Stop the Music

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Other people have minds.  I have this thing in my head that gave me this sentence as I woke up “There was a mist of squirrels off shore, a multitude of them, blotting out sea and sky.  It looked like they were running one on the other, and the bottom layer had formed a living raft with their bodies.  They were armed with catanas.”

You tell me what in living blazes I’m supposed to do with that?

This is why I write, because otherwise this type of strange imagery and — dare I say it — story prompt, spills over to my waking hours and then the men with butterfly nets start chasing me around.  (And the fact that spell checker tried to change catanas — which yes, I’m sure it’s misspelled — to cantatas only adds to the madness.)

I haven’t done a state of the writer for a while, so this will have to do.  If you feel hard done by and bitch in the comments, I shall fling either a blast from the past, or the opening of the novella with Nat and Luce at you.

That is by way of being a problem.  It must be written, as it’s already late for Kevin Anderson’s Wordfire “Five by Five,” but I’ve never before written a novella set in a world and with characters that have been in novels.  The first five starts had the “obligatory infodump to bring you up to speed on the where and who these characters are.”  It doesn’t work well in novellas.  So I decided “screw that.”  Even though the Novella is 10 years after AFGM (around the incidents when Nat gets invalided from active duty.  No, it’s not mushy.  It’s about sabotage, treason and war) I figure it might very well be the first time people encounter the series, so I’ll give just enough of the background to make them curious about the novel, but not so much they feel like they’re being bludgeoned.  We’ll see how it goes.  I have the opening but it’s a hard balance act.

I considered writing it in the world of Winter Prince, (Yes, I do know it’s a stupid title for a novel of genetics and alien invasion.  It’s a working title.  I don’t know if it will let me change it, though) but all I need is to wake another series.

Speaking of, I do have the opening for Spirits of the Air which comes between Witchfinder and Rogue Magic.  I’ve been informed it’s a YA steampunk(ish) and it probably is, given the main character is Michael and it starts with him being pursued by the automated barber (magical) which he built and which the under gardener has to shoot.

But most of all, this week, I’m working on Through Fire, to hopefully lay it down.  Which is good because I’m not obsessing on Witchfinder numbers which have suddenly gone through the floor this month.

Now this is probably, partly, our spectacular economy, but it is also, definitely, from talking to people, the trajectory of indie books.  If you don’t have a new one in a series in two months, it drops off a cliff.  I’m not sure what does it, except, of course, ebooks are different.  I’m assured when you have a few more up, they never QUITE fully drop off.

We shall discover if this is true once Baen books are safely on Toni’s desk.  I also have the Musketeer Mysteries die hards asking for The Musketeer’s Confessor, which is half written.  I’ve been hesitant to devote time to it, because the series is selling so unspectacularly — though I’m putting it on ebook soda tomorrow and we’ll see — but Witchfinder has shown me that a new release is a completely different ball game, so I’ll bring that out, (At this point, because of move that HAS to happen looking like September/October) and we’ll see.  I don’t now if a new release in an old series has same effect, I’ll have to try it out.

I’ll admit part of what excites me about indie is that nothing is known.  It’s part of what scares me too.

Ah, well, so long as I don’t have to write about squirrels with catanas (I suspect somehow I got Robert’s dream) I’m fine.

To my subscribers — I’m sorry I really have been very bad at putting up stuff and servicing the other goodies.  Let me fight through the move and it will come.  I’m not kicking anyone out/changing the password, so even if you subscribed for only a year, you’ll get your compensation.  Also, you (poor things) are going to be the first recipients of the “novel in novellas’ that details the life of Jarl Ingemar (and the first 200 years of future history with it.) Hopefully starting next week and running for ten weeks.  (I don’t want to start posting it on Amazon until I have a full novel written, even if it needs edits.)  To explain, that’s an “indie experiment.”  I’m going to bring out the novellas at 2.99 each (20k words) over ten (or twenty, if I space them two weeks) weeks.  Those in a hurry can buy them, of course, but I will make it explicit that they’re going to be collected into a novel at the end, with some bridge sections, and the novel will probably be 4.99 (I know, but we’ll see.  Maybe enough people will be impatient?  Not you guys, though.  you guys get it for free.)

