Here’s a post at a site called AutoCrit: Internal vs. External Conflict: Balancing the Fight

[I]nternal and external conflicts are tricky to balance, and it’s easy to accidentally tip the scales one way or the other.

Swing the pendulum the other way, and you have deep, heartfelt characters that feel like our best friends. We care for them, we enjoy their company and we want to see them succeed… but the story becomes boring because they really don’t seem to do much of anything. There’s little for them to strive outwardly for, and the story itself feels one-dimensional and uninteresting.

Offhand I think we see a lot more Type One issues in SFF than Type Two. I can think of any number of grand sweeping epics where the characters are flat, and I bet you can too. For example, I felt that Ken Liu’s much-praised Grace of Kings was going in that direction and so I did not read on past the sample. I’m not even sure I finished the sample. We had Brave Boy and Bookish Boy, then disaster struck and Brave Boy saved Bookish Boy and . . . yeah, both characters seemed so flat to me at that point. If the disaster had played out the other way, I’d have been much more interested. Somehow that is the example that comes to mind for me, though I think we see grand adventures with flat characters more in science fiction than in fantasy.

The other way around, these great characters that you really connect to, but that don’t then seem to do much of anything, I don’t think we see that very often in SFF. Right? That is more something you expect in literary fiction. Except that I seldom have found characters in literary fiction very appealing. Realistic, maybe, but that’s something completely different. I’m thinking here of Tana French’s Into the Woods, where the characters are so well drawn, but the protagonist, driven by demons from his past, destroys his own life and pretty much his partner’s life during the course of the story. Triple ugh with a cherry on top, but I think you find that kind of thing a lot in literary fiction and far less in SFF.

This post goes on to define internal and external conflict and then offers solutions if you find your story has become unbalanced one way or the other:

Make every conflict a visible obstacle to the character’s goals

Give your characters complementary – or opposing – conflicts

Make your conflicts iconic

To me the most interesting point is this:

Internal conflict archetypes range from being driven to do what’s morally right in the face of overwhelming opposing forces, to wrestling with the darker side of your personality. Every one of us can relate to most internal conflicts, but an archetype arises when one becomes synonymous with the genre – or when the outcome becomes inevitable. Some may dismiss this as cliché, and on some level would be correct – but your job, as a writer, is to make the journey interesting. As long as you can do that, archetypes are generally not to be feared.

I agree. I have no problem with stereotypical situations or common tropes or clichés, as long as the writer has done a good job with the detail work. No trope or plot element or protagonist type is so stereotypical that it can’t be brought to vivid, unique life by a skilled author. Even if you’ve already encountered a hundred books where a young protagonist comes of age while fulfilling an ancient prophecy, I bet you will still enjoy Tui Sutherland’s Wings of Fire series.

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So, you have two choices when you’re writing dialogue. No, wait, three.

a) You can write good dialogue.
b) You can write bad dialogue.

I bet that seems like it exhausts the possibilities, doesn’t it? But no, because

c) You can write dialogue incorrectly.

Let’s start with the most trivial case, one you don’t see all that often actually in print:

c) Incorrect dialogue.

Any book published by an ordinarily competent publisher should be free of actual errors, which is why you should be able to pick any book off your bookshelves to see how to punctuate dialogue correctly. But look at this:

“You don’t have to retire,” Von protested.
“I do,” Eva rejected the compliment. “And if Liege Monitum doesn’t make me an offer soon, I will have to retire here.” She smiled. “You would keep me?”

And also this:

She took his face in her hands. “Promise me that you will be here? Promise me that you will dance with me?”
“I don’t know, Eva,” Von squirmed. “Liege Monitum may not want that.”

Do you see what’s wrong with these tidbits? Eva rejected the compliment and Von squirmed cannot in any way be substituted for Eva said or Von said. They are complete actions, not dialogue tags, but they are being used as dialogue tags. This is wrong. This is incorrect dialogue. In both these cases, there should have been a period rather than a comma inside the quote marks.

