Today’s post will be a short one. An actual “update” if you will.
As previously mentioned, I decided to use the audiobook medium as a means of re-“reading” books. There is a lot of stuff I’ve wanted to get back to for the longest time, but couldn’t, because there was always something new to read. So, adding audiobooks to my “non-reading” time has been a game changer!
After finishing Dune, I went to Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkossigan Saga, which I have been aching to come back to. I am going through them in order of internal chronology, and since I read Shards of Honor last year ago, I started listening to Barrayar. It is absolutely fantastic, just as I remembered it from my teens! Bujold’s writing is effortlessly engrossing, in a way that fills me with dark envy.
Sidebar: I am taking a stance against male narrators pitching their voice high when reading female-coded dialogue. Come on, dudes, it just makes the characters sound scared all the time!
My adventures with audiobooks continue. After the awesome experience with John Scalzi’s Redshirts, I decided to try Catherynne Valente’s Space Opera next.
The result was horrific.
Don’t get me wrong. The book is adorable. But my body was not ready for a slow-reading Brit doing accents and dialects. My body was particularly unprepared for an entire chapter in the voice of a southern diner waitress. I think I will have to stay away from works that include dialects and “funny voices”. For my own sanity, you understand.
Next, I started Dune, because Denis Villeneuve’s movie is OBVIOUSLY going to be the greatest work of science fiction ever made. And also because I have been meaning to reread it for years. So far, it is going splendidly, and the production is really impressive, with multiple voice actors and even some background music.
As an aside, it seems that audiobooks might be a solution to a problem. Since they have the dubious honor of occupying my “at night, while playing video-games” time, I think they can help me with getting back to works I’ve already read. A solution to the constant struggle of feeling like re-reading is a waste of time when there are so many new books to experience. Vorkossigan Saga, here I come!
Mistborn Goodness
In unrelated news, I wanted to brag about finally completing my set of Mistborn collector hardcovers. Guest featuring, the newest Dragonsteel HC — Warbreaker. Now all that’s left is Elantris, once I have the resources for it, and whatever Brandon Sanderson decides to tempt me with in the future.
The quality of binding of these editions is absurd, and the artwork galleries are stunning. And for fans of Sanderson’s Cosmere, it should be criminal that the books contain charts with information on Scadrial’s magic systems not actually in the stories themselves…
All in all, if one is about that collector’s life, these editions are a must. Of course, if you are a normal human with normal human priorities, there is no justification for spending the amount each of them costs. (Not a criticism to Brandon, his agreement with Tor does not allow him to sell them for less. And frankly — the quality justifies it). But if you are like me, I cannot recommend them enough.
In the past month, the Clarion West Writers Workshop offered a number of online classes through their website. I only managed to sign up for one class from the first round, but I was lucky (read – manic) enough to attend more from the second. The experience was absolutely fantastic on several levels, and the ability to directly interact with professional writers was like being plugged into an outlet, and having my battery charged.
The subject matter of the classes varied wildly, from the use of psychological responses and types of interactions in character building, to the relationship between worldbuilding, character, and story. The structure itself was very different from class to class. Some were webinars, with Powerpoint presentations and room for questions. Others were more lecture-based, with participation, exercises, and the like.
Some takeaways:
1. I need interaction with other writers, be it published, or aspiring ones. It is becoming more and more apparent to me that on a sheer motivation level, I require contact with others who are doing or trying to do what I do. This is making me evaluate the potential to find a writing group, even though I am instinctively suspicious of such things. But it really seems like something that will boost both my motivation, and output.
2. I seem to – and this one is hard to phrase tastefully – actually, uhm, know a lot. Not in the sense of “these classes were useless”, in fact the absolute opposite. I took something unique and helpful from each and every one. But more than a few of these things were rephrasing or offering a unique perspective on information I already had.
Which, to be fair, makes sense. I have listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts, and read a massive number of books on the business and craft of writing. With each passing class, I realized that invariably the most helpful aspect was the direct exchange of ideas, and the practical exercises.
There is always more to learn, and I am likely not even done with the beginning of the process. But it does seem that at this point I actually have a surprising amount of raw information inside my head. Which means that further “learning” for me will have a lot more to do with practice and personal exploration, than simply absorbing information.
Fuck… Oh well.
3. Most importantly, I am realizing that this is truly what I want to be doing with my life. Every class, every sit down with a bunch of other faces, all of us staring awkwardly at each other and the person speaking, has been another crystal clear resonance with the awareness that THIS is who I am. Who I need to be, and what I need to become.
