Emanations Art!

So, a while back I commissioned the awesome Nicole Thayer to do me up some Emanations.

You know the Emanations?

Amaat conceived of light, and conceiving of light also necessarily conceived of not-light, and light and darkness sprang forth. This was the first Emanation, EtrepaBo; Light/Darkness. The other three, implied and necessitated by that first, are EskVar (Beginning/Ending), IssaInu (Movement/Stillness), and VahnItr (Existence/Nonexistence). These four emanations variously split and recombined, to create the universe. Everything that is emanates from Amaat.

And when I went to make my tea blends I wished I had some artwork to put on them. And occasionally a reader would ask me what the Emanations looked like, since people wear them, or they’re featured in artwork in the books.

And the trilogy is finishing up this year, so I thought it would be fun to give out some presents. So! I will be linking to the Emanations that Nikki made for me. They will be free for you to use–to make things out of, or put on things, or to play with, whatever you would like. These images are being released with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial ShareAlike licence. This means you are free to copy and distribute them in any medium or format, and you are also free to adapt them–to remix, transform, and build upon them. You can’t use them for commercial purposes, and you should credit Nicole Thayer whenever that’s possible.

So, with that said. EtrepaBo, the Emanation of light and darkness, coming up soon!

Reminder: Ancillary Cover Art Sweepstakes

It says something about my life lately that I was folding laundry when I heard a sound that…could it be? It sounded remarkably like the back of a UPS truck opening. For about half a second, I thought to myself, “Self, how is it you actually noticed and recognized that sound specifically?” But I did, it turns out, because that’s exactly what it was. And guess what the UPS person brought me?

20150918_130107

Know what that is? That’s a stack of ten posters of John Harris’ lovely Ancillary cover artwork. I’m going to sign them, and send them back where they came from.

If you’ve pre-ordered or purchased Ancillary Mercy by October 13, you can enter a drawing to win one of these. Just fill out the form at this link.

Books you might enjoy

So, it won’t be long till Ancillary Mercy is available pretty much everywhere. So far reviewers seem to like it! Like, for instance, B&N’s Sci Fi and Fantasy Blog:
 

I’ll admit that after finishing the second book, I couldn’t imagine how Leckie could wrap up the series with just one more. I thought I knew how things needed to end, but, with skill and grace, Leckie proved me wrong. She has delivered a thrilling, clever, and incredibly satisfying conclusion, one that is both totally unexpected and redefines the two previous books. In short, Ancillary Mercy is an absolute delight.

 
But unless you’re a reviewer, you can’t read it yet. Sorry! I wish you could! I’d make it available to all of you right now if I could. But as it is, you’ll have to wait about twenty more days.

In the meantime, here are two books I’ve read recently that you might enjoy! And they’re out now, so no waiting.

First up, Zen Cho’s delightful Sorcerer to the Crown.
 

The Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers, one of the most respected organizations throughout all of England, has long been tasked with maintaining magic within His Majesty’s lands. But lately, the once proper institute has fallen into disgrace, naming an altogether unsuitable gentleman–a freed slave who doesn t even have a familiar–as their Sorcerer Royal, and allowing England’s once profuse stores of magic to slowly bleed dry. At least they haven t stooped so low as to allow women to practice what is obviously a man’s profession.
 
At his wit’s end, Zacharias Wythe, Sorcerer Royal of the Unnatural Philosophers and eminently proficient magician, ventures to the border of Fairyland to discover why England’s magical stocks are drying up. But when his adventure brings him in contact with a most unusual comrade, a woman with immense power and an unfathomable gift, he sets on a path which will alter the nature of sorcery in all of Britain–and the world at large.

 
It’s a book that’s very much in conversation with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (which I loved loved loved and if you haven’t read it yet, add that to your “Waiting for Ancillary Mercy” reading list). If you liked JS&MN, you will almost certainly enjoy Sorcerer to the Crown. If you enjoy Jane Austen, and/or Patrick O’Brien, likewise. Or Georgette Heyer, I gather, though I’ve only read one or two of hers and can’t speak authoritatively on that.

