books – AUSTIN DEWAR

Using punctuation to lock readers into your protagonist’s POV

Life update! While I’m still pursuing writing, right now I’m detouring to focus specifically on developing my editing skills. Along with reading for Strange Horizons and Flash Fiction Online, I’ve taken on more freelance editing and story coaching jobs this year, and I’m working towards a copyediting certificate from UC San Diego. I thought some of the assignments I turned in for the first course in the UCSD program, a grammar intensive, might make for fun blog posts, so here’s one about using the semicolon (and other punctuation) to guide the reader through description of setting in a story, locking them into your protagonist or narrator’s POV.

Using punctuation to lock readers into your protagonist’s POV

According to The McGraw-Hill Education Handbook of English Grammar and Usage, semicolons should be reserved for instances “when the two parts of a compound sentence—the two independent clauses—are very closely related” (260). But, assuming fluid prose and sound rhetoric, all consecutive sentences from any given text may be expected to bear a degree of “close” relationship to each other. Although one can imagine two sentences side by side which bear absolutely no relation—for example, “I find it difficult to understand contemporary punctuation usage through studying examples from Moby Dick. My cat just vomited on my toe”—in practice, most writing will not contain sentences this jarringly disconnected. So how does one determine if two independent clauses are closely related enough to warrant a semicolon?

I’d like to explore this question in the context of writing fiction, particularly in describing setting. In a passage of setting description, generally the sentences are all “closely related”—they all describe the setting, lighting up aspects of place formerly obscured, like a flashlight beam in a night hiker’s hand. So when and why might a semicolon be used?

When describing setting in fiction, I try to think about where, based on the details I select, I am turning the reader’s attention, and how the reader is spatially experiencing the world of the book. If the protagonist enters a garden, I could describe the grackles in the pecan trees, the stink of stagnant pond water, or the irises wilting in the afternoon sun—details which ground the reader in a real sense of place, while also doing something to characterize the protagonist/narrator, whom the reader will infer (consciously or subconsciously) is the one noticing and pointing these things out to them. Just look at how setting informs character through the narrator in Ella Fitzgerald’s song, “Tenderly,” who describes how “the evening breeze / caressed the trees / tenderly,” compared to the narrator in T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” who describes “the evening spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon a table”!

Recognizing that description of setting is really simulation of character gaze or movement through space, an author may use punctuation to moderate that gaze or movement—and the reader’s “movement” alongside them. Punctuation may serve not simply as grammar notation or reproduction of spoken language’s rhythm, but as a lever or regulating valve for the reader’s flow through the physical world described in the text.
Then, while all the sentences in a passage of description may technically be “closely related,” different punctuation choices can influence how closely a reader feels physically proximal to what is described, depending on the effect you want to produce.

Consider this passage of setting description from Satin Island by Tom McCarthy:

There was a small window. A few feet from this there was a drape that hung along the wall: this big wrinkled curtain. I don’t know why it was there—maybe for warmth; behind it there was just a wall as far as I could tell.

Each of these sentences could be said to be equally related, because they are all describing something about the same room. But McCarthy doesn’t join them all with semicolons. He saves it for a specific impact at the end, while slowly escalating towards it through other punctuation, tightly controlling how the reader moves through and experiences the space:

First, the initial period forces the reader to come up short at the window, simulating the way one is naturally drawn to and transfixed by a source of light upon entering an otherwise dark room. Next, the colon similarly emphasizes the prominence of another detail: a peculiar curtain, which might have blended into the shadows if only a comma had preceded it. While the window is “small,” the curtain is “big,” and McCarthy’s next punctuation choices serve to magnify the oppressive curtain even further: an em-dash links question and answer bubbling in the protagonist’s mind in response to the curtain. Finally, McCarthy drops a semicolon to provoke the reader, after a tense pause, to dare to draw back the curtain.

If McCarthy had used a period here instead, the reader would not experience the sense of a continuously deeper slide into the room, as if sucked into a whirlpool. The punctuation parallelism would have made the curtain and wall seem to sit statically next to each other, two-dimensional instead of three-dimensional. The reader would know there was a wall behind the curtain—but she would not have pulled back the curtain herself to discover it.

Whenever you write a passage describing setting, return during the editing phase to interrogate its punctuation. Think about how a comma might dip a reader’s finger into the pool, where a period pushes them all the way in. Could the enclosure of one detail in parentheses better effect the reader poking their head around a corner? Consider if a colon or an em-dash announces the presence of the gothic mansion at the end of the lane—and its door, creaking open, slowly, very slowly . . .

Fencon 2025: Reflections on Intergenerational Fandom

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending Fencon, a fan-run science fiction and fantasy convention in Dallas/Fort Worth. The convention skews towards older, Southern fans in their late forties to seventies, and as a younger millennial steeped more in Tor than Baen, I had a blast getting outside my bubble and diving into oldschool fandom, learning the history, and exploring some cultural divides.

The convention, attended by perhaps 150 people, featured panels ranging from cozy discussions on favorite books, to brainstorms on military strategy in alternate histories, to NASA scientists debating the best way to mine asteroids. Military SF author Jack Campbell gave a lovely keynote speech about respecting your readers, and other people generally, and delved into the complicated dynamics of writing military life and hierarchy. I particularly enjoyed the contributions of Baen publisher/editor-in-chief Toni Weisskopf; I could listen to her talk all day! She is incredibly humble and generous, funny as heck, and has a breathtaking mastery of the editing craft–truly a legend. Rhonda Eudaly was another leading voice at the con, whose passion for sharing resources and bringing up new writers shone in everything she did.

As a younger millenial, and someone who fell away from reading for a while in my twenties, my speculative fiction cultural touchestones are way more recent–Ann Leckie rather than C.J. Cherryh, Jeff VanderMeer rather than H. P. Lovecraft. I was as surprised by the ignorance of many older fans about the stuff I consider “big” right now as I was confronted by my own ignorance of the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

I kind of assumed even older fans would occasionally check out what’s currently bestselling, but at a number of panels, speakers confessed a lack of knowledge about developments in the genre since 2000. For example, one panel focused on the panelists’ perceived prevalence of cynical stories about brutally violent antiheroes, but my perception, based on what my peers are into, is that the hottest heroes right now (outside dark fantasy, at least) are messy but noble-hearted reformists and revolutionaries working against Empire: Ancillary Justice, A Memory Called Empire, Gideon the Ninth, the Expanse, Some Desperate Glory, etc. On the flip side, through the weekend I collected an extensive list of big names I am embarrassed to have still not yet read—Zelazny, Delany, A. E. van Vogt, Lois McMaster Bujold, C.J. Cherryh, etc. Folks were more than happy to recommend titles (and pass on 6 actual books, courtesy of Scott Cupp) to deepen my knowledge of the pre-1980’s era.

Another divide was the difference between this type of con and what its members deride as “gate shows”–huge conventions like Comic-Con and Anime Expo, that are professionally produced and intended to turn a profit. The fans in my generation and younger attend these types of cons, and don’t even know smaller cons like Fencon exist. And unless Fencon finds a way to radically transform, or use their institutional knowledge to help invent a new kind of fan-con for the new era, it’s apparently on the decline. I heard several older fans lament “the problem of graying,” and the approaching death of Fencon, and reference a similar fate that befell ConDFW (Covid didn’t help). I was surprised to feel a surge of grief myself for something I only just learned existed, and started brainstorming ways I could bring all my friends next year, perhaps reinvigorate it with new life, connect the rich, institutional knowledge of these fore-fans with the new fandoms of today. But, and I say this well aware when we’re old, we’ll probably do exactly the same thing, it seemed like many of the older folks are content to keep it as it is and grumble about younger fans and their strange ways.

Still, I had a surprisingly emotional experience at Fencon, a bittersweet sense of both reunion and loss, coming home and grieving. This is a community that grew from handmade fanzines and correspondence snail-mailed across the country, from clubs organized out of the backs of magazines, who remember taking guest speakers like Harlan Ellison and Leonard Nimoy out to the local honky-tonk for drinks. I had a glimpse of what we younger fans have missed out on: a cozy, for-us-by-us gathering of fans, artists, editors, and writers from amateur to big name, all nerding out and partying together without autograph fees or thousand-dollar costumes or the expectation that you be the very best in whatever you do. Sure, we can exchange fanfiction and fanart instantly across the internet and have extensive discourse over social media, in special Discord servers, etc. but dammit, I want something tangible!

Hearing tales of Fandom past made me pine for an actual paper zine with scribbly cartoons and hot takes and gossip that arrives in my mailbox. And yes, I know people still make zines, but it’s not the thriving culture it was, and there’s also things like perfectionism and fear of commitment that makes organizing persistent activity difficult. So many initiatives start with a burst of energy and then immediately get dropped. Why make little fan cartoons when other creators are sharing professional quality content on Instagram–who would read it? Isn’t it cringe? And why show up to a small club or fan convention if you don’t know anyone, or don’t totally feel like it that day, when you could just connect with your perfect group of people online, without leaving your house? We know we’re lonely, we know we’re missing face-to-face connection and the joy of building something together, but I think we largely just don’t know how to do it anymore. I think many of us are struggling with having been raised as consumers and/or capitalists, “creators,” but not creatives, not organizers and participants in an offline creative social life.

