And on the subject of reviews, I will be writing one over the weekend for Jade Man's Skin by my friend Daniel Fox. Now, he is indeed my friend, but it is not just my personal bias showing when I say that this ARC was breathtaking, in concepts, in story and in prose.
It's the second volume of three in a mediaeval Chinese inspired fantasy, and you can read my burblings about the first volume, Dragon In Chains, here. The second volume is every bit as good. It's officially out in February, but is already available for pre-order on Amazon US and Amazon UK, and doubtless other places as well.
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I generally don't point at reviews of my books, even the good ones, unless it's one where I personally asked the reviewer to look at the book. But every so often there is a review that makes an author think, "Yes! They got what I was trying to do! It worked!" And Jenre has just posted such a review of Lord and Master.
[exit, bouncing]
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...because James Nicoll posted a poll about Questionable Content, which I hadn't looked at since before work went completely batshit insane, and I just spent the whole evening catching up.
James, purveyor of displacement activity to half of fandom...
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No wordage between the last report and yesterday for various reasons. Yesterday was pretty pathetic, as well. But tonight I have done my minimum 300 words, and for my reward can now retire to bed clutching that ARC I've not had a chance to get started on yet. Or possibly something a bit lighter that doesn't require actual thinking, because I am knackered...
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Just in case anyone in the UK is reading this in the next hour or so -- why aren't you watching Doctor Who? On at 7 pm...
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Family commitments mean that I will almost certainly not be able to make it to Eastercon 2010. This sucks, because a lot of my friends will be there, and because the Radisson is one of the few con hotels I have been to which gives me the feeling that I might actually get a reasonable night's sleep every night. I shall think about an appropriate regional/specialist con to go to instead, but I think that it will again have to be a matter of not making firm plans until very near the actual date. Which in turn means that one of the restrictions will be that I can either be sure of getting a room even if I leave it to the last minute, or can cancel the hotel reservation up until the last minute.
(I'm not releasing my Odyssey room booking and membership just yet -- the former because I need to be sure that my potential sharers have other arrangements, and the latter because even a supporting membership would now cost near what I originally paid for the full membership.)
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Here in Manchester the sun is setting on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, bringing this season of remembrance to a close. It will almost certainly be the last Armistice Day in which we have a living link to that first Armistice Day, to those on the front who heard the guns fall silent at the eleventh hour 91 years ago. Since last year's remembrance, the last handful of those living in the UK have gone. There are today but three still living verified veterans of the Great War around the world. The war to end all wars, which didn't.
Those men and women have seen more than one war since. Small wars, large wars. Wars which really were over within months, but more often wars which dragged on for years or decades. Monday saw the anniversary of two major turning points in two major conflicts which sprang from the unfinished business of the Great War. It was both the 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht and the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hate and hope on the same day, and perhaps that was not entirely a coincidence.
Lest we forget, for those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
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The big news in the romance blogosphere yesterday was that Harlequin/Mills&Boon are opening a digital-only press, Carina Press, which will cover a much broader range of genres than the print divisions do. They'll be publishing more than romance, and in romance they'll be publishing material that wouldn't fit into the print lines. While it doesn't explicitly say so on the website, apparently that will include LGBT, multiracial, and other "non traditional" romances that have already proven popular at the established digital publishers. It will also include things which you might think at first glance would be perfectly traditional Mills & Boon fare, but which don't actually fit into their existing lines -- e.g., if you've got a cross-genre, it won't be necessary to ramp up the romance to make it fit. The other print-related restriction that's gone is story length -- they'll consider a much wider range of manuscript lengths.
Part of the big news is that they've recruited Angela James, former editor-in-chief at Samhain. This is a smart move. Angela has several years of experience at one of the biggest players in the current digital publishing market. This matters, because while Harlequin have been doing well at digitising their print lines, what this represents is a direct move into a different style of digital publishing. Carina Press is digital-only, DRM-free, and following the model of no advance but high royalty rate -- the same model that has become a flourishing niche market over the last decade by being able to cater to genres with a readership too small for mass market but large enough to support excellent small press sales.
Will it succeed? Maybe not. But this is Harlequin we're talking about. They've survived in business for a century by giving the market what it wants, and they've already got good experience in what it takes on the technical side to put together an ebook and sell it. I want to see their royalty rate and contract[*] before signing on the dotted line, and I want to see them in business long enough to look viable before I risk a full-length manuscript with them, but yes, I'm interested.
[* Harlequin is an actual example of "big publishers screw over their authors too". They've improved over the years, under pressure from the RWA and others, but their contracts have at times been examples of Publishing Evil.]
