Jay Lake: Writer

[process] Copy edits and manuals of style

I am currently more than halfway through the copy edits of Kalimpura, recently received back from Tor. The manuscript is actually pretty clean, and the copy editor’s queries are both minimal and very much to the point. I’m going to assume this is a good thing, though as calendula_witch recently said to me in a related context, she feels like she’s cheating when she receives a clean manuscript to work on.

However, one thing that has always baffled me is why fiction publishers use manuals of style for copy editing manuscripts. In my case, per the abbreviated notation in the style sheet that accompanied my copy edit, M-W 11th, Chicago 15th, Words into Type, and Garner’s Modern American Usage.

I do understand why some aspects of house style are important, such as getting the ellipses and em dashes correct. That’s a book design and typesetting thing. For example, the style sheet says the following:

em-dashes:
“Use this form—” When an action. “—interrupts the speech.”
“Use this form”—when an action occurs simultaneous to speech—“without interrupting it.”

Okay. Fine with me. This is how Tor wants their books to look. Hooray! I’m not a book designer, and I certainly didn’t embed any punctuation geekery in the manuscript I turned into them.

But on usage and spelling…? Fiction is in one important sense all about voice. And there’s a lot of changes that get made in the copy edit that I have to stet. There are certain archaic or non-standard spellings I favor. “Storey” for “story” when describing buildings. “Dreamt” instead of “dreamed”. “Til” instead of “till”. All of which get carefully amended to the current standard written usage, and all of which I just as carefully stet back to my original.

Don’t even get me started on the that/which distinction. The rule about restrictive and non-restrictive clauses is a piece of prescriptivism demonstrably at odds with the way people actually use those words, and I personally will deliberately stray from the rule for the sake of smoothness of the reading. (i.e., not creating a clunky string of serial uses of “that” or “which”)

Likewise “who” and “whom”. I know the difference perfectly well, thank you. But almost no one uses “whom” in casual speech, so in dialog my characters don’t, unless they’re the sort of personality who would be either that formal or that persnickety. Also, “they/their” for third person gender indeterminate is a very common usage dating back hundreds of years in English, and really doesn’t need to be corrected.

Oh, and comma splices, I loves me some comma splices when I’m writing fiction. So what? It’s my voice.

Fiction isn’t formally correct, and it shouldn’t be. It should reflect the author’s voice. I can write very formally when I need to. I do it all the time for business writing in the Day Jobbe (though that has its own usages and quirks). I also do some legal writing in the Day Jobbe (disclaimer: I am not an attorney and I do not practice law, I do, however, routinely draft certain contract provisions for our Legal department to review), as well as some technical writing that is distinct from my business writing. I even occasionally do marketing writing there, though less often than I used to. Each of those forms has their distinct speech register, expected norms of usage, and formalisms.

The really great thing about fiction is that you get to craft your own speech registers, your own norms of usage, and your own formalisms. While I definitely need to be internally consistent in style and usage within the text (though I can readily imagine exceptions even to that statement), I don’t need to be consistent to formal usage, so long as I remain clear and comprehensible.

So I’m always puzzled about why publishers instruct copy editors to round off all the interesting bits.

Tags: Books, Kalimpura, Process, work, Writing

Posted: 5:32 am Tue May 15 2012 | Comments(5) |

[links] Link salad shines white light and wants to show how everything still turns to gold

On Wordcount, and Snitty Entitlement — Lilith Saintcrow is interesting.

Superheroes and cringe comedy: Why women aren’t allowed — Pandagon on The Avengers, and specifically, the Black Widow character.

5 Transformative Uses for Disney’s Touch-Sensitive Technology

Legalize Pot, Save Public Education, and end Student Indebtedness

Report: Global biodiversity down 30 percent in 40 years — Freshwater tropical species hardest hit, says World Wildlife Fund. The human race is an Extinction-Level Event.

All the Water on Planet Earth — Interesting visual illustration of the volume of the hydrosphere. However, look closely at Greenland on the ‘dry’ globe. Pretty sure that’s an ice sheet showing there.

Record-setting 2012 warmth largely confined to North America, western Europe — One of the ironies here is that, even though the global temperatures are fairly typical of the last decade, the unusual spring warmth might have an outsized effect on public opinion. People in the US seem to rely on their personal experience (along with the economy) when they formulate their opinion on climate change. Right. Because what does the data count against staving off the evil liberals?

