Thursday 17 April 2014

Food for thought

Today I made it to see my lovely aunt, as I mentioned I'd be trying to while down here. We had a great time, talking for probably far too long about a surprisingly wide range of things. She's a bit of a gourmet chef (this is an understatement) so given my tentative inching into that Actual Cooking stuff we ended up talking food for quite a while, and she persuaded me to try some new cheeses and crackers. I seem to be surrounded by people who know what they're doing with food and are eager to take me up on my promise to "try anything once". I don't regret it yet...

Among the food discussion, a couple of books came up - Elizabeth David's works, which sound half cookery book, half food history and exploration of why and how regional dishes came about, due to sources of food and so on. I (as you see) whipped out my ever-present notebook and took down the name, because one area where I am very aware I am lacking in worldbuilding is food. I'm really bad at including meals at all when writing, because I don't know enough about what's available in what sort of climate, at what level of technology and civilisation. And I do rather need to include at least fleeting mention of meals when I write so many important Round The Campfire scenes. But I get lost in clickbait when I try to do vague internet research around that, and end up briefly extremely informed about the spice trails through the Middle East and not very informed at all about pre-potato British cuisine. Or pre-British potato-based cuisine, for a little continental diversity.

Anyway, I have a name and a few titles and hopefully that sort of focused attack will help. In the meantime I'll have to reread Ray Mears and make do for the moment.

Ah, the troublesome life of a writer. Nothing escapes scrutiny, to add depth to the next book.

The best kind of nitpicking

I am dangerous to things I love. The more I love a film, TV show, or book, the closer I'll be looking for flaws. There's lots of reasons for that; it means I can defend it better when someone (if we could all just take one concerted look at my brother at this point, that'd be great) inevitably tells me it's rubbish because this... It also means I get to pry open its narrative ribcage and have a poke around at the little problems inside. In the good old days this meant an awful lot of fanfiction to fix the plotholes and the dodgy characterisation and the glossed-over developments. These days it tends to mean I prod one tiny little aspect that doesn't quite sit right (this female character is irritating because with her background she should clearly have reacted in this way... this scene is great on the action but they should have escaped using this clever method... this male character has completely changed his attitude for plot's sake and obviously this must have happened offscreen to make that work...) and unspool a whole new idea from it. Switch up the setting and the surrounding plot and boom, future project.

That's how Hanith started life in entirety, after all. And it's where a lot of bits and pieces in most everything else came from. I tinker. I try to fix things.

This does mean watching films/TV with me has become, occasionally, a little tiring, I'm sure. If talking is permitted (never with my brother, usually not if I'm watching something for the first time, definitely not if I'm watching something for the first time and am desperately interested in it - this is partly why I try very hard to see everything I want in the cinema, so there's no chatter and missed dialogue if it's all new) then I have a tendency to point out these little flaws and discuss with whoever's watching with me. (Oh dear heavens, the ecosystems in My Little Pony, the briefings in the waiting room of Quantum Leap, the skeevy morality and ethics and potentials of the technology in Dollhouse...) And I have definitely got worse at that after hanging around with far too many people (you know who you are) who do the same, profess not to mind, or actively encourage it.

In totally unrelated news (honest, really... No, I didn't think you were going to fall for that) my friend down here in Cambridge and I watched X-Men: First Class this evening. Oh, my love for X-Men knows no bounds. It's just such a beautiful setup, to enable so much fun and such variety among your characters. I'm sure it had quite some influence on the fantasy world I created with twenty magics. (Really, precisely. I can probably still reel off the list. At some point I will go back to that and rewrite the plot and characters with the benefit of a dozen more years' writing and some nice clear hindsight.) I've always liked that kind of smorgasbord of power. A huge ensemble with different abilities, and the real fun kicks off when you team up unexpected combinations. It's just glorious, and I will forever, eternally, be distraught that I didn't come up with it first.

I do love Marvel for that. The films are doing a grand job of taking lots of different characters with defined skills, and smashing them together in fits of glee and beautifully CGI-ed explorations of how they can bounce off each other. Sometimes literally.

You go, Black Widow, illustrate my point.

That's definitely one thing I try to stick to in my writing - people have different abilities, and they work together in different ways. I am long, long past the days of the single overpowered has-every-skill-and-every-power-available characters. Power down and partner up, my dears. Even Dryden, ridiculously powerful as he is, needs other people to do what they're good at.

Anyway, yes. That's the thread I pulled most happily from X-Men. Power team-ups are just plain fun and there should always be more of them.