But I don’t want to end on a morose note. Despite the comments above, I don’t feel cynical about the newer generations, and I’m confident we will continue evolving our own forms of community and overcoming the obstacles to it. And, while this will sound like a cliche moralism, I do think we will get a head start if we make an effort to seek out the wisdom of older generations, get outside our bubbles and attend things like Fencon, and study the history of the genre even where pulpy and problematic. Likewise, I would love to see older fans fight for continuity–pass on that institutional knowledge of how to organize cons, how to bring people together, how to resolve conflicts, etc. to new generations.

One idea–Fencon has often run a “con within a con” format, where they team up with a specific fandom (this year, the 1632 universe) to bring in more numbers. What about networking with Gideon the Ninth, or Powerless, or ACOTAR fans, who don’t have a con of their own, to have a mini-con within Fencon and bridge the gap between established and brand new fandoms? Now, there’s nothing more annoying than someone rolling up, knowing nothing about what you’re doing, and telling you how to fix it, so my two cents may be worthless. But I would love something like Fencon for the next generation, and despite retiring from organizing I find it hard to turn off organizer brain, so I can’t help scheming…

Some ways that stories start

This week I studied story openings! I looked at a number of short stories and novels in science fiction, fantasy, romantasy, suspense, and literary fiction. Here’s what I noticed:

Starting in medio conflictu

I found that one thing 99% of openings had in common was that they began with some kind of conflict. It could be epic in scale, along the lines of “Once upon a time there was a war between the Humans and the Faerie,” or of middling importance (like a fight scene or argument about something fairly important) or even super low stakes (a guy struggling to open a jar of pickles, or bickering with his sister over something almost inconsequential).

It seems like it basically doesn’t matter what the conflict is, as long as there is one. Some do retain relevance on rereading—this seems particularly common in short stories, where the opening conflict often reflects the heart of the story. In these cases, the real significance of the opening conflict is only made clear at the end of the story, giving these stories a circular quality, as in the echoing and layering “We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim. The jar of pickles may turn out to be the key to saving the world! But this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. I found other stories where, however dramatic the opening conflict seemed, further reading revealed it was more of a throwaway event simply for the purpose of hooking attention or setting things up. Gideon the Ninth and its sequels are notoriously built for re-reading, yet I find that the opening of Gideon, where she tries to escape her prison-home, is actually a fairly unimportant conflict, soon swept away by more relevant ones.

The opening conflict can also be a single, sustained issue, or a barrage of problems. In “Lucky Thirteen” by Tracy Clark, the singular, subtle opening conflict is the hint of difficulty in an old man’s traversing an icy path. But in “La Chingona” by Hector Acosta, in setting the scene, each sentence describes a new conflict: a church which looks like it’s flipping off God, a storm and thunder making the lights flicker. Neighbors arguing upstairs. An eviction notice. Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes begins with a low-stakes conflict in the form of argument between the MC and her brother, then proceeds at almost breakneck pace, introducing new exposition, mysteries, obstacles, and stakes with every line of a dialogue.

Application: some writing exercises

Some exercises and methods I’ve drawn from this are:

1. Think of opening a story or scene in terms of conflict, not simply in terms of things happening. If I’m starting with a character, ask what would stand most in opposition to their achieving their goal right then? What kind of initial conflict, however low stakes, might exemplify the main character’s overarching problem, or explain the driving forces in the world of the story, etc.

2. Try out two ways of opening a story or scene: “slow,” going long and deep on a single, sustained conflict, or “fast,” piling on the problems like an opening salvo.

3. Ask how each sentence, aspect, or scene could be modified to most maximize or imply conflict. Instead of a tree standing next to a house, the tree’s branches might beat against the window. Instead of opening with someone reading a letter, open with them having to put on their reading glasses first. Turn each line of dialogue into a rebuttal or disagreement in some way, rather than allowing characters to chat obligingly. Write a scene like those classic commercials where everything goes absurdly wrong.

4. After finishing a story, go back and ask how the opening conflict could be revised into something emblematic of the driving conflict or that foreshadows the ending.

Some Types of story openings

I also noticed some common types of story openings crop up again and again. When I start working on a fantasy novel next year I’m going to do an even deeper genre-specific dive to understand common structures and beats, but for now here’s what I’ve found across various genres, that can be helpful in thinking about where and how to begin:

The Founding Legend Prologue opening

Usually 1-3 pages. Tells the foundational myth or event in a prologue that sets the stage for the world of the story, generally followed by a first chapter which can enter straight into action scene and not require as much explanation of the magic/world because the prologue has cleared up the basics. It also helps to serve as a promise of the premise or clarify what the story is about for the reader, so even if there aren’t werewolves in the first chapter, you know to expect them. In Elantris, a single page prologue briefly explains how the city of Elantris was once great and people magically turned into immortals to live there. In The Serpent and the Wings of the Night, the prologue establishes the origin story of an important character, and that this is a world of humans vs vampires.

The Theme or Philosophy Concept opening

Can be a prologue or opening to first chapter. In The Power, a couple pages describe the book’s stance on the concept of power: “The shape of power is always the same; it is the shape of a tree[…].” The Left Hand of Darkness features the MC ruminating on a concept that led him to where he is today. Or in Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Intriguing Clutter / Lagniappe opening

Opens with various pieces of “texture” leading us into the world of the novel, like news clippings, letters, email or text exchanges, poems, epigrams, fake author/title page, drawings, etc. (see The Power which includes many of the above). An exception is that in fantasy genre, it’s so typical to start with a map and/or dramatis personae that these do not feel like intriguing clutter and I would not consider them an in-story opening, rather I consider them frontmatter.

“This is Real” Author Note opening

An author note references the book as if it’s real or what it describes is real. For example, Thomas More’s Utopia or Gene Wolfe claiming he has tried to translate The Book of the New Sun into English and Latinate approximations, explaining name choices and worldbuilding.

Hard Action opening

Opens in the middle of a fight scene, a raid, a dogfight, or interrogating somebody, etc. BAM hits you in the face with dramatic action. Typical of action thrillers, but also seen in fantasy or science fiction. A Broken Blade by Melissa Blair opens with the MC Opens in the middle of (really, right at the end of) interrogating a victim whose throat she slits at the end of a short scene.

Soft Action opening

Opens in the middle of an active scene (versus narration/exposition), but it’s lower stakes, not as dramatic. Gideon the Ninth opens with the dramatic situation of an escape in process, but it’s softened by humor and the fact that the character isn’t being pursued or prevented from carrying out their plan until the end of the scene.

Contemporary Day in the Life opening

See Starter Villain and many generic romance books, mystery, and contemporary horror: opens with character just going about their normal daily life activities, which each thing they do or reflect on giving a piece of information setting up the character, setting, and story to come. There needs to be some kind of driving mystery, problem, little conflict, or piece of intriguing news that drives you to keep reading among these generally humdrum details, although there is some general interest in this person just for being a person and demonstrating different quirks, complaints, gossip etc.

Fantasy Day in the Life / Hero’s Journey opening

Technically also day in the life, it starts with character waking up and/or going about their usual activities, but it looks pretty different from the contemporary one. Often because the hero is starting in a wretched village, and their status quo is wretched, whereas in Contemporary Day In Life, the status quo is generally pretty chill and pleasant. See Foundation by Mercedes Lackey, which starts with a young boy MC working in the mines. Elantris could be considered this I think, starts with character waking up and, if only very briefly, experiencing a moment of peaceful day in the life of a prince, before he’s suddenly thrown into a new reality.

Big Game Hunter opening

It’s funny this would happen enough to be its own category, but there’s a distinct trope of opening fantasy stories with the hero hunting a deer, in many cases only to stumble on a magical creature. Hunger Games, A Court of Thorns and Roses, Eragon, and The North Wind all open like this. I guess it’s an easy way to make a character be immediately engaged in action/conflict, while still setting up the status quo before the real inciting incident. It also seems to be a trophy way to demonstrate “strong female character who don’t need no man.”

The Tool of the Trade opening

Opens by demonstrating and/or explaining some craft, technique, or trade. “The Dragonslayer of Merebarton” by K.J. Parker opens with an explanation of mending a chamberpot. “Stingers” by LaToya Jovena opens with a bartender’s perspective on life and mixing drinks as chemical processes. Can be combined with another opening, for example the Hunter opening shows an everyday skill, as does the interrogation scene mentioned in “Hard Action opening” above.

Dialogue opening

This would also count as an action opening, but one comprised mainly of dialogue between the main character and somebody else. In a short story, this will often cut straight to the chase, and comprise a conflict between the main character and their foil, love interest, or antagonist. The reverse is true in novels, where the dialogue will either be with a throwaway character, or with a beloved sibling, best friend, or comrade in arms. In a novel, the antagonist and love interest aren’t usually introduced in the opening dialogue/scene, I think because you don’t want to rush past developing the main character before introducing them. But this convention is occasionally broken, as in A Promise of Fire by Amanda Bouchet, where the love interest shows up in the first page. Like pure action, the dialogue should usually be a conflict between the two characters, although it can be low stakes, like “you look like shit,” “thanks a lot” “you sure you shouldn’t be resting?” “people depend on me” etc. Can also be combined with the Day in the Life opening, for example in Bannerless the main character comes down for breakfast, giving a glimpse of her normal daily life before she heads off to a detective assignment in an unfamiliar town.

