The Y People begins

I've started a new novel, The Y People, over on my City of Masks blog. It's a YA piece about four young people with mysterious powers.

My plan is:

1. Write it on the blog. Get comments if I can, but I'm not holding my breath.
2. Use Lulu's new affiliate in NZ to get proof copies printed for a few of the Usual Suspects to read. This will give me a chance to practice with Adobe InDesign for layout, as well.
3. Revise it in line with the feedback and release it as an ebook (on Smashwords) and POD.

Because I won't need to do an actual print run, the time it will take to break even will be significantly reduced. City of Masks is still in the red, because I did a print run of 50 to give to people, send to the National Library and sell in NZ, and NZ sales have been, to say the least, slow.

In fact, all sales of City of Masks have been slow, despite the fact that everyone who reads it likes it, because I can't be bothered to relentlessly promote it. That's not nearly as much fun as writing is, and the additional happiness from selling a few more copies isn't worth the extra effort to me at the moment. I'm pouring most of my promotional efforts into my hypnotherapy practice, and that isn't exactly going stratospheric yet either.

Marketing is a lot of work, at least by the non-Baboon's Backside method.

The Name of the Wind

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I'll be honest - I picked this book because I needed something thick enough to last me through an overseas trip with a lot of time spent on planes and in airports. But it turned out to be really, really good. I rarely give five stars to anything, but The Name of the Wind deserves them.



Not only is it a well-written, well-plotted and fascinating adventure, but it has a richness of allusion and a sense of so much happening offstage, so many threads to be woven together, that it not only keeps you reading but leaves you eager for the rest of the series. The main character is complex and multifaceted and an interesting rogue with principles who is constantly in strife. I was reminded of the Locke Lamora books, except that Kvothe is less of a rogue than Locke and at least some of his troubles are not self-inflicted.



The editor needs to work harder - there are a few misused homonyms ("make due" instead of "make do", "discrete" for "discreet" and the like). But the writing, the dialogue, the worldbuilding and the characterisation are all very good indeed.


View all my reviews.

Magic Lost, Trouble Found

Magic Lost, Trouble Found by Lisa Shearin

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
A nice piece of work, with standard fantasy tropes (elves, goblins, magic, a sinister High Priestish guy, a magical McGuffin) used skillfully to create a story that goes well beyond the usual boring, repetitive genre fantasy.

I liked the main character (who's also the narrator), who's in the popular Kickass Heroine mold but definitely not a Mary Sue. She struggles and suffers but never abandons her friends or her principles for any reason.

The other characters could be told apart from each other easily (not always the case in fantasy), and the setting is evocative and interesting.

I'm looking forward to more.


View all my reviews.

Fiction review: Urban Shaman

Urban Shaman by C.E. Murphy

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I've been sampling a bit of urban fantasy lately and this is the best I've found - or at least the one that matches my particular tastes best. There's an endorsement from Jim Butcher, one of my favourite authors, on the cover that says, among other things, that the main character is likeable, and she is (in contrast to some other urban fantasy main characters I've been reading recently, Marla Mason being the main one that comes to mind). She's strong, courageous and has a clear moral centre, but is also flawed and aware that she is going to have to deal with her flaws and that it will be painful.



The other thing I liked was that the story is redemptive. The main character sets out to heal the villain - not destroy him. We could do with more of that.



Well told, with a good touch of humour that isn't overdone. I recommend it.


View all my reviews.

Review: Nightlife, by Rob Thurman

Nightlife by Rob Thurman

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
A good one for Jim Butcher fans. This is urban fantasy, a little darker and scarier than the Dresden Files perhaps, but comparably well-written and entertaining.



Cal (short for Caliban) is the son of a monster and a Gypsy fortune-teller. His half-brother Nico is a martial arts genius who protects him and tries to raise him right. With the help of the puck Robin Goodfellow (now a car salesman in New York) and a cute teenage psychic, they confront Cal's darkside family, who are very motivated to ensure that human history never happened.



Rob Thurman does a great job of the narrative voices and writes a thrilling, fast-moving and action-packed plot.


View all my reviews.

Collaborators wanted

I'm looking for one or more artist collaborators for a couple of graphic novel projects. I see them as following the free webcomic/POD print version model.

Project 1: Guardian of the Gates. A young thief-girl is sent to steal an elaborate watch from a mysterious man, and discovers that he is the guardian of gates to other dimensions. The wizard who commissioned her wants to take over his power, but as she grows to know the Guardian, and accompanies him on his rounds, she realizes where her destiny lies.

I see this one as being illustrated in a very beautiful painterly style.

Project 2: Four orphan teenagers come together and discover that they have some unusual abilities, and that a mysterious man in a brown coat is after them. They try to piece together the story of their past and defend themselves, while confronting the personal issues which their powers reflect and intensify.

This one would suit a more manga style.

So, tell your artist friends! Send them here, or send me to their portfolios via the comments.

And artists, check the links to my fiction projects in the sidebar to get an idea of how my imagination works.

[crossposting to City of Masks]

Eating elephants

It's said that if you want to eat an elephant, the correct way to proceed is to take a spoonful at a time.

