One of the most important lessons I learnt lately was from Ben Rosenbaum, at the last VD workshop I attended: he said (very rightly) that the bits and pieces of a character that aren’t in service to the story are those which make them come to life.
So, for instance, if I have a character who likes soy sauce and prawn crackers (and none of that is relevant to the story except in an incidental capacity), she’s going to feel much more real to you than “random girl who gets dropped into magical country and must fight to survive”. Because that last is a plot description, and nothing else: it’s a shell that’s waiting to be filled, but it can never, ever be a good character description.

It’s not a new lesson–on some level, I’ve always known that, but it’s something I struggled to put into practice in my first short stories. When I was starting out, I wrote too much wordage, and I had to teach myself to cut–and that included cutting out the bits that I thought didn’t advance the story, like the “extraneous background”. The problem is that my characters ended up being–not cardboard cutouts, but people who didn’t feel real. People who’d sprung up, all armoured and armed, to answer the need of Story. I could swap them, and it wouldn’t change anything. Acatl in the first Obsidian and Blood stories (here and here) is a nice enough guy, but he doesn’t really exist. He inhabits a detailed world, but he’s as thin as paper, containing just enough to move the plot forward, give him handy crises of conscience when needed, and that’s about all. It’s not like those stories are failures–they’re mainly plot-driven, so it’s not so vitally important for the main character to feel real–but they lack something. They’re thin, for want of a better word.

The good news is, I’ve got better at this for short stories; but from the start I was infinitely better at the whole backstory thing with novels. I might not have articulated the lesson well at this stage, but I approached things in a very different matter when I started planning my first decent novel: I wrote characters sheets, and they all had a “quirks” section–it’s Acatl’s love of food; Ceyaxochitl’s acerbic character, and her tendency to bang her cane on the floor to punctuate her words. It’s also their views on various things that I didn’t really need for the novel itself: when I started writing Servant, I knew exactly what Acatl feels about women, even though this was never actually required to come up in the first novel–but this helped me, even at a subconscious level, to sort out his character, and to round him into someone who would feel real to the reader. I also knew pretty much everything about Acatl’s life from his birth onwards, and most of that never made it into the novel either; but it helped me handle how he felt about his brother or Ceyaxochitl.

There are other bits that are, strictly speaking, extraneous from a novel, if we view it only from a plot standpoint: secondary/minor characters [1][2]. They’re not required by the plot, per se–well, OK, they are, but the plot doesn’t require much to them beyond, say, “be an obstacle to main character’s attempt to free his brother”. So, accordingly, those characters weren’t overly planned in my synopsis: a brief mention was more than enough, or so I thought.

I hadn’t expected most of them to hijack the narration, or to be so much fun. I think what happened was a variant of the “non-essential” thing: because I didn’t feel bound to respect any kind of character sheet or plot summary with them, I basically improvised as I was writing, and created them out of whole cloth in the space of a few scenes. Mihmatini, Acatl’s sister, was basically a name on a piece of paper; I hadn’t actually expected her to berate Acatl quite so soundly, or to be so mercilessly pragmatic. Likewise, Nezahual-tzin was just a required role, as the Revered Speaker of an allied power; I hadn’t thought that so many sparks would fly between him and Teomitl; or that he would have such an enigmatic and exasperating streak.

Three books in, and I’m proud of my unexpected characters. I gave them story arcs (both Mihmatini and Nezahual-tzin have pivotal roles in Master of the House of Darts); developed their personalities and had them interact with each other (one of my favourite scenes in MoHD is one which has Mihmatini meet the over-arrogant priest of Tlaloc, Acamapichtli, and they have what is best described as a courteous spat); and, of course, because it’s book 3 in a trilogy, I put them through the wringer, and tested their loyalties until they broke. Because, you know, it’s what authors do.

