Mice are bowling

 It was back doing summer stock. Several of the crew had come off a particularly hated production of Evita and the most printable of their filk versions was a take-off on "Dice are Rolling" (which has the clever lyric, "...overweight to a man; they have that lean and hungry look.") They particularly hated the actor playing Juan Perone, but anyhow.

Might have been the same group and the same conversation but someone said that after yet another merger, Warner might have the rights to do another Evita -- but this time, casting from the stable of Warner Brothers animation.

Such as, the role of the self-important, womanizing tango singer Augustin Magaldi would go to -- Foghorn Leghorn. But who, you ask, would be cast as the all-important Eva Perone herself? There's not a lot of good women's roles in that period of Warner animation.

Ah, but you miss the obvious. There is only one character who could carry that off; Bugs Bunny.

Which makes the obvious casting of Eva's critic Che -- Daffy Duck. Besides, Daffy looks darling in a Che cap. Since this crowd wasn't exactly a Juan Perone fan anyhow, that role goes to Porky Pig. I think there was more to that conversation, but we've already strayed far from the original subject.

Mice.

Or to be precise, M.I.C.E. That's a coinage by Orson Scott-Card:

The idea is, a story may contain all these elements, but not in the same proportion. One story will be largely about exploring a new world. Another will be about fighting a war on that new world. Yet another will be about how the characters are changed by that new world. And so on.

Another interesting idea for the MICE is that these elements are usually introduced and closed out in nesting order. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle demonstrates this well (and if you haven't watched it, go ahead; it is a competent action-comedy made extremely watchable by the fine comic acting of Karen, The Rock, and Jack Black as ordinary teens finding themselves in very different bodies. Duane getting distracted by his own muscles remains hilarious.)

Anyhow. We start by introducing the teens. They are sucked into Jumanji. They find the land is under threat. Then, unfolding, they save Jumanji from the evil infesting it. There is a distinct pause, a moment, between them finishing the internal adventure (the Event) and leaving the world (the Milieu). And then...there is a postscript scene back to the original cast to see how they have been changed by the experience (Character.)

But why am I thinking about MICE right now?

I am fairly committed to the Venus story now. I have done enough research to have the bones of what kinds of things will work there. But instead of haring off into the sinkhole of world-building a hundred civilizations the story will never visit, I am going to shift gears (appropriately) into roughing out a story line I'm likely to follow.

And that brings up the question. How much is this a character-driven story? How much is about some big Event, and how much is just exploring the world as a (mostly) static place? Presumably it is going to be a mix of all of them but what leads?

I have an image of the Swift, a sort of space (well, air) Beagle, out on a voyage of discovery for the honor and prestige of the Crown. I also have an image of a massive and aged floating city that is rather Dickensian in the class society, abject poverty, and colorful gangs. One could easily spend quite a lot of time Oliver Twisting around the heights to the bowels of such a city.

And then there's the possibility of a slightly higher-tech and much more energetically machine-oriented diesel-punk sort of city which is rapidly gobbling up territory both through some advanced exploitation of mineral resources and some actual military expansionism. Hey, if I can't have Hornblower in Space, what about a few fleet battles between air-battleships?

And with the polar sargasso, there's potential for sword-and-planet adventures on something that vaguely resembles land. For "really, really watch your step" values of land. Even full-on jungle adventures.

Did I mention Venus climate is weird? 

And I've pretty much decided I am just going to bend the rubber science in two and copy the idea of some of the real elements of Venus, such as the mid-latitude jet streams or the nightly shift in the height of the cloud layer, but change the numbers all over the place until they have reached the proper levels of interesting; big enough to be dangerous, but still survivable without my cast having to go around in oxygen masks...and hazmat suits.

Oh, yeah. Paris isn't stalled, but I'm having to rework that book. What I had for a structure isn't working and although I have some good ideas I haven't quite narrowed it down to the right fixes. But that adventure with revising the Kyoto book was very much worth it. The biggest change was giving Penny more agency, more of a goal, and more visible progress through Part I. And that actually went fairly quickly. The places I had to stop for a week or two were places where I wasn't quite as sure where the theme and feel and character arcs wanted to go.

That's the trick, really. Once I know what I'm trying to write, it goes quick. It is figuring that out that takes all the time.

Something in my I

The last chapter in my grammar pass, and I've finally figured out what I've been doing wrong.