The Ensemble opening

This may be a convention in some genres like epic fantasy and bad writing in others, like more basic fantasy. It’s an opening in which a bunch of characters are introduced, not just the main character and one or two foils or companions (I noticed most books have only 1-3 characters in the first scene). Now, this is different from an ensemble story, like Gideon the Ninth or Murder on the Orient Express, where each chapter introduces a couple more characters, until you’ve met everyone, and then the chapters sort of cycle through focusing on a couple at a time, so you can give each their deeper turn. No, this is referring to having over 3 characters in the very first scene/chapter. I am not personally a fan of this kind of opening, I feel it taxes my brain to try and hold too many characters at once right at the beginning of the book. I get them muddled up in my head since I don’t yet know them intimately on an individual level, and I also don’t get as interested with a broad sweep of characters (which can’t go as deep) versus giving me a single character or couple of characters to go deep on at first.

Taking storytelling seriously – 6 month progress report

Reflection

In January, I committed to seriously pursuing writing fiction as a long-term vocation. I’ve written since I was young, and had periodic years where I put serious effort into improving my writing and publishing, but have always set storytelling aside. I’ve struggled with the usual sense of inadequacy, the internalized idea it’s not a “worthwhile” pursuit or that there’s “more important” things I should focus on, and genuinely needing to overcome some challenges in my life first. But I’ve always loved writing, felt compelled to write, and it’s the one thing I know I can stick with for the rest of my life and give my all, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Looking around, I see people develop at different rates, and compared to many of my peers, I have been a slow grower. But, we all start from different places, and life has thrown me a couple extraordinary curve-balls. It took me about 30 years to sort out my priorities, and I used to worry about falling behind, about “proving myself.” But nearing my thirties, something shifted in my brain to perceive, more patiently, a different time scale. Now, I think in terms of being in it for the long haul. My goal is to have written ten novels by 2035, and maybe published one of them. It feels good to be patient with myself and give myself the time I need to actually learn this craft. I’ll be a sloth or a snail, just enjoying the doing—“I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.”

It was a challenging start to this commitment this year, because I also started working two jobs, sometimes 60 hours a week. But I have been extremely disciplined about how I use my remaining time. On work days, I tend to either study a story or writing textbook, or work on a shorter piece or exercise. Fortunately, looking back on creative writing and education courses I took in undergrad, and my own teaching experience, I’ve been able to design what I think is a pretty good syllabus for the year, which I continue to adapt and develop as I learn more. On off-days or days I only work a single job, I write 4-12 hours. Although entering this next half ofthe year, I’m cutting back because I do have a tendency to go too hard and see diminishing gains. Now I’m trying to keep it around 2-4 hours of writing a day, plus study hours. Rest and doing other stuff is important, not just for recovery and strength, but because the subconscious plays such a role in writing and needs unstructured time and space to foment, as well as new experiences to draw from.

I figure that, if I continue to work consistently and keep study widely and deeply, there’s no way I can’t be at least decent at storytelling after ten years. I have reached mastery of only a few things before, not even mastery but just being roundly competent, like getting to the point in tennis as a kid where I could compete for and actually win first place. It felt amazing. Not the winning, but the sheer possession of the craft, the deep thrill of being really very good at something. The special joy you can get out of life when you know something backwards and forwards to the point you can actually begin to innovate in the field. That’s where I want to get with writing stories. The failure for me now is if I don’t follow through, not if I never become a genius or get recognized or rich (ha!) from writing.

Of course, I’d still also love to be recognized, and to make some money from writing. That’s another thing I used to feel embarrassed about admitting, but I’m kind of done trying to impress people, I prefer to just be honest about everything. I write because I have things I want to share with other people. I want to give people a good story, relief from suffering, connection with others, useful ideas, and assistance in noticing certain beautiful things. And my life would be a lot easier and more enjoyable if I could make a living from it too, so that I could truly put all my best hours into production, doing what I love. That’s the dream.

For now, I will do my little writing exercises and write my shabby, deranged little first drafts, and hopefully start to make some writing buddies along the way, because this would be even more fun with company.

2024 Stats – 6 Month Progress Report

+ I got a poem accepted for upcoming publication in my favorite magazine, Strange Horizons (!). While I’m learning to write stories now, I’m still trying to work on poetry while I can.

+ Outlined and completed 8 chapters of a romance novel based on study of a particular niche and market. However, I decided the goal of completing a novel was one I needed to fail for now. The more practice the better at this novice stage. I can complete a lot more short stories in a year and probably learn more from that than from completing a single novel, so I pivoted to short stories starting in February.

+ I finished 8 short stories out of 14 projects. It took me a couple months to learn I needed to focus on finishing everything I start. Since then, I’ve finished everything, even though these endings are predictably abysmal, because… I haven’t been practicing endings, since I haven’t been finishing things.

+ I published 5 blog posts, including 2 book reviews (and this post :P). I also wrote a number of essays/analyses/blog posts for private reflection and learning/practice, but was selective about what I published here.

+ I developed a syllabus and disciplined practice for learning to write stories as well as a 5 year plan for moving forward with writing. This may actually be the best achievement of all, because it’s allowed me to make incremental, actual progress that I can track and know I’m not floundering.

+ I read 40 books, far more books in 6 months than I probably read in the past 3 years (below).

The biggest lessons I ‘ve learned so far about learning to write stories

1. FINISH what I start. No matter how terrible and ridiculous it makes the story, give the story a conclusion. Also applies to study–work through one textbook or story analysis at a time. Embrace that you are a beginner, that this story isn’t going to be good, that everything is practice for a much longer-term goal.

2. Set goals and steps to meet those goals, and reflect regularly (at least once a week) on progress towards the goal.

3. Break down other peoples’ stories and write in imitation of them for practice. I think this is the most effective learning strategy I’ve tried so far. Textbooks can help give you broad overviews of story structure, or different techniques, but the active/constructive learning that occurs when you break down a story yourself, then try to apply it to writing your own story, really sticks and improves your writing the most. Across history, artists learned through direct imitation of the masters. When you read something more than once, break it down and analyze it, and try to write in imitation of it, you really lock in the information and learn in a way you don’t retain just reading stuff passively. Had to learn to read for writing.

4. Similarly, when stumped, study more. Feeling stuck or “writer’s block” is often a case of simply trying to summon stuff up out of thin air, instead of going out and finding the information you need to move forward. When I haven’t known how to proceed, it was usually because I either didn’t actually know enough about the art of writing a story, or I hadn’t fleshed out my characters, concept, etc. enough to project what would happen next (often a combination of both). Here, studying how other authors have handled an issue is again helpful, as well as becoming more knowledgeable about my limits, what I’m actually capable of writing at this level, etc.

5. General technique stuff. Not gonna list it all out here. Just the base matter you have to accumulate as a beginner, a chaotic blend of information and half-baked ideas and dawning awareness of things you don’t yet understand, which the coming years of further practice will refine into something meaningful.

6. A grounded perspective. Working at a book store has been really helpful to give me a humbling, but also encouraging sense of perspective about the business/publishing side of writing, and who readers are. I’ve seen how books come and go on the shelves, with even great writers eventually circulated off to make way for the new big thing, and it’s made me realize that like everything else in life, the world of books is actually in a constant state of change. Just because someone is big right now doesn’t mean it will last forever, and just because someone is small right now doesn’t mean that, after another twenty years or publishing five more books, they don’t become huge. It’s helped me plan the rest of life accordingly, understanding I won’t be able to make a living writing fiction (at least not any time soon), and to stop seeing the options as “failure” or “famous” and instead as “all you can do is work consistently, love the work itself, and hope for good fortune.” Working with a lot of different readers (coworkers and customers), has also given me a better grasp of audiences, trends, marketing, commerciality, and the need to factor these into writing I want to make money from, when I get to that point.

Maybe I’ll check in again at the end of the year and see what’s changed. I feel like it took me this long just to kind of figure out what my process needed to look like, learning strategies and resources, how to organize my time for this, etc. so hopefully the next six months will show a slightly accelerated progress!

Books I’ve read so far this year

NB: Many of these I “read”—listened to, actually—thanks in large part to audiobooks via Libby, since many days I have 2-3 hours of cumulative commute time.

Jeff VanderMeer – Southern Reach Trilogy (while it remains a trilogy), Hummingbird Salamander, and Borne
Tamsyn Muir – The Locked Tomb trilogy (pending book four)
Asimiov – Left Hand of the Electron
A. K. Larkwood – The Unspoken Name
Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows – The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society
Aimee Lim – Spindle of Fate
Arkady Martyne – A Memory Called Empire
Sarah J. Maas – A Court of Thorns & Roses
Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone – This Is How You Lose the Time War
Ted Chiang – Exhalation
Sayaka Murata – Convenience Store Woman
Rachel Harrison – Cackle
Ann Leckie – the Imperial Radch trilogy
Hiron Ennes – Leech
Meg Cabot – Enchanted to Meet You
Mira Grant – Kingdom of Needle and Bone
Lisa Jewell – None of This is True
Catriona Ward – Sundial
Gillian Flynn – The Grownup
Melissa Marr – Remedial Magic
Lana Harper – In Charm’s Way
Larry Brooks – Story Engineering
Gwen Hayes – Romancing the Beat
Thich Nhat Hahn – The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching
Agustina Bazterrica – Tender is the Flesh
Jack Woodford – Plotting for Every Kind of Writing
Kate Wilhelm – Storyteller
Carlo Rovelli – Helgoland
H. P. Lovecraft – The Shadow Over Innsmouth
Ryu Murakami – Piercing
Ralph Bauer – An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru
Jane Goodall – The Book of Hope

The girl who chose violence: The Spindle of Fate by Aimee Lim (ARC Review -Coming 6/4)

Disclaimer: I received an advanced reader copy (ARC) of this book for free for the purpose of giving an honest review.

