Anyway. Let’s start today off with something good! Back in the day I decided that I needed to write a post-apocalyptic dinosaurs on Mars story. The result was “The Endangered Camp,” which appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 2 Which was, itself, chock full of awesome stories–one was nominated for a Nebula (Saladin Ahmed’s “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela”), and several others turned up in various years best volumes.

But it was not avaiable in an ebook edition. Until now! Gentle readers, I give you the Kindle edition of Clockwork Phoenix 2! For $3.99!!!!

Editor Mike Allen has links to Amazon UK and Amazon DE and says it’ll be available in epub and mobi at Weightless Books next Tuesday.

Yeah, I’ve got Real Life Crit Group on Sunday, and a story I need to finish before then so I can, you know, get it critted. I’m up to the climactic scene, I’m kind of stuck for a detail. Normally I get those details by reading huge amounts of nonfiction, and then adding in showers or naps. So I ought to be using arcane methods of divination to figure out what nonfiction I need to read. Instead, of course, I’m writing a blog post.

I was, as I just mentioned yesterday, a victim of the Arthurian Virus. Around the same time, I also contracted a Sherlockian infection. It was mild compared to the Arthurian thing, but it left a lasting impression.

Before I recovered, I had ingested not only the entire Sherlockian Canon, but also The White Company and a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle. It wasn’t nearly as hard-hitting as Arthur was–I was left able to appreciate most of the pastiches that occasionally hit the market (Carol Nelson Douglas FTW, IMO), but never amassed a collection or spent time tracking down related historical information. And I have to admit, besides the fake notes customarily tacked onto the front of pastiches about finding boxes of papers signed by Dr Watson, I have a decided aversion to The Game.

This desperately needs a cut. Don’t click unless you want to read nearly three thousand words of me blathering about Sherlock Holmes.

Anyway. Reading Sherlock Holmes from a modern perspective is…interesting. I enjoyed the original stories very much–but they’re so very Victorian. Even as a high schooler, the attitude towards women made me wince. And that’s even though, from all I can tell, those attitudes were in some ways strikingly progressive for their time. I love the fact that one of the few people to defeat Holmes was a woman–a woman whose intelligence he underestimated. But I wince every time I read the line about how…well, here:

When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a perfectly overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of it. In the case of the Darlington Substitution Scandal it was of use to me, and also in the Arnsworth Castle business. A married woman grabs at her baby; an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box.

It’s hard to read that without wincing a bit. Doyle grew up surrounded by intelligent and formidable women, and it shows. But the prejudices of his time also show. Doyle himself thought the idea of women voting was absurd.

And then there’s the racism.

At the sound of his strident, angry cries there was movement in the huddled bundle upon the deck. It straightened itself into a little black man—the smallest I have ever seen—with a great, misshapen head and a shock of tangled, dishevelled hair. Holmes had already drawn his revolver, and I whipped out mine at the sight of this savage, distorted creature. He was wrapped in some sort of dark ulster or blanket, which left only his face exposed; but that face was enough to give a man a sleepless night. Never have I seen features so deeply marked with all bestiality and cruelty. His small eyes glowed and burned with a sombre light, and his thick lips were writhed back from his teeth, which grinned and chattered at us with a half animal fury.

That’s The Sign of the Four. Of course, once again, Doyle could also be fairly progressive for his time. In “The Adventure of the Yellow Face” a white American woman married a Black man, who died, and she has hidden her child, lest her new husband find out and abandon her because her child is Black. The passage, where Holmes discovers this and the woman confesses, is today a trifle cringe-worthy, but having confessed:

“…and I ask you what is to become of us, my child and me?” She clasped her hands and waited for an answer.

It was a long ten minutes before Grant Munro broke the silence, and when his answer came it was one of which I love to think. He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held his other hand out to his wife and turned towards the door.

“We can talk it over more comfortably at home,” said he. “I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.”

I can think of writers who’d have played out that scene very differently–indeed, the entire scenario would have been set up along very different lines, given another suitably disposed author. Doyle is due some criticism, but also a few cookies. Like anyone, he was a product of the time and place he lived. (Important note–this does not exempt him from criticism.)

So, why do I read and enjoy Doyle–and Dickens and Carnacki the Ghost Finder, and so on, why do I enjoy those, and wince at the sexism and the racism but still say, “Well, there’s good there too,” but when I read Steampunk, I don’t make those allowances as easily? I haven’t totally worked out the answer–but what I’ve come up with so far is that I can look at the time and place Doyle was writing and say, “Yeah, well.” I read someone writing today and I think “Why don’t they know better?”

Which brings me to Sherlock.

I watched the first episode on PBS just, what, two weeks ago? And I said to myself, “Self, this is freaking awesome.” Watson’s psychosomatic limp–I giggled aloud. “Afghanistan or Iraq?” The whole deduction from Watson’s cell phone thing. Rachel–ha ha! All the nods to the originals (that I caught–like I said, I’m a fairly half-assed Sherlockian).

