neongrey

Ah, the 80s. May you never return. I'd try Katherine Kerr's stuff, starting with Daggerspell-- there's a series that is just not popular enough, because I think if it was starting in the 90s or today and, sigh, was written by a dude, we'd be watching getting mangled by HBO now. I think Jill's a character you'll appreciate though.

I will say too, that while something like a query letter is a formal business letter and should be written and polished as such, an agent who'll give you poop for sounding ESL is not an agent you want anyway.

I can tell you what I do, which is 'lol writing stuff down is for losers let's just memorize everything between me and my sometime-collaborator and extrapolate on the fly'. It works for me, but, I, uh, can't say I recommend it. It does help steer me away from what I consider to be some of the big cancers on the genre, ie, over-systemetizing and over-world-building (which is not to say really that it's bad to know where you're coming from, but how much of that needs to be detailed in the work..........) but it's not a great means of data storage, lol.

Hmmm. In that case then, I think I'm probably okay with it. The culture runs emotionally restrained (by now well-established); there's baggage (which half the scene is about); Adrichel has him conditioned to not do anything (which half the scene is also about); and the question of 'well, why doesn't he do something about it' is in large part the core of Eshrin's arc. So I think we're in a good place there. Thanks for clarifying!

The other thing two is that people like to talk about/think of self-pub as "a way around" slush piles. It really isn't, it just moves where the slush pile is. Self-pub gets a bad rap from readers because it puts the slush pile in front of them rather than being in front of the agent/editor, and the reader's basically pulling from slush. One's chances of actual success are about the same going either route. Some genres, too, I think are better for it-- Romance, erotic romance, etc I would straight-up tell you not to consider trad pub if you were just starting out now, unless you really wanted a print run. That's a market where the readers consume a huge quantity of books and are accustomed to self-pub. SFF, a bit less so; the 'average' reader is looking more for ~the big release~ and is generally a bit more hostile towards self-pubbed work on principle. The thing too I think is worth considering is what you're gaining from going either route. A sufficiently small press isn't going to do me a whole lot of good, eg, because I can get my hands on sufficiently good editors who can do me buddy rates and I have enough graphic design skill that I can do a cover, and what they'd do for me promotionally/distribution-wise isn't going to be a whole lot other than what I'll get from doing that myself. So there's a point where self-pub has more benefit to me than a small enough publisher. But that line's going to be in a different place for everyone. Look at what you're able to do for yourself and what you need done for you and gauge accordingly.

cool, yeah, i think 5 is right on track now. i think i prefer the first sentence as-is but you're right, the second's missing an it, lol, thanks. Do you mind elaborating in what way? I'm not terribly concerned by this unless it strains credulity but I'm curious as to where you're seeing as the line. Hmmm. I'll think it over. Thanks!

one weird trick to keep you out of gdocs at work: fill your google account with things of varying degrees of NSFW-ity. IT departments hate it!

Honestly, I prefer google docs for my purposes but I also need something that isn't tied to my main google account because I can't be logging into it at work.

Who knows, they've been going downhill a lot over the past year. I think I'm moving to onenote.

Heads up, if anyone else uses evernote. I'd sort of advise that you stop.

Here's a decent article.

Yeah that's a good site, and there's people (whom you can hire) who do sensitivity reads too and I think that's also a great resource. One thing I do advise against is hitting up marginalized people to basically do your legwork for free. Especially in a social media context, the fact that someone's willing to discuss the subject as it impacts themselves doesn't necessarily mean they're willing to explain themselves, in detail, again, to every person who has the same questions over and over again.

Indeed. But realizing it took twenty-five thousand words for there to be a conversation between two men, and then for it to fail reverse Bechdel warms my misandrist little heart. and regrettably, as far as not-real people go, I have a type........... I suppose better fictional scumbags than real ones. Hmm, the one where he's simultaneously bent out of shape at Lasila for having gone for the reveal thing, and at Adrichel for having been pleased about it? I can look at that. Thanks!

Oh yeah, absolutely. And there's absolutely times when a story, straight-up, is not going to be yours to tell*. One hopes this will usually be obvious, but if it were, it wouldn't keep happening constantly. *(honestly in these cases, the story you would be telling is usually worse than the story you're talking over anyway. i don't believe in 'write what you know' but if it's a story about things that you haven't experienced but other people have, it usually shows)

That's generally the ideal, if you are not yourself a rocket scientist. There definitely are people out there who will say otherwise so don't take this as gospel, and there's things you want to keep an eye out for, like, say, making sure you're not taking credit for the rocket scientist's work/ideas/lived experience/etc, but I think so long as you're considerate of the actual people behind your subject matter, things generally work out okay.

