Lies They Tell You in Math
Howdy! Sorry it's been a while.
This newsletter will have: where you can read a new story by me for free, a random art piece, musings on writing & tools, a FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions), and a catten pic.
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My story "The Ethnomusicology of the Last Dreadnought" is now up at Sunday Morning Transport and you can read it for free! I've been fascinated by musicology and music theory for a long time, and I read up on ethnomusicology a bit when I learned of the field, which is relatively young as these things go. (Yes, I have the Red Book.) There are some interesting debates stemming from the field's origins—for example, if you ever go shopping for sampled instrument VSTs (basically software instruments based on recorded sounds), have you noticed how Western/European instruments like the violin or even bagpipes are, like, "regular" but if it's a pipa (Chinese) or morin khuur (Mongolian) it's "ethnic"? Yeah.
In other news, Tiger Honor has been named one of the top ten books in its age category in the ALA's Rainbow Books List and made the 2023 CORE Excellence in Children's and Teen Science Fiction list: Eleanor Cameron Notable Middle Grade Books! I'm really honored.
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For my 44th birthday I made Jedao art. XD I've been experimenting with different (digital) art styles.
[man shooting gun against a backdrop of candles and the phrase "thank you for the light"; the lines drip into blood]
[By the way, if anyone knows how to add image alt text in Buttondown, let me know?! I guess I will hit up tech support? I couldn't figure it out.]
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Lies They Tell You in Math, and Writing "Rules"
Today I'd like to talk a little bit about writing and "rules," and my philosophy regarding craft, through the lens of math.
Usual disclaimer: This is a framework that helps me. It may not help you! Ignore anything you don't find helpful and do what works fo ryou.
(Caveat: B.A. in math from Cornell U. and M.A. in secondary math education from Stanford, but I am not a mathematician.)
There are a lot of writing "rules" floating out there, usually aimed at novice writers. "Don't write in the second person." (My first story sale, to F&SF, was in the second person.) "Show, don't tell." (Showing is data, telling is metadata—sometimes the metadata are important.) You get the idea. Most of them are reasonably good rules of thumb. I can't think of any that are absolute other than, y'know, if you want someone else to read the story, you have to get it out of your head.
I want to back up and talk about math education, and how math teachers lie to you. I promise this is related, and I also promise that math teachers lie to you for fairly good reasons. (Well. Sometimes.) My experience is with American math pedagogy so I'm coming at the topic from that angle.
Generally, when small children are first being introduced to the concept of number, they get taught 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Maybe also 0. In math speak, {1, 2, 3...} = the natural numbers. This is what numbers are, we tell them.
A few years later, kids learn about negative numbers. Who knew, you can subtract 100 from 25 and get -75! This has a meaning (e.g. debt)! This is also a type of number! Plus fractions, decimals, rational and irrational numbers, real numbers.
Around middle school, kids are introduced to imaginary numbers (starting with i, the square root of -1) and complex numbers/the complex plane. This is usually after teachers at earlier levels tell you that you "can't" take the square root of a negative number, but lo! Now you can, if you're working in that system. If you're not mathy, it's okay if you don't remember the details. The more important point is that we start people with "simple" number types and then keep introducing new kinds of numbers.
Depending on the curriculum or how much math you take, you might also see vectors and matrices in high school. You might see rings and modular arithmetic systems (e.g. "clock arithmetic" or Z/nZ). You might learn that modular arithmetic can be done using polynomials (I'm eliding details). You might learn that infinities, as numbers, have different "sizes" or cardinalities (e.g. the set of real numbers is "bigger" than the set of natural numbers) and that infinity "arithmetic" has weird properties.
(If you're a STEM person, this is not a rigorous discussion, sorry! I'm giving the general flavor.)
Writing guidelines feel similar to me. You may start with some fairly rigid principles and then discover that someone can break the rule and make it work, or create a piece that vitally depends on breaking the rule.
So many craft decisions in writing depend (for me) on figuring out what I want to accomplish, figuring out what my goal is, and then deciding what technique or plot device or whatever will lead to the goal.
One of the books we studied regarding pedagogy and curriculum design during my teacher ed program at Stanford was Grant Wiggins & Jay McTighe's Understanding by Design. The Cliff Notes version is that you go backwards: first you decide what it is you want the students to learn, then you decide how they demonstrate that learning/understanding to your satisfaction, then you figure out how to teach in such a way that they can produce the desired demonstration.
A favorite example here is the idea that a story should be written with more or less grammatically correct, correctly spelled, correctly punctuated language. In many cases this will facilitate clear communication with the reader.
But consider Daniel Keyes' story (later novel) "Flowers for Algernon." This is told in the form of diary entries by a mentally disabled man who receives an experimental treatment that turns him into a genius. Here are the first couple of lines:
"Mr. Strauss says I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. I dont know why but he says its importint so they will see if they will use me."
Over the course of the story, we see this man's written language change. The spelling becomes correct. The diction and word choice become more sophisticated. The sentence structures become more complex. This evolution of language, starting with the "incorrect" passages, is integral to the effect of the story and its themes.
Let's take clarity as a principle. God knows, every time I look at a terms of service document I wish people would write these things more clearly for laypeople. Sometimes, in other contexts, I get my wish. The 9/11 Commission Report is an exemplar of clear writing. (However, I don't recommend reading it on an airplane, which was my mistake.)
Why would you ever want not to be clear? It's kind of like the passive voice. People slag the passive voice, but the passive voice specifically avoids naming an agent/taking responsibility, and sometimes you deliberately want to show that effect. People obfuscate, sometimes, when they're avoidant—whether for malicious reasons, or because they're in pain. You can reflect that in your prose as an oblique means of characterization.
