"This Should Not Be Hard Between Two Sane, Consenting Adults."

I was writing about the difficulties of communication over on FetLife, and I got a sniffy comment that was essentially, “This is not a difficult thing to work out between two sane, mature adults.”
No.  It’s not difficult between two sane, consenting adults.  It rarely is.
Unfortunately, we’re also rarely entirely sane.
Thing is, sanity is a percentage.  We all have weak spots where if you poke us, we melt down.  We all have embarrassing hotspots that we reflexively conceal, whether we should or not.  You can be perfectly sane about 99% of things, but everyone has some crazy spot that triggers them into overreacting.  And everyone has some emotional issue that, when raised, makes them word not so good that communicates are mall workingfail.
And when someone skips across your insane zones – you have them – then you react in bizarre ways, and God forbid your bizarre reactions trample on your partner’s insane zone.  If you’re lucky, eventually you deal with it.  But that doesn’t make it magically “not hard” to do, especially when your monkey-brain wants to bite their face off for leaving toothpaste on the sink again.
If I only wrote essays aimed at sane, mature adults interacting with other sane, mature adults, the entirety of my output would consist of “Trust your instincts.”  But no.  I’m writing essays aimed at people who are, say, 86% sane (which is actually a pretty good sanity ratio), and dealing with someone who, up until now, has appeared to been sane 100% of the time (but we both know that’s not true).  And we’re asking what happens when either you’re walking into the minefield of your 14% craziness, or are unsure what proportion of crazy your partner has or even where their crazy-zones are.
Of course this issue is not difficult to work out for two sane, consenting adults.  No issue is.  Might as well say that “Being married is not a difficult thing to work out between two sane, mature adults” or “Raising a child is not a difficult thing to work out between two sane, mature adults,” or any other number of other flabbily unhelpful things, mainly because the definition of “a sane, mature adult” usually lines up darned closely to “someone who never has problems with common issues.”
But as for the rest of us, we’re navigating a list of unspoken assumptions with people we don’t know quite as well as we’d like (which is, actually, everybody we love), trying to see whether the insanity lies within them, or within us, or within both.
And making the blanket assumption that everyone will be as sane as you on this topic tells us that a) this place is somewhere that you are perfectly sane, and b) one of your insanities may lie in the field of empathy.

