Time, Patience, and the Beginning Writer

Beginning writers enjoy the unappreciated luxury of time. They can work without submission deadlines and crash and burn editorial demands. There’s an undeniable glee in such deadlines; they are the mark of a professional author, aren’t they? They demonstrate our commitment to our writing careers, and that our publishers take us seriously. Deadlines, especially short ones, imply an editor’s trust in our ability to work competently, even brilliantly, at speed. Surely, that’s proof of a high degree of Expertise, not to mention Importance.

If you haven’t picked up the sarcasm in the opening paragraph, please insert it now. Bleary eyes, aching shoulder muscles, unwashed laundry, family eating frozen dinners, and kids running amok from neglect are nobody’s idea of good working conditions. For many published and publishing authors, these things happen from time to time as a part of the publishing industry’s inherent chaos. If we can’t change them and don’t feel we have the option to refuse, then we make them more acceptable via glamorization of suffering. To be sure, when we were beginning writers, we may well have regarded the necessity of dropping everything to proofread a book that should have been done two months ago as a good thing. We wanted to see our work in print, the sooner the better, and too many of us jumped at the chance of being published anywhere.

The time during when we are writing seriously but not (yet) on contract offers its own gifts, and one of them is freedom from publisher- (or editor- or agent-) induced overwork frenzy. We may be overworking in a different way, juggling day jobs, families, and other responsibilities. Our friends and families may regard our writing as a hobby, no matter how seriously we take it, because we have yet made any money at it. (And when we do, the bar escalates: we haven’t sold a novel, we don’t earn enough to support ourselves entirely from our writing, we haven’t won a national award, etc., and with the achievement of each goal, we are subjected to another, even more difficult one.)

A beginning writer has the flexibility to accept external deadlines, like for submission to an anthology or contest, or to ignore them.

Short Book Reviews: A Heroine of the Magical Underclass

 Servant Mage, by Kate Elliott (Tor)

Kate Elliott always delivers entertaining stories with relatable characters, and Servant Mage is no exception. Indentured fire-mage Fellian leads a drab life, half-starved and clinging to memories of her childhood, before the rigid, fundamentalist Liberationists came to power and enslaved anyone with magical power. The usurped Monarchists have formed an underground rebellion, and they need Fellian’s Fire magic. Of course, one among them is devastatingly handsome, thereby setting expectations of romance to come, as well as the restoration of a noble, altruistic king.. Here’s where Elliott departs from the usual and becomes deeply subversive. Fellian holds steadfastly to her own values when presented with an attractive man and the lure of a benevolent monarchy restored. Instead, she asks piercing questions and relies on her own judgment, time and time again. She is keenly aware that the other conspirators need her special talent, and she’s not about to exchange her autonomy for a new community. In short, she thinks for herself. Through her, Elliott strongly questions the romantic notion so prevalent in fantasy: the noble aristocracy, devoted to the welfare of their subjects. Fellian insists that to trust future generations of entitled rulers is folly and that exchanging one form of top-down rule for another is no guarantee against despotism. This emperor might be just and fair, but in a generation, common people like her might find themselves just as oppressed.

I love how respectful Elliott is of her readers’ intelligence. She plays fair and gives us all the information we need (such as Fellian’s passion for literacy in teaching fellow servants to read and write) without ramming conclusions down our throats. She lets the characters and unfolding events speak for themselves without telling us how to feel about them. For this, and for superb storytelling and compelling characters, I’ll grab anything she writes!

 

[politics] Strategies for Reclaiming the Right to Choose

The New York Times recently published a piece by Kate Zernike, "The Long Road to Reclaim Abortion Rights." Because it's behind a paywall and the information is so important, I've summarized it here.

Abortion rights groups have mounted a multilevel legal and political attack aimed at blocking and reversing abortion bans in courts and at ballot boxes across the country. They have rolled out a wave of lawsuits in nearly a dozen states to hold off bans triggered by the court’s decision, with the promise of more suits to come. They are aiming to prove that provisions in state constitutions establish a right to abortion. They are also working to defeat ballot initiatives that would strip away a constitutional right to abortion and to pass those that would establish one, in states where abortion access is contingent on who controls the governor’s mansion or the state house.

Democratic-aligned groups are campaigning to reverse slim Republican majorities in some state legislatures and to elect abortion rights supporters to positions from county commissioner to state supreme court justices that can have influence over the enforcement of abortion restrictions.

