David Kudler's Blog, page 6

In response to a recent post about Ursula K. Le Guin, I was challenged on some of what I’d had to say about George R.R. Martin’s writing ��� specifically, I was told that Martin’s gritty, brutal fantasy was somehow more realistic than Le Guin’s.

Well, to each their own. If you love A Song of Ice and Fire, then great.

I don’t love the series, though I can see the books’ virtues and appeal. But I object to the idea that gritty somehow equals realistic.

When I started reading Game of Thrones, my youngest was seven years old. I got about seventy pages in when (spoiler)���

(spoiler)

(spoiler)

(spoiler)

Game of Thrones, Seasons 1, episode 1 (copyright �� HBO Studio)

���a seven-year-old was tossed out a window. Put down the book and didn���t pick it up again for four or five years.

When I did, I appreciated Martin���s ability to pull me in, and especially to make me care about the compelling, complex characters. But I also quickly figured out what his game was: pull me in, make me care about the characters��� and then surprise me by treating them horribly. Death. Rape. Torture. Torture. Death. Rape. More rape. More torture. More death.

Now, I���m all for ���realistic,��� gritty fantasy. I���m a big fan of Jim Butcher���s Dresden Files books, and The Lord of the Rings is a wonderful, epic response to Tolkien���s own experiences in the trenches during WWI.

But A Song of Ice and Fire���s gleeful leaning into gory, grimdark awfulness eventually struck me as no more interesting ��� or realistic ��� than the daisies-and-sunshine you get in a lot of bad children���s fantasy. They reminded me of Stephen Donaldson���s books, which I read with pleasure as a teen ��� for a while, before getting similarly bored. When the whole point of a series of books seems to be to draw me in, make me care, and then shock me (over and over), boredom is a clear sign for me to put down the series.

Authors like Tolkien and Le Guin ��� and Rowling and Pratchett and Gaiman and Butcher and Baum and Lackey and Butler and Jemisin and Beagle and many, many more ��� present worlds of both light and dark, and explore the interplay between the two. Which is why I tend to prefer them.

And it’s that interplay evident in the history of the Sengoku Jidai, the Japanese Civil War Era, that inspired me to write Seasons of the Sword.

Images copyright �� HBO Studio

The post Is “Gritty” Realistic? appeared first on Seasons of the Sword.

In response to a recent post about Ursula K. Le Guin, I was challenged on some of what I’d had to say about George R.R. Martin’s writing -- specifically, I was told that Martin’s gritty, brutal fantasy was somehow more realistic than Le Guin’s.

Well, to each their own. If you love A Song of Ice and Fire, then great.

I don’t love the series, though I can see the books’ virtues and appeal. But I object to the idea that gritty somehow equals realistic.

When I started reading Game of Thrones, my youngest was seven years old. I got about seventy pages in when (spoiler)...

(spoiler)

(spoiler)

(spoiler)

Game of Thrones, Seasons 1, episode 1 (copyright © HBO Studio)

...a seven-year-old was tossed out a window. Put down the book and didn't pick it up again for four or five years.

When I did, I appreciated Martin's ability to pull me in, and especially to make me care about the compelling, complex characters. But I also quickly figured out what his game was: pull me in, make me care about the characters... and then surprise me by treating them horribly. Death. Rape. Torture. Torture. Death. Rape. More rape. More torture. More death.

Now, I'm all for realistic, gritty fantasy. I'm a big fan of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files books, and The Lord of the Rings is a wonderful, epic response to Tolkien's own experiences in the trenches during WWI.

But A Song of Ice and Fire's gleeful leaning into gory, grimdark awfulness eventually struck me as no more interesting -- or realistic -- than the daisies-and-sunshine you get in a lot of bad children's fantasy. They reminded me of Stephen Donaldson's books, which I read with pleasure as a teen -- for a while, before getting similarly bored. When the whole point of a series of books seems to be to draw me in, make me care, and then shock me (over and over), boredom is a clear sign for me to put down the series.

Authors like Tolkien and Le Guin -- and Rowling and Pratchett and Gaiman and Butcher and Baum and Lackey and Butler and Jemisin and Beagle and many, many more -- present worlds of both light and dark, and explore the interplay between the two. Which is why I tend to prefer them.

