I finished The Lies of Locke Lamora last week, but an element in the middle bothered me. Act I of the book (it closely followed a three-act structure) was mostly setup, but Act II introduced a supremely powerful new villain. This villain somehow knew every one of the protagonist’s secrets. He effortlessly out-maneuvered the most clever secondary characters, then the protagonist. The villain’s henchman wielded dominating power that left the protagonist utterly helpless.

Despite this almost comical power imbalance, the seemingly invincible antagonist made Act II a gripping read by wrecking the protagonist’s life. The tension level was off the charts. I kept wondering “how’s the protagonist ever going to defeat this guy.” Then in the climax of Act III, when the stakes were the highest, the protagonist used a simple loophole, a thing that he’d already considered in Act II, to easily neutralize the antagonist’s supreme power and defeat him in less than a page.

So I got to thinking about this paradox. A powerful antagonist will cause lots of conflict, which is good. But the more powerful he is, the harder it will be for the protagonist to defeat him. When the protagonist eventually does triumph, that victory needs to be extremely clever or brave or strong to make it feel justified.

In Locke Lamora, the protagonist’s eventual victory was way too easy, especially given the antagonist’s seemingly limitless power. But by that point in the novel, the gripping read of the middle (largely due to teh conflict caused by that antagonist’s power) had already hooked my attention. I still found the climax weak, and partly because of that I’m not planning to read the sequel. But it seems that the dominantly powerful antagonist was a compelling element even though his defeat was unjustified.

Heaven help my atheist soul, I have a blog. As I don’t yet know how best to do this stuff, all I can say is that I will be working very hard to have it only concern itself with writing fiction.  It will likely be my online Klaxon for news about stories, essays, and general ruminations about fiction with the occasional post about that other side of my brain concerned with military history.

So, on that front, I am  “auditioning” to be a reviewer at the Fix. When I have more to share, I’ll post it here.

Thanks to Erin for making this all possible. It sure beats sticking post it notes to my Abacus and mailing it to everyone on earth!

JSR

If the muse is late for work, you start without her.”
– Peter S. Beagle

I’m over halfway through The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch. I’m always curious in F debut novels to see what element might have caught the notice of the publisher. So far, the world of Lies is incredibly vivid; the story is a ripping yarn in the best classic F thief-tale style. But the shallow POV and the narrative structure are driving me nuts.

The alternating chapters of boyhood-Locke’s coming of age and grownup-Locke’s scheming leave me feeling jerked around. The boyhood stuff is solid, and the chapters are cleverly ordered so the timelines compliment each other. But every time I finish one of the current chapters, I hate to have the plot interrupted by another boyhood interlude.

The shallow omni POV also leaves me feeling distant from the characters. I don’t mind a narrative zoom-in or zoom-out at the start or end of a scene, telling me something outside the character’s view (like an unseen pursuer tailing our heroes). The POV at least head-hops smoothly from one character into another in the same scene, rather than abruptly. But I’m constantly distracted by the huge quantities of arbitrarily withheld information — things that Locke and the other POV characters obviously know but the author is artificially hiding from the reader to maintain suspense.

This all combines to make the narrative feel extremely distant to me. The POV does describe the characters’ simple emotions and physical reactions, but except for that, it feels almost cinematic.

Maybe it’s the back-cover comparison to Ocean’s Eleven that sparked this thought, but I think what Lynch has done is write a prose movie. His shallow POV communicates the characters’ basic inner thoughts, the same things shown in an actor’s gestures and expressions. Information that the protagonists know is withheld, just like in a movie, so the reader is surprised at the later revelations.

As a proponant of the limited third-person POV, I’m not sure how I feel about this. Limited-third evolved as a response to the rise of movies and TV–a way to get inside a character’s head that those visual formats could not achieve. Lynch isn’t so much regressing to the authorial omni POV of Tolkien and Lewis, but presenting his story in a movie-like format that is physically vivid yet shallow in characterization.

But if characters are defined foremost by their actions, is this shallow “movie” third-person all a ripping yarn type of story needs? In this age of F video games and F blockbuster movies, is a shallow “movie” POV good enough to reach most readers?

My writing buddy Pantsless Justin posed a neat question recently:

The speculative aspect (in SF/F Fiction) — can it be entirely in the period and the setting, the moral code, and the language with which the tale is told?

I certainly think so. But then again, I’ve written a lot of “fake historical” F (a term coined for Guy Gavriel Kay’s work), and it had very little obvious magic. I also love historical fiction. So I don’t care how much overt speculative-ness is in a story, or if there is any at all, so long as the setting is neat and the characters are captivating.

Many other writers and editors disagree. I had a lot of trouble with critiquers who weren’t sure whether my “fake historical” F was supposed to be speculative or not. A bigger issue may be readers — most F readers want obvious speculative elements, for awe and wonder, and they’ll be looking for them as they read.

I think the most important thing is to write the story you want to write, and worry later about how speculative it is and where you should submit it. This approach of course can lead to a stable of stories that don’t quite fit any market out there (ask me how I know! :) ), but I do think it’s the best way for a writer to hone their natural voice and produce the best possible work.

If what Ann VanderMeer told me last spring still holds, my short story “Excision” will be in Weird Tales #347, her first issue, which is supposed to be out this week. But the Table of Contents hasn’t been released yet, and the Weird Tales blog says #346 is coming out this week. I’m [...]

“It’s the job that’s never started that takes longest to finish.” J.R.R. Tolkien

Back from Context, and I enjoyed it a great deal. Con report comes later, since I'm still behind on the updateage. But I managed to hijack a panel into talking about virtual worlds, where the new gig and the idea behind it (also more later) gained a lot of enthusiastic traction, which was very cool. Didn't catch up with people as much as I would have liked (las, nayad), but it was a lightning fast convention -- and I'd like to go again next year.

But here's the new place.



The sprawling crabapple tree about fifteen feet from my door:


When I look outside the big window, this is pretty much what I see, though obviously without the cottage in the way:


I officially live on the St. Lawrence River:

(And walked out onto that dock to take a picture of the water, but it apparently didn't come out.

This sucker was the first thing I saw when I walked into the cottage:


I thought it was plastic, but my dad says it's most likely real. Yay taxidermy!



There are more photos in that parent directory, but basically this one gives a good idea of the property size, this is my driveway, which goes past two other cottages and is about a quarter mile from the road, and this is about what it looks like right now, my favorite time of the evening. A big flock of sparrows comes down about this same time every night to peck around in the dust just outside my door -- it sounds like rain.