When writers are new, we can easily mistake symptom for diagnosis. Symptoms of infertile worldbuilding include: your workshop or beta readers complain of confusion, of complicated worlds that are hard to understand/ hard to track or visualize in their mind’s eye, and if they had trouble suspending their sense of disbelief. But these worlds can be coaxed back to life, just like my houseplants, when I remember to water them.

One writing prompt I give in my Great Escape class at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies is to add to your work-in-progress an element of ephemera from your world, such as a diary entry, news article, letter, excerpt of a history textbook, blog, description of a video, song, spell, poem, etc, etc. This is useful for discovery—it encourages a different angle or perspective on the world—and it adds texture, becoming a thickening agent, fleshing things out—even if the writer later deletes the ephemera, as usually occurs (more on that below). A ‘found’ or ‘primary text’ can make the world feel more real, which is why the inclusion of maps and epigraphs are so beloved among science fiction and fantasy writers (and readers).

Unfortunately these primary texts are often not as fun to read as they are to write. For this reason they are so frequently left on the cutting room floor. I ultimately culled all of them from my first novel. They live on only in small pieces, as facts of worldbuilding I plucked out of their originating text and folded into the greater flow of the narrative. (For my second novel, I plan on keeping the ephemera as interstitial texts between chapters—kind of like beefy epigraphs.)

There are a few reasons ephemera can be problematic:

1. Primary texts tend to be dull, stylistically. How many news articles are as gripping as novels? Add to this issue that the novelist is aping a style they probably aren’t familiar with, and so liable to fuck it up. Writers may overcompensate here with overwriting, which isn’t great either.

2. Primary texts risk “taking the reader out” of the story. Encountering another text within the main text shunts the reader into a different style of engagement with the novel; this can be refreshing, as dialogue can be refreshing after several paragraphs of descriptive narration, but it can also break the continuous flow of immersion, prompting the reader to put the book down and check their email.

3. Within a story, another text is just an object, not obviously/ automatically colored by the characters or the point of view.

Tips to make ephemera an effective storytelling technique:

• Brevity helps. I’ve also found that these texts work best if they are humorous, or if they ask the reader to interact with the text like a puzzle, setting them on a clue-finding mission or—harder to execute—philosophical line of inquiry. Why? Well it matches the change in narrative distance (#3) with a corresponding change in engagement-style. (This is where fictional footnotes and endnotes can try the reader’s patience, if they don’t justify the eye movement and attentional shift.)

• By contrast, the other way to get around these problems is with length, allowing the nested story to gain a sort of climate of its own, and for the reader to sink into the story, so it becomes a book-within-a-book. That means the inner story needs a set of nested characters, discrete plot tension, and all the attendant pleasures that the larger story has, only in miniature. (See Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin or Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author, which both seat pulpier sci-fi novellas within their more grounded, literary-styled main stories. As with Death of the Author, a postmodern spin can let the speculative element bleed across the divide, such that Ruth Ozeki has her cake and eats it too in A Tale for the Time Being.)

More importantly, the nested text needs to matter to the main story. This might seem to be an obvious point, and yet.

Recently I read Possession, by A.S. Byatt, on the recommendation of a friend. My current project (novel #2) is a dystopian/ dark academia mash-up, a speculative take on grad school, and I wanted to get in the mood with a campus novel. (Recommendations welcome—yes, I’ve already read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.)

Possession is about academics who discover a trove of love letters between a couple of Victorian poets. It isn’t dark like The Secret History, but it is equally atmospheric. (I’ve never seen an author spend so much energy describing bathrooms.) Besides the lengthy, aesthetic descriptions of antique tiles and commodes, what struck me, reading Possession, was how it uses ephemera. Byatt presents a collection of invented texts, including but not limited to: excerpts from an unpublished memoir, Romantic poetry, love letters (in full), and fairy tales. What’s more, the surrounding story reacts to those texts. The nested narrative profoundly acts upon the characters, impresses itself on them, making both the texts and the characters feel all the more real.

The hierarchy of importance is evident in the order of revelation; as readers we get the characters’ reaction to the texts (the love letters and long poem) before we read them ourselves.

Below is Maud’s reaction to reading the letters (she refers to Christabel, who is both the subject of Maud’s research and the author of half of the letters):

And it continues,

I love this turn! Instead of a dusty, formal past, it is the present that pales before the vigor of the past! (Like when you have a “book hangover” from an especially transporting novel.) It’s a gorgeous example of how point of view can both focus the story, so we can see the world with clarity—and can layer the world so we see the forest as it is to Maud, as the saplings from the time period (and text) she envies—and simultaneously make a cast of Maud’s character.

What’s more, as we read on, we see how the letters effect her contemporaries differently, and in fact, how people can misunderstand a text, revealing the limits of their perspective—revealing themselves. With each facet, the image begins to move, to change, to slip, to assert itself.

This, then is the diagnosis: a dead world isn’t reactive, reacting. To give it life, it has to be seen through, seen in-part, seen from more than one angle, all grounded in the rich soil of perspective. The understanding meanwhile needs to be up in the air, kept aloft by the consciousness.

Thanks as always for reading—

Amanda 𓆉˚⋆𓇼˚⊹ 𖦹 ⁺｡°

Subscribe now

Most of the time, I’m worrying about creating the fictional world, and keeping the world afloat on the sentences. I’m focused on starts and developments, transitions and escalations, on lines of tension—on building those arches in the aqueduct that carry the plot, and reader, along (borrowing a metaphor Margot Livesey deploys in The Hidden Machinery). My concerns are to present a shared sense of reality, a compelling intimacy with characters, and high stakes, avoiding at all costs disinteresting the reader, or pricking that precious balloon, the suspension of disbelief. I want to envelope or immerse the reader, as if in a dream.

As John Gardner writes in The Art of Fiction:

…if the effect of the dream is to be powerful, the dream must probably be vivid and continuous—vivid because if we are not quite clear about what is that we’re dreaming, who and where the characters are, what it is that they’re doing or trying to do and why, our emotions and judgments must be confused, dissipated, or blocked; and continuous because a repeatedly interrupted flow of action must necessarily have less force than action directly carried through from its beginning to its conclusion.

Then it comes time to end the thing, to wake. Finally, the culmination of the draft! And I realize how little, by comparison, I’ve thought about endings—when the ending can wholly change my experience of the novel! (A recent example that comes to mind is Trust by Hernan Diaz; the ending dramatically elevates what comes before.)

Subscribe now

How to wake from the dream? How to end the story? E.M. Forster lays out the problem of endings in Aspects of the Novel:

In the losing battle that plot fights with the characters, it often takes a cowardly revenge. Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This is because the plot requires to be wound up. Why is this necessary? Why is there not a convention which allows a novelist to stop as soon as he feels muddled or bred? Alas, he has to round things off, and usually the characters go dead while he is at work, and our final impression of them is through deadness…there is this disastrous standstill while logic takes over the command from flesh and blood. If it was not for death and marriage I do not know how the average novelist would conclude.

…but then skirts the subject when the solution is sought (instead he moves laterally, describing postmodernism). Aspects of the Novel is rightly a classic, and Forster is excellent (my current audiobook is A Passage to India) but he’s little help here.

Perhaps the problem is that the ending shouldn’t do all that much. There should be an answer to the promises of the beginning, sure; the expectations ought to be not only met but exceeded, with just enough surprise…but that’s more to do with what should occur by the end, not necessarily at the end-end.

We shouldn’t skip past the climax—the point of release and destination of the story, the final consequence from what was initiated by the catalyst of the story. Helpfully, we can divide, as Michael Tierno does in Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters, the plot-action from the moral life of the character, the external conflict from the internal—what we might think of as the world of argument, symbol, texture, and emotions. The denouement is for that subterranean setting, not the whiz-bang of the cause-and-effect dominoes meeting the extent of their momentum.

Share

Don’t introduce new information, at least one of my teachers instructed the workshop. Perhaps this is an attempt to avoid the overgrowth of logic E.M. Forster describes as a mundane quality of endings. Instead, the teacher advised, linger on an image. Think Great Gatsby! Think the green light! I don’t think this is wrong advice, only offputting-ly prescriptive, but perhaps we can get more specific—and less reliant on high school ideas of symbolism. We can at least try to add some types to that advice:

• a single, reverberating image

  • a flash-forward

  • a fadeout, or an intake of breath

  • a repetition of the originating image, from a new perspective

• a twist (hard to pull-off, and must be heavily foreshadowed)

• a zoom-out or reverse funnel

• an overlap or end bracket [ ] of a framing device

From Jeff Vandermeer’s The Wonderbook:

As you (and thus the reader) begin to get a sense of its silhouette, out in a mist beginning to dissipate—there is often the feeling of things closing down. This occurs even in cases where the ending is a form of opening up…that part of the story during which no new characters, settings, or facts are introduced, but where the ultimate meaning or understanding of characters, settings, and facts is highly volatile…In science fiction and fantasy texts, the unreal elements are also up for reinterpretation during endings.

Note that reinterpretation does not equate to an introduction of a new element, but rather a new perspective on an existing one. And indeed, Freytag terms this part of the story the return.

Fate wins control over the hero; his battles move toward a momentous close, which affects his whole life. There is no longer time to secure effects by means of little artifices, careful elaboration; beautiful details, neat motives. The essence of the whole, idea and conduct of the action, comes for- ward powerfully; the audience understands the connection of events, sees the ultimate purpose of the poet; he must now exert himself for the high- est effects; he begins, testing every step in the midst of his interest, to contribute to this work from the mass of his knowledge, of his spiritual affinities, and of what meets the wants of his own nature.

That end is a truth, a final revelation of the story brought on by a new perspective, a new knowledge.

But it isn’t the end-end. The end-end isn’t supposed to have all that drama of Truths Unveiled; there has to be a sort of letting-go, an intake of breath to avoid the over-emphasis on the final note, to allow the reader to return into their bodies, and to imagine the characters continuing on in their new equilibrium (if they survive that far). Otherwise the audience will remain poised for an even greater reveal than the climax, and be disappointed when the pages cease increasing in number, the revelations in magnitude, and the world in scale. See Elizabeth Bowen’s Notes on Writing a Novel:

Plot must further the novel towards its object. What object? The non-poetic statement of a poetic truth.

There remains, latent in this idea, a sense of what can be said, and also can’t be reached (why else portray/dramatize an idea, rather than write a thesis or summary?) And so the difficulty of an ending is in the balance between a landscape and the hint of what might lay beyond. Or as Philip Fisher defines the speculative, “a horizon-effect of the known, the unknown, and the unknowable.”

˚₊⊹ Amanda ｡ꕤ

Questions toward an ending:

What have you learned & who from? (Lessons may be contradictory and yet useful all the same.) Which lessons served you & which did you outgrow?

What did you learn without being told?

Why would you reread this story? What morals do you feel were compromised?

What is undecided still?

When & where did it go wrong? For whom? Who never spoke?

Is it worth trying to change somebody else? Is it appeasement not to?

What is the corner that you’ll never understand? What if there were competing stories?

Who was witness? Bystander? Recorder? Passive player or active participant? Audience member? Performer? Judge? Who believes you and who doesn’t?

What unified the story? Was the pattern ever broken? By what?

What groups broke and formed anew? What fractures remain?

Should you keep looking? Or let it lie?

Who never had grace?

The metaphor is dangerous,

Or at least, it is for the speculative fiction writer. That’s because, even when they confine themselves to Earth, the SFF writer describes an alien landscape. All things are possible. The story must be translated, in a sense, twice—first from the imagination to the page, as Edwidge Danticat describes of the act of writing fiction generally, below:

And a second time, because in speculative fiction, that imagined reality does not resemble our own. For this reason, Joanna Russ describes sf as a genre whose “subject matter does not exist;” it hasn’t yet occurred, cannot occur, and/or may never. Hence, as Gwyneth Jones writes in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, “the reading of an sf story is always an active process of translation.” This active translation process is a genre-marker, a definer: SFF is a “literature of estrangement,” says Jane L. Donawerth.