And that cipher, Dr. Watson? Who in Doyle isn’t much more than a framing device with a name? Was now a much more interesting character in his own right. It’s the first time one of the modern pastiches/adaptations actually made me interested in Watson. Lestrade–Lestrade is fantastic. He’s not just there to be not-quite-smart-enough alongside Holmes’ brilliance, he’s an actual character. And the obvious ways things had to change, to move Holmes up to the twenty-first century. Cell phones! “Not your housekeeper, Dear!” I was really enjoying that. All right, the moment of slut-shaming made me wince, but the rest? Was awesome.

I was annoyed that I’d have to wait a whole week for the next one, and it would be airing during trick-or-treating and I’d have to watch it on the website the next day. Except, while I was wandering around the internet I kind of tripped over some files that were just sitting there completely unattended and…*

So I watched the other two.

The second one had its moments–Holmes demanding to know if Watson remembered the graffiti, for instance, was very amusing. But. That opening bit, with Holmes fighting the guy who was supposed to be, I don’t know, an Arab or something? I mean, what? Not seriously?

We’re dealing with Chinese smugglers–who make origami? A Chinese shop that sells Lucky Cats? It’s not just a criminal gang, it’s a cult? It’s…Doyle was a product of his time. Surely a contemporary writer should know better? It really left a bad taste in my mouth.

Pondering this issue (instead of working on my own stories, of course), the best construction I could put on it was that it’s another sort of nod. Doyle didn’t do much research. Well, he did for his historical novel The White Company, which he felt was far superior to his Holmes stories, more Important Work, but he fairly famously didn’t check some of his facts for the Holmes stories, things that were pivotal to Holmes’ solutions. You can’t actually tell from a bike track which direction the bike was going. Snakes don’t have external ears and while they can sense vibrations, the one in “The Speckled Band” probably wouldn’t have heard its owner whistling for it.

He wasn’t even very consistent about internal details. Where did that Jezail bullet hit Watson anyway? What was Watson’s first name, who was the landlady at 221B? During what period was Watson married? These inconsistencies lend interest in The Game, to those who enjoy coming up with elaborate rationalizations, but if you ask me, they exist because Doyle just didn’t care very much about that sort of thing. He only cared about a good, lurid story. The result was, foreign locales get, well, casually treated if Doyle hadn’t ever actually visited them. Same with foreign cultures, and anyone who wasn’t familiarly English. (Which included Americans–he felt, IIRC, that the Revolution had been a mistake on the part of the British, and he looked forward to the happy day when Americans were re-united with the British Empire.)

It’s entirely possible that the second episode meant to nod to this directly, mixing up Chinese and Japanese, exoticizing the foreign villains. The more I think about it, the more certain I am that’s what was intended. But it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, it doesn’t work so supremely well as the first episode.

I think part of why it didn’t work for me was the fact that “ironic” racism is, to put it mildly, a really difficult thing to pull off. To put it mildly. And then there’s the fact that the first and the third episodes struck me very much as someone having carefully, surgically removed Holmes from its original setting and grafted it seamlessly onto the present, in a way that’s astonishing just because the stitches are so deftly done, it looks like it could have been a whole piece to begin with even though you know it isn’t, even though you can see the stitches. Whereas the second feels to me like it’s constantly elbowing me in the ribs and saying “Look, I cut this patch out of a Victorian antique!” I mean, the elbowing is bad enough, but the bit they cut out is only my least favorite bit of that Victorian antique, the actually problematic part, and the patch job doesn’t seem to recognize that. I couldn’t go, “Yeah, yeah, I love that bit too!” like I did with 1 and 3. Because that was exactly the bit I didn’t love.

Don’t get me wrong, there were good moments. I just really, really hope they rethink the racism bit in the future. To put it mildly.

You’d think that would be all I have to say, but it isn’t! This story I’m working on isn’t going to not-write itself, you know. Okay, well, it is.

So anyway. Then I got to thinking–what is it people love so much about Holmes anyway?

Take Holmes away, and you’ve got some fairly conventional Victorian stories. Some nice Gothic touches, certainly. But very conventional. It’s not just Doyle’s touch that makes them so popular, because Doyle wrote other stuff, work he thought was much better than his Holmes stories, and while most of us more or less know of the existence of, say The Lost World, how many of us have read Micah Clarke or The White Company? We think of Doyle, we think of Holmes.

It’s Holmes we’re interested in. Watson’s just the frame for Holmes’ picture, Lestrade, Gregson–they’re only there to contrast with Holmes’ genius, his justified arrogance thrown in relief against their self-deluding confidence. The stories are fairly conventional, if lurid. What we love is Holmes’ flights of deduction. It’s like a magic trick. Show him your pocket watch and he’ll tell you all about your dead, drunk brother. Show him a hat, and he’ll tell you its owner’s wife no longer loves him. But like a magic trick, there’s a logical explanation, a chain of reasoning behind it, and the recitation of that chain of reasoning is itself entertaining, one of the things we love about Sherlock Holmes.