And my favourite character? It’s a bit like choosing favourites among one’s children–always a fraught business… I’m going to go for “which character surprised me most”–and the answer to that is actually Acamapichtli, the High Priest of the Storm Lord. In book 1, he was basically the “need an obstacle” character, and I gave him everything that went with the role: staggering arrogance and cutting wit (it wasn’t an entirely conscious decision, but of course both of these are flaws that Acatl would hate to bits). By the time book 2 came around, I wondered if I should kill him off and replace him with another High Priest; but I had the feeling this would be too easy, and way too nice for Acatl (and we’ve already established I don’t do nice for characters, right?)
So Acamapichtli stayed in the end–and the guy who started out as a foil for Acatl gradually evolved into someone else–a character who has his own problems, his own decisions to make; and his own sense of ethics and morals (totally contrary to Acatl, but diversity’s good for you, right? 🙂 ). And his own twisted sense of honesty, too. Basically, he’s awesome fun to write, and that’s why I like him.

In book 3… let’s just say Acamapichtli is back for more fun; and that putting him in charge of the entire palace during an epidemic is just a handy way to create more problems for poor Acatl…

What about you? Have you ever had secondary characters appear out of nowhere? Or, if you’re a reader, have you ever seen secondary characters who were as, or more memorable, than the main characters?

[1]I’m not sure where to draw the line between those. I’ve always been very uncomfortable with the “protagonists/everyone else” distinction, and I tend to think in terms of “main characters/secondaries/unnamed”. The main characters are those who drive the narration for me: for instance, by standard terms, Acatl would be the protagonist of Servant of the Underworld; but I consider him on the same level as his brother, Neutemoc, whose desires and wishes drive a lot of the plot even though Neutemoc isn’t either a viewpoint character or a protagonist. Secondary characters are named, and have a specific and distinctive personality (Mihmatini, Tizoc-tzin); but they’re not as important to the plot; and you could pull them from the narration and replace them by someone else with a few minor adaptations. Minor characters are just walk-on parts, and are generally (but not always) unnamed.

[2]If you’re curious, I had characters sheets for the following in Servant: Acatl, Ceyaxochitl, Eleuia, Huei, Mahuizoh, Neutemoc, Quiyahuayo, Teomitl, and Zollin. All the others I considered “secondary” (yes, even Mihmatini! Though she now has her own sheet, of course).

So, this is actually the leadup to the Master of the House of Darts release (it’s out in the US on Oct. 25th, and for some odd reason the UK has to wait a little bit more, till Nov 3rd. The ways of publishing are impenetrable…).

So, to prepare for next Tuesday, I’ll be publishing one blog post a day until Friday (process, research tidbits, behind-the-scenes bonuses, and more…)–and watch out next Monday for a competition with neat prizes (including a tuckerisation and an Aztec print!)

(warning: minor spoilers for Servant of the Underworld)
Continue reading →

And a thematic news roundup of publishing in non-Western-Anglo countries:

-Charles Tan on “How Publishing Favours the West”. All very true, sadly, and once again a case of the US (and associated UK/Canada/Aus/NZ, who benefit by virtue of language and cultural proximity, even if they’re not the same) oozing into the local markets, feeding tremendous demand but not adapt local prices to said demand (said it before, will say it again: $8.00 does NOT buy you the same thing abroad. In Vietnam, it’s one-fifth of the average monthly salary). And how Amazon and Apple are pretty much doing the same with ebooks. [1]

-K.S. Augustin on her experience with Kindle publishing in a non-Amazon country. It’s horrendous, in case you had doubts: Amazon encourages local publishers to use Kindle, but won’t even grant them access to the software for formatting books and checking out what they look like (I think preventing the publisher from checking out a preview of their own Kindle book has got to be a new low…)

-And apparently, the hot topic of the Frankfurt Book Fair is publishers parcelling out digital English rights in non-Western-Anglophone countries and selling them one by one, presumably to local publishers. That’s right: if all goes according to plan, and you want an English-language ebook in France/Spain/Vietnam, you’ll have to wait for a French/Spanish/Vietnamese editor to buy the English-language rights in France/Spain/Vietnam (yes, I know. Who in their right mind is going to pay more than a pittance for this, especially for books that aren’t bestsellers). Ain’t that awesome.

This is a particular flavour of insane (and I still think ebooks should be sold by language, not territory. Yeah, sure, authors and publishers are going to be losing out a bit, but it’s a fairer deal, and it doesn’t leave us in non-Anglo countries feeling like second-class citizens).