This is from an actual published book. There were things I liked about this book, and did finish it, but I then gave it away. Even though there aren’t a lot of errors, I keep mentally rolling my eyes when I hit things like the above and this is not conducive to a smooth reading experience.

b) correct but bad dialogue, type one

I’m a big fan of adverbs, compared to anybody who thinks NEVER USE ADVERBS EVER EVER EVER THIS MEANS YOU is a rule to live by. I think adverbs are a perfectly respectable part of speech, thank you. But here is a bit of dialogue which shows why so many writers turn against adverbs:

“I know we can’t do anything right for you, Ann,” he said, “by definition. But there is something I want to be sure you know before you go.”
“Flying is bad for my health,” Ann said sarcastically.
“Of course, but I didn’t mean that.” He looked down into his big, gentle hands.

Actually, this doesn’t bother me if you only see it now and then. But if characters are always saying things sarcastically or hastily or nervously or whatever, probably the author should go through and strip at least two thirds of those dialogue-tag adverbs out of the novel. Three quarters. Nine tenths, maybe.

You want to beware of adverbs in dialogue tags where the dialogue itself or the situation makes it plain that somebody’s sarcastic or hasty or nervous. If a car blows up, you don’t have to say it blew up suddenly. Because, hello? That is the nature of explosions? To be sudden? You only need to specify if an explosion happens slowly, somehow.

Where the dialogue and/or situation don’t indicate how a line is spoken, though, you can reasonably have somebody say something gently or sharply or harshly or whatever will draw the right picture for the reader. Though not too often.

When combined with another error — too much variety in dialogue tags — overuse of dialog-tag adverbs really stands out. On just one page of a book I read not so long ago, we have characters who:

Pleaded
Asked
Said
Countered
Volunteered
Exclaimed
Demanded
Pointed out

And the only two invisible tags in this list are “asked” and “said”. Any one of the others would be fine, even any two, but because there are so many different words used as tags, they start to catch the eye. And once the reader notices that there are too many different words being used as substitutes for the invisible “said”, this starts to sound more and more ridiculous.

b) grammatically correct but bad dialogue, type two

Boring dialogue is just as bad as overuse of creative tags. There are heaps of books with boring dialogue out there, but I don’t keep them, so it’s hard for me to come up with a good example. I’m talking about the kind of dialogue where every line is predictable, where every line serves to convey information but nothing about it surprises or engages or entertains the reader.

Sometimes this kind of dialogue is just used to dump info, where you aren’t having a conversation but a series of monologues, but that’s not necessarily the case. You can have what should be a quick, light conversation and yet every line said is boring and predictable and clichéd.

Info-dumpy or not, this is the kind of writing where you find yourself skimming ahead to see what happens because you aren’t really engaged in the story or interested in the characters. I personally seem to see this a lot in contemporary mysteries when I’m trying to find a new author my mother will like, which is hard because the old-time mystery writers were SO GOOD stylistically (Rex Stout, Emma Lathen, Ngaio Marsh) that it’s hard for contemporary writers to compete.

Serviceable but boring dialogue is easy to write, so lots of authors write it. Snappy dialogue is hard to write unless you happen to have a knack for it, which is something I envy because I don’t have that particular knack. Steven Brust does — check out his Vlad Taltos series. Laura Florand does — check out her romances. Lois McMaster Bujold does — check out her Vorkosigan books.

a) Fabulous non-use of dialogue tags by Lois McMaster Bujold.

If you’re looking for an example of how to minimize use of dialogue tags, you could hardly do better than Bujold. Just take any of her books off the shelf, flip it open randomly, and you get something like this:

Miles sank into his seat with a groan. “Some bodyguard you are,” he said to Elli. “Why didn’t you protect me from that interviewer?”

“I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I’ve been shy of fire ever since . . .” her hand touched her face.