Figurative language removes description a step away from the concrete. Applied in an SFF text, these basic writer tools can make the strange only more strange and potentially inaccessible to the reader. For example, “when an sf writer says, ‘She took heavy mechanical steps towards the door,’” as Orson Scott Card explains in How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy, “there is always the possibility that in fact her legs are machinery.” Card finds that experienced readers of sf and fantasy are more likely to assume that the character might be an android, robot, or cyborg—while the inexperienced will assume “mechanical” is a characterizing descriptor, an insight into the character’s mental state. Samuel Delany illustrates the same point with the example, “her world exploded,” whereas Ursula LeGuin demonstrates the idea as, “he was absorbed in the landscape.”

The risk of confusion lessens as the narrative unfolds, but never completely fades away.

A tangent:

Q: Is this instinct (to interpret literally) the difference between an sff and literary reader?

A: As they teach the reader how to read their story, writers can go minimalist in worldbuilding—often favored by literary writers, as simplicity of world allows room for depth of character psychology—or maximalist, more often favored by straight-up genre writers, which favors exploration and, frequently, literalism. This corresponds to reader expectations.

Put another way, audience expectations are a tension of desire and patience, for what is given and what is withheld.

A common piece of writing advice is that each scene should accomplish two (or more) ends, further the plot and develop the character, for example—and while that is fine advice, since many early draft scenes hit the cursor’s terminal-blinking without depicting change or much else of interest—in fiction’s sequential “and then this, and then that happened”- form, not everything can happen at once. There is a hierarchy of attention, which makes for a hierarchy of telling. The writer can hint at many elements early, but not foreground them all. That simply isn’t how the reader processes information. (We—humans, readers—are not very good at experiencing both intellectually and emotionally at the same time. We are bad multitaskers, no matter how we lie to ourselves. So the lyrical speculative writer must choose relatively simple initial brushes with the strange. Simple in plot or in the version of oddity, scaled down to fit. In the beginning, the writer steps lightly.) The writer curls their finger and tries to waggle the reader on.

So: What pulls the genre reader—as opposed to the literary reader—into the story? (A sense of curiosity and awe?) What will they be patient to fully understand? (The nature of the wider world?) OR What will they allow to be vague, underdeveloped or unknown, until the story can come around to paint in that element?

Practically speaking,

the danger of the metaphor in SFF is a point of view problem.

The world, being the world, resists being viewed entire. But once motivated by story, the POV wants desperately to know something, and will chase it, because the characters want to know. This motion, of the characters pressing through an ever-shifting, always questing and questioned life, is one full of richness. The POV provides not only access to an interesting wedge of a foreign world, translating that imagined reality to the page, but also access to a person of that world, who has been shaped by it. The character gradually reveals themselves in the act of looking at a strange thing, in hitting up against the obstacles of their world, and in doing so, gradually reveals the world. One illuminates—reveals the complexities—of the other.

No person has total and unbiased knowledge of the nature of things. The POV enacts the problem of understanding the world. Speculative fiction activates that truth, bringing it to the fore of the stage.

This essay, I readily admit, is influenced heavily by Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sheep?, by Seo-Young Chu. In it, she writes that “science fiction is a genre that operates beyond (or even counter to) mimesis.” Consequently, speculative fiction “can accommodate referents ordinarily averse to representation,” and, “in transcending the literal/figurative dichotomy, science fiction provides a representational home for referents that are themselves neither purely literal nor purely figurative in nature.”

Perhaps it is wrong to think of the metaphor as a ‘problem’ after all. The metaphor is a tint on the story, a sign that a person was there. A soul was there. The distance of figurative language is a way in, a slantwise approach when straight paths would fail to bridge the divide.

There is power, not just pitfalls, in the evocative connotations of words: what a thrill, words pointing to objects and experiences that have no neat referent in the known world. What possibility, in the eternally receding horizon.

˚.⋆✶ Amanda ✶⋆.˚

Subscribe now

Share

1. Music Metaphors: Motifs in a symphony or jazz progressions. Modulation of tone. Translations in notations. Call and response. Bridge as release of tension or an undercut of mood. Moods. Major and minor. Staccato and legato. Crescendo. Chorus. Ensemble introductions to plot in opening songs & the 11 O’Clock number, the “I am” and the “I want.” Reprise. (Time as the ‘secret subject"—not sure who I’m quoting, although certainly one of my teachers.)

   

2. Architecture Metaphors: Material palette accretion. Spatial understanding. Escalation of scale (compression and release). Void and volume. Thresholds. Light and shadow. Living in the space. Breathing room. Form follow function. Absurd and whimsical scales. Human perspective or sight lines and escaping human perspective. Hallways. Vernacular architecture. Bricks are made to fit in the hand. (Architecture also curious about the problem of living in a day, often on author’s minds)

3. Nature Metaphors: Slight iterations on a theme, honed over time, seen skipping on wind. No jumps, only revisions and recursions. No endings, only parentings. The shape and texture of: ferns, rivers, trees, valleys, roots, jellyfish, seeds. Virus, pandemic. Asteroids, silt, clouds, floods. Seasons: ups and downs and ups. Coincidence and calamity. Light and shadow, again. Weeds, pods, mountaintops, and so on. Urban and suburban as stilts on nature, nature as everywhere and thus invisible. (Borrowing from Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode)

4. Mechanical Metaphors: Tools extending our reach. Matrices. Screens. Things we use without understanding how they work, how to make them ourselves. Control, command of what we did not make ourselves. Defunct technology. Replacements. Cheap and expensive technology. Access, lack of access. Production and reproduction to design. Copies. Planned obsolescence. Software and hardware. Enshittification of things once useful. Virus (a secondary metaphor). The information is stored elsewhere. The Wayback Machine. Forums as decentralized structure. Moderators, censors. Anonymity and anxiety as twinned phenomena. Freedom from a single place and time, a single object. The medium is the message

5. Anatomy Metaphors: (The body is too tempting a metaphor to ignore.) The eye. The hand. The mouth. The plot as digestion, as metabolism, as vegetable and sugary sweets, presented and then consumed, or not. (“Food” could be its own category and probably should.) Skin layers, some easily shed, some not. Muscle and training, no pain no gain. Clothing and costume. Cancer. White blood cells: surrounding the problem as a way to address it. The arteries and capillary tributaries: allowing for many ways towards an end. The senses and what they miss. Haptic quality. Mind and body dualism, rejection of dualism. Inflammation, illness, entropy, death, etc. Too many to list.

6. Cartography Metaphors: Patterns and positioning (See Samantha Hunt on Maps and linear thinking). The territory and limits. Relative meanings. Boundaries and trails and roads as lines you can trace with a finger. Overlapping claims and disputes. Retained place names. Maps for driving, maps for mining, maps for tourism, maps for war, maps for remembering, maps for migration. Overlaid marks and meanings existing simultaneously. Translation of multiple dimensions into a flat surface. Approaching the subject from above. Approaching the subject by making a false version, a simplified version, labeled. Foldable subject

   Subscribe now

7. Visual Metaphors: Zoom in, funnel. Lenses and light and point of view. The eye vs the camera. Parallax. Focal range and blur. Zoom out. Foreground and background. First read and second read. File storage, RAW or lossy. Establishing shot. Visual field. Impressionist, mosaic, abstract, cubist, chiaroscuro. White space. Black point. Contrast (low or high) and saturation. Facade. Veils. Omission. (Difficult to list well, as visual/cinematic metaphors have already become suffused into our language—both general and in terms of literary craft.)

8. Politics Metaphors: Powers to be balanced against one another. Conflict as see-saw. Power as stress on a system. Power, like water, finding escape in order to be expressed, finding any crack in the wall. (“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always be on the side of the egg” -Haruki Murakami). Top-down versus ground-up. Narrative as a swelling, or perhaps eroding, certainly a tip-over-the-edge. Groups, interests, leaders: shapes of power. Speeches and audience. Power as change and what resists it. Rights as the measure of what we might and might not allow power to take. Time as tracing revolutions and backlash. A moral question, a people question, the structure of argument

Recently read: Trust by Hernan Diaz, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, Empire of AI by Karen Hao, Arcade by Erica Hunt, and others that I quit partway through, as I tend to.

Currently/TBR: The Witch by Marie Ndiaye, What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle.

Q: What metaphorical territory are you interested in?

.ೃ࿔Amanda⋆˚꩜｡

Share Future Debris

I was at the dentist because, the day after I finished writing a draft of my novel, my tooth fell out. (Freud, you win this one.) The tooth was a baby tooth, so it was already on borrowed time; for context, I have hypodontia, as in I’m minus a few adult teeth I ought to have, and when you lack the adult replacement, your baby tooth just kind of hangs on for as long as possible. Unfortunately it only half fell out, so I needed the rest of it pulled.

Joke’s on me for subjecting my characters to bouts of body horror! You can rest assured I come by my influences honestly.

I’d never been to this particular dentist before, and thus the choice to bring a physical book to my appointment was tactical; I wanted to indicate I was a person. I’ve experienced enough ambient medical misogyny to develop this habit; nothing horrible, but enough. Here’s a free tip for you: performative reading isn’t just for looking hot! If you want somebody to take you seriously, take you for human, read a print book. Loft that spine! Tbh, I’d prefer to listen to my audiobook in such situations (currently Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler)—I love to listen to audiobooks, especially since having a baby—and I have nothing against ebooks, except I find I’m more likely to fail at finishing them—but that wouldn’t have the same signaling power, so I don’t. And I would have missed out on the conversation that began when the hygienist asked about Elena Knows.

One of the alternately lonely and lovely parts of moving to a big city like Toronto is anonymity. Brokered by the freedom of a busy street, you can live as you like. You also run a risk of forgetting the people for the crowd, and of being forgotten yourself. People reading fiction are no longer a common sight, and when I do spot a reader in public, I feel not just kinship, but also recognition.

Riding the streetcar home, I spotted a woman reading On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, which has maybe my favorite book cover in recent years, and I immediately wanted to talk to her. I might’ve, if I wasn’t at that moment biting down on a bloody wad of cotton gauze.

Subscribe now

I don’t buy that fiction is automatically morally edifying—although in this age of fractured attention, I do think it important to point out how literature is intellectually edifying—that reading and writing are skills worth cultivating. (I wouldn’t teach writing if I didn’t.) There is real power to being able to read well, to sit with words. There is real power in the ability to order your own thoughts logically, and to analyze deeply another person’s argument. To understand what is said and what is elided. These are endangered skills, already at a crisis.

Now each time I open my novel draft as a pdf, Adobe asks me if I want an AI summary. For awhile I had to close two (2!!) pop-ups before being able to read my document. I don’t disregard the genuinely useful aspects of this technology, and I’m convinced it will transform the next decades by changing the way many jobs work, for good and for ill. I try not to let knee-jerk reactions stand without consideration.

For a long time I’ve tried to pin down what disturbs me about the application of AI writing—not just for artistic purposes, but for laymen uses, too. And this human signaling is the core of it.

Reading is the immersion in another person’s world, an experience of sharing in their thoughts, and on a gut level, AI is a betrayal of that trust. It feels like being cheated on. How terrible, realizing the person you thought was there, wasn’t. What’s more, I see art routinely dismissed online as “obviously AI,” even when it isn’t. If everybody online feels potentially like a bot, it erodes our sense of shared humanity. Online thinking bleeds IRL, NPC-ing our interactions. AI didn’t start this erosion, but it will flood us. AI will train us to treat written language like robocalls. How long until we get in the habit of never answering the phone?

What Voight-Kampff tests will we have to create (and endure) in the future? Writers—clearly not including me—already avoid em-dashes for fear of being labeled an LLM. I hope watermarking of AI will become universal, but I fear the damage has been done. If good watermarking does become standard (the disinformation age of social media has me skeptical) I nonetheless worry that people will, in any case, learn to divorce speech from speaker. On that day, words become noise.

Subscribe now

Share

Lately:

By accident, I’ve been reading autofiction. I mentioned last time that I read All Fours by Miranda July, then the difficult-to-categorize Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor, and then How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. I read that last because it’s set in Toronto. I mentioned an interest in reading more local authors to my pilates instructor after group class, and she lent me her most recent read, also set in Toronto: Pick a Color by Souvankham Thammavongsa. (This isn’t autofiction, afaik.) Current pick-ups: Cyberfeminism Index, edited by Mindy Seu, and Annie Bot by Sierra Greer.