Oh, we found a very cheap flight to LC — leaving at midnight, the traditional red eye — so we’re bringing the boys, for what we expected to pay just for us.  They wanted to come, and after all, Robert is writing like a pro, some with hopes of Baen and some straight to indie. (For various far too complicated reasons, it would be a bad idea for him to find a job for this year.  Also, likely, difficult for the same reasons, but his fingers aren’t broken, and he can write.)  And Marsh will probably be sitting in on the writing panels, or at least I hope he is, since he needs to get over his fear of publishing.

And let’s not forget that it was a comment — by David Weber — at a Liberty con which propelled me to (I think) a new level of writing (after the two shifters, before the revision of DST and all the rest) by saying “The details aren’t important.  People will forgive you any kind of bad writing, or any stutter in world building if your voice is confident enough to carry it.”  He was right.  But, published 5 years, I’d never stumbled onto that truth.

That’s it.  If you demand another post I’ll do one, but right now I’m going to go have caffeine and then be confident in writing (which is way more difficult than it sounds.)

Just.No.Squirrels.

Update: Oh, yeah, I forgot the business, of course.  Tomorrow I’m running at countdown sale on Wings, starting at 99c and I also will be taking short stories free, and if I forget to announce what’s free those five days, someone poke me?

 

 

151 thoughts on “Stop the Music”

  1. Obviously, you hit the ‘c’ instead of the ‘k’ – katana …

    I do it all the time ;-)

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      2. Personally, I like your spelling better. “k”atana just says to me ‘poorly balanced, too short, two handed saber”, where as “c”atana sounds like a sword made out of cats!

        An army of squirrels wielding cat forged swords!

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      3. And now I have this horribly hilarious image of squirrels swinging cats at each other in a giant, “Kill Bill”-style swordfight stuck in my head.

        Thanks, Mrs. Hoyt. Thanks a bunch.

        :P

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    2. No, that’s only for the human swords. Squirrels arrogantly call them catanas in order to distinguish.

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        1. I was under the impression that in Japanese all syllables gotmequal emphasis. Or is that just another of those things about Japan that you get told early on and later discover are mot only not really true, but very nearly the opposite of true?

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          1. I mangle languages horribly and am booger at figuring out emphasis, but I think the “equal emphasis on all of it” is a good way for an English speaker to mimic the slightly off way that they say a lot of letters?

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          3. it’s… well, it’s a tonal language. Which means that there is tonal emphasis on some syllables, but it’s not the same method of emphasis or rationale for application as in western languages, and the pronunciation of a syllable doesn’t change when it’s emphasized.

            So, when you are first learning, to prevent wild misapplication of your native language’s emphasis rules, it’s safest to start by preventing you from applying them at all, and later introduce the proper-to-Japanese logic and emphasis.

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            1. it’s… well, it’s a tonal language.

              You’re thinking of Chinese. I’ve studied both languages; Japanese is very definitely not tonal.

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              1. And despite what the Japanese say about stress being equal on every syllable etc. it DOES have variations that aren’t visible in the written text. Fortunately equal stress woks 99% of the time and is undertsandable the other 1%

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              2. Japanese has two tones, but they’re for dialect more than anything else. They aren’t required to understand what’s being said. We discussed this heavily in one of my later semesters of Japanese, but it wasn’t something that we would learn until much further along, and I changed majors so I never got that far. (That class beat me up so hard. I never made it past fifth semester. Just could NOT do it. :/ ) There’s an explanation on Wikipedia under Japanese Pitch Accent.

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                1. Duly noted. But it’s still nothing like Chinese, whose pronunciation gave me considerable difficulty. (Japanese, on the other hand, was damned easy.)

