Another First Draft in the Can

I'm pleased to report that I finished the first draft of my romantasy novel yesterday. In its present form it weighs in at an impressive 148,930 words, which makes it the longest thing I've ever written. Though that word count will have to come down a little, not just in the normal course of revising and editing, but because debut authors plunking down phonebook-sized manuscripts into agents' Query Manager are, ahem, frowned upon.

To put that word count into perspective, Sarah J Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses runs to about 130,000 words, while Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing is apparently over 200,000 words. Neither is the first book by their respective author, so I'll have some cutting to do.

The other notable thing about this accomplishment is that it took me barely three months to write it. The key factor was obviously my current lack of employment, which meant I had a lot of time to devote to it during the day, but I also think I did a better job of plotting it out than I've done with my previous attempts at novels. For example, the last novel I wrote, which ran to 98,000 words when I subbed it to agents in 2024, took about six months to write, mostly in one-hour increments at 8pm when I'd finished all my life stuff (work, dinner, tidying, etc). The novel I wrote before that was intended to hit at least 80,000 words but came out at 50k, so I cut 10,000 words out and repackaged it as a novella.

I'm not entirely sure why this one stuck in my imagination so well, but I suspect it's because I plotted it out much more thoroughly than those others, with a lot more emphasis on the two POV characters' journeys. Although who knows, maybe when I go back to revise it I'll see all kinds of glaring plot holes and infelicities. I won't know until July at the earliest...

It's also worth saying that, apart from any outcomes I may be hoping for, I just had more fun writing this than I have in a long time. Partly that had to do with the spicy scenes (if we're being honest), but those were a way to get further into the characters' heads - to me at least. My critique group might be horrified (or worse, bored) by them. But the upshot is that I'm a little sad to be leaving the characters behind for the moment - they were my main creative focus for a relatively short but intense time, and now I have to try and banish them from my thoughts for a while, so that I can come back to them at revision time with fresh eyes.

Though, one thing I've been pondering (and this might just be the bargaining stage of my grief journey at leaving them) is how this "put the book away for at least 6 weeks" thing works for authors who are on deadline? Surely when Rebecca Yarros or Sarah J Maas or Joe Abercrombie finish their first draft, they don't put it aside for a couple of months, do they? Their editors must be waiting for something, surely.

This is one of those things I'd like to learn first hand.

On the other hand, I have other projects that have started to demand attention, and I've been looking forward to revisiting and revising them, so at least I'll have other things to keep me busy for the time being. And my critique group has been asking about one of them, which is, with luck, going to be my next main project - unless my brain falls in love with something else and makes me work on it at all hours like it did with this project.

Brains are fun!

How to Write Romantasy, by Jenna Moreci

I've already written about how romantasy seems to be everywhere, but now that I've started writing my own, I've had a lot more opportunity to think about how it's built. My Instagram feed has a lot of discussion of tropes - both over- and under-used - and I've taken inspiration from Sarah J Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses series and Rebecca Yarros's Empyrean/Fourth Wing series. Inspiration, in this case, being both stuff to try in my own story and stuff to avoid.

But the other week I was poking around my local, Kepler's, and found Jenna Moreci's How to Write Romantasy, and snapped it up on a whim. I was already about 80,000 words into my own, but the layout of Moreci's book appealed to me. I've since read a chapter or so every day, and just finished it today, so I thought I'd give some thoughts on it.

The first thing to say, which I think the book does well, is to define the key aspects of both the romance and the fantasy genres, and from there, to define the two sub-strands that define romantasy: romantic fantasy and fantasy romance. In short, romantasy is essentially fantasy that doesn't work if you take out the romantic parts, and romantic fantasy puts more emphasis on the fantasy part, while fantasy romance puts more emphasis on the romance part. The differences are in the world building and when the leading couple gets together.

It's worth noting that this passage, which occurs early in the book, reflects what I've read elsewhere. My impression is that Fourth Wing is a little more romantic fantasy, and ACOTAR is maybe a little more fantasy romance, but I suspect the lines are more blurry than I'm suggesting.

What I thought was really well done about the book, however, was in its discussion of structure. It uses the classic Freytag structure:

1. Exposition
2. Rising action
3. Climax
4. Falling action
5. Resolution

Moreci looks separately at how fantasy and romance stories fall along this structure, and then combines them to show how romantasy should flow from one act to the next. She then talks over several chapters about how to create a good central relationship, ranging from matching the two (or more) romantic leads with one another to building that chemistry between them, to putting obstacles in their way, in the shape of both fantasy tsuris and romantic tsuris (as an aside, I've been warming to the potential of that word, "tsuris", which is Yiddish for something between trouble and grief).

Because I was already well into my own story, I used How to Write Romantasy more as a map to ensure I was hitting all the right notes, rather than to get ideas or anything else. But as I said, I liked the description of structure, especially because Moreci treats structure not as a strict prescription but as a general guideline of when things are meant to happen.

Now, I wrote this blog to talk about this book that I enjoyed, but also, it's because I've been thinking about what exactly I'm doing here, writing in a genre that I'd never properly read before about December and that is dominated by women. And then, this morning, I found this article in the Guardian. I agreed with the author's general thesis, that straight men aren't really writing sex anymore, although I thought he could have ventured beyond literary or highbrow fiction and talked about genre - though I can't think of too many recent SFF novels that contained much sex.

The exception being Joe Abercrombie's Age of Madness trilogy, though those scenes don't have the same goal as sex scenes in romantasy (or indeed romance), ie to deepen intimacy between the principal characters. Which I guess means I'm saying that the Guardian article could more profitably have been a discussion of why straight men aren't writing romance.

Answer: because straight men aren't reading romance. But also, maybe we should be? Both reading and writing romance and romantasy, I mean. Instead of writing porn, we could be writing about what sex means to our characters, and what it reveals about them - which strikes me as just as valid a subject matter as thinly veiled allegories of the Byzantine Empire or the Industrial Revolution, especially when elves and dragons are involved.

Bringing it all back to my original point, I think How to Write Romantasy is a good primer for anyone delving into writing the genre, though you should also read the genre, to get a sense of what other authors are doing, what works for you and what doesn't. Go and get it from your local bookstore rather than on Kindle, though!

Romantasy Seems to Be Everywhere

Thought I'd spend a few paragraphs on this topic, since everyone seems to be talking about it, but it's interesting to me how prevalent romantasy has become on bookstore shelves and in online chat about books. Even I, who am not on TikTok or Snapchat and rarely spend time on Instagram, have seen enough to get a sense of what everyone's talking about when they discuss ACOTAR, riding leathers and spice levels.

I think the moment that crystalized it for me was this summer, when my dad asked me about an article he'd seen on the New York Times that talked about Alchemized, the dark romantasy novel by SenLinYu that started out as Dramione fan fiction online (Draco and Hermione, for the n00bs). The success of that book, both online and in stores, got me thinking about the genre/sub-genre and where it came from: specifically, it feels like a convergence of the long-standing urban fantasy subgenre that I've been reading for a while, plus a continuation of the furore caused by EL James's 50 Shades of Grey, which also started life as Twilight fan fiction. It also touches on strands of internet book fandom that has passed me by, mainly all the erotic fanfic on An Archive of Our Own and the headcanon/fanon stuff that's been percolating around Tumblr and other social media for decades at this point. Because I haven't been in this community, I'm probably missing 90% of the undercurrents that have coalesced to form this current craze, but let's take this as a useful Cliff's Notes for the moment.

I subsequently spent the last couple of months since getting back from Europe perusing the romantasy shelf at my local, Kepler's, looking at the kind of books they had and who was writing them. This is also partly because I've been turning over an idea for a story that could fall into that niche, and I wanted to do some research on how many dudes were represented (answer: one that I've seen at Kepler's). Incidentally, I love how Kepler's just went ahead and split romantasy off from the regular SF and fantasy books - I've always thought genre segmenting on bookstore shelves is better for discovering more of what you love, rather than ghettoizing genre books away from "serious" fiction.

Then, just this past week, a friend of mine asked me if I'd read A Court of Thorns and Roses, by Sarah J Maas, because she wanted someone to talk to about it, so I decided to take the plunge and check it out - I'd decided Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros was more my speed, but I ended up buying both on Kindle (I know, I know... but my physical TBR pile is a mess - of my own making - so I can prioritize them better on Kindle). Since I started, we've also been trading silly romantasy-related memes on Instagram, which has been fun too.