Numenera Write-Up, Or: My City Of Echoes

As a Numenera GM, I have a love-hate relationship with the game.  I love the setting; there’s just not enough of it.
Which is to say that by the time I got to Planescape, there were fifteen sourcebooks detailing the setting, and I did not have to make anything up.  Now, I’m not opposed to making things up; hell, “generating worlds” is what I do in my fiction.
But when I’m GMing, I want to play with my characters like Barbie dolls, making them walk through the big Barbie Dream House.  I don’t want to make up a town myself; no, I want to fall in love with a town that someone else has made up, and then bring it to life for my PCs!  And so Numenera, which currently has no detailed sourcebooks, makes me a sad GM; I have to take the three paragraphs detailing, say, Eldan Firth, and make it all up.
And what if future sourcebooks contradict my ideas?  What if some day, Monte and Shanna write the Eldan Firth sourcebook, and it’s not at all what I envisioned?  I’m a canon freak, I like playing in other people’s sandboxes, so the idea that they could shatter the concept of what my town is unnerves me.  I want to be faithful to Numenera’s setting, not create some home brew!
And yet Numenera is so awesome as a game that I must make things up, or else I cannot play it.  And so I present to you, my take on one of the classic Numenera cities:
Shallamas, City Of Echoes.  (P. 139 in the sourcebook.)
Shallamas is a city twisted by love of assassination.  Those who murder in the dark here are celebrated folk heroes – even the ordinary citizens cheer when a stranger is abducted and never heard from again, for assassins were all that drove those Draolish bastards from their beloved city.
The history is simple: years back, the Draolish made a push from down South and captured Shallamas.  They garrisoned the town, filling it with their best guards, as Shallamas was one of Navarene’s most prized trading posts – and having captured it in a hard-won campaign, they were determined to keep a grip on it.  The city, which had relied on Queen Armalu’s troops for protection, found itself helpless.
So they did what smaller forces always did: they struck where they could, striking in the dark, chipping away at the edges of the Draolish power.  But Shallamas had a unique issue that made it harder on the locals –
– the echoes.
Without warning, residents of Shallamas will see and hear “echoes” of recent events, so accurate a picture of the past that viewing an echo is accepted as evidence in court.  Knife a man in a back alley at night, there’s a good chance that three days later your crime may be replayed at noon.  And so any criminal activity is extremely dangerous in Shallamar, as the people in power have a decent chance of stumbling across replayed evidence.
The Shallamarians took this as a challenge.
Led by One-Eyed Argrash Provani, the rebellion created a vast set of tunnels and traps underneath the city, to this day proudly called The Murder Holes, where unwitting guards could be tricked, dragged, or abducted.  They wore identical hoods to ensure that if they were seen, no one would notice.  They struck from places no one would think to look in, so even the murder was replayed, who would be watching the rafters?  The Provani used poisons, cyphers, never using the same approach twice, filling the Draolish with fear…
…and eventually, after a celebrated coup known as the Night of the Black Knives that took out three Draolish captains in one night, the Draolish retreated.
Years later, the Provani still rule the town, and assassination is seen as the reason no one else has invaded.  Only servants and peasants wear bright clothing, purposely given to them to mark them as targets; those in power wear loose-fitting robes of black and silver, seemingly identical from a distance.  (Nobles in Shallamas quickly come to mark distinctions in fabric and weave to see which robes are the most expensive.)
The Provani, a large and loosely-bonded family, pride themselves on their ability to still kill quietly.  From a young age, the Provani children are taught that stealing isn’t a crime, getting caught is.  A nobleman who can’t climb a rain-slickened wall or sneak past his own servants is considered a fool – though such noblemen often hire younger assassins to look out for them, a tactic that sometimes backfires.  The weakest of the Provani are assigned to bureaucratic positions, the lowest level of which are the tax collectors; it’s considered a deep shame to have to walk into someone’s house and take money by force.
The Provani are clannish but bored.  They’ve shredded the power of all the competing families, and so have begun to play elaborate power games among themselves.  The prosperity of the town is working against them, as the quiet peace leaves a family of killers little to do, and so the Provani are beginning to fragment as infighting and boredom take their toll.  Only the constant machinations of the current head of the family, Argust Provani, keeps the Provani in line, earning him the name Lord of Intrigues.
As for the people of Shallamas, they harbor the deep suspicion that if an assassin has killed someone, then that person must have deserved it.  They’re still horrified by death – the ideal is someone who vanishes without a trace, never being seen again.  (Clever merchants have discovered that if they can slip out of town unnoticed, they can often abandon some great debts under the pretense of being “assassinated,” so long as they commit to never returning to Shallamas.)  Finding a body in the street has a double horror for the people of Shallamas – at seeing a friend killed, and knowing that they were killed clumsily, doubtlessly by some outsider ruffian.
As such, Argust Provani uses his Shadowlings (secretly family members who he trusts) to stamp out “crime” – which is defined loosely as “Anything that interferes with the goals of the Provani family.”  The Provani, despite their infighting, want the town to prosper through merchant trade, and so merchants find it to be a very safe space.  Anyone who steals from a merchant is likely to find a short and violent retribution awaiting them.  Unless they steal in a surpassingly clever way, in which case the thief might find a highly-placed Provani willing to bring them in as a new “cousin.”
There are four marketplaces in Shallamas – one at each of the three Great Gates that allow entrance to the city, and one in the center.  Visitors note that the walls of Shallamas appear to be stone from a distance, but up close are made of some granular material that shifts slightly when no one is looking, and seems to expand and contract slightly as the day goes on.
The three marketplaces at the gates are split up by what merchandise they sell.  There’s Devour, where all the foodstuffs are sold – a mucky market filled with blood from the slaughterhouses.  There’s The Bleed, where weapons, armor, and training are sold.  And then there’s the Turned Eye, the fashion district.
All three gates are guarded by an affable man called Tryp, a man who used to Exist Partially Out of Phase before a cypher accident caused him to split into three equidistant blurs.  Now he exists in three places; as you talk to him at the Devour gate, he’ll often pause and mutter an aside to thin air as he answers a question posed to him at the Turned Eye gate.  Tryp can no longer be touched or interact with the physical world, a fact he laments, but a squadron of guards at each gate serves him loyally and without question.
The real jewel of Shallamas is The Culvert, the central market surrounding the Provani palace where “all the interesting things wash up.”  That’s where merchants ply the most intriguing wares – almost any numenera can be found here, if you look long enough.  Getting a slot in The Culvert is a highly political thing; many a provider of exotic armor or bizarre foodstuffs has petitioned the Provanis to be put in The Culvert, only to be stuck in the Turned Eye or the Bleed.  In particular, there is a decanted merchant named Liquil who sells exotic animals, condemned to work in the slaughterhouse of the Devour even though he’d be horrified if anyone ate his singing pigs or the brown-winged wagonhauler.
The Culvert bumps up against the batwing-shaped curve of Inviola, the large and mazelike warren-castle that the Provani inhabit.  Made of an unknown black material that makes an unnerving chiming noise whenever rain falls on it, it’s rumored the Inviola was here when Shallamas was created, and the town elders built around it.  What is known is that the warrens seem distinctly unfit for human habitation, with some hallways small enough that even tiny men must crouch, opening up into huge cavernous rooms with alcoves that could not be possibly reached unless you flew or were pulled up.
Some claim the Inviola is the source of Shallamar’s infamous Echoes.  Others claim that’s ridiculous, if that’s the case then why don’t the Provani simply turn them off?  And a third faction claims that the Provani know what would happen if they shut down the Echoes, and the ramifications were too terrible for them to consider.

