I’m reading the new Freya Marske book, A Power Unbound, to review for GeeklyInc. I made a mistake.
To be clear, I have no regrets about reading this book. I enjoyed the prior two (you can find my thoughts on them here and here), and…
Continue readingNot much to see here this week. I’m currently visiting with family, taking advantage of the rare opportunity to see both of my sibs in the same place at the same time, and to spend time with old friends. I hope you’re all having a good week, and I’ll be back again next Thursday.
I’m off in the woods, teaching kids and teens to LARP. I hope you’re all doing well, and I’ll be back next week!
I am such a sucker for this art style.
It’s odd, reflecting on the ways in which an author I love has grown (and stayed the same) over the years.
I’m specifically thinking about Martha Wells. I recently read City of Bones, which was originally published in 1995. I’m in the middle of reviewing City of Bones, because it’s being rereleased this year in trade paperback by Tor. I’ll have my review of that up on GeeklyInc in the not-too-distant future.
City of Bones is intrigue, archaeology, lost civilizations and past apocalypses. It’s a thriller, a mystery, it’s got political machinations and murder… you know, the good stuff. What stood out to me though, was…
Continue readingHere’s a hot take I’ve flirted with before: unbalanced games are more fun than balanced ones.
I think it has to do with gaming a system, beyond even outplaying an opponent.
Continue readingAs I was writing last week’s post, I knew that I was forgetting something. I’d read fun stories about an elderly woman involved in espionage before. Or more accurately, I’d listened to them: some of my childhood’s many long car rides were filled with hours of Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax books on tape. Young Henry thought those books were both hilarious and excellent.
I haven’t read them since. But I want to. I want to read them again, find out whether or not they’re as fun as I remember them being. In my memory, they were a perfect storm of ridiculousness and good genre fiction.
That said, I’m a little hesitant too. The first books in the series (there are many of these books) were written in the 60s. The last one was published in 2000. Given the gulf of years, I bet I’m going to stub my toes on something.
But I’m willing to bet it’ll be worth it. At worst, they’ll give me a place to start in my hunt for similar genre fiction. And if they’re anywhere near as good as I recall, I’ll probably be guffawing my way through them.
Plus, for all the absurdity and narrative contrivances that I remember in the several Mrs. Pollifax books I listened to, I think they captured several very important points that flashier spy stories forget. It’s valuable to be overlooked and underestimated. And—maybe this was just my impressionable youth speaking, but—Dorothy Gilman was nearly of an age with my grandmother, and Mrs. Pollifax’s surprising skillset reminded me of my grandmother too.
I remember growing up with plenty of stories about my grandmother. She fixed a stranger’s broken car on the side of the road (in Uganda or Kenya I think), using safety pins and pantyhose to replace a timing belt. She reversed a van at speed down a dirt track while being chased by a bull elephant. She had other adventures too, but more regularly she would weigh and vaccinate hundreds of babies in an open-air clinic, or help local women establish clinics in their villages and towns. And when I knew her as an older woman, she kept a thriving thicket of a garden, pointing me to the various things she wanted me to cut or harvest, showing me the good berry brambles.
So when I read Mrs. Pollifax, I see a little bit of my grandmother. They’re not the same person at all, they’re not doing the same things, but… in some ways they’re cut from similarly capable cloth. And reading that in a piece of spy fiction, when the protagonist sometimes underestimates herself almost as badly as her opposition does, is simply a treat.
Anyway, yes, I’m looking forward to picking up those books again. Maybe I’ll have something more for you here when I do.
I’m visiting family, and I’ve neglected to prepare a post for today. I am part way through A Taste of Gold and Iron, by Alexandra Rowland, and I’ll probably post about that soon. It’s fun. Court intrigue, gay romance, fun.
I hope that you’re doing well and staying safe and warm. Happy holidays.
Sometimes, you start a chapter and just know that this is the creepy one. You know it as you skim that first page. And when that happens to me while I’m lying in bed in the dim light and drifting towards sleep, my self-preservation kicks in.
I don’t always manage to do this, but the most recent time it happened, I stopped myself. I set the book aside and reminded myself of which world I existed in, and resolutely tried to go to sleep without the drowsy conjured nightmares of this fictional world. That mostly worked.
The problem was, once I’d done that I struggled to pick up the book again. I knew that I was going to return to the story at a spooky moment, and I still had that lingering sense of dread that had warned me away from reading more just before sleeping. Having put the book down that way, it took extra work to pick it back up again.
I haven’t finished that book yet.
I was right about that chapter though. It was spooky. I read the rest of it, after psyching myself up to do so, and I’ve read some more after that chapter since.