So, next time you see me apparently tearing something to pieces over a small flaw, bear in mind it probably means I love said thing to pieces, and am trying to dissect its problem so I can fix it forever. Or at the very least pull out its still beating heart and transplant it into something new and wonderful, to live on in a glorious, beautiful new form, with stitches around the forehead and bolts in the neck and that pure, perfect core hidden safely away inside.

Because I love it. So I will preserve it and pass it on.

Friday 11 April 2014

Assume the Perpendicular

We'll walk the grounds, of Capability Brown...

Anyway, enough Divine Comedy. The friends I'm helping in Cambridge and I went out today, to Wimpole Estate - which I am just this minute discovering apparently has geocaching spots, gosh darnit. Oh well. There was a kids' Easter Egg Trail, which was amusing and got us to meander around the gardens well enough, before rewarding us with a chocolate egg (since my friend was generous enough to buy the official trail guides, which resulted in prizes). And we went up to the farm area and saw all the cute fluffy little baby things, which they both delighted in, and a couple of absolutely flippin' huge Shire Horses, which I sighed over. Pure research, honest. It's not just that I want a giant horse. Really. Promise.

And of course, as happens everywhere I go (I am not kidding; I have managed this in multiple supermarkets), I found some secondhand books for sale. So naturally I rescued a Ben Aaronovitch and a Harry Turtledove from the tables by the exit.

Wheelchairs, however, do not go entirely happily with pine-needle-and-bark-shaving paths, especially when on a slight but persistent incline. My back is a little twitchy and I am rather tired, so I haven't got anything written or read today and it's definitely past my bedtime while I'm writing this.

Daisy sent me an invite to a game called Storium, though, which looks interesting and still has over three weeks left on the Kickstarter - looks like it's going to be a subscription service, to a certain degree, but so far from my little poke around to get set up and join Daisy, it also looks very tempting... Sort of an odd combination of play-by-post forum roleplays like I used to do constantly, and touches of co-operative board games with cards to play and scenarios to overcome. Plus I noticed a lot of familiar names (I'm spying on far too many authors via Twitter) on the list of people they've got doing some worldbuilding for them. So that's pretty darn cool.

I even got the washing up done.

Wednesday 9 April 2014

My brain is tired

In amongst all the cleaning, tidying, washing up, etc etc today, I managed to read the first 100 pages of Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, nominee for the Clarke Award in May. I've been seeing a lot about this one here and there, since Orbit decided to pair it with Rachel Aaron/Bach's Paradox trilogy for promotional stuff at one point. Lots of the "If you like that, try this" approach, I seem to recall. And then of course it was nominated for the Clarke Award, and it's an oddball, so it's caught a lot of attention. So I'm going in with that kind of bias, and a handful of non-spoilery reviews.

So far, there's a lot of squabbling going on in my head, between writer-me, reader-me, and LGBT/feminist-conscious-me. Between my many mes, I'm pretty sure I'm arguing both sides and the middle. I foresee another far-too-in-depth-and-yet-no-plot-spoilers sort of half review, half analysis in the future. Sorry about that. But I've got another 286 pages to go, yet. That might all change.

Four of the five other nominees arrived at the library back in York, too, today, which is a little frustrating as they'll only keep them reserved in my name for so long, and I am, naturally, in Cambridge until just after the deadline. I was hoping they'd turn up before I came down here, so I wouldn't lose two weeks of reading/reviewing, but oh well. I'm sure I'll work something out.

Anyway. People other than me tried the mini carrot cakes today and declared them tasty, so I'm quite pleased there. If I can work out cooking time, perhaps I can do a full scale one and distribute the icing more evenly that way, because whoa, these things are loaded with the stuff as it stands now. Not that I'm complaining, you understand.

I also ate spinach today for what I'm pretty sure is the first time ever, and it evidently hasn't poisoned me, so that's a plus too.

Tuesday 8 April 2014

Weary traveller

I managed to get almost everything done that I'd had in mind today, and since that included the two-and-a-half hour drive down to Cambridge to help out a friend, that seems good enough. And I'm sort of in the process of arranging a brief visit with my aunt, since it's been far too long since I last saw her.

Not a lot of writing, though - the drive was tiring and time on both ends was mostly occupied with cleaning and tidying and packing. I did listen to the first half of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds in the car though, and now clearly need to go back and slip a couple of references to that into Dryden. Very easily done.

Otherwise, sort of stalled and tired and in that stare-at-the-page-and-hope-words-happen sort of state. It's always annoying when that happens, but it's worse when I know what needs to happen next, it's just that fingers and brain can't even seem to form the concept of words, never mind find the right ones to put down. So I'm going to sleep, and try again tomorrow when I have more brainpower and time.