Cool, cool. My original worry writing the chapter was that going too far into the nitty-gritty would just get repetitive, but I am pretty satisfied with how it's shaking out now. And too I think I can't hammer in the marriage-as-business-transaction hard enough. It's just not super natural to most readers with our current way of looking at things. But there's certain cliches I want to avoid in demonstrating this (the couple-who-married-for-love-in-a-society-that-doesn't-usually-do-that-sort-of-thing-and-look-at-how-different-and-probably-better-they-are sort of thing. it's not a society that disdains love in the slightest, but i definitely want a looser correlation between that and marriage and doing it like that undermines the normativity) so it's some careful phrasing here Not missing anything, no. What this sort of ties into, and this hasn't come super up and won't be more than touched on because it's not super relevant to the story at hand, is that the reason the city's built into the side of a mountain is that it's actually built on top of the ruins of another city that crashed into the mountain when the magic that made it fly failed. It is tied, loosely, to the accursed people line epigraph on five, for what that's worth. Can probably reframe it a little bit, if it takes too long to become clear. Yes, but she's not the subject of the sentence (the breadcrumbs there are Iluya and geometry, and Adrichel wondering what she's noticed, but these are more of a so-it-isn't-out-of-nowhere-when-we-get-there rather than a thing-i-intend-to-be-predictable sort of thing). I was looking at that earlier too, thinking I should rephrase that; should be a breezy reference to Lasila. Yes, though if it's not fully clear by now that the escort is a fairly prefunctory thing with neither obligation nor anyone being particularly happy about it, it will definitely become so. Good, good. He's definitely creepy and manipulative, but he's also good enough at it that to someone like Lasila who doesn't know him, that won't be very obvious. Eshrin's a POV that needs to be used sparingly because he's a lot closer to the heart of the conspiracy but he's got an angle on it that really no one else has. Which is really why he gets the nod over, say, Iluya (who must have a pov, but not, I think, in this book), because at this point Iluya's take on things is going to be a bit too similar to Lasila's.

Let's consider it like this. And this is not the best of analogies but I think it covers most of how I personally am able to contextualize this. Let's say you (generic you) want to tell a story about rocket science. You think rocket science is pretty cool. So you write a story about rocket science. You write a story where rocket science is integral to the story. It's all about rocket scientists doing rocket science. But you don't know anything about rocket science. You read some books so it's not all wrong, but really, you know absolutely nothing about rocket science. People love your story and how it integrates rocket science! Hey, will you write this story about this famous rocketry incident? And imagine there's actual rocket scientists out there. They want to tell stories. Some of them are about rocket science. Some of them just have rocket scientists in them. Some of them are just sick and tired of you and people like you being treated as experts on rocket science. They are very tired of being asked 'hey did you read this book/watch this show/see this movie about rocket science?' They're very tired of society's collective understanding of rocket science being shaped by people who know absolutely nothing about rocket science. They're tired of 'oh but you've got that one popular rocket scientist, you all should be happy with that'. And so on. Now imagine instead of talking about rocket science I was talking about, say, black people. Or transgender people. Or disabled people. Etc. Seeking understanding's good. But the world is full of the privileged hijacking the stories of the marginalized.

P.1 Your opener runs in a vein that I'm never very fond of, to wit, 'wtholding information unnaturally beyond good purpose', in this case holding onto a mysterious 'they' well beyond when it would be natural to use a descriptor. I'm thinking robots but I'm not sure if that's because scrolling down, glancing over some of the other commentary was unavoidable. Either way, you're already leading in a certain direction; you probably don't need to contort your sentences around the subject quite so much. The first Sadie paragraph is fair bit of space given over to explaining things that are obvious to both her and the reader. Yeah, the interstitial paragraphs are holding out beyond all reason. There's no reason for something to be framed this way except to avoid directly stating what they're about. They're also, I'm afraid, not very interesting. These lines are pretty hackneyed; you're not bringing anything new to the table with them, and you're just retreading ground that's been done so many times before that the novelty has to be there. I'm just gonna pass over commenting on these sections unless I notice something changing. I have a suspicion that they're not actually necessary, and I know that I don't really feel like I have a need or reason to read them. 'She starts reassuring herself' is a pretty telly line, and it's being used here at the expense of actually depicting what she's doing to try to reassure herself. So far, I'm just not very engaged with this, and I do love me a good robot apocalypse. P.2 The way you're framing the thoughts, I mean, I have no objection to doing that in third but it feels like what you're actually wanitng to do here is first-person. But that aside, I mean, it's a short, you don't have a ton of space to work with, but for all of Sadie's reactions, her expectations, it's a lot of telling, not a lot of conveying the meaning. I assume, at this point, that you're holding back on account of her being a key component to the aforementioned robot apocalypse. P.3 The bit about NovaGear controlling her research is really shoehorned in. Surely there must be a better way to exposit this. I mean underneath all the window dressing, what we've got here so far is a person-encounters-mysterious-and-creepy-location-they're-not-supposed-to-be-in story. This is three pages of six of no real plot and a lot of 'this place sure is mysterious and creepy', with only the interstitial paragraphs to do any promise that there is actually a story here. And I just don't think those interstitial paragraphs are strong enough, especially given how half of their wordcount is devoted to phrasing around being about a robot apocalypse. P.4 Ah, yes, robot apocalypse it is. The distancing in Sadie's POV is not, I think, helping my engagement here, but this is also the first point where you're actually getting plot happening. This could be happening on your fourth paragraph, in a short of this length. It shouldn't be on your fourth page. I think, upon looking at the starting of the page here, that you could actually just start the story with this page, as-is, and it would probably be stronger. You cut a lot of meandering, of mystery-for-mystery's-sake, and and the distancing of POV isn't as out-of-place because we haven't already read most of it with a more moment-to-moment current-action description of what Sadie's doing. p.5 I mean the other problem with this is that robot-apocalypse-based-on-robots-acheiving-sapience is that it's very hot lately by which I mean it's very hard to shake the just-binged-Westworld sense. True or not, I think that feeling is going to be inescapable. p.6 And I'm honestly not sure that either reveal on this page are bringing anything new to the table either. Like I feel like you're undercutting the usage of the interstitials by outright using the first line there; readers can be thick sometimes, sure, but I think this is really not giving the reader any credit at all. And now I see why I saw battlestar galactica mentioned as I was scroling past. And in that sense, yeah, I mean I think this actually makes a stronger bsg fanfic than it does a standalone story, if for no other reason than you can get away with that sort of thing in fanfic, whereas here we've got basically a whole story based on circuitously phrasing around describing what the narration's actually talking about. That doesn't make for a satisfying read. The fact that we've got so much of basically nothing happening that serves no purpose at all except to pace out the interstitials... nah. I dunno. I feel like you could probably pare this down hard and it might be novel at flash length but I think at short story size this is too much hanging on the need to phrase around things.

