Some Reflections on a Bad Book I Wrote

I’ve been rereading the Vlad novels in preparation for writing the next one, and, eventually, finishing the series if I live that long. I’ve been going through them looking for guns I left on mantelpieces, so I can pick them up and have them go off together in ways that will make people go, “Wow! He had all of that planned from the start?” Well, and to remind myself of stuff I actually did know from the start. Anyway, in the course of this, I just finished a reread of Yendi and had some thoughts about it that might be useful to other writers.

Yes, I still think it is a bad book (although with some moments that, in retrospect, I’m quite proud of), and this post is not intended as a platform to argue that. Let me have it as a given and make my point.

My second novel was To Reign In Hell, and it was quite an experience. For one thing, I decided my biggest weakness was characterization, so I wanted to write a book that simply wouldn’t work unless I nailed the characters. It was hard, for that reason and others. It was an ambitious project for me. At one point, about a third of the way through, I spoke to Will Shetterly, and told him, “I should wait ten years before writing this one. I don’t have the chops to pull it off yet.” He said, “You’re right, you don’t. You should write it anyway. In ten years you’ll write something else, and what you learn doing this one will stay with you.” It turned out to be one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten.

After finishing it, I was exhausted, beat, done, wiped out. It felt like I’d been doing hard labor. I was emotionally drained and, for a while, wondered if I’d ever write again (it turns out, this is fairly normal for me after finishing something; I need a few months to recover. But I didn’t know that at the time). Once I did start getting the itch to write again, I was still sort of bruised from how hard it had been. Now, my first novel, Jhereg, I had thought of as a standalone. I put in hints of backstory and foreshadowing and stuff, but not with the intention of returning to the world, only because, well, I love it when books do that. But after finishing TRiH, it hit me that what I needed was something fun, something I could just kick back and enjoy writing without a lot of sweat or effort, to remind myself how much fun writing can be, and I realized that I already had the world and characters set up, I could just go back there and tell another story. To make it easier, I could use the backstory I’d already hinted at, plus throw in a bit of “foreshadowing” for Jhereg (like, Vlad remarking that no one would ever steal from the Jhereg Council, stuff like that). Because I felt a need to challenge myself at least a little, I decided to work on a different aspect of characterization than I had in TRiH, to wit, on finding the telling detail for each character that would make that one memorable.

Between these two goals—making characters identifiable, and kicking back and having fun—emerge the two problems with Yendi. First, it’s got too many characters; some of those folk are just in there so I could practice with them, and I would probably have removed them if there’d been a well handy. Second, it’s sloppy. It’s just kind of slapdash, thrown out there, with a few accidental contradictions, and not much substance. There is, in my opinion, nothing wrong with “a good tale well told,” but if that’s all there is to a story, well, it should be really well told, and that one was only fairly decent. That is why I’ve always regretted that book, and badly wished I could do it over (which, in a way, I did: Orca is in some sense the book Yendi should have been).

I should say, I’ve always regretted that book until now. Here we get to the point of this post, to what might be useful for new writers to think about.

Yes, because I was sloppy with that book, it has haunted me. I cringe when I think about it, and what it ought to have been, and still remind myself not to get lazy. BUT. I was right. It comes back to me that the book did exactly what I wanted it to: it reminded me how much fun writing can be, how to take joy in the process, and evil, cackling delight in imagining what I was going to do to the poor reader. And this has stayed with me. Of course, there are the horrible, wracking moments of where do I go? and how do I make this work? and how do I turn these concepts into a story? and what happens next? Of course those still happen. But underneath, since writing Yendi, I haven’t forgotten that at the bottom, I do this because I love it.

If you can keep that feeling at the price of one book that is weaker than you wish it were, well, I call that a fair trade.

Followup On Fourth Street

Had a long talk with a good and smart friend, who conveyed to me some of the confusion over my opening at Fourth Street. She says that it could be interpreted as regretting the “good old days” when women could be freely preyed on by pros at conventions.

It is difficult to explain why I chose to use “safe spaces” and “threatened” in that talk without a long explanation which is inappropriate to this post, though I’ll happily get into it in comments if anyone wishes. I had thought that when I referred to physically safe and “no unwanted harassment” (a stupid phrase, sorry; I mean, as opposed to the more usual wanted harassment? Sheesh, Steve) that would be sufficient to make clear that I proposed no such thing.

Evidently I was wrong. And, while one can always blame the reader for failing to understand, when enough readers get it wrong, one begins to side-eye the writer.

So let me state clearly and for the record I do not support that kind of atmosphere, I do not want that kind of convention, and I deeply apologize for any pain or fear that was caused by anyone thinking I did mean that. My fault, not yours.

ETA: It’s worth pointing out that it isn’t just a matter of reading, but that this was a speech, not presented as text, and a speech that, moreover, I deliberately opened with a shocker. This makes more reasonable the number of people who went past the “physically safe” and “no harassment” parts. Again, my bad.

My opening remarks at Fourth Street Fantasy Convention

This last weekend Fourth Street Fantasy Convention took place. At the beginning I made an opening statement that has generated discussion, dispute, and even some hard feelings. I have exactly no interest in perpetuating one of those idiotic feuds or convention brawls that plague the science fiction community like aphids on tomato plants, but as the discussion is continuing in various places, it seems appropriate to permit those discussing it to have the text at hand. Though these conversations often, alas, degenerate into personal attacks, I am hopeful that the issues themselves will receive some discussion. For those of us who love fantasy fiction, and want there to be better fantasy fiction, it should be obvious that, at least, the issues are important.

(The closing statement, which addresses the same issues from another, perhaps opposite perspective, was delivered by Scott Lynch and can be found here.)