Amanda .✦ ݁˖

Buttttttt then for a while I didn’t write much. I read some great books (Luminous by Silvia Park, Hum by Helen Philips—which I wrote about here— The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan, Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones, The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel, and when gripped with pregnancy insomnia, the Game of Thrones sequels by George R.R. Martin) and started and quit a few others. I didn’t read all that much, though, to be truthful.

Instead I played Baldur’s Gate 3 with my husband Samsun and ate heaps of chicken tenders and french fries and bowls of pho. I hadn’t gamed since RuneScape, AKA pre-puberty, before friend groups were severed by gender and middle school politics. I needed a break after completing the last draft. You have to let the creative field lie fallow for a bit, right? And pregnancy was kind of like puberty, with the body changes and the anxieties—if puberty also included feeling like you have a flu and leg cramps and dozens of other random, concerning symptoms for 9 1/2 months.

。*✿Baldur’s Gate, for the uninitiated, is a video game version of Dungeons and Dragons with surprisingly good graphics. Together Samsun and I spilled many hours on it in my third trimester, hours which the app Steam dutifully counted for me, as if that were something I wanted to know. ✿*。

In February our cat, Lyra, stopped eating. We took her to the animal hospital on a weekend when the city was nearly impassable with snow drifts, cars flashing their emergency lights from ditches, neighbors asking for help pushing their tires free. After the diagnosis, we were tasked with sneaking meds 3x a day into the jaws of a smart cat with zero appetite. She died a month later, at 9 1/2 years old. They say it was cancer, but I suspect she knew the baby was coming and wouldn’t stand to be second fiddle.

Her death was far more physical than I’d been prepared for—it was not a peaceful fluttering, a soft closing of the eyes—and I’d think of it a month later, while in labor with my baby. Not during the early labor, in which we finished our Baldur’s campaign, Samsun becoming frustrated when I’d pause midway in a fight for contractions (can you believe?!, we can all shame him for it)1 before ultimately defeating the big bad and ending forever my life as a gamer.2 Nor during the sort of middle hours of labor, which I bore in my bathtub while watching Terminator II, the soundtrack of dun-dun-dun Dun Dun! extremely apt. In the nameless hours in the hospital before they told me to push, while I waited too long to beg for an epidural and ultimately missed my chance for one, I thought about Lyra’s death. I’ve known the dying and the dead, both animal and human, and such a little thing, a cat. Still, she was the first life I’d taken care of, been responsible for, and the first passing I’d witnessed to the end. I couldn’t help but feel that I’d failed her. Now I was supposed to take care of another being?

There isn’t much choice in the matter at nine centimeters. As Maggie Nelson writes:

You don’t do labor, I was counseled several times before the baby came. Labor does you.

This sounded good — I like physical experiences that involve surrender. I didn’t know, however, very much about experiences that demand surrender — that run over you like a truck, with no safe word to stop it.

If all goes well, the baby will make it out alive, and so will you. Nonetheless, you will have touched death along the way. You will have realized that death will do you too, without fail and without mercy. It will do you even if you don’t believe it will do you, and it will do you in its own way. There’s never been a human that it didn’t.

People say women forget about the pain of labor owing to some kind of God-given amnesia that keeps the species reproducing. But that isn’t quite right — after all, what does it mean for pain to be memorable? You’re either in pain or you’re not. And it isn’t the pain that one forgets. It’s the touching death part.

After several more drowning, gasping hours while my baby refused to turn or tuck down her chin, in a confusing instant I had in my arms this hairless creature who I knew less well than my cat—how strange!—but was so much more important.

A week later the University library’s cherry blossoms bloomed at last.

Subscribe now

Life with a baby. Moving faster now.

Hours are immense, but months fly. Time is foreshortened. Time is bargained. Time is spooled in weeks, in a thousand stages forgotten once they are negotiated past. I’m mixing my tenses here, but it seems right, grammar be damned. I listened to audiobooks and podcasts before the dawn, and during naps, read some and wrote more than I anticipated, although still not as much as I wanted. The reason I’ve neglected this newsletter is that I’ve spent all my writing energy on the novel! (The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden—a rare Romance pickup!, Among the the Thugs by Bill Buford, Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell, Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green, Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang, The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, All Fours by Miranda July, Gliff by Ali Smith). In July, Samsun’s latest novel Likeness came out! The newborn era ends with the summer solstice.

Autumn to winter, I wrote quickly and read less. I began teaching again, which I invariably find grounding. Each session I sub in and replace a few of the assigned readings, but I always begin my Science Fiction and Fantasy course with Octavia Butler’s short story “Bloodchild”; oddly, it seemed more gruesome to me since giving birth. BTW, My next class with the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies begins in February, if you want to join! (I just finished my friend Maria Kuznetsova’s dark and funny manuscript—see also her recent lithub article that made some waves) and am reading now Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk.)

Today my baby is 8 months old, nearly as long in the world as she was gestating in my belly. I’m a few thousand words from the end of this novel re-draft, having deleted, replotted, and rewritten about 35k words. I almost made my year-end deadline, but I’m counting it as a win.

Have a great new year, everyone. Thanks for being here! ✿*。

Amanda

Share Future Debris

Beyond the attention-grabbing premise, Likeness is a series of thoughtful meditations on love and (in)dependence.

NYC friends: hope you can make it Aug 6th to P&T Knitwear for his reading with our wonderful writer friend Eskor—I’ll be there, too! We can grab drinks! I promise to show only as many baby photos as requested.

buy Likeness

review Likeness, it helps! :D

Sometimes I’m asked what it’s like to be in a relationship with another writer and if jealousy or whatever is a problem (answer: no but when we were younger, sometimes) and the truth is that, aside from personal disagreements about the appropriate length of sentences (line edits do NOT belong inside the relationship) it’s pretty great. It’s interesting and fun to talk through character motivations and structural dilemmas! Plus I enjoy simply talking about books we’re reading. It’s useful to have a partner who understands the emotional turmoil of both writing and publishing. Samsun is a very different writer from me, with a totally different process; I get a different perspective on my own work, kind of like having a second, more analytical brain to drawn from. And it’s exciting to go from reading the drafts to holding the finished book in your hand—even if it isn’t yours. I’m vicariously very proud of this beautiful novel. ♡

Speaking of relationships & family—I’m now mom to a 3-month old. For obvious practical reasons I haven’t been sending out newsletters these past few months BUT shockingly it’s also been because I’ve been making progress on my novel, and prioritizing it during her nap windows. I’m actually making good time with this redraft?? Granted, I have an unusually easy situation; Samsun has a flexible job and I have no teaching scheduled until the fall. (Thanks also to the incredible support of my mom, sister, and siblings-in-law who saved my sanity the first few weeks.)

Overall I am both more busy and less creatively sidelined by parenting than I thought I’d be. Hell, having to be on a schedule, even a grueling one, has been helpful. And it’s been a wild experience. I’ve already stolen little details that I’m sure my daughter will use as fodder for her premature memoir about how my artistic ambition fucked her up (jk, jk—perhaps?). My running joke is that it says more about how productive I was before having a kid that I’m now matching my old daily word counts.

It seems I am still mostly myself. As a writer, I am prone to seasonality, and this summer I’m in an exhale.

P.S. Recent reads have included a lot of nonfiction, as they are easier to digest in audio form, which is my primary reading situation while baby-minding. Lately: Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell, Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green, Among the Thugs by Bill Buford. On the fiction side: Luminous by Silvia Park, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, and Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. Q: Do you like to read slim books in the summer, or languid epics?

P.P.S. You may have noticed I changed the name of the newsletter to “Future Debris.” I’ve been rethinking what I want to use this space for. In addition to essays about speculative-literary fiction, I’ll be sharing more of my fiction here, diving into what decisions I’m making writing my book. So “Future Debris” has two meanings: sci-fi flotsam and also excerpts from future works.

-Amanda☆☆

I feel closer to revealing the name to these strangers; it would mean less to do so, much as it seemed less strange (and easier to feel a sort of general, easy joy) to tell my dentist I was pregnant than my friends; with acquaintances, I was a pregnant person, but with friends, *I* was pregnant. But I don’t tell our frontrunner name to the uber driver, the receptionist, or the older woman beside me in line at the post office. (It would piss off the people who care, to know that I’d told a nobody before I told them. Especially my sister ♡.)

Names are, for all their public utility and blandness, intimate. More on their blandness in a moment. Names are personal and powerful. You react to your name called before you register it. Names can be commands and pleas, are whispered in ears as turn-ons, are protectively withheld or abbreviated to their initial, are identifying, and ours.

Names are also silly. Names trend and fall out of fashion. And not just the unique names tiktok pushes at me (ohhh, I love “Timber” for a girl, the comment section coos, seemingly not hearing, as I must, the Ke$ha/Pitbull song).2 Names are silly and bland because even the most carefully selected name, with considered meaning or tradition behind it, loses definition upon investigation. There is only so much digging you can do into a name. A name is ultimately a way of pointing at a person or thing. Yes, names have strong associations for us, but these tend to be very individual, even more than associations are for words with agreed-upon meanings like “river” or “chair” or “frown.” (We are reaching the limits of what I understood of language games, full disclosure!) This the atomic quality of names: A partner will nix a potential baby name because of someone they went to school with two decades ago; one parent can think a name sounds aggressive when the other thinks the name sounds solid and dependable, and neither of them is objectively wrong.

Did I mention that I changed the working title of my first novel-in-progress? It was after speaking to an editor I met at the Bread Loaf writers’ conference who said my OG title was “too genre.” Based on my description, she suggested I should target the literary reader who likes speculative elements, and not open myself up to the criticism of straight-genre readers, who can be more punitive when the book doesn’t meet their expectations.

I dislike thinking of genre (and audience) this way, but tbh I have committed to a version of this already: when I was new to the writing world I’d call my work “sci-fi” because it had futuristic, invented technologies. Seemed accurate, because I grew up reading books shelved in both general and genre—still do—and didn’t think too much about the shifts of reading tastes and marketing. But these things matter when you’re trying to sell stuff. I do write sci-fi, but I rarely call it that anymore. I use the term speculative instead, to indicate that my work is “literary” in its style and pacing, and to align with the current trends.3

I like my new title, but not as much as the old one.4

What’s in a title? Last month I read The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, a title that has little to do with the novel itself, a polyphonic literary suspense set in the Adirondacks. But it did make me want to pick up the book. Similarly: I read a fair chunk of You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer, for the highbrow reasons of liking the title (and the cover).5

Currently reading Hum by Helen Phillips, a speculative dystopian novel that’s good but, well, dystopian—and since I’ve had an emotionally punishing February, I’m slow-walking my read. (In the meantime I’ve been on a nonfiction kick, including my favorites of the period: The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan, The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel.) Hum is a book title I like, and a technology name I like, too–it’s what the robots are called in the novel’s world.6

Lazy names are a red flag of genre dilettantism, imo. Naming is central to immersing the reader in a strange world. With speculative fiction, a genre whose “subject matter does not exist” (Joanna Russ), names must point to a referent that is not only fictional, but also imagined to represent a non-real subject. It’s an exciting writing problem, naming the unknown.

So: Why “hums?”

Why not “androids” or “robots”?

“Hum” superficially breaks the craft advice from Turkey City Lexicon, Don’t Call a Rabbit a Smeerp, defined as when “common elements of the real world are re-named for a fantastic milieu without any real alteration in their basic nature or behavior.” The rule would suggest that Phillips should simply call her robots robots, instead of coining a new word. Hum possibly escapes the Smeerp rule because it is a brand name—and more importantly, escapes the Smeerp rule for the reason anything in creative writing can escape a “rule,” as in, by being executed well.

Subscribe now

During what I call the anxiety hours (between 3-5am)—thank-you pregnancy-induced insomnia!—I’ve been simultaneously working my way through A Clash of Kings. While George R.R. Martin may not always have original character names—first names are often simply a remixed spelling of common names (see: “Wyll”)—his place names are another matter. Winterfell, for example, is memorable, with sonic as well as symbolic pay-off. Same for props (ex: Arya’s sword, Needle).