I'll leave the literary review for another post - I'm not far enough into ACOTAR to have much sense of how good Maas's plotting is, but at any rate the prose hasn't turned me off yet. What's more interesting to me is what the genre and subject matter is saying to women in this current cultural moment, as well as a recognition that women seem to be the only ones buying fiction at the moment, so what's on sale reflects that change in tastes.

The main thing that I see cited in talk about these books is female agency - Feyre in ACOTAR apparently makes a lot of questionable decisions, but at least they're her decisions. Moreover, if we look for ourselves in fiction, I suspect a lot of women appreciate seeing female characters getting into trouble and being at the center of things, rather than at the margins. Thinking about traditional big names in the regular fantasy genre, it's hard to point to women who drive the narrative in series like Game of Thrones or Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow and Thorne, even if they actually spend time giving dialogue and plot lines to female characters, unlike Lord of the Rings or other classic books.

This trend doesn't only apply to romantasy, by the way - looking at the SFF shelves right now, in any bookstore, it feels like the conventional fantasy and SF (at least the new books) is dominated by non-male authors. Which, again, is a reflection of the widening of book-buying patterns beyond just dudes who are looking for the next series that evokes the same sense of wonder as LotR did, way back.

My thinking is, when the momentum seems to be behind a certain book, or author, or genre, it's worth checking out, even if only to decide that something isn't for me. At the same time, when I have an idea that might fit into the genre, it makes it doubly important to see for myself how it works. And on that point, if my story ideas dovetail with what's selling - or more pertinently, has an audience - it's worthwhile to explore it. That's not intended to mean cashing in cynically - just that if you have an idea that seems to be gaining traction, it's worthwhile developing it to get the story out of your head and onto paper.

And even if nothing ever comes of it, then at least I can enjoy the memes.

UCLA TV Writing Courses Complete

This week marks the end of my cycle of TV writing classes through the UCLA Extension, and I thought I'd post a quick wrap-up as I come to the end of the fourth class. I last wrote at length about these classes back in January, when I'd just started and was plotting an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Well, I've now written the full script of that episode, and then gone on to write a pilot script for the third and fourth classes in the sequence. The same instructor taught all four classes, so the format of doing things was consistent across all four, and the pilot classes were fairly easy to navigate given that I'd already done that style of plotting in the first and second classes.

Another advantage of these classes, as I mentioned back in August, was that they gave me the tools to develop more stories in this way. As a result, I plotted three TV shows during TV III, and during TV IV I wrote three pilots, working on my pages for class in the mornings and then on the pages for my secondary story ideas in the evenings. This feels like a lot of output, given that the last time I produced anything comparable was in the first half of 2022, when I finished a novel I'd started the previous November.

TV seems to be my preferred medium now, as my attempts to tackle a big revision on that novel seem to be taking a lot longer - but on the plus side, it feels like this new version could lend itself to the TV format.

I'd also quite like to tackle the feature screenplay format again soon, but I don't think I can justify taking that class through UCLA Extension, given that I should really start saving more cash now.

In any case, now that I don't have the homework and reading for class to do, I should once again have more time on Sundays for this blog, as well as other types of writing. I'll be back to posting my thoughts on writing, football, politics and comics as I get back into the swing of things here - and maybe someday soon I'll be able to announce some good news? There's nothing on the horizon, but it'll come soon, I'm sure, whether that's a new job or something even more exciting.

Or I'll get bored of banging my head against this novel and sign up for the those feature-writing classes after all. Who even knows?

Unexpected Fecundity on Vacation

Given that this is my second time being between jobs, I've tried to improve on the previous bout, which was back in 2018. I had a lot more freelance work, then - scratch that, I had freelance work, full stop - but in between jobs I found it harder to maintain focus on bringing in business and taking care of other stuff I wanted to do. The main thing that I remember wishing I'd done more of was writing.

So this time, I decided to do things a little more intelligently. I built myself a weekly schedule, which broke each day into four parts similar to how I organized my time after I started working from home during and after the pandemic. While almost each day had to feature one block of time for job-hunting, I also built in a block for writing, and I've generally managed to stick to both, plus other important stuff like learning and going to the gym.

When I decided to take an extended trip to Europe I continued with my weekly scheduling, which was easier to do when I was in London and mostly on my own. It was a little more difficult in Oslo, but I gave myself a break for being officially on vacation... and I still managed to do a little job-hunt related stuff and a fair amount of writing-related stuff.

One thing that's helped keep me on track with writing has been the sequence of TV writing classes I've been taking through the UCLA Extension since last fall. I lost my job just as the first class in the sequence ended, and I've since continued plugging away at it, because I figured that at least I'd have something to show people once I finished (I'm now in possession of a Star Trek: Strange New Worlds spec script, if anyone out there wants to get me on that writing team before the show ends).

Now that I've moved on in the sequence to the part where I write my own TV pilot, I find the ideas flowing even more freely. In addition to the outline and script I'm writing for class, I'm developing a couple of ideas that have been percolating in my head for the last couple of years, as well as looking at revising a novel I was working on a year or two ago and writing novel versions of my TV pilot ideas.

It's actually been quite exciting to have so many things to keep me occupied during this time. Also, the class allows me to break up tasks in a way that deeply appeals to my methodical nature, which means that whenever I finish one component of a given project, I can just move on to the next project, knowing that I'll return to the first one the following week. Work for the TV class takes precedence, obviously, but the structure also gives me a way to break down my other stuff and devote time to work on it when I'm up to date on my homework.

The other thing that's allowed me to do so much writing is simply time. Of course I have the same 24 hours each day here in Italy that I have in California, but I also have fewer demands on my time. I'm way out in the country, so mobile internet is spotty, even with my roaming pass from T-Mobile; not only that, but the Wi-Fi in the house only reaches a couple of rooms, so I'm not doomscrolling from every horizontal surface I can lie on.

I also don't have a car, so I can't go out and do other stuff that I'd do in Palo Alto. The most obvious thing is going to the gym - though back home that got its own block of time on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so it didn't interfere with the writing. The main thing that should take time away from the writing is doing DIY work on the house, but even with that in mind I manage to carve out a couple of hours for writing and job-hunting and even some learning on Khan Academy.

Of course, I'm super fortunate. I have a pretty big emergency fund, plus I'm spending the month of August in a pretty cheap part of the world, and I'm not even paying for a hotel for the privilege. I had the wherewithal to depart for London, Oslo and Turin for two months in the first place, which not everyone in my position could have done.

There's also the fact that the freelance stuff has been singularly thin on the ground this year. When you don't have the option of doing that to earn a crust of bread, then you fill your hours with other stuff. I've just been lucky enough that I could fill my hours with writing a Star Trek script and plot out novel revisions. 

But the main point that's worth considering here is, how easy it is to get distracted from writing, or whatever else it is you think you "should" be doing. Even when you're not employed full time, your house can hold a lot of distractions, and the ability to deal with them. There must be some way to neutralize those distractions, and when I get home I hope to continue this streak of getting shit done.

In any case, the upshot is that, whatever else I remember and/or regret about this particular period of funemployment, when I look back on it at least I'll be able to say that I took the time to get serious about the writing. And hopefully that leads to something, somewhere down the line.

Andor Season 2: The Best Star Wars of All

I've been trying to formulate my thoughts on the second, and final, season of Andor since I finished the last couple of episodes earlier this week. The first thought that came to mind was that it may well be the best Star Wars offering of all, including the much-hallowed original trilogy.

Perhaps that's overblown. Andor and the original films represent very different things, based on the times when they were made and the audiences they were aimed at. Moreover, they're connected by Rogue One, which is my favorite of the new Star Wars movies but has its own problems. Still, I want to explore these ideas in this blog, and I'm gonna need to spoil the hell out of the show to do it, so you can catch that after the jump.

Daredevil Born Again Mostly Sticks the Landing

When I previously wrote about the show, I was three episodes in and we'd just seen the culmination of the White Tiger storyline, along with a tease of things to come in the shape of the assailant's Punisher logo-bearing shirt. Since then we've gotten the real thing, and in a fairly prominent role, as well as hints of the wider Defenders and/or MCU continuity. I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out, but if you haven't seen it yet, be warned of spoilers ahead.

