less the whole thing.
Jacqueline Winspear, Maisie Dobbs. The first in a mystery series that focuses more on the effects of WWI on the heroine’s life than on the mystery, but since that mystery is also WWI-related, the imbalance doesn’t grate. I’ll be interested to see how the rest of the series works, though, since it doesn’t seem all that repeatable. The best mystery series don’t rely on repetition…but most do.
Zong In-Sob, Folk Tales from Korea. This is from 1952. All sorts of interesting pieces and parts in it, useful thoughts for later projects. Does not have everything one could want; duh, really, it’s only one book. Very glad that Half Price had it, though.
The Laws of Thermodynamics
Last year one of the Fourth Street seminar participants approached me after the seminar. They had a lot on their mind and were feeling pretty strongly, though, I hasten to add, they didn’t seem angry with me or to blame me. The general gist seemed to be: I have had a lot of short stories published, so things are easy for me; this person is completely unpublished and has also struggled with issues in their job, their romantic life, and their health, and they were just not up for submitting themselves to more rejection; and therefore, they told me, they were going to self-publish, because that way they would dodge the possibility of rejection.
And that was where they lost me.
There are good reasons to self-publish, and there are good reasons to seek a traditional publisher. There are good reasons to make one’s career a hybrid of the two.
But if you are really, truly not able to deal with rejection, none of those three possible paths will work for that.
I’m sorry. I don’t mean this to be discouraging, which is why I didn’t blurt it out to the person from the seminar. Publishing can be awesome in whatever form, and the feeling of your work connecting with someone you don’t know, some stranger whose only connection is that you wrote a thing and they read it–that’s amazing.
But self-publishing moves the rejection from editor, agent, or publisher, to readers. Very directly to readers, since the self-published author really needs word of mouth and reviews. There will be thousands or millions of people who can reject your work instead of just dozens.
I don’t want to be dismissive or uncompassionate here–quite the opposite. Some people are going through such a stack of stuff at a given time that one more rejection is legitimately just too much, and that’s a thing to respect, a thing to know about oneself. I just…would really like for people who are in that situation not to go into a particular form of publishing thinking that it is the emotionally safe way to share their work with the world. There is no emotionally safe way to share meaningful art with the world. It all involves at least a small emotional risk.
Things that you create can sometimes wait. If you’re in a particular kind of really horrible place in your life, it’s okay to make awesome things and keep them to yourself for awhile. I’m not saying that’s the situation universally, or for you in particular. I’m just saying that self-care is all right and is sometimes part of making this whole thing work in the longer-term.
Rounding up
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that I’ve been linking to more short stories I’ve enjoyed lately. Or maybe not; Twitter is an ever-flowing stream, easy for individual Tweets to merge into the shuffle. But even if you hadn’t noticed, I had. This is deliberate.
There are lots of short stories out there. Lots. Whether you’re invested in the awards a genre has to give or not, short stories are almost as easy as Tweets to lose in the shuffle. I’d been setting my standards wayyyy too high on talking about short stories, essentially only bringing them up if they were life-changing, mind-blowing, THE VERY BEST OF MY LIFE. But the problem is that Octavia Butler doesn’t write short stories any more, and also I’m not 20 any more, so…other writers who write good, interesting stories still deserve to have their work read and discussed. So I’m going with that instead, and I’m going to try to remember not only to Tweet about stories in the moment but to round up those links from time to time in a more permanent location.
Here’s what I recommended lately:
The Ways of Walls and Words, by Sabrina Vourvoulias (Tor.com).
The Migratory Pattern of Dancers, by Katherine Sparrow (Giganotosaurus).
A Beautiful Memory, by Shannon Peavey (Apex).
City of Salt, by Arkady Martine (Strange Horizons).
The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn, by Usman Malik (Tor.com).
You’ll notice, if you look, that Katherine Sparrow’s story is from a few years back. That’s because my main focus is not to get people awards (although, hey, if the people who vote on awards like stuff I like, lovely). It’s to get people and stories together. I’m not pretending that I read everything–even the stuff I mean to keep up on, I often haven’t yet. So go ahead and recommend things you like in the comments, or talk about the stories, or both. Yes, even if it’s the same issue of a magazine as a story I’ve already linked to–I am rarely systematic about these things, so not mentioning something doesn’t mean that I have JUDGED IT UNWORTHY DOOM DOOM DESPAIR. I just…want to be louder about liking the things I like.