The path ahead is slow and not at all certain. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly say that the decision to have an abortion should be made by women and their doctors rather than state legislatures. But Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed hundreds of restrictions on abortion over the last decade, and legislative districts are heavily gerrymandered to protect Republican incumbents. Litigation in state courts will be decided by judges who in many cases have been appointed by anti-abortion governors.

Abortion rights groups say their cases offer a viable path forward to establish protections in states. Even in conservative states such as Oklahoma and Mississippi, they see an opportunity to overturn abortion bans and establish a constitutional backstop against further restriction. But in other places, the goal of the litigation is to at least temporarily restore or preserve abortion access, now that the court’s decision stands to make it illegal or effectively so in more than half the states, which include 33.5 million women of childbearing age.

In Louisiana, for example, though the state constitution expressly says there is no right to abortion, the legal challenge has allowed three clinics to continue serving women whose plans to end their pregnancies were thrown into disarray by the court’s decision.

By Friday, the groups had temporarily blocked bans from taking effect in Utah, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Florida; judges have set hearings over the next several weeks to consider permanent injunctions. But they lost bids to hold off bans in Ohio and Texas.

Very Short Book Reviews: Smart Oceans and Other Treasures

 Along the Saltwise Sea, by A. Deborah Baker (Tordotcom)

Along the Saltwise Sea follows the children from A. Deborah Baker’s (Seanan Mcguire’s) Over the Woodward Wall. Two adolescents—conformist Avery and adventuresome Zib, have found their way into the Up-and-Under, a magical world, via the aforementioned wall. Here they encounter all manner of creatures, from sarcastic owls to evil Pages to Niamh the drowned girl, and a girl composed of a murder of crows. Of course, they’re given a quest to fulfill to return home.

Along the Saltwise Sea adds even more delicious elements to their story: pirates! An intelligent ocean! A mysterious passenger!

  

Noor, by Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)

Okorafor’s work invites us into a world of the future, but one in which the foundational culture is not derived from Western Europe but situated in Africa. Her underlying premise is that the Africans of the future, in this case Nigerians, have developed their own rich technologies. Two stand out for me in this novel: harvesting solar and wind energy in the deserts of northern Nigeria; and the heroine herself, whose cyborg body has been extensively augmented. At the same time, herdsmen follow ages-old traditions. In Okorafor’s skillful hands, high tech and ancient ways of life blend into a seamless whole.

 

 

The Cat Who Saved Books, by Sosuke Natsukawa (HarperVia)

What a sweet story, featuring a reclusive teen, a bookstore full of used classics, and a talking cat bent on saving books. I found the slow pace deceptive, for there is a great deal going on between the words and the worlds. The book weaves together a series of quests with the slow process of Rintaro’s grief at his grandfather’s death evolving toward renewed engagement with life and self-confidence, all framed in discussions of the role of books, ideas, and story-telling, not to mention the publishing and book-selling industries.

Short Book Reviews: A Time-Twisting Murder Mystery

The Paradox Hotel, by Rob Hart (Ballantine)

If we ever managed to figure out time travel, who would control it? How would we prevent time tourists from messing with the past—and would that warp the present, as in the grandfather paradox? In Rob Hart’s latest novel, The Paradox Hotel, the US government has been policing time tourism and historical research expeditions, only now they’ve run out of funds and the franchise is about to go to auction.

January Cole works security at the Paradox Hotel, which hosts time travelers awaiting their scheduled “flights to the past” at the nearby Einstein Institute. She’s a seasoned time traveler herself, having made many trips as part of the policing agency. As a result of spending too much time in the past, she’s become Unstuck, with the result that she often sees events and people from prior times. The best of these incidents allow her to be with her sweet, loving girlfriend, now dead. But January’s condition is worsening, and she’s not only seeing the past but the future. That future includes a corpse in Room 526.

With trillionaires arriving for the auction, baby velociraptors on the loose, and January’s grip on the present moment growing ever less reliable, it’s inevitable that more things will go wrong…starting with a series of “accidents” befalling the powerful, ultra-wealthy bidders. Clocks run backward, time seems to stutter, the treatment for being Unstuck no longer works, and January’s running out of time to stop the murder.

I loved the convolutions of time, January’s wrestling with grief and guilt, the dips into the past, and of course, the baby velociraptors that grow much too fast, all with the fast pacing of a thriller. In short, Hart’s time-twisting murder mystery satisfies on many counts.