Harry Connolly's Blog, page 4

What the subject header says.

I’ve added audiobook sales links to the main post for The Iron Gate for convenience’s sake. In my experience, most audiobook listeners are locked in to a specific vendor but I’m happy to include as many options as possible.

Tantor has brought back the same narrator, too, which I’m happy about. Also, with previous releases they offered the book as a compact disc. I haven’t seen those yet, but I’ll add them when I can.

Anyway, you can pre-order right now and…

I don’t really have a lot else to talk about. Take care and please post reviews.

I’ve been meaning to write about the show Wednesday since it aired on Netflix, but it wouldn’t come together. Then I watched this video interview with the showrunners, and heard the interviewer call the show a comedy, and something clicked. 

I like the 1991 film in a middling way. The only parts I really enjoyed were Raul Julia’s face when he gets cut in the duel with Dan Hedaya and the scene where Morticia gives Fester a tour of the family ceremony. “We gladly feast on those who would subdue us.” Excellent. 

But the thing I remember most about that movie was a line from a review (yes, I know that’s weird and I wish I could find it now). In it, the reviewer asks (and I’m paraphrasing from memory) “What are the Addams family? Are they ghouls? Something else?”

And, yeah. I sort of wondered that myself while I was watching, while enjoying the feeling that I didn’t know and would never know. What exactly are the Addams family? Some seem to have weird powers. They welcome torture and death. They’re comical figures, sure, but how are they classified? What need and tidy category do we put them in? 

Who cares? We might as well ask what the rules are. 

But this is how a great many people experience stories about the strange and unreal. If the story is going to venture beyond the realm of the actual, they need to know how far, and in what direction, and please provide neat boundaries to let us know what we can expect.

Some stories work better this way, sure. Some don’t, and it wasn’t until I heard that woman call Wednesday (the show) a comedy that I realized that I was putting the wrong assumptions onto it. There are many kinds of comedy that have no interest in The Rules.

(Confession time: I sometimes don’t recognize comedies when I’m watching them. See also: A Simple Plan.)

But Wednesday (the show) is also a mystery, and that is a genre that is very much interested in setting up rules. So it made sense that the show is so weirdly rigid where the other Addams family stuff is very much not.

Personally, I’m not a huge fan of Charles Addams original cartoons. They were fine. I didn’t love them. I didn’t connect with them. His famous “Downhill Skier” cartoon is unforgettable, and perfectly exemplifies the point I was making above about comedy and “the rules” but I knew his most popular creation from the black and white sitcom, and as a kid my favorite character was Cousin Itt, who was created especially for the show and not by Addams himself.

So I’m not what you’d call a purist. 

But as much as I enjoyed Netflix’s Wednesday, I couldn’t help but feel annoyed that the show took this weird family of suis generis characters and carefully nestled them into a setting full of stock tropes and character types that are as rigid as a cheap role-playing game. 

At Wednesday’s new school, there are four houses just like at Hogwarts, although they make much less of a fuss about them. The other students are (mostly) grouped by types—werewolf, vampire, siren, gorgon—along with a few psychics bearing traditional psychic powers.

Even the family themselves have been sorted. Now there are outcasts and normies. The normies are… muggles, I guess, who are fully aware that non-muggles exist? The outcasts are everything that’s not a normie, which reframes that weirdly affecting cemetery scene in a way that bothers me. It’s no longer the Addams family itself that must resist oppression by outsiders. It’s their entire group, their whole category, which is apparently defined by the fact that they’re ostracized.

Is it weird to complain this way about a show that I enjoyed, even though it felt at times—especially the climax—that they were filling out a checklist? I would probably have written this post months ago if the show had been a failure, but it’s been wildly successful.

And why not? The young actors are terrific. The jokes mostly land. The story races along. The whole thing looks great. Plus, the rules are clear. And maybe that’s why I enjoyed it but didn’t love it. 

Roman Gabriel.

He’s the first Eagles quarterback whose name I remember. I’m old enough to have known about Norm Snead or Pete Liske, but I didn’t have much interest in the game at that age. Besides, those names were boring. Roman Gabriel is a fantastic name, and I’m pretty sure I started sitting down with my dad and watching football with him (in part) because of that name.

