a couple bits of news

For those who like my Driftwood stories, "A Heretic by Degrees" will be in the IGMS Award Anthology, alongside a number of great tales -- including Von Carr's "Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain" (one of the readers' choice award winners) and Aliette de Bodard's "Horus Ascending."

Also -- a bit belated -- I did a guest blog for Jim Hines while he's out of town, on the topic of fairy tales and how they make no sense.

The DWJ Project: The Merlin Conspiracy

At the request of elaine_th.

This is, as mentioned before, a sequel of sorts to Deep Secret, albeit a loose one. The only significant connection is the re-use of Nick Mallory as a character; Magids also appear, but this book has much less to do with the Upper Room and other Magid affairs, being mostly about the world Blest.

Like Deep Secret, though, it divides itself between two protagonists: Nick, who gets flung out of our world and has to help three people before he'll be able to come home, and Roddy (Arianrhod), a Blest girl who's trying to stop the titular conspiracy. She, of course, is one of the three people Nick helps (or rather, promises to). And then there's Romanov, a very powerful magician who starts out seeming like an enemy, but ends up being more interesting than that.

In one structural respect, I think this one works a bit more smoothly than Deep Secret did: the alternation between Nick's pov and Roddy's jerks around much less than the Rupert/Maree equivalent. This may partly be because the narration is less explicitly framed as taking place at a specific point in time; aside from the opening couple of lines, that drops away until nearly the end of the book. (Contrast Maree's entries, which were being written more in realtime, which caused unfortunate difficulties.) The flip side is that Nick and Roddy spend much less time on the page together; they're off on near-separate tracks until about page 360.

Which got me thinking: of the DWJ books I know well, nearly all of them are either written from a single pov (third limited or first), or the omniscient perspective of a narrator. The exceptions are all later books: these two and Enchanted Glass; maybe others I'm not remembering. So I'll put it to the LJ hive mind and ask, is this impression correct? Are pov shifts something she started doing later in her career? Because they don't feel like something she was entirely comfortable with on a technical level.

As for details of the plot, we go behind a cut for that.

( Read more... )

Expect another post soon, as I finished a second book before I got around to posting about this one.

The DWJ Project: Warlock at the Wheel

Another short-story collection, and more successful than Stopping for a Spell -- but that's largely because it includes a few stories I think are better than anything in that collection; some of the others here are just as forgettable. In other words, the quality is very uneven.

"A Plague of Peacocks," "The Fluffy Pink Toadstool," and "Auntie Bea's Day Out" all feel a lot like the pieces in Stopping for a Spell, being of the "person is unreasonably awful and then gets their comeuppance via magic" type that I really just don't enjoy. I wasn't much of a fan of "Carruthers" either, which feels much the same even though its structure is different, and "No One" was a less-than-confident foray into science fiction.

The three I liked better:

"Warlock at the Wheel" is (loosely) a Chrestomanci story, and benefits from that by having more plot momentum than the ones I mentioned above. After Charmed Life he goes on the lam, but very incompetently, and hijinks ensue. It isn't up to the standards of her novels, and Jemima Jane is rather like the Izzies in The Merlin Conspiracy (by which I mean she sets my teeth on edge), but it did entertain me by confirming the speculation I made when I posted about The Homeward Bounders: Chrestomanci's agent Kathusa has a Kathayack Demon Dog, which is either a hell of a naming coincidence or a direct pointer toward Joris' Home world.

"Dragon Reserve, Home Eight" was the best of the lot for me. It sets up far more complete of a world than any of the others, and ditto characters; in fact, it almost feels like it's connected to something else, but to the best of my knowledge that isn't the case. (Please do mention in comments if I'm wrong.) I would definitely have read more about Siglin and the Dragonate and the Thrallers and the whole heg business.

"The Sage of Theare" is also good, and also a Chrestomanci story. It's more conceptually complicated than "Dragon Reserve, Home Eight," but less successful for me on a character and worldbuilding front (which is why I prefer the other). If it could have married its philosophical ideas about questioning and doubt and order and chaos to a firmer narrative framework, I would love it.


I think I'll do the Dalemark Quartet next, but I'm still open for requests for things people would like to see me tackle sooner rather than later.

Books read, June 2011

In which it will be obvious that I am now working on a novel.

Dreaming of Wolves: Adventures in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania, Alan E. Sparks. I don't actually remember how much of this book I got through -- not all of it, certainly -- but whatever, we'll count it as read. I picked it up for environmental detail on the aforementioned Carpathian Mountains, as it is the account of a man who went there as part of some wolf-studying project. It's not very well executed, but I got what I needed from it, more or less.

The Land Beyond the Forest: facts, figures, and fancies from Transylvania, E. Gerard. More research, and again I didn't read the whole thing; just the section on Romanians. This was written in the late nineteenth century, and wow, the racism. I have to quote:

Briefly to sum up the respective merits of these three races, it may be allowable to define them as representing manhood in the past, present, and future tenses. The Saxons [of that region; not of England] have been men, and right good men too, in their day; but that day has gone by, and they are now rapidly degenerating into mere fossil antiquities [...] The Hungarians are men in the full sense of the word, perhaps all the more so that they are a nation of soldiers rather than men of science and letters. The Roumanians will be men a few generations hence, when they have had time to shake off the habits of slavery and have learned to recognize their own value.

Yeeeeeeeah. But, well, I'm writing a nineteenth-century-ish novel set in a Romania-like region, so I don't regret picking this up from the library. On the other hand, I don't think I'll be copying from it all that closely: there is merit to Isabella being obsessed with dragons and really quite careless of human notions like racial superiority.

Eight Days of Luke, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

The Snow Queen's Shadow, Jim C. Hines. If I'd gotten around to posting this sooner, I could have said, ha-ha, I have this book and you don't, nyah nyah. But the book is out now, so I'll skip that part and go straight to the bit where I say that Hines has done a remarkable job wrapping up this series. He's said elsewhere that it took him a while to figure out that the fairy tale books have been about questioning and complicating the notion of "happily ever after," and this delivers on that theme, in very excellent ways. (Also, to echo Mris: this series is now done. So if you're one of those people who prefers to wait until you can get all the books, you're now cleared for take-off.)

Deep Secret, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.


So far, July is shaping up to be the Month of Much Manga. (And comics, but that doesn't alliterate, so.) But we'll see how it goes.