ETA: apparently I can't read, in spite having read the guidelines looking for *and* *expecting* *to* *find* a statement that LGBT was welcome. It's certainly there now. Insufficiently caffeinated this morning, obviously.
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Yesterday I posted about my visit to the Hack Green Secret Bunker museum, where I stood and looked at a pair of decommissioned nuclear missiles. I'm at the older end of Generation X -- I was already a young adult twenty years ago. I grew up in the shadow of the Bomb, with the knowledge that there was the capability and perhaps the will to go to Mutually Assured Destruction, the potential end of civilisation in a war that was not survivable in any meaningful sense.
And then, twenty years ago today, the most blatant symbol of that terrible, deep division between nations -- was repudiated. The East German people decided in large numbers that they had had enough of being divided from their own across the Berlin Wall, and the newly installed leader of East Germany declined to give the order to shoot. An order that had been given many times in the past, but not twenty years ago today.
It was a process that began before the Wall came down, and continued long after. It is a process that is not entirely complete, that has had reversals. There is still suspicion, there are still madmen with access to the tools of mass destruction. But twenty years ago today is a day I can point at and say that that was the day I really believed that the world would not end in fire just yet.
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(If you're reading this on the Dreamwidth journal, you'll need to go over to LJ and pick up the torchwood boxset tag to see previous installments.)
"We're talking to the wrong corpse."
The very first episode showed how Torchwood is the worst and best job in the world, with Jack's second-in-command getting a little too carried away with her job, and ending up on ice in the vaults herself. Three months later, the team have reason to find out just what she knew about the background of their current problem -- and in Torchwood, even suicide isn't always an effective way to resign from the job...
Intricately plotted, well acted, and wonderfully filmed and directed, this meditation on life and death shows just what Torchwood is capable of -- from what was originally one of the over-commission scripts which were commissioned to give the production time extra material to draw on in case of problems with the primary scripts.
Watching it for the first time is like playing with one of those Russian doll sets; every time you open up a layer, you find something else nested inside. This does sometimes give me suspension of disbelief problems on rewatching, in part because Suzie's plan is so elaborate, but on my first time through I was too mesmerised by the developing story and character interplay to care.
( They Keep Killing Suzie )
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It is, indeed, sundown, and I am sitting here with a cup of tea, having just returned from an overnight outing. It was a friend's 40th birthday party last night, and so we were away to Shropshire, staying in a B&B in Market Drayton. This morning we left the B&B and went for a stroll round the town centre, just in time to hear the approach of the pipes and drums leading the Remembrance Day parade.
It was a pointed reminder that the deaths go on. The parade was led by the band of the Royal Irish Regiment, and there was a group of young soldiers in dress uniform all with identical shiny new medals, which must have been their campaign medals from their recent tour in Afghanistan. Soldiers with the accent of my home town.
And after we had seen the parade go by, and had paused at the cenotaph for 11 o'clock, we went on our way. Which led through Nantwich, and a spur-of-the-moment decision to visit the Hack Green Secret Bunker. Now it's a museum, but not so long ago it was part of the UK's last ditch defence system, part of the control system for the country after a nuclear war. This afternoon I stood within touching distance of the stuff of my generation's teenage nightmares, a pair of decommissioned but quite real nuclear missiles. They are remarkably tiny objects for something that could destroy an entire city. The place as a whole is a disturbing way to spend a couple of hours on any day, let alone Remembrance Sunday, not least because the video room has the banned BBC film "The War Game" on continuous loop. They are *not* kidding with the sign on the door warning that it's not suitable for small children. More information about Hack Green at the BBC's H2G2 site.
At the going down of the sun, let us remember, and be grateful that we are still here to remember.
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In the post tonight was an ARC. I rarely ask for ARCS, but this one's special -- it's the middle book of a friend's new fantasy trilogy, the first volume was so good that I would happily run out and buy this one full price on the day it's released, but getting an ARC means that I can read it this week instead of early in the new year [smug]. And all I have to do in return is tell everyone who reads this blog what I think of the book. I do not expect this to be a great imposition. :->
Exit, gloating...
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had my seasonal flu shot this evening, and as usual the vaccination site is starting to swell and hurt. I'm sitting here with an ice pack held to the vaccination site, and being glad that I've been practising with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Not much fiction writing for me this week as I find NaturallySpeaking too disruptive for fiction.
Also, NaturallySpeaking does not play well with Dreamwidth -- I'll have to dictate my entries into the Dragon box and copy and paste.