Monday 7 April 2014

Make my cake and eat it

I finally got round to making those mini carrot cakes I've been meaning to do for a couple of weeks now, today. And oh my, they turned out tasty. They're a bit slapdash and flung together with hope rather than technique, but the cream cheese icing I added (from a different recipe) worked out all right. They taste, in fact, like cafe cake. But minus those pesky chewy walnut bits people keep insisting on ruining good carrot cakes with. And the process of making them has revealed exactly why it is that carrot cake is often my favourite cake, surpassing even chocolate at times. There's cinnamon and dried fruit in the cake mix, and vanilla and cream cheese in the icing. It's like they came up with the perfect cake just for me.

I should probably segue into some deep thoughts about the perfect ingredients in storytelling and how there are some stories I'm always going to like if they have these key four elements in them, but it's late and I am tired after two rounds of washing up and a slight tidying spree to boot, and I have a long journey ahead of me tomorrow.

Really, I should try and figure out some way of writing in the car. It sort of feels like the hours on the road are wasted. As hard as I try to cling to the conversations and plot points I come up with on the way, my brain is always so focused on driving that everything else just slips away by the time I arrive. At best I remember the one key plot twist that made me laugh for twenty miles. I suppose it does filter things down to the really important, memorable bits, though. Better than nothing.

Sunday 6 April 2014

Back by popular demand

You may have noticed a lack of posts over the last few days. Interestingly, I've had complaints about that. I was expecting complaints about the excessive chatter, not the lack of it. Oh well.

So, quick refresh: the daily posts were part of an intent to focus on the happy, good things in each day and try to stay positive. You can draw your own conclusions from the lack of posts, I suppose.

Despite that, there were actually quite a few good things over the last few days. I helped a friend plan a complicated cosplay on Wednesday, and received art (and random little presents too, which was so sweet) from my friend Cally. She drew me a dragon for the new pen name, and named her, naturally, Leaf Pendragon. Ah, the puns. I should've thought of that one. Leaf's now the background of my Twitter page. I'm still playing with settings to work out if I can get her onto the background of the blog too, and keep everything legible. She's a pretty thing, though, you have to admit.

I also got some more feedback on Dryden version whatever it is at this point, and more again on Thursday. I was getting very lost in attempts to rewrite, second (and third, and fourth) guessing myself at every turn, certain of some problems and hating other bits but not sure if that was just me or if they actually needed work. Hearing back from my readers settles that - even if I disagree with the odd comment, it still solidifies what I have to do to make progress. It clarifies matters, and reassures me that there's something worth saving in the draft.

There was also the NaNoWriMo group chat on Thursday night, which meant I got a little writing done. Hanith again, poor lad.

On Friday I made it into town to pick up the latest Loki: Agent of Asgard comic, because Loki. It did make me laugh like a drain, too.

Saturday included a trip to the cinema to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier for the second time... So I really can't complain about that. I even managed to do almost all the dishes and cook again, afterwards.

Today was monthly NaNo in-person meetup, too, so I spent the afternoon hanging out with half a dozen other writers, generally geeking out, chatting, and keeping up to date with everybody's plans and current writing status. It's nice, though this particular meet did leave me more exhausted than usual. I think I'm still not quite entirely recovered from the troubles of Tuesday through Thursday. Remember I mentioned how the food and the happy overlap a lot? This does mean that lack of happy equals lack of food, especially if I'm feeling guilty. That in turn slows me down for a while, which does mean a much lesser chance of sparking off further guilt-inducing incidents, but also means it's difficult to get back up to doing a full day of normal stuff without ending up utterly shattered at the end of it.

Oh well. The delays in getting round to actually writing Dryden 2: The Second One have meant that the plot is getting longer, more in depth, and crueller with every passing day. Shame it all makes sense and follows on from the chaos of the first book. My poor characters. They did so little to deserve this.

Tuesday 1 April 2014

Honour's Knight (spoiler free)

(Yes, that is the American cover, but so was the copy I read, so shush.)

Book: Honour's Knight (Book 2 of the Paradox trilogy)
Author: Rachel Bach (Rachel Aaron in disguise! Also, @Rachel_Aaron on Twitter)

Okay, this is BOOK TWO. Are we clear on that? I've tried not to include spoilers for either book one or two, and though that's quite tricky I think we're all clear. I've checked through a couple of times. This is a long post though, so if you're short on time or interest you can scroll to the bottom. I've highlighted in bold the point at which I stop babbling excitedly and summarise basic book thoughts. Otherwise, here we go.

In the interests of not spoiling book one for any of my fellow spoilerphobes, the summary for Honour's Knight shall be merely the tag-lines, not the blurb:

Devi Morris has a lot of problems. And not the the fun easy-to-shoot kind either.