Naming is when fiction writers should most try to think like poets. How does it sound, how does it round and roll in the mouth? Does it match or insert friction with the other names you’ve introduced into the story?

Hum and A Clash of Kings share little in common, sure. In parallel, each demonstrate what I think of as “micro-worldbuilding,” but might be as easily thought of as word choice, syntax, rhythm, and texture.

“Hum,” a name’s breakdown:

Hums are a thing (robots) and a brand—and they are sound, an action. The associations: soothing, nurturing (another technology in the book is called a “womb”), biological (the child characters have little interactive watches called “rabbits” that are painful to remove). Hums are produced in the mouth and yet often also mechanical, produced by a droning fan. Hum, therefore, straddles two interpretations of “manmade.” We learn from the story that the hums began as non-corporeal programs, language-first, and only later were encased in bodies. “Hum” emphasizes speech, or the precursor to speech, more than “robot,” which leans physical, kinetic. The hums in the novel are common as white noise, active with potential energy, and keyed to respond to human needs. “Hum” carries these connotations of both machine and maternal better than “robot” does. The technology names in the novel taken together (hum, rabbit, womb, etc) quilt into a cohesive style and thematic territory.

Share

Names have a conjuring effect: they make things feel more real.

A performative utterance, simple as saying, “her name is ___”

Amanda ⊹₊⟡⋆

Mina Le, a fashion/culture vlogger, blames a supposed death of personal style on:

• the homogenization-tendency of algorithms

• dearth of true subcultures *with cultural coherence & political/social attributes*1 & IRL “scenes,” which have been lost to

• the overwhelming pressures to sell out & engage in micro-trends (for influencers) or to simply fit in (for the rest of us insecure and uncertain dressers).2 Our lives are so very online. We lack “third spaces” for people to gather and organically find things

• In sum, Mina Le argues that style is less finding the “right” elements to wear—as in, being fashionable—and more about who you are. Basically, style is a genuine expression of self✮ ⋆ ˚

That seems pretty reasonable, if difficult to use. After all, it’s damn hard to be genuine / to know one’s self. As if the self were stable. And it is even harder to be genuine when you are hyper-aware of your own reception.

Topic of today’s Collected Fictions: Does this death of personal style extend to literature & if so, what’s to blame?

When I am trying to wrap my head around something, I find looking for foils, for opposites, helpful.3 So. Q: what is the opposite of the Genuine? A: Irony.

Irony requires consideration of audience. (In dramatic irony, for the exacting example, a character is unaware of something the reader knows.) There are multiple layers in the text for the viewer/reader to slip between.

Irony is a very online aesthetic. It fits with the internet’s capacity for immediate response and regurgitation—take tiktok’s hyperactive ability to turn a joke> into an inside joke> into a joke format (aka, a meme) in a blink of the eye. It prefigures the response of the next person. So the online style adjusts, aware of this mirror, seeing itself in the reflection, inserting distance and deniability, accommodating in advance the interruption of another perspective.

No wonder we are collectively getting exhausted by it.4

What if we are trying to extricate ourselves from an ironic age and scrambling for its opposite?

I’m stealing a bit here from my husband, Samsun. A few weeks ago, as we stepped out of a packed showing of Nosferatu, he remarked on the film’s earnestness. There was some humor in the movie, but every line and shot was delivered straight. Compare with decades of MCU—or even the meta-maximalism of Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was heartfelt, yes, but also layered with switchbacks. Everything Everywhere All At Once, in fact, seemed to only be able to access the heartfelt by way of anal-plug-powered multiverse karate.5 Imho Nosferatu was far from perfect, but it really did lean into being a single vibe, an immersive effect…a sincere style.6 Not one part of it felt hyperlinked.

Ironically, this line of thought made me return to Lincoln Michel’s recent substack “Turning Off the TV in Your Mind,” in which he makes a very convincing case about the outsized stylistic influence of visual media on contemporary prose:

Counter Craft

Turning Off the TV in Your Mind

I am not a neuroscientist, but learning an artform changes your brain. Or at least it changes how you think. To learn to photograph, you learn to think in angles and apertures. To learn to paint, you begin to think in brushstrokes and pigments. And to learn to write fiction, you start to think in sentence…

Read more

2 years ago · 302 likes · 59 comments · Lincoln Michel

We are tv-brained and we are internet-brained. Has irony, brought about by our online-ness, gotten in the way of our developing genuine style? (I fear it may be time to attempt Infinite Jest again.)

Subscribe now

Hmm. We are conflating things in this death of style discussion. 1. Style as it relates to presentation of the self (individual—Joan Didion dressed like Joan Didion)…but also 2. Presentation as a group with shared interests (punks, emo kids, hippies)…and 3. Style as an identity goal (I am a petite white woman from California, so I want to recreate Joan Didion’s closet and produce metaphors about the Santa Ana winds).

We tend to talk about writing style in a rather American way, in the same way we talk about talent: you have it or you don’t. It’s individualistic and innate; it’s a-contextual and ahistorical. There are trends, but there are no regional camps, no ‘schools’ (despite the ubiquity of writing instruction), no battling pedagogies or manifestos, not really. With some exceptions, the market is ignored as a driver of style movements. Anyone who has tried to become published (traditionally or self-pubbed) will tell you how much of an oversight that is. As if my style’s genetic line originates with Me. No wonder it so often ends up being a pretty low-level, generalizing-at-best discussion of “I hate MFA fiction” or “literary fiction is elitist and boring” or “genre is plain prose.”

There is a great diversity of writing occurring right now, but so frequently (in fact, just this weekend, most recently) I hear from readers that so many books seem the same, especially within genre categories. They are overwhelmed with choices that seem similar.7

Perhaps there simply isn’t a healthy enough literary ecosystem rn for ‘schools’ and ‘scenes’ and competing visions of what is good taste. There are so few readers, and their attention is so hard to acquire and keep. Books compete with so many mediums of entertainment that are faster and easier to consume. There isn’t enough air to be particular, to be a hater, to defend the fugly as potentially leading to somewhere fresh and cool.

Personal style begins with others, by defining who we are and who we aren’t. If we aren’t among others—only their looming reactions— how can we commit enough to see what our style might become?8

There’s no fix at the individual level for the above, but I wouldn’t want to leave this substack without a positive vision of personal style, and how to nurture it.

Previously I’ve talked about style in terms of cohesion, layering, and limits; I shared a sort of writing mood board as I did. My go-to writing prompt for classes is also about style, although I usually introduce it as a method to generate ideas: the iconically stylish Kelly Link has a lovely bit of guidance in “write from your obsessions,” which advises tracking a set of interests, the ones that we tote around with us, mull in the back of our brains—this pebbling of different influences and inquiries, developed over time. Similarly: At the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, one of my favorite lectures was by the speculative writer Samantha Hunt, which was less a how-to craft talk and more a tour of one creative person’s mental space, drawing on many other works visual and textual, in order to create a conversation on the theme of mapping. “Conversation” is an overused word, so perhaps instead we’ll call this a collection.

A collector has a slow, evolving practice of style. And a collection is not discovered by solely looking inward. It is found, again and again, out there in the world.

⊹₊Amanda｡˚

Share

• January-Toronto-cold met its equal in the cold of deep space with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. Next I began The Book of Love by Kelly Link on a trip with my family in LA, exploring Joshua Tree & Palm Springs. (My previous J-Tree visit, I’d read Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill and cried awkwardly by the side of the road.) The Book of Love was my first and best listen of the year

• Although. I also was obsessed with the audiobook of The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith and cleaned every nook and cranny of my house, so as to finish the book in one go…and destroy any damning evidence, of course

• Writing-wise, I licked my wounds for awhile

• Finally legal to work in Canada—hooray permanent resident status—I began teaching a science fiction & fantasy workshop called “The Great Escape” at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies (next is winter session, beginning February 4). Keep an eye out for wholly new online classes in the near future…

• Incredibly, in May we moved again. For those counting, that’s twice in one academic year, and over four times in the last four years. Hopefully no more moving until I’m dead. Meanwhile I bounced off of things. I auditioned a lot of novels as audiobooks—usually my surest bet to return to reading after a hiatus—that either weren’t meant for the format or I simply wasn’t in the mood. Listened to some nonfiction instead, toeing through Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass as I made my morning pour-over’s, and waking my husband up with podcasts until Ezra Klein’s voice took on (for him) the abrasive quality of your phone’s daily alarm

• I picked up The Employees by Olga Ravn mostly for the cover and because I figured a short novel would bring me back into the fold. It worked—I love a delightfully strange and poetic sci-fi. I dug into fat fantasy reads for a bit, with The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez (attempted first on audio, then read physically) and Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman my favorites of that period

• Also in the summer, I returned to the re-draft of my first book, brought it 95% to the finish line, and then, the morning of my drive to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, I decided to stop at the gas station and pee on a stick. I called my husband (meanwhile at his own work conference at Cornell) but the service was so bad it took three attempts before he heard “—I’m pregnant!” And we talked excitedly the rest of my drive to Vermont. So, Bread Loaf friends out there, if I seemed exhausted and bloated/green-faced, that’s why. I don’t recommend doing a packed ten-day conference while in the throes of your first trimester—secretly ill, socially overstimulated, and sober among a bunch of nervous, vacationing writers (the least-sober grouping on the planet, for the uninitiated). I couldn’t even stand up straight?? Yet sitting for hours for workshops and readings had my guts in knots, and I was weirdly sweaty and gross. I was anemic and my fingernails turned purple. But the experience was also special and sweet

• Turns out it’s pretty hard to write when you feel fatigued (fatigued is not strong enough a word) and supplied with an entirely new topic of research. When getting used to the idea of pregnancy and parenting, I’d read Emily Oster’s Expecting Better and other books of that sort, which I refrained from including in my Jan-July reading log. Nonetheless I spent the little energy I had, what wasn’t devoted to teaching, on scrolling the internet and reading more books on the subject. Friends and family visited, and we traveled for weddings, and it was a happy, distracted time. My own first novel sat in the drawer, nearly ready to be sent out, but I couldn’t bring myself to open the Scrivener file. My laptop keyboard broke, rendering it semi-unusable, and I still haven’t fixed or replaced the damn thing. My second novel similarly languished, despite my eagerness to revisit it after a very helpful workshop with Rebecca Makkai and my peers at Bread Loaf

• Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías was my favorite read of this queasy season, closely tailed by Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa and Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, the latter of which my husband and I read to each other on the return drive to Toronto—along with H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald. And I listened to some interesting nonfic audiobooks (detailed here)

• Finally, lately, writing. I was promised the second trimester of pregnancy was easier and that’s partly true. I certainly have had more energy—enough to flog myself with. Nobody will demand your unpublished debut novel from you, and as a depressive-type with an unfortunately bulbous ego and high personal standards, I’ve always struggled with finding the proper balance between self-loathing and self-aggrandizement. Somewhere in that pendulum swing lies the motivation for the last 5% of a novel revision. “Embrace seasonality and community,” I tell my class, and myself, periodically. With the assistance of supportive people in my life, caffeine, and an embarrassing-but-effective spotify playlist, I’m writing consistently again, and it feels good

P.S. Just about finished rereading A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. So tightly plotted for a thick epic! I might make a substack about how he juggles his ensemble cast (and talk about character webs-as-worldbuilding). Let me know in the comments if there’s interest, assuming you’ve made it this far. Probably will wait before picking up the sequel, that said: I feel like reading sci-fi again. Also 75% through the audiobook of Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, a great writer to check out if you enjoy an atmospheric speculative read with strong prose/characters. It was pitched to me as a King Lear retelling, and I love those (A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley is incredible) but it isn’t so much that. Read Private Rites anyway and feel damp and mournfully horny—or else frustrated with your sibling. I should probably proceed to the books on my TBR shelf, but as a consummate mood-reader we shall see what actually occurs…

Thanks for reading! Please share the standouts of your past year of reading/writing, below. Happy Holidays & see you in 2025~

꩜Amanda ✩°｡ ⋆⸜ 🎧✮

I don’t remember much about that first reading experience, except that I was very invested in the writing and characters and also very disappointed in the downplaying of magic in this fantasy world. The dragons were only skeletons, and the gods, unfeeling. (The series is not without magic, but it is a slow build.) Moreover, the world was cruel. If, as Ted Chiang has proposed, the difference between science fiction and fantasy is that in fantasy, the universe cares—the universe quests into our souls and selects certain individuals to be important—well, in A Game of Thrones, the stars were distant, and cold.