The Spindle of Fate can be purchased here.
***SPOILERS***

New author Aimee Lim’s The Spindle of Fate is a middle grade fantasy drawing on an old Buddhist tale, Mulian Saves His Mother From Hell. It tells the story of Evie Mei Huang, a 12-year old girl who descends into the Chinese underworld to rescue her dead mom, who turns out to have been part of a secret magical society. Both educational and entertaining, the overarching narrative serves as a vessel to share a sampler of Chinese myths, folk tales, history, and language tidbits as it follows vengeful antihero Evie into Hell.

Personally, I think this book is horror disguised as fantasy. From depicting the Huang’s petty bourgeois world where even the magic system functions as a family business, to the literal pond of blood the kiddos have to swim in, it sets some deeply unsettling scenes. Evie herself is a horror movie fan, so I feel like it’s intentionally nudging at that genre, even if the book had to get marketed as plain fantasy. I would still say it’s appropriate for its proposed 8-12 year-old audience, as a kid that loved horror at that age myself—just a head’s up that it’s more Dante than Rick Riordan.

Evie reminded me of one of Roald Dahl’s spiteful characters, and was fun to read precisely because she’s not “good.” She doesn’t seem to like anyone, even her supposed best friend, and has a particularly carceral/punitive ethics driving her every move. Despite being given strong evidence to the contrary, Evie can’t wrap her head around the idea that the cycle of violence is bad. Instead, in order to overcome the cognitive dissonance of seeing innocent people harmed, she decides to believe they must be guilty in some way. When that fails, she allows herself to enjoy their suffering simply because she likes it. She even engages in some torture of innocents herself, using a magic staff that her forebearer Mulian once used to liberate people. Lol. One of the book’s themes is capitalist ethics superseding other values systems the Huang’s Chinese ancestors upheld, so this checks out.

At the end of the book, in one of the most psychologically disturbing moments to me, Evie is forced to smile and shake the hand of the guy who murdered her mom. Her mom’s ghost, demonstrating lackluster ethics, had made her swear not to avenge her death not because killing people is wrong, but because you might go to prison for it. But the conclusion of the book, and Evie’s almost nonexistent character arc, is that since she doesn’t believe in filial piety, she is gonna freaking murder this guy anyway, against her mom’s wishes.

I was a little confused by this ending, as the story felt like it was setting up a moment of reckoning where Evie realized, through several illustrative metaphors and potential lessons from past and present, that the best way to “avenge” her mom is actually to refuse to continue this cycle. For example, her sidekick is a boy who barely gets to see his mom because she’s off on her own revenge quest all the time. But Evie sees and then overlooks this. It’s like Hamlet if Hamlet didn’t die at the end, and decided to go on killing more people, without any repercussions for his actions.

It left me wondering what I’m supposed to take away from the story—that it’s actually a good thing to seek revenge? That everyone else was wrong and Evie was right? That money really does come before everything (for example, the only argument that showed signs of convincing Evie not to kill somebody was when she considered how it might affect online reviews of the family’s business—lmao). I’d be curious to hear how others interpret this story’s message.

One other thing that bugged me was how a last minute introduction of a bisexual character was handled. At the very end, the boy character, Kevin, gets his wish to know who he’s fated to marry. The problem is, he’s informed of his fated mate, at twelve years old, in front of a crowd of adults we don’t know much about, and it’s another boy. This is presented as totally fine. But I felt visceral shock that an adult would out him publicly in front of other adults, not only that but ones who had been shown throughout the story to be committed to a lot of traditional values and in some cases were particularly violent. When the rest of the book mentions things like colonialism and sexism, I assume homophobia exists in the world too.

I also would have preferred if the story more meaningfully engaged with Kevin’s sexuality. Like have him discover this aspect of himself through the course of the story—have him love—rather than through an adult telling him what he is at the end of the book.

But I’m still glad that such a character is on the page at all, which is a big change from when I was Kevin’s age. I’m thankful Aimee Lim wanted to make this gesture towards queer kids to let them know they’re welcome. And if the book becomes a series as it’s been set up to be able to do, I’m sure Lim would be able to expand on things like giving Evie and Kevin both more character development, and working out some of these things that felt a little underbaked.

All in all, I would recommend this book not only to young readers, but to their older friends, family, and teachers—there’s a lot here to use as a springboard for learning about other stuff together, like Chinese history and mythology, so I could see this book landing on school reading lists. Congrats to Aimee Lim on getting published—she’s a librarian, so I can imagine there will be a super cool moment when she gets to shelve the book she herself wrote!

This was my first Advanced Reader Copy review so I’m still learning the ropes, and I think I went more into analyzing the characters I was fascinated with than giving the overview someone deciding whether or not to read the book needs, but I’ll work on improving my approach for the next one.

Buy the Spindle of Fate here!

The Bookshelf Ecosystem

Notes from the Bookstore Sales Floor, Episode 2

Welcome to episode two of Notes from the Bookstore Sales Floor where I, someone who knows little about either writing or selling books (yet!), presume to teach you about both. For the start of this blog series, check out episode 1, about who buys all these books anyway? here.

[Image via Penguin Random House. Cover design by Amanda Dewey]

I’m currently reading Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland, about the origin and philosophical implications of quantum physics. One of Rovelli’s main arguments is that the essence of reality is fundamentally made of relationships, not substances: “[Things] do nothing but continuously act upon each other. To understand nature, we must focus on these interactions rather than on isolated objects.”

With this on my mind, I’ve started looking at the bookshelves of Big Name Bookstore (BN for short), where I work, as a living ecosystem of relations.

Bookstore shelves are an environment more dynamic and fascinating than one might suppose at first glance. They are continuously acted upon by the people in the store (and everything else, according to Rovelli, but we’ll focus on the people), and they themselves act upon people, by design and coincidence.

You choose to pick up a book based on a combination of internal factors (your preferences, history, mood, etc.) and external factors (the book’s cover, marketing, placement on the shelf, etc.). Or rather, you do not pick up the book, and the book does not make you pick it up, but you and the book emerge in relationship with each other.

It’s difficult to wrap your brain around, but I envision this emergence in the way that music emerges only in the relationship of violin bow, tuned string, player, and composition, and can’t just come into being on its own or hang around in the air without something producing and reproducing it.

Similarly, a book emerges on a shelf through relations of writer, publisher, workers producing the physical book-object, the sunlight that went into the trees that went into the pages, etc. And the composition or activity of the broader bookshelf also continuously changes and evolves.

Most fascinating, in my opinion, is how booksellers and visitors alike engage with the shelves in a kind of guerrilla warfare, or evolutionary struggle, with all the spontaneous organization and furtive acts of sabotage that entails.

I’ve already talked about some of the factors at play in my first “Notes from the Bookstore Sales Floor,” regarding the impact of promotion (or lack thereof) and regular book buyer behavior on what happens to a book at the store. But here I’ll look a bit more at how booksellers and visitors operate as active subjects in relation:

Booksellers: are people, and unpredictable

Outside of bestselling books, whose promotion can’t be avoided, which books are featured on a shelf can largely fall to the whims and interests of the store’s booksellers. They are human beings, so they bring to their work a complex relation of motivations, ethical beliefs, areas of expertise, physical states like enthusiasm or fatigue, limitations… like being too short to reach the top shelf and organize it… etc. The relations between these shape the actions of the bookseller, and the actions of the bookseller shape the shelf, and through it, the actions of customers and their interest or ability to buy a book.

I was organizing a shelf yesterday and found a book that had, perplexingly, been shelved under the name of the testimonial in small print beneath the title. The cover quoted something like “‘Great book, 10/10’ – Michael Scott,” and so the bookseller had shelved it under “Scott”… Even though the author’s name sat in very large print just above that, and was the only name on the spine. Some mysterious set of relations produced an action the author and publisher could have never accounted for, which made this book effectively disappear from access for who knows how long.

Another example: the vast majority of my coworkers are romance/romantasy/YA readers. So these sections in our store remain impeccably “gardened”—regularly checked and lovingly maintained. The sections closest to customer service, the hub at the center of the store where employees congregate, are also better maintained on average. But sections hosting genres our booksellers aren’t personally invested in, like science, Spanish-language, and true crime, are disasters. Or were, because I personify everything and fall in love with the overlooked and bullied, so I took these areas under my wing like orphaned baby birds.

Case study: my own shelving behavior

To do a deeper dive into bookseller-as-relation, here’s what I’ve noticed about myself.

For my part, when I approach a shelf that needs some books faced-out (cover turned out to highlight the title), and it doesn’t matter which, I tend to promote books based on four basic impulses: fidelity, empathy, sense of humor, and ethics.