Thoughts on Star Trek: Prodigy (with Spoilers)

Just finished Prodigy last night, and wanted to set down some thoughts. The first being, it's nice to see that it did get picked up somewhere after Paramount Plus cancelled it and dropped it from its platform. It was a bit slow going at points, but in the end it came good, with an emotional ending to the second season and nice tie-ins to the rest of Trek. Anyway, there are probably going to be some spoilers, so catch my more detailed thoughts after the jump.

Thoughts on TV Writing Classes

I've been looking for evening classes for a while, to get me either out of the house or to help improve some skill that's important to me. And then last summer/early fall I started seeing ads on Facebook for TV and film writing classes at UCLA.

Because I'm not quite on the verge of moving to LA, I was glad to see that these classes through the UCLA Extension are mostly offered online. I started off with an Intro to TV Writing course, which consisted of six weekly sessions on Zoom. As the name implies, it was an introduction to how TV is generally written, both 30-minute comedies and 60-minute dramas. Each week we had to watch an episode of one or more specific shows, then compare them with the scripts or write our own beat sheets summarizing the various plot lines going through each episode.

It was in this way that I got introduced to Barry, on HBO, and Severance, on Apple TV Plus. I've sort of fallen off with Barry, but I want to get back to it soon, while for Severance I'm currently taking advantage of Apple's promotion to get a month of Apple TV Plus for free, so that I can catch up on the first season and watch the second season. I'm even considering keeping the subscription for an extra month, so I can get to the end of Season 2.

After that, I decided to keep on doing it, so I found an Intro to 60 Minute Drama class, as that's more in line with the kind of TV I'm interested in. That's a ten-week class, so I'm still in the middle of it, but so far it's pretty interesting. Where the previous class talked a lot about theory and the business, this class drops us straight into the plotting aspect - early on we had to choose a show for which to write a spec script, and every week we've been refining the idea for our spec. Because I don't watch loads of network TV, and most of the stuff I've watched lately is more of a limited series than an ongoing (stuff like Agatha All Along and the Penguin), I opted for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

It helps that SNW is episodic rather than serialized, so I don't have to worry about fitting into something so tightly plotted - although a couple of classmates are tackling shows like House of the Dragon, which I found too intimidating (apart from the fact that I'm not watching it).

At any rate, I've enjoyed coming up with a story for my own episode of SNW, and at the same time figuring out the B and C stories, and determining how they fit into the overall whole. Because SNW's episodes are mostly self-contained, it's easier to watch them to piece together how that interplay works, and then try to replicate that in my own story.

We also have to give feedback on classmates' work, so I get to examine storytelling from that angle, too - looking at what works and what takes me out of the story. A couple of other people are doing SNW stories too, so I've mostly commented on theirs, but I've also given comments on a few other shows, though some of the ones that I don't watch are tough to find comments for.

With regard to the teaching, I think it's pretty good so far. For this week's assignment I had some questions for the instructor, and she got back to me with some helpful comments quite quickly. That meant I ended up submitting my assignment a few days early (we have a deadline every Friday), and so I can do other stuff, like this here blog.

Another thing that's been helpful about this class is that, while it seems focused on network dramas with ad breaks, the format that it teaches is still relevant for shows on streaming services, which typically don't have ads. It's one of those things that feels very "duh" when you see it, but it's been a revelation to see how act breaks work, especially with the need for a good cliffhanger to keep that audience there from act to act. This is a relic of network TV, when viewers might use act breaks as an excuse to flip to other channels, but it's still relevant when you're competing against whatever they're looking at on their phones.

I don't know if it'll lead to a TV writing job, since I don't know what the prospects are for a 45-year-old with no experience, but I'm also looking at it as an opportunity to improve my storytelling in other media. The main thing I'm taking from it is plotting out my main plot and subplots, from start to finish, and then plotting the story by putting them together. I figure that any skills that improve my writing should be transferable to whatever form I'm writing in, whether it's TV, movies, prose or comics. It's also given me a taste for deconstructing books and shows that I like, to see how they're telling their stories.

And yeah, if it does end up leading to a Hollywood writing career... that's not such a bad outcome, is it?

Uncanny X-Men 700 and the End of Krakoa

This week, for the first time in about 20 years, I picked up a current issue of a comic. It was X-Men 35, or in Legacy Numbering, Uncanny X-Men 700, and it was intended as both the epilogue to the last five years of X-Men stories, and the intro to the coming era.

The reason I picked it up, rather than waiting a few months for it to appear on Marvel Unlimited, was that it felt important to grab an issue that was a milestone, both in terms of numbering and in terms of storytelling. For the former, I like the idea that X-Men has reached 700 issues, despite all the reboots over the past few decades. The original run of Uncanny ran, unbroken, from 1963 to 2011, with a few stints where it was bimonthly and then other periods when it would go biweekly during the summers, like a lot of Marvel titles did at the time. I consider it too bad that Marvel's been so ready to reboot titles to give collectors a number-one issue every couple of years - DC does it too, but it feels like Marvel's worse about it? I'll be better able to rule on this when I eventually subscribe to DC's app.

But I like the idea that, despite all the reboots and relaunches, and the thicket of "core" X-Men titles, Marvel is recognizing that its flagship and biggest seller for so many years has reached 700 issues.

In story terms, as I said, it's the epilogue to the Krakoan era, which kicked off in 2019 under Jonathan Hickman. It's actually a little silly of me to have bought it and read it now, since I'm still reading through the Krakoa stories; I've effectively jumped straight to the end of the story. But as I've said before, I don't mind spoilers so much, if I can still appreciate the journey to the end of the story. 

What I like about Hickman's work on X-Men is that it felt like an attempt to do something big and new and innovative with the book, something that hadn't really been seen since Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men, which ended 20 years ago. Like New X-Men, the House of X/Krakoa era wanted to introduce a new status quo and a new way of looking at X-Men stories - rather than purely superhero shenanigans, it would be a science fiction story with a dash of Game of Thrones. It would take everything that came before, throw it in a blender with some new ideas and some logical extremes for certain X-Men tropes from way back in the Chris Claremont era, and see what the result looked like.

The result looked like a mishmash of good stories and blah stories - and, if some of the commentary I've seen or heard on the internet is to be believed, some duff storytelling as they tried to wrap it all up. But it was also a story told with deep love and understanding of the characters and the themes they represent. By putting the traditional "good guys" and "bad guys" on the same side as they built the mutant nation of Krakoa, they found new ways to examine the motivations of many of these characters - I especially liked what they did with Apocalypse, who's generally been portrayed as one of the most evil mutants, but who hearkens back in this storyline to a comic from the 80s that seemed to cast his motivation (ensuring that the strong destroy the weak) as his own misguided way of protecting mutants.

Another thing I liked about the Krakoan era was that it kind of bridged the gap between the eras that I know and the stuff in between. Before I began my X-Men reread last November, I was familiar with bits of the early Claremont era, the Outback era, and the Blue and Gold team era, when the original five members returned to the team. I was also familiar with New X-Men, but didn't really know how to bridge the gap between that and what came before it. I also didn't really know anything about what came after it, apart from having looked at various issues here and there over the years.

Under Hickman's supervision, the creative teams found a use for almost all of the characters and teams I knew back in the 90s. They also managed to update them while also filling in some gaps but also being faithful to the way the characters were back in the 80s or 90s. One example is the New Mutants: characters like Cannonball and Wolfsbane have clearly moved on from their confusion and angst as teenagers, but their newly confident versions feel organic and earned. 

I could say the same for characters like Scott Summers and Jean Grey, about whom I go back and forth: sometimes I think they're Marvel's greatest and most enduring pairing (even more than Reed Richards and Sue Storm), other times I think they need distance from one another. Whichever way I feel about their relationship at any given time, the comics of the last few years (which, incidentally, I've only started reading in the last six months) have looked at the relationship from both those angles.

Speaking of relationships, the main tone of the X-books under Hickman was one of joy, and nowhere more so than in depicting queer relationships, but also exploring friendships among various characters that haven't been thrown together before. In other shows and books, it sometimes feels like the woke stuff is shoehorned in, but (apart from one or two cases) here it all felt organic. That's important for the X-Men, in particular: because the theme of the book has always been about outsiders and found family, it has acted as a stand-in for all kinds of social justice causes. Apparently, back in the 70s and 80s and 90s, Chris Claremont wanted to depict queer relationships in the X-books, but editorial prohibited it, so it feels like justice that the current teams have managed to introduce a lot of those stories that he pioneered - my favorite being the revelation that Mystique is not Nightcrawler's mother, but rather (thanks to her shapeshifting powers) his father.

