Yes, I revise things

I'm that kind of writer. I can't look at something I've written, even five minutes ago, and not find something I want to change. You might say therefore I'm not suited to writing an online serial novel; and yet you might say I am. Because, on the Internet, revising the published (i.e. posted) version is not only possible but quick and easy. I love that.

So don't be surprised if something has changed a bit when you reread a post. Or if you spot a typo but then go back again and it's gone.

I just did a big revision in post 20 of the revised Chevenga books, "Manacles with invisible chains," adding about a thousand words that I had written years ago, meaning to add if there was ever another published version, but forgot to include when I first posted the post.

What do I mean by 'fantasy fiction for Dems'

Posted on Daily Kos, 11:00:24 AM EDT April 17 2009

As a Kossack since 2003 or so and an online novelist for about a month, I naturally had Kos come immediately to mind when I was thinking about how to promote my work. The catch-sig-line "Fantasy fiction for Dems" popped into my head immediately.

I know intuitively what that means to me, but it occurred to me an explanation might be in order in case the line looks too much like pandering to the Kossack masses. So here it is.

First off, it certainly doesn't mean that Republicans aren't allowed to or shouldn't read my work. It's bipartisan in the sense that, in its world, there is no Repub or Dem party (it takes place in the fifth millennium A.D.) and Repubs of a thoughtful and non-utterly-wingnutty frame of mind might well enjoy it.

What I mean is that my personal values play out in my writing. (That's true of all writers; whatever your values are, they will come shining -- or oozing -- through in your work, whether you mean them to or not, and whether you are aware of it or not.) And they are "Dem" in an abstract way, meaning that many Democratic voters would hold them, with a leaning to the more progressive side. Egalitarianism, democracy, the recognition that power and responsibility are one and the same, tolerance for other cultures, sexual freedom, open-mindedness and a rationalism that doesn't preclude spirituality, especially the spirituality of personal experience (which is really the only valid spirituality to my mind), and probably more that I will think of later and add in a diary edit, are what I write about. (Tell the truth I'm finding it quite difficult to just declare them like this... I'm squirming.)

So if you're looking just for sweaty-thewed barbarians bashing each other over the head with swords (or "thud and blunder" as it's sometimes referred to in the sff world)... intrigues in which everyone's quest for power is mindless, vicious and unquestioning, in a dog-eat-dog world where everyone assumes that's as good as human nature allows... or freewheeling magical power without consideration as to what that would really imply... you'll be disappointed. If you're looking for a story that vindicates a belief in might-makes-right, as all too much sff work does, look elsewhere. I hate that shit. When I was much younger, I looked for an oasis of practical idealism in the tide of cynicism and indifference that dominated sff political discourse, and found it in a few works such as those of Ursula K. LeGuin and Joanna Russ... but there wasn't a big enough oasis, so I wrote more of it.

I am not cynical, and I try to make my work ultimately life-affirming and positive: about human nature, about the power of collaboration, community and love, and particularly about free will, emphasizing the power of choice.

So I've got things like a nation that runs by direct democracy, kind of like Switzerland... going through a soul-searching discourse when the possibility of conquering a slave-holding, tyrannical empire becomes real. Or a warrior-king trying (vainly so far) to put together a low-tech version of the United Nations. Or the female side of the spiritual culture of an oppressively-patriarchal society asserting itself the moment it becomes free to, and undertaking to rewrite that society's definitions of good and evil, and pain and pleasure.

My main character is a politician, and in the past few years my writing about him has been informed by things about politics that I've learned right here on Daily Kos... I can't help it. I am inspired, and heartened, always, by the intelligence mixed with compassion that I see in the discourse here, and I take that inspiration right back into my work.

So that's what I mean... I'm not sure the explanation does it justice, so I might come back and edit in the future.

Splash site for my online work here.

Everything I need to know I'm learning in Analytics

Google Analytics really is the most amazing service. Shirley and I have found it necessary to become a two-person support group re the googleanalyticoholism problem that we're both experiencing. The urge to go on and see how many hits we got today is irresistible. So is the urge, for me at least, to allow my mood to directly correlate with the ups and downs on those little graphs.

Analytics' stock-in-trade, of course, is not just to show you how many, but all sorts of other things about the visitors. The idea is to use this information to tweak your content and your promotional efforts. We're starting to learn that, and I for one have already made some decisions based on it.

Things I know about our readers:

• They are only a few at the moment, but only a month into blogging it's still very early.
• I have readers in Canada and the USA, no surprise, but also in Peru, Belarus, the Czech Republic and Australia.
  