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Read in October:
WJ Burley -- Wycliffe and the Dunes Mystery (reviewed 24/10/09)
Poul Anderson -- The High Crusade (reviewed 31/10/09)
WJ Burley -- Wycliffe and the School Bullies (reviewed 31/10/09)
Gregory Benford -- Timescape (DNF, reviewed 11/10/09)
Wycliffe Omnibus, containing the following novels:
Wycliffe's Wild Goose Chase
Wycliffe finds a gun discarded on the beach at the bottom of his garden. Soon afterwards, the body to go with it turns up in one of the village businesses. Some digging finds an obvious suspect for murder, but Wycliffe starts to suspect that all is not as it seems, and that he's being sent on a wild goose chase.
Wycliffe and the Quiet Virgin
Wycliffe goes to stay with an acquaintance in a remote Cornish village for Christmas, and find himself mixed up in first a missing teenager case, and then the double murder of her parents. Digging into the past finds a lot of family secrets, some of which go back to a previous unsolved case.
Wycliffe and the Cycle of Death
When the current head of a family of booksellers is murdered, the family closes ranks. Then one death appears to lead to another, and Wycliffe is offered a nice convenient scapegoat. But he's not convinced, even if the press are...
(Yes, I've been on a bit of a Wycliffe kick. This is because The Works, a specialist remainder bookshop chain, has been running the books in their 3 for 5 pounds section for the last couple of months, and every 2 or 3 weeks there's a new pair of titles, plus something else I'm happy to try at that price.)
And I started on Galaxy Volume 1, the first part of a two volume anthology put together in 1980 to celebrate the 30th birthday of Galaxy magazine.
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This book follows one of Burley's standard formats, with a flashback prologue showing the reader a motive for a crime, then showing the crime that first brings Wycliffe into the story, and following the process of solving the crime. Here the motive is the vicious bullying of a young teenager on a school trip, and the crime is the separate murders of two young women. At first there appears to be no link between the two murders, but as Wycliffe digs into their past, he starts to find connections. Connections that lead him to a motive, other potential victims, and a race to find the killer. It's not difficult for the reader to work out who the killer is, but the point of the story is to follow along as Wycliffe pieces together the fragments of information that might lead him to the next victim before the killer. It's an entertaining read with some interesting character sketches, although be warned that the prologue could be triggery for bullying victims.
LibraryThing entry
at Amazon UK
at Amazon US
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In the year 1345, an alien spacecraft lands in the small English village of Ansby, expecting an easy defeat of the local primitives. Unfortunately for them, the local primitives are preparing to go on Crusade, and their reaction to having one of their number burned where he stands is a disciplined military reaction. That discipline and the aliens' surprise results in the English capturing the ship. Unfortunately for the English, the last alien survivor manages to lock the ship onto an autopilot program that will return it to its base. Unfortunately for the alien empire, that gives the Baron 10 days of travel time to come up with a plan to conquer the garrison on the alien colony planet...
It sounds daft, and it is, but Anderson was a good enough writer to pull it off. Sir Roger may be a mediaeval baron, but he has an open mind, an excellent grasp of tactics, and a sound understanding of practical psychology. That makes him a formidable opponent for an empire that hasn't had to deal with serious opposition for generations. It also makes for a very funny story, particularly when Sir Roger cheerfully lies his way through various negotiations, presenting himself as the representative of a large multi-planet empire.
First published in 1960, this is a short novel by today's standards, but just the right length for the story it tells. It's enormous fun, and well worth a read.
LibraryThing entry
at Amazon UK
at Amazon US
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116 words yesterday, and it was like pulling teeth. But something seems to have finally unstuck (oo, er, missus), and I've done 367 words tonight in spite of being very tired after the clock change at the weekend. Shall call that a day and go to bed now.
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Given comments in comments, it's probably once again time to point to the explanation of "cat-vacuuming" for the benefit of newish readers. This is actually a writing term which originated on an sf writer's group (originally in the form "cat-waxing". More details here:
http://julesjones.livejournal.com/18594.html
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Excuse me, brain. We do not do writer's block.
We do getting distracted by shiny new idea, or forgetting what we were doing last time we picked up this story. We certainly do "I am bored with this idea now and want to play solitaire". We do cat-vacuuming. We do mucking about while waiting for the confabulator to finish slotting bits together neatly.
We do not do Yer Actual Writer's Block. The closest we get to it is occasionally getting blocked on one particular story, which is easily solved by moving to something else that was in the queue and writing 300 words per diem on that instead. We most certainly do not sit staring at the screen three days running, completely failing to come up with the next paragraph of something we actively wanted to write, and had the next scene of outlined.
There may have to be another bout of rummaging in the fanfic ideas drawer if this goes on. And we do not get paid for writing fanfic, do we?
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