There were things I didn't love about the Krakoan era. For all that I liked the emphasis on celebrating mutant culture and getting everyone on side, I would have liked to see the "hated and feared" part sidelined more. Around the time I started rereading my old X-books, I had this idea of giving the X-Men the "Star Trek treatment", i.e. depicting a true utopia where mutants are accepted and live in peace alongside humans. When I first heard of Krakoa, I thought Hickman was doing just that, but instead he maintained the idea that the humans would continue to stop at nothing to eradicate the mutants.

I don't want to claim that this is unrealistic, because every advance in social justice in real life consists of steps forward and steps back. You see this in race relations and LGBTQ+ issues. But I was hoping that we could see more of a cooling off, just as a way to show how a better world is possible.

Also, the main anti-mutant faction, Orchis, didn't seem to have much motivation beyond hating mutants. They felt nihilistic rather than well-rounded - which makes sense given that Mr Sinister was a key player in Orchis. But when I say nihilistic, I mean that the violence inflicted on the mutants during these years feels excessive - Orchis built space stations around the sun and colonized moons of Mars, all in a bid to eradicate mutants, but somehow it just never felt organic to their characters.

There were also a couple of books that petered out, despite having started strongly. In one case, it felt like a showcase for a queer relationship that, when I initially read about it, felt like a good idea, but in practice felt like a slog to read and the writer didn't seem to have much sense of either of the participants' personalities. This was disappointing because the book in question started out as a compelling read, addressing a lot of character arcs that were fun.

(BTW I'm purposely not naming the books because I don't want to be associated with the bad-faith trolls who talk shit about everything these writers do)

But enough about the negatives. Krakoa was all about joy and celebration, which is in short supply in comics in general, let alone the famously angsty X-Men. Like Chris Claremont and Grant Morrison, Jonathan Hickman aimed for the fences with his time on the books, and mostly hit home runs. Excalibur, Hellions, Marauders, New Mutants - these are the books I've read the most, and thought they were wonderful, full of good characterization and fun.

I wish some of the structural issues, like Orchis, had been addressed, so that we could have had it last longer. I worry that the coming "From the Ashes" era is going back to how the X-books were between Claremont and Morrison's runs, but I also appreciate the creators that have been hired to steer the books in the next few years. I may wait a little to pick those up, so that I can catch up with the rest of Krakoa, but I hope that the X-Men books are properly back, and won't be subject to a set of wilderness years like they did after Claremont left and again after Morrison left.

And I hope, one day, to be able to write my own chapter in the X-saga. That'd be fun, wouldn't it?

Getting Inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons

I've mentioned before that I did NaNoWriMo to get started on a novel-length project, back in November, and I've probably alluded to the fact that I've continued working on this project. NaNo's website is pretty handy to carry over even past the usual month that they do, because you can create a new project and track your progress against it. The best part is, you can set whatever word-count goal you want, so instead of aiming for 50k words each month since then, I've gone for more realistic goals, which I've hit every month (except December, when I set myself the goal of doing 25k words; probably not the smartest thing when you have a week of not working between Christmas and New Year's).

That said, I haven't talked much about where the idea came from. As the title suggests, it came from a weekly-ish game of Dungeons & Dragons that I've been playing with my friends since January 2021. I started playing my character, and as I fleshed in his backstory, it occurred to me that he might make for an interesting novel protagonist. So as I went on playing the game, I also thought about where he came from, why he's an adventurer, what his motivation is, and as those came to me, so did ideas for a story.

Another inspiration was the Classical Chinese account that inspired the novel (and TV series) Journey to the West, which gave rise to the character Monkey. To be clear, I've read neither Journey to the West, nor the Tang Dynasty era Buddhist monk Xuanzang's historical account, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions. But I came across a mention of the factual account in a history of China I was reading in 2020, and was taken by the idea of a scholar traveling across a fantasy world. That thought probably gave rise to the character I rolled for my D&D game.

Now, since I started writing back in my teens, I've seen the repeated advice not to try to turn your D&D campaigns into a novel, so I want to make it clear that I haven't. Rather, I've taken the way I play the character, and the way I see him, and turned him loose into a story centered around him. None of my friends' characters appear, nor do the settings we play in. I've shared some of the backstory I created for my character, including his family dynamics, with my DM, and she's incorporated a couple of these points, but the two are linked only by the same character appearing in both.

At the same time, it's important to mention that role-playing game settings can form the basis of actual stories: Steven Erikson and Ian Esslemont based their Malazan books in an RPG setting they'd created (and it kinda shows in the first book), while Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck based the Expanse series around an RPG setting that Franck ran, or at last devised. I'm sure there are others, even before we get to the decades' worth of Forgotten Realms and DragonLance novels that TSR commissioned in the 1980s as tie-ins to their D&D settings.

I suppose the difference is, creating a setting and exploring the stories that arise from that setting is valid, as opposed to trying to novelize an account of each fight and each perception check your characters run. It's probably why there have been so many bad movie adaptations of video games over the years. At any rate, I find that D&D stories are rarely fun to retell to someone who wasn't in that session, which makes it even harder to turn them in narratives.

As I mentioned, I'm not translating my D&D campaign into a story, so that's not a problem here. What I do find interesting is how it took certain elements I'd been thinking about for a while, remixed them and generated a story that I've now been able to draw out into over 70k words, and which I've been working on for a little over five months. I've found that story ideas frequently come to me like that: I'll pick up some interesting fragment from somewhere, and it'll sit in the back of my mind for a long time until it can latch onto another interesting fragment, until enough of them have fused together to become an idea worth exploring.

It also makes sense that D&D, or RPGs in general, should be the starting point for ideas. I've long played video game RPGs, starting with Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy on the NES, but even the most advanced ones that I've played recently are still fairly rigid. A table-top RPG, on the other hand, forces you to come up with a lot of backstory to explain why your character does the things they do. This backstory then influences the choices your character makes in the course of the campaign, giving you a good sense of their personality. I've always had trouble with characterization, but I think this campaign has helped me with that, at least to an extent.

Anyway, this is how it's panned out for me. There are many ways to get inspiration for stories, but D&D has revealed itself to be a good one. Just as long as you remember not to retell your weekly campaign.

Year in Review 2021: Yet Another Year That Can't End Too Soon

Like every year, 2021 had ups and downs on a personal level, though this year the personal downs have outweighed the ups for the first time in a while, as my relationship ended. Globally, it's been just the latest tough year for everybody, a streak that began in 2016 with the great celebrity die-off and continued through Donald Trump's election, something that affected how things have gone this year.

On the writing side, my fiction suffered a bit, as the second year of lockdown meant more mental stress and fewer ideas overall. I tried to write a cyberpunk short story, but fell afoul of the rule Lavie Tidhar once gave me for writing steampunk, which is that it should be about more than its genre. I think I have the atmosphere almost right, but I need more compelling characters and a better plot. Still, some of it's percolating and elements will likely come out at the right time.

More positively, I was pleased with the work I did throughout the year on my other blog, where I did a round-up of mobile plans aimed at seniors, students and children throughout the US and Western Europe. They weren't always easy to pull together, but at least each month I knew what to work on, and in the end I think I created a body of work that no other analyst has collected and compared. And it was just fun to use my various language skills to do the kind of mobile industry research I enjoyed in 2012-13.

The other writing positive is that I started work on a new novel idea. It was partly inspired by my character in the Dungeons & Dragons game I've been playing this year, and I spent part of the year working on background and worldbuilding for it. I started writing it in earnest in November, when I took part in my first NaNoWriMo, which was unexpectedly fun.

Speaking of D&D, that almost-weekly game was a good anchor for the year, as it became my primary vessel for seeing my friends, even if it was only through a computer screen. I've slowly started seeing them in person again for outdoor walks, but D&D turned out to be a fun activity to keep connected to my main social circle.

Fitness-wise, things were made difficult by the ongoing pandemic and another summer of heat and unhealthy air. The pandemic means I'm not going to the gym, especially to breathe hard on a treadmill or elliptical, but when smoke from our now-annual wildfires blankets the Bay Area, I can't run outside. I still managed some regular workouts, and even started seeing a personal trainer again (virtually), but I'm really looking forward to the day when I can go back to the gym with confidence, or at least when I can buy my own damn treadmill.