Prosecutorial Discretion And Child Sexual Abuse — Ta-Nehisi Coates commenting on a New York Times report on the sexual abuse of children among ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn. This is precisely why we don’t need religious “morality” in our laws and social norms. Are Christianist congregations any better about this?

Another “Hot Text” For the War on Women: Rosemary’s Baby — Interesting. (Via scarlettina.)

Equality is bigger than the president — Barack Obama and gay marriage. If school desegregation amendments had been placed on state ballots in the 1950s, “separate but equal” might still be the law of the land in the South. Fortunately, state-sponsored segregation was not put to a popular vote. The “will of the people” isn’t always right. That’s the error of majoritarianism.

Why We Regulate — But regulations are evil! Ask any conservative. (Apparently conservatives don’t drink air, breathe water, take medicine or expect a stable economy.)

What Eduardo Saverin Owes America (Hint: Nearly Everything)

Austerity geniuses — Hullabaloo on the magic of Republican economics, as practiced by (among others) Democrats.

?otd: Will the tune come to you at last?

5/15/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (Kalimpura copy edits)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.25 (solid)
Weight: 242.2 (!!)
Currently reading: Light Breaker by Mark Teppo

Tags: business, climate, Culture, gay, gender, Links, Movies, nature, Personal, Politics, Process, reviews, Science, sex, Tech, Writing

Posted: 5:03 am Tue May 15 2012 | Comments(0) |

[process] Slamming the doors on your spaceship

I have this whole theory about the non-normative nature of the science fiction genre and its transformational narratives. Luckily for you, I’m not going to talk about that in this blog post. Not much, at any rate. (Ask me some other time.) A somewhat more plain-English way of articulating one of the key concepts behind that theory is to say that most of us read science fiction to experience something meaningfully different than what we find in our everyday lives.

One of the signature fillips in the original Star Trek was the doors on the starship Enterprise. It’s hard to remember this now, but when Star Trek went on the air in 1966, those automatic doors we’re all so used to at every grocery store and whatnot basically didn’t exist. The bridge doors sliding open and shut with a “schmuck” sound behind Shatner’s every entrance were very, very strange. Different. A simple signifier of a bold, new world. (We saw an attempt to recapture that sensibility in Deep Space Nine with those weird rolling cogwheel doors.)

Different.

In a similar vein, a very common narrative trope in science fiction is that future spaceship operations will have their roots in naval tradition. So, for example, almost all spaceship or starship crews seem to follow naval or merchant marine ranks. Ships have “hatches” instead of “doors”, “decks” instead of “floors”, which is often reflected in science fiction usage. Less often but still common are usages such as “overhead” for “ceiling”, “bulkhead” for “wall” and “passageway” for “hallway” or “corridor”. This is both part of how we’ve been trained to think about spaceships in our narratives, and part of making things in the narrative feel just a little different, an echo of the frisson we got from the original Star Trek‘s bridge design.

Lately I’ve been doing a fair amount of workshop critique reading for various events, and as happens anytime one reads a number of manuscripts, certain coincidental trends emerge. In this case, it’s writers setting stories on space stations or spaceships where the interior fittings are described with common architectural terminology. This bothers me vaguely based on my lifelong training as a genre reader, as well as the sensibilities I’ve evolved as a genre writer these past two decades and more.

I really can argue this both ways quite readily. Part of the challenge of making the unfamiliar feel real in fiction is leaving in enough bits of naturalistic reality that the reader can follow along with the adjustments in reality that the story offers. (Oddly, the_child and I were discussing precisely this point a day or two ago in a slightly different context.) This is the source of that piece of genre writerly folk wisdom that says you get to do one impossible thing for free in your story. If you change everything at once, the story becomes incomprehensible.

In other words, having people on spaceships live in rooms and open doors and walk down halls and stare at the ceilings keeps the reader from being distracted by wondering what the hell an “overhead” is, when that’s not the point of the story. At the same time, people who live in rooms and open doors and walk down halls and stare at the ceilings may as well be hanging around in my house. It doesn’t feel different.

And different is what science fiction is all about.

Still, I can forgive this in pursuit of the story. Every writer has their own vision of how the narrative should flow. Every writer’s vision evolves.