Like a lot of dads in the seventies and eighties, he as a big football fan, although the Eegs (as everyone called them) were an endless source of disappointment. He wasn’t a man who cursed in front of his family, but he wasn’t above shouting “Gyot Damn Eggles!” forty or fifty times a game. And he never pronounced the name that way—Eggles—except out of frustration. Years of frustration.

Hanging out to watch the games was something we could do together, along with watching cheesy old monster movies. At least, we could until he passed, many years ago.

Me, I still like those monster movies but I have stopped watching football. Once it became clear how much damage the players were doing to their bodies by competing in this way, the fun went out of it. I don’t want to watch big hits–or even little–hits any more.

Five years ago, when the Eagles beat the Patriots for the championship, I decided to make an exception to my rule and watched the game. I didn’t know any of the players except the ones who were pop culture famous, which meant Tom Brady and Tom Brady alone. He’s a guy I root against under most circumstances.

And while I was glad the Eagles won, I wasn’t elated. It didn’t thrill me like it used to. Without my dad sitting on the couch, it didn’t seem to matter.

It’s been a long time since they died, but I’ve been thinking about my folks recently. My son turned 21 a few weeks back. He’s officially an adult now, but he never got to meet his paternal grandparents. They would have loved him, obviously, but I know they would have really really liked him, too.

(Don’t smoke, kids. And if you do smoke, keep trying to quit until it sticks.)

And now it’s Super Bowl Sunday again. The Eagles are playing, and I’ve been thinking about how much my father would have felt about this day, and how I would feel about it, too.

So I’ve decided I’m going to make a fancy onion dip, a big bowl of buffalo wings, some pizza, some beer, and I’m going to spend the day watching something else.

It turns out Gone with the Wind is about as long as a championship game. I’ve never seen it, so I’m finally going to cross that one off my list. And if the movie sucks, well, so do most Super Bowl games. It’s part of the tradition. During the pregame bullshit, I might cross a few other films off my list. HBOMax has a bunch of Kurosawa just sitting there, waiting for me to finally sit down with Rashomon and Ikiru. Maybe.

Anyway, I just discovered that we’re just about out of baking soda, so I’m going to run out and buy some for the wings. However you spend this Sunday, I hope you get to spend it with people you love, and that it’s a good day. 

Back in 2001, when the movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was released, part of the story around it (as I remember it now, 20+ years later) was that director Simon West threw out the scripts he was given (apparently the producers had more than one writer working separately and simultaneously) and, with a pair of co-writers, wrote a new one in a week or two. Apparently, he said it was not that hard.

A review I read at the time (which I can’t find at the moment) seized on this quote, because of course writing is easy if you don’t care how (or whether) the sequences fit together, or even if they belong together at all.

I was thinking about this quote as I watched Nicolas Winding Refn’s Copenhagen Cowboy.

On one level, CC is a story about a woman with supernatural powers who is forced to survive in a world of ruthless mobsters. She is considered to be a “lucky coin,” someone who brings good luck/grants wishes, but no one trusts her and she gives every impression of being passive and helpless until suddenly she isn’t.

On another level, CC is an art film with long lingering shots in which nothing happens, slow circular pans in rooms where more time is spent on the wallpaper than the characters, shots full of color, and beautifully composed images.

Me, I like both of these things, and so Copenhagen Cowboy ought to have been my absolute jam. Instead, I admired it more than I liked it. I indulged it by giving it my time instead of feeling moved.

Most of the time, anyway. I certainly loved sections of it, but overall?

Nah.

There are many art films that don’t want the audience to engage with them on a literal plot and subplot level—movies where you just sit back and experience it. They don’t offer the easy engagement of narrative, because the audience response comes from something else.

Copenhagen Cowboy wants both elements, but doesn’t know how to combine them. It’s a chaotic jumble of pretty shots, images of women being degraded, rotating camera POVs, gross/grotesque imagery, and supernatural nonsense. It’s an interesting failure and little more.