A lurking issue here is, clear to whom? Listeen, I spent my childhood baffled by books that never explained what the hell a "Tupperware party" was because the author assumed that I, as an American, would "obviously" know.
I had an interesting exchange a few months ago with a South Korean science fiction author, Kim Bo-Young. She said that my book Dragon Pearl was a fascinating experience for her because it was clearly culturally Korean, yet not aimed at Koreans. (It was written for the American kids' market.) There's a part where I explicitly explain that gimchi is one of the banchan (side dishes) at the meal table. No Korean would EVER mention this because it's axiomatic that gimchi is one of the banchan. You'd only call it out if it was MISSING. I also described the appearance of a baduk (go) set—again, something that Korean readers would take for granted. What's "clear" is audience-dependent, and it's worth thinking about assumptions of whose cultural lenses are considered "default."
Another example, although not in the written domain, is a sports anime I watched some years back, Eyeshield 21. This show follows Japanese high schoolers playing American football. Because of the intended audience (...Japan), the show systematically goes through explaining American football rules one by one. Listen, I personally don't understand American football (...I have to turn in my Texan card now) but I'm 99% sure that a kids' animated show in the USA where its episodes dogmatically explained the rules would never in a zillion years be greenlit, because Americans are assumed to know!
Simplicity also gets into issues of style. I'm someone who spent a lot of time trying to write in a "clear" style. Then I encountered Roger Zelazny. His Creatures of Light and Darkness is not written in such a style, but it's one of my favorite books. I would be sad if its weird, experimental stylistic choices had been swapped out for something more straightforward.
There are always going to be trade-offs when you make a decision craft-wise. Picking "simpler" words or sentence structures will make your writing more accessible to a larger audience. But maybe that's not your goal. There are effects that can only be achieved with more complex sentence structures, more complex narrative structures, more avant-garde pleasures. Maybe you want to appeal to a specific narrower audience. Maybe you're interested in pushing against the boundaries in an Oulipo manner. There isn't going to be a one-size-fits-all solution here.
Sometimes there are venal considerations! Brevity is the soul of virtue, but y'know, if my wordcount limit is 10,000 words and I'm getting paid a great rate, I'm going to pick a more complex story concept that will run longer so I get paid more. An unusual workaround for this I saw was the sf anthology Twenty Epics, which had a tiered pay scale such that shorter stories were paid more. So of course I wrote as short a story as I could get away with. (The editors accepted my 900-word story on the condition that I add 500 words.)
I do recognize that not every writer (or reader) wants to spend energy chasing corner cases. That's fine! We like what we like. But again—writing principles and techniques and character types and plot hooks don't exist in a vacuum. It's all about what you want to do with them.
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FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions)
What are you working on?
I'm partway through the rough draft of Lancers #2!
I may also have committed an outline for a linguistics space opera. XD
How's your health?
Thanks for asking foxily! Still dealing with some lingering symptoms BUT I'm slowly on the mend, it just takes time.
What's one thing that you're reading right now?
Let me recommend a poetry chapbook I read recently and loved, full of TINY incisive micro-poems: Sarah Campbell's We Used to Be Generals (available here). I mean, please, this is me, I bought it on the strength of the title. Here's an example:
FOX
Falcon
I mean, WOW.
What are you listening to lately?
My friend T. generously got me Christopher Tin's Offworld Trading Company (Original Video Game Score) for my birthday and I've really been enjoying it—very sci-fi sounding electronica.
Who is your least favorite character ever?
You know, probably the most memorable one was Quinn Dexter (Dexter Quinn?) from Peter F. Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction books! At the time he filled me with SO MUCH RAGE. But to be honest, this is a testament to Hamilton's skill at not only creating such a compellingly hate-worthy villain—literally the biggest reason I read all kazillion pages of that series was to see if Quinn Dexter went down—but teasing the reader along with his villainous deeds and the fact that he kept escaping!
Who is your favorite character from television?
I'll separate this out.
For anime, tie between Roy Mustang (the various incarnations of Fullmetal Alchemist), who was a major inspiration for Jedao. :3 The other is antihero Lelouch Lamperouge from Code Geass.
For Western animation, Castlevania's Trevor Belmont. (Honestly, this is so hard. I also love Sypha Belnades and Alucard. I fell for Lisa even faster than Dracula did.)
For live-action TV, The Expanse's Chrisjen Avasarala. (But that show also has SO MANY great characters it's hard to pick. Bobbie, Amos, Naomi, Drummer...)
What do you think would be an interesting job to work, if you were in an alternate universe?
If I'd gotten the training early enough in life, I would have liked to pursue chess! Although I am not devious enough.
If I were independently wealthy and had the resources...a falconer. A huge commitment, basically my entire life would have to revolve around it. I think about it though.
I have a foxy question you haven't answered here!
Sure, please email deuceofgearsart@gmail.com and I'll get back to you!
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Obligatory Catten Pics
[cat looks up at a table]
[cat looks up at a table, calculating her jump]
[cat on a table, having made her jump]
These three pictures capture what Trigonometry Catten (as she calculates a jump up) looks like!
And finally, out of context theater:
My husband Joe: "Yoon, you know you left Jedao in the bathroom, right?!"
He was referring to a prototype Jedao acrylic standee:
[acrylic standee: a gunman in black and red, flames behind him]
Honestly I think I want to do completely new art, but the manufacturing quality is great. (I used Vograce.)