My biggest piece of good news was that I managed to find a new job. I'd been trying since January 2020, but the pandemic stopped that fairly quickly, but I set myself the goal of sending out a certain number of applications, and got to work for the first six months of the year. Ironically, the interviews I got were based on applications I sent out last year, which were only now being followed up.

The timing was also good, because the day before I received the job offer that I ended up accepting, my previous company announced that we'd be expected to go into the office for team meetings, which was awkward for me as my team was in Arizona. Being on Zoom in the Los Altos office would be okay, but being on Zoom at home would not. I gave my notice the following day.

Two other thoughts from that whole experience. The first is relief that I left when I did, because I recently learned that the project I'd been working on was pulled. I don't know where I'd have ended up if I'd still been there, so I'm glad I'd left. The other thought is more of a rule for life going forward: never have your last day on a job be the last day of the month, because your health insurance coverage ends the month you leave. I managed to give my notice on 1 July, which meant I was covered throughout my whole 18-day between-jobs period.

At a global level, the pandemic slightly faded into the background, though it was always there to remind us that we're still very much in it. One reason for the fading was positive, as the vaccine rollout took on speed, and I got jabbed in May (and boosted this month). They may not confer 100% protection, but as another layer of protection on top of masking and social distancing, they helped lower deaths and hospitalizations, at least in some places and for a while. More negatively, we've seen the drawback of our inequitable system of distributing vaccines, as two terrible variants, Delta and Omicron, arose in India and South Africa, respectively - taking advantage of large pools of unvaccinated people there to develop.

The other thing that put the pandemic on the back burner was way more frightening, as a mob of right-wing extremists stormed the US Capitol on 6 January to stop Joe Biden being certified as president and keep Donald Trump in office. We've seen the effects of right-wing violence resonating throughout the year, from that and from violence at some BLM protests last year, and the atmosphere just grows more and more worrying. Mass shootings are back up in 2021, after last year's lockdowns meant people weren't congregating in places, and far-right extremists are just elevating the tensions further by making more explicit threats against lawmakers they don't like - sometimes lawmakers themselves are threatening their colleagues.

To add to the instability, Republicans are making moves that will make it easier for them to steal the next presidential election. The media's focus has been on voting laws in places like Georgia, where the accusation is that voters of color will find it harder to vote in coming years, but the GOP has also quietly been shifting election officials in various battleground states, who are expected to be more tolerant of shenanigans than the officials in place in 2020. 

All of these steps, and the simple demographic sorting of Democrats into urban areas and Republicans into thinly populated rural areas, are setting the stage for Republican minority rule for years to come. That'll mean more regressive laws like Texas's SB 8 abortion law, but my other big worry is that laws like that will be used to weaken laws in progressive states - our governor in California, Gavin Newsom, says he wants to use SB 8's model to sue gunmakers, but I also see a danger in right-wing judges striking down our own gun, environmental and labor protections.

The cherry on top has been the political polarization of the pandemic, which started last year with protests against lockdowns and mask mandates, but gained a new battleground with the vaccines. Many of the same people parroting the big lie that Trump won the election are also pushing the idea that the vaccines are dangerous, sometimes in very cynical ways (see any Fox News host, where vaccinations are apparently mandatory and well taken-up). On the fringes, but dangerously close to the mainstream thanks to social media, are people claiming that the vaccines are a plot to depopulate the world.

To sum up, I had a couple of good wins this year, but a couple of big losses, and weighing on all of it is the uncertainty of what's happening in the world around me. I'm lucky to live in an area that's both responsible with regard to pandemic precautions, and is seeing lower numbers, but other parts of America (and California in particular) aren't so lucky. I see the pandemic continuing for another year, if we go by the length of the 1918 flu pandemic, but I also expect that the polarization and misinformation on vaccines will mean we have to get boosters for the next few years, which will suck.

Unfortunately, next year will see a midterm election, and the forecasts are already negative for the Democrats, so we can expect gridlock and hateful right-wing rhetoric to ramp up. So unfortunately, I don't think we're going to see a good year for some time to come.

Chris Claremont's X-Men

Once again, a dispatch from my big comic-collection reread, where I've now moved onto my much-diminished Marvel collection. Just as reading my DC books started with the Justice League, which was my favorite of those titles, here I've started with the X-Men, which is what got me into superhero comics in the first place. Though the book that did that was (New) X-Men #1, I've started with Uncanny X-Men, the title that had gone back to the team's creation by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Like most comics readers of my age and generation, the Chris Claremont version is pretty much definitive, having given us a lot of the ideas and characters that we associate with the team now. Because of my searches for back-issues back in the 90s, my collection of his run goes all the way from the late 70s to his departure in the early 90s, so that you can get a sense of how he reused characters and settings over time.

Something that struck me recently, as I read the Muir Island Saga that ended his run on Uncanny, was how well he developed sub-plots over a long time, so that they paid off years later. The Muir Island Saga took place in 1991, but we started to see hints of the Shadow King's takeover there in issues from 1987 or 88, taking advantage of other storylines and subplots that had taken place even earlier. Rereading these issues, I remembered feeling the same awe at seeing a bunch of storylines come together as I did back in the 90s when his run on Excalibur came to an end (though sadly I only have one issue of that run remaining).

Part of what let him put all those subplots in place was the enormous breadth of characters that he created for the book. The main X-Men team, at that time, was believed to be dead but was actually operating from an abandoned outback Australian town. Events conspired to separate them and deposit them, with memories erased, all around the world, leaving Wolverine to go and collect them again. At the same time, tipped off by Jean Grey, two marginal X-Men, Banshee and Forge, went looking for them, while also investigating the odd happenings on Muir Island. On this read I enjoyed the way these characters, who either weren't very well-established or hadn't been seen for a long time, alternated as leads with the main X-Men characters, giving a sense of a self-contained universe.

This period is also notable for being when Marc Silvestri and then Jim Lee were drawing the book. I was a little surprised at how rough Silvestri's style was at this time, somewhat inconsistent and not very recognizable to the linework of his later Cyberforce or Witchblade comics - probably the effect of his inker Dan Green, though I could be wrong. Lee's style, meanwhile, undergoes an interesting transition from his early, Art Adams and manga-influenced work, to the linework that's become more associated with him.

Lee's style, in particular, gave rise to legions of inferior imitators, especially once he and Silvestri and others decamped to Image to create their own books. Interestingly, you can see Claremont's influence there too, as a lot of early WildCATs or Gen13 stories feel like what the writers think Claremont would do. This is both in the breadth and type of villains, and in the ponderous language used in the narrative captions.

One thing that I don't love about Claremont's work now is how wordy it is. Compared with a Warren Ellis or Garth Ennis, who either don't use narrative captions or use them less, these X-Men books take a long time to read, because there's so much speech and narration going on. His language isn't as stilted as, say, Roy Thomas's (my earliest X-Men issue is the one where Thomas introduces Sauron, with typically florid language), but I do remember a friend in college laughing about the vocal tics that Claremont was known for.

The other thing is his accents, which are uniformly terrible. Rogue's is pretty bad, but Banshee's is worse - if you've ever heard an Irish accent in real life you won't recognize it in how Claremont wrote him. Moira MacTaggart's Scottish accent is also not great, in part because Claremont didn't seem able to distinguish it from Banshee's Irish one. These are kind of minor quibbles, but they get magnified by the legions of inferior imitators who propagate these terrible accents because that's how Chris did them.

Because I haven't gotten to New X-Men yet, or read what was happening around the books, I don't recall exactly why Claremont left the books when he did. What I can say is that he left just as they got big in the wider culture, with the 90s animated show using a lot of the characters, designs and plots of that New X-Men reboot period. As I've suggested before, this wider attention is a mixed blessing, because even though it means more people are familiar with the work, it also puts pressure on the creators not to veer too wildly from what viewers of the TV show or movies are familiar with.

Another way of saying that is that Claremont's more long-form, sub-plot driven stories, with less-recognizable characters in less typically superheroic situations, wouldn't have worked in the X-Men's imperial phase of the 90s. Unfortunately, in the hands of lesser writers, the whole universe became bloated and unwieldy, which at least led to the creative rebirth of the late 90s and early 2000s, where Grant Morrison took on New X-Men. 