I thought it was because I was using too many "tee up" clauses; "After leaving the tunnel, we saw the dirigible landing," or "Because the dirigible was on fire, we decided not to board."

(And, oops, I just solved one of my world-building problems. How could I do a steampunk story and not have dirigibles? So no magic/liftwood/ninth ray floating stuff. Just brute force and hydrogen gas.)

Anyhow, I was making a simpler and subtler mistake. Which is also a different mistake; when writing in First Person one is tempted to put the "I filter" in front of descriptions; "I heard a noise," "I saw over the ridge," etc. Just as all description is assumed to be through the eyes and ears and nose and procioreceptors of the narrator, a very large number of the actions taken can also be assumed to be those of that same person.

And I was making that mistake. Especially with "and" forms; "I kicked down the door and I ran into the burning building." And that would get flagged by the grammar checker because those are technically independent clauses and a comma should precede that "and."

Or...leave out the second "I." Now both verbs are attached to the same actor and they are no longer independent clauses soldered together with a comma, or strung together, breathlessly, without one.

"I kicked down the door and ran into..."

Done.

Do I want to go back through the entire damned thing and find all of these? Maybe I do. On the other hand, I was striving for a certain amount of run-on...

Nitrous

Down to the last few scenes in the post-revisions grammar check of A Fox's Wedding. I go back and forth on how many times I'll let the software argue me into putting commas in.

I suppose I should do a check for italics consistency but that is a thorny problem. It was probably a mistake italicizing Japanese in this book. The only consistent solutions are either to never italicize it (which leaves weirdness like Penny's alea iacta est at the top of the adventure), or to always italicize it.

The latter is a choice I have seen other authors make. It means that ninja and sushi get italicized as well, which is a bit weird. On the gripping hand, there's a sort-of-reasoning that "ninja" and "sushi" are being used -- and pronounced -- correctly, thus in this Japanese context they are properly italicized.

But as a footnote (ran out of hands), there are at least two characters who are using Japanese wrong. Aki is an American fangirl of the type that throws bad Japanese into her speech, and Penny is...Penny. She's throwing around "ganbatte!" at every excuse until someone finally explains she's using the wrong verb form.

***

I found time to review all the finished chapters of the Paris book (Sometimes a Fox). It isn't working. I am beginning to think this concept, at least how I put it together, can't work.

I am making one big change, though. Huxley's cryptic couplet clues, I'm going to set out as epigraphs. Not all chapters are about solving one of Huxley's puzzles, though, so I may not always be able to do this. In places I can quote from Huxley's text instead; that might work.

What I don't know is how to do this within my current software...and be able to see it while I am writing. Because this is really something I want to see what it looks like on the page before I go for it.

And that's another problem; I think Amazon KDP, after years of pushing us all to submit only as MOBI, now wants submissions in ePub. So I have to re-do all my work there, too.

***

And Venus ran into an interesting problem. Nitrogen. There are ways to hand-wave that there is enough oxygen above the cloud layer for humans to breathe. But there's only 4-5% nitrogen, according to the latest probe data. The rest is CO2. 

The entire chemistry of the situation, and the greenhouse gas effect that creates the Venus we know and love, is all about that CO2. Anything that would put a ton of nitrogen in the upper atmosphere would 1) destabilize all that chemistry until Venus looked very different, and 2) if you could do that, why wouldn't you fix the surface while you were at it?

The fun with playing with Venus is playing with Venus as we know it; the sulphuric acid clouds, the 200 MPH winds, the molten-lead temperatures down on the surface.

It's a lot like the alternate history problem; people really want to make some deep-time change so the American Revolution is actually a border conflict between the Colonies and the Iroquois Confederation-- except that we still get Washington, Jefferson, and Ben Franklin.

There is one slim out, however. Apparently there is a as-yet-unexplained chemistry gradient in the real Venusian atmosphere. Nitrogen is almost absent at the surface, and the proportions increase as you climb into the upper atmosphere, being possibly most concentrated at the magic 50km level.

Just, like, not seventy percent.

He didn't use

Plugging through my grammar and gremlin check. Will probably finish this weekend and be back to "writing" writing. Still tempted to hire a proofreader but that's another thousand bucks in red ink on a book that barely sold twenty copies. No, I really don't think a few misplaced commas are what is killing my sales.