And it’s that interplay evident in the history of the Sengoku Jidai, the Japanese Civil War Era, that inspired me to write Seasons of the Sword.

Images copyright © HBO Studio

The post Is “Gritty” Realistic? appeared first on Seasons of the Sword.

We are giving away three signed copies of Bright Eyes: A Kunoichi Tale on Goodreads! Sign up for your chance to win today!

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Goodreads Book Giveaway Bright Eyesby David Kudler

Giveaway ends March 31, 2022.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

 

Enter Giveaway

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/widget/342841

Bright Eyes Kickstarter REACHES GOAL Bright Eyes Kickstarter – Just Funded

Also, our Kickstarter campaign for Bright Eyes has reached it’s minimum funding goal! But we aren’t stopping there ��� we’re looking at stretch goals, add-ons, and special gifts. Guarantee yourself a copy of the sequel to the award-winning YA historical adventure novel Risuko today!

BACK BRIGHT EYES KICKSTARTERAbout Bright Eyes

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Can One Girl Stop a Killer? The future of Japan hangs in the balance, and it���s up to a girl who likes to climb to save the day

Two armies have descended on the Full Moon, and the war that has torn Japan apart for over a century threatens to destroy Lady Chiyome���s school for young shrine maidens (and assassins).

In this thrilling sequel to Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale, Risuko must face warlords, samurai, angry cooks, a monster in the hills, the truth about her father, a spy among the kunoichi���

And a murderer.

Someone kills a Takeda lieutenant, staging it to look like suicide. Can Risuko figure out who would do such thing?

And can she keep it from happening again?COMING May 5, 2022!Read a sneak preview of Bright Eyes: ���The Cave��� 

The post Win a signed copy of Bright Eyes! appeared first on Seasons of the Sword.

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We’re excited to announce that the Kickstarter campaign to support the launch of Bright Eyes: A Kunoichi Tale, is now open ��� and already halfway to its initial goal!

About the Kickstarter Campaign

This crowdfunding campaign, which runs through April 10, will help us create the best possible book ��� while guaranteeing our supporters copies at less than the retail cost.

As author David Kudler said,

Thank you so much for supporting Bright��Eyes!

Green is spring’s color
Rain and rebirth flow like joy
Publishing takes cash

It’s true. Publishing isn’t cheap. While��Bright��Eyes��is nearly finished, I need your help to make the book a reality and to help it find its audience.

Reaching the funding goal will help create an attractive, exciting, historically and culturally accurate thrill-ride of a teen book.

Some things you’ll help make happen:

Producing an audiobookFinal fact-checking by a historian (support your local scholar!)ProofreadingAdvance reviews (Yes, disgusting isn’t it? Some of the major sources of book reviews charge small publishers simply to be reviewed.)Inclusion in major catalogues, trade shows, etc.Thank-you gifts for the��Risuko Beta Team��(a group of phenomenal teens and adults who are helping me to polish the final book)

Some of those are not very exciting in and of themselves, but they’re all essential if we’re going to release the best possible book.

Should we surpass the goal, there are a number of would’t-it-be-nice options that we’ll be able to go for, from presenting the book at cons and festivals to marketing directly to libraries and schools to creating braille and/or large-print editions for the vision-impaired to finding translators for foreign language editions. When we get there, I’ll start announcing some stretch goals.

About the Book

Bright Eyes is the thrilling sequel to Kudler’s award winning teen historical adventure novel Risuko:

Can one girl stop a killer?The future of Japan hangs in the balance, and it’s up to a girl who likes to climb to save the dayBright Eyes cover

Two armies have descended on the Full Moon, and the war that has torn Japan apart for over a century threatens to destroy Lady Chiyome’s school for young shrine maidens (and assassins).

In this thrilling sequel to��Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale,��Risuko must face warlords, samurai, angry cooks, a monster in the hills, the truth about her father, a spy among the��kunoichi…

And a murderer.

Someone kills a Takeda lieutenant, staging it to look like suicide. Can Risuko figure out who would do such thing?

And can she keep it from happening again?

(Teen historical adventure ��� Release May 5, 2022)

SUPPORT THE BRIGHT EYES KICKSTARTER TODAY!