Okay, he says five lines and she says five. How many actual dialogue tags are in this passage? Not ten. We have “said” once to get the conversational ball rolling. After that, there are no dialogue tags at all. But we aren’t allowed to get lost in who-said-what? confusion, because every time we need a reminder about who’s speaking, we get a movement tag. Elli grinned. Miles was vaguely cheered. She shuddered appreciation. He twitched singed eyebrows. She touched her face. That’s four lines of dialogue with no tag at all and five with a movement tag, and zero confusion.

Plus! Notice the adverb “vaguely”? See how great that adverb is? “Vaguely cheered” is so not the same as “cheered” – we get a way better idea of Miles’ state of mind because of this adverb. And in the next line, Elli declares that the picture of Miles on fire was “properly” terrifying. Then Miles tucks his hand “unobtrusively” under his other arm. See how good writers aren’t the least bit shy of using adverbs? But mostly don’t in dialogue tags.

Nobody I know of does dialogue better than Bujold. The rest of us could only improve by studying her dialogue and trying to consciously apply techniques that I bet she just uses by feel. That was from Brothers in Arms, btw, but I expect you all recognized it?

Here’s another example:

a) Snappy, fun, unexpected dialogue by Dean Koontz

Now, one of the reasons I like Koontz is that he is kinda horror-light, if you know what I mean. Things turn out happily in his books. The characters you become particularly attached to never get killed, whereas when the bad guys get eaten by mountain lions (or whatever), they are bad enough you can cheer their deaths. If there’s a dog? It won’t get killed, either. You can just absolutely trust all this, which I deeply appreciate because I really am not a hard-core horror fan.

But the Odd Thomas books are imo a definite step up from most of his other books, and the wit of his protagonist is one big thing that contributes to this.

Listen to this, from BROTHER ODD, the third book in the series. This is [part of] a conversation between Rodion Romanovich, who is supposed to be a librarian from Indianapolis but certainly isn’t, and the protagonist.

The kitchen offers stools here and there at counters, where you can have a cup of coffee or eat without being underfoot. I sought one of these – and came across Rodion Romanovich.

The pickle had a nice crunch. I wondered if Romanovich had added a few drops of anything lethal to the brine in the pickle jar. Well, too late. I took another bite of the dill.

Okay, I hope everybody finds that as much fun as I do. The interplay between these two characters adds such pizazz to this book!

You can also see that out of nineteen lines in which somebody speaks, there are only four real dialogue tags – three using a plain “said” and the other an equally plain and invisible “asked”; none using adverbs. There are also two movement tags. The other thirteen lines I’ve quoted don’t use tags at all, but it’s always crystal clear who’s speaking. Partly this because of grammatical conventions – ie, switching paragraphs between speakers – and partly it’s because the two characters’ voices are so utterly different.

Not only are the voices distinct and distinctive, but also very little in this exchange is predictable and boring.

Personally, I loved the bit where Romanovich says “I will once more be a full and complete Hoosier.” He’s a great character with a wonderful voice. Plus, hey, cake! I will just remove some of the suspense and assure you that the cakes are not poisoned.

Okay! That’s enough, I’m sure! Go forth and pay attention to dialogue! Me, I’m going to go re-read something by Lois McMaster Bujold now.

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As you may know, I’m participating in a writer’s workshop at ArmadilloCon this weekend. I really enjoy these, and this one sounds like a Really Big Deal — it goes all day, starting with panel discussions and so on, with the actual workshop in the afternoon. I have extensive written feedback to hand back to the four participants in my section, which I hope they all find helpful.

You have probably noticed that at any convention, if you ask a roomful of attendees who all is writing a book or thinking of writing a book, most of the hands go up. Today, when it’s so easy to throw a book up on the internet to sink or swim, I think it’s more important than ever to think about learning to write. About the craft of writing. About quality. About what makes a story sing. Which, in my more optimistic moments, I think I have managed to do, now and then.

Like so many other things worth doing, writing is a craft you learn. All the raw native talent in the world probably won’t let you whip off a great book, or even an adequate book, the first time you open up your laptop and start hitting the keys (though yes I can think of exceptions).