I don’t think any practical benefit I could list (and there were specific ones, to be sure, from each class) will measure up to this simple realization, or rather its reinforcement. Quarantine has been hard on all of us, and I have had my unproductive moments, just like everyone else has. However, after these past two weeks, I feel energized and motivated. And not simply to overcome anxiety, depression, and the uncertainty everyone is dealing with, but to know that even when I fail to do it, my path remains unaltered.
I am no less a writer just because I haven’t been published yet, or because I might have unproductive, uninspired, or flat out blocked streaks. I am more of a writer, knowing that after each of those streaks, I will be back at it, writing. Because I can’t imagine not doing it.
P.S. As for the picture of Jaime protecting my work area as the majestic panther god that he is – you are welcome.
During quarantine, my daily routine has been fairly fixed. Mornings are for writing, editing, and blogging. Afternoons are for reading or other work. Evenings are for movie/tv time with the boyfriend. And late evenings are for videogames and podcasts after he goes to bed.
But with that said, I ran out of episodes on the podcasts I follow, and it struck me that I could attempt — cue dramatic drum effect — an audiobook! I have always been resistant to the idea, but the reality of the fact is, I had no rational reason for that resistance. So I went and downloaded something I thought might be a good gateway, and a book I hadn’t read: John Scalzi’s Redshirts, narrated by Will Wheaton.
Well, about halfway in, I have to say I am loving it! I do get characters confused here and there, and the “[name] said” tags are profoundly visible in this format. It has, if not limitations, then certainly a learning curve, but I had no trouble maintaining attention, and I couldn’t stop listening. Of course, it does help that the actual book is really good. I will definitely not be “switching” to audio from now on, but as an addition to my reading, it is certainly not nearly as awful as I expected.
As an aside, this project features TWO people that have been given the “KHAAAAAAN!” approach — both Will Wheaton in The Big Bang Theory, and Scalzi himself, in early seasons of Writing Excuses, where he was, for a time, Brandon Sanderson’s “nemesis”.
As for the title of this post… I know. I’m sorry. I will see myself out.
I stumbled onto a tweet by an indie writer recently. They were advertising their novel, and it went something like this:
If you like Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, Outlander, The Hobbit, or Harry Potter, [BOOK TITLE] is for you!
Now, I don’t usually try to write professional advice on here, because I don’t have the credentials to be telling anyone what to do. With that said, the problems with this tweet were so glaring, and hit me on such a visceral level, that I realized something: this is a subject where one’s credentials as a reader are actually more relevant than those as a published writer. So, here are my thoughts on comp titles.
First, what is a comp title? “Comparison titles” are works similar to yours. They are usually used when you are trying to sell said work to agents or editors, and occasionally — directly to readers. There are several formats traditionally used for the purpose:
(Disclaimer: I came up with the examples on the spot, I accept that people might not agree with them. Which would kind of make my point later.)
[TITLE] in/on/with [TYPE OF CHARACTER]/[PLACE]/[GENRE]. These are trying to tell whoever you are pitching, that your work is very similar to another work, but with one particular difference, be it the character(s), location, genre, or some twist in the story. Example comp: Mistborn is “Ocean’s Eleven, set in an epic fantasy world”. Or The Lion King is “Hamlet, but with lions.”
[TITLE] meets [SECOND TITLE]. Now you are telling whoever is in the elevator, that your work is a mixture of two other works. This doesn’t imply equal parts – your project might take the plot of one title, and place it into the world of the other, or have characters similar to one, but placed in a story, similar to the other. Example Comp: The Hunger Games is “Battle Royale meets 1984.”
[TITLE] meets [TITLE] in/on/with[TYPE OF CHARACTER]/[PLACE]/[GENRE]. An obvious amalgamation of the previous two.
Of course, there are plenty of other ways to do comp titles, because a smart writer/agent will think of the best way to sell theirparticular work, rather than be slave to templates. But overall, the goal of a comp title is to make people think of more famous works in relation to yours. If this already seems like a risky proposition, I would like to direct your attention back to the tweet that started this.
First and, well, blatantly obvious rule of comp titles is that they should actually fit with your work. If you are writing fantasy and your comp title uses 2001: A Space Odyssey, you are obviously misleading people, and it will take them one confused page into your work to find that out. On this level, the comp from the tweet is ridiculous, because let’s be real here. The only thing Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, Outlander, The Hobbit, or Harry Potter have in common, is that they are all speculative fiction. They aren’t even for the same target groups — half of those books have been written for adults, and half fall in the Young Adult or Middle Grade fields.
