Mea Culpa

I’m sorry!

That’s the first point of this entry—to apologize.

When you subscribed to this list, through Facebook or the website or however, I promised that I’d send entries more or less once a week, with reviews, commentary, musings, meanderings, and whatnot. And on the whole, I’ve kept my promise, in that I’ve written entries pretty much weekly. I did a lot of reviews, and more recently I’ve done some thematic entries considering different authors and styles and so forth.

BUT…

It turns out they didn’t get emailed out. Facebook worked, but not email.

I’m usually fairly tech-savvy, but I completely misunderstood how this works. In short, SquareSpace (which I use for the site) forwards the subscriber list and the entry content to MailChimp, which… does nothing at all, unless I set up a special “RSS feed campaign.” I didn’t know that. So it’s all been ready and waiting.

I discovered this when a friend and I were Zoom-ing, and we realized that she hadn’t gotten any of the entries. I was sure it was her mail program filtering me out as spam, so I didn’t dig hard. I went through the subscriber list and yes, she’s on it, so I went digging, but not very hard: as I say, I was sure the problem was on her end.

Silly me!

Once I figured out the basic problem, I set up a new campaign and made a test-send to me… and it sent. Yay! Only I didn’t get it. I spent hours trying to figure out the problem. Eventually I got my techie son to dig into it. Turns out, for some reason, MailChimp won’t send to the originating address. So we set up a new test-send, targeted to my other email address, and after lots of tinkering and fighting, IT SENT!

So now, if there isn’t some other problem I don’t know about, the thing should send out new entries to the subscriber list. All this time, I’ve been writing away happily and sending nothing. Grrrr.

Anyway, my apologies. It should work now (I hope).

First item of news: The Chapterhouse of Elith is almost done. It’s slow and dark, with very little action, but I like it as a fantasy mystery.

Second item of news: I have begun serious work on the next volume, which will be part 3 of volume 4, or alternatively volume 6 as a stand-alone. It’s about fairy tales, and stars Riobard the Dancer. I’m hoping to make reasonably rapid progress with it, now that I’ve got an outline that makes sense, but it’s too early to suggest a publication date. I’ll keep you posted (now that I’m actually posting…).

Third item: I wasn’t expecting to do a title-share this week, what with the tech stuff, but then along came Timothy Bateson’s Under A Hunter’s Moon, a short story which sounds like a good bit of fun; it’s a $0.99 prequel to his series called Shadows Over Seattle. Check it out!

In other topics, I ran into something interesting when working on Chapterhouse.

Everyone knows that novels run on characterization, which is essentially narrative style in miniature. And since Chapterhouse consists largely of a series of extended conversations with a cast of peculiar characters, characterization is where it’s at. Since these are conversations, the way any given character talks—manner, phrasing, gestures, whatever—is the central issue at stake.

When developing these things, there are many methods. Some people write up a little characterization essay, others make lists of points. Sometimes you imagine a physical gesture or an item of clothing as a “hook” from which to hang the character; a speech tic can serve the same function.

The problem with this, though, is that the hook tend to produce caricatures. There’s a great deal of art involved in using such things well. Charles Dickens was a master: his initial descriptions give you characters pretty indelibly, and every time they pop up again, he reminds us, gently, of the initial bits. But that doesn’t work in every style, or at least, you can’t always do it Dickens’s way.

An extreme of this approach can be found in the Sherlock Holmes stories. If you imagine a character as a list of tics and hooks and traits, all adding up to a total person, a great part of Holmes’s deductive genius is that he spots all the bits and instantly puts together the complete picture. Rolling gait, Chinese fish tattoo… must be a sailor.

Unfortunately, this requires a series of assumptions about how people work, assumptions that were crucial to the Victorian middle-class perception of society, but are neither broadly necessary nor common today. Terry Pratchett ridiculed this approach in one of the earlier Sam Vimes novels; I don’t have it immediately to hand, but his point (Pratchett’s and Vimes’s) is that the “sailor” could be a guy with a knee problem who got drunk in a Chinese part of town when he was seventeen, and the scream in the night could be someone stepping out of bed onto a fallen hairbrush. The world just isn’t neat and tidy the way Holmes (and Arthur Conan Doyle) imagines it to be.

Which brings me back to Chapterhouse.

In creating my characters, because I need the illusion of rich, complex depth, I’ve given each character has a manner that is not only distinctive but also redolent of an established type. To take my best example, Sister s’Galliddan, Assistant Chief of Mission at the Chapterhouse, tends to talk like an upper-class English public-school/Oxbridge man. Not an idiot like Bertie Wooster, but with a breezy, facetious, allusive manner. Under pressure of interrogation, she never fights back but sideslips, shifting the subject smoothly and not letting the questioner get a word in edgewise. In the first extended conversation, which is held in a dining-room, she talks about food, because it’s relevant to the moment without being relevant to what the investigator, Avren, wants to know.

Now if the book were set in 20th-century England, the reader wouldn’t blink, and would immediately draw a series of inferences about s’Galliddan: upper-class, highly educated, intelligent, well-read, and so on. She’s basically well-intentioned and a decent person, but she’s also performing a diplomatic job, and that means she has to be a bit devious, and (so as not to be rude) she covers deviousness with a self-deprecatory facetiousness, leaving her interlocutor nothing to grab hold of. You can’t take offense, you can’t say she’s not cooperating, but nevertheless she says only and exactly what she intends to say, and controls the conversation.

Fine—but this isn’t 20th-century England. One reader got stuck on precisely these points. Why does she talk like an upper-crust Old Etonian?

My problem is that I want to use the manner and style as a complex hook. I want the reader, at some level, to think, “I know how this character works, I can imagine her on TV or in a movie, I’m comfortable.” I want the series of automatic inferences to be accurate within reasonable limits. But I can’t pick a manner from fantasy, because it doesn’t have any, so I have to use material from other kinds of fiction.

Look at how characterization in even extremely good fantasy is done. The coarse, thug-like sergeant (elite Guard, Uruk-Hai, whatever) always talks in a not-quite-identifiable English lower-class accent. The elf-lord usually talks in a thou-thee-thy semi-formal mode, all too commonly done badly (see previous column). But that’s caricature: we can’t infer anything from it except a simplistic class system.

In the end, I’ve left s’Galliddan chattering away facetiously. If characterization is to be “show don’t tell,” I’ve got to demonstrate her background without simply announcing it, and the only way I know to do this is to adopt and adapt a manner appropriate to her by way of trans-cultural translation.

Next time I hope to have something interesting to say about Vladimir Propp’s 1928 Morphology of the Folktale.

And, once again, my apologies!