I'll probably write more about that later, but it's interesting that it took a talent like Morrison to shake the X-Men free of Claremont's influence. Though it has to be said, rereading his run emphasizes how much better he was than the writers who immediately followed him.

Finally Doing NaNoWriMo

Every November for years I've seen people talking about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but I've never joined up myself. It always felt a little gimmicky, or I had other stuff I was working on, or any number of other dumb reasons.

This year, though, I've decided to give it a try. I've felt a little directionless with my writing for the past 18 months or so (gosh, I wonder what that could be related to), even when I had stuff to revise or write down. More importantly, it's been a long time since I've felt able to work on something longer than a short story (and even those didn't seem to be coming to me), so this felt like the right time to do it.

On top of that is the realization that to properly get ahead in publishing, it helps to have longer works. I've been focusing a lot on novellas lately, but have also been finding it hard to find markets that would take them. A novel, on the other hand, seems easier to shop around to agents, which seems like the most reasonable port of call for getting ahead with my writing.

It helped that I finally had a novel idea, which I spent a little while developing earlier this year. I outlined it and wrote a few world-building type documents, that would help me get a sense of the structure of the story and the tone I wanted to strike, but then I found myself distracted by my tech/telecoms blog, and didn't do anything more on the novel idea for a while.

Incidentally, the tech/telecoms blog was so easy to work on because I knew, month to month, what I wanted to do with it. This is what I mean when I say my fiction writing has felt directionless - I had a short story idea a few months ago, and I got as far as the first (hand-written) draft, but in the transition to the typed second draft, I couldn't make it work or muster much more interest. With the other blog, on the other hand, the subject (comparisons of age-related mobile plans in various countries in Europe) dictated the structure, so I knew that after I finished writing about plans aimed at seniors in Italy, I could write about plans in Italy that were aimed at kids.

It's the same with the novel I'm currently working on. Because I spent some time figuring out the structure earlier this year, I know what I want to accomplish in most of the chapters, and can spend my precious and limited writing time accomplishing it, rather than getting hamstrung by all the possible things I can do. Of course, this is the kind of thing that works for me, so maybe a different type of writer thrives on that ambiguity.

As far as the actual NaNoWriMo, it turns out the goal is to write 50,000 words in November, whereas I always thought it was 30k. It doesn't matter either way, as the important thing is to have something workable at the end of the month, and because my writing sessions are regularly yielding much less than 1,000 words, let alone the 1,667 I'd need to average to get to 50k. It's still satisfying to go to the website and input the number of words I've written that day, and see the little meter tick up. I probably should have tried gamifying my writing ages ago...

In any case, it seems to be working, i.e. I have something to write that's holding my interest, and crucially I'm looking forward to certain scenes later on in the story. Even if I don't have the full 50k words by the end of November, I'm aiming to continue writing this initial draft into December, so fingers crossed that I'll be able to do something with it in 2022.

Tips for Writers: LinkedIn Learning

One of the perks of working for a large company like my previous employer, State Farm, is that there are a lot of resources available to employees. These ranged from discounts on stores via its Perks at Work program, to learning resources like Degreed and Linkedin Learning (formerly Lynda.com). The content on Degreed is mostly client-generated and client-collected, meaning that State Farm itself was putting together courses on subjects it deemed important, and cribbing from across the web to populate them.

But my big discovery was that LinkedIn Learning also contains a bunch of courses on creative stuff, which is why I was glad to find that my new employer also gives us access to it. There are a number of creative subjects on LinkedIn Learning, like photography, but the area I want to focus on is creative writing, because there's a fair amount of content on the platform that writers will find useful.

The first thing to say, though, is that you're probably better off accessing LinkedIn Learning through your employer's subscription, if they have it. It costs $29.99 per month for a monthly subscription, or $19.99/month if you take out an annual subscription, so it can be costly; if your employer doesn't offer LinkedIn Learning, you can find a number of the same courses on Udemy starting at around $15 per course. By the way, I found an article comparing the two, which claims LinkedIn offers a la carte courses, but I couldn't find anything on its pricing page other than its monthly prices, so that's potentially a strike in Udemy's favor.

The other point about LinkedIn is that it's better for fiction writers than screenwriters. I was able to find just one course related to screenwriting, but I stopped using it after a couple of days, because the teacher seems to have only one credit to his name, which I'd never heard about before. The fiction writing courses are run by actual authors (e.g. Jessica Brody) or writers who have made a career of focusing on the way stories work (e.g. Lisa Cron). I may never have heard of Jessica Brody before LinkedIn, but a quick google search reveals that she's published over 20 books - so at least she knows the industry and is a working writer.

Some of it can also be very basic. The first writing course I watched was Foundations of Fiction, which features a lot of explanations of types of point-of-view, exercises on writing types of characters, and so forth. But that proviso should only put you off if you're already a bestselling writer - those, like me, who are getting their writing careers off the ground can probably always stand to go over the basics again, every once in a while.

(It's also interesting how easy it is to not learn the basics if you're entirely self-taught, in any subject. At least a basic course will frequently explain these points in a systematic manner)

Jessica Brody also has courses that are aimed at the business side of writing, like how to sell your novel to a major publisher, and developing ideas that sell. I haven't gotten to those courses yet, but I am going through one on productivity hacks for writers, which is full of good tips even if your writing time consists of just an hour a night before bed.

One other course that I've bookmarked to watch at some point is on using Scrivener. I bought it a few years ago, and while my prose stories are still all in Word, I always consider it would be good to learn how to use it to full effect (I've also written screenplays in it).

Beyond the writing courses, there are some good courses on time management and productivity, which have some useful tips and approaches that can transfer over to writers. I'm also partial to the Desk Yogi series on movements you can do to mitigate the effects of sitting at your desk all day - like time management, these are relevant for writers and non-writers alike.

Overall, there's a good amount of creative writing content on LinkedIn Learning, enough that if you have a few minutes free at the end of your workday, you should be able to learn some useful tips or approaches to writing. It's also good to keep your mind thinking about writing, even outside of your normal writing time (though I don't think you should spend all your work time fooling around on LinkedIn Learning).

LinkedIn Learning may not have the brand-name appeal of MasterClass, but if your employer offers it for free it's a good resource, and I highly recommend it.

RIP John le Carré

Just saw the news yesterday that John le Carré passed away, and wanted to write a quick tribute to an author who was probably my favorite outside the SFF genre.

Because of my dad's interest in mysteries and thrillers, le Carré was one of the names I remember seeing on the bookshelves from my earliest childhood, along with Agatha Christie. I never picked up anything of his, however, until my early 20s, when I discovered copies of his two earliest books, hidden away on a bookshelf at our house in Italy.

I read A Murder of Quality and Call for the Dead, le Carré's second and first novels, in that order, and then went on searching for more of these books featuring George Smiley. Soon after I moved to London and found Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, followed by The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, as well as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I didn't love all of these - Schoolboy I found a particular slog, and I also don't remember being so dazzled by Spy Who Came in from the Cold - but the ones I did like I liked enough to keep looking.

Part of it, of course, was my personal circumstances. When I found Tinker Tailor I'd just moved to London and was experiencing firsthand much of what le Carré was writing about. It's hard to really appreciate the London of the 70s when you're sitting in sunny California, but if you're actually surrounded by the flock wallpaper and hissing radiators it's easier to imagine the milieu that Smiley's traveling in.

Over the years I read a few more of his novels, but none grabbed me quite like those first two, or Tinker Tailor and Smiley's People. Still, there were also the adaptations - Tailor of Panama, The Constant Gardener and so on. I remember, after the latter movie, being struck that le Carré had done well to identify unscrupulous corporations as the real villains of the 21st century after the end of the Cold War. Indeed the reviews of his books from the 90s to now have focused on his anger at the more venal aspects of the establishment - whether it's illicit arms sales, pharmaceutical malfeasance or the War on Terror. 

A recent pleasure was reading The Night Manager, and contrasting it with the TV version that came out a few years ago. I'd say le Carré was rather well-served by adaptations, as the TV version of the Night Manager updated and streamlined the novel quite well, and Tailor of Panama boasted a wonderful cast in Pierce Brosnan, Jamie Lee Curtis and Geoffrey Rush. But the two best have to be the BBC miniseries of Tinker Tailor and Smiley's People.

