Author: terribleminds (page 172 of 466)

PSST.

You.

Yeah, you.

Put down your Pokemon-abduction game for a moment.

Guess what?

LIFE DEBT IS OUT NOW.

Or, the more proper title: Star Wars: Aftermath: Life Debt: The Gang Hunts Imperials: Han & Leia’s Excellent Adventure: Jar-Jar’s Erotic Awakening 2, Gungan Bombadaloo.

You can procure it anywhere where books exist. That includes your favorite indie bookstore, or Amazon, or B&N, or that shady guy who lives in the wizard van down by the docks.

I think it’s a good book. Other people seem to like it.

The Collider Jedi Council did a smashing review video.

Sci-Fi Now gives it four out of five stars.

Tosche Station team gives it a GO review (no spoilers).

Blabba the Hutt gives a pretty spoilery positive review.

You can also check out some excerpts —

Han Solo excerpt at EW.com.

Leia excerpt at Mashable.

Maz Kanata excerpt at USA Today.

Malakili excerpt at IGN.

Hope you check it out and hope you like it. If you do like it, I’d surely appreciate a positive review somewhere. If you don’t like it — well, ha ha, ahh, I expect to be hearing from you folks one way or another. *winky shrug emoji*

As promised, my (tentative, may certainly change) SDCC schedule is here.

First, I want to say right up front that even if you’re not going to the con but are able to make it to San Diego, a bunch of us are doing an event Saturday morning at the Upstart Crow Bookstore! (Event page here.) Saturday the 23rd at 9AM! Kevin Hearne! VE Schwab! Richard Kadrey! And myself. Come swing by and say hi.

Okay. Onto the schedule proper:

Thursday the 21st

10AM: Signing! Location: Del Rey Star Wars Booth

1:30PM: Nerd Trivia Challenge, Author Edition! Location: Horton Grand Theatre. Featuring: Me, Patrick Rothfuss, Romina Russell, Sam Sykes, Cecil Castelucci, V.E. Schwab, Camilla D’Errico, Duane Swierczynski, and Brandon T. Snider

3:30PM: Signing! Location Autograph Area 7

Friday the 22nd

11AM: Star Wars Publishing Panel! Location: Room 7AB

12:30PM: Signing! Location: Del Rey Star Wars Booth

Saturday the 23rd

9AM: Signing! Location: Upstart Crow! Featuring: Me, VE Schwab, Kevin Hearne, Richard Kadrey

4PM: Signing! Location: Del Rey Star Wars Booth!

Sunday the 24th

11:30AM: Signing! Location: Del Rey Star Wars Booth!

That’s one of the painted lady butterflies we raised in B-Dub’s butterfly garden kit that we got him for his birthday. The little flutterby hung around for a while after release to get some vanity shots, the little narcissist. Raising butterflies was a lot of fun. You should do it. You should do it and then start a butterfly farm because they’re all so delicious and sustainable and you just deep fry them for 30 seconds and them pop them in your mouth and —

Whoa, ha ha, hey, no, I’m just kidding. I don’t eat butterflies.

*quickly pokes a crumpled wing back in mouth*

*chews*

*swallows surreptitiously*

Let’s see. Any news?

I’ll do a more proper Life Debt news-purge tomorrow when the book is out.

My SDCC schedule should be fairly well finalized, and I can get that up too for tomorrow.

I’ll be gone for SDCC, then, and also for the time before, so expect BLOGGERY to be light over the remainder of July — particularly after this week is over.

I think that’s it.

Enjoy the butterfly.

Be good to each other.

Stay brave.

Drop acid and fight demons at Wal-Mart, or as I call it, “Pokemon Go.”

THE END

S.L. Huang is one of those authors who, if she ever wants to pull up blog space here at terribleminds, she’s welcome to with nary the blinky-wink of an eye. Her posts prior — one about defending big boomy popcorn fiction and another about unlikable women protagonists — are just so damn good. This one is no different. Behold: manpain.

* * *

Watch out, feminism incoming.

There’s a fan term called “manpain” that fascinates me. It refers to the phenomenon of a media property that excessively and self-centeredly focuses on a male character’s angst after tragic events happen to the people around him. As the linked Fanlore definition says,

“I’m a dude, this is my pain, this is the REASON FOR ALL MY DOUCHITUDE, BEHOLD MY EPICNESS AND DESPAIR … sometimes it leads to sitting in the dark, brooding.”

(Or just think of any scene in which a stoic Manly Man gazes into the distance as a single crystalline tear slides gently from his eye.)

When this trope is in effect, The Man’s pain is the one we are focused on, as readers/viewers, and meant to sympathize with. If his family is murdered, if his girlfriend is turned into a vampire — it is still his pain we are shown, his drama that is the important fallout.

