tl;dr: If you’re a man, or a writer, don’t read this. Just… don’t. I can’t speak for women who don’t write.
A friend of mine recommended the Cat Star Chronicles to me a long time ago. After all, I write catboy/catgirl smut, I should be able to enjoy some of it. So let me say off the bat that I tried, I really did, to enjoy the second book, Warrior, and in that I have failed utterly.
Here’s your basic plot: In a science-fictional universe, our heroine lives on a world that has turned its back on technology. She knows her world has a starport, but nobody goes there, and in fact people teach their children that the stars, indoor plumbing, books, vaccinations, and decent communications are for crazy people. Sane people lead, and subject their children to, short, brutal lives in a sub-gunpowder world of furs and swords. She’s also a “witch,” which is the author’s poorly-reasoned shorthand for someone with psionic powers, including talking to animals and setting stuff on fire. A supporting character drops off the romantic hero– a cat-man supersoldier who’s ill with an unspecified problem. The witch is supposed to heal him, at which point the supporting character will come back and claim his slave.
I fully believe Cheryl Brooks is a woman, rather than a man masquerading as one. And as a man, I was offended from the very first sex scene: his penis is large, prehensile, knubby in just the right way, and worst of all, exudes a pre-seminal fluid, the scent of which is a perfect aphrodisiac to humans, and the taste of which induces orgasms. It’s wish-fulfillment of the worst sort. Every sex scene thereafter is built upon these premises; our characters aren’t so much in love as she’s addicted to opiates he exudes.
After their mutual compatibility is established, the supporting character comes back to reveal that something terrible has happened, and he needs the unified tracking skills of the witch and the cat-man to right a terrible wrong. What follows from this is a far, far too wordy journey through the snow to a distant keep and a final battle. Worse, the witch character, despite her rejection of all things technological, has the Weltanschauung of an American coastal liberal who’s never thought too hard about her ethical and moral choices. She talks and she talks, often in tell-don’t-show form, to the reader and the characters, pointlessly retreading the same ground in chapter after chapter. The epilogue is a piece of breathless, “Reader, you won’t believe what happened next!” nonsense. I kept re-wording whole scenes in my head to show myself that important plot points could be revealed in dialogue and action without “as you knows” in front of them. An experienced writer could have done it easily.
Cat Star Chronicles: Warrior reads like an ex-valley girl hauswife decided to write something vaguely like the Kushiel series, only without education, voice, or wit. If you’re a man, you’ll be insulted by the hero: He’s a cardboard cutout with a massive strap-on dong dripping a mixture of Astroglide and meth. If you’re a writer, you’ll just be insulted.
Dead Iron by Devon Monk
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Devon Monk’s Dead Iron: The Age of Steam is a mash-up urban fantasy-meets-steampunk-meets western. Set in a 19th century Oregon small town facing change as the rail comes closer, Dead Iron is a satisfactorily well-written but by-the-numbers example of how steampunk ought to be written.
In Monk’s formulation, the veil between faery and Earth is very thin, and a mysterious, rare substance called glim enables those blessed with the Gift of Artifice to empower marvelous steam-powered “matics” with force and capacity and will. Monk’s world features mad agents of The Faery King tracking down a banished prince of faery and his dark magics, a college-professor cursed to be a werewolf by a god of an other-than-faery and now turned bounty hunter, and a witch whose only spells are vows and curses, and a chaotic good zombie. Dead Iron is the kitchen sink.
Monk’s prose style is amazing. Every character’s voice is utterly unique, and Monk attunes both grammar and vocabulary chapter by chapter to the needs of the point-of-view character: Bounty Hunter Ceder Hunt is lettered and well-mannered, but brutalized by his curse; witch Mae Lindstrom is simple, home-bound, but determined; the zombie’s thoughts are stuttering, guttering, but driven by a savage force of will. Monk’s language gives every character the room he or she needs to be clear and expressive.
The plot is solid, but predictable. Monk is very good about getting her characters center-stage and setting things in motion. It’s steampunk clockwork, and not a piece is out of place as the chess game goes from opening moves to its explosive ending. She pulls new pieces into the plot smoothly and without raising your sense of disbelief, she lays down foreshadowing with skill and experience.
However, the book is not perfect. The heroes are all too damned Good, the villains too damned Evil, the ordinary townspeople too damned Stupid. Dead Iron‘s morality is pure fairy tale, and none of the main characters really grows much during the course of the book. Each character is led by circumstance and reconcilition with one’s existing values, rather than growth and maturity or avarice and decay, from one scene to the next. They’re all wonderful people, but that’s about it. The book relies on language, likability, and a predictably relentless buildup to the final cinematic confrontation to sell its successor. It works, but just barely.
View all my reviews at Goodreads
I was at an erotica writing workshop recently, and one of the women running the panel on characterization said that one of the scenes she likes to write is the “celebration” scene. That’s what she called it. The whole “We’ve been through a terrible time and survived. Let’s celebrate… by fucking!”
I asked her about that. Shouldn’t every scene move the story forward? She was adamant that a celebratory scene was acceptable on its own terms, that it didn’t need to advance the plot or characterization in any way.