If you are allergic to Austen or O’Brien, or JS&MN, well, maybe this won’t be your thing? But honestly, this book is just great fun.

In the interest of full disclosure (and also of giving you cool stuff to read), when I edited GigaNotoSaurus I bought a story of Zen’s, “The House of Aunts.” It’s free, it’s awesome, it’s shorter than a novel.

The other book you might want to check out is Fran Wilde’s Updraft. It’s set in a world where people live in the tops of constantly growing towers of bone, and people fly between towers on manmade wings.
 

Kirit Densira cannot wait to pass her wingtest and begin flying as a trader by her mother’s side, being in service to her beloved home tower and exploring the skies beyond. When Kirit inadvertently breaks Tower Law, the city’s secretive governing body, the Singers, demand that she become one of them instead. In an attempt to save her family from greater censure, Kirit must give up her dreams to throw herself into the dangerous training at the Spire, the tallest, most forbidding tower, deep at the heart of the City.
 
As she grows in knowledge and power, she starts to uncover the depths of Spire secrets. Kirit begins to doubt her world and its unassailable Laws, setting in motion a chain of events that will lead to a haunting choice, and may well change the city forever-if it isn’t destroyed outright.

I happen to know that Fran did some actual wind tunnel skydiving as research for this. This book has political intrigue, action, airborne wind tunnel combat, and voracious flying monsters with tentacles. Seriously. You want to read this.

Long List Anthology Kickstarter

So, I don’t know if y’all are aware of this, but the Hugo Awards this year were somewhat unusual.

Yeah, you’re all sighing. I’m sighing too, for any number of reasons. But! Basically, David Steffen is Kickstarting an anthology of short fiction that was shoved off the Hugo ballot by asshole slatemongers, or that would have come close.

Because there’s so much short fiction published every year, it’s not unusual for even folks who nominated in the short fiction categories to find work they’re not familiar with in the eventual Hugo Voters packet–and, after the awards themselves, in the nominating data the committee releases, which includes works that just missed nomination. This is one of the cool things about being a Hugo voter, and one of the joys of not being the sort of person who insists that the ballot only consist of your own approved choices.

So David Steffen has stepped up to edit this anthology of work that, if things had gone the way they usually do, would have turned up on the Hugo ballot, so that we can all have the fun of reading them. Or that would have turned up in the nominating data as having almost made it onto the ballot, because Hugo nominators genuinely loved them and thought they were award-worthy.

The kickstarter has met its goal, but it’s just shy of its final stretch goal, which is to be able to afford not just short stories and novelettes, but also some novellas. At the $10 level, you’re basically signing up for an ebook of the anthology.

This is actually my favorite kind of Kickstarter–the sort where you’re basically pre-ordering a book. This is going to be an assortment of excellent fiction, and personally I think it’s well worth your while to consider contributing just so you can get all of it in one place.

*****

If you’re a longtime reader, David Steffen’s name might sound familiar. He runs the Submission Grinder, an online sub tracker for writers, and he is also the current champion of Ferrett Steinmetz’s Rejection Challenge. He received a rejection to a story some five minutes after he submitted it. The submission was to Podcastle, and was very short, and was timed exactly perfectly for the slush reader to respond to it almost immediately. I know this because I was the slush reader in question. High five, David! I’m exceedingly glad you’re doing this antho.

Note, by the way, that David says nothing about slates or assholes. That is entirely my description of the situation.

What the Reader Wants

Hey, I haven’t posted any writing advice in a while! And what with one thing and another, there’s a particular issue I’ve been pondering.

Sometimes–this happened to me more when I hung out at various online crit-group type places–I’ll see someone advise writers that they need to make things digestible for the reader. They need to follow reader expectations, because otherwise the reader won’t like the story. The advice was rarely so general. It usually took very specific forms. Don’t write something that requires some sort of previous knowledge! Or, don’t use long, obscure words! Don’t use complicated sentence structures! Don’t violate plot expectations! (Make sure there’s a romance/happy ending/three act structure/whatever.) Don’t use second person! Don’t use present tense! Don’t use omni, readers think it’s headhopping! Whatever.