• The geographical profiles of Shirley's and my visits are very similar, meaning a lot of the same people read both our blogs. This means that the crosslinks and cross-promotions are working -- which way, I'm not sure, but suspect it's both. It also means that each of us can more or less cut in half the resources needed for promotion, because anything either of us does will drive traffic to both of us.
• Promoting on Daily Kos works for us. My sigline, when I comment on Kos, is "Fantasy Fiction for Dems" and it links to chevenga.com. I did a snarky photoshop in a front-page comment section the other day, resulting in 15 recommendations for the pic -- but also a little spike in visits to my site for that day, mostly from Democratic-leaning states in the USA.
• After I SEO'd www.chevenga.com a couple of weeks ago, we're just starting to get search engine traffic. Getting search engine traffic for an online novel isn't easy because there isn't an agreed-upon term for the concept ("blook" also refers to dead-tree books based on blogs)... but then I already knew that.

More to come.

The joy of genre

When people ask me what kind of books I've published, I generally tell them 'fantasy,' toeing the party line of the marketing classification they were given by my publisher (and, not to single out Baen, probably would have been given by any publisher). But I often go on to explain that they aren't really fantasy, but science fiction, which no doubt leaves the impression that they're a sort of hybrid between two apparently inimical things, being as science fiction tends to be rationalistic and aimed at the left brain, and fantasy more symbol-oriented, allegorical and spiritual, aimed at the right.

I wouldn't call it a false dichotomy, but I would say that we all have both a left brain and a right. I will also say that anything that seems to transcend the divide I find totally fascinating, which is one reason I got into homeopathy, which is a whole other story I'll get into some other time. But let me give the definition I use to differentiate science fiction and fantasy. Since, as Arthur C. Clarke famously said, any sufficiently-advanced technology appears to be magic, and technology is advancing all the time so that yesterday's magic is today's routine use, the boundary isn't so clear. It can come down simply to what you think is possible or impossible, and that is an unsolvable and potentially extremely nasty argument (consider whether you think the existence of one or more spiritual beings is possible or not). You can read intelligent discussions by Lawrence Watt-Evans here and by Sally O. Odgers here.

But some writer, and I can't remember or find who else I'd quote and link, came up with a definition that I embrace, perhaps due to the elegance of its simplicity. It's this: science fiction rigorously postulates a chronological and causal connection to the real, existing world as we know it, extending into the future (extending into the past is the territory of historical fiction). Fantasy doesn't. That's it.

That means that not only is Lord of the Rings fantasy, since 'Middle-Earth' is deemed to be in the distant past but where and when exactly is vague, but so is Star Wars, set "a long time ago in a galaxy far far away."

Thus, the Chevenga books are science fiction. asa kraiya takes place in A.D. 4980, and there are some characters who actually know it's taking place in A.D. 4980 because one society has managed to keep the same calendar. Relics of the ancient technology are all over the place, from the Imperial Book to the moyawa, literal translation 'single wing', recognizable translation 'hang glider,' and legends and garbled memories abound.

However, that's a logical definition. The marketing definition, based on the projected tastes of readers, goes more like this: 'If the tech level is pre-gun so characters are running around with swords, and there are psi-powers, it's fantasy.' So that's the section of the bookstore Chevenga ended up in, for good or ill.

When it comes down to it, though, what fascinates me most is that which bridges the divide. So I am the sort of writer who, if I want to describe moonlight shining on the night of April 11, 4980, will check to see what the phase the moon actually will be in on that day (there's a website) and write accordingly; and I'm also the sort of writer who will go into altered states of consciousness (and not by taking anything), have spiritual experiences and bring the knowledge of "the other world" so gained into my work.

Considering how many other writers write both science fiction and fantasy, I don't think I'm alone in feeling that without both sides of the divide, we are incomplete.

Part of me, disillusioned with genre divisions entirely -- when it comes down to it, what culture other than the western, English-speaking one, draws a firm line between 'fiction' and 'fantasy'? ALL fiction is fantasy! -- just wants to make fun of it all, and perhaps leap on reigning genre trends for promotional reasons.

Fact is, Fifth Millennium is steampunk. Notice those goggles Chevenga's wearing in the pic, so as to protect his eyes from exploding laptop bits? More often he wears them while flying via moyawa. The mad scientist's cart of the inventor Diyadesai, the hand-cranked DC-generator the Haians use, the Great Press of Arko -- oh, the Great Press of Arko! Sneak preview description:

In a cavern in the cliff wall of Arko, by a rivulet that runs down through the rock and turns a huge wheel as in a mill, sits the great press of Arko, the first of all of them after the Fire, the only one for centuries. I have been there a few times, felt the sweltering heat, smelled the metallic air and the tang of ink, heard the booming and clicking and pinging of its works in rhythm more perfect than any human drummer can make. In the office where the scribes work, it is a deep thrumming that you feel through your feet more than hear, day and night, as if the Earthsphere itself had a racing heartbeat.

C'mon... how steampunk can you get?

Legal matters

It was a coincidence, I guess, one of those confluences that nature furnishes unawares, tempting us to see it as replete with meaning, that both of yesterday's posts were about specific pieces of legislation posing Chevenga problems.

[Disclaimer: IANALBIWOIAPLNS (I am not a lawyer but I was one in a past life, nuff said).]