That's an approach that works really well for writing. The blogging that I'm doing over at Hypno NZ is gradually getting me the elements of a nonfiction book. I've already assembled one series into an ebook on personal change techniques, and another series, on Health Behaviors, is just about to wrap up. Together, and with a bit of expansion and incorporation of other blog posts that weren't in the two series, they should make a decent book.

The other good thing about the blog format is that it encourages you to write new stuff instead of procrastinate by revising what you've written so far.

I'm also writing Gu on another blog. Again, it's a good way to write. I've never been very good at short fiction, because my ideas want to expand. This way, I get to do a long-form work that consists of short-story-like vignettes of about 1500 words each. The short story on which Gu is based was 5500 words, but I've reached - I'm estimating here, because Blogger doesn't have word count - about 24,000 now simply by expanding the embedded stories in that story. (That's based on 16 posts so far at about 1500 words. The early ones are probably a bit shorter, the later ones a bit longer.)

Unfortunately, at the moment I can only see about another six posts or so in what I still have to cover. (I have a sort of hit list of ideas.) That would take me to about 33,000, which is short of the 40,000 words that the SFWA counts as a novel, and the 50,000 that most other definitions use.

Still, 7,000 words short is definitely spitting distance. Even 17,000 is probably achievable, though I don't want to just pad it out for the sake of it. I'm especially wary because it's told as a documentary - it doesn't have a plot as such, in the sense of characters doing things - and I don't know how much of that people can put up with. I have kind of a sense of how I might incorporate story into it, by following the documentary maker, Susan Halwaz, as she lives out her everyday life using Gu. Silent, mostly, with no dialogue. And then after each such sequence (or before?), an interview with some expert about what she's just experienced.

I'm not sure why I feel the need to make things harder for myself by doing experimental stuff like this. I mean, a novel which is puportedly a blow-by-blow description of an immersive documentary, told in the second person, in which large sections have no dialogue and most of the rest is talking heads? But the fact is, because this is a completely noncommercial project - nobody has bought it, I have no publisher who cares if I can sell 5000 or 10,000 copies and wants me to write a series of three books - I can do what interests me and what occurs to me at the time. Artistic freedom, huzzah!

It also makes it more difficult to actually sell it, of course. City of Masks suffered from not being in any recognizable genre, so it's hard to identify a market for it. A wide variety of people who have read it have all responded favourably, despite its odd language and journal format, which encourages me that it is actually good and would do well if only anyone knew about it. And I'd tell them, if I knew where they were.

Gu has a more identifiable market: Science fiction readers who like Charles Stross or Neal Stephenson. (One person who's reading it has also compared it to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, mainly for structural reasons.) And such people are open to new ways of doing things. So maybe I will be able to sell it after all, who knows?

Who cares? I enjoy doing it. Even though this blog post is an attempt to procrastinate working on it, because I have minor writer's block about what I'm going to write next. So I should just start writing and see what comes out. That's basically what I'm doing anyway.

My Harry Potter alter ego (found via Jim Butcher's Livejournal)

Your Harry Potter Alter Ego Is...? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Remus Lupin You are a wise and caring wizard and a good, loyal friend to boot. However sometimes in an effort to be liked by others you can let things slide by, which ordinarily you would protest about. Remus Lupin 80% Hermione Granger 75% Ron Weasley 75% Albus Dumbledore 70% Severus Snape 70% Ginny Weasley 60% Harry Potter 50% Lord Voldemort 40% Sirius Black 40% Draco Malfoy 25%

Rachel Caine: Another good author for Jim Butcher fans

I've been reading the Weather Warden series by Rachel Caine recently, having discovered her through the short story collection My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding (which is worth reading, and not only for the Jim Butcher story).

They're good. They're the kind of story I like. They have an endorsement from Jim Butcher on the cover. The protagonist is the kind of person (like Harry Dresden) who will die doing the right thing, and in her case actually does, several times. I thought for a little while it was going to happen in every book, actually, but the author may have decided that was too South Park.

The first book is Ill Wind (I had trouble remembering that; the titles are all unmemorable cliches which, unlike Jim Butcher's titles, don't bear any particularly clear relationship to the specific book).

They are, apparently, chick lit, though I wouldn't know, having come in through the door marked "urban fantasy". This is an original take on urban fantasy, too, with no vampires or werewolves this time; the mysterious shadowy organization is the Wardens, who battle natural disasters supernaturally, with the help of the Djinn (yes, the slave-in-the-bottle kind, which is a major plot point). Joanne Baldwin, the protagonist, is one of the strongest Wardens and also has a conscience; despite her obsessions with shoes, clothes and fast cars, she's not bribable, especially when the safety of other people (or the world in general) is at stake. Which it generally is; they're fast-paced, high-octane thrillrides with lots of damage to scenery, vehicles, buildings, bystanders, Jo, and - eventually - anyone who pisses Jo off.

Are they as good as Jim Butcher? I would say not quite, but if I identified more with someone who's into fast cars and designer clothes and shoes and less with someone who lives in a basement with a collection of comic books* my answer might change. They're well-written, pacy, funny and have a strong moral thread and a tough-but-vulnerable protagonist. I recommend them.