But there is another major risk, when picking your perfect comp title: using massive bestsellers. Here, the issue is one of finding the middle ground. There is no point in using a comparison that nobody has ever heard of. You want to use a famous title that will resonate with whoever you are pitching. But you NEVER want to use the absolute outliers. Because once you start comparing your work to Game of Thrones or Harry Potter, you aren’t telling me that you’ve written an epic fantasy full of political intrigue, or a fantastical adventure in a magic school. Instead, what you are now telling me, is that your thing has the same potential for success.
For obvious reasons, everyone is going to be skeptical of such a claim. Not only agents and editors, but also readers, most of whom have a highly tuned bullshit detector, not to mention have usually read a lot of works in the genre you are writing in. They already know your work is not the next Harry Potter, because NO WORK is the next Harry Potter. If you end up becoming an outlying success (and statistically speaking, chances are you won’t), your creation will be just as unique and incomparable to others, as Harry Potter is.
In the end, to get back to that indie writer and his tweet, I get it. I really do. Self-publishing is brutally difficult, platform and outreach are critically important. All of those titles were written as hashtags, so as to draw people that might be browsing them. But your book is not Donald Trump. When it comes to fiction — and especially in such a small and tight-knit community as the SFF genres — there most certainly IS such a thing as bad advertising. You never want to be the author with the overblown claims of his own work, because, well, nobody believes that author.
Comp titles are amazingly useful shortcuts in trying to get someone interested in what you’ve created. But they are a first step, and the second inevitably involves your actual creation. Which has to fit the way you advertised it, because there are several more steps before you reach your intended audience. So if you start with unrealistic claims or outright lies, you won’t get far.
It is profound and triumphant, and makes the discoveries of irrigation, electricity, and vaccines not just pale in comparison, but appear truly embarrassing and pedestrian. It is a discovery of such magnitude, in fact, that I am offended that I have not been given the Nobel Peace Prize for it yet.
Here it goes:
You can — and I hope you are sitting down for this — read short stories from anthologies without committing to the entire anthology! Boom! You. Are. Welcome.
While we are on the subject of “duh”, I have to admit it is truly impressive how well your mind can hide the obvious from you, when it sets its… um… will toward that goal. My resolution to read at least three short story collections this year has been in armed conflict with my ARC pile, and my “squirrel!” random reads, and I was beginning to worry that a third into the year, I have not read a single word in short form. But then it dawned on me — with the aforementioned “duh” — that I could just read one story here and there, instead of dedicating days to going through an entire collection.
So, little by little, I am now making my way through The Mythic Dream, so far enjoying every story I have read from it. And I don’t have to pause on my novel reading to do it.
The Collapsing Empire trilogy holds a special place in my heart, as does John Scalzi himself. The eponymous first book was the catalyst for my decision to finally pursue my lifelong dream of becoming a writer. Not because of any one specific thing in it — though it’s certainly an awesome space opera — and perhaps I was already looking for something to give me the final push. But the fact remains that it was Scalzi and his story of a galactic society, built on corporate monopolies and controlled comfort, that made me want to do this myself (I am referring, of course, to contorlling society through corporate monopolies).
The trilogy is finally done. And the whole thing worked!
(Obviously, SPOILERS to follow — this is the third part in a series after all.)
The Last Emperox begins where The Consuming Fire left us: Cardenia Wu-Patrick, a.k.a. Emperox Grayland II, has just thwarted another attempted coup by her now full-on nemesis Nadashe Nohamapetan. And in the process, she has arrested both Nadashe’s mother, and nearly a third of the nobility of the Interdependency, for treason. But that hasn’t stopped the plots, and she knows that her time is running out — both the time she has before her relentless enemy succeeds in her attempts to off her, and the precious years left before the Flow collapses entirely, dooming the billions of citizens of her empire to die a slow and miserable death cut off from vital resources.
Using this wonderful setup, Scalzi does what he did in the previous two books — uses smug post-modern omniscience to entertain, and does it brilliantly. The Last Emperox reads like something Terry Pratchett might have written, had he been an American, and probably a very different type of human. The narrative moves between a tight third person, and detached authorial observations, both of which never fail to win you through sheer coolness-factor. Scalzi knows how to do humor, but he also knows how to do tension and drama. This book is light on the former, unlike the previous two, but pretty stable on the latter, as the story draws to its inevitable conclusions.