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                  1. Oh, agreed! They’re nothing alike, and part of the reason I chose Japanese instead of Chinese was that there weren’t tones changing the meaning of everything. Lovely to listen to, but I didn’t want to try learning it.

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                    1. In college, I did quite well in my Chinese class. I was the professor’s favorite. :)

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                    2. I was terrible at Japanese. I pushed through five college semesters of a nastily hard program through sheer stubbornness, but one day it was just too much. I majored in Kamakura Period Japanese Literature instead. Had a lot of fun, worthless degree though.

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                    3. I mostly studied Japanese outside the classroom, beginning with a Japanese-to-English dictionary I got for Christmas when I was in middle school (because I asked for one.)

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              3. You, sir, are absolutely correct. I’d blame something other than my own self or pretend victimhood, except, well, it’s not true. I’m just wrong.

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                1. Glad to hear it. :) Plus, I know the trick to remembering Chinese characters: they’re made up of a discrete set of parts. Memorize the parts, and memorizing characters becomes easy.

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  2. “Just.No.Squirrels”?

    What about Rats? [Very Big Evil Grin While Flying Away Very Very Fast]

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      1. Can’t say this from experience, having never eaten rat, but I would assume that squirrel is MUCH more tasty. As for an army of squirrels, time to break out the 10-gauge double-barrel and the #7 bird shot…

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          1. IIRC, squirrels have the same nutrition problem as rabbits, so you have to supplement them if you’re eating them large scale. But yeah, you can cook squirrels on a board and stuff like that. Never had it myself, though.

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            1. Mmmmmm … rabbit stuffed with squirrel. Maybe stuff the rabbit into a pig, for the fat? Or just wrap it with bacon?

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              1. ” Or just wrap it with bacon?”

                Always the safest choice, when one doesn’t know for sure …

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              2. If you eat nothing but lean meat like rabbits, you get hungrier and hungrier for fat. If you do not get it, your liver freaks out. You try to eat more and more, and you starve to death with a full belly. They call it “rabbit starvation.”

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        2. Calmer Half tells me cane rat tastes plenty delicious, and he doesn’t know why Americans don’t farm it.

          But then, I can’t take that man to a zoo without getting a rundown on how dangerous each African animal is, how it’ll kill you, and how tasty it is. You can take the man out of Africa, but you can’t take Africa out of the man…

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              1. Today we went to the zoo in the warm drizzle. The elephants were in their bliss, and Calmer Half was grinning as he pointed out the behaviors of very happy elephants. Along with such remarks as “I see the groundskeepers have finally come to their senses and stopped fighting the elephants’ decision about where they’re putting in a mud wallow” and reminiscing about being in contact range of orphaned elephants as they learned to use their trunks. (And the reactions they’d get if they stuck their trunk under a lady’s skirt, aimed up, and blew.)

                …

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          2. But then, I can’t take that man to a zoo without getting a rundown on how dangerous each African animal is, how it’ll kill you, and how tasty it is. You can take the man out of Africa, but you can’t take Africa out of the man…

            Man, that sounds like fun.

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          3. After the mess with, oh, salt cedar, kudzu, nutrias, cheatgrass, house sparrows, starlings, and so on, I don’t think anyone will be permitted to add more species to the US menu for a while.

            And I can see why some people might get a wee bit distressed to hear that [insert “majestic” exotic animal] tastes like chicken/not-chicken. *evil grin*

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        3. Does one serve a red wine or a white wine with squirrel? I’m thinking it would be a red but would hate to commit a faux pas.

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  3. But not deprived of crazed squirrels … for an Indie author, probably a pretty good trade-off.

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  4. Yeah, get that Five By Five out, so Kevin can get the anthology out, LOL. I thought about the confidence thing myself this week. I used to write and wonder if people would like it. After getting enough sales and reviews, I realize that some people will really like it, some will kind of like it, and some will hate it no matter what I do. I write for that first group, and that gives me the confidence to take chances and write what I want to write, which seems to work out pretty well.

