The Blue Candle Society

The village looked a little more lively than it had the first time Jefferson had been through, but that wasn’t saying much. A few of the houses on the main street looked like they were being refurbished, and someone was making a go at re-opening the grocer’s, although the filling station was still abandoned. There were still a lot of empty houses, windows boarded over or just broken, paint peeling and lawns gone to weeds. In his memory, the village had always been gloomy and dank. It was a comparatively bright summer’s day now, but still oppressively humid and overcast, with high gray clouds in the distance that threatened rain.

He had the feeling he was being watched as he drove through the quiet streets, and told himself it was just that folks were curious about the Cord–there weren’t a lot of cars in the village, and most were old and battered. On impulse, he turned just before the road would have taken him out of the village, and swung down a side street. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: The Figurine, Part 4’

Posted in Serials

If there is any justice in the world, the next time I check into a Holiday Inn, one of these generic landscapes with a monster painted into the foreground will be hanging on the wall.

Posted in Uncategorized

I was going to write a long, involved post about Tor going DRM-free, but really, do you want to read my thoughts on it when John Scalzi and Charlie Stross have weighed in on it?   But because it is my blog, I’ll make an effort: Lord, DRM sucks.  It does a lot more harm to legitimate consumers than pirates, who laugh sardonically as the crack it (because let’s face it: the sad, pathetic souls who get jobs making things DRM-complient are not exactly the cream of the crop, skilz-wise, and almost by definition don’t really care about their jobs), whether it’s messing up a computer game or an e-book. It doesn’t seem to do the creators of content much good, as near as I can tell, and it doesn’t even seem to help massive, soulless computer game manufacturers and so on (ask the makers of Spore, once destined to be the best-selling game evar, how DRM worked out for them).

The only people who benefit, as near as I can tell, are companies like Amazon, who can use it to lock normal, law-abiding consumers (who don’t have the time and/or inclination to crack their DRM) into a single platform, so they stop buying content from anyone else (who wants to buy 6 or 7 devices just so they can buy from different stores, after all?)  Frankly, I think Amazon will get along without that little boost, so I’d just as soon be able to actually buy an e-book and have a shot at still owning it in ten years.

So I think it’s good news, but go read Scalzi and Stross, because they have more intelligent things to say about it anyway.

Posted in General writing things

“We found a Blue Candle with Sullivan, Mrs. Glass,” Gantry said. “Thought it best we bring him along.”

Mrs. Glass turned her gaze on Jefferson. “And what is your name?”

“Jefferson Quinn, ma’am.” The house was almost as hot as the car had been, and he longed to pull out his handkerchief and mop his forehead.

“He’s one of Tacy’s” Farthing put in.

“Well, now, I already told your boys here, I ain’t really Tacy’s,” Jefferson said. “I don’t even like her that much, truth be told.”

“Well, she is a horrible girl,” Mrs. Glass said. “No respect for her poor grandfather, from what I hear. But surely one does not need to like someone to take orders from her.”

Jefferson glanced back and forth between Gantry and Farthing. “I’m sure these boys like you just fine, ma’am, a nice woman like you.”

“He’s been making clever comments like that the whole time,” Gantry said. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: The Figurine, Part 3’

Posted in Serials

Something on the Wing

Posted in Uncategorized

Was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom markedly inferior to the other Indiana Jones movies because of the fact that the female lead spent the whole movie running around shrieking and waving her hands (as posited by this article in the Guardian), or because of the lack of Nazis?

That may be a question best left to the philosophers, but N.K. Jemison has a post with a bit more nuance along the same lines but coming at it from a different angle, which I found interesting.

Posted in General writing things

“Easy now, boys,” Jefferson said. “We’re just settin’ in a car here. You looking for money are you?”

There was a dry laugh right behind him, and a new voice spoke from behind the driver’s seat. “Just sitting in a car. Sitting in a car holding that thing. Hand it back.”

“All right now,” Jefferson said soothingly, though his heart had sunk at the way the man seemed to recognize the little statue. He took as much care as he could not to let the small tattoo of the blue candle on his wrist show as he carefully handed it back. Sullivan made a little noise of despair as it went by, drawing another laugh from the man holding a gun to Jefferson’s head.

Jefferson took a glance back as he passed over the figurine, had the impression of a vast bulk and a sleeve of seersucker, a large gun held to the back of Sullivan’s head. Then he was back to looking out the windshield, thinking. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: The Figurine, Part 2’

Posted in Serials

So I was led over to this story about crap books by a Guardian columnist by way of the Christopher Priest kerfluffle (Damien Walter’s view was that Priest was all bitter about the Clarke’s slate because he has never quite been admitted to the ranks of “literary” sci-fi greats.  That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but the article in which Walters put forth that theory led me to another of his pieces, the aforementioned one where he talks about crap books.