What I found pretty interesting about The Last Emperox — and really, about the entire trilogy — is that it tells two parallel stories, and it breaks some pretty well-established conventions in telling one of them. On one hand are the characters, each of them with their own POV chapters: Cardenia/Grayland, Marce Claremont, Kiva Lagos, Nadashe Nohamapetan. They all play their parts in the great drama of the collapse, and yet their stories feel largely pre-determined. Like the pieces of a puzzle that could have only ever turn out one way. These stories combine with no really big surprises, and are often resolved through Deus Ex Machina.
In a lesser story, this would have bothered me. Not here.
Because The Collapsing Empire trilogy is not the story of Cardenia and co. It is the story of — wait for it — the collapsing empire. The story of the Interdependency as a society. That is the story we have really tuned in for, eve if the personal experiences of the characters living through this catastrophe are what makes it personal enough for us to care. And that story is anything but easily resolved. Where Scalzi is not afraid to descend from the skies and fix his heroes’ lives (or end them, as the case might be), he takes no easy paths to the resolution of the grander tragedy unfolding around them.
In this sense, the trilogy ends with a bang, the conclusion meant to both give us a sense of many stories still to come, and a firm ending. This universe is wider than the Interdependency, and there are plenty of adventures to be had in it. Personally, I am more than satisfied with the The Collapsing Empire as a complete work, but I would love to return to its worlds (well, ok — habitats) in a different time or place. Meanwhile, it’s a flawless work of science fiction, and a massive recommendation from me.
After last Friday’s post, a friend reached out to tell me that she understood my point, but loved fanfics too much to agree with me. It made me realize that I had never actually talked about fan fiction in that post, and that made me question why.
The first and obvious reason is that I don’t really read fanfics. I know a lot of people who do, I am aware that there exists some great literature in that community, and I am familiar with the tales of great commercial success that originated as fan fiction (though, sadly, when the first example that comes to mind is 50 Shades of Gray, I struggle to feel very appreciative about it).
However, it has just never interested me. To me, the “canon” is always what the creator of the work says, and nothing else. Even in superhero comic books, where there are so many authors and artists working on the same characters, I will still almost never read “what if” or alternative reality stories, because they just detract from the “real” thing (please, don’t take this as snobbishness, it’s far more obsessive-compulsive than it is pretentious, I promise).
With that said, fan fiction has also never bothered me, and I do see a firm distinction between that and author tweets or fan theories. See, fan fiction is actual fiction. Good, bad, brilliant, or atrocious, it is a dramatized experience of the characters of a given work. A story. It treats them the same way the original author does – as creations to be put through their paces in an isolated frame.
Fanfics don’t treat people or events as any more “real” than the work that inspired them. And this is why, while not for me, I have great appreciation for the form. In the end, fans want more or different adventures (or, yunno, crazy naked sex) for the characters they love, so they create them, or go read the works of others who have created them. It is ultimately a positive and constructive act on both the creative and reading end.
Tweets about the characters, providing “information” about them that does not exist in any kind of work, be it original or fan-made, are not the same thing. Neither are theories that presume material that does not yet/will never exist. And, as I said last week, I am not in any position of authority – legal, moral, or otherwise – to tell you how to enjoy the things you enjoy.
But if I am going to learn about pooping wizards, I want to learn it from a work of fiction, not social media. You are not your characters’ town crier. You are their creator. And as far as I am concerned, you should always act like it.
So, here’s the thing. Reading has always been a huge part of my life. Growing up, I never didn’t have a book I was currently on, and it impacted every aspect of my existence. My hobbies, my first freelance work, things I have been doing for literal decades (reviewing), and things I have only been doing for a short time now (writing).
But something happened around the time when I left home and came to study in America. For the first time in my life, I was living alone, had a personal laptop (don’t @ me, I’m Eastern European, and old), and then — not long after — came out as gay. Life changed, and reading was kind of left by the wayside. It’s not that I stopped reading, exactly, but I went long periods of time without a book by my bedside.
Last year, I decided to do something about it. I was already doing much better, but I wanted to get ambitious (for me). So I set a Goodreads (by the way, follow me!) goal of 52 books in 2019. A nice, weekly number. The only problem? I set that goal in late September. What’s a boy to do?
CHEAT!
(Kinda.)
Desperately trying to catch up (I had not read over 30 books by that point), I turned to the venerable literary form of the novella. And realized that I had been an idiot, because that is, as far as my scientific analysis shows, fiction in its most perfect form. The “condensed novel” is a brilliant medium, and I discovered a metric fuckton of writers I would have otherwise ignored — some who write long form as well, and some for whom this is as long as they get.