I disagreed, and I still do. I find the “celebration” scenes at the end of Star Wars and Return of the Jedi rather boring (although My Little Pony‘s send-up is cute) in that they don’t really wrap up anything. “The Heroes lived happily ever after” is all fine and dandy, but the throne room sequence goes on and on.
And I think it’s especially true of erotica. The whole point of erotica is to get the characters to reveal something important of themselves in the bedroom, to realize their own self-knowledge or their knowledge of the other, or to advance a personal, perhaps even inimical agenda.
To paraphrase a common writer’s saying, “They fucked and it was good” is just an anecdote. “They fucked and it was good because she overcame her fear of hurting him” has a plot.
17
Sep
2011
Showing Too Much.
17
Sep
2011
Show, don’t tell.
It’s not just a great song by Rush, it’s a battlecry of writers everywhere to the raw recruits. Over and over, we writers are told, it is import to show the story through the eyes of the characters, through the words they say and do, through the events they hear, see, and feel. By doing so, you get a story, not just a collection of events arranged in the outline of a plot.
I had a problem, though. I had, what I thought, was a great idea for a story. One of the biggest problems I have with The Journal Entries is that I rarely explain anything to the audience. I use a lot of high SFnal tropes, some of them relatively recent (mind uploads, consciousness taking credit for unconsciousness, robot rights, things like that), and I expect a reader to come up to speed on the things she doesn’t recognize fairly quickly. Sometimes, when I’m feeling merciful, I write a fish-out-of-water story, taking a character from the Corridor and dropping them somewhere else, or taking someone from somewhere else and dropping them into the Corridor. The culture shock scene is place where the character can say, “Back home, we do it this way.” I’ve had one of those on my writing machine for a while, Nefer & Sabrine, which first appeared on my notebook as “City Terran / Country Sterling.”
I have written and re-written the first three scenes over and over, never getting anywhere. Nefer is my city Terran– a mechanic and engineer, attached to an expedition soon to head off to a dangerous place. Sabrine is my country girl– a historian by trade also attached to the same mission as team archivist. Nefer is also a powered-armor goddess, but Sabrine’s dance training allows her to master the armor much faster than anyone else, giving Nefer a fit of jealousy, and of course desire. Nefer turns out to be one of those people (like me) who dive headfirst into a language’s grammar and have it down in three months, after which all that’s left is the slog of encountering new vocabulary and remembering it, so soon she and Sabrine have a private language, French, between them. This facility makes Sabrine jealous, but hearing an ordinary human speak her language also makes her homesick. And despite both of them feeling obliged to put aside romantic attachments for the duration of the mission, and having other reasons to avoid entanglements, well…
Well, that’s tension.
I tried too hard, over and over, to impress the reader with Nefer’s and Sabrine’s relative skills. I tried to show, and the scene got longer and longer without going anywhere. One of the best pieces of advice I recently got from Trey Parker (of South Park fame) was this: “If you have two scenes, the connecting phrase between them should be ‘but,’ or ‘therefore’. If it’s ‘and then,’ your story is boring. ’This happened then this happened then this happened is boring. ’This happened therefore this happened but that happened therefore this happened,’ that is an interesting story.” My story had a “this happened then that happened” quality.
I stepped back and said, “What is this story about?” The story was about Nefer and Sabrine seeing something interesting in each other. One paragraph of admiration from Sabrine about the quality of Nefer’s armor, one paragraph of surprise from Nefer as she watches newbie Sabrine push her armor into a retire devant and then into a full battement develope while keeping the other foot en pointe, a common but difficult ballet move, was all that was needed to get past that scene. (Yes, it’s told from two points of view. That’s common in romance writing.)
The lesson is simple: Don’t show what doesn’t need to be shown. Concentrate on what the story is about, and cut out any scenes, however lovely, that don’t progress the story.
I was re-reading Diane Wynne Jones The Tough Guide to Fantasyland shortly after reading a forgettable spy novel from the mid 1960′s in which the villain was quite fey and enjoyed threatening the hero with sodomy before death and all that.
Jones asserts that many fantasy parties have a gay wizard (paging Lynn Flewelling), who is always good for a casual footrub and sage advice.
It occurred to me that the whole “gay is villainous” thing swung so far over that the backlash ought to be done by now. And all characters who interact with one another, at least romantically, must have a sexuality of some kind. Even the villains. So, when will it be okay to write gay villains again? Would it ever be okay to write a gay villain? Not even Krod Mandoon suggested otherwise.
I suspect the answer is “never.” Heterosexuality is assumed by default. Making a character gay is still A Statement, regardless of who’s making it, and not some by-the-by characteristic of the villain. Witness the recent kerfluffle over gay characters in YA literature; several authors accuse YA agents and publishers of trying to nix even a minor gay character.
You can play a gay character for laughs or seriousness, but it’s still tricky water to navigate (he said, mixing his metaphors the way one mixes crisco & j-lube). But not villainous. I suspect the gay villain will not be a part of anyone’s toolbox, at least not in genre literature, for a while yet.