It seems to me that there are four major constituents of a story: setting, character, plot, and style (which includes sentence-level craft). (People frequently seem to forget style, but I think it is the foundation on which everything else is built.) What I have noticed in previous workshops, though to a lesser extent in the entries this time, is a focus on plot to the virtual exclusion of everything else.

After thinking about this, I went down to my personal library and pulled three books off the shelves. Let’s look at how talented authors establish setting and character in the very first pages, as well as setting up the plot.

I am pretty sure that one piece of (common) advice workshop attendees have frequently taken to heart is Start by setting something on fire. In other words, start in media res. Start in the middle of the action. Do not, for God’s sake, start with your character waking up, or driving somewhere, or staring into a mirror.

And that may be good advice, generally. But check this out, from The Breach by Patrick Lee:

————

On the first anniversary of his release from prison, Travis Chase woke at four in the morning to bright sunlight framing his window blinds. He put his backpack in his Explorer, left Fairbanks on State Route 2, and an hour later was on the hard-packed gravel of the Dalton Highway, running north toward the Arctic Circle and the Brooks Range beyond. From the crests of the highest hills, he could see the road and the pipeline snaking ahead for miles, over lesser ridges and through valleys blazing with pink fireweed.

The console showed an outside temperature of fifty-nine degrees. Travis lowered the windows and let the moist air rush through the vehicle. The height of summer here smelled like springtime back in Minneapolis, the scent of damp grass just freed from snow cover.

—————

Look! Travis woke up and now he is driving somewhere. We are emphatically not in the middle of the action. How much internal dilemma and scenery description does it take before we get a glimmer that something exciting may possibly be on the way? Twelve paragraphs – about four pages. And the first hint of trouble?

He woke with a quickened pulse, aware that something had startled him, but unable to tell what, exactly.

But a storm has come up, and he thinks that’s what woke him up – it might have, too, for all we can tell. There are quite a few more pages before stuff really starts happening.

Then things build and build and build and OMG you have no idea. Starting so quietly only makes it more effective when Lee starts to turn up the pressure. Have I mentioned this is one of the best SF thrillers EVER? It totally is, even though it was marketed as a mainstream contemporary thriller and not as SF at all.

But look how Lee does something a beginning writer often seems to have trouble with: he builds his world up around the protagonist, layering in sensory details to draw the reader right into the story. This is totally crucial. And if you’re writing a kind of more out-there SF or a secondary world fantasy? The farther you are from the contemporary world, the more important it is to build the setting.

And look at how Lee’s doing characterization right from the start It’s not a coincidence that Travis is heading to this really deserted, isolated, demanding country, or that he’s planning a route that’s going to avoid any chance of meeting anybody. We know something about the main character just from this choice. Plus, right away we get told this big thing about the main character: he’s been in prison and now he’s trying to figure out where to go with his life. Lee tells us this, but he’s showing us the protagonist’s sense of being stuck and his sense of alienation from normal life through the protagonist’s actions. That’s followed up with paragraphs like this:

What future did he see among [his family]? Even to the few who could understand and forgive what he’d done, he would always be the brother who’d spent half of his twenties and all of his thirties in prison. Twenty years from now, in the eyes of the next generation, he’d be that guy. That uncle. You could only get so free.

Right from the beginning, Lee is showing the reader this guy named Travis who did something – what? – something bad enough to be in prison for fifteen years. We have no clue what, but we know we’ll find out. We’re really interested, we’re drawn in. It doesn’t take an explosion to grab us, we’re already there. We can wait a few pages for the action to start.

But besides that, besides showing us this one character, Lee’s also showing that he understands the way people are, that he gets what it’s like to be that guy, the guy who’s an ex-con. We’re all nodding: Yeah, that’s true, that stuff about you can only get so free, it would really be like that, that’s just how a guy in Travis’s shoes would feel. This story is going to feel real because the author knows how to put real people into a book.

And the writing itself is deft. Lee is showing craftsmanship. It’s not just grammatically correct – though it is – it’s just good. If you read the first few pages carefully, you’ll find a fragment sentence – but you’d never notice it if you weren’t looking, because it fits the rhythm of the writing. And there is a rhythm to it. That’s important. Lee’s prose sounds good to the ear.