The post Bright Eyes Kickstarter Live! appeared first on Seasons of the Sword.

Here’s the story of how I crushed a character mutiny and finished a book.

Back when Risuko first came out, I was hard at work on the sequel, Bright Eyes. I was cruising along, with every expectation that I’d have the book ready for publication in 2018.

Then one of my characters mutinied.

I was about to kill her off (spectacularly, I thought) in order to move the plot forward. As I began to write the scene, however, I realized that I hadn���t set up the death or the character well.

In my mind, she sat there, yelling at me, telling me the scene sucked. And the way I had written her character sucked. And because they sucked, the whole book to that point sucked. Massively.

She wasn’t very polite about it.

I realized, to my horror, that she was right.

Killing Off Characters

Now, I’d killed off characters before, and none of them had liked it. I’d told them that I was sorry to do it, and they’d gone along with it because the story needed them to die. I mean, I’m writing books about a young girl in the middle of a civil war being trained to become an assassin. You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

I had to grant, however, that the omelet I was making wasn’t ready for that egg to break just yet.

Bright Eyes ground to a halt. I was stuck.

Juggling Scorpions

As you know, I’m sure, writing is really hard.��Writing a novel is like trying to juggle dozens of scorpions. You have to keep track of a huge number of uncooperative parts, keeping them moving together — keeping them all in the air.

And when you lose track and one stings you, the whole enterprise crashes to the ground.

I asked other writers how I should best move forward. Most of them suggested that I put the mutinous girl and her death scene aside, and simply keep writing ��� that by reaching the end of the book, I’d see what I needed to do with my mutineer.

I tried ��� I really did. I spent two years straining to finish the manuscript, so that I could go back and clean things up. Hey, I knew I was going to have to rewrite anyway.

But that approach didn’t work for me. Not for this book, at least.

Back to the Beginning

Eventually, I realized that I needed to completely rethink where I was going. And without going back and rethinking/rewriting the whole of what I’d already written, I couldn���t see where the story needed to head. I spent quite a while moving scenes around, deleting, adding, taking notes. (If you’re interested, I use the writing app Scrivener, which makes this kind of thing easy. Well, easier, at least. It’s still juggling scorpions!) I cut a fun secondary character who introduced a lot of confusion and unnecessary action and exposition. I focused the action of the story in on Risuko ��� even as the Full Moon was overrun by invaders.

After another year up to my elbows in the guts of the book, I was able to see more clearly what I���d been setting up, and followed those threads.

Last November, after many false starts and scorpion-stung fingers, I was finally able to type ��� — The End.

And yeah: I killed off the character who���d refused to die. And I enjoyed doing it.

Bright Eyes��comes out on May 5, 2022

The post Character Mutiny, Pt. II — The Author Strikes Back appeared first on Seasons of the Sword.

Here’s the story of how I crushed a character mutiny and finished a book.

Back when Risuko first came out, I was hard at work on the sequel, Bright Eyes. I was cruising along, with every expectation that I’d have the book ready for publication in 2018.

Then one of my characters mutinied.

I was about to kill her off (spectacularly, I thought) in order to move the plot forward. As I began to write the scene, however, I realized that I hadn't set up the death or the character well.

In my mind, she sat there, yelling at me, telling me the scene sucked. And the way I had written her character sucked. And because they sucked, the whole book to that point sucked. Massively.

She wasn’t very polite about it.

I realized, to my horror, that she was right.

Killing Off Characters

Now, I’d killed off characters before, and none of them had liked it. I’d told them that I was sorry to do it, and they’d gone along with it because the story needed them to die. I mean, I’m writing books about a young girl in the middle of a civil war being trained to become an assassin. You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

I had to grant, however, that the omelet I was making wasn’t ready for that egg to break just yet.

Bright Eyes ground to a halt. I was stuck.

Juggling Scorpions

As you know, I’m sure, writing is really hard. Writing a novel is like trying to juggle dozens of scorpions. You have to keep track of a huge number of uncooperative parts, keeping them moving together — keeping them all in the air.

And when you lose track and one stings you, the whole enterprise crashes to the ground.

