incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Here's what our free-books bags at World Fantasy Con contained:

• The First Betrayal (The Chronicles of Josan, Book 1) by Patricia Bray (2006)
• The Curse of the Raven Mocker by Marly Youmans (2006)
• Undertow by Elizabeth Bear (2007)
• Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller (2004) (two copies)
• The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm (2006)
• 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill (2007)
• Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy by Michael Moorcock (2004)
• Things That Never Were: Fantasies, Lunacies & Entertaining Lies by Matthew Rossi (2003)
• The Leopard Mask (The Guin Saga, Book 1) by Kaoru Kurimoto (2003) (two copies)
• The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld, complied by Stephen Briggs
• A miscellany of samplers, Fantasy & Science Fiction issues, and other stuff.

I was vaguely planning to read The Faery Reel and 20th Century Ghosts already, so that was good. Any comments about the rest?

Also, on the topic of free books: Chad has posted about the Fantasy Novel Scavenger Hunt we came up with: "participants would be given a list of things to find, and sent to the Dealer's Room or free book bags to find them and bring them back." Here's what he's got to get things started:

• One book featuring a telepathic bond between a human and an animal.
• Three books with dubious guilds (Thieves Guild, Prostitute's Guild, etc.)
• Three characters with D'Read A'Postro'phes in their names [no kidding, one of the Aussie books had a single name with three apostrophes in it!]
• A book with a map in the front, in which the characters visit every single country on the map.
• A book with a faintly insulting "Exotic" setting.

I think participants should automatically win if they come back with a copy of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, myself. But what else?

Another sucky week here at Chateau Steelypips, so let's talk about writing instead.

Apparently "ten things I know about writing" is going around as a meme. I'm not doing ten, because this is a specific list: ways that writing a legal brief is like writing a work of fiction, as noticed by me in the last couple of weeks.

1. Reader expectations.

   You must know what your readers expect from you, at pretty much every level of the work—from the way a sentence will proceed, to the way that sections fit together, to the way the work will end. In fiction, you can violate those expectations, but you must know what you're doing so you can make it worth it. In legal writing, violating reader expectations is not recommended, because the consequences of annoying your readers are rather different.

   This struck my attention when, on the same day, alg had a "demystifying publishing" post on genre, and I asked for feedback on how suitable a draft brief was for a new-to-me audience.

2. "Said" words.

   In fiction, "said" is invisible as a dialogue tag.

   When I got back a draft that replaced every "the court stated" with "the court said," I realized that the same rule applies to non-fiction.

3. "I've suffered for my research, and now you must too."

   Yes, you did several boatloads of research before starting to write. Yes, you're proud of all the nuances and variations you now comprehend fully. Yes, it was important to have as complete a map as possible of the landscape before starting, because you can't know what path you're going to take without a map.

   But once you've picked your path, most of that information becomes entirely superfluous. And you don't get points for including superfluous information, no matter how hard-won it was.

4. Other sets of eyes.

   People who will keep you from inflicting violated expectations, said-isms, and too much research on your readers? Priceless.

1. Chad has posted his own Fantasy Conversion Kit, with a different emphasis, at The Library of Babel.
2. I hadn't realized that vonnielake started this and is keeping lists in her memories.
3. I posted my list to rec.arts.sf.written, where there is some discussion going on.

I propose the following theorem (with corollary) regarding discussion of science fiction as a genre.

(ETA: Now revised for clarity! Plus a tentative title, and a suggested additional theorem.)

Theorem of Science Fiction Denial:

If an artist makes a point of asserting that a creative work is not science fiction, then (1) the odds that the work is science fiction increase to a near-certainty, while (2) the odds that the work's science fiction elements (e.g., world-building, science) are good decrease dramatically. Nb.: the work as a whole may still have artistic merit.

Corollary:

If an artist makes a point of asserting that a creative work is not science fiction because "science fiction is X", then the statement "science fiction is X" is almost certainly wrong.

Proposed Theorem of Genre Denial:

Take the above theorem (and corollary), replace "science fiction" with "genre," and remove the parenthetical.

( prior comments, edits )