The stories present Holmes as supremely rational. His arrogance is not sociopathy–Sherlock‘s Holmes calls himself a “high-functioning sociopath”** but I don’t think Doyle’s is, by any stretch of the imagination. No, Doyle’s Holmes is supremely rational, arrogant because he knows he’s smarter than anyone around him. Really, he’s kind of a jerk, but he’s a really really smart jerk, and he uses his powers on the side of justice and Victorian morality, so that’s all right, then.

Put that way, I’m not sure why I like Holmes so much, but I do.

It’s that “supremely rational” I’ve been pondering. Here’s Doyle’s Holmes:

From a drop of water,” said the writer, “a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.

“The writer,” if you haven’t already read A Study in Scarlet, is Holmes himself.

Here’s the thing–from a drop of water, you might infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara–maybe. If you knew enough about water. If you knew there was enough water in the world to produce either or both. Certainly if you were intimately familiar with only the Atlantic, a sample of Nile water wouldn’t really allow you to infer much about the Nile beyond what you generally might know about water. You could figure out some things, but you couldn’t go from there to crocodiles and Egypt. That idea–that from one drop of water, from one small sample of information, one can infer the existence of essentially everything else in the universe, isn’t really true. Holmes isn’t relentlessly logical, not really. If he were relentlessly logical he’d never have underestimated Irene Adler, for one thing. No, what he is, is hyper-aware of the details and associations of the social and physical context he lives in.*** Hop into your cross-universe time machine and ask Holmes to deduce your occupation from your appearance, and how far do you think he’d get?

I wonder if part of Holmes’ popularity at the time Doyle was writing didn’t involve a sort of unstated assumption that the society they (we!) lived in was merely a logical outcome of the nature of the universe itself. And now, of course, we still perhaps enjoy that assumption, and still love the magic trick, and there’s something attractive about the arrogant genius who uses his powers for Good. I’m not sure just what it is that’s attractive about it, but it’s there.

Well, I’ve wasted plenty of time. Vacuumed that cat utterly dustless, wouldn’t you say? I think I’d better get myself another cup of tea and actually apply my brain to my actual work.

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*Don’t fret, I’ve ordered the DVD.

**Incidentally, rather like the originals, there are some odd holes in Sherlock. Both “psychopath” and “sociopath” are terms that have very fuzzy meanings, both in ordinary conversation and in psychology. Meanings have shifted, legal definitions don’t necessarily match current theories, and as a result splitting hairs about whether this Sherlock is one or the other strikes me as kind of silly and meaningless. It was an amusing line, nonetheless.

***Which is exactly why he underestimated Irene Adler. And why we wince when Holmes declares of the large-hatted man whose wife no longer loves him because she hasn’t cleaned his hat in weeks (because a loving wife is a good maid!) that he must be an intellectual because his head is so big. Phrenology FTW!

****And here’s another of Doyle’s odd holes–in order for Holmes to function, he needs as much miscellaneous information as possible. No detail should be too small or too irrelevant. And yet, in The Sign of the Four (and again in Sherlock, updated a bit) he tells Watson that he only has room for important information, that politics and art and society gossip and astronomy are useless to him. They’re not, of course–politics and art and society gossip are all overtly useful to him. And while astronomy never is in Doyle’s stories (that I recall), it’s trivial to construct situations in which it would be. As demonstrated already, yes, but I bet you could come up with more with five minutes’ thinking.

It’s November 1! Samhain, All-Saints, whatever you prefer to name it! And that means GigaNotoSaurus is live, with a story by Ruth Nestvold, “The Bleeding and the Bloodless.” If you’d like a portable version, something you can read on the train or whatever, there’s a link to an epub version right there at the top of the page.

And the etc. involves more fiction!

I saw this morning on Shweta Narayan’s journal that the Carl Brandon Society is…well, here:

The Carl Brandon Society is holding a prize drawing of five eReaders starting November 1st and ending November 22nd, 2010. The funds raised will benefit the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, a fund that sends two emerging writers of color to the Clarion writers workshops annually.

Entrants will have the opportunity to win one of two (2) available Barnes & Noble Nooks, one of two (2) available Kobo Readers (with Wi-Fi), and one (1) Alex eReader by Spring Design. Drawing tickets cost one US dollar ($1).

In addition, each eReader will come pre-loaded with books, short stories, poems and essays by writers of color from the speculative fiction field. Some of the writers include N. K. Jemisin, Nisi Shawl, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Terence Taylor, Ted Chiang, Shweta Narayan, Chesya Burke, Moondancer Drake, Saladin Ahmed, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and there will be many more.

How awesome is that? How much will a dollar set you back? For a chance to win an ereader with amazing authors on it? Go enter, you know you want to.

