Flood

I am pleased to note that my writing energy has increased dramatically since my last post. The most obvious reason for this is a marked improvement in my day-to-day routine. My eldest has finally begun adjusting to pandemic life, settling back to his mellow self after a difficult period of aggression and frustration. Obviously, this adjustment has been greatly helped by a return to almost-normal school, which would freak me out a lot more if he didn’t have his vaccinations. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that herd immunity is on its way. (Please get your shots. We’re all depending on each other).

So I have more time to myself, and I’m in a better mental space. Not that I’m stress-free, hah, what a life that would be, but my mind has felt freer, and that in turn allows my creativity to flow more readily. When I sit down to write, there’s a lot more enjoyment and satisfaction in proportion to the effort expended.

I found the thread I needed to pull my novel (Everburning Fire) to its climax and completed it a few weeks ago. Hooray! I’ve put up new pages for both books in my planned trilogy, The Machinist. I have a fairly solid idea of where the third book will go, but it’s on the back burner while I work on a new novel/possible series. I’m currently wild with excitement over this particular story, which came to me a few months ago and has been simmering impatiently while I practiced discipline and finished Everburning Fire first. I knew if I abandoned it, I would really struggle to pick up the momentum. So, one book finished, and an eager dive into the next one.

For some time I’ve wanted to create a magic system based on music. Music is possibly my biggest hobby outside of writing, but it’s rarely played much of a role in my stories because it’s just so hard to convey through words. I thought it would be an interesting challenge, if only I could find the right hook. I had a separate idea about a character who genuinely believes in their own alleged godhood, rather than a charlatan duping everyone else. And suddenly I had an idea to tie the two concepts together with a nice twisty plot (and yes, a romance, though verrrry slow burn). Once it began to crystalize, I was so ridiculously excited I could hardly wait to start.

It’s currently titled Eastward Sings the Wind, a bit of a departure from my terse one- or two-word titles. I’m about 12,000 words in and loving it, in spite of the inevitable road bumps.

Creating first drafts is, for me, the absolute best part of writing. Revising can be such a slog; it’s hard to pinpoint what needs to be fixed and how. But taking a blank page and putting a story on it? Bliss. Truth is, I have every good reason to focus on existing manuscripts right now. I literally just completed a book; I’ve been workshopping novels with my writing group. And I finally got back into querying again, after a hiatus to deal with depression and anxiety and, you know, A WORLDWIDE PANDEMIC. These are all important writing tasks that I could reasonably focus on without feeling like I’m slacking off in the least…but none of them bring the sheer adrenaline of a first draft. And hey, if I ever have an actual publishing career, I can attest that I’ve had a lot of practice developing a vigorous writerly work ethic. We’ll see how long this flood keeps pouring in.

Avast, Me Hearties! There Be Spoilers Here

It’s become a widely-accepted view that spoilers are a Bad Thing and should be avoided at all costs. Even if you’re the sort who enjoys them, you’re probably characterized as transgressive; even mean-spirited, trying to cheat the system or ruin it for everyone else. This perception originated as a perfectly reasonable notion — that people should be allowed to experience stories as they please, without having all the surprises and twists given away beforehand — but it has ballooned into a messy problem in its own right.

Allow me to explain. The concept of a spoiler seems fairly straightforward at first glance: something that reveals an unexpected element from the story, hence “spoiling” the experience of encountering it at its natural point in the narrative. We can all name the famous twists from our favorite movies, like Luke Skywalker’s parentage or the status of Bruce Willis’s character in The Sixth Sense (odd, isn’t it, that we all seem to know the twist but have trouble remembering the guy’s name? It’s Malcolm Crowe, in case you were wondering). And we can recall the moment when a twist is revealed — the startled gasps, the world flipping upside-down, that instant of total shock that can never be re-captured once you know the truth. It’s not fair to deprive someone of that experience; what motivation could there be other than pure mean-spiritedness?

Actually, there are other motives, but I’ll get to that in a moment. First I want to explore how the definition of a “spoiler” has expanded far beyond the occasional twist ending. With the Internet age, entire movies can be leaked before their release, and details about its plot will proliferate. Piracy is an entirely separate issue that I won’t address here, but it’s certainly complicated the attitude of movie studios toward their audiences. Avoiding spoilers is no longer just a matter of common courtesy. It has become an all-encompassing policy of absolute secrecy, to the point of legally-binding agreements. The studios aren’t being courteous. They’re terrified of losing money. If the whole movie plot has been leaked, no one will bother seeing it, right?

That’s absurd. This is a false equivalency between knowing the details of a story and actually experiencing the movie or book itself. First off, does anyone really debate whether to watch a film, or simply read its Wikipedia entry and consider it just as good an experience? That’s absurd on the very face of it. Secondly, a movie’s value is often measured in how re-watchable it is. That means that whatever twists it might contain are not going to carry the same effect as the first time, and yet people will happily watch The Empire Strikes Back more than once. (I suspect I’ve seen it more than fifty times myself. Never gets old.) I’m not particularly interested in a story whose only strength lies in the shock value of its twist.

The release of Avengers: Endgame was an enormous event; certainly one of the biggest I’ve observed in my lifetime. A whole series of posters highlighting each character and whether they were lost at the end of the previous film or not; promos all over the Internet; huge anticipation about the mere teaser trailer, let alone the film itself. And the trailers showed us…almost nothing. Barely a hint of the film’s plot, just tantalizing flashes carefully arranged to give away nothing that could possibly be construed as a spoiler.