But I really, truly draw the line at slamming the doors on your spaceship. That whole concept is so predicated on contemporary Western interior design, and echoes strongly of teen tantrums and relationship spats. It makes all the sense in the world in a romance novel taking place in a naturalistic contemporary setting for the protagonist to slam a door. That’s an emotional signifier and a familiar action. But damn it, I want my spaceship doors to go “schmuck”, or dilate, or hiss gently into the walls, or dematerialize, or at the least clang ponderously. I don’t want them to be slammed.

There’s a fine line between the familiar and the banal. For good science fiction to work, you really need to keep on the right side of it. Otherwise you’re missing the whole point of the genre, methinks.

Do the doors slam on your spaceship?

Tags: Child, Conventions, Process, Writing

Posted: 5:19 am Mon May 14 2012 | Comments(4) |

[links] Link salad can dance if it wants to

Special Needs in Strange Worlds | Jay Lake – Cancer and Writing — A weekend reacharound repost, because I think this is important. In which I guest blog at Bookworm Blues.

Behind Every Great Novelist — Oh, how true… (Thanks to goulo.)

Fantasy Philately: Collecting Stamps from Tatooine and Alderaan? — (Thanks to scarlettina.)

Women are better than men — Roger Ebert is, as usual, interesting.

Radioactive man? Milford resident pulled over by state police — Weird. (Thanks to my Aunt M.)

Human-Caused Lunar Methane — Hahahaha. (Via threeoutside.)

It’s Not So Lonely at the Top: Ecosystems Thrive High in the Sky — The Amazon tepuis. I would love to go see these. (Via my Dad.)

Capitalists and Other Psychopaths — More on the psychopath ratio on Wall Street. Language Log injects a note of reality into the discussion.

“At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” — Pharygula takes issue with Obama’s comments on gay marriage.

Top GOP Pollster to GOP: Reverse On Gay Issues — I’d love to see this happen, but it isn’t going to. The GOP is enslaved to its base, which continues to slaver for an ever more closed and intolerant society. And a lot of Republican figures would have to eat a hell of a lot of crow to walk back their stance on gay marriage. (Via my Aunt M.)

Evangelicals Unhappy With GOP’s Gay Marriage Strategy — Huh. Whaddaya know?

U.S. Ranks as 25th Best Country to Be a Mother — A woman in the United States is more than seven times as likely to die of a pregnancy-related cause in her lifetime than a woman in Italy or Ireland. Gee, I wonder which political movement in this country is dedicated to undermining women’s health at every turn, and fiercely opposed to ay efforts to rationalize and improve the healthcare system. We’re number 25! Thanks, conservative America.

Romney, bullying, and me [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] — Another weekend reacharound repost, because I think this is important, and the comments I got on both sides of the blog are also important.

Republicans only interfere with morals — Republicans claim to be the party of small government, but the reality is that they’re the party of using government when they see fit. When dealing with religious beliefs, Republicans talk about government staying out of the way. When it comes to personal choices dealing with relationships, what religion others follow, or choices about a women’s body, small government rhetoric is pushed aside and intrusive government arrives with a vengeance.

Bush Convicted of War Crimes in Absentia — Unfortunately, here at home we will never see any review of the Bush administration’s conduct concerning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As any conservative can tell you, blow jobs are much more important than the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people on knowingly false premises. So is Kenyan Muslim socialism. (Via danjite.)

?otd: Can you leave your friends behind? (Note the importance of proper apostrophe placement, or lack thereof, in that question.)

5/14/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (Kalimpura copy edits)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.75 (solid)
Weight: 244.4 (!!!)
Currently reading: Light Breaker by Mark Teppo

Tags: Cancer, Christianism, Cool, Culture, economy, Funny, gay, gender, health, healthcare, interviews, Iraq, Links, nature, Personal, Politics, Process, Religion, Science, weird, Writing

Posted: 4:51 am Mon May 14 2012 | Comments(0) |

[personal|photos] This, that and the other thing; with bonus ranting about architecture

Some generally unrelated squibs for your amusement…

Writing

In between bouts of napping in a Lorazepam-induced haze, I got through about a quarter of the Kalimpura copy edit on the plane yesterday. So far it seems to be a pretty clean manuscript. There’s a little mental game I play with myself on copy edits, which is to count how many pages I get without a single markup. Those pages are the ones I “won”. So far, in 104 pages processed, exactly two have been clean.