I was lonely in my early college years, toiling at the task of forming an identity, mourning my childhood, yadda yadda, and reading long books at a rate I’ve seldom matched since. I kept a journal, eyed the world through my camera lens. I related a little too strongly to Jon Snow, stuck at his post at the end of the world.

Ned Stark’s death—I’d say spoilers, but c’mon—is also one of the handful of times I’ve literally thrown a book across the room. The most recent book-throwing, not to be confused with a book launch, was when I finally became rather offended and gave up on Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. Anyway, I was angry enough at Ned’s beheading that I did not pick up A Clash of Kings, the sequel in Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, no matter how curious I was about the fates of the characters I’d grown so attached to.

A Game of Thrones (GoT) opens with a trio of characters who die one by one. This is a warning, and a promise. It’s hard to remember GoT before the hype, but initial readers did not know how much death would animate the story; Martin announces the tone and thematic territory here, in the prologue.

I love the description of Ser Waymar Royce’s dress, above, which is when the eye of the story lingers so as to catch all the details. Not only is his wardrobe expensive, it is recently purchased. This man is new and yet he’s in charge—why’s that? Well, he is the knight, and this is no meritocracy. He has the pedigree and he looks the part.

That won’t save him, of course.

“It is hard to take orders from a man you laughed at in your cups, Will reflected…”

(Indeed, looking the part is always suspect in GoT, we will come to find. The handsome knight Jaime sleeps with his sister and defenestrates children. His brother Tyrion is the real hero, although he does not fit the trope’s mold.)

The reader may flip pages primarily in response to the rising tension, from the deepening cold and sense of unease, wanting to know what creature lurks in the snow—but as they read for the plot, they pick up on the social dynamics of this world (as well as the lore and other factoids we tend to think of when we think of “worldbuilding” and “exposition”). What kind of world is it? GoT is the type of fantasy in which the knights giving orders don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, and are likely as not to lead you, common man, to your grave.

Also, the longest of long arcs is introduced: the frozen dead are waking, and walking south.

Subscribe now

Every story’s beginning contains its ending, and so we begin with this one with a beheading.

Chapter 1, in young Bran Stark’s POV, kills the last of the prologue’s trio of guys. The reader has a lot to track, with many new characters and foreign terms (some explained, some merely mentioned), yet they aren’t overwhelmed with information. As with the prologue, the action of this first proper chapter is simple: in this case, the man is beheaded, and the orphaned direwolf pups are found. But what really keeps the chapter moving light on its feet is the strength of the POV. The scene is grounded at the human scale, focused on Bran’s excitement and intimidation at being included in this gruesome rite. What’s important is what’s important to Bran. He must sit tall on his horse. He must not look away when his father, Ned Stark, beheads the deserter: “Father will know if you do,” Jon Snow instructs.

This beat above does great double-duty. Jon saves the direwolves by sacrificing his position, which establishes his quick-thinking and goodness AND by-the-by explains his last name and bastard status. Bran notices this sacrifice, and loves Jon for it, displaying empathy. Ned Stark notices too, yet allows it to unfold.

Small, specific contrasts draw out the inequalities: Jon calls Ned Stark “Father” when one-on-one with Bran, whereas he says “my lord” when before the larger group. People wear different stances in different situations. As with the prologue, power dynamics shape the interaction, forming the secret subject of the scene. By the end of the chapter, the reader is primed to attend to power—who has it and who doesn’t—as the mover of this world.

Share

Since last time…

• Although my suspicion that I’d be left without answers/satisfaction was confirmed, re: I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jaqueline Harpman, I still am happy I read it. I’d say if you want something philosophical and quiet you may enjoy this strange, short novel.

  

• I can’t believe I forgot to mention reading Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (translated by Adrian Nathan West) given that this August/September I chatted about it to everybody! This is a “hybrid genre” book about real physicists and mathematicians, but that becomes gradually more fictional as the page count rises. With the exception of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, I’m never entirely sure what to put into the “speculative nonfiction” box, but When We Cease to Understand the World might belong in that interesting category. There were parts of this book I adored and parts (the middle) I found repetitive and overwrought (the women were not written well, what’s more). That said, I recommend it. My husband and I like to read books aloud to each other on long car trips, and this book was perfect for that, because it sparked many nerdy discussions.

• What are you out there in the void reading? GoT nudged in front of my TBR, but I’m in need of a new audiobook. Any suggestions for my winter walks and procrasti-cleaning spells?

Amanda⋆𐙚₊˚⊹♡

• God, Human, Animal, Machine, with the clunky sub-title Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, by Meghan O’Gleblyn. I listened to this nonfiction book while driving to and from Ripton, Vermont to attend Bread Loaf (and if anybody out there in the ether wants more info on my experience at the OG writers’ conference, I’m happy to share it). O’Gleblyn’s personal journey—one of leaving the church, the void left in its wake—grounded the work, reminding me of my favorite parts of R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries. I loved learning about older and wilder Christian ideas of the afterlife, which showcased O’Gleblyn’s years of study, although some elements of the techno-spiritualism discussion felt dated already. (I confess I have little patience or interest in Elon Musk and his ilk—I don’t think they’re that deep.)

• Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa. If you are looking for a bone-chilling read for the Halloween season, this will provide. The prose is sharp and the stories themselves are unsettling in a way that will stalk your thoughts long after you’ve finished reading. Translated by Stephen Snyder. (Shoutout to my local bookstore Little Ghosts, which is where I first came upon this short story collection. Btw: If you ever feel like the same few titles are getting marketed to you over and over, or if you feel bored with what you’ve picked up lately, go out to the store. They are curated! You can browse! It’s sick!)

• Against Technoableism by Ashley Shaw. Another nonfiction audiobook I inhaled as I traveled for the weddings I had on my schedule this fall. Overall I recommend it, especially for sci-fi writers who 1) desire inspiration to create new tech that is realistic (as technology that avoids differences among people is not) and 2) want to avoid the problematic aspects in popular tropes of the genre (better to know the cultural baggage you’re toting). My asterisk is that I found the essays to be a bit more of a survey than I wanted, more of an introduction than this reader was looking for, so I wished the book to be longer and more directed; I would have loved the sections on hearing aids and artificial limbs to go on longer, and to linger on the assertion that people with disabilities can teach society how to adapt to a rapidly changing planet.

  

  Subscribe now

• Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías. This short novel continues my infatuation with Latin American speculative fiction, especially the terrifying kind. Translated by Heather Cleary (I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: translators, you have my heart, and you should be paid better for opening up the world to us). It’s a quiet but arresting story about an ecological plague, one of the best writings about covid lockdowns (my other favorite, even if it was probably written prior to the pandemic, is Piranesi by Susanna Clarke). Vaporous and difficult subjects are better examined slantwise, through the literalized metaphors of speculative fiction…before I turn you off from reading it, this isn’t a book About Covid. It’s about inertia and climate change and body horror and break-ups as much as it is about a virus. What’s truly frightening is our inability to change, despite every fact demanding it. This sort of fear—and how to contend with it in art—is a familiar visitor to my late night anxiety spells; the known and the unknown and the unknowable pressing against my thoughts. (Jeff Vandermeer maps this territory like no other and I recommend his recent interview with Adam Morgan in Esquire.) Pink Slime was one of those novels that for reasons I can’t share without spoilers I found a bit unsatisfying directly after finishing it, but that grew on me over time, as it haunted my thoughts for days and then weeks.

• Tell me, what scares you?

Share

Currently Reading (too many things at once, as per usual):

• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jaqueline Harpman, translated by Roz Schwartz. I’m intrigued thus far, although concerned that this one might not go anywhere/I might not be in the right mood for it.

• The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera. This novel is very good and very different from a lot of contemporary fantasy. Enjoying, especially now that I’ve settled into its immersive world.

• A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar. If you’ve been following along here, you know I’m a vocal Samatar-stan BUT I’ve only read her short stories before this. I’ve just begun A Stranger in Olondria and the writing is impeccable, no surprise.

Amanda ✿✫・*。

At least the fiction labeled as such is a miss for this cynic. I’ve tried the short and sweet speculative novels so many people adore and I feel no warm fuzzies. Their utopian visions leave me cold. The sci-fi satirical charmers and jokers make my eyes roll. But I’m certainly not immune to the cozy when it takes the form of quick banter, coffee, and friendship—I’ve binged gilmore girls more than once—nor am I immune to the glory of nora ephron—and practical magic’s victorian home by the sea reliably makes my heart flutter. I feel things, okay! Perhaps I allow myself a swaddle of a film/show in a way that I don’t with literature, that my scrupulous writer brain is getting in the way, killing the mood…

One day I showed practical magic to a friend, introducing it as my favorite comfort watch. They were astonished to find darkness in it, including death of a loved one, and especially the sexual violence, although in the end the bad see their due and the HEA (happily ever after) is assured. I replied that I probably wouldn’t be so emotionally attached to the movie if it was pure rainbows—it would have no heft. But it got me thinking. Movies can become more comforting in retrospect, after repeat viewings; the effect of the dark elements are subdued by my meta-knowledge of what will happen. Still there must be a set of intrinsic traits to compel repetition.

Most things I would call cozy include romances, so I might be overcomplicating the issue as per usual. Except I rarely seek out books that are published as romance; they don’t appeal to me. Sure, I might just be a reluctant romantic, but I think there’s a bit more there, something greater than basic preferences or elitism, the same difference in type that keeps me from, say, enjoying romantasy. What is it about these lower case romances that do appeal? What makes “cozy” fiction different from fiction I find cozy?

It occurs to me that romantic subplots are cozy not only because love is positive, but also because love is normal. Love is where the average humans are, in fiction. They are heroes because they get over their own hang-ups, not because they defeat the dark wizard and return the world to justice. It’s a slice-of-life situation with what feels like life-and-death stakes to the characters. (As the will-they-won’t-they is a subplot, there’s also a frame narrative with greater plot propulsion to provide a black-point.)

I often seek comfort in visual forms, and not only the narrative kind. I seek the same pleasure in interior design and (once upon a time, RIP) image-based blogs. I am addicted to magazines, websites, social media accounts devoted to the subject and adjacent subjects. I refine and refine until, ideally, the algorithm shows me nothing but beauty. My style, or other styles I admire, iterated and interpreted, reimagined and developed without the rude intrusion of something ugly, off-putting, out of place.

Beauty calms my eye. It’s a unity and balance that I seek (albeit with greater thought) when I raise my camera, shaping a frame. A good photograph is not without contrast, but the composition—its total control of the scene—this I find comforting. Aesthetic consistency requires control, gathering all the parts into a whole, into the embrace of a tone, an argument. The photograph has a point of view, and assembles the world into that perspective.

This is an element of coziness seldom discussed: control.

Sometimes it’s not about beauty, but about sameness. Or: beauty to its rational extreme is sameness. This plays into the tendency of repetition, too. (Why sitcoms are so good for cozy binges: they always revert to the status quo.)

When I was quite depressed, some years ago, I became obsessed with youtube videos in which everything was the same color. Or a small register of colors, a neat palette, satisfying textures. Nothing that might snag the eye. Cafe vlogs in which everything was cream and camel- hued. Snow globe worlds with an assortment of matching stationary in each drawer, taken out and shown with ritualistic care. Coordinated outfits and drawn-out disclosures of what a bag might contain inside it. A sort of ASMR. (I hope this does not make me sound too insane.) I forget how I stumbled upon this core-sample of deep internet—perhaps via “desk setup” videos and slice-of-life vlogs, the latter of which I still use as background noise, when podcasts are too distracting and I desire the sense of another, mild personality. They are valuable for their interchangeable quality; you wouldn’t return to one of them, call one a fave.

But it would be uncharitable to say such internet rabbit holes for dissociative-types are in the same category as gilmore girl binges.