Like the sound of that? Here's a little more depth:

Deviana Morris is a kickass mercenary in the far-flung gloriously space-opera future, with enough burning ambition to set the whole universe on fire and a keen awareness that life as a mercenary means she probably doesn't have much time to fulfill those ambitions. So she'll take any chance she can to get herself boosted up the career ladder into the prestigious (and dangerous) job she's really after - joining the Devastators, the most elite fighting unit in all of the colony worlds.

So a year's contract on the Glorious Fool - a ship so dangerous it's said to be cursed - seems like the perfect way to get noticed.

The Fool's crew are all oddballs; aliens and psychics and mysterious men with deep dark secrets. Devi tries to be a dutiful security guard and not dig into what doesn't concern her, far more interested in her honour and ambition than with other people's secrets, but it's another matter when those secrets start putting the lives of everyone on the ship at risk. Then things really get rolling and it's more than just the ship at risk.

While all this is going on, Devi still manages to find time to fall in love. But even that isn't simple or safe.


So. That's how it all starts.

Book One, Fortune's Pawn, crackled through some rip-roaring action sequences and steadily ramped up through small scale character development to uncovering big mysteries and taking on huge conspiracies with very little chance to stop for breath. And then it ended on a cliffhanger.

Honour's Knight opens with a prologue which is frankly horrifying, and then steps straight back in where we left off in Fortune's Pawn.

There's a helpful recap of what happened in the climax of book one, which essentially adds up to "spot the bullet holes". Reading through it elicited a lot of, "Oh, yeah, that got shot too, didn't it?" but worked very well to orientate me again, since it had been a couple of months since I read the first. Throughout the book there are a few neat recaps like this one, which is very useful, because there's a lot going on. Fortunately for us, Rachel Bach can handle the doling out of information very well, so we're never truly at sea even in flurries of double crosses, backstabbings, ulterior motives, and huge, epic, universe-sized long-term goals.

The stakes are raised again and again - every time you think things can't get more overwhelming, they do, and with a whole book left to go I have the feeling it's not even maxed out yet. This isn't done arbitrarily, though, but in keeping with everything we know, and everything we find out with Devi. The background and the worldbuilding (although worldbuilding seems too small a word for the whole universe and multiple alien species and cultures) are consistent throughout, and gain depth as we go along. All this information gets filtered through Devi's first-person narration, and while she is very intelligent she's also not a scientist, so things are translated through her understanding, without jargon or too much dwelling on intricacies for an action adventure. Generally we get everything we need to know delivered to us in a quick, clear way, so we can move on to the plot and the fight scenes.

If you do get lost, there are still those regular, crisp updates on the current situation. Devi, after all, is a soldier, so it makes perfect sense for her to be evaluating her position and considering her options and counting up her advantages whenever the ground shifts under her feet yet again. A helpful writing tactic and a nice bit of characterisation, solidly defining Devi as capable and resourceful, all in one.

And the ground shifts under Devi a lot in this one. Everybody around her (not excluding Devi, either) has their own motivation and plans, which means alliances shift and unlikely teams crop up as everybody tries to get what they want and different people's methods and aims temporarily align. This certainly keeps you on your toes when reading - as soon as you start thinking you know who are "the good guys" or "the bad guys" everything switches up again, someone else's backstory and primary motivations are revealed, and you'll find yourself on their side too.

All the major characters, then - and it's an expanding cast - are more complex than they first appear, and they all stay true to their driving forces. None of them conveniently forget what they're after to hurry the plot along. Most everyone gets pushed to their limits in this book, and it's their deepest beliefs and varying moralities that come into play, usually in completely unexpected ways.

For anyone who's read Rachel Bach's previous series (The Legend of Eli Monpress, written as Rachel Aaron - and delightful they are too) this moral murk is quite different to Eli's much clearer-cut villains. In those there was a definitive Great Evil to be fought, and some pretty clear, uncompromising definitions of what was right and wrong, usually from the dutiful Miranda. There were still characters and situations set up to explore the limits of what could be done "for the greater good", but they were resolved quite clearly one way or another.

Here, though, allies and organisations are clashing over pretty much every single issue that comes up, and even Devi with her high concepts of honour and duty has trouble arguing for moral absolutes. And there are consequences when everyone takes too long fighting over what to do next, and often worse consequences when they don't, and simply take the course of action that seems best at first, but naturally has hidden problems and unpredictable results. There's a pretty impressive body count as a result, even for books focusing on a mercenary in a high tech weaponised suit of armour dealing with forces so powerful the Death Star starts to look tame in comparison.