There’s an even more disturbing subset of manpain that starts to set itself apart after you see it enough times. It’s the “Man Is ‘Forced’ To Make A Horrible Choice That Hurts Someone He Loves Just To Wring Angst For His Own Emotional Journey” trope.  For instance: Tyrion is “forced” to rape Tysha, and we see how  tragically that affects him. The Doctor is “forced” to ravage Donna’s memories to save her life, and we focus on how sad and despairing that is for him.

I have a love-hate relationship with this trope, because I have to confess that a character being “forced” to do something awful can, when well-executed, be one of my all-time favorite means of deliciously wrenching emotion. But there’s no denying the troubling trend that we so often see men being “forced” to do horrible things to women, and afterward, the woman disappears and we focus on the pain of the man. His pain. The pain he has because he did something horrible to HER.

And she’s gone from the narrative.

There’s something so very fucked-up about that.

To be sure, some of the gender imbalance here probably comes from there being a gender imbalance in protagonists — we’re naturally focused on the protagonist, and the protagonist is disproportionately a man. But even when a woman has to make a horrible choice and do a terrible thing, it tends to be framed differently. See when Buffy had to kill a re-ensouled Angel at the end of Season 2 — we don’t get to sympathize with her single stoic tear over swelling orchestral music as she stands in the rain, tragic and romantic and remade. Instead, she’s severely depressed, her friends turn against her, and instead of striding off into the distance in a swirling long coat to be a lone dark knight, she has to come back and try to fit herself back into her old life — where her friends immediately start yelling at her about having their own problems.

Oh, yeah, and Angel comes back. And gets better. And gets his own TV show where he is the definition of manpain and can brood into next century with all the focus on his angst forever.

I’m still waiting for Tysha and Donna to get their own shows.

In Plastic Smile, the fourth book of my Russell’s Attic series, I set out with one of the subplots to do something very aware and very specific: to take a typical Manpain scenario and tell it from the opposite point of view (and hereafter will be some spoilers for the book). Cas, my main character, meets someone from her past who did something horrible to her — because, as he sees it, he had to; it killed him to hurt her but he had to; the guilt has eaten him up forever but he had to; yadda yadda etcetera MANPAIN.  If this book were told from a different perspective, that same male character would be the Epic SF Hero Filled With Angst, brooding in the dark as we feel his moral anguish, and Cas would be a distant, grievous memory.

Instead, she punches him in the face.

It’s interesting, the responses I’ve gotten on this character and this scene. Male readers have tended to be neutral on the arc and the character or even view him as weak. Whereas female readers have almost universally come back with, “OMG I HATE HIM SO MUCH YEAH CAS PUNCH HIM IN THE FACE PUNCH HIM AGAIN!!!”

Of course, a few first readers on one book aren’t enough to draw empirical conclusions. But what I can say is this: it’s a pervasive trope, and at least some of us are really dang tired of seeing men given sympathy for the awful things done to women.

It ain’t your pain, dude. It’s ours.

SL Huang majored in math at MIT and now uses it to write eccentric superhero novels. The box set of the first three Russell’s Attic books is on sale for 99 cents through July 11, and the fourth book is available now. Online home: http://www.slhuang.com and @sl_huang on Twitter.

ELKA BARELY REMEMBERS a time before she knew Trapper. She was just seven years old, wandering lost and hungry in the wilderness, when the solitary hunter took her in. In the years since then, he’s taught her how to survive in this desolate land where civilization has been destroyed and men are at the mercy of the elements and each other.

But the man Elka thought she knew has been harboring a terrible secret. He’s a killer. A monster. And now that Elka knows the truth, she may be his next victim.

Armed with nothing but her knife and the hard lessons Trapper’s drilled into her, Elka flees into the frozen north in search of her real parents. But judging by the trail of blood dogging her footsteps, she hasn’t left Trapper behind—and he won’t be letting his little girl go without a fight. If she’s going to survive, Elka will have to turn and confront not just him, but the truth about the dark road she’s been set on.

* * *

Hands-On Research is the Best Kind

There are a lot of survival elements in The Wolf Road and while I devoured a dozen such TV shows, read the SAS Survival Handbook cover to cover, and drew on my memories of holidays in the Canadian wilderness, nothing beats hands-on experience. There’s nothing like sleeping in the woods, under a shelter you made yourself from branches and leaves, with a fire you also made yourself (without matches or a lighter, may I add) blazing just outside. It’s the kind of full sensory experience you can’t really read about. Well, you can, but doing it yourself is way more fun. To write The Wolf Road, I undertook a three-day survival and bushcraft course where I learned, among other things, fire-making, shelter-building, trapping techniques and preparing game. I wasn’t about to shy away from skinning a rabbit. What kind of survivalist would I be if I got squeamish? Elka, my main character, is far from squeamish. She’d have laughed me out the woods if I got all precious about it. So I skinned that rabbit, and gutted those trout and pulled the head of that pigeon and did it all in the name of research. It was utterly invaluable in creating – I hope – an authentic experience for Elka and for the reader. From now on, as much as possible, I’ll be getting my hands dirty for my writing.