* I don't live in a basement or have a collection of comic books. But I am a geek, and so is Harry Dresden.

City of Masks for sale on Lulu

You can now buy City of Masks on Lulu. I had just finished recording the next podcast episode and was about to start editing when there was a pounding on the door, and there was the courier with a very large and well-packed package, containing my proof. As far as I can see there are no printing errors, so - the book is officially available.

W00t!

The CreateSpace corrected version is on its way to me now and should arrive this week (based on past performance). Based on the emails I got from their support people, they went through exactly the same steps this time as last time, suggesting that they need to improve their ability as a "learning organization" so that they only have to fix problems once.

Once that proof arrives, I'll do a major post comparing Lulu and CreateSpace step-by-step, feature-by-feature. At the moment I have to say I wouldn't be using CreateSpace except for the access they give to Amazon (and their audiobook and multi-disk CD capabilities), but their site is somewhat less cluttered and, for me, slightly easier to use.

I had fewer (in fact, no) printing hassles with Lulu, whose pricing is slightly better for single books and much better for bulk.

(Their freight prices to NZ are just ridiculous, though. If I get 50 books shipped to NZ, it's $245.16 (USD) for shipping and it'll cost me $14 (NZD) per unit in total, for printing, postage and packaging. Shipped to US: $31.60 (USD) for shipping, $8.58 (NZD) per unit. Actually, if I select USPS Media Mail instead of UPS as my shipping option, it's only $17.30 (USD) for shipping and $8.21 (NZD) per unit. So I'll be asking my parents-in-law if I can trans-ship through their address in California. There's no way it'll be over $200 for them to send the package on here.)

I know that others' experiences may well differ; anyone want to share Lulu or CreateSpace stories, good or bad?

New novel idea

I might have known that once I got the previous novel all-but-published, the next one would pop its head up.

Here are my thoughts so far.

There are seven main characters. I think this one will probably more third-person, although rotating first-person might be interesting - hard to do, though. It's set in a kind of eighteenth-century Praguish place, to the extent that City of Masks was set in early Renaissance Venice (i.e. it has the general atmosphere but not the historically solid detail).

THE MUSICIAN feels like he's two people; a graceful, expressive master when he plays or composes, and a stammering, stumbling, almost incoherent idiot the rest of the time.

THE POET is, by contrast, not short of words, in fact he never shuts up. But what he can never find a way to express is the sense he has of something essential missing or lost.

THE PAINTER pays fierce attention to the world as an object, then vigorously depicts it, but seems almost blind to himself - and to the world as something he can interact with.

THE MODEL, the painter's mistress, is attempting to herd the abovementioned cats, with some limited success. She at least manages to make sure that they eat and sleep most days, and that many of the bills get paid almost on time. None of the artists notice this particularly.

THE MYSTIC is a herbalist, of uncertain age, who owns the house in which he, the three artists and the model live. He seldom speaks but is always worth listening to, and spends much of his time, when not making and dispensing remedies or meditating, on reading books with words in the titles that even the poet doesn't recognize. The books line the halls and other public spaces of the house; only the bedrooms of the three artists are free from them. He tries to live as the inheritor of the traditions described in the books, the previous living practitioners of which have all died years ago.

The mystic suggests, surprising everyone, that the poet and the musician might find resolution for their ills of the soul if they write an opera together, and agrees to tell seven stories over seven nights, from which they can select one as the story of the opera. The painter offers to design the sets.

THE FINANCIER is one of the painter's subjects, who agrees to be the patron of the opera. His money is inherited and his relationship with it is a difficult one, particularly as he suspects it wasn't earned entirely honestly.

THE DIVA is a beautiful young woman of peasant origins, hired to play the leading female role in the opera. The musician and the poet immediately fall in love with her, eliciting their finest work. However, at first unbeknown to them, she begins a liaison with the financier. The model befriends her, and together they... I'm not sure what yet. The mystic figures in it somehow.

Over the course of the novel, each person, without realizing it, chooses a story to live out from the seven told by the mystic, and their redemption is shaped accordingly.

Working title is Shadow Play, though I've also considered Shadow Work.

City of Masks proof

The City of Masks proof arrived from CreateSpace just now - impressive, considering that it was shipped on Tuesday (and I ordered it on Monday). Especially impressive this close to Christmas.

The cover looks great, title, cover illo, C-Side Media logo, even the spine text is correctly aligned, despite CreateSpace's dire warnings about the risks of putting text on the spine of a book under 130 pages (it's 128).

However, something's gone wrong with the ligatures in the interior copy, and the letter combination "fi" has dropped out almost everywhere it occurs (also fl, all apostrophes, and probably some others). It looks fine in the PDF I have here. I've just sent a support request; hopefully they can help me out.

I was going to do another proof in any case, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I'm now planning to dual-publish at CreateSpace and Lulu. Lulu has much better pricing once you start buying in bulk, but getting distribution through Amazon with Lulu is relatively complicated, costs extra, and has certain limitations, so publishing through both at once makes sense. Unfortunately, when I was doing the original CreateSpace setup I picked the size 8.5 x 5.5 inches, completely arbitrarily - and Lulu doesn't print in that size. They both do 9 x 6, which just involves putting an extra quarter-inch all the way around the pages, so I should be able to do that without too many issues. (EDIT: No, I can't. CreateSpace doesn't let you change your mind about the trim size after you've ordered the first proof. Damn!)

