reviews; plus some other stuff

The Queen in Winter is reviewed at Sequential Tart. And at nichtszusagen. Also, very briefly, at myshelf.com

And Mélusine gets reviewed over at Swarm of Beasts. Also here. And it makes the SF Site's Best Books of 2005 list.

Since this seems to be turning into a shameless self-promotion post (::adds tag::), I might as well mention that "Elegy for a Demon Lover," a Kyle Murchison Booth story that was published in Tales of the Unanticipated 26, is going to be reprinted in The Best of the Rest 4 from Suddenly Press. Also, I've sold another story (not KMB) to All Hallows. (I have a perfectly ridiculous number of things in press at the moment.)

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I am grumbling very slowly at Chapter 2 of The Mirador. This is the book that taught me how to plot--insofar as I could be said to have any grasp of plot whatsoever.* But this means that, especially in the early chapters, I was still learning how to plot, and certain things that happen later in the book could stand to have better set-up than they do. Also, of course, there's the new first person narrator, but if my trusty and well-belovèd beta matociquala is to be believed (and she is), I may actually be getting a grip on that. But still. I think the hardest thing I've learned--in that it took me a long time and in that it's still really difficult to work with--is that characters have to do things for their own reasons. Not for my reasons. And it doesn't matter if their reasons never get explained in the story. They still have to be there. And they have to be--not consistent, because human beings aren't, but coherent. Yes, characters are puppets, and yes, authorial solipicism is justified (they don't exist if I'm not looking at them), but it's crucial to pretend that these things are not true. That they're people. That their lives continue off the page.

It feels to me like ... like protecting the characters' dignity. Whether they're villains or heroes or spear-carriers or clowns. Making them behave out of character is a kind of deliberate humiliation--and doing it unintentionally is almost worse, because it signals very clearly that I didn't care enough to pay attention to them, to understand what they would and would not do. And characters deserve that kind of dignity, that integrity. No matter what horrible things I do to them, I owe it to them to let them face disaster as themselves.

Because that's the best any of us can do.


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*No, you haven't fallen into a temporal anomaly. Between 1994 and 1999, I wrote a book called The Shadow of the Mirador. Then I wrote the sequel (which was at that time called Labyrinths Within). Then I went back and rewrote The Shadow of the Mirador, turning it into two books, viz. Mélusine and The Virtu. And now I've worked my way back around to Labyrinths Within The Mirador again. When I finally get to work on Summerdown, it'll be the first time in, um, five years or so that I'll be writing fresh instead of revising. ... No wonder I feel some days like Sisyphus with a balky hippopotamus.