This isn’t as bad as it might sound, as many of the CEM markups are typesetting notes and whatnot, so for example, every manuscript page with a scene break on it has markup. Likewise some basic usage stuff which doesn’t reflect errors on my part or copy editors queries, but rather conformance to Tor’s house style. However, for my little mental game, only clean pages count, regardless of the reason for the markups. 2/100 is about average for me, I think.

Go, me!

Weight

I hate part of this monster for dinner last night:

Terminator sandwich from the Rock House Grill at Cartlandia.

This may have something to do with me weighing in this morning at the highest weight I’ve been at in several years. So, time to get very serious about diet and exercise. The frustrating thing is that chemo has apparently changed my metabolism. (Again.) Despite yesterday’s sandwich, I’ve been eating and exercising at levels consistent with my behaviors prior to this last round of cancer, which were sufficient to keep my weight down in the 220s. That same level of diet and exercise now seems to peg me around 240. So I’m going to have to work more and eat less to maintain where I used to be. Which is both irritating and discouraging, to say the least.

Architecture

So my hotel bathroom in Columbus, OH had apparently been designed by an architect who’d never actually shut a bathroom door, or taken a shower. This was a nice, upscale business class hotel, where I wouldn’t expect such weirdness.

The bathroom was sort of triangular in shape. I’m not sure why, as the building itself was a pretty standard 15- or 20-story box like most hotels of its class. Because of the triangular shape, the bathroom door was hinged down the middle, as well as being hung from the doorframe in the usual fashion. Sort of like one of those bifold closet doors gone freelancing. So you pushed open the door and folded it at the same time.

The bathroom door

However, that is a solid core door. It’s fairly heavy, and only made heavier by all the hardware. Not so hard to open from the outside, but if you’re inside the bathroom and have managed to close the door, in order to open it again, you have to do a little dance around the vanity and the toilet. There’s simply no place to stand when the door is swinging open or shut. And if there’s a bathmat on the floor in the usual place one might put a bathmat, just outside the shower, it’s pretty much impossible to open the door again because it snags on the bathmat. God help you if you’ve dropped a towel on the floor.

The pièce de résistance, however was the shower.

It’s quite elegant looking. That’s a long shower pan on the floor, with a floor-to-ceiling pane of glass blocking the water splash in lieu of a shower curtain. However, in order to turn the shower on, you have to step into the enclosure and reach forward to the water controls. This results in an unavoidable blast of water in the face, as there’s no other way to approach them. In an unfamiliar hotel, you have no idea how hot it’s going to be on any given setting. In my case, nearly scalding water nailed me in the face, which I then had to reach through, twice, to adjust to a tolerable temperature.

There’s no damned way to control the water except by standing in it, thanks to that pane of glass.

Not to mention which, once you insert your corpus delecti in the shower stream, all the water splashing off your body goes right out the step-in opening and soaks the bathmat.

Which makes the damned door that much harder to open.

I’m sure someone thought they were very clever when they designed this bathroom, but I have to say, the architects were idiots, as were the hotel execs who approved this design. People who design this stuff ought to be forced to use it before it can be foisted on an unsuspecting public.

That’s all the ranty I got this morning.

Photos © 2012, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags: Books, Cancer, Food, Funny, health, Kalimpura, Photos, Process, Travel, Writing

Posted: 6:47 am Sun May 13 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad celebrates its moms

You don’t have to read my books — Justine Larbalestier explains this very well. I take a nearly identical position. (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)

Absolutely worth the drive — John Booth on Friday night’s open dinner in Columbus, OH.

Langweil’s model of Prague — This is cool. Of course, as a writer, I know nothing whatsoever about obsessive creative behavior.

Searching for meaning in distant solar systems — Is it better for a science writer to be technically correct or understood? These questions apply to SF writers as well, albeit with a slightly different slant.

Weird deep sea creatures — Art guru James Gurney with some bizarre images. In case you needed to write about aliens today.

New Study On Manta Rays Reveals Their Hidden Life

We’re all mutants now — There are a lot of us now, and most of us are a little bit off The headline is hilarious if slightly misleading.

Off the Charts: Shrinking Government — As Andrew Wheeler says, “[G]overnment spending has dropped substantially under Obama, while the private sector has surged. But you know what they say about facts’ obvious liberal bias.”

