Teaser from an Untitled Work in Progress

I’ve read some great stuff in the last month or so, and wanted to point to some books that I thought people would particularly enjoy. Most of these were read on the Kindle, and I will usually link to that version if it’s available.

I loved Amanda Downum’s The Drowning City and The Bone Palace. Her work reminded me a lot of Martha Wells’ richly textured fantasy, and I thought Savedra was the best of any trans character I’ve encountered so far in fantasy. In grabbing links for this blog post, I realized there’s a third, Kingdoms of Dust, so that’s getting snagged right now.

Gemma Files’ fantasy western, A Book Of Tongues, was awesome and features a great character in the form of Chess, a saucy red-headed ex-whore and hexslinger who’s following his lover Rook and the rest of his outlaw band. I’m looking forward to the sequel, A Rope of Thorns, to the point where I am saving it for sometime when I can sit down and happily devour the book in a single setting.

I finally finished up the Hunger Games trilogy with Mockingjay. It’s a good, solid trilogy, but the first remains my favorite.

Joselle Vanderhoof was kind enough to give me a copy of Sleeping Beauty Indeed & Other Lesbian Fairytales while I was at ArmadilloCon. I got very tired of retold fairy tales while working with Fantasy Magazine, but there’s plenty in here doing something interesting rather than just regurgitating the tale.

I went back and reread Barry Hughart’s The Story of the Stone since I discovered it on Kindle, and knew I wanted something good for a plane trip. I first ran across the series in ancient days and still think it’s a lovely piece of fantasy and I wish there were more than just a few books about Master Li and Number Ten Ox.

The same trip was good for reading Masked, edited by Lou Anders, an anthology of superhero stories which is a nice addition to that field and has some stories

Rereads included E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series, which I re-read every few years as comfort food, and just love. They take place in early 20th century small English towns and feature village life at its most intensely gossipy and social. I must admit, I read a lot of books with the thought “boy, a fantasy version of this would be great” lurking in the back of my head, and this is one I’d love to see translated, although I think it’d take some major talent to pull it off.

(Saturday class – you haven’t had this session yet, don’t worry, we will this weekend!)

Week Three deals with the world of the story: both the setting (the world as the characters know it) and the world of the narrative (the world as the readers, who have the benefit of additional information like title, tone, and style, know it).

We looked at the beginnings of several pieces, including one of my all-time favorite books, Matt Ruff’s SET THIS HOUSE IN ORDER and Sara Genge’s short story, “No Jubjub Birds Tonight” from the anthology DESTINATION FUTURE.

Looking at the punctuation of the beginning of Stephen King’s THE STAND helped talk about how a world gets set up by style and narrative methods. Tone was compared to the emotion conveyed by a human voice and I mentioned that if you have two strong emotions working in a story, the best effect is gained if they are contradictory in some way.

We also talked about some of the things involved in style and the strategies for looking at your own work in order to figure out what’s characteristic of your style. I mentioned that often in writing one returns to the stories that shaped and fascinated us and pointed to “Magnificent Pigs” (CHARLOTTE’S WEB), “The Mermaids Singing Each To Each” (THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA), and “Long Enough and Just So Long” (“The Menace from Earth” and PODKAYNE OF MARS) as places where I’d done that in my own work.

In talking about metafiction as a particular style, we looked at the beginning of Kelly Link’s “Travels With The Snow Queen,” from STRANGER THINGS HAPPEN.

In the area of world-building, we meandered freely, talking about how much detail to include, the advantages of writing in a persistant world, using sensory detail to make a world feel real, the RPG approach and how it can lead to cat-vacuuming.

Next week’s assignment is the expository lump exercise, taken from Ursula K. LeGuin’s excellent book, STEERING THE CRAFT, which will start us off talking about delivering information, using description, and literary devices.

Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.