I asked other writers how I should best move forward. Most of them suggested that I put the mutinous girl and her death scene aside, and simply keep writing — that by reaching the end of the book, I’d see what I needed to do with my mutineer.

I tried — I really did. I spent two years straining to finish the manuscript, so that I could go back and clean things up. Hey, I knew I was going to have to rewrite anyway.

But that approach didn’t work for me. Not for this book, at least.

Back to the Beginning

Eventually, I realized that I needed to completely rethink where I was going. And without going back and rethinking/rewriting the whole of what I’d already written, I couldn't see where the story needed to head. I spent quite a while moving scenes around, deleting, adding, taking notes. (If you’re interested, I use the writing app Scrivener, which makes this kind of thing easy. Well, easier, at least. It’s still juggling scorpions!) I cut a fun secondary character who introduced a lot of confusion and unnecessary action and exposition. I focused the action of the story in on Risuko — even as the Full Moon was overrun by invaders.

After another year up to my elbows in the guts of the book, I was able to see more clearly what I'd been setting up, and followed those threads.

Last November, after many false starts and scorpion-stung fingers, I was finally able to type 終 — The End.

And yeah: I killed off the character who'd refused to die. And I enjoyed doing it.

Bright Eyes comes out on May 5, 2022

The post Character Mutiny, Pt. II — The Author Strikes Back appeared first on Seasons of the Sword.

Here’s the story of how I crushed a character mutiny and finished a book.

Back when Risuko first came out, I was hard at work on the sequel, Bright Eyes. I was cruising along, with every expectation that I’d have the book ready for publication in 2018.

Then one of my characters mutinied.

I was about to kill her off (spectacularly, I thought) in order to move the plot forward. As I began to write the scene, however, I realized that I hadn't set up the death or the character well.

In my mind, she sat there, yelling at me, telling me the scene sucked. And the way I had written her character sucked. And because they sucked, the whole book to that point sucked. Massively.

She wasn’t very polite about it.

I realized, to my horror, that she was right.

Killing Off Characters

Now, I’d killed off characters before, and none of them had liked it. I’d told them that I was sorry to do it, and they’d gone along with it because the story needed them to die. I mean, I’m writing books about a young girl in the middle of a civil war being trained to become an assassin. You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

I had to grant, however, that the omelet I was making wasn’t ready for that egg to break just yet.

Bright Eyes ground to a halt. I was stuck.

Juggling Scorpions

As you know, I’m sure, writing is really hard. Writing a novel is like trying to juggle dozens of scorpions. You have to keep track of a huge number of uncooperative parts, keeping them moving together — keeping them all in the air.

And when you lose track and one stings you, the whole enterprise crashes to the ground.

I asked other writers how I should best move forward. Most of them suggested that I put the mutinous girl and her death scene aside, and simply keep writing — that by reaching the end of the book, I’d see what I needed to do with my mutineer.

I tried — I really did. I spent two years straining to finish the manuscript, so that I could go back and clean things up. Hey, I knew I was going to have to rewrite anyway.

But that approach didn’t work for me. Not for this book, at least.

Back to the Beginning

Eventually, I realized that I needed to completely rethink where I was going. And without going back and rethinking/rewriting the whole of what I’d already written, I couldn't see where the story needed to head. I spent quite a while moving scenes around, deleting, adding, taking notes. (If you’re interested, I use the writing app Scrivener, which makes this kind of thing easy. Well, easier, at least. It’s still juggling scorpions!) I cut a fun secondary character who introduced a lot of confusion and unnecessary action and exposition. I focused the action of the story in on Risuko — even as the Full Moon was overrun by invaders.

After another year up to my elbows in the guts of the book, I was able to see more clearly what I'd been setting up, and followed those threads.

Last November, after many false starts and scorpion-stung fingers, I was finally able to type 終 — The End.

And yeah: I killed off the character who'd refused to die. And I enjoyed doing it.

Bright Eyes comes out on May 5, 2022

The post Character Mutiny, Pt. II — The Author Strikes Back appeared first on Seasons of the Sword.

Can a man write from a woman’s point of view?

Gosh, I sure hope so! I am, after all, currently writing a series of books from the point of view of a thirteen-year-old girl.