Many blacks shrug off Obama’s new view on gays — I have always been baffled by this intersection of racial issues and gay issues.

Sen. Rand Paul: Didn’t think Obama’s view ‘could get any gayer’ — Stay classy, conservative America. It’s what you do best.

An open letter to the right wing in the wake of the passage of Amendment One in North Carolina — As usual, the people who most need to read this never will, and if somehow they do, they will reject it out of hand. (Snurched from Slacktivist Fred Clark.)

Bullying and Business — Scrivener’s Error with more on Romney and bullying from a business analysis perspective. Dovetails nicely with my post of yesterday [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] on Romney and bullying.

Mean Boys — While I have real reservations about holding senior citizens to account for what they did as seniors in high school, I have no reservations about expecting presidential candidates to know how to properly address the mistakes they once made. More on Romney in the New York Times.

In address at Christian university, Romney to urge graduates to honor commitments to family — It’s not like I was going to vote for Romney anyway, but lending his name to the educational and intellectual fraud that is an Evangelical institution like Liberty University does not improve my opinion of the man one whit.

Romney’s Anachronism Problem — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison remarks on how Mittens is running against a now-distant past.

?otd: How’s your mother?

5/13/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.75 hours (Kalimpura copy edits)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.5 (solid, plus 4.0 hours of fitful airplane napping)
Weight: 244.6 (!!!)
Currently reading: Light Breaker by Mark Teppo

Tags: Art, Books, business, Christianism, Cool, Food, Funny, gay, Language, Links, nature, Ohio, Personal, Politics, Process, race, Religion, Science, Travel, Videos, Writing

Posted: 6:15 am Sun May 13 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad flies home

Special Needs in Strange Worlds | Jay Lake – Cancer and Writing — In which I guest blog at Bookworm Blues.

Avengers Enthuse Post — cathshaffer pins down a lot of what was so very good about The Avengers from a story critique perspective.

Why fiction is good for you — (Via daveraines.)

Evil Clown hired for stalking, threats and a pie in the face — An ‘evil’ clown who stalks and threatens kids is being hired by parents as a birthday treat. (Via Mike Brotherton.)

Chinese Physicists Smash Distance Record For Teleportation — The ability to teleport photons through 100 kilometres of free space opens the way for satellite-based quantum communications, say researchers. Consider the implications of that headline. Until quite recently, it would have been SFnal on several levels. Today it’s just ordinary news. I love living in the future.

Mighty Moth Man — An evolutionary biologist’s posthumous publication restores the peppered moth to its iconic status as a textbook example of evolution.

Baby, 18 months old, ordered off plane at Fort Lauderdale airport — Apparently the child’s name was on the TSA’s no-fly list. Feel safer?

Game Over for the Climate — Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. Unless, of course, you live in the facts-optional universe of the Republican party.

Top ten reasons given to ban same-sex marriages — Hahahah.

In the battle between morality and faith, morality is winning — When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was “antihomosexual.” “Intolerant” comes to mind as well.

U.S. Military Taught Officers: Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam — Feel safer now? (Via danjite.)

Fox News guest laments ‘mistake’ of letting women vote — Conservatives, classing up the joint since, well, never. And determined to remain on the wrong side of history no matter what it takes. (Via shsilver.)

Top Romney aide gleefully outed transgender woman, ending her political career — Yep.

Romney backs away from gay adoptions — Keep pandering, Mitt. The more Americans realize that the Republican party stands for an intolerant and closed society, the better chance we have of avoiding your presidency. I still remember what happened the last time we has a Republican president.

The Big Flip — Everyone agrees American politics have become completely polarized. Perhaps more remarkable is another change: over the past half-century, the two parties completely switched roles, with the G.O.P. turning into rebels and the Democrats defending the status quo.

?otd: How many time zones in the Soviet Union?

5/12/2012
Writing time yesterday: 0.25 hours (WRPA)
Body movement: n/a (airport walking to come)
Hours slept: 6.25 (solid)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: Light Breaker by Mark Teppo

Tags: Cancer, climate, Cool, gay, gender, health, interviews, Iraq, Links, Movies, Personal, Politics, Religion, reviews, Science, Travel, weird, Writing

Posted: 2:24 am Sat May 12 2012 | Comments(1) |

[travel] Feeling daunted by time

Today is going to be a long day, work-wise. I’ll have to get up about 3:00 am Eastern tomorrow to make my flight home. (That would be, ahem, midnight where I live.) I won’t be back to my house for the evening until well after 9:00 pm tomorrow night, Pacific time. That’s at least a 21-hour day right there, following on today’s long day.