These monochromatic videos strike me as a precursor to the AI slop pressed at us from every angle now. Among my other more immediate concerns about AI, I worry how rounded-AI media is becoming a larger portion of the internet. Images pebbled by an ocean of other images, the real creative referent receding and receding from our view. At first AI had some reassuring weirdness, even uncanniness, but the sharp is becoming streamlined, the friction filed off along with the serial numbers.

This is an another element of coziness: a lack of discord, an exclusion of wrongness.

But you might rightly object that things are cozy for other reasons: nostalgia, lightness of content, stakes that are scaled to normal human life. The ring, after all, is aesthetically consistent but rarely considered a cozy watching experience. Content is important but the focus on content over form is mistaken. People redesign the most expensive room of their house to mimic a “nancy meyers” kitchen! The style is central.

Recently I read a couple books that I found to be so cozy I wanted to live inside them.

The first I’ve mentioned in a previous substack—Kelly Link’s The Book of Love. It’s a long novel that I did not want to end, because then I would have to leave the small, magic town in which it takes place. The story is mainly about grief, but also teenage horniness, and also sibling rivalry. The other book was Juliet Marillier’s The Daughter of the Forest, a retelling of the myth in which a girl must sew six shirts out of stinging nettles, one for each of her brothers, who have been cursed, transformed into swans. Daughter of the Forest is about survival, and healing from trauma, and also desire. Both books eventually become focused on romance, but also showcase a style of worldbuilding I find less common nowadays—I struggle to define exactly how—perhaps its the type of fey, strange magic operative in each, the more flexible, less voice-driven POV. A style influenced by myth, and by children’s literature, despite the darkness of their content, which includes murder and rape.

The romances in both novels are critical counterbalances. So too are the atmospheric settings, the small quaint town and the magical dark forest—these are so atomic, so classic, I want to capitalize them—Small Town, Magical Forest—sites of nostalgia and aesthetic coherence able to embrace it all, the dark and the light.

This is an aspect of coziness that’s more familiar: immersion.

A beautiful world you want to step inside and stay awhile, familiar yet discrete from our own: that is where the desire for repetition emerges from. It’s where the AO3 fanfics spin-off from. It isn’t a total lack of pain, or strife, but a balance that tends ultimately, inevitably towards good.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗˗

Subscribe now

☆☆This fall I’m teaching another creative writing workshop at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies! “The Great Escape” is online, and as per usual focuses on writing science fiction and fantasy with a literary bent. More info & enroll here!

On to the newsletter proper…

Between Two Fires, by Christopher Buehlman, is a fantasy tale about a lay priest, a fallen knight, and an orphaned girl who travel on a religious quest through plague-ravaged medieval France. It includes a lot of monster fighting, with some battles taking place on Earth, some set high in the firmament, and far, far more in the trenches of the human heart and mind. No wonder, as Temptation is a major theme of the book: in this world, the demons are real, and they smell sweet. Most of the population is dead of disease or hunger and the towns lie empty, the fields fallow. Beauty and comfort are more seductive than ever in a collapsed society. It’s the end of the world, so why not live a little?

It’s interesting that the book is categorized as Horror on the cover…I suppose I’d call it grimdark fantasy? There are horrors within to be sure; the horrors in Between Two Fires find diverse shapes, some I found hard to read (the threat of sexual assault, for instance—although I wouldn’t necessarily say it is gratuitous in the book, as it really only appears twice over 430 pages, and while it is disturbing, it is also thematically relevant). But the driver of the book is a quest, a quest seeking to return the world to a better, previous state, to return the demons to hell and the angels to heaven—which is fairly standard for fantasy. Perhaps grimdark was less common a term back in 2012?

Share

What I found surprising was how the story forks from the trauma plot norm. Each of the characters undergoes Trauma (see the Horrors above) and their painful pasts are dramatized in lengthy backstory. Usually trauma in narrative serves to provide the characters with a bit of psychological realism.

«A Spoiler» The knight’s trauma involves his wife’s betrayal during the war. Buehlman might’ve included the betrayal simply to give the protagonist some depth: his past hurt is the source of his gruff personality, etc, etc. However, the narrative moves through this mode and into another.

The backstory is not separate from the present plot, it is an obstacle preventing the knight’s self-actualization and success in his quest.

If you’ve been reading this substack a while, you’ll know I sometimes find trauma plots irksome, not only because they are dominant but also because they can erase ambiguity. They can be narrative dead-ends. Explain-away-ers. Ah, we say, the character thinks himself impossible to love because he has been betrayed in the past. As if reading is about cracking a code, not experiencing a story. This doesn’t have to be so, but too often it is. What’s more, trauma as a framework has a tendency to—although again, does not by necessity!!—focus on the individual self instead of on how people exist together. Looking ceaselessly backward and inward. Still, I would not call this book an “anti-trauma plot” narrative. Rather, Between Two Fires favors a frankly Christian iteration of the trauma plot, which requires the radical forgiveness of another: if the knight cannot forgive his wife, he cannot defeat the demon.

The disgraced knight must see beyond himself, beyond his own perspective, and look outward with sympathy, or he will fail.

☆

In film, a “visual bible” is a folio of reference points for how the final product should look and feel. The idea of a visual bible is to get the entire production crew on the same page, in order to create a cohesive movie (despite the many people who are involved in the process).

Now you might say: Amanda, you are just one person working on your novel, why would you need an aid in order to get yourself on the same page? And to that I say: some of us are very distractible! It takes authors months or years (usually years—and definitely years for me) to write a novel. During the drafting, I’ll often read another book and fall in love with its unusual structure /narrative choices, and want to mimic it—whether or not it suits my project. Experimentation is key to finding your style, right?

Also, it is nigh impossible to keep an entire novel in your head. The problem is that it’s not just the scenes on the page you must recall; you remember all the false plot branches and character arcs you considered and abandoned along the way. So even as a production crew of one, the visual bible is a useful tool. It allows me to envision the novel, remind myself of the themes and images patterning throughout, and to maintain consistency, so the ending matches the beginning (which is harder than you think to accomplish).

style as layering & style as limits

For my work in progress, I knew I was influenced by cyberpunk but did not want my story to be too cyberpunk. I’m a fan of the subgenre, but it’s been overly self-referential for a long time. We all saw Akira and Blade Runner1 and rightly fell in love but that’s where the genre has mired itself. (I know neon signs+rain=cool but we’ve been there a million times.) Plus there’s frequently orientalism and xenophobia lurking just beneath the surface of those aesthetics; blind reverence to style is risky.

Instead of purging your work of all influence, a doomed venture, I think of the creation process as additive, accretionary.2 So I began layering influences, hoping to reach fresh territory. My goal was to write slantwise through the cyberpunk influences while coming up with something new—essentially, my own style.

Subscribe now

my visual bible

I always begin with place, but you might not work that way.

Setting A: Southern California desert

Setting B: Strip Malls /My Hometown

Setting C: Lived-in Home Spaces, cf. Spielberg

Setting D: The Laboratory

This final setting is also in a sense one of the story props.

Prop A: Ductile Technologies

One of my first prop decisions was to avoid digital tech. Our current era is very polished and corporate and Steve Jobs, so to achieve the estrangement of sci-fi (without, again, using Asia lazily as Foreignness) I went the opposite direction: I wanted as little use or mention of pixels, phones, social media, etc., which feel overly contemporary. Above all, I wanted to privilege touch, gear, and instruments. (I’m an amateur photographer and one of my favorite parts of it is the amount of stuff involved! The lenses! The buttons! The tools!) Moreover, the body is important in my novel—I know, we all say we write about the body but forgive me, I do!!—so tactility in the tech makes obvious sense.

Share Collected Fictions

Prop B: Big-Ass Machines You Go Inside

Sometimes I took cues from the current technologies and sometimes I took cues from experimental ones.

Prop C: Tubes! (Recurrent Shapes/Forms)

Sometimes I’d come across inspiration in the wild. I took these photos myself, when I became lost in the Providence mall.

Prop D: Skincare / Makeup / Body Stickers

Another important part of the story is being a teenager, so I was thinking about appearance and beauty as well.

I’m running up against the email limit, so I suppose I should wrap things up. I think you get the idea! You can add motifs, conceits, and images to your visual bible. You can add lists of words that taste right, that evoke the mood and tone you want for your project. Let yourself, in all your specifics, be a funnel for the weird: Always write from your obsessions.

What I think can help make this exercise more meaningful than, say, making a pinterest board or drawing up a bullet-point list of tropes, is to reason with yourself why you are drawn to these visual references, and in particular how they interact with the content of your story. Meaning may only emerge belatedly, as you collect and connect your influences together. Keep editing, curating, placing in parallel. Sweat the small stuff. Be precious with it. Keep looking until the surface becomes strange. Your style is there, in the details.

☆❀☆❀☆

It’s been a little while. I’ve been in hermitage working on the final act of this novel rewrite. :) However I recently emerged from hibernation (read: my couch) to attend Ted Chiang’s talk, “Thoughts On Being a Cyborg.” (I’ve yet to devote a full newsletter to the idea-driven short story adept, but I’ve mentioned Chiang here and also here.)

A brief summary of Chiang’s lecture and discussion with Prof. Avery Slater—with the caveat that I couldn’t take notes:

1. Writing is not an innate skill (like speech), but rather a technology, one invented only a few times in history, and

2. Writing re-circuits how we think—hence we are cyborgs—to the extent that

3. The advent of writing represented a paradigm-shift in communication & experience.

4. Science fiction has been great at imagining what a paradigm shift might evolve into, but ONLY AFTER the first inkling of the technology has been invented. For example, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (published 1992) extrapolates from the fledgling computer graphics of the time to imagine immersive online worlds (popularizing the Sanskrit term “avatar” in this context, as well as the portmanteau “metaverse”). Snow Crash accurately predicted the great leaps we’ve already seen—and ones we have not yet been able to produce…Tech-y people also were inspired by Snow Crash, but Chiang didn’t address that part.

5. Generative AI (LLMs) are NOT the beginning of a new paradigm shift. (This came up over and over in the Q&A, which Chiang rejected, along with all things Elon.) We haven’t seen the beginning of the next paradigm yet, he contends.

Something I’ve long found fascinating in Chiang’s work is his ability to escape our current dominant paradigm and cast into previous or alien modes of understanding. He does this in both the content and style of his stories, which seem to have more in common with earlier generations (Borges, Sturgeon, Ballard) than his contemporaries. Curious for an SF writer in particular, how his stories feature alchemists and philosophers as frequently as robots and the denizens of outer space.

Often we project onto the past our logics and morals, or depict humans with alien masks rather than push ourselves to imagine something different. We write historical fiction in which the white people we are supposed to root for are conveniently also on the right side of history, as if the Victorian cutpurse or feudal lord was Selected by the author-god to receive a crash course in civil rights, inclusivity, and the scientific method. Of course, it can be truly draining to read about racist/ sexist/ homophobic/ etc etc ugh-type characters, and nobody has to—we get enough of it bombarded at us, in the 4chanification of the internet and IRL. This problem is also prevalent, though, in the form of Christian ideology foisted onto pagans or capitalism/ stock-colonialism onto distant spacefarers. It’s flattening, Disneyfied and simplified, gameplay-ready-player-one-’d. It is generally applied so that we the Reader are not challenged. The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but it is also long, so why does everybody seem to think the same?

Share Collected Fictions

And for that matter, if we suggest the characters are on the right side of history we also assume we are on the right side of history. As if the daylight between right and wrong was eternally sharp. While it’s clear we are correct in fighting for equality and freedom, it’s rare that we all agree on what that means, and how best to go about it.

I recommend this excellent essay on worldbuilding by Vajra Chandrasekera, author of The Saint of Bright Doors, which is high on my tbr—and just received a Hugo nom as well. In the essay, Chandrasekera is critical of the worldbuilding ambition:

“The world, to be built, must be made small. The technique requires the stripping away of complexities…It is common to describe worldbuilding projects as encyclopedic, but few worldbuilding projects have the space (or the interest) to investigate the depths of historical-psychological complexity, ambiguity, unknowability, and irreducibility that might be seen in the edit history of a single contested Wikipedia page—to say nothing of the epistemological failures of Wikipedia itself, its biases and overwhelmingly vast absences. Worldbuilding as a totalizing project cannot help but fail. My feeling is that “suspension of disbelief” and “secondary world” were not helpful ways to think about what is actually happening when we read a text, and yet they are tropes so influential and well-established that many of us take them as givens, as expectations of how we should read and what a fantastical text is supposedly doing.”