Decided against a sensitivity reader. I haven't the heart for another round of revisions. May toss the Paris book to one, though. Do it before primary revisions and clean-up...

***

Speaking of commas. So this series is told in First-Person Immersive. Meaning the narrative has the flavor of the character's natural speech. Not entirely; narrative is generally more structured and formal.

But here is a place it falls down; as speech, I am using punctuation for the sound. Just like writing words phonetically to capture an accent. One of the ways I have been showing Penny's motor-mouth approach is by leaving off commas, in particular, the comma between an introductory subordinate clause and the rest of the sentence.

Things like, "When I left the station there was a motorbike parked outside." The grammar books really want a comma to follow that "station." There is a good Strunkian reason for it; without the comma one might be tempted to lump "station" in with the following word or words; "When I left the (station there was) a motorbike parked outside." Which is confusing, and that is the supposed point here.

Thing is, the way it is spoken -- by this character, that is -- that implied pause isn't there. So I am caught between using punctuation for the sound and using punctuation for its primary task of clarifying structure and meaning.

For this edit pass, I'm putting most of those commas in. In almost all narrative but in somewhat less dialogue. I hope that will do.

***

And last night I hit a "You didn't used to." Oh, boy. The commas above are, mostly, not an edge case. It is pretty clear when they are grammatically needed and when they are needed to clarify the sentence. "Use to" is another thing entirely.

Pages and pages everywhere, language forums, academic and publishing forums. Here's how I break down the various levels of argument:

The first is the simplistic Prescriptivist approach. I have sympathy for Prescriptivists; there are nuances of meaning that would be useful to preserve and some of them do seem worth fighting for. This is none of them; this is more of a reflexive hyper-correction that takes the simplest form of the rules for "use" and applies them. As such, the Prescriptivist guides are unclear and possibly contradictory as to whether it is "use" or "used" across varieties of construction; "I U to," "I never U to," "I didn't U to," "I U never to," etc.

A probably correct approach that is, unfortunately, not as useful in an editing context is to understand how spoken usage leads and the written recording of it sometimes struggles to follow. Because of that immediately-following "to," the typical pronunciation becomes "I didn't useta..."

It feels natural to separate at the "to" but leave that tongue stop there; "...didn't used to..."

And this approach still -- despite the Prescriptivists -- marks a slim majority of all citations in the wild, including professional publication by style-leaders; newspapers and the like.

But "habitual colloquialism" is not the permission slip you want to be waving under the nose of a hardened editor. Fortunately, there is analysis, analysis that uses terms my understanding of language is far too primitive to understand. So it can be understood if this phrase is not the grammar one might assume it is, but instead a rather different bit of speech.

And, actually, what it appears to be is an idiom. "Use" is one of those words that creeps into all sorts of corners and has far too many different roles. It is probably standing in here for some word or phrase that would be easier to understand, and has been given a specific declension because that is how it was habitually used in speech.

It still doesn't help that it gets marked as "colloquial, not for business use." Fortunately I only have it once in the book, and it is in dialogue by someone who hardly speaks Oxford English, so no problem there.

But it is the annoyance of editing. The computer flags something. I spend hours reading up and I discover that the only "authorities" who speak with assurance as to the underlying rule are those who are trying to sell their simplified (and too often, entirely incorrect) version of the rules so that they can sell their service of helping you use those rules.

***

And now the computer has flagged '80s. Because the decade is the '80s -- a trailing apostrophe is incorrect for numbers, but a leading apostrophe is used to indicate the truncation of "1980s." Unless you are talking of 80's music...oops. Because now it is possessive...or is this one of those possessive cases (like the infamous "its") where the apostrophe is omitted?

Makoto

I'm finally at the epilogue. I'd almost forgotten that one of the things I was trying to do with my (original and wrong) understanding of makoto was the idea of a character archetype; the sort of foolishly truthful, pure-hearted naivete of Sir Gawain, or Parsifal, the "pure fool." I'd even referenced the impetuous and prideful Susunoo in that context.

Probably a mistake, as I hadn't really explained anything from the Kojiki other than the story of Amaterasu in the Cave of Heaven.

In any case, the true sense of makoto seems to be "the real truth." It works well in a context of "the truth revealed." And that phrase about "even a lie may hold the truth" fits in just so well with the idea of Penny playing with, and often wanting to discard, the various masks she puts on during this adventure, and finally coming to accept that she really is, under everything, a badass adventurer.