Next! Not a huge steampunk fan–though the recent Sherlock Holmes adaptation has me thinking even more about Steampunky issues and I might avoid fiction-writing by throwing those thoughts at y’all*–but, okay, where did that sentence start?

Not a huge steampunk fan, but look at the TOC of Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and tell me it doesn’t look tempting. You can pre-order it, it comes out in January.

ETA–Oh, and dang it! This is what happens when I have a bunch of stuff tabbed up and mean to post about it–I miss something.

Apex Magazine’s Arab/Muslim themed issue is up. I know what I’ll be reading today.

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*Loved it! Except the second episode kind of bugged me a bit. I’ve been mulling over that. But I find myself watching the other two over, and I pulled my copy of the originals off my bookshelf this weekend, and that’s a sure sign something’s fermenting.

So, like I said a while ago, when Beneath Ceaseless Skies appeared on the scene, I said to myself, “Self, I would love to sell them a story.”

And lo, I have done this thing! And the newest issue is now posted, and my story “Beloved of the Sun” is available for your (I hope) reading pleasure!

I’m incredibly pleased to be appearing at BCS. They’ve published some really great stories, and I’m thrilled to be in the same company as the authors who have been published there.

Ooh, a blog post! Ann must be avoiding writing fiction!

Right you are!

So, my last post about first person led at least two commenters (Asakiyume– on LJ and Megs on annleckie.com) to mention that first person doesn’t need some sort of constructed excuse, or logistical framework, and what about stories like Sunset Boulevard or The Lovely Bones? And of course they’re right.

That got me thinking about assumptions we make–as readers and as writers–about third person narratives. The argument is that first person requires an occasion or at least the possibility of an occasion where the narrator is actually telling the story. That’s okay as far as it goes–I don’t think it actually goes very far, truth be told, but I’ll entertain the notion for the sake of argument.

Who is telling the story of, say, “To Build a Fire” and how does the narrator know what happened, given that there’s only one character and he dies at the end, quite alone?

Did you ever ask that question? I’m betting not. Because, I think, we’ve got this idea of stories in third person as being neutral and objective, like it’s pure narrative coming out of thin air. But there’s always someone telling the story, whether it’s obviously someone who was obviously present, or not. So what makes third person any different from first person in this regard? Why are there no faux-prohibitions against writing any stories at all in which the protagonist is the only character and dies an unwitnessed death?

Or even less dramatically–if we need that sort of “logical” framework to tell a story, how is it that any narrator who is not the character herself can tell us what’s in the thoughts of that character?

The answer is, they can’t. No actual, existing narrator can. Fiction conventionally ignores this, so that we can tell stories about men who die because they’re alone and can’t build fires, or tell stories about the intimate psychological states of various characters, or whatever it is we need to do. First person is really no less able to take advantage of convention, ignore it or twist it, or whatever the writer wants to do. As long as it’s done well, and it works, then it’s all good.

I think ignoring that aspect of third person–that whether or not the text acknowledges it directly, there’s always a narrator, always some entity with its own point of view telling the story–isn’t a particularly good idea. Particularly if you’re interested in working with Omniscient, which isn’t really fashionable right now, and to judge from the two slushpiles I see regularly, isn’t a tool in a lot of aspiring writers’ toolkits, or at least not one they know how to use effectively. Omniscient isn’t just pure story and exposition coming from out of the air, all-knowing and utterly impartial. I mean, sometimes it pretends to be that, but it isn’t, and IMO understanding that is important for being able to handle omni well.

I also think it’s a good idea to stop and think about all the “third person” stories we tell and hear just in our daily lives. Casting them in third person can make them seem completely objective, but every story is told from a point of view, and no single point of view is completely objective and impartial. I think it’s important to realize that, just generally.

Thinking about this led me off on a tangent. You know stories like, oh, The Worm Ouroborus, or A Princess of Mars, or Looking Back, or…there are bunches of them. They want to be stories about someone in a Fantastic world–the far future, Mars, Mercury, etc, wherever. If someone were writing those stories these days–well, they’d be very different stories, no one would write those stories these days, because “these days” are their own time with their own concerns and preoccupations, but that’s a whole other digression–if someone were writing those stories these days, would she bother making some present day person have a vision in which the story set on another planet could unfold? Not likely–she’d just tell us what happened, plain as that. Would she bother having the main character fall asleep and wake up in the future? Maybe–but she’d be more likely to say, “I want to write about the future!” and just…start the story there. And even if she went with waking up in the future, she’d likely not bother with the “And then I woke up!” ending, thus explaining how we could have received the story to begin with. Because we don’t actually need that. Would she bother to make the main character mysteriously fall into a torpor and wake on Mars–and then mysteriously wake up again on Earth? Maybe–but then again, she’d maybe just start “One day on Mars…”

I’m thinking it used to be much more common for writers to construct those sorts of logical frames around fantastic stories, the issue of “how are we hearing this tale to begin with” was a question they felt needed an answer.* But it’s not one we’ve really been interested in, as readers or writers, for quite some time, particularly in F&SF. Who cares how we know the story? All that really matters is the story itself.