But the material since hasn’t been as spooky as I’d expected. It was a very sharp peak of spookiness. As I’ve kept reading, I’ve struggled to tell how much of that diminishment of spookiness is in the story, and how much of it was inside my own head. Did the story actually reach such a heightened peak, or did I create more of a peak through some combination of reading late at night and apprehensively avoiding the book for a few days?
And, critical for me as a writer, how much of that experience was desired or intended by the author? How was that experience created?
People have funky and idiosyncratic responses to stimuli. Sure, there’s some general consistency, but when you’re trying to produce specific emotional responses in your audience via art you’re going to run into some odd responses. People will experience things that you didn’t anticipate, or that you thought weren’t there. It’s even worse when you have little control over how the art will be consumed. Once you’ve released art into the world, you give up any semblance of control over how it’s interpreted and just have to hope for the best.
Back to the spooky piece at hand…
The question that nags at me here is: how much of that experience came from the author’s decisions, and what can I learn from that? How much of that can I use in my own work? And how much of it was inside my own head, and won’t be shared by anyone else reading the book?
I’m lucky. I know that some of my friends are reading this book right now, and I’ll have a chance to talk with them about it soon. I already have a few questions lined up. But until then, I’ll keep reading and stewing, wondering what precisely is going on underneath the surface.
Today is Thanksgiving in the US. It is also the Day of Mourning, as organized by United American Indians of New England.
I grew up in Vermont.
Maybe more importantly, I grew up knowing that I was on Turtle Island. I was surrounded by stories of and from the Abenaki people who had lived there long before my settler ancestors arrived, and who live there still. I studied the history of the Iroquois Confederacy and their governing principles. I learned about how the First People in the Northeast had lived on the land, tending to it and to the well-being of the life around them, seeing the connections between each.
My fascination with stories was fueled by Wolfsong, an Abenaki storyteller. I went to every event of his that I heard of, and I can still hear his voice in my memory. His tales resonated deeply with me. I listened to him enough that (this must have been insufferable, adorable, or both) I would sometimes mutter them to myself while he told them. His stories certainly meant more to me than the ones people told me were my own.
For better and for worse, I was told that I have Mohawk and Huron ancestors (among many others). The family members who told me that were pretty reliable with tracing family connections back in other places, but… I haven’t done that research myself, I can’t trace that back, and I won’t claim it as truth. I am far too aware of the tradition of settlers claiming American Indian descent to be comfortable with it.
But I’m thankful for that old family story. I have no doubt that it drove some of my search for greater understanding of many groups of First People, and gave me greater respect for their traditions. I know that it informed some of my family’s engagement with ecological education and stewardship, environmental advocacy, and community building.
At the same time, I’m also descended from people who were on the Mayflower—and I *can* trace that back. I know that my ancestors received aid, and made treaties and honored them. I know my ancestors also broke those treaties and engineered the death or expulsion of many. I know that I have benefited from that, directly or indirectly.
I say all this to remind you, my mostly USA-based audience, that however much Thanksgiving is a time for giving thanks, this is also a time for remembrance and acknowledgment. The highly sanitized origin myth for this holiday was cobbled together during a time of civil strife, and it erased the sobering legacy of the violence that preceded and followed that feast.
So. Please, listen to what American Indian communities have to say, today and on other days. Learn about our past, and how that has shaped our present. If you want somewhere to start, try UAINE.
I’m writing LARP material again!
It’s been a while. I’ve sat on an idea of mine for a little over a year, and I’m finally having the excited conversations with other LARP friends that keep pushing me to develop it. It’s a good feeling.
I’ve also been writing material for a different LARP that my friends are running. This means taking limited information about national histories, and group goals, and maybe a sentence or two about group flavor, and turning that into 400-500 words of group background with coherent flavor. It’s a rewarding exercise, something I haven’t done recently but have plenty of experience with. Plus, it’s wonderful being able to just produce creative work and share it with people immediately.
I’ve stopped doing that here, for a number of reasons, and I regret that sometimes. Maybe I’ll change that again in the future.
As for the fun LARP ideas I’ve been having, they’re tied to a combination of old story ideas I’ve mused over for about five years and a set of scene ideas that have inspired me in the past two years at Wayfinder. The basic concept: PC groups of treasure hunters and historians return to the ancient places of their ancestors in the Shunned Lands to recover lost relics, and in the process discover both why their old stories refer to a prior golden age and why that golden age ended in catastrophe. The rest of the game is all about facing the consequences of releasing the disastrous remnants of that ancient history.
My excited conversations have mostly been about puzzling through how to produce specific scenes, and what we’d need to make them work. It feels really good, engaging with my WFE friends like this outside of the camp season. That collaborative problem solving and supportive creativity is something I always miss during the rest of the year, when I spend most of my time staring at words and trying to cudgel them into some more effective shape.
Perhaps I’ll be able to work more of that into my other writing routines, and carry that excitement forward.
Fistful of Wits 