The other reason I need to revise it is that I put a URL on the cover and in the front matter for a Wordpress blog, before I'd thoroughly investigated the functionality available at wordpress.com. I was relying on a description I'd read that said "Wordpress can do such-and-such", without realizing that while Wordpress the application can do a great many things when hosted on your own site, Wordpress the site is very sandboxed and paranoid and will let you do hardly any of them. In particular, you can't put HTML in your Wordpress blog which includes a form, so I can't include a signup form for my mailing list on the blog. That's a dealbreaker for me; people are much more likely, in my opinion, to sign up from a simple form than they are from just a link. So I'm going to be using city-of-masks.blogspot.com as my promotional blog for the book.

I'm planning to record myself reading the book and release it as a series of podcasts, then sell it as an audiobook. I may even, if I get myself organized, release the podcasts on the corresponding dates to the dates in Gregorius's journal (most of the book is told through journal entries). That would be kind of fun, and would give me a deadline.

Fenimore Cooper the Postmodern Novelist

I've just been reading a collection of short works by Mark Twain, and have discovered conclusive proof that Fenimore Cooper (Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer etc.) was a postmodern novelist far ahead of his time.

The Twain piece is called "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses". It begins with quotes from two professors of English literature praising Cooper, which is a fairly good start on being a postmodern novelist. But the real proof is in what follows. This is what Twain says, with tedious repetition removed:

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In "Deerslayer," Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

2. That the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

3. That the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

4. That the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

5. That when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

6. That when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.

7. That when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it.

8. That crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as "the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest," by either the author or the people in the tale. [This is a bit obscure; what Twain apparently means, judging from his later examples, is that some such label should not be used to justify any ridiculous ability or achievement that enters the author's head for the characters to possess.]

9. That the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.

10. That the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.

11. That the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

In addition to these large rules, there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.

14. Eschew surplusage.

15. Not omit necessary details.

16. Avoid slovenliness of form.

17. Use good grammar.

18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.

Any novel that violates all eighteen of those rules is clearly a postmodern masterpiece.

City of Masks about to be published at last

I finally decided to stop waiting until I was happy with the game for City of Masks and just publish the novel without it.

I'm going through CreateSpace, since that gets me straight into Amazon (who own CreateSpace). So far it seems pretty straightforward.

I've used LyX for my typesetting, which was somewhat frustrating for a while but I finally figured out how to get it doing what I wanted. It's one of those programs that has two levels: Incredibly basic and very, very technical. I managed not to stray too far into the very, very technical side but it did take me some messing about. I'll be able to use it much faster next time.

I did the cover in Inkscape, because I find the Gimp totally unintuitive; I always end up frustrated whenever I try to use it. I should probably download GimpShop, which skins the Gimp to look like Photoshop. Not that I've used Photoshop for years, but it may be an easier interface to work with.

The cover illustration of the mask comes from an Italian artist, appropriately enough, at DeviantArt (donia.deviantart.com). She very kindly let me use it for free with acknowledgement.

So my total outlay for getting my book into print (and distribution) will be $5.71 USD plus shipping, for the proof to be printed and sent to me for approval. Amazing.

Publishing certainly has changed since I were a lad.

What I've been reading

I haven't posted for a while, so here's an update on what I've been reading.

I have about three more letters from Meditations on the Tarot to blog about, but they take a little while, so I'm waiting until I'm finished my online shop for hypno.co.nz. (That's what I've been working on in my spare time lately.)

While we were in LA I bought several books at Brand Books, an excellent little second-hand bookshop in Glenfield. One of them was New Techniques in Behavior Therapy and Hypnosis: Including Advanced Techniques in Sex Therapy by Arreed F. Barabasz, written while he was lecturing at Canterbury University (30 years ago, so the "new" isn't applicable any more). There's some good stuff on migraine which I'll make use of (basically you teach people to warm their hands, since that shifts blood flow away from the head, and too much blood flow in the head is part of the problem). There are also some useful ideas on systematic desensitization for phobias. The sex therapy material is mostly either things I already knew or things that would require me to be a doctor to put into practice, but there's also a section on sleep disorders with one or two useful points.

I'm partway through John Crowley's LITTLE, BIG; I've kind of got bogged down in the tragic story of Auberon and Sylvie. It's one of those books that's really well written but I don't necessarily enjoy all of. I've read it before; I don't remember whether I finished it then or not. Possibly not, since all I can recall is the very early scene where Smoky and Daily Alice go off on their honeymoon walking trip. I'd forgotten how much sex it has in it, and forgotten that there were drugs in it at all (no rock-and-roll, though). I've been stalled on it for a while, reading other things, but I do intend to finish.