It did mean rather artificially cramming that saying in there. I'd been a lot more cunning in sneaking in things like "Yuki no Shingun" or even "Hotaru no Hikari." For less payoff, too (pity, though; the reader never got the full translation of the former and so when Penny, fleeing into the national park, says "anyhow, they never intended us to return" the reader isn't going to get the effect I'd intended.)

So that took a bit of work but now I'm finally revising the very last scene of the book. That one involves what I call "The God Game." That is, the original conceit of the series was that Penny, playing a character named Athena and visiting the temple of the goddess Athena, manages to catch the attention of said goddess.

So each story so far has, intentionally, some element of the ineffable. In the Kyoto book, Penny sees lights up above Fushimi Inari Taisha that are strongly implied to be the kitsune no yomeiri -- A Fox's Wedding. And during her yuki-onna stratagem up on the slopes of Haku-san, there are briefly heard mysterious noises from the mist; as if the yokai are real and have come out to help her chase away the punks pursuing her.

There's not going to be one in the Paris book, by the way. Nothing mystical at all.

But that leaves me with not being sure in the epilogue how much Penny is going to pick up on some of the dropped hints in this and previous stories. So I'm going back and forth a lot on this. If for no other reason than that this is an epilogue and should really be focused on closing out this story. Not setting up a new one.

Picking a Theme

Watched an article on the design of Disney's "Star Wars Experience." Interesting stuff.

Also makes me think about the various stories -- at least three books and one movie I can think of off the bat -- that take place in a theme park and try to bring together that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas combination of rides and fun and cotton candy with murder and mayhem and so on.

Most of these chose Don't Mess with the Mouse and set the story in an imagined park. But whether it is Lincoln Child's Utopia in the thriller of the same name, or Lowryland in one book of the urban fantasy Incryptid series, or Wonder World in a buddy-cop action comedy, there is something missing.

For whatever reason, none of these writers brought the kinds of details to the mythology of the worlds these parks are based on that would give them the resonance we get with the famous parks in the real world. I'm not talking of stories set around traveling carnivals or circus tents or amusement parks that are nothing but rides, but ones that, like Disney or Universal, involves the audience with shared lore about the characters and worlds.

Like Universal's Wizarding World of Harry Potter; you go into this experience knowing something of the world and its lore and already invested in the idea of drinking butterbeer and picking out your own wand at Olivander's.

It is sort of strange and even a bit off-putting that Utopia and Tricks for Free both give the characters of the book, major and minor, investment in the inner fictional worlds, crying out in glad recognition at well-loved characters and referencing known lore. But the authors haven't given us, the audience, that same familiarity or the same lore.

Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom does take on the Mouse. I am actually not sure how. But then, Ready Player One also name-checks about a million intellectual properties.

I do say "name checks" because Ready Player One may have the resonance, but it isn't followed through. It is largely on a level of "And hey, here's the DeLorean time machine from that movie you liked!" At least in the movie, all the emotional effect is just seeing the thing. At least at a Star Wars Experience, you can talk with the Stormtroopers.

Just a weird side thought. Almost done with revisions. Back to working on Paris soon. I hope.

Calling Anton

 

I'm finishing up on revisions for A Fox's Wedding and I'm at a scene I really should have realized would be difficult.

It's supposed to be one of the minor revisions. Instead I've been at it all week and I'm still not sure how I'm going to work my way through it.

In the last book, Penny had to stab a guy. She's been dealing with it since, almost not going on the Japan adventure at all. This scene is late in the book and this is the place where she finally accepts that the path she is on is worth it, even if it does lead to violence again.

And I set it up at a gun range. Which was probably a mistake. It makes it far too obvious what is going to happen at the Crisis Point. It also puts the focus in the wrong place. So I'm trying to find a way through to the story beats I really want.

Without changing the chapter count, because I don't want to have to apply for a new ISBN.

This isn't about guns. The problem is, putting guns on the page makes it look like it is.

Incidentally, the Part headings are now "Tatemae, Ganbatte, Kitsune, Honne." I liked the rhythm of "...Makoto" much better but my Japanese translator talked me out of it. "Makoto" is truth, but the sense is more of "the real thing, the true thing" rather than "the hidden facts, discovering the truth." And I didn't really have a good space to explain another word to the reader, not and make it feel familiar and right to the reader by the time they hit the end. Whereas Honne (my translator hit on it at the same moment I did) has been taught and should have been expected...and equally applies to what is happening at the end.