Look at the first two paragraphs above. You know how many words are in each sentence in that first paragraph? 24, 37, and 27. Now look at the second paragraph: 5, 3, and 18. Five and three! Look how much impact those short, punchy sentences have after all those long flowing sentences before. You don’t have to stop and analyze the writing to feel the punch, nobody’s going to stop and analyze this! You just feel it.

Style is so important. A feel for the language is so important. And we don’t have to worry about that with Lee. We know that in the first page, we can feel it. We can trust this writer. He’s going to tell us a story and we’re going to relax and let him take on his roller coaster ride.

Now, there are things that can go wrong with a book that starts well, obviously. Plot holes (I had a pretty serious suspension-of-disbelief problem with this very book), characters that are annoying for one reason or another (The woman needs to be rescued again? Really?). Maybe the plot is a bit too predictable. (Now, that’s not a problem with Lee!)

But that sort of thing is definitely not what an aspiring writer should be thinking of when thinking about how to write a novel that works. And definitely not when trying to hook the reader in those first couple of all-important pages. That writer should be thinking about building setting and character. And while it’s important to have a plot that flows from the beginning straight through the end, with good character arcs for the important (and some secondary) characters, it’s even more important to think about style and developing a feel for language.

The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen offers another beautiful beginning:

—————————

The day Paxton Osgood took the box of heavy-stock, foil-lined envelopes to the post office, the ones she’d had a professional calligrapher address, it began to rain so hard the air turned as white as bleached cotton. By nightfall, rivers had crested at flood stage and, for the first time since 1936, the mail couldn’t be delivered. When things began to dry out, when basements were pumped free of water and branches were cleared from yards and streets, the invitations were finally delivered, but to all the wrong houses. Neighbors laughed over fences, handling the misdelivered pieces of mail to their rightful owners with comments about the crazy weather and their careless postman. The next day, an unusual number of people showed up at the doctor’s office with infected paper cuts, because the envelopes had sealed, cementlike, from the moisture. Later, the single-card invitations themselves seemed to hide and pop back up at random. Mrs. Jameson’s invitation disappeared for two days, then reappeared in a bird’s nest outside. Harper Rowley’s invitation was found in the church bell tower, Mr. Kingsley’s in his elderly mother’s garden shed.

But no one was paying attention. Least of all Willa Jackson.

—————————-

What a charming book this one turned out to be! It’s the first one of Allen’s I’ve ever read, and really delightful, all about friendship and family loyalty and what it means to be adult and the bonds we feel to the past. Especially friendship, an emphasis I always appreciate. I’ve been a big fan of Allen’s ever since I read this story.

It’s also a story that falls into a somewhat unusual category: magical realism. This is a world where the saying that digging up one secret releases others isn’t just a saying, and where you’re not quite sure that the old tale in town about bottles filled with fog couldn’t be literally true. I really enjoy magical realism, which I first encountered in A Winter’s Tale by Helprin. I loved that book, but Allen’s book is more approachable and has such appeal and charm, not to mention very sweet romances.

Also, not to belabor the point from the previous point, but see how this story starts? So gently and softly, even though the second paragraph sets up tension and also assure you that this book really is fantasy, which isn’t obvious, btw, and I was kind of thinking it was contemporary when I picked it up off the TBR pile, but it’s not, quite; and I thought it might be a mystery, but it’s not that either – quite. One curious little detail is that the protagonists never do find out the truth about the thing that happened in the past and that’s driving the story now – isn’t that interesting? (The reader does find out, but not the protagonists.) But the way the secret stays hidden ties into the theme of friendship and loyalty very nicely.

Here’s a third example of an excellent beginning: Gunmetal Magic by Ilona Andrews.