A book that does include rock-and-roll is Russ Haines' Digital Audio: Record | Rip | Edit | Mix | Master | Burn | Stream, which although it was published in 2001 is still a very valuable resource, because unlike so many technical books it gives underlying principles, not specifics of using rapidly outdated tools. In fact, he emphasizes that the (software) tools you use don't particularly matter; there are several of them, find one you like and learn to use it well, they're much of a muchness as far as the basics are concerned. I want to summarize this one fully from the perspective of voice recording and post the results to my hypnotherapy site (since this is why I got it from the library: to learn how to make better recordings that I can sell in my new online shop). I'm waiting for a device he recommends, an analog-to-digital converter, to reach me from Australia, and it's taking forever. (Australia Post were slow when I lived there 17 years ago, and apparently are still slow. You'd think that for $9 they'd be able to move a small package 1200km in less than two weeks.) Once I have that I'll go through the book again.

On the spiritual side, two things. I've finally got round to Sister Mary Margaret Funk's A Mind at Peace, which I must have had in the "to-read" queue for over a year. It summarizes the teaching of John Cassian, who collected a lot of sayings from the Desert Fathers in the 5th century, on meditation and dealing with the "eight thoughts": food, sex, things, anger, dejection, acedia (spiritual weariness), vainglory and pride. Andrew has been using it in his Centering Prayer workshops for a while now. The writing itself is not tremendously well organized and is quite poorly edited, but the ideas are useful. I just finished the Sex chapter this morning, and already the book is making a difference. The basic principle, as with Centering Prayer, is to be aware of the eight thoughts (thus making them mindful rather than mindless), and then "renounce" them, or as Centering Prayer more helpfully says, let them go, so that they don't carry you where you don't want to go. It has a handy appendix with a number of different practices listed and briefly explained.

And speaking of Centering Prayer, Andrew lent me his copy of Love Is Stronger Than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls by Cynthia Bourgeault last week. I didn't quite finish it before I had to pass it on to Julianne, but it's interesting. We've been reading her books in reverse order, first Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, which borders on being orthodox (albeit in a slightly unusual mode), then The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming An Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart, which is definitely esoteric, and now this, her first book, which is very unusual indeed. She believes (and may be correct in believing, I'm not in a position to say) that she still has a powerful, living connection with her late teacher, a hermit monk with whom she shared a (non-physical) love affair which surprised both of them. Together they formed a "second body" which, she claims, persisted and continues to develop after his death.

Finally, I'm currently reading, and very much enjoying, Charles Stross's Glasshouse. Damn, this thing is good. Future society, nanoassemblers, ability to upload yourself, change your body, and - this is important - change your mental "state vector", i.e. the contents and pattern of your mind. Someone infected all the assemblers with the Curious Yellow information virus, which censored everyone's memories of the past as they went through the assemblers (to change bodies, heal, de-age or whatever) and made them vectors of the virus to the next assembler. A major war was fought to destroy Curious Yellow and "clean" those affected. During this war, people did terrible things, some of which they then had memory surgery to forget about. One such is the protagonist, who along with others in a similar situation volunteers for a sociological experiment, a recreation of the long-gone society of the late 20th/early 21st century, as best it can be reconstructed from fragmentary records - which is kind of 1950s suburbia (with strongly defined gender roles) plus a mixture of technologies from various eras. All, though, is not as it seems...

For its handling of gender alone, this novel deserves an award (in fact, I just took a moment to nominate it for the James Tiptree, Jr Award, and I'll be surprised if I'm the first to do so). (EDIT: I wasn't.) But it's also incredibly well written and gripping, real mind-expanding "what if" science fiction. Stross is finally learning to keep his tremendous intellect and immense knowledge in the background, dialled down to a level where lesser beings can still understand - something like what Connie Willis and Neal Stephenson have learned to do - and it makes it even better than his earlier books, because for almost all of the time I know what the hell he's talking about. It has the disturbing presence and depth of Neil Gaiman, than which I have no higher praise to offer.

David Zindell's Lightstone

On the recommendation of my compatriot and fellow Story-Games hanger-out Mike Sands (thanks, Mike), I'm reading David Zindell's book The Lightstone. I have to tell you, this man's blurb writer has not done him justice.

I'm fairly sure that I've picked up his books in the library, read the blurb, and put them back, dismissing them as Just Another Genre Fantasy Phonebook - thick, full of names, and unoriginal. Assorted group quest for Maguffin to prevent dark lord taking over the world, yawn.

And yes, an assorted group is questing for a Maguffin (the Lightstone, a golden cup with magical powers), to prevent a dark lord from taking over the world. And yes, Bad Fantasy Name Syndrome (it's a really bad idea to give your hero's brother, horse and beloved names which all begin with A and differ only by a few letters). And yes, excessive Tolkein influence - mainly from the Silmarillion, which even provides a couple of the names as well as the cosmological backstory. But.

Amid all this stale genre stuff, I find the central character genuinely engaging and fresh: trained as a warrior, but blessed/cursed with an empathic power which makes him feel any violence he does to someone else as if it's done to him (which mitigates the usual crass cruelty of the genre). There's a fair bit of Buddhism (almost certainly more than I recognize; I know a bit about Buddhism but I'm not an expert), which makes for a different flavour and is well-handled. And Zindell does something I've never seen done before, which is obvious to me and which I've been planning to do myself sometime: he has the hero learning meditative practices which help him to deal with the trials he encounters.