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      1. Evidence thereof:

        The rejection letters: how publishers snubbed 11 great authors
        [SNIP]
        8. “Your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”
        The poet TS Eliot, editor of Faber & Faber, was one of the many publishers, including George Orwell’s own, Victor Gollancz, who rejected Animal Farm. When it was published, in 1946, Orwell’s original title, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story was amended.

        9. “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.”
        Stephen King received this letter about Carrie. His first published novel was rejected so many times that King collected the accompanying notes on a spike in his bedroom. It was finally published in 1974 with a print run of 30,000 copies. When the paperback version was released a year later, it sold over a million copies in 12 months.

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          1. Don’t it, though? The fact that the greater the intelligence the more self-serving the character is a theme resounding throughout the book makes a body marvel at the blindness.

            “Public-spirited pigs”????? The bind moggles.

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  5. If a group of squirrels bunched together closely enough to raft is all carrying katanas, “mist” is a pretty good description of what will result.

    Know that even those of us who get the novellas for free will still buy them…and then will buy the complete work when it comes out as well. :)

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    1. You know, I figure it was magic. The problem is the image was still in my mind as I woke and it was actually scary. “Evil magical squirrels” is a great name for a rock band.

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    1. Five by Five is a military scifi anthology by Kevin J Anderson, with five Novellas per book. Sarah and I are supposed to be in the third one, coming out, soon, I hope?

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  10. The ‘crawling raft’ of squirrels was a simple thing – the squirrels ran along the backs of their brethren, and when they reached the edge of the raft in the direction they were going they’d take a deep breath, lock arms and tails, then jump into the water and float to provide more backs for the followers to run along. The last ones would help the last row up out of the water – and the rows would then run forward again.

    It was unorthodox and looked a lot like a flat furry Caterpillar tractor tread minus the tractor, but it got the mist of squirrels to their beach assault zone on D-Day with no lives lost – and faster than the Allies managed with all their mechanized equipment.

    The Germans, of course, thought the whole procedure was crazy – as did the Allies, but the SAF was a feared fighting force – especially with their penchant for assaulting up German trousers and giving impromptu orchiectomies with their laughably little – but razor sharp – katanas.

    Later on in WW2, when General McAuliffe was given the German message demanding his surrender at Bastogne, he read it, crumpled it into a ball, threw it in a wastepaper basket, and muttered, “Aw, nuts”. The official reply was typed and delivered by Colonel Joseph Harper, commanding the 327th Glider Infantry, to the German delegation. It was as follows:

    To the German Commander.

    NUTS!

    The American Commander

    The Germans started looking into the trees… warily, and pre-emptively clutching their groins.

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            2. Wasn’t that the subject of President Reagan’s magnificent D-Day commemorative address, The Squirrels of Pointe du Hoc?

              Oh, sure, he changed “squirrels” to “rangers” and “boys,” but only because operational secrecy was still in effect at the fortieth anniversary.

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                1. Dunno if it could have been prevented, but it surely could have been avenged properly.

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                    1. 1. I doubt Reagan’s administration would have been caught in pants-down condition

                      2. There would have been more severe consequences than “suspended with pay” for staff responsible

                      3. Nobody would have been out and about blaming this on a video

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                  2. I sit here reading this more than a year after.
                    My heart rate increased, my jaw clenched, my palms sweaty,

                    I want blood.
                    I want the earth salted and no stone left standing.
                    I want sand fused to black glass.

                    I will NEVER forget or forgive.

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                    1. I want them, in the dark of night, to tell their children stories of the Americans who will not tolerate insult. A hundred years from now I want their boogyman to be named ‘merican.
                      Yes, we are together in htis.