I’m feeling a bit daunted by this.

My current plan is to take a Lorazepam when I get on the plane here in Columbus tomorrow morning, and sleep as much as possible through both segments of my flight home. I’m not sure that’s the best idea I’ve ever had, but it sure beats staying up for nearly 24 hours, given my body’s current sleep needs.

I suspect there won’t be much if any writing today or tomorrow. Which is okay. I got the Asimov’s galley edits for my novella “The Stars Do Not Lie” done yesterday, and I have a couple of weeks on the Kalimpura copy edits.

But, yeah, tomorrow…

Tags: Books, health, Kalimpura, Ohio, stories, Travel, Writing

Posted: 3:50 am Fri May 11 2012 | Comments(0) |

[writing|process] And then I passed the top step…

I finished the first draft of Their Currents Turn Awry this past Monday. Ever since then my brain has been nagging me. “Why aren’t we writing? Why aren’t we writing?”

It’s like running up the stairs and stepping wrong because you tried to keep going upward past the top step.

This almost always happens to me after I finish drafting a novel. For some reason, the sensation has been very strong this week. I know from experience that it’s a bad idea to view this phenomenon as a form of momentum and try to keep writing. The writer brain must be allowed to reset and recalibrate.

Still, why aren’t we writing?

Tags: Currents, Process, Writing

Posted: 4:54 am Thu May 10 2012 | Comments(1) |

[process] Do we need Sauron and Voldemort?

A day or two ago, I asked the question on this blog, “Do we need Sauron and Voldemort”? By which I meant, do we as writers need strong antagonists to make a story compelling?

Obviously, that’s a storytelling modality that works very well. One can hardly argue with the commercial success of either Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. Either of those series probably moves more books in any given month than I’ll sell in my entire publishing life.

Humans, or at least humans living in the storytelling and cultural traditions of the West, have a strong affinity for dualism. Perhaps we’re all birthright Manichaeans. The simplicity of moral contrast, of a binary choice, appeals strongly to us. Many people distrust nuance in ethics, in morality, in politics, in law. There’s something very comforting about a simplistic good-vs-evil dynamic. You know who the “us” are, and you know who the “them” are. And certainly in both Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, that is unambiguous on the page.

Yet there’s a gentleman down in New Mexico who’s shifted more than a few million books writing about a world where the good guys aren’t very good, and most of the bad guys have mixed or even noble motives. Kind of like real life, where everyone is a protagonist, a hero of their own story. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire has proven in a big, big way that you don’t need stark moral dualism to sell well. Damned near everything in those books is ambiguous. There is still a decidedly strong moral dimension. It’s just ambiguous and complex to the point of being non-Euclidean.

So I think about my own work in this context. Most of my books don’t have clear-cut, central antagonists. (Well, maybe none of them do.) My plots tend toward one of two models — the hero(es) opposed by a shifting collage of shadowy forces; or a set of interlocking protagonists with conflicting goals. I like what I write. Bluntly, if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t write it. But I don’t write like Tolkien or Rowling. Or Martin, for that matter.

I write like Jay Lake. And Jay Lake is a guy who sees the world as complex and nuanced, and largely filled with people who think they’re trying to do the right thing, even if too many of us cannot see the consequences of our own actions and beliefs for what they really are. (Yes, that’s a not-very-veiled reference to contemporary American politics, but it also really is how I see the world in general.) So I write fiction where the world is complex and nuanced. I don’t think I could write a Sauron or a Voldemort. I just don’t believe in pure evil for evil’s sake, any more than I believe in pure good for good’s sake.

So, no towering antagonists for me. Which makes me wonder about Sunspin, which is decidedly in the vein of interlocking protagonists. Much as the precursor novel Death of a Starship was. It also makes me wonder about my sales figures. Am I really writing stories people want to read? Or am I doing it wrong?

What do you think? Do we need Sauron and Voldemort? Or does George R.R. Martin have the right of it? Where do you fall as a reader? Where do you fall as a writer?

Tags: Books, Culture, Politics, Process, Starship, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 5:54 am Wed May 09 2012 | Comments(11) |