The givens are the issue. As writers, the question is how to see outside of the ocean we are in.

My husband (side note: you should buy his novel) takes forever sometimes to read the books I recommend. Granted, I do the same thing to him!! I retain my right to give him guff about it, though. A book I’ve been recommending probably since we started dating is Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, which has stuck with me since I was assigned it as a bright-eyed Political Science major/Asian Studies minor. He just finished it, so after the Ted Chiang talk—while out for dinner and a flight of ciders with our friends—we immediately began relating the two thinkers.

Chiang argued that writing is a technology, and that it is substantively different from the oral tradition. Yet Chiang focused on the effect of writing-tech on the individual—transforming us into cyborgs—not so much the effect on populations. Perhaps he didn’t have time. But this was what I kept thinking about. If we are cyborgs, what sort of communities do cyborgs form?

Would you die for your country? Commit the ultimate sacrifice for someone living in, say, South Dakota who you’ve never met, or for some future American you never will? Maybe you personally would not, but many people have. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson points out how incredible this is. The nation is not like a tribe or town. We imagine we share something important in common with Americans who live across thousands of miles or existed before our time, or will be born only after we die. A continuity that severs at the border. Then we build walls across the desert to keep people out. This is pretty weird!

Last summer I immigrated to Canada from the US. I technically live closer to my family in Los Angeles now than when I lived in New England and New York, and there is no language barrier (in Toronto, aside from some fun slang—I just learned the term “a keener”), few cultural differences aside from celsius (which I will never grasp) and the milk that comes in bags instead of cartons…but the border makes it feel further, to myself and to others.

What is especially fascinating to Anderson is that nationalism is quite recent, historically speaking, and yet commands such fervent (religious-like) loyalty. The nation-state arose under particular historical circumstances and yet is “modular, capable of being transplanted” around the world, and seems ancient, natural. Nations and their borders feel like a given, they are everywhere—and many groups of people who don’t have a nation greatly desire it. I understand well that in our current political reality, nationhood is the most probable path to security, rights, and power—that without a state, discrimination and subjugation can be difficult to fend off. The nation can offer much to marginalized peoples. But it is not the only political unit that can.

All nations were invented at a certain point in time, and like any tool, have both their uses and abuses, consequences seen and unforseen. In short, the nation is a technology, too. Why don’t we think of them this way? What is gained, if we do?

• After the invention of writing came a variety of inventions to share writing: the printing press, the newspaper, the television, the internet, and finally, social media. Imagined Communities contains a wealth of convincing evidence to show that it is only after the printing press that we see the modern idea of the nation emerge

• Memory accumulates with writing

• The middle is getting cut out of our newspapers, our book publishers. What happens if there is only Substack (or whatever) and The New York Times left? Will the fragmentation of our media lead to the fragmentation of our sense of shared community? Has this happened already?

• What paradigm might occur after the nation?

SFF right now, in movies and literature, is interested in revolution—in the overthrow of the evil empire. How many speculative works are interested in the creation or transformation of the state? I agree with Chandrasekera that “worldbuilding” in the usual sense is inadequate, in that it assumes a knowable world. What I want to add is that we worldbuild in our world all the time, and that it goes unacknowledged. So many parts of our societies are technologies we created, we imagined into being. (Don’t get distracted by whether or not a thing has cords, gears, screens!) These are technologies nonetheless that can constrain us or can work for us, that shape the way we think, that terraform our world—shouldn’t we pay more attention to them?

Subscribe now

A primer on writing about seggs, especially when tentacles/the dead/magic/etc is involved. Jk—we can say the word “sex” here, it’s not tiktok, thank god!!

The origin for this newsletter: While traveling to visit my family in LA (we took a car trip to Joshua Tree and Palm Desert), I listened to the first eleven hours of The Book of Love by Kelly Link. It’s great! It’s also, among other things—namely grief, magic, love, friendship—about horny teenagers. The characters think about sex and relationships often, and sex is portrayed as both normal and exciting, and is at times described instead of wholly elided—a rare combo in literary fiction. Oh, and often the sex in The Book of Love is with a partner who isn’t mortal.

So, let’s have the sex talk.

Disclaimer: I have not read any Sarah J. Maas, although seemingly everyone else and their mother has. (Speaking of: Hi, Mom, I hope you enjoy this entry). xoxo

Questions to guide our inquiry: How much should fiction *go there*? Must it “advance the plot?” Do you agree that in our media everyone is beautiful and no one is horny? Is speculative fictional sex different, craft-wise, from regular fictional sex? And how do you avoid inducing cringe in the reader?

The following is geared toward writing literary-leaning fiction, and may not be applicable to erotica, romance genre, or AO3 (as much as Raylo fanfic repackaged with YA-ish cartoon covers has publishing by the neck these days)...no shade! Just not my field.

Okay, let’s begin, shall we?

1. Let the faeries have big dicks, if so desired. Sex is a part of life, fair game as subject matter; that includes all kinds of sex, although literary writers seem to prefer masturbation (portrayed pathetically, or as strange—looking at you, Philip Roth) and mediocre sex as subjects, a tendency I describe with the technical term, the “womp-womp approach,” in which sex is unsatisfying or awkward or even traumatic and rarely if ever Hot, presumably because we are a bunch of cowards. There’s a place in fiction for bad or meh sex, but it really is altogether too common.

   Here more than anywhere else in fiction, we beg the reader not to take us too seriously. The other emotions we freely ask of them. Loneliness is great stuff for narration. Yearning we can do, that’s respectable. But raunchiness? Something so sincere as that? So frequently, we demure. Rather insert a white space break and let the reader’s imagination fill it in. Because good sex, explicitly depicted, flirts with the pornographic, and the pornographic gets pulpy, silly, popcorn-y. Pornographic and Artful, however, are not by necessity at odds. Garth Greenwell writes well on this. Greenwell and R.O. Kwon have also highlighted the value of queer desire as a literary subject, and how other aspects of identity (such as race) intersect with our intimate selves.

   

2. Sex happens to characters. Garth Greenwell again: “Sex is an experience of intense vulnerability, and it is also where we are at our most performative, and so it’s at once as near to and as far from authenticity as we come. Sex throws us profoundly into ourselves, our own sensations, physical and emotional; it is also, at least when it’s interesting, the moment when we’re most carefully attuned to the experience of another.” Sex is like anything else in a novel, caught in the web of events and meanings, marriages and funerals, beginnings middles and endings, pacing and tension and release. It doesn’t have to “advance the plot” (such mechanical phrasing, ugh!) but sex always has an effect.

3. The “inches on the page”—pardon the pun—of description should be in proportion to importance, to mangle an Annie Dillard quote. This is my preference, over the idea that everything in a story has to advance the plot. What is gained with depiction, over summary or elision?

   Carmen Maria Machado’s speculative short story “The Husband Stitch” has a lot of descriptions of pleasurable sex. This is a wonderful example, not only of how explicit prose can be artful, and that excess (check out her similes!) can be a virtue, but also how the surface of desire provides a sense of depth. Machado almost solely relies on showing the character’s lust as the means to make the narrator feel real. And it totally works. It ties into the themes (power, trust, desire) of the story, and it both belies and underlines the fairy tale -esq flatness of the characters. (The fairy tale part comes in with the source material of the green ribbon, the section headers that encourage an oral telling, and the nesting of other stories within the main story.)

   

4. Sex is both normal and transgressive. The normal part is addressed in #1. For the transgressive part: taboo is fecund territory for fiction. It’s thrilling and juicy, much like violence is. It gets at our masks and what lies beneath them. It’s a leap, a juncture, a contrast, a divide.

5. Euphemism is risky. I understand—there are so few good anatomical words—and it gets medical fast. But beware: I used to read slush at a poetry journal—that’s not the beware part (I recommend to all writers becoming a slush reader if you can, because you will cut more bad writing habits that way, and speedier, than any other method)—this was about a decade ago. Here is the beware part: I still remember a submission that referred to a vagina in an extended metaphor as a “scabbard.” It was…not good. But hey, I do remember it.

   Subscribe now

6. Avoid describing sex like it’s chess. As with all physical action in fiction, it doesn’t have to be a blocked play-by-play. I had a teacher who loved to say that “reactions beat actions,” and I think that’s generally right. Above in “The Husband Stitch” excerpt, there is physical description, but it is all grounded within the narrator’s point of view, focused on the dynamism of the scene, the shifts of energy, the buildup to pivotal moments, on how the character feels.

   

7. Ask yourself, what is sex, to your story? How are you framing it? It shifts, as all things do, with context. If you want to write flesh that has real weight, you have to flesh things out. In speculative stories, the context of the sex—what it means to the characters, the stakes and effects—might be quite different.

   I find, when building out stories, it’s clarifying to start with opposites. Create foils. So: What isn’t sex, in your story? Think in terms of balance. If there is one version of something, one extreme, you should consider including its opposite as contrast (and perhaps its midpoint as well). In my newsletter “A Box Full of Eyelids,” about horror writer Mariana Enriquez, who wrote the novel Our Share of Night, which by the way is quite horny, I shared part of her interview from the excellent literary podcast Between the Covers.

   The interviewer David Naimon asks Enriquez why there’s so much sex in her novel. She answers that her novel is about death, and that it is desire, not love, that is the opposite of death. This is one of those pronouncements that maybe I don’t entirely believe, but I find generative. What’s more: it is a true statement, within her novel.

8. You must risk cringe, for kink. In that same interview, Naimon describes how “sometimes one needs to risk pornography in the portrayal of violence.” This might be rephrased as: How much control does the writer have over the reader’s reaction to their words? What if you mean to write a sexy scene, and instead, oh no, it’s cringey?? (See #5, and this image, below)

   

   In fiction, cringe is the experience of being “taken out” of the story. It is a problem for the suspension of disbelief. It’s easy to avoid cringe by framing the sex with sarcasm, with pity, or evading depiction (see #1). However, cringe can be avoided another way: by saturating the story in the POV. Avoid cringe with narrative distance, or else with closeness.

9. Sex has power dynamics. My favorite story to teach is “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler. (Side note: we really don’t talk enough about how sex features in Butler’s oeuvre. It’s strange and interesting.) “Bloodchild” is essentially (SPOILERS) a gender-swapped pregnancy story with ambiguous consent. See the ways our understanding of this sexual experience is tied deeply to the worldbuilding, how this occurs at the level of the character, and also at the sentence, the word.

   

10. About those tentacles. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know my answer at this point: You should go for it, baby. Get weird. Or just plain get different from what you think is common or expected. For instance, why should sex with an alien be the same as sex with a human? What if they were ambisexual? Game of Thrones shook up the fantasy genre in part by foregrounding a sexual morality as dark as its medieval politics. (Sometimes things that should not be radical or surprising are, given our genre history and culture. For example: Why not a classic dragon-filled high fantasy that’s also sapphic?) If your characters can live for several lifetimes in the far-off future, might they choose to experience life as various genders, and assume various roles (mother one lifetime and father the next)? If you are writing an entirely created world, why should it be hamstrung by the same prejudices as ours? Would an AI who can inhabit many bodies at once think of sex and gender as we do? Perhaps your science fantasy epic could have a throuple with a pirate. Or (below) you could imagine a very different “first contact” story…

Setting aside for the moment that AI writing is bad in quality—to use something, however briefly, is to enter a kind of relationship with it, and no relationship goes in one direction.

What effect does convenient writing have on us?

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell writes: “Our civilization is decadent and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse…underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.” This assumption morphs to fit Silicon Valley’s optimism, nihilism, and mysticism. Tech promoters would have us believe that AI’s babbling is as good as speech, or will get there soon.

The problem is that writing is a type of precise thinking, so if you delegate the writing to another, you delegate the thinking, too. (This will be true regardless if AI improves.)