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                    2. I always figured we should get somewhat mafioso on terrorists. Figure out who they are and kill them. And kill their family. And kill everyone in the village they live in. And make sure that everyone knows who did it and why. But that’s me.

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                    3. In the aftermath of 09-11-2001 I disagreed with those asking “Why do they hate us?” in that the foremost question in my mind was “Why don’t they fear us?”

                      Say what you will about Old Nick, he was right when he said “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”

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      1. That’s the announced history, and I’m sticking to it.

        (I agree, I think it was more like “%$^# you, and the horse you rode in on, and !@#@ #@#$% ^#@!3#@ $@!!@$@. Twice! Sideways!” )

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        1. As I remember the story, the accounts say Gen. McAuliffe never used profanity, being a devout Christian, and “nuts” was in his regular repertoire. Others in his command used more pungent pith.

          I’ve known a select few capable of command with a quiet word politely uttered, no further stress needed. Perhaps General McAuliffe had this capacity.

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  11. Stopped at second paragraph: I was thinking it should be “catenas,” Latin for chains, and they were sort of a floating biker gang of squirrels. OK, I’ll go back to writing the WIP and get more black tea.

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      1. That also crossed my mind. You know, it’s funny. I never really got into the Darkover novels, but I loved the short-story anthologies, and a lot of the ideas got filtered over the years into various projects of mine.

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  12. Shades of Alan Dean Foster!
    Squirrels, why did it have to be squirrels!
    For the rest of the truly anal retentive among us:
    Katana – long sword
    Wakazashi – short sword
    Tanto – knife
    All slightly curved with that angled point typical of Japanese blade makers.

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    2. If a Squirrel Assault Force with German orchiectomies on their collective mind wants to call what they use ‘katanas’, I’m not gonna argue. Besides – they ARE long swords to a squirrel.

      Gotta keep a sense of proportion, right? :)

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  13. Excepting them being armed, I’ve read a description of that scene before. It was, the author claimed, a sight witnessed on the Ohio shortly before the New Madrid earthquake.

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    2. This IS a writer’s blog, after all. What do you expect? Besides, most of us find this kind of thing an amusing distraction from the characters screaming in our skulls…

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  15. I just wanted to tell you that my dad and I found copies of A Few Good Men in our local Barnes and Noble. Face out and something like four copies. We took a photo, if you would like that for your amusement. :)

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    2. They closed our local B&N at the start of the year. I used to like heading down there and browsing through the bookstacks for something new to buy during my lunch break.

      No longer, unfortunately.

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      1. sigh

        I industriously buy everything I can at the bricks and mortar B&N, and the rest on their website, in hopes of doing my bit to avoid that sad predicament.

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  16. In 1637 a wandering samurai was traveling through a forest when a small gray squirrel darted into his path. The squirrel stopped in front of him, sat down and stared. He waved his arms and yelled. Excoriating the creature to make way for a true follower of bushido. It would not be budged. Exasperated he drew his wakazashi raising it to strike. The squirrel promptly ran up his leg and into his hakama. An epic battle was fought his pants.

    That warrior was later found bleeding and pantless by his master Lord Isquerrto Squirrahama. His lord inquired as to the cause of his unsightly state. The samurai related his story and then committed ritual seppuku to wipe out the dishonor of his defeat.

    Lord Squirrahama, intrigued by the squirrel’s bravery and embrace of death, which exemplified the way of the warrior, dedicated the Squirrahama school for the perfections of samurai squirrels.
    Three hundred years later their appearance inspired terror in Allied forces in the Pacific.

    There was a mist of squirrels off shore, a multitude of them, blotting out sea and sky. It looked like they were running one on the other, and the bottom layer had formed a living raft with their bodies. They were armed with catanas formed by the bones of cats.

    Two weeks before the Americans had taken Cat Island in the Marianas as the island hopping campaign pushed further to the west. Since their arrival American troops had been preparing for the inevitable counter attack.

    As they drew near to the beach Major Kingman bellowed, “All right boys. Here they come.