On the uses of writerly proprioception
We’ve talked in the past about something I call writerly proprioception: the sense of relative shape and position within a story, the sense of where stuff is in relationship to other stuff and how much there is (but relating to one’s story, not to one’s body). For me this is a very literal analogy: it feels like knowing that my left knee is x many inches from my left foot because, well, because. Because you just know that. Because it’s your leg.
(My actual proprioception sometimes gets a little messed up–go neurological symptoms, sigh–so I guess that part of the analogy is possible too.)
But recently I heard the advice, “Don’t keep writing just to keep writing”–that is, don’t add on words to a section for the sake of adding on words–and I think that’s mostly good advice? but I have a caveat.
If you’re adding words to a scene of your story/book/whatever because you have a word count goal for the day and have not yet met that goal–or because you know that it’s very difficult to sell adult novels unless they reach a certain length–that’s not likely to result in quality fiction. If the scene is done and you haven’t met word count*, the correct answer is to finish the scene and start another scene.
But. If your writerly proprioception is telling you that something else goes there–if your writerly proprioception is basically saying that there’s a gap between your foot and your knee–sometimes writing more in that spot and seeing what emerges is really, really useful. If the actual words you write don’t contribute, you’ll have to take them out again. But if you know there needs to be something there, and you don’t know what yet, writing to get to it is a perfectly reasonable method, and at that point, by all means, keep writing just to keep writing.
Recently the current project (Itasca Peterson, Wendigo Hunter! filled with fierce eleven-year-olds and their grandpa!) did that to me. I could feel that Chapter Two was not done. And so I kept writing, and up popped a subplot that has implications in Chapters Four, Six, Nine, and Fifteen. I said, “We’re having an infestation of what?,” and then I just altered the outline and went on doing it. Because my sense of shape and structure knew there needed to be something there, and when I kept writing, there it was. Boom.
In the past I’ve told myself I could edit that kind of thing out later. I have learned better than this. I have had structural mice and load-bearing bears. The things I didn’t know I needed are the least removable of anything in a piece of fiction, basically. That is the brain doing what it’s trained to do. That is the part that’s smart about story asserting itself in the face of the part that thinks it knows what’s going on. Listen to that part. You’re working hard to let it out.
*And if word count is a good way for you to self-motivate. It isn’t for me, and I have known a lot of people to get hung up in various ways on word count. But I also know that it works for some.
Books read, early April
Balak, Sanlaville, and Vives, Last Man: The Stranger. Discussed elsewhere.
Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, Hostage. Kindle. Sequel to Stranger, very dependent on its events and characterization. If you were wanting more of that, here it is, but this is not the place to start. Implication and ramification, though, both in terms of the world and individually. I don’t see that coming out nontraditionally did a thing to harm this book.
Roz Chast, Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?. A memoir of her parents’ old age and her experiences in eldercare. In comic form. Wry and in some places dark, not as much depth as I would have hoped.
CJ Cherryh, Tracker. The latest atevi novel. For the love of Pete don’t start here, but! We have plot progress! This is not merely another book in which people drink tea, pick out coats and furnishings, and try not to get assassinated! Not that I didn’t enjoy those, but: serious plot progress hurray! (Of course, I flipped immediately from being thrilled with the plot progress to being impatient for more. Readers, man. You just can’t win.)
Adam Christopher, The Machine Awakes. Discussed elsewhere.
Mary Robinette Kowal, Of Noble Family. Discussed elsewhere.
Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings. This is why I keep reading epic fantasy: because sometimes there is a book like this. So immersive! I found my sense of how much more it was reasonable to read before doing laundry/making supper/etc. stretching out as the book went on: “Oh, only 100 more pages in this section? sure, that sounds like a sensible amount to read before eating.” The influence of the Chinese classics was so structurally pervasive that I think it even changed how I saw POV shifts. There is a thing in classical Chinese literature where you get a POV character for a short time but it doesn’t feel like head-hopping, and that came into play for me very early on in Ken’s book, that the short-term perspectives felt signaled to be an homage to that instead of just random. Other people have talked about how there aren’t very many women characters early in the book, and this is true, but I think that the last part makes up ground quickly and promises good things in future volumes, and considering the literary influences on it, it is jam-packed with women doing both traditional and non-traditional things in awesome ways. Very much recommended. Looking forward to more.
Robin McKinley, The Door in the Hedge. Reread. Wow, am I glad I didn’t pattern short story writing off this. Her structure is so weird. Most short stories–even novelettes and novellas–are not better with a prologue, an epilogue, and then two chapters. That…is not really how this goes mostly. Also she was doing lots of early-career trite stuff–if I never see a tiny sprinkling of freckles described as keeping someone from being perfect/too beautiful again, it will be too soon. Still immersive and lovely.
Nayad Monroe, ed., Not Our Kind: Tales of (Not) Belonging. I make a policy of not reviewing books I appear in. Therefore I can tell you: this book exists, I read it, I wrote part of it.
Marie Rutkoski, The Winner’s Crime. This is very much in the “characters dig themselves a muuuuuch deeper hole” school of second books. Do not, do not, do not read this first. Go read The Winner’s Curse first. Then if you don’t want to keep going, The Winner’s Crime was not the book for you anyway. Revolutions, negotiations, politics, star-crossed lovers like whoa.
Salla Simukka, As White as Snow. Finnish YA suspense novel. Second in its series but not as dependent upon the first one as some other things I read this fortnight. Very, very Finnish. Matter-of-fact romance with a trans character, very structurally weirdly handled though: it’s the sort of thing that feels like it somehow didn’t fit in the first book where she was setting backstory/expectations and needed to be there (I’m guessing) before the third book where she wants to have some kind of continuation/plot/payoff, so…it goes in the second book, but basically offstage. Strange place for a romance plot. (I mean that the romance plot itself was offstage, not just the sex scenes, which were at least highly suggestive-to-pretty-onstage for this type of YA. That inversion confused me, too.)
Jo Walton, Ha’penny and Half a Crown. Rereads. After I finished Farthing last fortnight, I basically just wanted the whole arc. I think there’s enough backstory in these to make them readable at any point, and the three non-Carmichael voices are so vividly different. I found the follow-through into Elvira’s attitudes particularly wrenching. I said last time that Jo is one of the best at theory of mind stuff, and this comes through particularly, I feel, on something like her characters’ reactions to Hitler. It appears to be really difficult for people to put themselves in the mindset of someone who doesn’t think of Hitler as they do, or else they feel insecure about whether everyone will understand that they know Hitler was really bad? or something. But Jo gets it just right, the chasm between what someone under a fascist system will think of a charming politician they’ve just met and what we know, or the things that growing up under a particular system can normalize. I love these, but I can’t reread them too often.
Robert Charles Wilson, The Affinities. Discussed elsewhere.
Last Man: The Stranger, by Balak, Sanlaville, & Vives
Review copy provided by First Second Books.
(I could have sworn I posted this review earlier. Apparently not.)
The visual style of this slim graphic novel is clearly influenced by French-language comics of the past (French and especially Belgian). It’s doing a plot that shows up in anime a lot: basically a tournament with lots of fighting, a tiny bit of subplot for the characters but not much. But the faces don’t look like anime. The fight style doesn’t look like anime.
This is not quite Tintin Goes To A Tournament, Manga Style. But it’s pretty close.
Nor is this a complete story. If you’re someone who likes fight comics that don’t get too gory, and you don’t mind stories being stretched over several installations of blam, peuh, and thwok, this may very well be your thing. I’m going to try it on my favorite 12-year-old and see whether he likes it, but for adults it’s likely to revive feelings of being that age. You can judge for yourself whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. So far, it’s executing reasonably well, but if it’s doing more than dead-center genre-standard things, I can’t see what they are.
Please consider using our link to buy The Stranger from Amazon.