Which doesn’t mean thinking about that framework isn’t potentially useful, or no one should use that sort of frame because it’s old fashioned or whatever–use whatever seems good to you! But it’s been a long time since anyone really worried overmuch about how a guy on Mars could give us a first person account of his adventures if he was on Mars and we were here–or how adventures on Mars could become known to us at all, first or third person. It’s not a matter of every story needing some sort of justification, it’s not a matter of rules about what could or couldn’t be told to us under what conditions. It’s a matter of what you’re trying to do, of what works for the particular story you’re working on.
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*I have not done extensive research to back up this assertion, so it may turn out to be entirely incorrect.

So, this weekend, sitting around drinking coffee in the bookstore, talking about writing with Anna Schwind. By a fairly circuitous route, the topic of rules came up, and one of my least favorites, the “rule” (or sometimes merely “advice”) that one shouldn’t write in first person.

So, why shouldn’t one write in first person? Give me one good reason.

You know what that one good reason is? I’m sure you do, you’re opening your mouth to say it right now, just this very moment, “Ann, the reason is that you can’t have any real suspense in a first person story, because you know the narrator doesn’t die! You knew that!”

Okay. So. That’s bunk. It does not bear examination.

So let’s examine it, shall we?

Y’all know, don’t you, that threat of death is not the only sort of suspense available? Or even the best? Or the worst. It’s one of several. Each story is going to have its own crises, its own climax, its own stakes. These do not always–or even often–involve risk of death.

And even–perhaps especially–in adventure/SF/F, the risk of death isn’t what it seems like. The fact is, that a writer can threaten the life of her heroine all she wants, and make that very suspenseful, and exciting–and frankly we all know the heroine isn’t going to die. If she did die, chances are the reader would feel angry and betrayed (unless it was telegraphed early) because that’s just not how the game goes. First person, third person, doesn’t matter. You know the heroine will emerge from the story alive, most of the time. This does not damage the suspense one bit.

And what about stories like, oh, Treasure Island, a flat out adventure novel told entirely in first person. No lack of suspense, I assure you. Great Expectations? Any number of detective novels? The Great Gatsby (Can Nick Carraway possibly make it out alive???). Moby Dick. If you had trouble slogging through Moby Dick it wasn’t because it was in first person so you knew Ishmael would live through it. It was because of all those infodumps.* A Princess of Mars? No suspense? Really?

You can say it over and over again, that first person negates suspense because the narrator must necessarily survive, but when you examine actual books and stories it turns out not to be true. You can say of every example that doesn’t fit “Well, that’s an exception,” but more than one or two exceptions and your rule isn’t a rule anymore, is it? And even one or two exceptions have to be explained. And there are a hell of a lot more than one or two exceptions, and the Occam’s Razor explanation for them is “The rule isn’t actually true.”

So how the heck did it get to be even said in the first place, let alone repeated and freaking believed by anyone?

So I’m saying these things, and gesturing vehemently with my (by now fortunately empty) coffee mug, and suddenly it dawns on me.

There’s a persistent problem in slush–one of two besetting difficulties of beginning writers. One is the inability to think past the obvious, the automatic grab for the first thing that comes to mind, without digging past that first cliche-loaded layer.

The other–the pertinent one here–is a fundamental misunderstanding of how suspense works.

It shows up a couple different ways. One is in the “Gotcha” stories. “Aliens are tormenting our hapless main character. Wait, our main character is a fish and the aliens are employees in an aquarium shop! THE END!”

A similar sort of thing is, say, a story about someone wandering in an inexplicable landscape–either familiar surroundings where no one seems to see them, or a strange world where nothing makes sense to them. They can’t understand what’s going on! It’s all mysterious and makes no sense! Until the end, where the overly patient reader discovers along with the main character that the MC was actually dead all along and needed to come to that realization in order to Move On.

I’m going to say this flat out, and I rarely say this about any kind of writing issue–plot or technique or whatever. These stories can’t work. They are fundamentally broken. If you find yourself writing one of them, throw it away and write something else.

What is it that makes them broken? Well. It’s the same thing that makes this broken:

Jeremy stared at the glibzorb on the table. Whatever was he going to do with a glibzorb? Of course, it was a perfectly good glibzorb, even if he didn’t much like that shade of purple it was painted. But why Uncle John had specifically left his glibzorb to Jeremy, right there in black and white in his will, Jeremy could not imagine.

And on in that vein, steadfastly refusing to explain what a glibzorb is. Nine times out of ten, the end of the story–the intended punchline–is the explanation of what, exactly, a glibzorb is, and it’s never much of anything.