Then I found this interview with him on Vulture. In it, he says that the title of the show has no relation to the show itself. He just thought it sounded cool.

Also, that he shot the series in chronological order so he could change things on the fly “based on how [he feels] in the morning”. For example, there was a scene where the protagonist talks about being abducted as a child, and he changed it at the last moment to being abducted by aliens. Why? Because he’s “always been interested in science fiction”.

In the third episode, he suddenly decided that the main character knows kung fu, so they brought in a trainer and choreographed a big fight scene.

When I read this part of the interview, it occurred to me that my experience of watching all this Dumb Pretty Art TV must have been similar to the experience of the cast and crew as they made it. What? I’m part of an intergalactic race now? Oh, we’re going to resolve this confrontation with a martial arts battle? Okay then. Let’s, um, make that happen.

And this moves the show out of the “interesting failure” category into something much dumber. I’m usually in favor of characters going all karate on each other, but it’s so commonplace that it needs a commonplace structure around it. It can’t be thrown in as a last minute change because you have no idea what should happen next.

That’s the kind of easy writing that doesn’t care how the scenes and sequences relate to each other.

But NWR can (sort of) get way with this in a way that Simon West can’t. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider has a lot of beautiful people, locations, and shots, but they aren’t beautiful in an art-house style. LC:TR is beautiful in the background while other, much-plottier stuff is going on.

With Copenhagen Cowboy, the story stops for beauty. The extended rotating pans around a 360 degree set are an intentional (and condescending) choice by the director to deny the audience the kind of editing that grabs your attention. The grotesquery is designed to unsettle. The ambiguity is meant to intrigue.

And I’m pretty sure the scenes of beautiful women in degraded circumstances are supposed to titillate.

None of this is as successful as the director’s fans hope it will be. Personally, I wanted to be one of those fans, but it’s not going to happen on the strength of this show. Not when it feels so careless.

Random comments: NWR talks about this season as the start of his hero’s journey, with a second season ready to go. However, I was sure that the sequence of images at the end of the season showed the main character dying. Ambiguity, people. It’s how you recognize Real Art.

Finally, that Vulture interview I linked above is kinda hilarious. NWR is so fully committed to his Euro Art Nerd persona that he talks about his audience as though he’s “educating children.” He also says he wept with pride often when his daughter, hired to play a critical part that was added at the last minute, refused to take his direction. Amazing.

Link, in case you can’t see the embed.

Remember, the True Meaning of Christmas is paying your employees a decent wage.

The Flood Circle reached one thousand copies sold (counting Amazon sales only) as of yesterday, 11/29. The Iron Gate hit this same milestone on in early November, so copies of TFC have moved a little faster.

I’m sure that’s because of the cumulative effect of promoting the previous book.

And while reviews of The Iron Gate have been terrific, I was concerned that some readers would have been dissatisfied with the plot and would just quietly stop buying. That doesn’t seem to be happening.

::dabs brow with hanky::

Also, I’ve posted a note on Twitter about the order of the stories in the Twenty Palaces series. Here it is

I had someone ask me about the story order for the Twenty Palaces series and it makes sense that people don’t know it because I put it on my website, and who looks at websites anymore?

But here’s an infographic pic.twitter.com/mf0ebb1SM6

— Harry “New 20 Palaces Available Now” Connolly (@byharryconnolly) November 30, 2022

With luck, that embed won’t be a dead link in two weeks.

Anyway, the reading order is the order on the front page of my website. The only exception is the novelette “The Homemade Mask”, which is included with my short fiction collection. It comes after Circle of Enemies but before The Twisted Path.

“The Homemade Mask” isn’t what I’d call “essential” to the series as a whole, but if you’d like to read a story told (partially) from the POV of a predator, that’s the place to go.

I’ve also dropped, for a short time, the price of the first book in the series to 99 cents. At this point, there isn’t a lot of promotional stuff left for me to do, unless I start buying ads or whatever, and that has been a decidedly mixed bag for me. I mean, I have basically one social media platform that I use with any regularity, and there’s only so many times I can tell the same group of followers that I have a new novel out.