Or maybe not. Because I just ran into the proverb "uso kara de ta makoto" -- which is colloquially translated as "Many a true word was spoken in jest." Because, really, this gets a lot closer to the heart of what is going on. "Honne" is true feelings, and Penny has never had any problem being open with those! As a proxy for the center of the home, the hearth, the privacy of the family spaces, it isn't very good. Native speakers wouldn't think of that first, and that is the audience I care about in doing these language revisions.

Everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked

Finally coming up towards finishing the revisions on A Fox's Wedding. In part 4 of 4 now. I thought I didn't have any big notes to do until the climax, but when I reached the first dojo scene I decided Penny's flippant behavior there was bugging me too much.

Oh, boy, that change cascaded. The following scene, she is more scared and hurting and that was almost a total re-write as a result. And then the scene after that she's still feeling it. And I still have to revise the second dojo scene (that one, at least, was on my notes.) Then the big ones...Guns and Monet, and pretty much the entire Shirakawa-go sequence. And the epilogue. And tweak the love scene.

And then another full grammar check and proofing pass. And then re-format and re-upload. So a couple of weeks yet. I hope I still remember what was happening in Paris when I get back to Sometimes a Fox.

***

I thought I knew what I was going to work on next but the Venus idea still won't leave. 

I've accepted it is going to have to be a bit rubber science. In my mind, it doesn't matter whether you openly flaunt known science, or you hand-wave around it with Clarke's Law; "A techno-wizard did it." I do sort of feel the second is too open to abuse. Once you've added mad wizards, err, nanotechnology to the setting, you can have it do anything.

The current world-building question I am dealing with is how this is steampunk. Not so much that I care if it meets some kind of genre box. No, the point is that steampunk sort of implies a world in flux. And I want a world in flux.

Sure, you could have lots and lots of exciting battles but still keep a sort of status quo. I'm thinking particularly Europe during the Napoleonic era, but that's probably because I've been at long last learning a little about that. But there's something less satisfying in knowing that no matter how exciting it is, at the end of it all that has changed are the faces on the money.

What is exciting is when new ideas are in the mix. When a war happens that changes the status quo for good. A French Revolution. Or a revolution in technology. Or (that old anime standby) some new power that one side is employing to completely change the world (rarely for the better).

I think I want a world that has that. Forces out of balance. Even if it is just a political entity that has reached critical mass and has influence that hasn't been seen on the world stage for hundreds of years. That's a thing I've thought about, too; books that have an unusual setting fall into two broad categories; ones in which it is background, and ones in which it is plot. That is; the difference between "Welcome to this strange place, now have adventures" and "Welcome to this strange place which is itself under threat."

(And that bit about empires opened up a whole side discussion about the map. You wouldn't have to stretch the real Venus too far to have bands of fast-moving air near the equator. Really, really fast. As in civilizations of each hemisphere hardly ever have contact with each other. And that spills into ideas of character; say, a reader viewpoint character who is new to this entire hemisphere...)

Another thing I'm puzzling over is tech. Really, it comes down to floating. How do things not fall? Is it gasbags? Propellers? That's one kind of look. Or what about floating wood? Or some other thing that flies or floats? Magic rocks, lost technology...?

I think the setting needs animal life, because it is hard to imagine the food chain without it, and there is so much plot and atmosphere even if all they are doing is sniping at birds for an added delicacy for the table. But that gives rise to the temptation to go biotech to solve all sorts of tech problems, and that's a very different look, and I rather like propellers better.

(It is rather tempting to come up with some natural basis for the cities, because then your ships can be basically airships and aeroplanes or otherwise constructs, dependent on their technology to stay in the air, but the cities can be stable and long-established. But I haven't been able to come up with anything that doesn't sort of lessen the miracle of floating cities. If there are random floating islands in the sky, then there could be millions of them just ripe for colonization and this whole "here we are suspended in the air, barely surviving" thing kind of goes away.)