The problem is, the writer knows that what she wants is suspense. She wants to compel the reader’s interest, to make the reader want–no, need to keep reading. This is an excellent impulse, it’s absolutely true. That’s just what a writer needs to do. And issues of information flow–controlling just what information the reader gets and when–are, in fact, very important, especially in exposition-heavy fields like SF&F. It’s good to be considering that.

So, okay, how do you do that? What makes suspense? Like a lot of writing questions, maybe the best way to answer it is to examine stories one finds suspenseful.

From a certain point of view, a certain kind of surface examination, it seems like suspense is generated when you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Indeed, there’s a qualitative difference between, say, watching an action flick the first time, when you don’t in fact know what’s going to happen, and watching it a second time, when you do. So it seems reasonable to say “Suspense is what you get when you don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

Stop there, and you get Dead and Don’t Know It stories. You get glibzorbs, and “Gotcha!” stories. And rejections. Lots and lots and lots of rejections.

You also get the idea that knowing the narrator survives must necessarily damage suspense.

So, you can’t stop there. Not knowing what’s going to happen next is not a condition for suspense. You know the hero will live. You know the crew of the Enterprise will be back at their stations same time next week. It’s not that you don’t know. It’s that you do know, but you care about what happens next. Sometimes the writer keeps you in the dark. Will she choose tea or coffee? You don’t know! But if she makes the wrong choice…

Or sometimes you do know. You see our heroine’s hand reaching for the tea and you know the horrible consequences of that choice and you can’t look away.

And sometimes the stakes aren’t world-shattering or life-threatening. Sometimes a story turns on the main character simply realizing something. That doesn’t make those stories any less interesting, suspenseful, or significant.

So, look. Don’t worry so much about suspense. Suspense isn’t about concealing information from the reader. What information you give the reader and when is an important issue, but it isn’t the sole basis for suspense. Worry about engaging and holding the reader’s interest. Worry about making the reader care. And then make whatever stylistic choices you need, to make the story what you want it to be. Write it in third, in first, in second, in omni, whatever the story requires. They all have their virtues, and their weaknesses, and you won’t be doing yourself any favors if you start taking bad advice and throw perfectly good tools out of your box.

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*Try reading it as a hard science fiction novel and see if that gets you anywhere.

**I think all of my favorite Andre Norton novels are in first person, now I think of it. Some of them I stayed up under the covers with a flashlight to read, and I had to practically tape my eyelids open I was so tired but I couldn’t stop reading. That’s what you’re after, isn’t it? It’s entirely possible with first person.

For reasons that are probably obvious to anyone who would read this, I have been pondering the idea of people holding beliefs that unfit them for (American) citizenship.

What would those beliefs be? I mean, seriously.

Since the Constitution is very specific about the free exercise of religion, and the illegality of the government establishing or promoting any particular religion, it can’t be that any particular religious belief is too Un-American to be borne.

And let’s be honest–you could make a laundry list of aspects of Islam that were objectionable to you, start with the status of women, say, and maybe dig for some quotes about killing unbelievers and whatnot. Add in some religiously-motivated violence. Take that list, and then take a close look at the Bible, and the history of Christianity. Which, what, eighty, ninety percent of this country is some kind of Christian?

Let’s talk the Crusades–not just the ones everyone remembers, not just Jerusalem and the Templars (though, that there? Was some serious fucked-upness in the name of religion*), but the Northern Crusades and the Albigensian Crusade.

Let’s talk not just about the treatment of women in the past of Christianity, but present attitudes in some sects even today. Let’s talk about Quiverfull, and all those folks who take II Corinthians to heart, not just “It was progressive for its time, see,” but “No, that’s how God means women’s status to be.” Let’s talk Christians who openly advocate the execution of gays and adulterers. Let’s talk “God hates fags.” Let’s talk people who blow up clinics and murder doctors.

Let’s talk about what Christian beliefs might unfit one for citizenship.

Oh, but Christianity is huge and varied, and most Christians are perfectly nice! It’s those exceptions, those people gibbering over there, they aren’t representative of Christianity!

Islam is also huge and varied. I can’t say I’ve specialized in the history of Islam, but I can tell you without looking it up that Sunni and Shiite and Sufi are different groups, and treating them like they’re all the same is like saying there’s no real difference between Catholics and Baptists.

Yeah, you’re smiling, right? Of course there’s a difference. Catholics are the Original Universal Church and Baptists are heretics. Or, wait. Baptists are Christians, and Catholics are pagan idolaters. Sell you an indulgence soon as look at you! (I met a guy once, raised Catholic, whose school friends once confronted him with the horrifying historical fact they’d learned from their Baptist preacher–that the Catholics had thrown the Christians to the lions, during the Roman Empire. I am not making that up.)

When you say “Moslems believe…” stop and think how it would sound if you said “Christians believe…” Christians believe gays should be executed? Christians believe non-Christians should die unless they convert? Christians believe women are lesser than men and shouldn’t speak in public? Christians believe Christianity should be the established religion of this nation? Not all of them, but some have, and some do.

