A Bridge Too Far
Howdy! This newsletter includes: an essay on my current philosophy of "plausibility" in worldbuilding and fiction generally, a FAQ (foxily asked questions), and a catten pic.
If there's a topic you'd like to hear about (writing, games/game design, and music composition are always fair game), please email deuceofgearsart@gmail.com. :3
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A Bridge Too Far
I'm always fascinated by what things in fiction people consider a bridge too far for suspension of disbelief, and what they will accept.
My personal ridiculous example is the fantasy or Forgotten Realms tie-in novel (I don't remember which) where I was evicted at top speed reading in high school because the character thought, in passing, about how cruel catgut strings were to cats. "Catgut" isn't made from cats; it's made from sheep/goat intestines. I stopped reading.
This is silly, in that the name is misleading and it's rather plausible that someone would have the misconception. (I assume Forgotten Realms characters don't have Wikipedia, unless maybe Elminster does.) But I was a judgy fifteen-year-old.
On the other hand, I watched Suits for a while. I have a few lawyer friends and the fastest way to make their faces melt in horror was to mention that I was watching Suits. I am not a lawyer, although the one weird benefit of Suits was I FINALLY learned that the two sides aren't "Attack" and "Defense." (Can you tell who's a gamer?) The appeal of the show for me was pretty people in pretty outfits and witty banter. But the premise of the show, which involves a guy who never attended law school or passed the bar faking it as a lawyer, melts lawyers!
And this is so individual and variable! I find it hilarious the number of people who find "sentient telepathic flying mecha dragon powered by ground-up paintings" completely acceptable but "flying to the moon" to be a bridge too far because "but what about vacuum, that's impossible!" I dunno, the Korean folklore I grew up with is also full of celestial maidens, that one story about the kids who run away from the talking tiger who ate their grandma and get carried up into the sky on a bucket lowered by the gods, and the rabbit in the moon. If you want Western literature, Orlando Furioso has the paladin Roland losing his wits and a journey to the moon in a chariot with four chestnut horses to retrieve them!
When I wrote "The Battle of Candle Arc" [Clarkesworld], whose tactics are cribbed from the Battle of Myeongnyang, I made Jedao's odds easier: outnumbered 8-1 instead of 10-1 because I thought pushing it risked snapping suspension of disbelief. I'm sure every fiction writer has a story of some bit they put in based on solid history/research that an editor queried as improbable-sounding.
What I did not realize as a judgy fifteen-year-old was that there are writers who don't care that much about picky details, there are kinds of stories or genres where picky details don't matter (or the point is to actively get the picky details wrong in hilarious/subversive fashion, e.g. John Barnes' One for the Morning Glory), there are readers who don't care about picky details, and probably a lot of writers/readers who care more about some kinds of picky details but maybe not about others, and writers/readers who vary depending on their mood or the phase of the moon. And sometimes people move between categories depending on the phase of the moon and their mood, and that's fine! (Unless you're a copyeditor.)
If you mess up (Western) music theory, I will notice. It might not matter for the story you're telling, but I will notice. If you mess up British nobility terminology (is a baron or a viscount a better catch for a Regency heroine hoping for love? who knows?), I won't be able to tell. (I remember being in a hilarious conversation about the latter and the apparent infelicities in the Japanese vampire anime Hellsing.)
Sf/f discourse often treats picky detail failure as a moral failing. I used to think that! But these days, I have come around to the view that it depends on the (sub)genre and its conventions, and what the specific work itself signals as being important. I mean, look, I'm the asshole who thinks that if we're REALLY going to fight about this, if your modern "hard science fiction" has FTL drives and it is NOT based on the Alcubierre warp drive or similar, you are cheating.
And I mean. Let's be real. So if you have a hard sf book where all the physics are completely rigorously extrapolated from state of the art, but also exactly zero characters are fully characterized human beings, is that a "more accurate" representation of the world, as opposed to a world of handwave nonsense magic but every single character is portrayed and behaves in a complex, multi-faceted, psychologically believable way? These are two extremes, but why is one "better" than the other?
Right now I'm in the midst of a mecha trilogy. At the point where you have BIPEDAL MECHA, quibbling about fine points of ballistics is besides the point. I will never forget a (fun!) Gencon presentation I went to that discussed bipedal mecha very seriously. The punch line: "Oh yeah, at Battletech/Gundam sizes/tonnages? One step and your mech would sink into the ground and get stuck. They're completely implausible. In real life, you want tanks. But we're here to have fun with the idea."