And that opens up another discussion. Because if the convenient life is part of the original human terraforming, then this is basically Lost Technology. Except not just one quest item; built into the hull of every floating city. Which suggests there's a whole bunch of stuff spread all over. (Also pretty much requires that it either be 1) extremely long-lasting aka very Clarkian, or just barely in advance of what they can build now -- hence maintainable -- but that also implies potentially building more of it.)

Plus that leads to thoughts about the whole analogy. Air is an ocean thing. Is falling off the deck of a ship always certain death, or is there some sort of personal flotation? How have people adapted psychologically? Are they still afraid of falling or have they largely accepted this as a familiar danger? Ah, but maybe this is different between different societies. Like the tech they use. Like recycling -- a floating city that is living off hanging plants and passing birds probably wants to recycle as much organic matter as possible. 

(Or is it a status act to burn or otherwise not give one's body back to the city? Or are there scavengers in the deep atmosphere and organic matter does eventually get recycled anyhow? So many options!)

And add to this mix that falling is absolutely Checkov's Gun; it is going to happen to one of the major characters. And be survived.

The one thing that seems clear is that I don't need to stick to one paradigm. For every way a culture and technology comes together, whether Sentinalese bow-hunters on an organic Sargasso of the air, or Brotherhood of Steel-like hoarders of old technology in their massive steel ships, I can come up with good excuses why they can be both in the same setting. And intersecting, which is the really fun part.

Two Worlds

For no particular reason I went and left reviews for multiple books out of a series that I've been reading, also for no particular reason.

Well, the reason for the latter is I'm still battling a bug and my brain can't handle serious history books this week. This series is your basic space opera, brain candy. It moves well enough and doesn't require much of the reader.

And it is also really poorly written. The reviews are almost perfectly split between very low and very high ratings but most of them have the same thing to say; that the story is fun, the characters engaging, there's a lot of imagination...and that there are numerous typographical and related errors. They aren't wrong...but that isn't the full story.

Between reviewing all the books I've read of this series so far (I don't know that even the brain candy will keep me at it), the edits I'm still at, and maybe the binge-watching of Crispy's Tavern (stories of table-top role playing game sessions gone bad), I am having some thoughts about this.

Let's take the negative reviews first. Most don't go beyond the spelling and punctuation. And, yeah, I have this idea that there is a particular kind of pedantic mind, one that carries this illusion that grammar is a simple set of universal rules and only the callous, careless, lazy or stupid go around breaking those rules. When I see someone hammering on just this one thing, I have to wonder if they even recognize that writing takes other skills as well, or if they believe that grammar is the one big hurdle and the rest is easy.

But leave that aside. A small number of reviewers -- and almost entirely in the negative column -- are addressing the other skills of story-telling. With detail and passion and this feels like the writing of, well, other writers. And I'm going to come back to that in a bit. 

I also feel they are assigning low marks not as punishment, but as encouragement. Several of them addressed the author directly, asking them to please learn more about the craft.

A final note on the spelling et al; in the wording of the grammar-pedants, particularly, it is described as "several" errors. Perhaps their eyes are not as sharp as they think. When I put on my proof reading hat, I found some strange error in almost every single paragraph of one sample all the way out to page three. Some wrong words, not too many actual spelling errors, rather, various sorts of rather odd punctuation and capitalization:

"Sir, must I talk to,...those people." 

Followed by, 

"I know they can be rather frightening but You have done nothing wrong."

These are rather odd mistakes, to say the least. They seem less like errors in typing and more like the errors left during revisions or editing. But also the sort of thing that a grammar checker should catch. The thing they are not is misunderstandings of standards in grammar, spelling, or punctuation.

I think these are at best diagnostic of something...very possibly a broken process that leaves insufficient space for feedback, revision, and above all improvement. Given the number of different series the same author is putting out very nearly simultaneously, I'd say lack of time is quite likely.

But onwards. That small number of fellow writers who left reviews chose to dedicate their remarks to top-level problems in story-telling; pacing, world-building, the like.

These are certainly there. But let's start with some lower-level craft; craft like POV and tense. There are places where this author forgets he is writing in First Person. As in, during a first-person narrative, some of the narrator's actions are described in third person. Very odd.

There is a similar magnitude of error in tense, with present and past tenses sharing space in some paragraphs.

The problems with POV go well beyond pronoun trouble. When I am active on Quora, a very typical question is "Can I have third person bits in a first person story?" These are writers, it feels like, who have stumbled into the first challenge of First Person; the desire/need to show something that the first-person narrator can't have seen or shouldn't know.