Also, this is all leaving me very puzzled, because I think any media business strategy today has got to be weighed against the cost of the piracy option, whether it’s for ebooks or for movies. We can argue all we want about how morally incorrect piracy is, but the fact remains: it’s available, and it’s relatively easy, and its only drawbacks are non-guaranteed quality, and possible legal prosecution (which means downloading a pirate ebook or movie is not quite free: there’s an equivalent cost, defined as the sales value when a given buyer will prefer a legit option to downloading the pirate copy).

But if you have a model in which you keep feeding demand (as Hollywood does, by exporting movies everywhere and making them the baseline of cinema; as the Big Six publishers do in a lesser measure) but not making stuff available at reasonable prices, or not making stuff available at all, you’re basically encouraging people to turn to piracy (and sure, you can say you’ll stomp on pirates, but let’s face it: stopping all piracy dead in its tracks is far from easy). And you can complain pirates are taking away all your business, but for me you’re bearing a share of responsibility because of the demand, prices and availability policy you set (not all the responsibility, to be sure, but still…).
What I’m seeing of the situation so far sounds like another music industry train wreck waiting to happen. It seems to me that we’re going to need a new legal model and new copyright laws to deal with the digital age; but so far this hasn’t exactly been happening.

An addendum on book and DVD prices: I can’t remember where the stat comes from (it was a scholarly report on piracy in various countries, but I can’t find the link for the life of me), but a DVD in India is sold for an equivalent value of $700, if we bring the price in rupees back to US-cost-of-living dollars. Imagine that you kept seeing ads and trailers for the new Batman movie, that people kept talking about it at work, kept insisting that if you hadn’t seen it, you were really behind the times and totally uncool; but that the act of seeing it cost you $700. No wonder there’s a whole generation in Asia growing up not knowing what a legit DVD or book is… [2][3]

Why, yes, I’m feeling cheerful and optimistic about the future of the ebook market today…

(and I suspect not everyone will agree with me RE copyright laws, piracy and ebooks. Feel free to comment/argue/refute in the comments. This is very much something I would love to hear discussion on).

[1] I know, it’s a complicated problem from a business point of view, especially with the permeability of boundaries: it was fine to set prices in the US for the US; and then to deal almost on a case-by-case basis on export problems, but today the market and the demand have gone global (and there are people taking advantage of this–see arbitrage in financial markets).
[2] There are pirate physical books, too. If you’ve ever gone to Asia (well, at least India and Vietnam. I haven’t tried elsewhere), you’ll find itinerant book peddlers selling bound books basically made of photocopies. It’s a sobering experience when you dwell on why they’re here at all.
[3] And yes, I agree that it’s not legal, and probably not ethical either. But the rise of piracy has all too clearly demonstrated that people do not have a natural moral fiber.

Handful of blog posts, while I’m off hammering more words on the novella:

-Ekaterina Sedia on “Challenges of Writing Alternate History Set in Other Cultures”. Some very interesting stuff–like, yeah, I could do an alternate history in which Gia Long’s eldest son acceded to the throne instead of Minh Mạng and Việt Nam was softer on Christian missionaries, but conveying the turning point and its consequences gracefully would require a looot of footwork to make you understand (and I can do the same with “obscure” bits of French history, too, and it would be hard too, though French history is less obscure than Vietnamese).

-Jess Nevins on “The ‘Problem’ with Asian Steampunk”. I’m a little… ambivalent about this? There are a lot of cool ideas here, but by and large they take the tropes of Victorian steampunk (the treasure hunter, the PI, the pirate) and make them more culturally appropriate than a mere cut-and-paste–basically, this is taking the blatant Orientalist out of steampunk, but I should think there’d be ways to do Asian steampunk with uniquely Asian tropes instead of warmed-up Western/Victorian ones (how about Chinese scholars trying to survive the upheaval of the Ming/Qing transition? Vietnamese building steampunk boats in order to resist the French encroachment?)
Yes, it’s the extremist in me again. I’m not against better “crossover” steampunk that uses this kind of trope (and some of these would definitely make for very interesting stories); but I’m also in favour of going yet further afield, and using the culture(s) more effectively? I’m thinking of Shweta Narayan‘s awesome steampunk series, which make good use of the Indian motifs of tales-within-tales even as they draw on Mughal history; but I’m pretty sure there are/will be others (if anyone wants to recommend good Asian steampunk? [1]).
At any rate, that’s my ambivalence towards lists like those, because they go, “ooh, check out those cool stories” without explaining what makes them cool. In this particular case, although you can argue some of those tropes are also appreciated in Asia (the martial art school, for instance), the sum total of them is a list of cool Victorian/pulp adventure tropes, which are more Western than anything else. Yes, I know, me splitting hairs again. It’s a tricky line to draw…