Far be it from me to insist that there aren’t lots of crap books.  That would be crazy, and I even enjoy mocking one now and again.  But Walter’s theory, in a nutshell, seems to be that a) a lot of people are stupid, b) bestselling books are simple, and c) stupid people like simple stuff.  But here’s the thing: it isn’t so simple, figuring out what is simple.  I studied complexity theory for a while, unlike Walters, I daresay, so I bring my own perspective to this.

To a simple man, it may seem obvious how to tell if writing is complex – it must be the stuff that is harder to read, books where the plot performs all sorts of clever tricks and uses non-standard narrative techniques.  Heck, to some of the commentators to the post, it is even simpler – good books are the ones that are no fun to read.

But complex is not the same as complicated, which is where I think Walters runs into trouble.  Sure, something can be both, and complicated is the most obvious form of complex (the simplest version of complexity, as it were), but there are a lot of incredibly complex things that hide their complexity unless you know how to see it.  Walters, I imagine, refers to books being “complex” rather than “complicated” because the latter is rarely thought of as a good thing, while the former is more positive.  But these subtle shades of meaning are important, and those engaged in the writing game ought to pay attention to them.

Just because a book is enjoyable to read, just because the pace cracks along, just because it has only one narrative viewpoint, etc., doesn’t mean it was easy to write, and it doesn’t mean that it is simple, at heart.  It can be damn hard, damn complicated, to write something that seems so simple that a reader forgets they are even reading a book.  And there’s nothing wrong with it, either.  There’s nothing wrong with constantly reminding a reader how clever everyone in the room is to be keeping up with a complicated book either, but the idea that it is inherently superior is just weird.

Now, this is not to say that there aren’t plenty of horrible books that are simple, but figuring out why they’re horrible isn’t quite so simple.  And blanket pronouncements about which broad classes of books are good and which are bad is just simple-minded.

But then, perhaps I’m being too simplistic in my assessment.

Posted in General writing things

As I’ve established, I’m really a descriptivist when it comes to grammar, except in very important matters, where prescriptivism seems to be demanded.  One of these has recently come to my attention.  I speak, of course, of confusion between various metaphorical elephants and gorillas.

So once and for all:

Intimidating, right?

800-pound gorillas are large, scary creatures, capable of imposing their will on those around them.  Thus, they represent an entity with a great deal of influence that tends to throw its weight around (all 800 pounds of it).  Microsoft is a classic 800-pound gorilla.  But 800-pound gorillas don’t just hang out in rooms; that would be silly. “The 800-pound gorilla in the room” – nonsense.

Elephants are what are in rooms, where they are extremely difficult to ignore.  Obviously.  I mean,

Look at everyone trying to ignore it

could you ignore an elephant in the room?  Hence, your standard elephant represents something everyone knows (elephant in the room – hard to miss, given the relative sizes of elephants and rooms), but isn’t talking about (that part of the metaphor is slightly less clear).

This would just be a horrible gift

But a white elephant, now yeah, you’d know it was there, but how could you not talk about it?  (“Hey man, I see your elephant is white.  That’s weird, huh?”).  Using a white elephant in the room to represent something hard to ignore, that would just be gilding the lily (I’ll talk about gilded lillies later).  No no, a white elephant represents something that is valuable, in theory, but expensive to maintain, and impossible to get rid of, and here we look to history for our metaphors, since the kings of Siam used to give them to obnoxious courtiers as a jerky gift, or so it is said.

We also need to look to history for the good old “seeing the elephant”, which is simply a metaphor for extreme excitement, since back in the day it was pretty unusual to see an elephant (unless it was right there in the room with you for some reason, of course).  Nowadays of course, you can barely walk down the street without tripping over one, so it is a pretty uncommon expression, and hardly ever confused with elephants in rooms, or gorillas, or whatnot.  I include it only for the sake of completeness.

Pink elephants go beyond the merely unusual, of course, to the impossible, and are just what you see when you’re drunk.  Not so much a

See? Crazy

metaphor as a phantasm, I guess.

So now that that’s settled, I hope to hear no more about “white elephants in the room” or, saints preserve us “800-pound gorillas in the room” or so on.

Posted in Grammar Gripery, Metaphor!

Jefferson Quinn took a sip of his drink and grimaced. The bartender had called it Bourbon, had showed him the bottle and everything, but he was pretty sure it was mostly water and something he didn’t even want to think about giving it color. And what whiskey was in it was probably Canadian. It was a crime to sell something like that to a man from West Virginia, but then they might not know any better, here on the outskirts of Boston. He shook his head. It was tragic, the places his job took him to at times.

He stood and took the drink, whatever it was, to a rickety table in the corner. From what he heard, prohibition was going to be repealed soon, and maybe he’d be able to stop hanging around speakeasies. It really was a depressing place. There was a little stage, but no one was playing on it tonight, not on a Tuesday. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: The Figurine, Part 1’

Posted in Serials