Writing is difficult, yes.

”But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.”

(George Orwell again, in an uncanny prognostication)

AI is the literalization of this shirking. So we shouldn’t be surprised to find that the writing AI spits out routinely sounds a lot like Orwell’s laundry list of bad habits in “Politics and the English Language”: ChatGPT favors a clutter of unnecessary words, received phrases, euphemism, and repetitive sentence rhythms.

Even when it isn’t disclosed, you can feel when an article was composed with AI. There’s a certain tone, a house style. Driven to a bland median, it lacks sincerity, texture, and clarity. That’s why bots shine in writing tasks that involve bullshitting. Yet even where AI finds its best use-case—in formulaic, padded writing, like that seen in cover letters—it does so because it spams the reader with nonsense fluff. It encourages you to skim.

The only interesting creative uses of large language models I’ve seen so far emphasize this non-human style, although notably were created early, before the edges were rounded off the LLMs.

A dead metaphor is a comparison that is used because it’s handy, but holds little meaning, thoughtlessly applied. ChatGPT, which cannot think, produces utterances solely composed of dead metaphors, a zombie language. And I wonder: if a large percentage of the applicants for a job use AI for their personal statement, what good is the metric? Probably the employer will stop requesting cover letters. The quick-fix spawns more issues down the line, clogging the system.

AI inspires grand predictions, but it is nothing more or less than, as Ted Chiang explains well, “a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web.” And that blur can introduce unexpected elements. I see a version of this when I edit student drafts. For instance, a fantasy writer influenced by The Lord of the Rings will accidentally regurgitate racial stereotypes. It is obvious to them once the problem is pointed out, and the writer feels terrible because it wasn’t intentional. It was a trope they’d seen before, and hadn’t thought through.

Language is always freighted, whether or not it was chosen with care.

The blurred language of AI enters at the individual level, when you delegate to ChatGPT, and it also enters at the societal level, when good writing is buried by the bad, and when readers learn from blurry ideas. The problem is not passive voice itself—it is when a headline obscures the actor in the crime. The problem is not a dead metaphor, it is when whole groups of people are compared to vermin. Students are using AI to do their homework at a point in history when media literacy and analytical thinking is critical. AI is a new iteration of the ongoing enshitification of the internet, but, in our age of misinformation and mistrust, it also presents a real danger. The danger is not that sentient machines will murder us (and we do well enough with the “dumb” machines, as far as mass murder goes). The danger is we stop paying attention when we need to most.

Convenience is a sneaky ill; a personal quick-fix won’t address structural issues, only patch them; for example, because our cities are not walkable and we are overworked, we drive everywhere; as a result, we miss out on chance encounters with others who are different from us; we pollute our environment, worsen our quality of life, and deepen the political divide. The effects seem to be local and temporary, but the damage is universal.

We may not identify convenience as a defining problem of our era, but of course, the point of convenience is not to think about it.

Subscribe now

Want to read along with me? My current audiobook is The Spear Cuts Through Water, by Simon Jimenez. I’m about halfway through. (I’ll admit I let it wash over me more even than I usually do with audiobooks, as I complete my little chores or walk about—it still works as this epic fantasy reads like One Thousand and One Nights.)

For physical books, I’m reading The Employees by Olga Ravn (a sort of sci-fi prose poem-like novel, for fans of Renee Gladman) and next on my TBR is Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi.

I’m teaching The Great Escape, an online writing workshop at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies, from May 7-June 25! Spread the word! FYI for those who were in my Catapult (RIP) courses, there will be overlap in material, although of course the workshop is always new. Feel free to ask me questions and thanks as always for being here. Ok, now to the newsletter~

THIRD APPARITION Be lion-mettled, proud, and take no care
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are.
Macbeth shall never vanquished be until
Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill
Shall come against him.

⌜He⌝ descends.

MACBETH   That will never be.
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earthbound root? Sweet bodements, good!
Rebellious dead, rise never till the Wood
Of Birnam rise, and our high-placed Macbeth
Shall live the lease of nature, pay his breath
To time and mortal custom. 

Act 4, Scene 1. The witches, after a bit of “double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble,” summon a set of apparitions, which intone the prophecy to Macbeth; namely, that he will be killed by no man born of woman, and that he will be safe until Birnam wood marches to Dunsinane Hill.

Prophecies are slippery bastards. An Act later, the forest does not literally march itself, but instead is carried as branches by the army, making good on the terms of the prophecy but disappointing a young J.R.R. Tolkien, who desired a grander magic than that. He imagined a different battle: what if the forest walked literally? Thus Macbeth inspired the creation of ents, those tree-shepherds of Middle Earth.

This is not actually a newsletter about The Lord of the Rings or Shakespeare—I apologize to my nerdiest subscribers out there in the void. Yet I did watch the trilogy over Christmas (a tradition of mine is to have the films playing in the background over the holiday) and remembered this fact about the ents and Macbeth from the behind-the-scenes documentaries that came with our family’s box DVD set—

★⌒~ break for deep nostalgia ~⌒☆

—and thought about how reader expectations collide with, and are informed by, genre. When novels dramatize that speculative/realism divide, and not in the way of the normalized strangeness of magical realism (think Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits) nor modernized fairy tales/surrealism (think Helen Oyeyemi’s What is not Yours is not Yours) nor lightly science fictional books (think Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven). When I tried to find examples over on the bad place, I received many well-intentioned suggestions in this vein. I’m not talking about novels that have speculative elements but are literary in style, your “genre in-betweener” books or whatever you might call them. Frankly a lot of “literary fiction” these days is “genre in-betweener,” with their plot and structure influences from the genre side. (Lmk if that phenomenon is of interest…I have many thoughts.)

I am talking about a narrower category: when the genre is a source of suspense.

I tell students that “what kind of world is it?” is a primary form of suspense at the opening of a story. Usually the narrative begins answering that question from the first paragraph, providing the reader with clues and details about the world as they discover it. But there are quite a few books I love that both prompt the reader to wonder “what kind of world is it? is magic real? are we in the future? etc.,” and withhold that information until it is dramatically revealed at some point later in the story, often near the climax.1

New writers sometimes do a version of this by accident, causing confusion and reader frustration. But if executed well, it can be a satisfying trick; the books that accomplish this trick rank among my all-time favorites. A few come to mind…

• Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell: A coming-of-age story about a girl from a family of gator wrestlers who own a sort of roadside attraction. After her mother (the main act) dies, their family becomes insolvent and falls apart. The girl, left totally alone, goes on a quest to save their home, encountering a sort of wizard—perhaps. The girl’s strange POV, the heightened landscape of the Florida swamp, the girl’s unusual upbringing, etc.—it could be magical. I cannot tell you.2

• The City and the City, by China Miéville: An unusual detective tale set in Beszel and Ul Qoma, two imaginary cities with overlapping territories at the fringes of Europe. These cities have very strange boundaries indeed. A citizen of one cannot hear or see the other, as if the boundary was drawn on the mind, not the map…

• Fever Dream, by Samanta Schweblin3: A mother and her child become mysteriously ill while vacationing in a rural town. The mother, feverish, attempts to piece together what has happened—you can read this one in a single night.

• The Vegetarian, by Han Kang: This novel in particular makes me consider how the uncanny style increases the sense of genre trouble. Driven by nightmares, a wife goes vegetarian, sowing discord.

• Bunny, by Mona Awad: “On Wednesdays we wear pink” + your worst MFA experience. Tbh I didn’t love this book as much as the others but many do. Interesting to me is that satire often flirts with this boundary.

• Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor: Cast of characters whose lives intersect with the murder of the village witch. This is a gorgeous, flinty book (if you prefer to look up content warnings I’d say do that for this one especially).

• Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro: Ishiguro writes in such a way that on some level, I feel like all of his novels qualify for this list; that said, this book might be a reach here? Two timelines, one describing a coming-of-age at a mysterious boarding school and the other, the adult aftermath.

• The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht: I fear this opens up the category too much into what might be magical realism? Family generational epics that are grounded in realism in the contemporary setting, whereas in the past it feels like magic is more possible, might be an entire subgenre on its own…but hey I thought this novel was great, so I’m including it. A story of a country in the Balkans shaped by war, and the grandfather’s encounters with “the deathless man.”

• The Magus, by John Fowles: My current read and the other inspiration for this post! A directionless recent college grad decides to take a job on a remote island in Greece, where he encounters a mysterious old man, who is either a trickster or magician.

• Short story examples: “An Account From the Land of Witches” by Sofia Samatar, “The Dirty Kid” by Mariana Enríquez, both available free online, if you want to dip your toes in.

As you can see, it’s almost impossible to discuss how this trick works without gnarly spoilers. Atmosphere and style can certainly heighten the sensation of genre trouble, by hinting without showing its hand. This isn’t much of an explanation, however. I can tell you that all of these examples only function because of (shocker) the author’s chosen point of view. Told differently, these novels would clearly be either speculative or realist from the start, but the writers chose perspectives that are quite limited, and chose plots that put pressure on the POV.

Put another way: the characters’ theories or understandings of the world are directly challenged. The POV dilates over the course of the story, as information is gathered. The nature of world is revealed not only to the reader, but also to the characters inhabiting it. That’s why it is dramatic. There is a moment, a scene, introducing a fundamental shift in the world physics.

Now that I’ve explained what I mean better, I really am interested in more examples—please leave a comment below if you think of some! ☆

From the chill of the alps to the freeze of deep space:

A few days ago, I finished listening to Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s space opera on human (and arthropod) faults and foibles. On the literary<—>genre spectrum, it is solidly genre. Half of the narrative is set on an ark ship, in which most of the remaining human population is in cyrosleep, awaiting colonization of a new, terraformed planet. They are the survivors after a previous empire destroyed the viability of Earth through pollution, and wrecked their other options by war, dooming the human race (#relatable).

My favorite bit was the plot thread of a relationship splintered by the two characters unevenly entering and exiting cyrosleep. At the start, the man is much older, but as the woman is an engineer, and thus more important to the function of the ship than him (a historian) she is frequently called upon to fix things while he remains in amber. As the timeline—actual time, and time as experienced in his stop-start perspective—hops forward, and both characters are woken up for varying periods and reasons, she catches up and then surpasses him in age. Somewhere in there they become lovers, briefly. It was a small element in the book, but it stuck with me as a great example of how science fiction can be both idea-driven and character-led, so long as the sf element is tied to personal stakes. Also a great example of sf as exploring unforeseen consequences, à la Frederik Pohl’s: “science fiction should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”

It would become a very different book, perhaps less sociological in scope, but I wanted it to explore the idea. For although Children of Time was an engaging read, I rarely found myself emotionally attached. For this reason I don’t think I’ll continue forward with the series. Has anyone out there read it? Am I mistaken to quit? (For what it’s worth, for a “similar but different” vibe, I enjoyed more Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, despite its rather forced action sequences in the final act.) What if Children of Time centered the strangeness of two characters attempting connect while they are whipped forward in time and eras? Age gaps can be complicated as it is, without adding the hurdle of saving humanity from its self-destructive tendencies. I can’t easily articulate how I feel about large age gaps (within limits), and the undecided is the source of most good writing. Tchaikovsky assiduously avoids any whiff of impropriety in the relationship, but I think that if there was more grey to their situation, it would be more interesting. He doesn’t even tease out the gender dynamics (although he does elsewhere, for the spider plot lines, which I’m not getting into, lol.)

The science fictional element of cyrosleep could have added a truly weird perspective to the ethical dilemma. In Children of Time, the POV on the ark ship is confined to the man’s POV, and the form of the perspective directs the content of the story. What if instead, Children of Time borrowed from the POV and structure of Normal People…? “Science fiction Sally Rooney” might not have been on your 2024 bingo card, but hey I’m into it. The reader could hop between the lovers’ heads and through the years, entering chapters not quite sure of how the lovers stand, what was missed, what century it was, how the other has aged and lived in the interstitial years…perhaps the societal gender dynamics shift around them, influencing one person in the relationship and not the other…imagine the untapped seams of misunderstandings, unknowns, ambiguities! Now that’s a traffic jam.

Subscribe now