I won't say I wasn't fascinated in my earlier writing days by things legal; it was yet another thing I didn't feel I was really up to writing about, and on retrospect I might have been right. At that age I didn't yet understand that a jurisdiction's legislation is actually a system, a big verbal machine with parts that connect and fit into each other and, one hopes, make sense, and which is constantly being revised and added to, like full-featured software. On good days it runs as if it's well-oiled; on bad days it clunks and sputters and makes ugly mistakes that ruin lives. It is both conceived and operated by those most imperfect of creatures, human beings, and so is at times necessarily, as the saying goes, an ass.

And yet, generally speaking, people see law as necessary to facilitate that most human thing of getting along. Given their choice and a sense of ownership over the result, they'll enact laws and more laws. For those of a libertarian bent who think of laws as inimical to true human nature, individual or social, so that regular folks would choose to throw them all off if permitted by their oppressors, I rebut by giving you: Switzerland. This is a nation of direct democracy, a system in which citizens get to vote on proposed laws by regular, frequent, mail-in referenda (or so it was when I learned about it; if I were them now I'd do it online, and it looks like they're starting to). The result: such a massive, detailed, ornate plethora of laws that it's hard, if not impossible, to emigrate there. If you weren't born there, you just aren't going to learn what is and isn't legal well enough.

(And yes, in case you're wondering, I did steal ideas from the Swiss political system in creating the Yeoli political system. Just wait until the Yeolis log on to the Fifth Mill version of the Internet...)

Anyway, in the intervening time between publishing my dead-tree works and now, I've done such things as researched articles on legal questions, involved myself in the regulation of a health profession in the province of Ontario, and even been involved in three lawsuits and a criminal proceeding. And darned if I didn't find myself fascinated (at least when the clouds of the emotional horror of injustice, in some cases, cleared). Law is all words, of course, so that an exploration of law is an exploration of language and meaning... and I'm a writer. But it's also language that has to work, like computer code, because it's going to be used. The precision of legal language, and the questions of interpretation that come up when it isn't entirely precise -- because of course it can never be perfectly precise -- I find totally intriguing.

To go even deeper into my own motivation, I think I also find understanding the law of a society that upholds democratic and egalitarian principles an empowering relief from the arbitrary capriciousness I was raised in in my thoroughly-dysfunctional family. When you grow up in a weird cross between anarchy and dictatorship, a working system in which everyone, just for the fact of being human, has rights, feels a bit like Nirvana.

So I was much less bored at the dronings of Sichera-e than young teen Chevenga is, and I realized a while back while doing preparatory work for ak that by the time he's semanakraseye, he's a legal geek, and then, aspiring to be Imperator of Arko, he becomes a policy wonk as well. I was at one time unaware that pride in a legal system was an option, since I'm Canadian -- ours just hums along quietly, for the most part, and we take it for granted -- until I happened onto Daily Kos and found Americans who were noisily proud of their system. And while it's not Chevenga's style to be noisily proud, he naturally feels that the Yeoli system is far and away better than anything else in the world, would love to export it if he could, and prides himself on having geekishly mastered its intricacies.

It also occurred to me that fantasy literature, for the most part, is missing that legal aspect. Sophisticated, complex, literate civilizations are postulated without any apparent written laws, and legal questions don't come into plots. From Hammurabi to Egypt to Greece to the medieval Church to China to the USA to the International Criminal Court, you can't have civilization without laws. Some might argue, law is civilization. In fact human society occurs nowhere without law. Stone-age tribes are not anarchistic; their laws are expressed orally rather than recorded in writing, but their purpose is the same -- facilitating everyone getting along -- and they have jurisdiction as strict as any silicon-wired empire's.

So, in the new work, I've allowed legal matters to take their proper place in the action. Chevenga's youthful agonizing over whether to reveal his secret is going to be more... organized... and questions of law will produce some interesting plot twists, particularly in asa kraiya. Two of my favourite new ak characters are kick-ass legal types who both give new and different meanings, at least in the fantasy genre, to the term "strong female character." Oh, are they going to have fun with Chevenga (no, not that kind... get your mind out of the gutter.)

Final note: I quote a line that my eleven-year-old son Raphi has been singing a lot lately, penned by that modern icon of astute cultural observation, Weird Al Yankovic, in his song "Jurassic Park" (to the tune of "MacArthur Park"): "A huge tyrannosaurus ate our lawyer; well, I suppose that proves that they're really not all bad." The question -- does it mean tyrannosauri aren't all bad because they eat lawyers, or lawyers aren't all bad because they taste good? -- is one of interpretation, it seems. The jury is out.

The pic

See what happened was that my laptop is a Dell and I've noticed it getting... well, not screaming hot, but... pretty hot. And then when I went looking for an image of a Dell laptop to put in front of Chevenga, as he blogs in my kitchen, in his bloggles, I was amazed at the number of images I found of Dells in flames, or in ashes. In fact there's a shot of one exploding at a conference. So I'm making a bit of a joke at their expense. Sorry Dell... otherwise the laptop's great.