There are two points I want to make about my remarks:
1) I thoughtlessly permitted my statement to be interpreted as coming from the Fourth Street Board, rather than being my own opinion. That was a mistake and I regret it, and I apologize to the board and membership for that confusion.
2) I stand by what I said.

Fourth Street Fantasy Convention is not a safe space. On the contrary, it is a very unsafe space. Of course, it ought to be safe in the sense of everyone feeling physically safe, and in the sense that there should be no unwanted harassment, and it should be free of personal attacks of any kind. But other than that, it is not safe.

Your beliefs about writing, and my beliefs about writing, and what is good, and how to make it good, should be sufficiently challenged to make us uncomfortable.

The interaction of art and politics is getting more and more in our faces. Whether this is good or bad is beside the point (although I think it’s good); it reflects changing social conditions, intensification of conflicts. Anyone who thinks art is independent of social conditions is as hopelessly muddled as someone who thinks there is a direct, simplistic 1:1 correspondence between them.

The result of this is that political understanding, unexamined assumptions, agendas, are very much present in the art we create and thus in the discussions of that art.

If no one feels unsafe, or threatened during these discussions, we’re doing them wrong. The same is true in discussing technique, because technique, content, form, attitude toward the creation and role of art, and understanding of society, are all interconnected, and in challenging one, we are liable to find ourselves challenging another. Am I interested in turning a discussion of writing craft into a political dispute? No. I’m here to talk about craft. But I recognize that there is no clean separation, and that the one can lead to the other, and I’ll not shy away from it when it does.

If our primary goal in such discussions is to make sure everyone feels safe, then we must above all avoid the very sorts of passionate dispute this convention was created for. At that point, the convention has lost so much value that I, for one, would rather spend the weekend writing. I come to Fourth Street to have my assumptions and opinions about fantasy writing challenged and threatened; I come here to feel unsafe. If you aren’t here in order to have your assumptions and opinions challenged, then one of us is at the wrong convention.

If no one feels unsafe, we’re wasting our time here.

An Old LJ Post: The Drug-Allergic Invalid

Apparently LiveJournal is going weird, and everyone’s diving off it and saving their posts. I don’t have a great deal from my old LJ days that I want to save, but this post, from 18-December-2006, needs to be preserved in the annals of, uh, whatever annals one preserves such things in.

Back from the doctor

The doctor says my symptoms are absolutely classic for having a bad drug reaction. She even showed me off to another doctor as having perfect symptoms. I was very proud.

I am the very model of a drug allergic invalid
With bright red rashes from my feet that make their way up to my head
I have no wish for food or wine or sexual amenities
I only wish to stop the swelling up of my extremities

My hands are swollen up so much I cannot hold a cigarette
How many days this will go is more than I can figure yet.
When I shuffle down the hall like a weak septuagenarian,
You’d say I was within a couple days of set for buryin’

You’d say he was within a couple days of set for buryin’
You’d say he was within a couple days of set for buryin’
You’d say he was within a couple days of set for buryburyin’

When you see I can do nothing except watch reruns of “Drag-a-net”
While choking down the steroids and the Benedryl and Tagamet
When it takes me seven minutes to get from my desk down to my bed
You’d see I was the model of a drug allergic invalid

When it takes him seven minutes to get from his desk down to his bed
You’d see he was the model of a drug allergic invalid

I began taking Sulfa on November 27. My glands became swollen on Dec. 7. On the 8th I started developing a rash. That’s when I stopped taking the sulfa. On the 12th, the fever hit, and lasted 2 days, peaking at 102. Around that time, my glands were no longer swollen, but I had some muscle ache. On the 15th, my hands and feet started swelling. Naturally, it was Friday, so I couldn’t go in to see the doctor until today. The swelling has gotten worse since then. I was prescribed steroids, and told to continue taking the Benedryl and Tagamet.

I search the internet for lists of symptoms and the latest memes
That deal with how to make my body stop producing histamines.
When I see my body is now just a single toxic whole
It makes me wish I’d never even heard “Sulfamethoxazole.”

When I cannot stand up without assistance or good leverage
When my lips are so puffed up that I cannot drink hot beverage
In short with the swelling and the rashes on my the skin so red
I am the very model of a drug allergic invalid.

In short with the swelling and the rashes on his skin so red
He is the very model of drug allergic invalid.

One of the Songs I was Raised On

There’s a song that is partially quoted in The Skill of Our Hands, the most recent book by Skyler White and me. It’s to the same tune as the haunting Irish ballad, “Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye” (my favorite version is by Odetta), and its US Civil War update, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”

The version quoted in the book was one of songs we’d sing in the car when I was a kid, along with “Solidarity Forever,” and, “Avant di Popolo” and “Hold the Fort” and so on. When using the song in the book, I changed the word “Fools” to “Fooled” in the tag line because the former strikes me as slightly offensive. So, with that change, here are the full lyrics as I learned them, in case anyone is interested.

The battle is on that none can shirk
—-In field and street.
The lines are drawn twixt those who work
—-And those who eat.
We are the many, they are the few
But we’ve always done what they told us to
Now the time has come when we’ll not be fooled anymore.

How do they hold the upper hand?
—-The answer runs.
They’ve got the gold, they’ve got the land
—-They’ve got the guns.
Divide and conquer has been the trick
With the gift of gab and the hired dick
But the time has come when we’ll not be fooled anymore.

Mighty the engine, vast the field
—-From coast to coast.
The skill of our hands, the wealth they yield
—-Is all Earth’s boast.
For ours are the hands on those machines.
Just think for a minute of what that means.
And the time has come when we’ll not be fooled anymore.
The time has come when we’ll not be fooled anymore.