For snappy dialogue and fun situations and a couple of GREAT practical jokes – I’m so tempted to give away the thing with the purple carpet, but I won’t – anyway, this is a great story. The story also offers a couple of very nice little tidbits about hyena behavior that are actually based on reality. Though that bit about how hyena siblings fight and kill each other, I don’t think that’s accurate, btw. Hans Kruuk never mentioned anything like that, and van Lawick provided anecdotal data which would tend to imply the reverse – strong friendly bonds between siblings. But the thing about hyena cubs digging dens too small for adults to fit into in order to get away from potentially deadly adult males is absolutely true.

Plus besides the stuff about hyenas, we get an Olde English Bulldogge! Nobody even knows that breed exists except me! And Ilona Andrews, apparently! I LOVE the way these authors know their dogs! So unusual!

Anyway, if you’re thinking about picking up a paranormal, this is a great choice. If you’ve never tried paranormals, this series is a good place to start, but I’ll just add that the first book is okay, the second better, and the series really hits its stride after that, so be patient and pick up the first three before you make up your mind. And the other series, the Edge series by the same authors – also quite good.

Plus! GUNMETAL MAGIC itself is long enough you don’t feel cheated, but – and though this is mentioned on the back cover, it was a nice surprise for me – as a bonus there’s also a hundred-page Kate Daniels novella at the back.

————————–

Thud!

Thud!

————————–

So you see, sometimes you really do start in the middle of the action. I didn’t want to leave everybody with the idea that you never do this. There’s this tiny little prologue, disguised as a couple of paragraphs of a newspaper article and clearly meant to orient new readers, but I think the authors are expecting most readers to be familiar with their world and characters, and I suspect they are right. So they jump right in with a series of action scenes before we start to develop the important personal dilemmas and relationship stuff that form the heart of the story.

On the other hand . . . ever hear how you aren’t supposed to start a novel with your protagonist waking up from a dream? Because actually, the above snippet IS a dream, and then Andrea wakes up. And it’s a great scene, because she’s tucked in the closet and holding a butcher’s knife. Sleepwalking to get a butcher’s knife probably does not count as the sort of dream that bores people! Which of course is why it works to start this book.

So. What an author should strive to do is use the very first page to establish style and tone, setting and character, and then maybe get the plot started. But if the rest falls into place, I do think the reader will give you a few pages to get to the action. Whereas if you jump into the action without nailing the rest, a whole lot of readers will close your book and go on to the next on their TBR pile, because action and plot are nothing without character and context.

I will add, this has been the Working on Beginning a Novel summer for me. I usually try to finish a project over the summer. Not this year! I have instead started four (4) different novels, each of which are between 50 and 100 pages long now. This year, I may need to actually participate in NaNoWriMo in order to finish one by the end of the year…

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This week, I’ve got a couple startling glimpses of the past to share with you:

Copper-covered mummies discovered in remote Siberia from a long-lost Arctic civilisation

The mummified remains of a baby and an adult have been discovered in a medieval necropolis in remote Siberia. The adult was covered in copper from head to toe, while small fragments of copper boiler were placed on the baby.

Archaeologists have yet to find out what exactly these funerary rituals meant. It is also unclear what mysterious ancient civilisation these two individuals belonged to. However, the archaeological site where they were discovered has been known for twenty years and has already revealed a number of secrets about the past….

You know what? Archaeology cannot “discover” exactly what those funerary rights meant. How could anybody possibly do that, absent a time machine? “Meaning” is not something that can be dug up and explicated for posterity. Still, this is quite something.

Next:

Imaging Reveals Medieval Manuscript Hidden in Book Binding

In the mid-16th century, a bookbinder picked up a piece of parchment — one that was already centuries old — and used it to bind a book of poetry. This parchment’s text remained unreadable for nearly 500 years, but now, thanks to state-of-the-art imaging techniques, people can read its words once more, according to a new study….The team sent the book to the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) in Ithaca, New York, where powerful X-rays fully imaged the text and its marginal comments. When the researchers sent the results to study co-researcher Richard Kieckhefer, a professor of religion and history at Northwestern, he announced that it was a sixth-century Roman law code with notes referencing the church’s canon law

Now how about *that*? The things you can do with modern technology. Amazing.