    “Damn Jap Kamikaze Tree Rats.” muttered to himself as his packs of terriers barked their battle cry.

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  17. So *that’s* the real reason why the Soviets tried (and failed) to weaponize dogs in World War 2…

    :P

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  18. Intriguing comment by David Weber. I wonder who it might apply to from old stuff – Burroughs, Van Vogt? Did he mean vision trumps pedantry, writing workshops impede vision? I’m not sure what he meant.

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    1. Story is paramount. All the other details are often barely registered, at least by most readers. Fellow writers will notice, and critics will lambast, and editors will issue cutting remarks, but readers just say, “when’s the next one out?” It’s an important lesson, and one that’s often impossiblesomewhat difficult to internalize. Dean Wesley Smith talks about this as he relates his writing process. It’s really what Larry is getting at with his Sad Puppies campaigns.

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      1. Oh the other hand, Super Author Of Everything John Ringo is scared to get on Facebook because he had Faith try to impress some POG Marines by telling them she’d had 7,000-8,000 combat hours in the course of 8-9 _months_.

        Note that a month has ~720 hours.

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        1. So… she was basically saying that for 8-9 months they were in combat conditions non-stop? One could argue the definition, I suppose, and I’d guess the POG Marines weren’t impressed…

          Still, the idea of John Ringo afraid of Facebook is making me smile.

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    2. I’m pretty sure he just means that storytelling power, or the flow of the story itself, can trump a lot of other considerations. Look at The Da Vinci Code. So many things wrong with it, but obviously plenty of people were carried along by the potboiler more than they were stopped by any of the crappy bits.

      That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to avoid crappy bits, but it does mean that readers don’t necessarily care about deficits more than they care about assets. One or two psychologically powerful assets can trump all the deficits in the world.

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      1. It is called “willing suspension of disbelief” and it is the author’s most precious commodity, not to be squandered by any trivial flaw that knocks the reader out of that state. Allow not plot holes you could drive a truck through lest the reader escape your trap.

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    3. If it helps, he was answering one of my fledgelings at the time (one of those times I wanted to dig a hole and crawl in it, because he was just right next to me) because he was one of those “writing advice from the internet” people and he asked — I don’t remember the question exactly, the words might have been different, but they were this random — “I know that if you have “then” or “before” in your story, people know you’re a total amateur, but would you ask for a rewrite or just toss a story like that?” Now, the words were absolutely that common, and the advice which he had found on some writers’ group page was that nuts. it was beginners looking for a magic bullet that made them instantly “professionals.” If I had been Dave Weber, I’d have laughed. (I’d laughed earlier, but I only had ten books out, what did I know?) Dave Weber gave a very urbane answer about stopping polishing to the nth degree, worrying about this word or that, or this word building detail or that. If you tell the story like you believe in it, people will too.” I’ve found this is true, and yep, too much workshopping and dissecting and looking for hidden meanings or trying to follow a “School” destroys that.

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      1. I’m glad I don’t write, cuz frankly I’m not sure what that means exactly. But I do often wonder about the seeming division between Golden Age SF and today and how much of that is my imagination and how much is some fundamental way of story-telling that’s simply different. The implication is as you have said: that story-telling may not only trump craftsmanship but that writing workshops act against artistry.

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        1. Story telling is the necessary precursor. Do that often enough, give it time and attention, and you build your craft – craftsmanship. And then, maybe, given time, talent, practice, etc., one may aspire to artistry.

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      2. I have a friend who has a masters in literature from Northeastern. She would talk about the classes she was teaching and TA’ing and how everything was about style and substance was a secondary consideration. If I recall correctly she got nuked on an assignment because her protagonist wasn’t “Redeemed” at the end. Um… not everyone gets redeemed.

        If you’ve ever seen and enjoyed a Wes Anderson movie, it’s because he tells a story well enough that you’re willing to suspend disbelief about things you’d never let someone else get away with. Or at least I do.

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    4. Well, I do find references to this strange planet known as “Garyson” in his Honor Harrington novels. Obviously settled by the denizens of the “Far Side” newspaper comics.

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  19. I have a funny little British covert ops man living in my head. Periodically he pops up and say something like “There is a,practical limit to what can be accomplished with a penknife and boundless,enthusiasm.”

    Maybe I should sick him on your squirrels?

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    1. My wife’s family have a little poem:
      The other day upon the stair,
      I met a man who wasn’t there.
      He wasn’t there again today,
      I think he’s from the CIA.

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  21. “You tell me what in living blazes I’m supposed to do with that?”

    You have a son who could do a LOT with that … just sayin’ …

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  22. “I’m glad I don’t write, cuz frankly I’m not sure what that means exactly.” I wouldn’t say that- It seems like the “POC Room vs 911” you wrote on Larry’s blog was an example of Weber’s point. I shared it with my wife and a friend, neither of which are even in this genre or aware of Cons at all and both thought it was Hilarious. I didn’t judge it, just enjoyed the heck out of it.

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    2. I guess I understand what you’re saying. If an SFF author has a lot to get off their chest, and the insights are fundamentally true, that’s a kind of thing that bleeds past mere writing talent and energizes a story. One might say that even though what Heinlein and Burroughs wrote was mostly serious, there was always that insightful satirical voice that seemed to capture a lot of truisms about ourselves. If that’s so, that might account for books I don’t like, which seem to spend a lot of time describing rooms or something. Maybe the authors don’t have all that much to say. I was reading Time Considered As A Helix of Semi-Precious Stones by Samuel Delany and it’s amazing how energetic the narrative is. I think all the good ones were like that early in their careers. They had a lot they wanted to say and mixed that into their plots. Heinlein definitely had a lot to say.

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      1. It’s not just not having much to say. The establishment has become increasingly more stifling and scary. I didn’t dare show anything I believed till I “came out” politically, so I did exposition and description. (Well, DST was me, the other stuff… varied.) Bit even liberal writers are afraid. The doctrine changes. What is enlightened today is reactionary tomorrow. Say you called women “ladies” in your books… well… you’re out now.

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        1. I think I understand. It would be like Heinlein taking out his satirical voice which rides above the story and making the story from nuts and bolts only – it might be clever but it would be empty. So now you’re letting what you want to say mesh into the story and fill it out. I’ve noticed those old school authors don’t spend a lot of time describing things without a good reason. It’s like a racer they’ve stripped down. I think we’ve seen the opposite of that in epic multi-volume fantasy, where it’s felt the extra room gives nuance. I think I understand what they mean, but I don’t think that’s true. It can go horribly wrong. What might’ve been interesting is to see Fritz Lieber do a multi-volume epic of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. I don’t think Lieber needed much space to give nuance.

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          1. So now you’re letting what you want to say mesh into the story and fill it out. I’ve noticed those old school authors don’t spend a lot of time describing things without a good reason. It’s like a racer they’ve stripped down.

            Ah. Sarah has explained that elsewhere as having been because the editors of era (I know someone will correct me if I’m remembering incorrectly) thought that novels should be short, compared to today’s standards. The tendency was, therefore, to do minimal descriptions and let the reader’s imagination fill in the rest. Today, people want every little thing described in extreme, sometimes nauseating, detail.

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            1. I think word lengths came out of magazine lengths and those were established and used within the industry for at least the first 60 years of genre SF. When Frank Herbert tried to publish “Dune” in 1965 its word length was almost unprecedented. Top 40 music was similar but for more arbitrary reasons – it was a 3 min. limit or something like that. Starting in the late ’60s underground radio started playing long songs and even whole albums, which just wasn’t done in the industry. Strict formulas died. Underground formats became so popular they actually produced hits that crossed over to Top 40, like “Lola” by The Kinks. Mainstream radio wanted nothing to do with a girl/guy until they figured out money was money.