About the only thing you can say all Christians believe would be something like “Christians believe Jesus was the Son of God who came to redeem our sins.” Maybe. More than that, you run into a zillion sects and individual, idiosyncratic readings of Scripture.

Moslems believe there is no god but God and Mohammed is his prophet. Beyond that? Well, what kind of Moslem are you talking about?

All of the big religions, the ones that have lasted a thousand years or more and have large followings, all of them are like this. The problem isn’t some particular religion, the problem isn’t that one religion is about peace and love and the others aren’t. The problem is, people are people, and some of them are gibbering fuckwits, and some of them are sociopaths who can manipulate large groups of gibbering fuckwits. All the big religions are, actually, fragmented into sects, the single category containing each one is really just a sort of generalized tag for a grab bag of variations on the basic theme.

All of them have, in scripture or tradition, stories or verses that are unpleasant, that could lead a gibbering fuckwit to do violence. And all of them, that I’ve noticed, have some version of “Look, don’t be assholes to each other, ‘kay?” as part of their beliefs. People being people, any given person or group’s success in following that guideline rather than going with the nasty bits is wildly varied. It’s not like there’s one category in particular that fails more at it than others. Not like there’s any religion of long standing that doesn’t have embarrassing corpses stashed away in its many closets.

And, truth? Most of the gibbering fuckwits, the evil, horrible people I’ve met or heard about were worshippers of Jesus. That’s because the vast majority of people surrounding me worship Jesus. Not because there’s some philosophical flaw in Jesus-worship as a whole. (Though, personally, I think there is a philosophical flaw there–which is why I don’t, myself, worship Jesus. I just don’t think that flaw is proof that Christianity is “really” evil no matter what my nice, mild-mannered church-going neighbor says.)

If anything about Islam unfits its followers for citizenship, I submit those same features should unfit Christians. Funnily enough, no one seems to think that’s the case.**

There’s no religion in particular that can unfit anyone for American citizenship. The only belief I can think of that would unfit anyone for citizenship would be a lack of belief in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And that has fuck-all to do with who or what you pray to, or what your holy scripture is.

So, you worship a dead pigeon in your backyard, that told you to hop on one foot on Tuesdays and wear a newspaper hat on your head the rest of the week? First amendment. So long as you aren’t doing anyone any harm, you pay your taxes and whatnot, well, who cares? I hope you have a lovely Maggotmas. That there? Totally American. That there, it’s what America is about. It neither, as a famous ex-president once said, breaks my leg nor picks my pocket.

You worship a zombie Judean rabble-rouser executed by the Romans? Cool! Yes, I’d love to learn more about your beliefs and your strange rituals! But not, you know, have you try to proselytize my children. Or murder doctors. As long as we’re clear on that I’ve got no problem with you.

Or maybe you worship the Goddess, or Shiva, or the angel/peacock whose name escapes me just now, or Cthulhu…your scripture is the Vedas, the Bible, the Quran, or Robinson Crusoe. Maybe you have no scripture and worship nothing at all. In the US, none of that matters. Or it shouldn’t, anyway. And that’s by design. That bit, that wasn’t a mistake or an oversight, that’s not something susceptible to popular vote, that’s not changeable, it’s right there in black and white on parchment, on purpose. Because none of that shit breaks any legs or picks any pockets. If you’re concerned about beliefs that unfit people for citizenship, that belief right there, that the First Amendment somehow doesn’t mean religions you don’t like, well….that right there kind of counts.
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*“Not only did our troops not shrink from eating dead Turks and Saracens; they also ate dogs!”

**Well, unless those Christians are Catholics. Because Catholics aren’t really Christians. You know what would happen if we elected a Catholic to the Presidency? He would totally take orders from the Pope. Catholics can’t be loyal American citizens because they’ve sworn loyalty to a foreign power. True fact!

Got some downtime, or gonna have some time to read? Maybe you’ve enjoyed Rachel Swirsky‘s work in the past–stories like A Memory of Wind or A Monkey Will Never Be Rid of Its Black Hands or the story that just appeared on Tor.com, The Monster’s Million Faces.

Well, then, you might enjoy Rachel’s new novella–the longest piece she’s written to date, unless I’m mistaken–The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window. Because, you know, it’s awesome.

So go read it!

Y’all know that M.K. Hobson is awesome, right? Because you’ve read “The Hotel Astarte” or “Hell Notes”, and you’ve heard her narrate stories and host episodes for Podcastle. Right?

Well. Her first novel, The Native Star, comes out today.

It’s 1876, and business is rotten for Emily Edwards, town witch of the tiny Sierra Nevada settlement of Lost Pine. With everyone buying patent magicks by mail-order, she’s faced with two equally desperate options. Starve—or use a love spell to bewitch the town’s richest lumberman into marrying her.