A Vital Note On Lon Con And Jonathan Ross

Many in the sci-fi community are horrified by the way their fan-reaction to Jonathan Ross’s aborted emceeing of the Hugos is being presented, now that it’s making national newspaper stories in Britain.  “They’re missing vital context!” people are crying.  “They’re omitting vital facts!  They’re taking a biased view, and skewing things!”
Now.
Apply that same criterion to every story that has ever gotten you upset, and ponder how that distortion may also apply before you rush to an easy judgment.
I’ve been at the center of some internet controversy-storms before, and I can tell you: facts always get omitted, contexts always get slurred, opinions always override actual content.  Maybe there is a skeleton of truth, teetering around the center of the storm somewhere, but wherever there’s blog-frenzies of reactions, there’s inevitably a lot of cherry-picking.  Things get distorted, and villains get made because people love villains.
And people love to feel superior.  That’s what the villains are for.
If this is your first time at the rodeo and you’re all like, “…but these people are making judgments upon people I admire without having all the facts!”, then ponder all the times you read a single article from a single person, decided that their story was the full truth of it, and decided to blast it out into the world with the air of “this is what happened” as opposed to “this is one person’s take on events, what I hear disturbs me, and I’m wondering what happened here.”
Because this distortion field is what happens.  It’s what always happens.  And if you’re offended by the skewed way your community is being presented right now, then remember it the next time you see someone else’s foibles being picked apart, and think, maybe this isn’t the full truth.  Maybe I’m missing something.
Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t post that link.  Sometimes, people acting badly are… actually acting badly.  Just aim that cannon of your personal PR with the recognition that things are usually more complex than presented, and things tend to congeal very quickly into camps of right and wrong, and the truth is usually floating somewhere in the middle – close enough for both sides to brush fingers against but not quite tight enough for either to hug.
Monkey-brains love simplicity.  Despite millions of years of evolution, we have monkey-brains.  And simplicity is often the enemy.
(And yes, the same critique could be applied to both the reaction to Jonathan Ross himself, and the reaction to the reaction to Jonathan Ross.  That’s rather my point.)
(And yes, I’ve been guilty of this in the past as well.  I try not to be.  But even trying, I often fail.  That is also rather my point.)

A Brief Announcement

I’m a man who goes through a lot of depressive states, and, like most depressives, I don’t announce them.
The problem with depression is that it’s tedious, and actually anti-story.  Tales are about people having bold breakthroughs, shedding old habits, transforming into newer and more dazzling people.  Depression, however, is like the weather.  Some days things are good, some days it’s raining out, and other days there’s a cold winter storm and all you can do is hunker down and hope you survive it.
There’s no beating the weather.  There’s no vanquishing the stormclouds.  You just learn to buy an umbrella, and hope you have the cash for the heating bills.
I’m undergoing a profound depression right now that’s fluttering on the edge of a nervous breakdown.  I’m actually loath to call it “depression,” since depression as I have defined it personally has been a chemical thing, this pall of sadness that comes from nowhere for no good reason.  It’s like I’ve been drugged to be unhappy – no, actually, that’s precisely what it is, except the drugging is of an organic and accidental nature.  This depression, however, is based on a series of career setbacks I’ve had, and I’m struggling to regain my footing, but I’m barely able to function.
I am functioning.  This, I am proud of.  But it’s at a vastly reduced level, where I’m not responding to things I should, and overreacting to things I shouldn’t, and am in general crawling instead of walking.  All my skin has been stripped off, and I am glistening tenderness everywhere.
But I may be very erratic for the next few weeks.  I’m very bad at dealing with actual sorrow; chemical depressions I can go, “You’re lying,” and wave them away, but sadness created by genuine events leave me wondering what to do.  I will figure it out.
For now, I’m significantly aching that I feel it’s worthy of a blog post to warn people who interact with me.  I don’t want any rah-rah you’re wonderful Ferrett speeches, as they’ll slide right off, and there’s a better-than-even chance I may take your head off in the doing.  I am not wonderful, not right now.  I am crawling back, one step at a time, towards something a little more functional, and maybe I’ll even be stronger, but right now I am so tired of crawling, of needing cheerleaders, of needing to try, that I’m very down.
And you should know, if you plan to interact with me.  That is all.