Fidelity means I highlight books I love and feel a devotion to because of what they’ve helped me become. I say fidelity and not just affinity, because it feels almost like an indebted sense of duty to pass these books on. I look out for the authors I grew up with like Ursula K. Le Guin, Diana Wynne Jones, and C.S. Lewis, and the authors I’m fanning for lately like Jeff VanderMeer, Tamsyn Muir, and Ann Leckie (also A. K. Larkwood, who isn’t on our shelves sadly, but who I highly recommend—The Unspoken Name is basically the glorious second coming of Le Guin’s Tombs of Atuan, and reads like what it would have been if Le Guin had felt free from male readership bias to let Tenar lead the story and also have a cute gay romance).

Anyway, continuing on: Empathy means books that haven’t been promoted well, yet seem good. I offer my support to these Davids against the Goliaths of authors like Patterson and Brandon Sanderson hulking across the shelves next to them. Because these are books in which I can see myself. Imagining one day I will publish a book that only gets a single ignominious copy sent to the store, I try to give these little friends a boost up.

Sense of humor is usually invoked when I encounter an absurd, oddball cover or an amusing juxtaposition on the shelf. Ship of Destiny by Frank Chadwick is one of my most beloved covers—I can NOT stop laughing at this perturbed owl in a crop top who’s about to kick your ass—so I face it out periodically. Sincere shout out to the artist, Don Maitz, who offers some lovely reflections on craft and cover design here. An example of juxtaposition: in the science section, I like to face out a Stephen Hawking book next to Hawking Hawking by Charles Seife, which condemns the scientist as something of a charlatan, and let this conflict potentially draw in a reader.

[Image credit: Simon and Schuster, cover art by Don Maitz]

Ethical means if I think your book is literally evil, such as encouraging violence or dehumanization of people, I will not help promote it. BN sells more than a few books which advocate for the abuse, dehumanization, and death of people like me, and other minority groups. This is fucked up enough already without me obligingly aiding in their promotion.

Overall, these aren’t conscious guiding principles in how I shelve, but were largely unconscious behaviors to me until I critically reflected on what I do. There are all kinds of processes, conscious and unconscious, that go into the promotion of books at this ground level, and I’d be curious how other booksellers conceptualize their relation to the shelves.

[Nota bene: if you enjoy wacky cover art, check out Funny as Shit Book Covers and r/badscificovers]

Visitors: the left hand of bookselling

Along with bookseller influence over shelving, there’s the even more chaotic element of visitors to the store. (I say “visitors,” not “customers,” because they don’t necessarily come to buy anything). Visitors are not so different from booksellers as you might think, but like the electron to their proton, they participate in the same practice with a different charge: they have just as much access to shelves and control over shelving as booksellers, with none of the responsibility.

Periodically, they awaken to consciousness of this latent power.

Just like booksellers, visitors shelve books, reorganize shelves, choose what to feature and face-out, and what to remove and discontinue. But as the trickster fairy version of staff, they shelve books according to impulse and malice, rather than alphabetically. They re-home books to different sections, sometimes out of carelessness, other times intentionally; for example, often I see Bibles shelved in Self Help by Christians, and in Fiction by Atheists.

Visitors have their own form of face-out, I call “faceover.” They face-out a book over an already faced-out different book, hiding the one and promoting the other. This may cause booksellers to overlook the problem for a while, especially if both books are the same dimensions, assuming they are the same book. It’s like a brood parasite, a cuckoo overtaking a nest.

Visitors also have another technique, which I call “edging” because these are not serious terms. This is when instead of shelving the book with the spine out, they turn it 180 degrees so all you see are pages. This is most often used as a camouflage technique and act of protest, to hamper the sale of certain books. Currently, our most frequently edged books are Ron DeSantis’ The Courage to be Free and all our books about Israel, but especially Israel, a history by Martin Gilbert, which would otherwise feature prominently on the shelf with its many, hefty copies. Visitors will apply a moral judgment to the shelf, to a degree most booksellers avoid, since they have to worry about keeping their jobs.

Insights for authors: I’m sure everything averages out on a large scale, and a lot of what I’m describing here are odd flukes and strange maneuvering, outlier situations and mutations. But these peculiarities do have effects as unpredictable as they are undeniable, and may be worth considering if you’re involved in the book trade.

Personally, my chaotic neutral side kind of loves that millions of dollars and years of work can go into producing, marketing, and promoting a book only to be undone in a second by some punk walking in off the street and flipping it around back to front.

But if you don’t love this, then it should increase your respect for the diligent work of the noble booksellers who, despite only getting paid $11 an hour (💀), walk miles per shift circling the store and fixing displays, putting your book back where it can be easily found by a reader, and perhaps even giving you a helping hand as a newer author.

There’s so much more I’d like to analyze, and may try to tackle, in a future post about the art of shelving, BN versus American Library Association standards, fun terminology (I love learning about the vocabularies of different trades and practices), and following Carlo Rovelli, thinking about the relations of books and people. But for now I’ll leave it here.

If you engage with books, whether as an author, bookseller, reader, etc. what is a (perhaps unusual) way you’ve found yourself making an intervention in this ecosystem? I would love to hear anecdotes from others’ experiences!

Tomb Writers: A. K. Larkwood, Tamsyn Muir, and Ursula K. Le Guin

The children yearn for the tombs…

***this post contains spoilers for A. K. Larkwood’s The Unspoken Name and Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon/Harrow the Ninth***

What is it about being a child bride to a dead god in a sepulcher deep underground that we find so relatable? Whatever it is, if you’re getting ready for Tomb Girl Summer, your reading list must include Ursula K. Le Guin, Tamsyn Muir, and A.K. Larkwood.

For this post, I wanted to focus on hyping Larkwood, who has done something special with her debut novel The Unspoken Name. But I couldn’t help but review this book in literary conversation with Le Guin and Muir. And because I’ve got a million things on my mind this week, instead of this being a standard book review, it’s more like an overflow area for connections between these three writers my brain keeps flooding with.

Like, I only found Larkwood because of Muir. I fell in love with Muir’s Gideon the Ninth a few months ago, and in an interview she mentioned being friends with Larkwood and embroidering her a blanket or something that said “Love means never having to say you’re Csorwe” which cracked me up. (Csorwe is the main character of Larkwood’s book. See? Now it’s funny.)

Anyway, Larkwood’s book performed a kind of miracle for me, and I wanted to share this happy surprise.

Atuan, Atutwo: A. K. Larkwood’s Reenvisioning of Earthsea

When I was a kid, I adored The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin. I returned to it again and again over the years because it’s so immersive, the kind of fantasy story that feels like it literally unlocks a door between worlds. Comforting and magical at the same time, a Narnia you never get told you’re too old for.

And yet, to this date I have never read any of the other Earthsea books. Somehow I stumbled on Tombs first (it’s not the first book in the series) and stopped there. When I tried to read further, I was disappointed to find Tenar, the priestess of the tomb, didn’t remain the main character. But that Le Guin, feeling bound by sexist fantasy conventions, had to set her aside in favor of some guy wizard.

Ursula Le Guin herself expressed regret over how Earthsea manifested, quoted here as saying: “The Earthsea books as feminist literature are a total, complete bust. From my own archetypes and from my own cultural upbringing I couldn’t go down deep and come up with a woman wizard. Maybe I’ll learn to eventually but when I wrote those I couldn’t do it. I wish I could have.”

I wish Le Guin had lived to read Larkwood’s book, because I feel like A. K. Larkwood wrote the Earthsea that Le Guin envisioned writing in a better world.

I can’t express how much catharsis I felt reading The Unspoken Name. Calling it the “spiritual successor” of Tombs of Atuan isn’t enough, because it’s more like the reincarnation or second coming. Which is not to say this book ever feels derivative or like it’s purely an homage. It’s entirely its own story too.

Yet all these years, when I’ve thought about Tombs of Atuan, I’ve felt this wistful regret that it ended where it did, and never could have imagined that someone could write something that would completely wipe away that feeling. To stumble onto exactly that was a startling, lovely experience.

Now that I’ve tried to express how blown away I was, I’m going to pivot away from #LeGuining and compare and contrast The Unspoken Name with another book, Gideon the Ninth, by Tamysin Muir.

Note: Because I listened to the audiobook, I don’t know how characters’ names are spelled, and will be referring to them as I heard them. Obviously I could just google them, but I’m interested in the idea of audiobooks as a distinct medium/experience and in the potential they have for reintroducing elements of oral storytelling to the writing and enjoyment of mainstream fiction. So for experimental purposes, I’m passing on the names of these characters as I experienced them, and if you want to look like you know what you’re talking about, you shouldn’t quote me.

Note note: Speaking of Le Guin and blogging, I just learned she started a blog toward the end of her life, where she reflects on aging, and writing anecdotes and advice, and her cat’s adventures. You can find it on her website still, and some of these posts were collected into a book.

Tomb Fast, Tomb Furious: Muir vs Larkwood

Tamsyn Muir and A.K. Larkwood seem to be IRL friends and there are a not-insignificant amount of similarities between their debut novels Gideon the Ninth and The Unspoken Name, respectively. I would not be surprised if as an inside joke or something, they drafted their books based on the same prompt or list of things it needed to include.

Likely, their books emerged through shared conversations around mutual favorite authors and themes, producing two different takes on a common vocabulary/conceptual set.

I enjoyed reading Muir and Larkwood back to back; it’s similar to reading C.S. Lewis and Tolkien together, and getting additional depth out of the reading experience through the comparison of how two good friends tackling similar genres and themes can produce such divergent results. I’m early in my fiction writing journey but the dream of this kind of friendship-of-professionals is what motivates me to get out of my hobbit hole and network.