So far, I'm enjoying it a lot - thanks again, Mike.

Wen Spencer, please work harder!

ADVISORY: Probable complete unfairness to a living author.

I've been reading a few books by Wen Spencer lately. I came across Tinker first, liked it, moved on to the four Ukaiah Oregon books, liked them too, and last week read A Brother's Price. Which I liked. But I would have liked it a lot more with a bit more work from the author.

To get at what I mean I'll have to give a little background. Like my City of Masks, A Brother's Price is speculative fiction in which there is no magic and the technology is lower than our current real-world technological level, but there is a significant sociological difference. In ABP's case, this is based on a significant biological difference: Very few male children are born. Consequently, men are highly valued - as possessions, to be protected, traded and sold. They aren't usually taught to read (which leads to the classic "deny them education, then point to how dumb they are" maneuver), and they do most of the domestic work - washing, cooking, childcare - for the very large families of sisters and their offspring by a jointly-held husband. Women do everything else. In other words, gender roles are switched, and this provides some thought-provocation.

Where I detected laziness, though, was in the worldbuilding and in the characterization/plotting (I group those together because plot is what characters do).

Firstly, the setting. It's basically 19th-century America, complete with sixguns, Stetsons and derringers (each so called), which I find very lazy worldbuilding. There is a difference: the country is ruled by Queens (they aren't a monarchy as such, because whichever generation of the royal family is currently the "mothers" are, jointly, the rulers; rule passes to the next generation at the birth of its first child). In fact, the country is called Queensland, which raises the never-explored questions, how are other countries governed? What other countries are there? Where are they located in relation to Queensland? What trade goes on with them? Is Queensland a former colony of somewhere else, or has it been settled time out of mind? Queensland seems to sit in a historical and geographical vacuum, surrounded by blankness. There is some history of Queensland, a kind of civil war fought a couple of generations before, but that appears to be all the history there is.

What's more, the women who do everything in Queensland do it in exactly the same kind of macho way as men would - they are warlike, violent and argumentative. Whether this is realistic could be debated, but in this book, it certainly isn't; it's just a given. The people who run society will be macho idiots a lot of the time, end of issue, now let's have some fighting.

Then the characters and plot. One of the (male) main character's sisters behaves very badly and irresponsibly early on, then - gets over it and doesn't do it again, doesn't take revenge out of anger for her punishment, generally seems to mature for no discernable reason. One of the princesses has a very understandable objection to a course of action favoured by the others, and then - gets over it all of a sudden and for no discernable reason. We don't see any process of how these characters changed, how their powerful emotional issues were resolved. They just cease to be an impediment to the plot. Just as in Ukaiah Oregon the "Famous Bitch of Ice", FBI Agent Zheng, thaws completely and instantly when she meets Ukaiah. We're not told why she's a bitch of ice in the first place, exactly what was magic about Ukaiah... We see no process.

I'm not advocating holding up the action while the characters talk endlessly about their internal conflicts; after all, I'm reading this kind of fiction rather than another kind because I like the externalization of internal conflicts. But that's not what I'm receiving. I'm receiving the replacement of internal conflict (and its resolution) with external conflict, and it's just not fully satisfying; it feels rushed and incomplete.

Why I like the stories I like

This is a kind of follow-up to The Loneliness of the Postmodern Protagonist, which was about why I don't like the stories I don't like.

I like stories set in an environment that is somehow quirky, odd, eccentric or bizarre. (Hence why I hardly read anything that isn't fantasy or SF; not because such environments are restricted to those genres, but because you can be guaranteed to find them there.)

I like stories where the protagonists are not cynical, selfish nihilists, but people with a degree of childlike innocence, who want to do the right thing and will do so even if it costs them. They may be wrong about what the right thing is, they may get themselves in terrible trouble by trying to do it, and they will suffer, but that's their motivation. They care about people. They are engaged in a heroic struggle on behalf of others, and it's one that they will win - though they may get badly battered along the way. They're not perfect; they suffer temptation, they make bad choices, they get it wrong. Ultimately, though, they triumph against people who are grasping after power for their own selfish ends, or because they think they know better than anyone else what is good for everyone (and think that it's OK to have other people, not themselves, pay the cost of that good), and who "treat people as things" (Granny Weatherwax's concise definition of sin).

And I like humour with that. Either the characters don't take themselves too seriously, or the author shows up their quirks and foibles in an amusing way.

So: quirky, funny, not too dark, underlying ethical assumption. What have I found that matches these?

Novels:

• Terry Pratchett. Hardly any other "funny fantasy"; everyone else is either too cynical (e.g. Tom Holt) or not actually funny.
• Lois McMaster Bujold. Particularly the Vorkosigan novels, but any of hers really.
  
• Jim Butcher. Great thanks are due to Fred (Iago) at Story-Games for putting me onto him. Harry Dresden is exactly what I like. And I have the ninth one waiting for me at home tonight. W00t!
  
• Julian May, at least in the Galactic Mileau novels.
• Some of the later Ursula Le Guin, after she got over herself and got a sense of humour.
• Some of the earlier Sherry Tepper, before she got under herself and lost her sense of humour.
  