It all boils down to “Don’t challenge the reader. The reader wants the story to go down easily, and be exactly what they expect it to be.”

Here’s the problem with that: what reader are you talking about?

For a specific example, I once workshopped a story that included a silly joke about Occam’s Razor. One critiquer complained that I should not be including obscure stuff like that in my story, and they knew it was obscure because they had never heard of it. I pointed them to the wiki entry and was told that not everyone cared much about religion and I should just leave that kind of stuff out.

Now, the joke was stupid. It was not my best story. But Occam’s Razor? Obscure? Occam’s Razor is not obscure. At least not in the circles I tend to hang with.

But of course, I bet if I went into the grocery store right now and asked everyone who came through the doors all day about Occam’s Razor, there’d be a bunch of folks who’d never heard of it. I bet bunches of them would be readers, too.

And there are readers who actively enjoy complicated sentence structures, second person, unusual narrative choices, challenging reading. Now, granted, you’ll probably sell more copies if you write like Dan Brown (and if you can hit on the combination of anti-Catholocism, pseudo-history, and Biblically-connected conspiracy theory he did. Please don’t get me started ranting on that topic). And if that’s your aim, well, you know, go for it.

But that is not the only way to please readers. A healthy chunk of readers want something more. Hell, a healthy chunk of readers want a lot more. And you probably won’t retire to your own island providing it, but you can do pretty well. It’s nice work, if you can get it.

Not all readers are the same. I know there are folks out there who just will not believe this, but some readers genuinely enjoy things you might think are “pretentious” or unreadable or whatever. Their taste is different. No, really, they actually enjoyed that. The writer was not trying to show how clever they were in writing it, they were just writing for a set of readers that does not include you. Which is fine! Nothing wrong with being (or not being) part of any particular intended audience.

It’s also, by the way, an actual impossibility to write a story that doesn’t require some kind of previous knowledge. Well, maybe Dr Seuss managed it. Maybe. Even Goodnight Moon is written for someone who’s got some kind of knowledge already in place. It would be a mess of incomprehensible syllables and images otherwise. (It probably is to a fair percentage of its intended audience, at least for a few months until they get a handle on things like bedtime and balloons and bears and chairs.) And while there are probably things large numbers of readers are likely to be familiar with, that will never be all readers.

I think there’s a kind of weird tendency to assume that one is, oneself, the baseline default sort of human. (I would, in a less charitable mood, suggest certain types of people are more liable to this assumption than others, but let’s leave that be for now.) And that if one likes something, everyone else must like it because of course it’s good or one wouldn’t like it! And if one doesn’t like it, of course it’s bad, and anyone who says they do like it is lying about it so they can seem hip and with it.

This is not the case. The fact is, there is no one single type of reader whose likes and dislikes can be so easily categorized. Best you can do is maybe figure out trends–larger numbers of readers prefer certain things, maybe. And that’s fine, but that’s not “The Reader.” That’s those particular readers.

When someone generalizes this way about what readers will or won’t read, or what they do or don’t want, ask yourself, “What reader?” (Often it’s obscured by the sentence but it’s there if you dig. “Readers don’t want books about women/POC/LGBT.” Oh, see what’s not being said there? What specific kind of reader is being framed as “all readers”? Which readers are being dismissed as not existing, or not worth caring about?)

Write the thing that interests you. Don’t worry too much about warnings that “readers” don’t want anything but standard vanilla custard writing. (No offense to vanilla custard. I might have to go make some when I’m done here because that sounds delicious. If you’re aiming for Dan Brown style bestsellers, well, you go, and good luck to you.) You, yourself, are a reader, and if your project seems cool to you, likely it will seem cool to at least some other readers. Don’t worry about what some nebulous mass of “readers” might or might not want. Worry about doing your cool thing really well so that those readers like you will appreciate it. You have my permission to stop taking advice from anyone who tells you that you can’t do anything interesting or difficult because “readers won’t like it.” (Or because editors won’t like it. Gods help us all, run don’t walk away from that advice.)