I made this compare and contrast chart of random similarities (***SPOILERS!***)

Concept	A. K. Larkwood	Tamsyn Muir
What I imagine their concept for the book was	Tomb of Atuan II: 2mbs of A2an	The Westing Game but written by a terminally online Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Revenants	Weak zombies, not central to story, raised to serve necromancers, common on dying worlds	Powerful, big part of lore and feature in story, come back to fight necromancers who pissed them off, literally are dead worlds
Spellcaster/Swordswoman partnership	Csorwe (main character) is swordswoman to a powerful wizard/chancellor, Sir Thennai. Student overcoming her mentor relationship.	Gideon (main character) is swordswoman to a powerful necromancer, enemies to beloveds relationship.
Librarians who kick ass and are also necromancers	Oranna has a masterful character arc that keeps you on your toes, and is the main antagonist	Pal/Cam and Abigail Pent all fit this category to a degree, but are helpful friends and not main characters
Sapphic main characters and nothing unusual about homosexuality in the world of the story	Csorwe and Shuthmili are both young women, very sweet and wholesome sapphic story of first love. Other main characters are gay as well.	Gideon and Harrow are both gay women, story does not feature a traditional romance B plot between them, but they are together. Lots of other characters gay.
Important Tomb / Help! I married a dead god	Csorwe betrothed to the god of death “the Unspoken and Unspeakable One,” who lives in essentially a tomb, but she escapes and denounces it	Gideon sworn to Harrow, the tomb priestess figure who’s basically betrothed to the body in the Locked Tomb they have both been raised to protect.
Genre	Fantasy, but with science fiction elements	Science fiction, but with fantasy elements
A particular narrative style characterized by contemporary cussing and somewhat “anachronistic” narrative voice for the setting	Generally, Larkwood sticks to traditional fantasy narrator voice, with a few exceptions like “Kicking the shit out of a crate of melons”	Muir references a lot of memes, which sort of has an in-world reasoning for it. “In some far-off way Gideon had always known that this would be how she went: gangbanged to death by skeletons.”
Narcissist male mentor who main character loves before learning better	Csorwe and Sir Thennai	Harrow and the God Emperor

Some more in-depth comparisons:

Narration, and emotional experience reading the books

If the experience of reading a book were a relationship, Gideon the Ninth felt like a teenage obsession and The Unspoken Name felt like a slow, stable romance. I enjoyed both, but I could see them appealing to different demographics who might only click with one or the other.

With Gideon, Muir’s narrative voice is what kept me turning the page. It was charismatic, unpredictable, and laced with descriptions that spammed the dopamine button in my brain. 80% of why I enjoyed the book was the freshness of the voice (especially as read by Moira Quirk, whose distinctly capturing the voices of over a dozen characters dazzled me!).

The compelling characters and narration perhaps allow Gideon (and its sequels) to get away with a plot that’s notoriously almost incomprehensible until you finish the book and read it through a second time. It worked for me for the first two books, but I couldn’t get through the third, which asked more of me as a reader than I was ready to commit.

In contrast, Larkwood offers a more traditional narrative style, a voice that mostly dissolves into the background to let the story bloom forward. There are a few moments of what felt like breaking character for the narrator, such as the “melons” comment in the table above. Although they made me laugh, these moments felt out of place, like the author was torn between a “mature” voice and a more trendy/quippy/internet style, as Muir employs consistently. It pulled me out of the moment when these happened, even though they were fun; breaking the fourth wall in a book that otherwise isn’t written in that meta style.

While the narration had a couple of these inconsistent moments, the plotting was impressively rendered, like running your hand over the perfectly fitted joints of a piece of woodworking craftsmanship. Gideon made my heart leap, but the sense of security in promises made and kept through The Unspoken Name‘s plotting had me feeling cuddled up by the fireplace in an old quilt.

Which is not to say I wasn’t on the edge of my seat, especially with a dramatic pivot and leap forward in time after the first act. As someone currently trying to learn how to write a novel, I was awestruck at the situations Larkwood dragged her characters into and still got them out of. I periodically paused the audiobook at scenes I knew I would have shied away from taking so far, not trusting my creativity to get the character out alive without some cheap effect, and I tried to guess what Larkwood would do next. (The answer, always: blow my mind).

Cults and religious trauma

Gideon explicitly features a “cult,” but it’s more a cult in the classical sense of a maintenance of a sacred site. Throughout the series, one of the main characters has a positive relationship with the cult and her spirituality through it. There’s an actual, unstated, cult around their God Emperor, but it’s not in direct conflict with the MCs like the cults in Unspoken are (at least, not in the first two books of the series).

The cults and abusive relationship dynamics in The Unspoken Name are a major theme, as several primary characters tackle being born into and growing to eventually escape cults of various and blended types: religious, political, family, romantic.

The Kharsagi empire was my favorite aspects of the worldbuilding. I haven’t felt that nauseating sense of horror from even the actual horror genre books I’ve read this year like I have from Larkwood’s depiction of the Kharsagi’s coldly sophisticated systems of religious and political repression. I think if you’ve had any experience with religious or cult trauma, especially as a young woman, you’ll especially empathize with Csorwe and Shuthmili’s long and difficult interior journeys.

Themes: the struggle with breaking out physically but not yet mentally, with leaving one master just to end up serving another until you can recognize the cycle, the overwhelming responsibility of deciding what your life should look like for yourself, being unable to trust your own perception of reality, feeling “contaminated” etc. Through the medium of fantasy, Larkwood was able to empathetically engage with these in a way that might be more triggering to read if it were straight up fiction or nonfiction.

Worldbuilding: cultural references and influences

The Kharsagi culture is not all evil, but has a few redeeming qualities. They are big on research projects into the history of a universe with a clearly troubled past and uncertain future, which the other worlds in the book don’t seem that interested in understanding. In an alliterative paraphrase of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (“though much is taken, much abides”), the Kharsagi scholarly motto is “Much is lost, but much lasts.” I often feel torn between old school and postmodern, Eastern and Western philosophy, tradition versus impermanence, so I appreciated this envisioning of a middle way–learning from what can be gathered of history even recognizing most of the data has disappeared, and that new, better ways are also being created.

I haven’t analyzed this in depth, so just covering what jumped out at me personally—both Muir and Larkwood appear to draw on a similar canon of influences, both Western classic literature and Millennial culture. But Muir leans into internet cultures and Gothic/Romanticism explicitly, with the direct incorporation of memes and characters named things like “Christabel” and “Annabel Lee.” While Larkwood’s worldbuilding draws more subtly on her influences, melding them together rather than directly pointing at them, as in the paraphrase of Tennyson, the echoing back to fantasy influences like Tombs of Atuan, and the subtle inclusion of orc- and elf-like races without smearing on the high fantasy tropes too thick.

Relationships

Another area where Muir and Larkwood diverge is in the treatment of toxic relationships. The relationship between the two main characters in Gideon, who follow an enemies-to-beloveds arc, is a troubled one, and the angst is part of the appeal. In Unspoken, basically every single relationship between every single character is toxic except for that between Csorwe and Shuthmili, who find a path out of their respective religious cults and narcissistic parent figures to create something entirely gentle, kind, and loving with each other.

I love that Gideon and Harrow are so nasty to each other, their banter is off the charts and their fraught relationship lays the groundwork for their eventual commitment to each other to be that much more powerful. I adore Csorwe and Shuthmili’s relationship for entirely the opposite: they never say anything mean to each other, but are both just earnestly trying to do the right thing, and that eventually brings them together. They are both respectful of each others’ differing religious backgrounds even while disagreeing and deconstructing their own. Especially in representation of a queer relationship, it’s lovely to just have love, without tragedy.

Also, in my headcanon Shuthmili is autistic. If this was indeed the intent, Larkwood did a great job with representation here too, without being hamfisted or stereotypical about it. A character who values research and rule-following, struggling to break free of the research and rules of the repressive religious cult she’s been brought up in, is a powerful story. And the respect that she and Csorwe show each other for things they have grown used to other people not taking seriously about them is just so heartwarming.

If you made it this far in my rambling about queer tomb maidens and second comings of Ursula K. Le Guin, you may just have what it takes to get through Gideon the Ninth and its even more perplexing sequels, and you are definitely in for a treat with A. K. Larkwood, queen of plotting, who would never have started this blog post with the punchline of a joke before setting it up.

Buy The Unspoken Name here!
Buy Gideon the Ninth here!
Buy The Tombs of Atuan here!
Don’t buy anything!

Notes from the Bookstore Sales Floor

Well, as is typical with blogs, I lost all momentum as soon as I announced I was starting one. But I have good reasons for it! I started a new job and several volunteer positions, and have been working intensely on writing–just not blog writing. But now that I’m in the rhythm of things, I want to keep blogging periodically about what I’m learning, starting with a series about insights for writers from the POV of a newbie bookseller.

I started working at Big Name Bookstore (BN for short) recently, as a kind of market research project for which I also get paid 😉 Through this position, I’m getting to learn a bit about the business side of writing and about my (hopefully) future readers.

Already, a number of conversations and observations have shaken the way I think about writing and publishing–in an exciting way! I’d like to write a continuing series of posts, focusing particularly on the romance genre and market. For context, I kicked off this year venturing into the romance genre. My heart is with sci fi/fantasy/speculative fiction, but I wanted to step from writing-as-passion towards writing-as-profession, and I thought a good way to make this leap would be to apprentice in the bestselling genre, and a genre I know nothing about.