I also enjoy some cyberpunk, despite the darkness, rather than because of it. I think if there's an excess of one of my favoured elements (in this case, bizarreness of setting) I'm willing to put up with a lack of one of the others. I'm just about to finish re-reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It's amusing to see how dead wrong a highly intelligent and well-informed person could be in speculating about, essentially, the Internet in 1992. That's only 15 years ago, you realize? Yet before the World Wide Web.

Webcomics:
I read a round dozen webcomics regularly. My favourites fit the above profile:

• El Goonish Shive. A sweet ninja squirrel girl, transformation guns, obvious aliens who wear T-shirts saying "Human", and really, really good handling of human relationships.
• Get Fuzzy. If a Siamese cat could talk, he would trash-talk, exactly like this. And the little dog is priceless.
• Irregular Webcomic! Bizarre nerd humour, done by photographing Legos. Very, very creative and often extremely funny.
• The Dreamland Chronicles. A 3-D comic that is just so beautiful, the story almost doesn't matter. (Not that it's a bad story, either.)
  
• Scary Go Round. I got onto this through Vincent Baker's blog. High on the quirk, a little low on the ethics (but that's part of the humour), saved from being dark by its total absurdity. Great quotes, often in the final panel.
  

I wish there was more of this stuff. I may have to write some.

The Loneliness of the Postmodern Protagonist

Originally posted on my Cityside blog on Wed, 22/03/2006 - 9:44am.

I was going to review John Barth's postmodern novel - or "narrative" - Coming Soon!!!, but I felt funny about reviewing a book I hadn't finished, so I'm going to blog about it instead. Blogging being what it is I feel free to just rant on without any particular structure, which is actually not dissimilar to what Barth does, or at least gives the impression of doing.

It's more or less a novel about a novelist having trouble writing a novel, which Barth (who taught as well as practiced creative writing for many years) acknowledges as the worst kind of undergraduate approach to getting around writer's block.

No undergraduate work this, though. Although part of the fiction is that a student at the university from which Barth has just retired is writing something which sometimes is another novel about the same material, and sometimes is the same novel, and sometimes an electronic fiction, and sometimes a musical show for performance on a showboat called The Original Floating Opera II (based in turn on a showboat in Barth's first novel). And so forth. Complicated, self-referential, continually shifting, etc. Postmodern. Memorably defined by Moe of The Simpsons as "weird for the sake of weird".

The verbal fireworks start on page one and don't let up - after a while they became pretty wearing, actually. And (to change the metaphor) eventually I got the sense that a talented magician was performing extensive patter and misdirection but failing to conceal - in fact, drawing attention to - the fact that he not only hadn't produced a rabbit, but didn't possess a hat.

So I stopped reading on page 288 (of 396) when it was looking fairly clear that nothing was actually Coming Soon!!!, that it would just be more of the same.

I'm giving the impression that I didn't enjoy it. I did enjoy it, for its sheer artistry and complexity and wit, but that's the thing about the self-consciously postmodern - I can appreciate it intellectually as being obviously very hard to do, very clever, but often my emotional reaction is that it wasn't worth doing.

One of the improvised songs for the show raises the question well:

Are we Postmodern?
Is this the end of the road?
Or is recycled self-conscious irony just one more passing mode?
If we're Postmodern,
How come I feel so passé?

- to the tune of "The Party's Over".

On the back of the book (Houghton Mifflin, 2001, ISBN0-618-13165-5 if you care) is a quote from the Chicago Sun-Times which I entirely agree with: "Barth is extraordinarily clever and a master of language." And that is what makes him such a great postmodern novelist, because cleverness and mastery of language are the heart of literary postmodernism (and a lot of postmodern visual art, too, where almost all of the skill is in the piece's clever title). He is playing an extended game, and playing it very well and with great flair and often very amusingly, but never allowing us to forget that it is a game, and therefore ultimately trivial.

Seems to me (and what do I know?) that the main achievement of postmodernism is to point out the emptiness of modernism. However, in so doing it also displays, in fact points at, its own emptiness, which is an even greater emptiness, because it is (supposedly) empty even of the modernist claim that it is telling a true and important story - in fact, the true and important story.

Whatever it is that I am - I don't have a name for it; I've sometimes said it's postmodern, but it isn't really, it's something between post-postmodern and neo-medieval, but that too leaves out a lot; maybe transmodern - responds to this postmodern perspective by suggesting that modernism is not so much empty as emptied. Modernism at its extreme has deliberately removed the spiritual, the mystical, and ultimately by association the personal and emotional, denigrating these and elevating the physical, the rational, the "objective" and the intellectual. Postmodernism - in one of its forms, anyway - takes this as its starting point and turns the intellectual cleverness of modernism back on itself, doing for its myth what it did for all the myths before it and declaring it, too, to be empty and illusory.

I, on the other hand, want to re-examine some of the value assumptions of modernism and say, wait on, what makes rationality necessarily more "true" than the other aspects of humanity? In order to be fully human we cannot only be rational (though we need not be irrational either; rationality is also an aspect of humanity, and attempting to abandon it is an overreaction to modernism). Yes, the emperor has no clothes. That's because he took them off - not because clothes don't exist.