Yeah, sometimes bloggers or reviewers natter about how obviously such and so author is a pretentious git who hates their readers because everyone knows readers don’t like long sentences or present tense or second person or stories told out of temporal order or narrated by cats, or whatever. Such people are saying more about their failure to actually think very much about writing and reading than they’re saying about the work they criticize, and you have my permission, if you need it, to take them as seriously as they deserve. Which is to say, not at all.

Don’t worry about some nebulous mass of “readers.” Worry about your readers. Your readers will be people who appreciate the sort of thing you want to do, particularly when you do it well. They’re the ones who matter to you. And it won’t be the least bit coincidental that, when you please yourself with your work, when you do the things that fascinate and interest you the most, your readers will turn out to be interested in and fascinated by the same things.

Do the thing you want to do, as well as you can.

Old Posts–Bias in Editorial Decisions

So, way back in 2011 I was on a panel at Wiscon called “Reading with a Squint.” It was about gender bias in editorial decisions. At the time I was still editing GigaNotoSaurus, and the issue was one I’d been chewing over for a while. I had lots of thinky thoughts about it, but in the way of panels, not all of my chewing or my thinky thoughts got expressed. So I came home and wrote a big honking long post, which I then divided into seven parts.

I was recently talking with a friend and realized they hadn’t read any of it, because they hadn’t known me then. I did have a WordPress blog at the time, but I didn’t always remember to crosspost (and didn’t have any widgets that would do it for me) and it was really an afterthought–I was mostly centered on LJ at the time. So these are all on LJ. I should probably import them over some time.

But for now, I’m going to link to them, because I still think there’s stuff worth chewing over.

Wiscon-Related Thoughts:

  • Part 1 Taste Is Culturally Constructed

     

    When I first heard about the infamous 4’33” I was in high school. The piece was described to me as “four and a half minutes of silence.” Another phrase that featured in the description was “total bullshit.”
     
    Which as it happens is also a pretty accurate way to describe calling 4’33” “silence.” Because that’s absolutely not what it is. But if you haven’t heard any of the conversation the piece is part of, don’t have any of the context, that’s certainly the way it seems.
     
    4’33” is (among other things) part of John Cage’s contribution to an ongoing discussion, a conversation that began with the question, “What is music?” It’s a question that seems incredibly simple and obvious when you first ask it, but then when you think about it your obvious answer falls apart. Music has this and that and the other characteristics–this other thing has those but you don’t call it music. Why not? Well, then, music also has….but this other thing also has, or this thing you say is obviously music doesn’t have something you just said was necessary…

  •  

  • Part 2 Slush
     

    So, at Wiscon, in the “Reading with a Squint” panel, I made the assertion (as I frequently do–regular readers of this LJ will have heard it before) that the gender ratio of slush shouldn’t actually be the same as the ratio of its corresponding ToC. That is, 70/30 male/female in slush might not actually translate to 70/30 in the ToC, all other things being equal.

  •  

  • Part 3 Ann Likes Red

     

    I also want to say something about representation. When I was a wee little Ann, I was dazzled by the color red. It was, in fact, my favorite color. And so, when I was given a copy of that enduring classic Ann Likes Red, I was thrilled. It was as though the author had seen into my very soul! And written a book about me.**
     
    I lucked out. My name was Ann, my favorite color was red. Maybe I still would have liked the book if those things weren’t true–the amazon reviews suggest that it was an excellent book for beginning readers and was beloved by more than just us Anns. Still, I had that extra joy, of seeing myself in the story.

  •  

  • Part 4 Bias Is Inherent in the System

     

    You all know this story, right? And Mary Anne Mohanraj mentioned it during the panel itself. But I’m going to tell it again.

    Symphony orchestras–the big ones, the world-class ones–have no percentage in excluding excellent musicians. They want the best, and that’s where their interests lie. No one was ever saying “Well, we’ll take Bill even though Jane is a little better, because Jane has girl cooties.”
     