When the love spell goes terribly wrong, Emily is forced to accept the aid of Dreadnought Stanton—a pompous and scholarly Warlock from New York—to set things right. Together, they travel from the seedy underbelly of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, across the United States by train and biomechanical flying machine, to the highest halls of American magical power, only to find that love spells (and love) are far more complicated and dangerous than either of them could ever have imagined.

Here’s a trailer!

You can click on that amazon link above and buy yourself a copy. Me, I didn’t have to buy a copy! Because she sent me an ARC, which I read this summer as I lounged beside the pool. It was an absorbing and fun read–a little romancier than I tend to like, but that wasn’t something that dimmed my enjoyment in the least.

I’ve said before that I’m not a particularly good book reviewer. So instead I’m going to link you to this review from Green Man Review:

If there was a shelf in your local library for Alternate American History Weird West Steampunk Romance Adventure Fantasy, The Native Star would be there. There’s no other novel quite like it, nor is there likely to be until the release of the second planned book in the series.

The aforementioned second book is The Hidden Goddess, but you needn’t fear you’ll be cliffhangered by the first–The Native Star works fine as a standalone.

You can read the first chapter here.

What are you waiting for? Run out and get yourself a copy!

Every now and then, I run across the comment that too many books are written “for critics” and not “for readers.” Sometimes the comment explicitly states that books (or stories) ought to be entertaining, and fiction that is difficult to read, highly stylized or poetic or idiosyncratic in its prose, and/or requires some amount of previous reading or cultural knowledge, or has some complex structure, the apprehension of which enhances the piece but requires a fair amount of thought to puzzle out, or …books like this aren’t entertaining. They’re hard work to read. They’re just meant to impress “critics” who somehow, by definition, aren’t actually readers.

Now, I have absolutely no argument with anyone who says something like “These are the sorts of books that entertain me. These others, over here, they really aren’t my cup of tea.” No problem. “I tried to read [Abstruse Masterpiece] and really didn’t enjoy it so I put it down.” No sweat.

But I’ve got a problem when it’s stated as an absolute–”I find this opaque and hard to read, and am not entertained, therefore this sort of book is not entertaining and anyone who writes something like this intentionally has made the mistake of not trying to entertain but instead attempting to impress critics.”

You do see the difference between the two?

I get frustrated with the second sort because I actually find (some) of those opaque, difficult books entertaining. I find their opacity and the intricacy of their construction pleasing to work at. Not all of them, of course. I can think of at least one book that was up for a major award this year that had a prose style that put me off before I’d gotten a hundred pages in. I could. Not. Read. It. Not without major effort that, in the end, I decided I didn’t want to bother with. But I would bet real money the author didn’t sit down at their desk and say “You know what? I want to write something that’s really hard to read so that only a few people will really be able to get into it! Something critics will laud me for, who cares about readers?” And I don’t think the only people praising that book are “critics” or “pretentious” or whatever. They’re people who genuinely enjoyed that book.

Critics get to be critics because they like to read. Critics are readers. They may (or may not) be a particular subset of readers–they may or may not share tastes and predilections with other critics that they do not share with the wider set of readers. But they’re readers. And just like any other reader, each one has their own idiosyncratic personal taste.

For people who like those books, the ones that are “pretentious” or “written for critics,” those books really, genuinely are entertaining. I mean, seriously. When a critic says “This is a great book” that pretty much means they found it entertaining. It’s just that the specific nature of the entertainment they derived from that book isn’t the same as the sort you, or I, or some other random person, might want or enjoy.

Entertainment is whatever entertains you. And not everyone is entertained by the same things. And people who like difficult books do in fact find them entertaining. Really.

It happens with music, too, actually–I used to work for New Music Circle, and while we generally had very small audiences (the few exceptions were things like Stephen Scott’s Bowed Piano Ensemble–click on the samples and you’ll see why) the folks who came regularly to the concerts really, genuinely enjoyed the stuff. I’d see my boss in the front row really grooving to one or another free improv ensemble, and if it wasn’t someone’s thing, if they’d never really gotten a taste for that sort of sound, that someone might sit there watching him and think “He’s got to be faking this, so he can look intellectual or something. Because this isn’t music!” But it sure as hell was music, just not that incredulous watcher’s thing. My boss? The season ticket holders? They genuinely enjoyed it. The only “problem” with that music is, it’s not the kind of thing you like to listen to. It’s not aimed at you in particular. So, you know, shrug and say “not my thing.” Don’t write a diatribe about how the problem with this music is no one could actually ever enjoy listening to it. Cause I’ll point to my old boss, grooving away, one hundred percent sincere.
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*If you’re feeling adventurous, try listening to some Kaffe Matthews, whose music I, yes, genuinely enjoy. (Her stuff is amazing live.) Or some Gunda Gottschalk.

If none of that appeals, here’s some more bowed piano.