Also, I have FTL travel, so believe me I am tap-dancing WILDLY in order to not discuss special relativity, let alone general relativity. I told my editor, No, really, you DO NOT want me to discuss FTL stuff unless you want me to get into Lorentzian contraction etc., which I am completely capable of doing, but you DO NOT want me to do it for these books and it would also require me to redo the worldbuilding from the ground up.
There's nothing wrong with enjoying picky details and getting them right. But there's nothing wrong with NOT being into that, or in sometimes doing one, sometimes doing the other. Really it's more: what reader expectations are you setting? And the understanding that no matter what you do, someone will love it for XYZ reason and someone else will hate it for the exact same reason.
John Stith's Redshift Rendezvous has a sf "what if?" premise (a ship where the speed of light is 10 m/s) but then rigorously develops the consequences of the physics involved. Some people will love that rigor. Some people will actively bounce off of it. Some people love rigorously researched historical fiction. Some people will actively bounce off of it. Some people love the way Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth is stuffed with anachronisms and rule of cool (and, I'm told, Homestuck memes? I'm not even sure what Homestuck is). Some people will actively bounce off of it.
It's fun to discuss this stuff, or to geek out over the details! But please. Sometimes with entertainment fiction, picky details are not...automatically moral.
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FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions)
What are you working on?
I just delivered the draft of Lancers #2! If you're wondering how you missed Lancers #1, you haven't! It's not scheduled yet. I haven't even revealed the title because, uh, the working title has changed three times already at the publisher, so I'd rather just wait until there's a finalized title.
How's your health?
It's a work in progress. One day at a time.
What's one thing that you're reading right now?
I had the recent joyous experience of rereading C. J. Cherryh's Downbelow Station. Cherryh is one of my favorite authors and has been since I discovered her in high school with The Faded Sun and Exile's Gate. Until recently, The Faded Sun and Cyteen were my favorites.
I read Downbelow Station in college and was baffled by it and found it slow and leisurely and underwhelming. I had memories of six scenes; except for a vague memory of a riot, my memory told me that all of them were leisurely and nothing happened and I was bored. I managed to completely forget that Conrad Mazian (HI I HAVE A TYPE) was in the book at all. In fact, I can only conclude that I read three pages of the book (probably the only three leisurely pages in the book, goodness knows) and was...busy playing Heroes of Might & Magic III instead because almost everything about my memories are 1000000% aggressive reading comprehension failure?
But what that meant, over twenty years later, was that it was like reading a whole new book, and I loved it to pieces. (I do think the portrayal of the hisa hasn't aged well.) I even chased down an eBay copy of the tie-in board game The Company War, although we haven't been brave enough to try playing it.
Also I want Conrad Mazian to be my fandom boyfriend for 2023 and I am going to hell. :)
Do you have book recs for queer characters by queer authors?
I don't generally go looking for "is this author queer?" (in some cases I know because the author is actively public about it, or I know the author personally; and sometimes I know for various reasons, but I don't know whether they're out; and sometimes I have no clue, etc.). So I'm just going to give recs for books I've loved with queer characters.
(That said, if YOU have recs for m/m space opera or military sf with hardcore space battles, especially if it is full of DISASTER and ANGST and HIGH DEATH COUNTS, trad pub or indie, please tell me! deuceofgearsart@gmail.com - I am all ears and I suck at finding it.)
Elva Birch, All Manner of Hats - witty lesbian steampunk romance novella with a murder mystery and bonus hat magic, standalone.
Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built - nonbinary protagonist, cottagecore utopian sf where the protagonist meets a friendly robot, first in a series.
Mar Delaney, Wolf Country - atmospheric lesbian wolf shifter romance set in rural Alaska, I think a standalone.
Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant - lesbian antiheroine, various other queer/polyamorous characters in later books, grimdark epic fantasy—I adore this, but it's not for the faint of heart. First in a series.
Kate Elliott, Unconquerable Sun - two queer heroines and other queer characters, gender-bent Alexander the Great space opera, first in a series.
Max Gladstone, Empress of Forever - queer heroine, gender-bent space opera inspired by Journey to the West, standalone.
S. L. Huang, Burning Roses - two heroines, mythology and monster-hunting, standalone novella.
Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire - queer heroine, space empire and cultural hegemony and poetry, first in a duology.
Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth - queer heroine and a number of queer characters and body hijinks, quirky space fantasy with lots of bones and murder, first in a series.
Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts - gender-variant heroine, sf set on a generation ship that has enacted USAn plantation slavery, with all the brutality that implies; standalone.
Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, Rose of the Prophet trilogy - look, I know this is Arabian Nights-inspired fantasy from the 1980s so it has flaws, but it's a lot of fun, and the protagonist, Mathew, is gender-variant in a way that was unusual in mainstream fantasy at the time.
Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow - queer/polyamorous heroine, YA science fantasy with mecha and a feminist primal scream, first in a series.
What are you listening to lately?
I discovered Antti Martikainen's epic instrumental music recently. My favorite is "Wild Iron" (c'mon), but it's all wonderful. I love this music for writing to!
What's a game you're playing lately?
I picked up Failbetter Games' Mask of the Rose for my Nintendo Switch! My progress is slow not due to any fault of the game but health complications. It's wonderfully atmospheric, and I love being able to explore the Neath's history.
Also, I am running Jedao so I expect this initial playthrough will end in DISASTER and I am here for it. (Emily, if you're reading this, I'M SO SORRY.)
Who's an artist you're enjoying lately?
Esther Sanz - I commissioned her for Fatum card renditions of Jedao and Khiaz and they are FABULOUS. She's amazing. (Why is Khiaz holding a wine bottle? I thought it would be more interesting if she was holding something, so I suggested it. I hope the wine is tasty??)
What do you think of the portrayal of your characters on the cover of the Ninefox Gambit RPG?
They're not specific book characters! They're "generic" faction characters. :) The cover artist, Stephanie Folse, generated seven characters of different body types and so on, and asked me to assign them to factions. :)
Are there other places in your story [beyond the opening] you try to place hooks for the readers (such as cliffhangers)? Do you design plot around these hooks, or do you expect the plot to do the heavy lifting?
Yes, with caveats. So, not all stories are structured around cliffs, although some types/formats tend to be. Serialized formats (this includes webtoons!) often use cliffs to keep the reader coming back for more.
I often put cliffs at the end of chapters, usually every chapter if I can manage it, and I do in fact try to structure my chapter arcs that way. This will include [SO WHAT HAPPENS?!?! HELP!!!] notes in my rough drafts when I'm trying to figure out a dramatic cliff to end with.
But this is because I try to use thriller DNA (so to speak) in most my works. For books that are not breathless action all the time, or more restful genres, this may be contraindicated! And in fact, it can be more effective sometimes to give your characters a breather and/or the illusion of hope before you do something awful to them. :) I've had an editor ask me to break up the tension to give the reader breathing space at times, for example, which is a legitimate consideration.
For a book ending (one that is intended to end a series or stand-alone) do you think it is more important to give the reader a sense of satisfaction? A central message? Both or something else?
I think this depends on what your goal is as a writer, and that's going to vary from individual to individual and possibly also book to book. Maybe your aim is to ENRAGE the reader! But from a commercial writer standpoint, you probably want some readers coming back for the next book. :)
I'm a didactic writer, so I generally start with a thesis/theme/message and construct the worldbuilding, plot, characters, and symbolism around it. This isn't the only way to do it (it seems to be rare among the professional writers I know), but this is what works for me.
I don't necessarily aim for complete closure, but this is also due to my personal philosophy. I think life is messy, based on the evidence of history, and that situations with "we beat the threat, everything is better forever" happy endings are nonexistent in reality, so I tend to leave some of that "and by the way, here are things that are still messy/unresolved/possibly worse" in my endings. Some readers want clean happy endings and that's fine; that's a de gustibus thing. Heck, sometimes I'm one of those readers, especially when reading genres like romance. We need books with hope and optimism and happy endings; we need books with wall-to-wall tragedy and downer endings; we need books with ambiguity or just WTF weird shit. We need them all!
Jedao’s song ["Overkill (I'm Your Gun) [feat. Tim Patterson]") is very fitting. Do you compose the lyrics first or the melodies or both simultaneously?
I often compose both simultaneously. But in this case, I wrote the lyrics first while struggling with the rhymes, and then sat down with various instruments (piano, classical guitar, harmonica, soprano recorder) banging on the melody. I do get melody and harmony at the same time, to the point where I'm not sure how you DON'T get them both. (Only-melody-first, only-harmony-first, and other processes are completely valid! If you hand me just a melody, I can harmonize it, and v.v.; this happens to be my specific brain and process.)
The original refrain was completely different back when this was a joke song:
Banner the Deuce of Gears
I am the goose you fear
which also had a completely different melody/harmony, so reworking that was a pain. But worth it. :) I am modestly proud of "Overkill's my calling card" in the refrain, especially since Jedao's game isn't chess, it's poker.
I have a foxy question you haven't answered here!
Sure, please email deuceofgearsart@gmail.com and I'll get back to you!
And as promised, the catten pic!