The author of the series we are talking about...just does it anyhow. Without even a scene break to make it clear (sometimes not even a change of paragraph). This is head-hopping at its worst. (And what is particularly annoying is that this first-person protagonist is in mind-to-mind contact with a "magic volleyball" AI -- who could seamlessly flick our POV to a convenient camera and thus never lose the focus on our first-person protagonist.)

This is such a basic tool it is sort of appalling. POV is one of the tools to draw the reader in, to help them empathize. And a tool to shape their experience, to control the information they get. By the fifth book this is so out of control entire chapters are suddenly about some other group of characters completely, with our purported protagonist only showing up briefly at the end of it.

And, yes, tense is part of that. Control of tenses is also part of forging that connection between reader and character, erasing the distinction when desired or bringing the voice of the narrator forward when that is the choice of the moment.

The shaping of pacing and scene organization is missing. Missing so thoroughly I can only think the author does not realize it should be there. Location, mood, cast change without warning, sometimes in the middle of a paragraph. A tense moment will end with an off-page rescue. No cycle of tension and recovery. He speaks all his part at once, cues and all, as Peter Quince would say.

It makes the times when these things are present stand out by their unusualness. In book five there's a bit with a mercenary finding himself taking on the backwoods dialect of the pair of annoying recruits he got stuck with. It develops over multiple scenes and comes to a small but amusing resolution. There's even a bit where the narrative voice slips into it the cornpone dialect.

Which almost stopped me dead. This is the author who apparently couldn't stay consistently in the same person with one character alone in a room...but now he understands Free Indirect Speech?

But even that is not the purpose of this essay.

***

The positive reviews. I will give them this; they aren't rubber-stamp. They aren't the kind of reviews popular fan fiction gets (generally an incoherent gush). These are often thoughtful and specific. They liked these aspects of the character, the situation, the story-telling.

And I guess I do, too. Which is after all why I come to fanfic. People misunderstand fanfic; they think because the writers are playing in another creator's universe, the imagination is lacking, the characters trite, the situation nothing that hasn't been seen before. It is almost the opposite; the major flaw of fan fiction is poor writing skills, but the character, situation, conceptions, and world-building shine with imagination and originality.

And that's what this is. What is working in these stories is in spite of the writing.

Or is it? Any writer knows that what the reader gets is different from what is actually on the page. A description in a book isn't a police blotter (usually!) It is a sketch, an Impressionist dash of paint into which the reader projects a cloud, a sailboat, a flower, a face. This is the power of writing; that this lively and detailed world is being visualized by the reader, drawing from their own experiences.

From these positive reviews, the readers are finding character and world-building and story, character development and emotional arc, tension and success...but all in the spaces between, as it were. Read into a text that doesn't, at least according to the usual analysis, contain them. Somehow they are finding a tiger in the pattern of the leaves, and that tiger is glorious to them.

So are we writers wrong? Does the reader bring so much to the experience we are fooling ourselves with all our work to put those character beats in and plan our scenes and otherwise shape the experience? It is more powerful the face they think they see in the shadows than the intentional and skilled brush strokes of a Monet or a Renoir? (Or at least the crude, forceful lines of a Kirby?)

To me, while I am enjoying this story, I am not enjoying it as fully as most of the other books I chose to read. I do like this character and these situations but I wish I could grasp them more clearly. For me, this is a world glimpsed through a shower curtain. It could be glorious, but I'm not really seeing anything but blur.

Are we writers fooling ourselves? The magic is working; we're all seeing that engaging character and that fun story. Or, perhaps, we are seeing the potential. These are the longest reviews I saw, and here I am, writing even more. Because we care about story and we believe in the craft and we want to help this author do better because we want to read it, dammit!

Then there is the theory that some people don't realize there is better. Thing is, many of these positive reviewers show signs of being experienced readers. They've read other books, and some of them even name-drop books by people who know what they are doing, books that have all these things our author in question either hasn't learned how to do yet, or doesn't even realize he should be doing.

So I don't think my theory about the two worlds can still fly. That was the idea that some readers are following, as you do, from one book to another, from one series to another, by word of mouth, by the name of the author, by Amazon recommendations; all things that will tend to lead you towards books that are similar, and not just in subject. Books that share, bluntly, the same amateurism. Possibly in both senses of the word; books that may be less an act of craft, but there is certainly love.