Now, she���s also Japanese, living in Japan.

In the sixteenth century.

I’m an American man living in twenty-first-century California.

If I can imagine living in��Sengoku-era Japan, I���d like to think that I can get inside the head of my young female protagonist.

Getting inside someone else’s head

Here���s the thing: if you���re going to write anything other than��roman �� clef,��being a fiction writer requires you to step outside of yourself. It requires a massive, sustained act of imagination, not to mention empathy.

If, like me, you���re writing about another time and/or place than the one you were raised in, you need to do a lot of research. And if it���s a time/place of your own imagining, you also need to do an enormous amount of thinking about the world your characters are going to be moving through. This is what’s called world building — and it’s one of the reasons I’m very happy to be writing historical fiction.

You need to think deeply about��all��of your characters. Not just the point-of-view character(s), but all of the major and secondary characters, and hopefully the minor characters as well. Who are they? What do they want? What’s their greatest fear? Their greatest secret? What do they think about when no one else is around? In other words, what makes them tick?*

Walking the Tightrope

I���m working very hard to write about sixteenth-century Japan in as thoughtful, well-researched, respectful manner as I can, while still telling what I hope are exciting stories.

If I can imagine life five centuries back in a country an ocean away from where I was born, I certainly hope that I’m able to bring my young narrator to life. Even if she���s a girl.**

I���ve read wonderful books written by women from a male point of view, and wonderful books written by men from a female point of view. Like all creative work, writing fiction is a tightrope walk. The risk makes the fall that comes with getting it wrong all the more painful.

But I would like to think that it���s worth it.

* I���ll admit that I tend to write like the actor I originally was ��� trying to get inside the heads of my characters and seeing what���s going on in there. They sometimes make my life really difficult. I do know that not everyone does this kind of work to the same extent. But if you can���t imagine being someone other than you are, then I suggest you stick to stories about yourself and leave the rest of the multiverse to other authors.

** In fact, most of the characters in my books are girls and women. My younger daughter proudly told me, as we were recording the audiobook for Risuko, that it passed��the Bechdel Test��with flying colors. But it failed the Reverse Bechdel: I never had a scene where two male characters talked without the conversation being about a woman. In my defense, Risuko is a first-person narrative from a girl���s point of view, in which most of the other characters were also female, so it wasn���t easy to have those sorts of conversations. Still, I’ve fixed that lapse in Bright Eyes!

The post Writing from another point of view appeared first on Seasons of the Sword.

As an author of young adult books, I’ve been asked many times about the authors who had the greatest impact on me. I’ll often start by mentioning Maurice Sendak, which people assume is a joke, but isn’t.

Next, I’ll mention Ursula K. Le Guin, the late author of science fiction and fantasy.

I first encountered her writing when I was around 12 years old when I stumbled across A Wizard of Earthsea, her masterpiece of YA epic fantasy. The book set my imagination aflame in a way that few books have ever done. Its hero journey story of a young man who discovers that he’s a wizard, goes off to study magic, makes friends, and is forced to face the dark shadow of his archenemy absorbed me the way that the Harry Potter books (which came out 30 years later) would absorb my daughters. I devoured the (then) two sequels and, as they came out over the decades, the final three books that make up the Tales of Earthsea.

Here’s Le Guin reading excerpts from the first book c. 2008 (and answering some questions) which will give you a taste of why I was so entranced:

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Ursula K. Le Guin reads from “A Wizard of Earthsea”

Three years later, when I was about fifteen, I encountered yet another Le Guin masterpiece, and it once again blew my mind. This was The Left Hand of Darkness, part of her science fiction Hainish Cycle. Where my first experience of Le Guin had been beautifully written, ambitious, but ultimately familiar epic fantasy, The Left Hand of Darkness was a book that used the trappings of science fiction to explode a concept that I (like most people of the time) so took for granted that we didn’t even realize that it was there: that of human gender as a fixed reality.

There are a lot of science fiction novels that deserve the title ���great��� ��� but The Left Hand of Darkness (in my opinion) stands without a doubt as the greatest.