I might make another blog post about this topic itself, but after two months, I’m now about 10 chapters, 25,000 words into my first romance novel and having a blast. I do think it’s helped improve my writing to work in a genre I’m not as emotionally attached to, because that distance has allowed for a more objective appraisal of what the book is doing and what it needs to be doing to land with readers. I’m able to focus on technique in the detached, demystified way a beginning artist practices shading spheres and cones before trying to paint a portrait of someone they care about.

Learning to write romance while working at a bookstore with a bunch of romance readers and observing the activity and interests of romance reader customers has been a great learning experience, and I hope to share more lessons, anecdotes, and peculiar insights into the sales side of writing. For now, here’s a couple general observations:

Lesson 1: People still buy a lot of books. And people who buy books, buy a lot of books.

Before working here, I didn’t understand how bookstores are still in business, because I considered myself A Reader, yet hadn’t bought a new book in years (I’m a Libby and Half Price Books diehard). I assumed other people were like me, and no matter how much they love books, had a kneejerk reaction against buying anything brand new at full price. Or got everything off Amazon.

But as it turns out, I’m just a miserable skinflint and not representative of the general population. People buy tons of books. Young people, without as many financial expenses to budget for, spend allowances and first paychecks on books. Teenagers buy simple poetry that speaks to complicated feelings. Manga readers buy each new installation in series (serieses?) that span hundreds of installments. Christians buy Bibles and devotionals. Everyone buys self-help. And romance readers… buy every single romance book on the shelf.

What’s more, although I don’t know the actual numbers, I think there’s probably a statistic like 75% of everyday book sales (ie not counting holiday shopping) come from the same 30% of customers. People who buy books tend to be repeat customers. So it seems to me that if you work to know your readers, to inspire and loyally serve them what they love you for, they will follow you to the end of the earth. So I would think, if you want to make money, make readers.

Lesson 2: Not all books are set up to succeed, but to every book there may be a season

Before working here, I assumed that if your book got traditionally published, actually put on a real shelf in a real bookstore, that meant you had made it. You’d been immortalized. Now I understand that a great number of important and wonderful books aren’t available at the bookstore—half the books I grew up on, which were fundamental for my development as a person and a writer, just aren’t here anymore. And many of the books that are here, won’t last, or get much out of it.

This starts with the publisher and proceeds down a train of people and practices that can help or hurt a book, and there’s a lot more to a book making it than just being on the shelf. Let’s compare two books, both alike in dignity, and yet one will go big and one will fade into ignominy:

Book one: This book a publishing house has decided to go all-in on marketing. We receive 10+ hardcover copies with expertly designed, eye-catching, rainbow-hued covers, and maybe sprayed edges. The publisher and BN make a deal to promote the book with special editions, signage, a display table, putting it on the book club/monthly recommendation list, etc. Books with 3 or more copies on the shelf, which will include these extra promoted books, get “faced out,” or turned to display the cover rather than the spine, which greatly increases the chance of their being picked up and purchased.

Book two: For whatever reason, the publisher doesn’t want to stake much on this one. They treat it as a throwaway title, one of a number of books they go ahead and try, but don’t expect to make a lot off of. We only receive a single, paperback copy. It won’t be on any eye-catching tables at the front of the store, on lists of must-reads and book club picks, and it won’t even get faced out. It is, in my personal opinion, just as good as Book One. But books are largely sold on everything but the actual writing inside. Right out the gate, this book has been condemned to sell poorly, and after the one copy sells, or hits a certain date, we won’t order any more.

This was an important lesson for me. On the business side of things, it stresses the significance of everything that isn’t writing to the profession of writing. The marketing, in a lot of these cases, is better than the book, and you can probably make more money through good marketing than good writing.

It’s also humbling, on the writer side of things. When you write alone in your room, you can start to dream up all kinds of self-aggrandizing visions; there’s nothing to check them. But when working at the bookstore, keeping vigil by the little books, the ones who have not sold a single copy in their years of sitting there, ushering them over the threshold of death when their time finally comes, you get reality checked. You think, damn, I’m much more likely to be one of these little guys than N.K. Jemisin or Brandon Sanderson.

But this isn’t discouraging. In fact, I find it comforting! I feel at home with the little guys [gender-neutral], I feel a kinship and camaraderie with them, and I can let go of that anxiety to punch above my weight. It’s taught me that you can be successful at whatever level you reach, especially if you study marketing and write to market.

And I see that the shelves are continually in flux, their ancient contents now eroded, and now shored up with new soil. How while this one little book may not last, for this month at least it sits where Ursula Le Guin used to sit! That this manga about a toilet holds the place once occupied by beautifully illustrated narratives like With the Light and Mushishi. It assures me that if I just keep learning and working, I can have my turn, and there is plenty of space and need for good books, and simply new books, even more than great books and immortal books.

I think acknowledging this doesn’t mean setting the bar low for yourself, but appreciating where you’re at along the journey, seeking opportunities appropriate to your level, and being mindful of the other factors that go into success besides the writing itself.

Thanks for reading! Hope to check in again soon.

Reviews you can use: Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer

First blog post, welcome!

I’m going to start by blogging edited-down versions of the analyses I write after reading stories, paired with writing exercises based on the book I’m reviewing, I call it “reviews you can use”!

As part of my writing practice, after finishing a book I go back over it and take notes on its plot, characters, structure, techniques, etc. With shorter stories, I will often construct a complete “template” based on the story’s beats and unique quirks, then write a story using this template. These blog posts will pass on templates and exercises I’ve come up with, which I hope you’ll find fun and useful too.

They will contain spoilers and may not make as much sense if you haven’t read the book yourself, but I hope you will find the writing exercises fun and helpful either way (scroll to the end for these), and that sharing these examples of how I analyze a text may also be useful in your own approach to breaking down a story.

**Analysis: Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer**

Warning: Spoilers!

Summary

Rachel, a scavenger in the nightmarish apocalyptic “City,” where biotech creatures engineered by “the Company” have taken over, finds Borne, a mysterious creature. It begins to rapidly grow and change, and she becomes a kind of mother to him, with all the love and heartbreak that entails. The story engages themes of not just motherhood, but personhood, as well as love and trauma, nature and nurture, destruction and evolution.

You can’t shake the feeling you’re reading Alice and Wonderland, but a version VanderMeer altered so much along the way that it’s a totally different story– only some vestigial Alice and Wonderland vibe continues to haunt your reading, like Rachel points out the reader yourself haunts her story. The Red Queen has been recast as the Magician, Wick whom Rachel pursues in their “warren” home is the White Rabbit, Mord is the Cheshire Cat, and most tellingly at the end of the story we learn that Rachel quite literally came here through a looking glass.

The narrator – the key to why this story works (for me)

The story’s world is so (darkly) whimsical and surreal, it almost turned me off, because absurdist stories are not so much to my taste. It takes a few chapters to get your bearings, you feel like Rachel when she looks at Borne’s shapeshifting colors and considers that her eyes didn’t evolve to be able to see anything like this.

But I was quickly anchored by the real-world-ness of the narrator Rachel, and kept grounded throughout as much by her presence as by her own grappling with the world. Through Rachel, I was able to appreciate the world as a metaphor for the psyche, and its chaos as a metaphor for trauma and growth, in a way I’m not able to appreciate Alice in Wonderland. Rachel is completely human and relatable, and she’s in charge of the story, so despite the madness going on around her, we’re able to stay sane through her and her ordering of the world for us via her narration and her actions in it. It also helps Rachel feel so real as a character because she makes us real to her– she serves to give a sense of meaning to many people’s lives in the story despite the chaos (both external and existential), including us readers.

I just started reading VanderMeer’s Annihilation since it was turned into one of my favorite movies, and it’s interesting in both books there’s a reason we’re receiving this story, here it’s Rachel achieving her dream of writing a book, there it’s the Biologist completing her requisite journal entries during their voyage into the mysterious Area X.

Dialogue

The dialogue is super fun and tightly woven into the activity of each scene. VanderMeer delightfully captures not only how kids talk, but how this particular type of kid would talk, who is not human and is growing up in 5 directions instead of 1. In the acknowledgments, VanderMeer thanks stepdaughter Erin Kennedy and grandson “Mr. R” Riley for help with this dialogue. That’s a good cue to seek advice and assistance in the writing process, and in particular go out and study and inquire from the type of voices you’re trying to emulate.

A flaw; there were a couple parts where Wick’s dialogue didn’t sound like him, but more like Borne. This was confusing because sometimes, Wick sounding like Borne was intentional foreshadowing that he WAS Borne pretending to be Wick. But there were one or two parts where he was definitely Wick but still sounded like Borne. Maybe this was to foreshadow that since Wick was also non-human, he occasionally had his idiosyncrasies. But it took me out of the story at these moments because it didn’t sound authentic to his character and felt like a fumble where VanderMeer got used to writing as Borne so the “Borne voice” leaked into Wick voice.