This also means virtually nobody comes out of this squeaky clean. Even the people trying to do the right thing don't always know what the right thing is, and most of those who think they do are happy to overlook a little collateral damage to get their way. Sometimes a lot of collateral damage. It makes for interesting reading, and it's intriguing to consider all the current options open to the characters and try to work out where things are going for book three. My money, actually, is on an entirely different option to everything that's been considered or put forward already. Something that will make readers and characters alike slap their foreheads and wonder how they managed to miss that idea when everything we needed to come up with it was laid out in all the laws of the setting and the characters' own ideals and moral codes.

That does seem to be a recurring feature of Rachel Aaron/Bach's writing, after all. There's always one more twist that she manages to keep very well masked in the build up. I was delighted with that in her Eli books, and it's come up already by the end of Honour's Knight, so I have high hopes. I like surprises.

A couple of asides, from personal interest:

One of the aspects of sci-fi and fantasy I'm particularly interested in at the moment is the portrayal of gender and LGBT+ elements. In the universe Rachel Bach has created in these books, humanity has colonised so many worlds that separate human cultures have a lot of differing technology as well as values, and there's a certain amount of culture clash and xenophobia among "Terrans" and "Paradoxians" and their various colony worlds.

And then there are multiple alien species: lizard-like xith'cal (purported to enslave and eat humans), an avian, peaceful species called aeons, and the lelgis, who generally keep to themselves and don't interact with humanity. These are introduced and explored through Devi, bringing up her preconceptions and contrasting those with other viewpoints and clearer facts about each species.

I found it intriguing that in exploring both xith'cal and aeons, gender came up as an issue. Both species are presented with a defined gender binary (clear cut male/female) and resulting roles and customs within the (fairly homogenous, it would seem) flock/hive cultures, but this fact is brought up by encountering members of each race who are gender nonconforming. This comes along with some issues about individuality and personal choices and freedom to be yourself, which ties in with... well, with everything.

Focusing on Devi herself for that, she is a soldier, trained and honour-bound to follow orders, not to think too much for herself, who now has to figure out where she stands and take the lead. She's also a tough-as-nails fighter, boiling with anger and aggression and a habit of shooting her problems. She sleeps with whoever she wants, and drinks and works out for fun. These stereotypically male character traits bring up gender nonconformity for her too - although most of the human civilisations seem to be fairly equal, there are clearly still prejudices and assumptions all over the place, cropping up in her interactions with anyone off the ship, especially if she's not wearing her armour, and even insidiously slipping into her own thoughts. When she makes an assumption about the gender of aeons she encounters based on their appearance and behaviour, a whole background of cultural norms has to lie behind that. This far-future still has issues of sexism and gender bias. Which is a little sad.

(As a small note, I was slightly sad that there isn't more outright gender equality or diversity visible among the human colonies, considering it comes up so clearly as a problem in the alien cultures. But we can't have everything, and I will gladly and gleefully settle (oh, the hardship) for a capable, rounded, intelligent, powerful female lead for now.)

Anyway, yes. The individuality idea. Devi's clearly had to fight (and fight, and fight, and fight) to carve out her own niche, to be more than just a cog in a machine. At the start of book one, we find she's willing to take a lot of risks to be who she wants to be - she's already quit, abruptly, a job everybody else thinks she should stick with, because she can't see how staying there any longer will let her be the person she should. Personal choice is raised again and again within the plot, and reinforced in so many of the characters' backgrounds that it does seem to be a running theme. The clustering and hive-mind examples cropping up are extremely plot-relevant, too, so I won't say too much more, though there's a lot of nice mirroring going on, where a major large scaled plot point is similar to a small issue raised and dealt with already. I can see a few ways this could pan out in book three, so I'm looking forward to seeing if I'm right there.

Okay, that got quite long and involved. Here's your TL;DR:

Basically, I really enjoyed this. It develops everything from the first book, without lagging or slowing the pace at all. In fact it speeds up. One problem is solved and another three are piled on. There's potential peril, mild peril, extreme peril, then oh-dear-heavens-everybody's-going-to-die-in-the-next-thirty-seconds-and-the-universe-is-doomed peril too, just when you thought you'd got extreme enough.

There are sci-fi in-jokes and references slipped sneakily in without in any way harming the plot or characters. The characters themselves are so well defined that sometimes they have a line that's just so perfect for them it's a delight to read - and wonderful to realise that we've been led to know these people well enough to spot that.

I am (clearly, she says, looking back up at the length of this rambling post) thoroughly invested in this universe and these characters, truly intrigued by the plot and eager to see where it's going, and very much looking forward to the finale in Heaven's Queen later this month.

There are still plenty of problems for Devi to shoot.