I won't reject that insular circles are still possible. And that different readers have different needs and that Umberto Eco isn't for everyone (he's barely for me, half the time).

Or the idea that writers can start to write for writers. Another echo chamber. This happens with musicians; what they find challenging and interesting moves further and further from what the average listener is capable of following.

Writers and musicians are both conscious of this, of course. Musicians play the music they love with the friends who can appreciate it...and spend the rest of their time playing the music that pays the rent.

So I'm not prepared to completely give up the idea of parallel worlds. And not the idea of just one ghetto, where cliches seem fresh because there isn't enough experience in the readership to recognize them, and technical skills are downplayed because neither reader nor writer knows what they are leaving out.

But the idea of craft as a similar echo chamber. That all this attention on increasingly subtle and esoteric bits of narrative person and tense and the finicky details of where the punctuation goes when a shout is reported in a bland voice within a parenthesis aren't as important to story as we make them. One could construct the idea that the "Three R" emphasis, reduced to math-and-english taught only in ways that could be put to a fill-in-the-circle standardized test, has infected a generation. Editors making themselves useful, disgruntled readers making their voices heard, and now software manufacturers seeing a new market opening up are elevating "did you put the comma in the right place?" as a huge money-making engine and a cheap and easy social currency for people on all sides of the writing table to show off.

That this in short has become a goal in itself. And out there in the self-publishing arena, the electronic books that can be delivered straight-to-reader like burgers being delivered to Wimpy, some of this is being recognized as fat that can be trimmed to increase the profit margins. I see typographical errors in published books and magazines, now more than ever (and despite computer-aided editing). I also see poor stitches and poor welds in consumer products. Like it or not, fiction is a consumer product.

Well. In this particular case, for these books and these authors, this is riding a wave that may go away. There is a juncture of various things -- such as Amazon's advertising system, which is truly biased towards the fifteen minutes of fame -- that make shoddy books written fast a viable strategy. The question is, as always, one of trade-offs. And it seems that, perhaps, with overall readership going down and much of the reading done by younger readers not in the form of literature but in chats and posts and game dialogue and news feeds and texts, that there is a smaller and small audience who recognizes the craft that should be there.

Because my bottom line becomes, oddly, the same as those grammarians. I don't think it is easy. I think craft -- and grammar! -- is hard. But I still think it is worth it. It makes for a better story. Some grammar is pedantic but even that can be a stumbling-block in the smooth flow of comprehension. And the rest of craft is a way of delivering a deeper, more immersive, richer, more emotional experience.

...and undead bunnies

The Venus thing isn't leaving.

Would really make a sprawling setting for a number of stories. Especially since you have to make the science pretty rubbery in order for the idea to work at all, you might as well take it that one step further; floating shoals, deadly sulphuric-cloud weather systems, floating trees, giant deep-atmosphere predators...

And of course a huge mix of cultures. And an overall shape that is up-for-grabs late colonial/Napoleonic (yes, I'm still listening to a 50-hour podcast history of Napoleon) with the Great Powers in near-constant skirmishes, changing coalitions and gaining and giving up colonies as concessions.

The cultures and technologies can vary by as much rubber as you are willing to add to the science. Floating wood, so an atmospheric Sargasso for one culture? Possibly primitive and hostile and mostly uncontacted c.f. Sentinel Island? Or a savage largely un-policed marquis/bayou?

And why stop there? Magitech left by humanity when they were actually capable of flying to Venus. Whatever remains of the original terraformation efforts (a huge available hand to wave over the floating trees and space whales and whatever). With possible factional disputes, meaning avian super-predators or leviathan terraforming creatures in the deep or intelligence; bred, robotic, accidental, even alien.

***

Yeah, I already had a setting in mind for the fantastical, science-adjacent mix of multiple weird cultures for the protagonists to adventure through.

Two, you could say, except that in the case of Tiki Stars, I've sort of decided that the intent is pastiche. Instead of trying to make a plausible western or alien-on-a-spaceship or whatever out of a single coherent world, I was just going to openly tweak/re-imagine the world as needed. Like, even the nature of Old Earth/Lost Earth/Mythical Earth changes from story to story, even though most of the cast continues and their back stories remain intact...