Featuring Alec Guinness as George Smiley, these two miniseries from the early 80s are probably the most faithful adaptations of his work that I've seen - and when I saw faithful I mean to the spirit of the books, rather than slavishly following exactly what happens in the pages. The film version from 2011 is decent enough, if slow and a bit hard to follow, but doesn't quite get across the time period as well as the earlier versions.

Citing an author as an influence is always tricky, because we cite authors and books that we think make us look more clever than we really are. However, it's fair to say that le Carré and George Smiley are all over my current work in progress, a melding of spy thrillers and fantasy novels. My main character is clearly based on Smiley, though I hope it's not arrogant to say that I'm trying to say something very different with my own character than le Carré was with his.

Regardless, I'm sad that another author I admire has gone. He himself may have despaired of how the public assumed everything he wrote was how the spy business is in real life, but his gift was that his world felt true. Moreover, as I wrote in my blog about the Night Manager, he had a gift for setting his scene, and for bringing to life the worlds his characters inhabited. There won't be any more from him, but I'm reassured that I don't have to venture much farther than my dad's bookshelf to find more books by le Carré that I have yet to read.

Openings: The King of Staten Island

One of the nice things about sheltering here with my girlfriend for the past month or so has been our movie nights on weekends. Between streaming services, her DVR and things we're generally interested in, we've managed to find some good stuff - for example, we're alternating between the films of Chadwick Boseman (RIP) and those of Pauly Shore. But one of the first we watched was Pete Davidson and Judd Apatow's King of Staten Island.

I think we were both intrigued by the trailer, and the movie itself is pretty good - it takes most of the good stuff about Pete Davidson and very little of the stuff that annoys me, and places it in a believable context of showing his character coming to terms with his firefighter father's death ten years earlier, and his growth from fuck-up wannabe tattoo artist to a (potential) adult. There are probably spoilers for the movie after the jump, so be forewarned.

Key Years

I've mentioned how I'm frequently rereading books and comics, or rewatching shows, that I've liked in the past, but I've been thinking lately about which media I'm consuming and what times these things are from. I've narrowed it down to three main periods that I keep revisiting, in some way or other. They are, plus or minus a couple of years, 1995 and 2002 and 2013.

The stuff from 1995 seems to be mostly music, comics and TV shows. From 2002 it's mainly books, and extending to around 2004-05 it's music. And finally, 2013 is associated mostly with books.

When I noticed this pattern I started thinking about why I kept coming back to these years, and the best I can come up with is that they were particularly key years, though usually for very different reasons.

1995 is associated with the best time in Britpop, which isn't just when I was experiencing exciting new music but also forming my self-image as a "European". I was getting more interested in European history (especially World War II) and languages, and starting to imagine what my life would be like when I could live on my own.

That interest in Europe and Britain in particular took in Premier League football, and the British comics I was discovering at the time. Of course, by 1995 Neil Gaiman's run on the Sandman was ending and Garth Ennis had finished his run on Hellblazer, but because I discovered those books around that time (actually even a tiny bit earlier) I associate them with the period. By the same token, I didn't read Grant Morrison's Invisibles until a few years later, but rereading the collections now I see how much that book was a product of its time: 1995.

The other thing I was into at around that time was Star Trek, so I can't help but associate that year with Deep Space Nine, in particular. In fact, I've already noted how my most recent rewatch had me remembering the first time I saw those episodes, i.e. 1995-97, rather than the second time in 2006 or so. About which more anon.

2002 is another key year because I'd just started my first job and was reveling in the actual circumstances of being a young adult on my own for the first time. I'd also gotten into travel, which meant I was fixated on travel writing in a big way. In a way every time I reread my beloved Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux books, I'm revisiting that period, when the world was opening itself up to me in a way that hadn't been possible when I was a kid and when I didn't have a monthly paycheck to finance such gallivantings.

In terms of music, 2002 itself was a little barren but by the end of that year I'd discovered the resurgence of guitar bands that had begun with the Strokes and the White Stripes. I was discovering new bands, both from the UK (like British Sea Power) and, in a first for me, from the US (like Interpol). At the same time, I was also discovering a lot of the older music that was influencing what I was discovering then, so I picked up Morrissey's post-Smiths back catalog, for instance, or Joy Division and New Order.

The next one is 2013, which isn't so much a year of a big transition as it was of a new feeling: actually being good at shit. In 2011 and to a greater extent in 2012 I'd found my feet at work much more than I ever had previously, and this trend carried on in 2013. I don't remember the football so much, and I'd kind of lost the thread of newer music by then, but what sticks with me most from that time is travel and history books. I've already written about it, but there was a whole sub-genre of books mostly by white male British writers extolling the wonders of one specific Northern European country, be it Germany, Switzerland or Denmark, and I was having it all.

The ones about Germany all seem to have hit around the same time, though I didn't read them all when they came out. However, I reread Germania by Simon Winder last year (preparatory to reading Lotharingia, his latest, this year), and I've reread Keeping Up with the Germans, by Philip Oltermann, several times since I bought it in 2014. Honestly, I'm kind of twitching with the junkie-like need to read it right now, although that might also be related to my Europe withdrawal, a result of not being able to get on a plane and go to London and Italy because of this stupid pandemic.

My 2013 nostalgia, by the way, is also manifesting in a desire to finish series I began or was in the middle of during that year. Last year I caught up with Ian Tregillis's alternate WWII trilogy, The Coldest War, and with Jasper Kent's Danilov Quintet, for example, and I'm still working on James SA Corey's The Expanse, though there wasn't a gap with those books as big as with the Tregillis or Kent books.

Now, it's also interesting to think about why certain years don't loom as large. 1997-98 is one, given that I'd just started college and was getting into a bunch of new music (namely all the gloomy Manchester bands from the 80s). 2006 is the other, since I'd just graduated from graduate school and returned to London to start Phase 2 of my working life.

For the former, the music just became part of my mental furniture and I've rarely been away from the Cure, the Smiths and whatever else I was listening to then. For the latter, all the bands that had become exciting in 2002-04 suddenly started releasing boring second albums. I watched a bunch of TV that was perhaps more admirable than lovable (e.g. Battlestar Galactica); or I started the big Star Trek rewatch that essentially continues now. And in terms of books, I have vague memories of a bunch of disappointing British SF novels and waiting for the next George RR Martin book to come out (which didn't happen until 2010).

Memory is a funny thing, of course. We all remember where we were when we heard about momentous events, but we also reconstruct otherwise meaningful times in our lives. By focusing in on those three periods, I can draw some conclusions about what was going on that perhaps resonates now, though it's best not to read too much into it - I could easily point to nostalgia for other books and series I was reading at the time, for instance.

Though I wonder if other people are so fixated on books, music and other media from similar significant periods in their lives, or if it's just because as an SFF writer I'm always chasing the high I got from reading favorite classics of the genre?

Writing Characters in the Chronicles of Prydain

I mentioned in my post about rereading Lord of the Rings a few weeks ago that I was eyeing up my old copies of Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, and at this point I'm about a third of the way into book 5, the High King. I hadn't read these books since I was about ten, so apart from the odd scene from bits here and there I remembered nothing about them.

A couple of things jumped out at me from the start. One is that the books move fast - the longest of them, the High King, comes in at 286 pages, so there's not a lot of time lost charting the intricate political alliances of Prydain before Taran, in book 1, goes chasing after the oracular pig Hen Wen. Think of it this way: these five novels altogether are probably shorter than George RR Martin's first Song of Ice and Fire novel, A Game of Thrones, likely because younger readers are a lot less interested in the buildup to people hacking each other to bits with swords.

The other thing that I noticed straight away is the verbal tics of most of the supporting characters. The bard, Fflewddur Fflam, is constantly aggrandizing himself ("a Fflam is valiant!"), correcting ("if you take my meaning") and telling lies that make his harp strings snap. The Princess Eilonwy likens things to other things all the time, and Gurgi speaks in the third person about himself and others, and worries about his "poor tender head".

There are others, both for these characters and for others, but it strikes me as a quick way of letting the reader know who's talking - there are a lot of characters to keep track of so it becomes important that Fflewddur have a different voice than Eilonwy or the others. It also reminds me of a point the critic James Woods made in his book, How Fiction Works, where he described such motifs as a way of making a one-dimensional character work - by insisting repeatedly that she'll never desert Mr Micawber, Mrs Micawber in David Copperfield is giving a glimpse into her thoughts, which have probably involved deserting Mr Micawber.