[1]Defined as “does not make me want to tear my hair out by exoticising or white-washing its protags”.

Hit 3k on a sekrit project, and started planning another round of edits to Foreign Ghosts (following very perceptive comments from my agent). And got to the end of book 2 (out of 3) in the novella, which makes 22k words. Cool bits: inserted a school called “The Abode of Brush Saplings” (a reference to the Hanlin academy, aka Court of Brush Wood, the Chinese office reserved for the very highest-ranked scholars. My students aren’t there yet, so I needed a name for the incubator 🙂 ). Mixed up all my generation references when I attempted to get the name of a particular ancestor and their generation number–this baby is going to need a complete pass to clarify the family relationships and the generations when I’m done… And put in more nice food (more pittaya aka dragon fruit) and extra references to dragons and storms. Now I probably need more actual, you know, SF and techno-porn in there… *embarrassed shrug*

We are also very rich in fruit and veggies currently, following a weekend at the in-laws where we picked apples from a farm (and got 4 kg’s worth of sub-varieties I’d never heard of, an example of how sadly normative the high-street grocery market has become in France), and a weekend where my mom dropped off some more fruit and vegs (tomatoes, raspberries and potatoes). I’m planning Singaporean croquettes (a recipe I filched from Charmaine Solomon’s The Complete Asian Cookbook, which involves ground beef, cumin, potato purée and breadcrumbs. Yum yum).

And this is made of awesome: the newest edition of the Czech magazine XB-1, which contains “Stavitelka korábů”, the translation of “The Shipmaker” (with thanks to Martin Šust and my nameless translator–I’m pretty sure they’re not nameless, but I can’t navigate the Czech website well enough to find out their name…).

(and yes, before you ask, quite obviously “-ard” is a masculine name ending in Czech, therefore I get to be known as “Aliette de Bodardová”, which is pretty darn cool)

Because, you know, I enjoyed those things when I critted them, and now they’re out in the wide world!
-T.L. Morganfield sidewise-nominated “Night Bird Soaring” is up at Escape Pod. I’ve loved this story since critiquing an early draft of it five or six years ago, and I’m definitely tickled pink that it’s had such a good career. And the ending is a killer (though T.L. might not agree with me on this, but hey, I’m entitled to my personal early reader opinion :)).
-Rochita Loenen-Ruiz “Return to Paraiso” is going to be in the October issue of Realms of Fantasy. It’s a fantastic, magical story with Rochita’s wonderful and ethereal use of language. You can get a peek at the illustration for it here.
-And now, for something I didn’t crit: Lavie Tidhar’s Osama is available from PS publishing and for the Kindle (US, UK). From the blurb:

Osama tells the story of a private detective hired to locate the obscure writer of pulp novels featuring one Osama bin Laden: Vigilante. The detective’s quest takes him from Vientiane to Paris, London, New York and Kabul, across a subtly-changed world where nothing is quite as it seems – including himself.

I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve enjoyed the short stories, and Lavie’s interview about its release (in Interzone this month) brings up fascinating topics about terrorism and the myths it engenders, and how to use the pulp fiction frame to tackle hard truths. And the book has been getting rave reviews, too, so definitely worth checking out.

Another few hundred words on the novella. Not very many, primarily because I spent ages trying to write a poem. I had this awesome idea of a plot point that would require my main character to compose a clever poem–the sort of idea that sounds fabulous in outline, and then less and less so as you realise that you are going to have to write the darn thing, and your poetry skills suck… I then spent about one hour rereading poems by Du Fu and Li Bai, and a couple other Tang poets–cobbling together a few verses [1] in order to actually write the rest of the scene.