Storytelling theme and narrative devices

There’s a strong theme of storytelling within the story, and VanderMeer also employs various devices to spice up the one running narrative by Rachel, like injecting journal entries, uncovered secret files, flashbacks, and a letter. Rachel herself wanted to be a writer, and her relationship with Borne, especially in its first stage, really develops through her continuously telling stories to him, even before she realizes he can understand her. She also, obviously, tells us this story, fulfilling her dream of being a writer. Rachel’s partner, Wick, designs drugs which can erase your memories and/or insert new ones– he too is a kind of storyteller, or inverse storyteller, untelling people their life stories. Borne himself is like a walking library of stories, since he remembers the life of every creature he “knows” (eats, kind of). We don’t get to know all the stories he knows, but VanderMeer probably wrote them out as worldbuilding, because you get glimpses into their existence based on things Borne says and does.

Significant names

You can’t do this with every type of story, but I find it fun when names have literal or significant meanings, and Borne, in all its weirdness, gets to run with this. All the names in this story seem to have significance, although only some are explained.

Rachel is the only person with a normal name (which tracks with her being the Alice who’s not from this world), explained as a name she was given because it didn’t run on either side of her family, a compromise between her Romeo and Juliet-esque parents. In the Bible, the original Rachel is an important matriarch whose relationship to motherhood is also complex and traumatic, interwoven with infertility, betrayal, and surrogacy. One could draw many parallels between the biblical story of Rachel and the story here –they both raise someone else’s child who appears to be a kind of divine intervention, they are both “discovered” by their partners beside pools of water, etc.–, but I won’t belabor (no pun intended) the point.

Rachel named “Borne” after a play on words her partner once made about being born/borne. Borne’s name gains added significance as a creature who is borne (carried, and carried to term) first by Mord, then by Rachel, and by whom others are borne, since his nature is to incorporate the material and information around him into his body.

VanderMeer’s own name indicates Dutch heritage, and in Dutch “moord” means “murder,” a fitting name for the embodiment of destruction that is Mord. (Also interesting, “VanderMeer” means “From the Lake” and many creatures in this story come from watery places).

“Wick” is more ambiguous, but my theory is that there’s an off-stage story behind this, that Wick was originally designed as a bioluminescent creature, and this is a candle metaphor –at certain points Rachel dramatically describes him as radiant with light, especially when his love for her is fully revealed in his acts towards the end of the story. The way she describes this can be read as metaphor, but looking back he may actually have a luminescent quality which Rachel was consciously or subconsciously picking up on.

An incomplete picture and keeping some mysteries

VanderMeer delivers on the big promises, but introduces plenty of mystery that doesn’t get answered, in a way that you won’t feel disappointed because you got the answers to the biggest questions, but which serve as further hooks to keep you engaged. Some examples:

What is Borne? We are given enough angles to form our own understanding of Borne, but a definitive answer is never given — we’re satisfied with this because we realize it’s asking the wrong question, or rather, this is the ultimate question of all creatures, and does not have a definitive answer– existentialism etc.
What’s up with the Company and the City? We get to know them fairly well, but at the end of the book there’s no definitive history given of where either came from and how they got to the state they’re in today, aside from the general understanding of human failings, capitalism, and climate crisis leading to apocalypse.
Who is Mord? — unlike Borne, we get a more definitive answer to “what” Mord is, but not who. We learn he was initially a human being who turned into a creature, but not who that human was. I was expecting to learn more about who was before, especially the way Wick talked about him sometimes I thought they might have been in a relationship. But I guess the interesting thing here is that, Mord is human who becomes a creature, who is he is what he is now, like everyone else.

Personhood

This is one of the two top themes of the book in my opinion, beside motherhood. “Am I a person?” “What does it mean to be a person” etc. are questions regularly asked directly by characters, or raised in the readers’ mind as the story unfolds.

The contrasts between characters and their relation to personhood allow for a holistic contemplation of personhood and humanity. We see each character as one thing and then learn they “are,” or were, something else entirely. For example, we see Wick as human for most of the story, but he doesn’t see himself that way. Later we learn that Wick is a creature we mistook for human. But he does become human, after self-sabotaging his own personhood for so long through self-loathing, love of Rachel, and hatred of Borne.

Within this theme arises the question of nature versus nurture, or the big impact both have. On the one hand, Mord is a human who is transformed into a creature through the Company’s evil surgery –nurture over nature. On the other hand, Borne is a creature who is transformed into a person through Rachel’s love, but also through an inner light or nature which understands himself in a subconscious way to be deserving of more love and personhood than even Rachel gives him –nurture, but wait! More deeply, nature.

Rachel is the only one who actually doesn’t change that much, now that I think about it, despite being the ostensible protagonist as the narrator (though Borne is really the protagonist imo). Or at least the change with Rachel is more subtle. At the beginning, the trauma was so great that she doesn’t know how she got here, she has a broken relationship with her beloved, and she’s also given up her dream of being a writer. At the end, she learns what happened to her parents, that their great act of love seeking a better life for her got them killed and brought her here, she has a complete and healed relationship with her beloved, and she has apparently written this story. She’s been able to heal and self-actualize even in what we initially considered apocalypse, she’s found new life at the end of the world.

Some other thoughts on personhood/character development

Borne’s dressing up as a wizard to disguise himself was the most adorable thing and made me just fall in love with him as a character. And as a shapeshifting creature that can look like anything and beyond, the choices he makes or feels he has to make about what he looks like serve as meditations on children trying to please parents, people trying to please societal norms, etc.
The horror of when Rachel, after obviously loving Borne as her child, completely neglects to check up on his wounds after asking him to defend her with his life, was one of the most shattering moments of the book for me. The mother using the child as a human shield and then just absentmindedly forgetting to even check up on the wounds he incurred in protecting her was brutal, it revealed in a way she doesn’t see him as a person like she sees her own kind (even ironically when the other human turns out to be not human at all). In this case, Borne is more human, or at least a better person, than Rachel. This was a key scene for interrogating who is really “human” or “person.”

Mixed feelings about the ending

The very last lines, in which we learn that Borne survived in a way, but that Rachel will kill him if he shows any sign of personhood, didn’t sit right with me. His survival felt a little deus ex machina, and Rachel’s reaction felt like VanderMeer delivering a moral to the story that I didn’t realize he was pushing, and which I highly disagreed with. For most of the read, I thought the book was gonna end with Borne devouring everything and this turning out to be a good thing because he’s a kind of preserving, healing, synthesizing force that becomes a new world in itself. So for Rachel to conclude it’s right to kill Borne felt all kinds of wrong.

But reflecting further, I can also see this as a masterful ending. Because remember, Rachel is telling us this story, not VanderMeer. Rachel’s conclusion is at the end of the day, Borne’s nature is a killing machine, so he needs to be killed before he can kill. But VanderMeer’s conclusion, is to have us interrogate this, Rachel’s conclusion, and apply the same logic to her: maybe humans are a killing machine that can be kept around in a future run by more evolved creatures only if we’re “nice” (one of the story’s motif words), but we may just to be eliminated if it seems we’re doomed by nature to be a killing machine.

This ending states that humans kind of suck and can’t think beyond certain limits, and Rachel will never be able to really outgrow her limited morality in this regard. But just like the book earlier wondered, “you wouldn’t hate a wolf for hunting, that’s its nature,” maybe in ending on this disappointing note with Rachel, it’s inviting us to consider that we shouldn’t hate humans for the apparent evils we’ve done either. It’s our nature, just like a wolf can’t choose to be vegetarian, we’re stuck thinking in terms of killing or being killed. Or maybe we’re like Borne, and may have [been] developed to be a killing machine, but can choose to be good, in the right conditions.

Either way, the ending seems to point to the City’s salvation via the creatures that succeed humans, who aren’t just better because they try to be better, as we try but fail to overcome our nature, but are better because they have better natures to begin with (a sort of Aristotelian ethics). Evidence for this interpretation comes in the angelic figure of the fox, who moves through the world (literally, through solid matter), accompanying its dying creatures in love, without yielding to them or harming them, on its way to building a world beyond them. I think this is an interesting form of climate optimism championed by VanderMeer, that humans may wreck and irrevocably alter the earth, and go extinct, but the earth will not end, and life will continue to evolve and improve.

**Writing exercises based on Borne by Jeff VanderMeer**

Practice writing child dialogue. Take notes as you listen to kids you know, or lookup youtube videos of kids speaking, analyze its sense and syntax, get inspired by its quirks, and then try writing your own.
Descriptive chapter headings. Outline or organize a story via descriptive chapter headings, like Borne is structured. For example, “What Wick had told me about the fish project and the company,” “What I found and how I found it,” etc. The novel Cracks uses this device as well, often in the form of questions, which the chapter answers: “Why did our parents send us to this school?”, “How we first heard about Fiamma.” Posing a question about the story as a chapter heading at then writing to answer the question can be a good way to brainstorm material as well as retain as a narrative device in the final draft.
Collage. Embellish or shake up your story by telling part of it through a journal entry, letter between characters, or flashback. For practice, try delivering the same content through all three different vehicles.
Who’s your narrator and why do they write? Write in the first person as if this is a real story you’re passing on, and consider in what manner it would have been written down and delivered, to whom, and why.
Write from nature. VanderMeer’s books attest to his growing up in, studying, and loving complex ecosystems. Spend time studying, actually studying, the flora and fauna of the place where you live. You can use apps like iNaturalist or PlantNet that allow you to snap pictures and quickly learn about what you’re looking at. Use this knowledge to enrich your worldbuilding and/or write an apocalyptic story based in your backyard and how the creatures you find there might evolve.