              I agree with the nauseating detail. Robert Jordan stuck his braid-pullers in a circus for half the book for no discernible reason. A lot of that stuff seems like thumb-twiddlng.

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            2. I have to wonder whether the evolution of writing technology from manual to electric typewriters, and further to word processors, hasn’t influenced book length. I know when I was working in the bookstore back in the eighties, books suddenly got longer.

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                1. Isn’t that the point of reading, rather than watching video? The images in your head are more vivid and real than what Hollywood puts out.

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              2. There was also the 19th century “paid by the word” logorhea from people like Nathaniel Hawthorne. He took.. what was it, 40 pages to describe a single room? NOBODY would put up with that today. You could cut the brooding with a knife, and it was very irritating. So I don’t think it’s technology. I think it has to do with culture, expectation, and who reads. We have lots of fanboys now who obsess over everything. Those people are going to want detail. Folks who read action packed thrillers are going to get less detail for things. Back in Hawthorne’s day, people who could read had more time to read, especially during the winter. So lots of brooding and implication were desired. The fact that we are sliding into more detail and implication is almost ironic, considering the infamous short attention spans everyone is bemoaning. Maybe it’s a reaction to the swiftness and changes from other technologies?

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            3. Blame distributors, actually. To raise the price, they demanded an increase in page count — feasible because, after all, the material going into the book is among the least of the costs.

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          2. Yes. Part of this is that I’m reissuing the old stuff indie, and one of the series is proving a right b*tch to fix, between the vast descriptions and bits of history and the stuff the editor injected which makes it extremely politically correct. Eh.
            But yes, I prefer to write books about something. This is why it came to quit or come out of the political closet and I figured I’d do number two and if it killed my readership, I’d quit.
            I think that’s why SF/F has become so… blah and why there are so many books about “interesting time periods” or other “difficult” settings. Because it provides something for the book to be about without revealing yourself.

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    3. I just thought a second more about what you said. I was trying to present the issues from the cop’s point of view, who didn’t know that culture. That meant the conversation is an info dump but inseparable from the story. It IS the story. It seems I’ve read that’s a big deal for writers when it comes to moving a story and presenting the culture at the same time. It never occurred to me they might be meshed in such a way to actually BE the story. Still, it seems really complex. I’m glad I don’t have to tackle that.

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  23. So… I had to go to town today and brought _A Few Good Men_ in case I ended up sitting to wait anyplace. So, I go to get the car washed and the clerk looks at the book and goes… “Ooohhhh, that looks so wonderfully horrible!” I wasn’t quite sure if this was good or bad (I’ll admit it not my *favorite* cover) so I sort of smiled and said, “Yeah, it’s, um, pretty fun.”

    So she snatches the book up from the counter where I’d laid it to dig through my purse to pay and starts reading the back of it. I ask if she reads science fiction and she’s, “Oh, yeah. And comic books and stuff.” and we chat a little and I ask if she’s ever been to Bubonicon and invite her to come. She hands me the book back and says she just might check it out. I say that _Darkship Thieves_ is the first one and it might make more sense to start there. So she grabs up a pen and writes: Sarah Hoyt, Darkship Thieves, on her arm.

    Or I assume that’s what she wrote, anyhow. And I thought I’d report that, today, cover art has done its job. Huzzah. :)

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    2. Yup. That’s the function of cover art.

      It’s really fun having spent years grumbling to one’s self about absurd cover art and then sitting down to throw together one’s own and realizing how inaccurate the cover’s going to be for saleability purposes

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      1. The best essay on the purpose and function of cover art come from the band XTC’s second album, XTC’s Go 2, and can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_2

        Mind, I haven’t the slightest idea what the album sounds like, as I never bought it and can’t recall ever hearing even one track.

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  24. Obviously, Sarah needs a hero who can defeat the squirrel threat. Could that hero be….

    …er, maybe not.

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