Don’t Be Afraid to go Dark

The Wolf Road takes some pretty nasty turns (see what I did there?). There’s a lot of violence and sometimes quite visceral, brutal scenes and because I was writing in the first person, I couldn’t shy away or fade to black or switch POV. Those scenes and experiences are what shaped my character. Elka wasn’t the same after she was chained to a table or had her ribs broken by a bastard with a crowbar. I felt like glossing over those scenes would be doing my character and readers a disservice. We need to see the dark to appreciate the light. I needed to have the absolute worst most awful terrible things happen to Elka so when something good happened, she grabbed on with both hands, dug her heels in and didn’t budge.

The Setting is a Character Too

And it needs to be developed. It needs to be that chosen place or time on purpose, for a reason. You set your story in London, it’s got to feel like London and won’t be right set anywhere else. You set a story in medieval Spain, I’ve got to be able to smell it, taste it, feel like I’m living in it. The setting for The Wolf Road is a near-future British Columbia. I tried very hard to evoke the wilderness accurately and fully. I learned to take my time immersing the reader in the world, building the atmosphere of the land and the wild and I hope it paid off. In one of my favourite books, Wuthering Heights, Bronte brings the moors to life. She uses the weather to great effect, makes the reader feel the cold and the wind and when you read her descriptions of the heath, you can almost smell it. That’s always stuck with me and something I wanted to really push in The Wolf Road. The weather especially is such a wonderful vehicle for conveying all kinds of things; emotion, passage of time, danger, foreboding. I found the way Elka interacts with the landscape and the wildlife to be such a huge part of her character that the setting just had to become something just as important and well-rounded.

Watch TV and Movies. A Lot.

Of course you should read too, you’re not getting out of it that easy. Jeez. I may get drummed out of the Writer’s Club for saying this and you all may think I’m cheating, but I’d rather watch a TV show or a movie for research than read a book on the subject. I purposefully avoid similar books – fiction and non-fiction – when writing a story. I don’t want to know how Awesome Writer described a forest, I want to see the forest and describe it myself, which is where the gogglebox comes in. I watched dozens, probably hundreds, of hours of Discovery Channel shows on Alaska and Canada. So much so it became something of a problem in my house. I didn’t much care for the people but when you can’t hop a plane to the Yukon to see what the rivers look like when the ice melts or how the rain clings to moss in the spring, these hour-long windows into that world become invaluable. Being able to visualise my setting, characters, clothing, everything, and then put it all into my own words is so important for me.

I Should Always Trust My Gut

This is probably the most important lesson I learned from writing this book. I’d written four novels prior to The Wolf Road, or was it five… They will never see the light of day until my great-grandchildren unearth them in an attic and try to make a quick buck. They’re not terrible but I wrote them wrong. I wrote what I thought people would want to read, rather than what I thought was best for me, my characters, and the story. I suppose I wrote for the market, with a beady commercial eye, thinking ‘this was popular in this book/movie/tv show, so I’ll put it in my book and we’ll be quids in’. You can guess how well that worked out. In those previous novels I’d tried to follow someone else’s rules and second-guessed my decisions based what someone else may think is best. Not with The Wolf Road. That baby is all me and all gut. I learned to follow my instinct and more importantly to trust that instinct was right for what I was trying to achieve with the story, something I’ll be doing for every book I write from now on.

* * *

Bio: Beth Lewis was raised in the wilds of Cornwall and split her childhood between books and the beach. She has traveled extensively throughout the world and has had close encounters with black bears, killer whales, and great white sharks. She has been, at turns, a bank cashier, a fire performer, and a juggler, and she is currently a managing editor at Titan Books in London. The Wolf Road is her first novel.

Beth Lewis: Website | Twitter

The Wolf Road: Amazon | Indiebound | Goodreads

So, uhh —

*clears throat*

That’s pretty cool, huh.

*wibbles*

As revealed on The Star Wars Show today.

Book’s available January 31st.

And what’s available next week?

Life Debt! Book Two! Ahhh!

*runs around swatting at invisible Sith with an imaginary lightsaber*

*hits a lamp*

*breaks a tooth*

ALSO HEY LOOK

There exists a special edition of Life Debt from Barnes & Noble — and if you procure this very special edition, you will obtain awesome posters featuring (gasp) The Millennium Falcon and (double gasp) MISTER BONES:

I’m really very geeked and love that Del Rey put these together.

Let’s see, what else?

I will be at SDCC in support of the book. I’ll post my schedule when I get it.

I’ll be at Doylestown Book Shop in Doylestown, PA promoting Invasive and Life Debt on 8/17.

And I think that’s it for now.

I HAVE NOW PERFORMED BLOGGAGE

*explodes your face with lasers*