Why? Because Le Guin uses all of the tropes that make science fiction what it is ��� space travel, other worlds, (semi-)alien species, advanced technology ��� to tell a story that deconstructs something so fundamentally human that most of us don���t even think about it much: gender. She thrusts a perfectly normal, standard-issue human male into a world where permanent sexual dimorphism is considered fundamentally deviant, has him fall in love with one of the gender-fluid locals, and then sends us on a wild sleigh-ride of an adventure where we are forced to question all of our assumptions about the innateness of our concepts of male and female.

It blew my mind when I read it at age 15 (about 8 years after it was published). It���s blown my mind in different ways every time I���ve reread it since.

I was talking with someone recently about where I thought Le Guin stood as a fantasy author compared to JRR Tolkien and George RR Martin (this person’s favorite fantasy writers). I answered that I think Le Guin, like Tolkien, stands as a true innovator in both that genre and in science fiction. Martin is a very good, influential writer, but Le Guin and Tolkien are on another level.

I���ll admit here that I haven���t read all of GRRM���s work. Having granted that, I will say that what lifts Tolkien and Le Guin into a different sphere for me is their ability to think the ramifications of their world building all the way through.

Tolkien spent a lifetime thinking the Legendarium of Middle Earth through with a scholar���s knowledge and attention to detail.

Le Guin ��� child of two anthropologists ��� approached both her fantasy and science fiction by asking deep, thoughtful questions (Left Hand of Darkness: What would the human race be like without gender? The Lathe of Heaven: What would happen if a machine could actually make dreams come true? The Tales of Earthsea: What would happen if the land of the dead was an actual place we could visit and return from?) and she kept asking them, even as she was writing. Like good science, her books constantly re-examine their assumptions and force the reader to reconsider what���s actually going on. Like good art, they pull you in and sweep you along.

These Tolkien, Martin, and Le Guin all tell gripping, well-crafted stories with fascinating characters. But where Martin���s stories are about, well, the stories, and Tolkien���s are ultimately about the incredibly rich world in which his stories are set, Le Guin uses the possibilities inherent in writing speculative fiction to ask fundamental questions about what it means to be alive.

Also, I happen to like Le Guin���s spare prose style best, but I���ll grant that that���s a matter of personal preference.

She inspired me as a reader and as a writer — but also as a person.

Here’s an example of that, from her speech while receiving a National Book Award in 2014 (the source of the quote in the meme at the top of this piece):

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Ursula K. Le Guin accepts the National Book Award (2014)

The post Ursula K Le Guin — Grandmaster appeared first on Seasons of the Sword.

Happy holidays!Akemashite omedeto gozai masu!

I hope that you’re enjoying a joyful, pleasant holiday season. My whole family is home (with significant others) and so our house is (as Charles Dickens would say) “full to bursting.”

One of the things that has us all excited is the looming publication of��Bright Eyes, the long-awaited sequel to��Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale. In fact, I just received the first rough proofs of the new book ��� they’re looking great.

I hope you’re excited too — and to get you in the mood, I’m delighted to be able to reveal the��Bright Eyes��cover:

Nice, huh?

Like the��Risuko��cover, it was designed by James Egan of Bookfly Design — and I think he once again knocked it out of the park. What do you think?

Here are the two covers together:

As for the book itself, an editor along with a few “alpha” readers��are working on it now — and we’re getting the print, ebook, and audiobook editions prepared for the May 5, 2022 release. And here’s the box of proofs that literally just arrived:

Okay. Yeah. I’m a bit excited, as I said.

If you backed the original��Risuko Kickstarter campaign at the Senior Initiate ($50) or Kunoichi ($100) levels, you’ll have a beautiful print copy of Bright Eyes��mailed to you as soon as they’re ready. (We’ll be reaching out this spring to confirm your mailing address.)

If not, don’t worry! You can always��preorder today����� or, if you’re willing to wait, you can pledge to the new Bright Eyes campaign, coming in March.

In any case, may your coming year be full of joy, light — and good books.

David Kudler

P.S.��If you’ve read��Risuko but haven’t had a chance to share your thoughts, I’d love it if you’d post a review on Goodreads ��or Amazon or your favorite ebook store. Or you can even comment on this post and let me know what you thought directly!

The post Bright Eyes cover reveal! (Also, happy holidays!) appeared first on Seasons of the Sword.