‘Tis done. Now for the aftermath. One scene away from wrapping up part 2 (of 3). And part 3 should be mostly downhill, as everything falls into place.

*knocks on wood*

[1] Yes, it ended up as a mostly Chinese poem. I did look a few Vietnamese poems, but decided that since in that timeline China was dominant, Vietnam would probably still be stealing a few cultural references from its neighbour. (also, my Vietnamese–which I really need to start again–is nowhere competent enough to read poetry in the original) To compensate, I had the banquet made of completely typical dishes (and lots of fish sauce 🙂 )
[2]Also, I have handed in my edits for Le Cinquième Soleil aka Harbinger in France. Not sure of pub date yet; it’s been pushed back but Eclipse didn’t know by how much.

I was reading this fascinating article by Jason Sanford over at SF signal, on military SF. Not that I’m much fascinated by military SF, I admit, but the article is fascinating for another thing: it’s the use of the word “political” to refer to something that, for me, has nothing to do with politics (in this case, whether or not to approve of war). I’ve seen it before, to refer to diverse other things, such as people’s positions on QUILTBAG relationships, abortion, women’s rights… The thing is, for me, those are not political problems. My position on war and abortion isn’t politics: it’s a matter of pure ethics, of how I put things in the context of my personal morals, rather than where my chosen political party stands on the issue (in fact, if anything, it would be a matter of where my religion stands on the issue).
Thing is… in France, parties don’t define themselves by this kind of position. Our left wing is slightly more pro-abortion and pro gay rights, for instance, but it’s far from their main campaign argument–so far that I don’t particularly associate a particular party with a particular moral stance [1].
This would seem to be a purely US use, and I’m curious–if you’re a USian and reading this blog, mind explaining to me why “political” for this kind of subject? Is “ethics” banned from public discourse, and I somehow missed the memo?

ETA: I stand corrected. Patrick Samphire and K.S. Augustin pointed out to me that this was also a UK and Aus usage. I’d not seen it in UK/Aus blog posts, and I leapt to conclusions regarding its use a tad too fast.

[1] Amusingly, I tend to define the French left wing and the right wing in terms of where they stand with relation to wealth: the left wing wants to tax the rich to death, the right wing wants to over-favour them. (and yes, this tells you everything you need to know about my politics vs my cynicism)

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards is looking for nominations for the year 2011. The Awards aim to reward translations from another language into English, and they’re quite possibly the only English-language awards I know of where the award is split equally between the author and the translator. They function as both a way to highlight non-Anglophone works, and to highlight the (often unrecognised) work done by translators. Both very worthy goals, and the list of nominations so far makes for a very interesting reading list, too.

Click here for full rules, eligibility, and works the jury is already aware of.

So, tonight I was rereading the French translation of Harbinger and finishing up with a few troublesome notes. Here’s a sample scene from that endeavour: I’m sitting in the sofa with the French translation on my knees, and going through my own notes. From time to time, I’ll ask a question to my husband that goes something like this:

Me: “Here, listen to this. Do you think there’s something wrong with it?”
The H, frowning: “Er. No. Quite honestly no. It’s just you trying to apply English grammar to the text.”
Me: “What about this? Don’t you think it’s too modern for the time period?”
The H, still frowning: “Hum… Probably.”
Me: “What would you replace it with? I’m coming up blank…”
[The H rolls his eyes upwards, but agrees to brainstorm suggestions with me for a bit]

And this, right here, is why I would make such a bad translator from English to French…

(let me reassure you that it’s nowhere as catastrophic as it seems, and that I manage most of the edits on my own, especially the translations of technical terms my wonderful translator–Laurent Philibert-Caillat–wasn’t entirely sure on. But about a fourth to a fifth of my edits have to go through my husband, to make sure that I’m not inserting random anglicisms into the text…)

In other news, the H forcibly put me in front of my computer Saturday morning, and insisted that I write something and stop moping on the internet. Whad’ya know, it actually worked. I broke 20k on the novella today–hit the first climax scene and the start of the spiral towards the end.
(one of the many, many reasons I’m happy to be married to the H)