Iluya's something close to a main character, yeah; she starts a little backgrounded but she's a key conspirator. And, well. I was quite literal about my org chart... But otherwise I feel like I want a bit more of Lasila lawyering (her identity as a professional is pretty personally important to her), more visible Iluya (and more of her waffling between boldness and timidity), and I feel like some of the stuff in 6 benefits from additional context as well as from giving some of where Lasila's methodology is coming from, but I don't want to bulk up 6 so much. I did feel like I had to keep Lasila griping about her ex, though, lol. It's a good anecdote. Still think the ex dodged a bullet though.

And a minor continuity note, that should be Senator Ralista at the end, not Riruna. That's what I get for working on different chapters concurrently.

Ownvoices is interesting because it's-- particularly in YA-- critical for readers because of that need to see people like them in fiction. It's easy to discount the value of this if you see people like yourself all the time but I can't emphasize enough how impactful this is. It's important for writers because of how much and how often marginalized writers are looked over. (consider the persvasive and untrue notion that women don't write epic fantasy, or that black people don't, or-- anything) And it's important for the broader cultural context because, frankly, priveleged people navelgazing about things that don't have anything to do with them are a dime a dozen. And that is harmful.

I think there's no avoiding that sort of situation being a bit messy, but, hey, it's a messy situation, lol.

Speaking as someone who based a novel-length work that mandated a similar conceit (fanfiction, so not super relevant otherwise here); I'm going to assume you're doing this in limited third rather than an objective POV so this is solely applicable to this form, but the most important thing to keep track of is that you are only in one person's head at the time. Both people have separate identities, and each identity would use whichever applies, but the thing that will muddle it is if you're swapping whose identity you're using as a POV within the same paragraph. If we're in her head, narrate as she experiences things, and in his head, vice versa. If it's an external party, go with what they observe. It's best to treat the narration not as what is happening but what your POV character is experiencing.

Yeah, I dunno. I have complicated feelings about the application of ownvoices as it applies to my own stuff. Like yes, the female lead is absolutely, unambiguously bi, which I am ok with claiming, but tbh she's not a character I want anyone to per se identify with. I've got my nonbinary leads but they're nonbinary in ways I definitely am not, and experience marginalization based on that which I do not; I have my own situation and baggage. So for my own part I'm less comfortable about claiming them personally in that way. I also feel awkward about possibly hijacking from the 'more marginalized' which is again more of a personal issue than an ownvoices issue. I'm in a weird position because I personally have zero need to actually identify with characters but I'm fully aware of how meaningful it is to have that connection to 'someone like you' in fiction. Whichever one they prefer at the time.

I'd say it's worth mentioning that treating that sort of thing like 'a reveal' is particularly a bad idea with trans characters because that sort of attitude throughout society is what leads to a lot of violence against trans people. I dunno, from what I have seen is that the people who are most inclined to not do the thing (in re any form of inclusion) are generally the people who treat their own norm as a default and who do the least actual research into the realities of other people's lives. Always gonna be people upset on the stuff you get wrong; it's a lot more about how you respond to the upset.