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Hey, all, here is a blog post at Willow Raven’s site, showcasing the cover for Shadow Twin.

Here’s what I’m going with as back cover copy, so far:

After everything she’s seen, Natividad was sure Ezekiel could take care of himself. Under any circumstances. Against any enemy. Whether he was temporarily exiled from Dimilioc or not. Then the link between them, forged when she absorbed a trace of Ezekiel’s shadow, makes it clear she was wrong.

But when Miguel and Natividad and the wolves of Dimilioc have no choice but to walk into a trap, even human ingenuity may not be able to get them out again…

I have always liked Miguel, the only non-super-powered sibling and one of the very few ordinary people living in Dimilioc. He is far more front-and-center in this third book than he ever has been before — except in that one short story with Cassie, of course.

Cassie isn’t actually present for most of the action in Shadow Twin. But the text exchanges between Miguel and Cassie are one of my favorite details.

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…. I hate to say this, because I hope you are all waiting breathlessly for the release of Shadow Twin, but I have decided it will be better to release this book next spring rather than this summer.

Several factors have gone into this decision, but the most important is this: I have nothing scheduled for traditional release in 2018. I can’t stand an empty year. Given that I had two traditional releases this year, I think it just makes sense to make 2018 THE YEAR to really pursue self-publication. Do the whole thing: apply for Book Bub ads and really try to promote my titles (but not, of course, with spam tweets or anything).

I’m thinking of a 2018 schedule pretty much like this:

February: Shadow Twin. That will put it three months after the release of Winter of Ice and Iron, which is better than stacking one release right on top of another.

March or April: Third collection of Black Dog short stories. (I need to write two and a half more stories. I have a great novella which I just love, plus the beginning of a short story or novelette. If there is a particular character you would like to see featured in a Black Dog story, you should definitely let me know because I’m still playing with ideas.)

June or July: Something that is not related to the Black Dog world. I am thinking of a collection of unrelated novellas and novelettes. I have a nice novella sitting right here that is not related to anything else I’ve ever written; and I would like to take the protagonist who got excised from The Mountain of Kept Memory and turn the first part of his story into a novella. After that, well, I have various ideas.

You know what would be interesting? Trying to do a tie-in novella or short story for each book currently published. Start with The City in the Lake and just go straight through my whole bibliography, one story per. I don’t know that I’ll do that, but it’s an idea.

October or November: Door Into Light, the sequel to House of Shadows.

I know, right? It’s been practically forever. I’m thinking 2018 looks good for that. Heaven knows when I will ever get rights back to HoS, so I don’t think there’s much point waiting for that. So that suggests I should just go ahead with it, and next year looks like a reasonable time to pursue that option.

Getting the rights back to The Floating Islands may be complicated for various reasons, but if I can get that to happen in the near future, then I could either seek a new home for that one plus the sequel plus perhaps a third book, or I could self-publish.

So you see, there are quite a few possibilities for 2018.

Meanwhile, of course, I will be working on various things aimed at traditional publication. The plan is to make 2018 an exciting year, not allow it to stand empty; but I don’t intend to stop traditionally publishing books either.

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So, yesterday Paul Weimer commented on Twitter that Elizabeth Bear’s Eternal Sky trilogy is perhaps not the very best epic fantasy to start with, if you aren’t already a fan of epic fantasy. Fine as that trilogy is, this is undoubtedly true! Which instantly leads to the question, what epic fantasies ARE good ones to offer someone new to the subgenre?

Naturally I wandered downstairs, perused my library for a while, and shortly thereafter had developed a Top Five Epic Fantasies for Beginners list, which I will share with you all forthwith.

First, though, definition time! What makes a fantasy an EPIC fantasy? Naturally opinions on this will differ. Here are the four criteria I used to winnow down my library:

a. Must have a high fantasy tone.
b. Must be at least a trilogy.
c. Must have multiple points of view.
d. Must be broad-scale — cover a large geographical region or a long time period, or both.