Twenty Novels, Twenty Opening Chapters: Jo Walton's Tooth And Claw

Today’s attempt to analyze what makes for a compelling opening chapter is a mashup that totally shouldn’t work – Jane Austen and dragons.
Yes, Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw is a book where genteel, cannibalistic dragons sit in English countrysides and worry about being married properly.  And that is one hell of a thing to sell.  It’s a concept so absurd that as an author, you’d have to work overtime to get past the initial silliness of the material – because Jane Austen is actually quite serious stuff.
So the question is, how does Jo Walton signal that these are both dragons and English-style gentlemen?
Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton (Feel free to download the sample to your Kindle, if you’d like to play along.)
Opening Sentence: “Bon Agorin writhed on his deathbed, his wings beating as though he would fly to his new life in his old body.”
I talked in my analysis of Old Man’s War about the need to signal the presence of a non-standard protagonist right away – if you’ve got someone who’s not white, relatively young, and male, you need to jar the reader out of that default analysis before they get too firmly set in their visualization.  (Which isn’t to say that it’s necessarily right that people default to zomgcisheterowhitedude, but it is a tendency you need to fight.)
And here, Jo is smart enough to recognize that if you’re gonna write about dragons, you’ve gotta start with a bold signal that these people aren’t human.  So: beating wings.  But also a deathbed, which hints at a more civilized society – a deathbed implies a long slow death, usually of the elderly, in a comfortable place – so yes.  Goal achieved.  Both the Austeny components and the dragonish components signaled up front before we’ve exited the first quarter of the first paragraph.  (The rest of that paragraph hammers on this double-duty as well – discussing “doctors” leaving the “draughty undercave” where he’s sitting on his “scant gold.”)
When Do We Find Out What Motivates Our Protagonist? Usually, it’s in or before the third paragraph, and here it arguably is in paragraph #3: Bon’s son Penn approaches his father on his deathbed to ask what’s wrong.  (The next paragraph fleshes this motivation out, where he wonders what’s troubling his father so.)
What Happens In The First Chapter? Bon dies, but not before settling his affairs (dispensing his gold and his body, which his family will eat and grow strong from), and making a shocking confession – that he ate his brother and sister alone to grow large enough to avoid being eaten by his adopted parents.  His son, a priest, grants him absolution regardless, but immediately regrets the decision.
There’s some wonderful justified worldbuilding here – and several first-chapter analyses later, one of the keys of “good worldbuilding” seems to be “justified.”  In this case, the son attempts to reassure his father by saying this:
“Beginning with more than a gentle name, you have grown to be seventy feet long, with wings and flame, a splendid accomplishment and the respect of all the district.  Five of your children survive to this day. I am in the Church, therefore safe…. Berend is well married and has children, her husband is a powerful and industrious Lord.  Avan is making his way in Irieth.  His is perhaps the most perilous course, but he has strong friends thus far, as you did before him.”
The dialogue rings a little of “As you know, Bob” – but in this case, the son does have some urge to go over his family, to let his father slip into death without guilt.  But note what gets accomplished there – we’re told in that first line of dialogue that dragons measure success in foot-growth, that wings and flame are something to be aspired to in this world.  And then, in the next sentences, it’s made blatantly clear that being killed is a distinct possibility, one that other dragons have to maneuver to be protected against.  All before we’re to the end of paragraph #5.
This is a short chapter, less than five pages, but it is also highly political.  Bon is concerned with dispensing gold, splitting up his body; Penn considers himself lucky to have gotten into the Church, and is worried about losing his position as parson.  Should it come out that he has given absolution for such a great sin, he could lose his position.
The thing is, the danger presented in the plot is slight.  The only person who knows about Bon Agornin’s terrible crime is his son Penn, and no one else.  Penn is shaken by the revelation, but it’s doubtful this will affect the plot as of the end of this first chapter.  What draws us in is the depth and complexity of this world – we’re not so much fascinated by Penn, who is at this point a rather unprepossessing minister, but rather the idea of a world full of dragons eating dragons, and how does a thinking being maneuver in such a society?
We’re drawn in by the promise of a bigger world.  Character is secondary; we want to know the society.  And given that the only rule in first chapters is that they have to make you want to read the second, that’s different, but it’s perfect.
Past analyses:

• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
• Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
• The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
• Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld