Myth, the Universe, and Everything

Wow, has it been that long?

Why yes, yes it has.

The holidays were fabulous around here -- lots of great time spent with family before the actual dates themselves and then lots of extra hours at work to cover the time I took off! We had some fun gaming in New York on the first with our characters from the 3.5 continuing Xen'drik Expeditions campaign (we couldn't just let it go when it stopped being an organized play game). Twostripe has ramped the karate schedule back up, and Bug is big enough in my belly now that I can feel her from the outside of my belly even when she's not moving. That, by the way, is wild. There's a little person in there! The editorial assistants are now eating grown up food ("We're not kittens any more, boss!"). And I've been copyediting, book reviewing, finishing up my Living Forgotten Realms Adventure (slot zeroes starting soon!), and doing reference writing -- my usual ridiculous pace of work. My big fun project for the weekend (besides crib shopping!) is creating a map of the kingdoms in Great Britain for the Viking Saga game. Since we're somewhere between 700 and 900-ish A.D., ambiguously, I have some great fun maps to play around with to help me decide. (New favorite resource: Anglo-Saxons.net.)

The other big news for the beginning of the year is that I've just gotten a Nook, and am in the testing phase to decide if I want to keep it. Much to my embarrassment (since I posted the assurances of a bookseller on several forums), the Nook does not, in fact, read .doc or .docx or .txt files, which was one of the primary convincing factors for getting it. (I had intended to use it primarily as a tool for 1) reading digital review books, and 2) keeping up with Substrate submissions.) The Nook does read pdfs natively, however, and there are plenty of free programs to convert files from Word to pdf. Next hurdle? It doesn't annotate pdfs yet (actually, it might -- there are differing reports from users on this, and I need to play around with it more; B&N just says it doesn't support the feature as yet). That's a hurdle for me, since I want to be able to annotate Substrate pieces to remember what my thoughts were while reading -- and want to be able to have other people do the same for me. (Twostripe has not yet given much response to my thought that he could, perhaps, read drafts of my manuscripts more easily on an e-book reader this way; he is a print guy.)

The reading function, however, works beautifully. I've had an overdue review for Flames Rising since, what, August? The book came to me as an e-book, and despite reading the first twenty-odd pages on my computer screen, and then printing it out to three-ring-binder in hopes that I'd actually read it in print, I hadn't managed to actually read the thing. With an e-reader, though the formatting is still a little wonky (the pages are about a screen-and-a-half, so every other "page-turn" is only a small portion of the screen), it's been a much easier read to digest. It's a short story anthology, and in the last two days, I've read the various introductions (there are three -- two nonfiction and one fictional) and three short stories (including the first actual fiction I've ready by Cherie Priest of Team Seattle, who I've been meaning to read for ages), which amounts to nearly a third of the book.

The Nook is easy to use, loads fast enough that I don't feel like I'm waiting, has decent wallpaper installed for when you put it to sleep (they recommend never turning it off), and seems like a pretty straightforward device. I'm enjoying the e-book reading experience far more here than either on computer screen or printed from a three ring binder, so it's a major coup in that regard (though whether it's better than any other e-book reader, I couldn't say). Since reading e-books for review was half of the point of buying it, I'm satisfied on that score. I'm still playing with the annotation function to see if I can make it work for the rest of what I need it for -- which will impact my final decision on whether I remain an e-book reader owner, wait for a model that does everything I want it to (the Kindle has a lot of the functionality I'm looking for, but doesn't natively read ePubs, and the conversion process for that sounds like a bigger hassle than .doc to pdf), or decide to purchase another of the devices on the market (despite what their flaws might be). In the mean time, I'm having a fun reading experience and generally enjoying using it, so I have no doubt I'll be an e-book reader owner in the future, if I don't end up keeping my Nook this time around.

Awhile ago, I talked about the learning curve I was experiencing with Meljean Brooks's paranormal romance series, because there was too much ongoing plot for a straight romance, but too much romance for a straight paranormal. Between then and now, I've been reading (somewhat voraciously) Nalini Singh's Psy/Changeling series, which has many of those same qualities, and, encouraged by how much I was enjoying those, I went back and got the first book in Brooks's series. This time, the series clicked for me. Whether it's because I started at the beginning or just hit my learning curve, I'm not sure. Whichever the case, however, I wanted to be sure to report that I have, in fact, gotten a better hang on how to read this side of the paranormal romance spectrum. (Many paranormals read more like urban fantasy or straight romance--but Singh's and Brooks's are smack in the middle.)

It occurs to me, having just read some really insightful entries from Erik Scott de Bie and Jim Hines on reading shared-world fantasy that paranormal romance isn't the only genre that requires learning how to read it. I suspect that if you don't start reading shared-world fiction before you realize it's a whole sub-genre all to itself, you bring to it some kinds of assumptions about what it means. The author hasn't created their own setting--so obviously they *couldn't* do so, and their writing is sub-par because the world isn't unique to them. This, of course, is not my opinion--but it's one that I've heard many times. Shared-world fantasy, particularly game fiction, has long been the looked-down-upon step-child of the fantasy genre.

But here's what I've observed, both as a reader and a writer in shared-world fiction. There are people who do it well and people who do it really badly. Some of those people who botch shared-world fiction are writers who do perfectly well in their own worlds, and even win awards and critical acclaim. But when it comes to writing in a shared-world setting, particularly one that requires use of the same characters, they miss the boat. Why? Because they're writing too much like themselves--and not enough like the characters. They change the world rather than enhancing it. Their work doesn't feel *genuine* the way a good shared-world writer's work does. The real challenge in shared-world fiction is writing something that makes that shared-world *more real* to an audience that carries a lot of expectations to every book it picks up.

If you're not keen on a setting, of course, you might be turned off by all the fiction, no matter how good it is. Despite my interest in the Living Forgotten Realms game, I've never been a huge fan of the Realms. There is way too much content to know--and as the best shared-world books have the setting deeply ingrained, from slang to deities to insults that only matter to people familiar with what's being insulted--so it's easy for me to get lost. I have enjoyed some Realms fiction, but the setting itself isn't enough to draw me. Some of the particular writers, like Erik, are the draw instead. I feel roughly the same way about the X-Men; I like them all right, but I bought the series written by Joss Whedon.

In settings that have a lot of appeal for me, I eagerly read the books due to the same things that frustrate me in settings I'm not keen on: they use slang, enhance my understanding of the world's deities, banter in ways that only make sense if you're in on the details of the setting. And then, there's more. Not only are these books marketing tools (and make no mistake, the companies that publish them are trying to sell their games and, in the case of Star Wars and other TV tie-ins, DVDs or other content, as much as they want to sell the novels). The books have the chance to also be great fantasy novels on their own. They can explore concepts like mortality, theology, ethics, and philosophy. They explore very human relationships between people who aren't always human. And they do all of this while maintaining a particular tone that reflects everything that has come before them.

Learning to read shared-world fiction and appreciate them for what they do may be the same kind of learning curve that I experienced with paranormal romances. Once you see what they're doing, not only in terms of story but in terms of enhancing a setting created by other authors, it's hard not to admire what these writers are doing. In my own work, I tried to think of the setting as a character in its own right, and I hope that when people read my novels, they see that as much as they see the characters and plot I created on my own.

So for the last two days I've been watching the community told_tales, a list about fairy tales. It looks like a great community that just posts way too often for me to keep up with. I may pop back by from time to time, but I have enough trouble keeping up with all the author blogs I read! I've already added the wonderful Mythopoeic Society mailing list to my daily reading, and I think I may be at a reading limit for a bit.

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For folks who have been talking about 4e, Keith Baker wrote in an excellent recent blog post "Is there any compelling reason to rush to switch your game to 4E... or to ever run a 4E Eberron campaign? Your mileage may vary. I'm not going to say 4E is going to be all games to all people. But the fact of the matter is that I not only prefer it as a system, I feel that it's a BETTER system for the Eberron setting than 3E - that in plays to things that I consider fundamental themes of the Eberron Campaign Setting."

As far as I'm aware, Keith hasn't been involved in the development of 4e directly (though of course he's involved in converting Eberron), so I think it's a nice vote of confidence to see this coming from him. I also like that he acknowledges 4e may not be the be all, end all--which leaves some great room for individual taste (as, I believe, all games should).

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Matt from flamesrising just posted my recent review of Happy Hour of the Damned by Mark Henry mdhenry. Now that the new flamesrising site is up, Matt has been posting several of the reviews I wrote this winter, and it's nice to see them up there. He's overwhelmingly sent me books that I liked, and I'm grateful for that. :)