So those are the criteria I was looking for. After that, it was all about which series were likely to appeal to readers who might already like other kinds of fantasy, but are perhaps new to epic fantasy. While I’m sure there are plenty, here’s my top five suggestions:

1. The Riddle Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip.

Why I think this is a good choice: first, the reader spends a lot of time with each point-of-view character. I think leaping briskly from one pov to another is one major feature that turns off newcomers to epic fantasy. I’m sure I’m biased: it’s a feature of epic fantasy that is often problematic for me. But you will see that all my choices encourage the reader to really get involved in each protagonist’s life and also to get emotionally attached to each one. It helps if there are relatively few pov protagonists, which is the case here.

Second, the story is engaging, with plenty of emotional depth and several unexpected turns. (I think; I’m so familiar with the story now it’s a little hard to tell.) Plus, this is McKillip, so the writing is just beautiful.

Third, for the large number of readers who are fans of YA, there are lots of YA elements in this trilogy. It’s the kind of story that would probably be considered YA today. So it should be a good choice to transition from YA toward the broader category of epic fantasy.

2. The Fionovar Tapestry by GGK.

I hear that publishers believe that portal fantasy doesn’t sell. I don’t know about that; they seem quite popular to me. This is one of the best, plus the modern American characters who step into the fantasy world easily carry the modern American reader into that world.

Again, lots of YA elements here. Again, characters with whom the reader can easily engage. Again, truly lovely writing — there’s a reason I’m always so flattered to be compared to McKillip and GGK. The plot follows each of the five — six? more? — protagonists, but braids everything together so smoothly the reader never feels confused or lost.

3. The Riftwar Saga by Raymond Feist

I’ve always wondered how Feist could possibly have thought it was okay to name a protagonist “Pug.” I mean . . . Pug.

However, this is still a really good series! Which spins off into other series, some of which are also good — I like Daughter of the Empire a lot — but certainly the original three (four, depending on edition) series can be read as a standalone epic. Lots of the same characteristics as the above two, but, to my taste, for sheer beauty, they definitely go in this order, with a biggish gap between the top two and this one.

4. The Darwath Trilogy by Barbara Hambly

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I would not personally recommend going beyond the first three books, which tie off the original story line just fine. I love Barbara Hambly — I really do — but the other books in this series are not her best.

She is often a really good writer, though, and before she switched to historicals she wrote plenty of excellent fantasy. This is not my favorite of her work, but it’s the most clearly epic fantasy, I think. Even at that, I’m not completely sure I’d count it as epic fantasy. It’s got smaller scope than the three above, for sure. For that reason, it might serve as a good stepping stone from adventure fantasy to epic fantasy. (Among Hambly’s standalone fantasies, Bride of the Rat God is hard to beat, btw).

5. Shadow’s Daughter and that whole series by Stephanie Meier, SM Stirling, and Karen Wehrstein.

The whole series consists of, let me see:

Shadow’s Daughter, Snowbrother, The Cage, Shadow’s Son, Saber and Shadow, Lion’s Heart, Lion’s Soul. The books interlock rather than following one directly after another, although some are paired, especially the final two. Each book reads like adventure fantasy and I’m not one hundred percent sure I should really count them as epic fantasy. Like the above selection for (4), I think they might serve more as a link between adventure fantasy and epic fantasy. Maybe I’m being too picky about what really counts as epic fantasy, though. If you’ve read them, what do you think?

Anyway, lots of similar features to the above — approachable characters with whom the reader spends a lot of time and to whom the reader can become emotionally attached, lots of elements that should appeal to fans of YA, relatively fast pace. I grant you, these books are not perfect in every way. I didn’t care for Snowbrother and I’m not sure I even own a copy any more. Also, Chevenga (Lion’s Heart, Lion’s Soul) is quiiiite the perfect young man. I actually rather like hypercompetent protagonists, so I enjoyed these books very much.

Okay! That’s five. I think the first three are particularly good examples of fantasy that is definitely epic but also likely to appeal to newcomers to the subgenre. Weigh in on these selections and offer your own in the comments!

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