Needless to say, I have leaned heavily on novellas for my 2020 reading challenge as well. Maybe this time I will go higher than 52. But either way, I will have read so much great fiction, that I won’t care.
Moral of this confession — cheat often, you never know what will come out of it!
Disclaimer: This is going to get opinionated. I want to preface it with saying that I am a massive fan of Harry Potter, and I utterly adore Bonds of Brass. What I am about to say should be taken as a broad commentary about the nature of fiction, rather than dissing either work, or its author.
There is something that has been chewing on the sides of my brain ever since I wrote my review of Bonds of Brass.
Bisexuality.
No, just kidding (kind of). It was Emily Skrutskie’s tweet (and comments in other places), stating that the two main characters of the book were bisexual, when they were not coded as such in the book itself. I have been trying to examine why this statement bugged me so much, and I realized it has nothing to do with identity.
Instead, it’s about what is on the page, and what isn’t.
Now, if the title hasn’t forced your mind in that direction, let me just remind the world that, at present, J.K. Rowling is the undisputed champion in extra-literary revisions. With every new tweet about the Wizarding World, she erodes our love for her books a tiny bit more, but it goes further than that — she adds information that was never part of the narrative of those books. That is not a problem for some people, but it is a massive issue for others.
I think there are two fundamental approaches to perceiving fiction (just kidding, there are a million. But stay with me on this one). You can treat it as an alternate reality that you are viewing form the window of the book/screen/whatever; or you can treat it as a work of art, with its internal rules and limitations — a sort of fourth-wall approach, in which you are aware of your role as a spectator. The two are not mutually exclusive, of course. In fact, I think they always intertwine to an extent. But in their extremes, they lead to different perceptions of the reality of the work.
If you see the fictional story as something real and independent of your perception, you can easily incorporate any piece of external information into the work. Such as — you guessed it! — Dumbledore being gay. It’s not in the Harry Potter books. It’s not hinted at, it’s not implied. There is literally nothing you can even retrospectively point at, and say “This codes Dumbledore’s sexuality”. If anything, he is the quintessential ace character — a wise old mentor archetype with no sexuality whatsoever.
But if you think of him as a real person, existing independently of the books that tell his story, he could easily be gay. The narrative isn’t about his personal life, after all, right? It’s plausible that it wouldn’t come up.
I don’t think in those terms. And I won’t claim that my approach is “the right one”, because hey — who am I, really, to tell you how to enjoy fiction? But I have always been on the opposite end of the spectrum. I hate fan theories with a fiery passion. I avoid forums that discuss ongoing fantasy series like the plague. No, Tyler, Daenerys is NOT secretly Tyrion’s niece. Jaime didn’t kill his mother. Arya doesn’t have a secret Braavosi lover.
You know why? Because they don’t exist.
These people are made up. Their experiences only ever occur in the fiction that features them. They don’t have independent life outside of it. I will not speculate as to the secret thoughts and actions of non-existent people, because the writer can, at any point, choose to take them in any direction they please. Sometimes — sadly — they do it specifically to subvert the expectations of fan speculation.
This is why the bisexuality of the Bonds of Brass boys bugged me so much. Because that is a story based around romance, and that romance is same-sex. That’s what is presented inside the book, and that’s all that exists of these two entities. Claiming otherwise, even as the writer, implies that they have a life outside of the work, that there are further dimensions to them that I am not privy to. And for all I know, maybe future books in the trilogy will blast their bisexuality in my face. I won’t love those two disasters any less for it.
But in the mean time, I believe that the work is the work, and only the work is canon. It doesn’t matter whether my story is about any particular kind of identity or circumstance. If it matters to me that my readers perceive my characters in any specific way, it is the simplest thing in the world to code them that way, without ever making it a focus of the narrative. A stray thought. A random line of dialogue. Someone casually noticing the attractiveness of someone else.
We are writers. The world of our own work is our butt-monkey. There is nothing we can’t make known to the reader, if we so choose.
In the actual real world that we live in, labels are still important, and identity is the nexus of social and political fights that have defined generations. Hetero is still the norm. Same-sex relationships still read “gay” or “lesbian”. Therefore, if we want to paint our characters in more complex colors (even when we are placing them in a post-identity world), we have to code them as such within the work.
I shouldn’t have to read J.K.’s tweets in order to know something so profound about one of her series’ most important characters. But BOOOOY would I love some hot and steamy prequel story about young Albus getting it on with another dude!