I found it downright silly that they shied away from even the most basic features that a trailer can offer. Much of the film, as we finally discovered upon its release, took the form of time-travel capers. Which I believe would have been a perfectly acceptable detail to include in the promos. It doesn’t ruin the film; it doesn’t give away huge shocking spoilers. It just presents the framework of the story’s plot, like you might read on the back of a book when you’re trying to decide whether to buy it or not.

Now of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is an extreme example, a franchise so popular that it hardly needs any promotional material at all. Slap a title on the screen, nothing more, and fans go wild. But I dislike the notion that such obviously manipulative marketing has been presented under the guise of “no spoilers!” when it’s really the overwrought precautions of a juggernaut studio’s legal team, looking to pack as many people into theater seats as possible. Perhaps the current quarantine, preventing such crowds, will lead to a significant change in the landscape of movie releases. Maybe we’ll finally let go of this ridiculous conception of “spoilers” that includes everything from the opening line to the cast list.

I am not advocating for the willy-nilly proliferation of spoilers. I do think there are plenty of trolls who delight in ruining for others the experience of watching a movie for the first time. However, there are some situations wherein an audience member might actually prefer to know the surprises beforehand. It all depends on our personal preferences. For some, the tension and suspense of a taut thriller is part of the fun; that constant edge-of-your seat uncertainty at what might be lurking around the next corner. For others, that’s a good recipe for a full-blown anxiety attack. In that case, there is absolutely nothing wrong with looking up the surprises beforehand. Why not, if reducing your anxiety actually improves your movie-watching experience? If the film is good enough, it can stand up even to a viewer who knows what’s coming.

I have no memory of being shocked about the ending of The Empire Strikes Back. I was born a year after it was released, and by the time I had any awareness of the Star Wars films (they were everywhere during my childhood, as any ’80s kid could tell you) it was common knowledge; a line that people quoted constantly. Did that ruin the film for me? Of course not. Sure, I like to imagine how I would have reacted if I had been old enough to experience it in 1980. But I don’t feel I’ve been deprived of some fundamental, essential element of the story. It’s more than a just a teetering tower of twists, sure to topple if you pull out one of them.

Not to mention that a hyper-awareness of spoilers can actually run counter to their intended purpose. Before 1980, no one was expecting shocking parentage twists in space opera sci-fi/fantasy films. Now it’s becoming something of a cliché, to the point that we’re all expecting something, even if we don’t know the details. The reason Luke’s shock is so impactful is because he, like all of us, had no question that he already knew his parentage. It wasn’t a deep dark secret that his mentors ominously promised to reveal to him someday. We weren’t anticipating anything, and that’s why the revelation was such a punch in the gut. And that’s why every attempt that Disney has made to recapture that shock has been a clumsy failure. I’ve never seen more hamfisted, clumsy attempts to draw interest in the Mysterious Hidden Secret Something. What a mess.

So I suppose my overall conclusion is that we need to take our stories just a little less seriously, and trust audiences to handle surprises according to their personal preferences. Shakespeare’s audiences all knew what was coming at the end of his tragedies, but they still happily watched them. And so we experience the best stories over and over and over again, not because of what happens in the story, but because of how well it’s told.

Women of Speculative Fiction: Margaret Cavendish

Here’s a rather obscure one. Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was a female writer from the 17th century who, in opposition to the usual practice of her time, published her works under her own name. She was a poet, philosopher, essayist and playwright. And she wrote “prose romances” – early versions of the adventure novel – including a work that could be one of the first examples of science fiction. Why don’t we try to bring her a little out of obscurity?

Much of what we know of Margaret comes from her own memoir, A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life. She characterized herself as very bashful, preferring to put her thoughts into writing – which was also a somewhat more acceptable outlet than being a verbally outspoken woman. Though her family and later her husband were aristocrats of relatively modest means (partly thanks to the turmoil resulting from their political positions) she was granted the time and leisure for developing her philosophical thoughts and writing skills that women of lower classes would not have been afforded. She also had a dislike for many of the tasks that women of her station were expected to busy themselves with – for example, she described poetry as “mental spinning,” and explained that she was better at writing and therefore preferred it over spinning. For its time, that was a significant critique of gender roles.

So how about that work of science fiction? It’s called The Blazing World, and it falls firmly into the sub-category of utopian fiction. The world mentioned in the title is an entirely separate place from our world, accessed by the North Pole. A women enters this world, becomes Empress over a society of talking animals, and then plans an invasion to defeat the enemies of her homeland. Pretty wild. It was actually published as a companion to her non-fiction work Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, as a sort of illustrative piece to bolster her intellectual discourse. Margaret herself is included as a character in the story, making it autobiographical as well. It kind of has a little bit of everything. Of course back then, genres weren’t the strictly-defined categories that publishers and booksellers use now. And those with the leisure to write tended to write in just about every category, from “natural philosophy” (science) to poetry to plays.

Still, Margaret defied many a convention of her time, and it’s always nice to point out how women have been a part of speculative fiction from its earliest days. However you look at it, she was a pioneer. And since I was rather charmed to read that, among her other ambitions, she had an unapologetic desire for fame, I’ve done my small part to make her just a little more famous.