Thinking about what I've learned from reading Barth has also helped me to figure out why I can't abide Gene Wolfe, a somewhat postmodern speculative fiction writer: Wolfe's characters don't act like real people (Barth's do, they just have the normal level of alienation for late 20th-century Americans). Wolfe's people are too completely alienated from each other (and themselves, and their world) to have deep relationships of affection and care - sexual attraction and tribal loyalty is about as good as it usually gets. So they don't respond like the people I know would to the events of their lives.

I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to like Wolfe because some people I respect, like Neil Gaiman, think he's brilliant, so I recently read his novel Castleview. Quite apart from the fact that nothing in the plot makes much logical sense (people keep apparently dying and then returning to the action with minimal explanation, for example), it makes no emotional sense whatsoever. At the end, a teenage boy whose father was killed violently a couple of days before hears another man in his mother's bedroom. His mother loved his father but is apparently having no problem transferring her affections to this man. He listens, and identifies the man; oh, it's the doctor, he likes him. He wonders if he will tell his girlfriend. Just wonders, in an unemotional fashion - despite the fact that all of them, he, his mother, his girlfriend, his girlfriend's mother, have recently seen the doctor concerned (who is apparently King Arthur) kill his girlfriend's father in a battle in Faerieland in which they were champions of opposing sides. (Except his girlfriend's father isn't actually dead, as such, but the boy doesn't know that.)

Gene Wolfe is extraordinarily clever and a master of language - and also knows a great deal about myth and legend (in which, now that I think about it, sexual attraction and tribal loyalty is often as good as it gets in terms of connection between people). But - speaking personally - I can't stand his books, not only because they're such hard work (his Wizard Knight speaks so cryptically and tersely that half the time I couldn't follow his dialogue at all, and although I have an unusually strong background in myth and legend myself, I miss a lot of his references), but because the characters are emotionally hollow.

In fact, a lot of science fiction and fantasy characters are emotionally hollow - science fiction being a quintessentially modernist genre. Actually, when you think about it, all of the genres of the old pulp magazines arose in modern times except for the romance, which is medieval, and is notably the one which is centred on positive human relationships (however unrealistic the treatment may sometimes be).

The detective story explores the dark side of human nature and relationships; the spy story traditionally involves transitory and superficial relationships with people who are usually killed if any close emotional connection looks like being formed; the horror story uses the fear of the Other and the Uncanny (which we don't really believe in any more - or do we?) to produce a thrill, as the often lone protagonist attempts to escape the inescapable; the Western tends to concern loners, itinerants and misfits in a changing and non-cohesive society. Even fantasy fiction, in hands less skilled and minds less steeped in medievalism than those of Tolkien and Lewis, often becomes merely dark and brutal. Not that medieval stories weren't dark and brutal, of course, but there was usually some point. Often modern fantasy is little more than an echo of the worst aspects of the World Wars, which brought such disillusionment about modernism and paved the way for postmodern consciousness.

So do I have a point, or am I just blogging on about anything that enters my head when I should probably be constructing a clearly reasoned book to unpack all this dense material?
Well. I think my point is that, in reading fiction which is consciously postmodern, I have come to understand the defects of modernism (and postmodernism) better, and the key defect I am identifying is that the connection between people (and to the transcendent) which was so central to the medievals has been marginalised, emotion and mystery denigrated, and an alienating tyranny of cold rationalism put in place. You can see it in the characters in these novels, disillusioned and tortured because they are incapable of simple genuine connection and have nowhere to belong.

And this in turn stimulates me to write what I know, to portray characters who have non-sexual affection for one another, who act kindly to others, who feel their losses (and others' losses) keenly, who believe in non-material goods, who are communities. Still, of course, with conflict and passion, their interactions driven not only by their connection but by what they desire and fear and hate and want to protect. But neither alienated monads nor fluffy New Age bunnies.
That's my ambition, at least.

Yet another blog begins

So, another blog. Why?

I realised last night, talking to Andrew (my spiritual director), that my online presence is kind of scattered and that reflects a slight lack of integration in my life.

I have a blog over at the Cityside community which I only post to occasionally, because I only put things there that I think may hold some sort of interest for that community (and at that I'm probably wrong half the time).

I have an old website at Geocities which is kind of an archive of my old articles and such going back 20 years. Most of it doesn't reflect what I think any more, but it may be helpful to people who are still at that stage of faith (in fact, sometimes they write to me and say it is), so I keep it.

I have my creative website, C-Side Media. I could blog there but then I'd have to build a comments feature (most of the code is my own), and creativity isn't all I do. Much the same goes for my hypnotherapy website, Hypno NZ. That's set aside for what I hope will be my new profession; a lot of my interests don't really fit there (and again I have written most of the code and don't need the grief of writing a proper blogging app).

I post on several forums. Story-Games is the one where I have posted the most - it's a forum for people who design and play narrative-focussed roleplaying games - but that's led me to the quirkily titled I would knife-fight a man, where the discussion includes sex, God and roleplaying games. I mostly weigh in on the God discussions.

And some of my fiction is at Xenoglyph (you'll have to get a user account to see it).

So that pulls together my online presence. I'll probably copy some of the posts I've made at the other sites over here too.