    Still, for years and years, there were very few women in the big orchestras. The folks who made the decisions said–very honestly–that they weren’t trying to exclude women, it just turned out that women didn’t play quite as well as men. It was sad, but that was reality. They only wanted the very best.

  •  

  • Part 5 Women Write Different Stories From Men?

     

    Do women write different stories, or do we see them as different like hearing their music as thinner or lesser? I don’t know the answer. Certainly some women write different sorts of stories. Certainly many women’s lives are very, very different from most men’s. At Wiscon, in the bar, a male writer who had been the stay-at-home parent for his family said (I paraphrase), “I realized, things that were supposed to be how women are were really how it is when you’re the person home with the kids all day.” Yep. You get a very different view of the world like that.

  •  

  • Part 6 Fight for Your Right to Party

     

    You know, sometimes it seems like we’re all at the SFF party, all talking, moving from one bunch of friends to the next. There are a bunch of people over by the table with a tray full of apples–they call it “The Fruit Tray” actually, and if you ask them they’ll tell you this party is all about the great fruit you can have and they point to that tray full of apples–anyway, there are men and women hanging out by the apple tray. And whenever someone unfamiliar with the party asks, “So what’s that party like?” someone points to that tray of apples with the people crowded around it.

  •  

  • Part 7 Ending on Felicitous Seven

     

    It’s no use saying that an editor just wants good stories. Every editor wants good stories. Every editor has constraints on the kinds of good stories she wants–a stated mission or target for her zine, the tastes of an established audience, demands of advertisers or publishers, and so on. Every editor wants something much more specific than just “good stories.”

  • The Bitter Story Behind the UK’s National Drink

    Every now and then I see someone remark that obviously I lifted the conditions on Fosyf’s tea estate (in Ancillary Sword) from the Antebellum South. In point of fact, I did not. I was (I thought fairly undisguisedly) thinking about actual conditions on actual Earth tea plantations. And if anything, I soft-pedaled it. Because the actual facts would have seemed cartoonishly, mustache-twirlingly unreal.

    Except it would have been entirely real.

     

    The joint investigation by Radio 4’s File on Four and BBC News in Assam, north-east India, found workers living in broken houses with terrible sanitation. Many families have no toilets and say they have no choice but to defecate amongst the tea bushes.
     
    Living and working conditions are so bad, and wages so low, that tea workers and their families are left malnourished and vulnerable to fatal illnesses.
     
    There was also a disregard for health and safety, with workers spraying chemicals without protection, and on some estates, child labour being used.

     

    And turns out, the Rainforest Alliance’s certification, which is supposed to let consumers know that the tea they’re buying was ethically produced, doesn’t actually mean much.

    None of this surprises me.

    I am not posting this in the hope people will stop drinking tea–Mithras knows I drink gallons of the stuff myself. But this is going on. And it might be worth thinking about where else it’s happening and we just don’t see it.

    Ancillary Mercy Cover Art Sweepstakes

    I have to say, I really love the cover art for the Ancillary books. In fact, I have a full-size print of the whole triptych on my living room wall. I bought it from John Harris, because I just loved it so much. (I don’t know who has the original, but I can only assume they love it as much as I would if I’d been able to afford it. )

    And to celebrate the release of Ancillary Mercy, Orbit is running a sweepstakes. Ten people will win a poster of the Ancillary cover art. Signed by me! To enter, pre-order Ancillary Mercy (or purchase it–this is open until October 13), and fill out this form. You also need to have a mailing address in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand.

    So, click on over and enter!

    Ancillary Mercy 32

    “Wasn’t the Undergarden evacuated?” I asked. Aloud, since obviously Ship wanted to have this conversation this way, no matter how I felt about it. “It ought to be empty.”

    “Exactly,” Seivarden replied. Ship

    And…it’s now a month before you’ll be able to read the entire book! If you haven’t subscribed to my newsletter and already gotten Chapter 1, no worries. Keep your eye on Orbit’s website, where Chapter One will be going live sometime soonish in its entirety.