The thing she - and the supporting characters in the Prydain books - repeats, becomes the defining feature, and while it's a single one that doesn't show her or them as fully realized human beings, it also allows them to come alive in a way that wouldn't be possible if the author were trying to give them that rich inner life.

Thinking about my own stories, the ones where I've differentiated the characters from one another more successfully are the ones where I've located an accent or a voice for them. That comes about from reading their dialogue out loud, so I suspect that my shorter stories are more successful in this regard than my longer novellas.

It's also worth noting that this is another example of YA literature doing something more economically (and perhaps effectively) than "serious" or "grownup" literature. Making a supporting character say the same things, or the same types of things, over and over isn't necessarily the best option for a character who'll be, for example, the point-of-view character for entire chapters, but without talking down or pandering to kids, it helps them get a quick sense of the character.

To take Fflewddur Fflam again: when he's introduced he's described as spiky-haired and spindly, a king who's so bored with ruling his kingdom that he went and learned to be a wandering bard. The lies he tells, which make his magic harp's strings break, reflect both his inclinations as a bard to make things more interesting, and hint at the idea that he's not so proficient either at music or at ruling.

Coming back to George RR Martin, he does something similar with the internal monologues of many of his characters, such as Ned Stark remembering the words "Promise me, Ned," which his sister Lyanna said on her deathbed. I've read some reviews that compared that to a musical motif, like in opera, though in contrast to Lloyd Alexander's characters it's hinting much more obliquely at the character qualities than having them repeat certain phrases or tics.

Beyond the characterizations, the stories are complex and sometimes quite dark, and discuss themes that fantasy authors these days are quite proud of themselves for addressing. In Book 4, Taran Wanderer, the reader is confronted with the human cost of all the wars and battles that populate fantasy fiction, and is also shown the pride and self-respect that non-nobles and non-combatants have for their trades, like smithing, weaving and pottery.

Apart from the lack of things for female characters like Eilonwy to do (and apart from the overall lack of female characters), such themes wouldn't be out of place in fantasy literature now, so imagine my surprise to learn (or re-learn) that the Prydain books came out in the mid-1960s. It also has very little echo of Lord of the Rings in it, which is another nice thing to notice, although surely Lloyd Alexander must have been familiar with JRR Tolkien's work when he was writing his own.

The books are simple, but they breeze along quite well and aren't (to me) embarrassingly childish. It's also nice to re-read one of the first series I was really into as a kid, talking about it with friends and my dad (who also spoiled the ending of Taran Wanderer for me). One of the nicest things as a reader of any age is getting stuck into a new series where all the books are readily available, so it's enjoyable to experience those feelings again.

Revisiting the Lord of the Rings

On a whim last month I decided it was time to reread my old copy of the Lord of the Rings. It's one of the earliest editions that collects all three major parts together - The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King - and floating on its cover painting by Alan Lee of Minas Tirith is a shield reminding us that this was an upcoming major motion picture from New Line Cinema.

To give an idea, I bought it in college, and it traveled to Germany with me for my exchange year, where it subsequently went on a series of travels without me, as I lent it to a couple of friends who took it separately to Barcelona and Poland with them. It's probably the best traveled of my books, and it's certainly visited a number of places I've never been to.

It's also fairly dogeared at this point, both because of those travels and the fact that I reread it three times before and during the release of the above-mentioned movies, once for each film. When I started that project, back in late 2001, it was to look for the bits that I expected Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens to change when they translated it to film. The easiest to deduce was Fellowship, since it has that long section early on where Frodo and co escape the Black Riders across the Old Forest and then meet Tom Bombadil - a section that while charming enough in spots, even then didn't feel essential.

The point of all this is to say that I know the book fairly well, so like all books that one rereads multiple times, it was comforting and reassuring to slip back into its pages and paragraphs, like putting on an old sweater that you weren't expecting to fit.

I've talked elsewhere about the oddness of rereading books with a few years' distance, how I'm a different person now than when I first read the book, but because I've read Lord of the Rings so many times that doesn't really apply here. Though it was interesting where I found myself most interested in the narrative and prose, and where I found myself switching off a bit.

As I recalled, my favorite bits have always been the ones most concerned with the Hobbits and the Shire (although Part 2 of Towers, which follows Frodo, Sam and Gollum sneaking into Mordor, is one of the bits that drags for me). The Scouring of the Shire, for instance, is one of my very favorite parts and I always thought it too bad that the movies couldn't include it, though Return's ending is long enough in movie form without adding a further hour of the Hobbits' return to find their homeland changed for the worse.

The other parts that I thought dragged a bit were the battles in Return, on the Pelennor and the Ride of the Rohirrim. Tolkien's register changes from the simple, charming and almost folksy language of the sections focused on the Hobbits into what generations of less talented fantasy writers have tried to recapture - though it's worth noting that as a professor of Old English at least Tolkien, unlike David Eddings, gets his "thees" and "thous" right.

But the parts with the Rohirrim riding to war feel overwrought now, as if he's trying to recapture some of the flavor of the Old Testament, which would be okay except it gets tiring after a while.

More interesting though is the question of what place LoTR has, or should have, in the fantasy "canon". I'm putting that in quotation marks because I've been seeing some debates on Twitter about how important the canon is to new fans and writers of science fiction. For some the question of canon raises the uncomfortable specter of gatekeeping, where not having read a certain "foundational" text means you can't be a "true" fan; for others the canon as constituted contains too many authors of one type (white, male, heterosexual, etc) and not enough other demographics.

For myself I lean toward not really caring if something is a foundational text of the genre or not - I've read Dune and a fair amount of Asimov and Philip K Dick, but very little Heinlein or Clarke (other than the 2001 books and Childhood's End), but no Moorcock - so does that mean my education is lacking? I have read a couple of Octavia Butler's novels, though, so maybe it isn't? I find this discussion boring and would rather share the good stuff about it rather than engaging in ever more bad-tempered culture wars over it.

So if you ask me whether LoTR should be part of the fantasy "canon", I'd tell you to un-ask the question. Reading the story itself, and especially the 100+ pages of linguistics, legends and so forth that comprise its appendices, it becomes clear that Lord of the Rings only spawned the epic fantasy genre by accident, and that you could just as profitably shelve it alongside mythology-derived books like Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, or Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (in the case of the latter English rather than epic fantasy).

Of course I'm guilty of perpetuating the second-artist syndrome with my own fantasy stories, which clearly owe a lot to Tolkien. Like Terry Brooks or Tad Williams or Guy Gavriel Kay, I'm engaging in a conversation with the earlier work and seeing for myself what makes it tick, but it's so easy for that engagement to fall into mimicry. That, of course, is the fatal flaw of the whole genre - and if you don't believe me, just read Joe Abercrombie's Third Law trilogy, which can't get away from LoTR even as it skewers and questions everything about it.

I also can't help thinking of China Miéville's dueling viewpoints on the book. On the one hand he calls it a wen on the arse of fantasy literature, needing to be lanced; on the other he grudgingly admires how it brings to life the Nordic mythology that inspired Tolkien, contrasting it with the Victorianized Greco-Roman pantheon that he calls sterile. Both can be true, and when you read some of the worst excesses of the genre (not naming names) it's hard not to agree with Miéville.

Taken on its own, of course it's old-fashioned (though not always cliche, in contrast with certain of the choices that the movies make). And not only old-fashioned, but quite uncomfortably racist, when he talks about the "evil" Southrons and Easterlings, the mingling of the Dúnedain with "lesser" men and the "foul" Orcs. There's loads more, and it's always made me uncomfortable, though I also appreciate that there was a different cultural context for talking about "evil" races that way.

At the same time, Tolkien still manages to partly humanize even a couple of Orcs, when they're talking about how the ongoing war affects them personally. It doesn't make up for the weird racism or the outright erasure almost all women from any pivotal role in the story (yes, spare me your Eowyns), but it's clear there's more to it than the detractors would like you to think.

So I'd argue that any newcomers to the book approach it from the viewpoint of English fantasy - go read some Norse mythology (or even Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology), Susanna Clarke and a translation of the Edda or the Kalevala, rather than lumping it with the Sword of Shannara, the Wheel of Time or Prince of Thorns or something. All of those newer books have their good points, but Tolkien's most famous work probably deserves to be read in a different, more scholarly context.