Which is why I ask once again that, if you haven’t already, please post reviews on your online spaces, on the sites where you bought the book, and even in face-to-face encounters in the real world, assuming that still happens.

Finally, I’m currently at work on my next book, which I’ve mentioned before will be a stand alone. The story and tone are coming together slowly, but I knew this new project would be challenging, and a new challenge is just what I need.

To help promote the two new Twenty Palaces novels I released this past fall, I’ve dropped the Kindle price for the first book in the series, cleverly titled Twenty Palaces, to only 99 cents.

Want to read a dark contemporary fantasy without the usual trappings, including a distinct lack of romance between the two leads? These are the books for you.

Or they’re the book for your pal, the one who reads fantasy voraciously and is always on the hunt for something a little different.

Anyway, it’s a high-value, low-cost gift for the holidays, so maybe buy a copy for a friend and maybe for yourself, too.

In case anyone out there needs to hear this: I don’t have a Venmo account. Please don’t send money to me through that service. That’s not me.

I got an email on Saturday congratulating me on opening an account, and I assumed it was phishing and sent it to Spam. Then the emails kept coming, and a quick check showed they were from the actual company.

Fun fact! In their original email, Venmo included a “Not you? Click here” -style link that would remove my email address from whatever account had been created with it.

Another fun fact! That link didn’t work.

So it’s been the usual back and forth with the help people, who per standard practice skim over my initial message and offer advice that doesn’t work for me. At this point, it seems we’ve reached the stage where they have blocked that email address, but I keep asking if it has been used to trick people into sending money and somehow the support staff keep missing that message.

God, the future is stupid.

Anyway, I don’t have a Venmo account. If someone impersonated me in that service and asked you for money, please report that.

For years, I’ve been picking up the odd indie game here and there, trying to find (among other things) one that seems like it could be a great mystery game. I haven’t really found a promising option.

Generally, they fall into two categories. The first is exemplified by a teen detective game called Bubblegumshoe, by Emily Care Boss (among others) and published by Evil Hat Games. Bubblegumshoe uses the GUMSHOE game system which, despite the name, I’ve usually seen in horror games. GUMSHOE separates “abilities” into two categories. First are General Abilities, which let you roll against them and you succeed or fail in the ordinary way. 

Second are Investigative Abilities. If there’s a core clue that you need to solve the mystery, and a PC is on hand with the Investigative Ability that would acquire the clue, it’s acquired automatically. GUMSHOE doesn’t let a game stall or derail because a bad die roll, or a series of them, prevents the characters from snapping up a necessary clue. That’s an essential mechanic for horror games, because the antagonists are supposed to be overwhelmingly powerful compared to the PCs. That’s part of what makes it horror. There’s usually a very narrow path to victory for the players, and if they’re denied the information they need to find that path, the game is an automatic failure and not much fun. 

Like I said, it’s a clever mechanic. But to use it in a mystery story, you also need a GM who is capable of setting up a mystery plot, full of red herrings, fake but seemingly unbreakable alibis, and all the other tropes of the genre. And take it from me, a guy that’s tried his hand at mystery more than once, that’s a challenging skill set to acquire.

Alternately, we have the cozy mystery/cosmic horror game Brindlewood Bay, a Powered by the Apocalypse system by Jason Cordova and published by The Gauntlet. In this game, the PCs are elderly members of a local mystery book club in a small, coastal New England town. Individual adventures are cases, like an episode of Murder, She Wrote in which mystery readers nose around crime scenes, solving murders.

Except PbtA is a “Play to find out” system. The GM doesn’t create a clue trail. That’s actively discouraged. Instead, they create a story prompt and a list of generic clues like “an unsigned will” or “a photograph of the victim”. During play, the players themselves add the necessary details that will separate the clue trail from the red herrings, then roll dice to see if this is the solution.

Which is fine, but it doesn’t give the player the experience of solving a mystery. It puts them into the role of creating the mystery.

I had a similar issue with a Forged in the Dark game I actually got to play some time ago. The game was called Hack the Planet (written by Fraser Simons and published by Samjoko Publishing). It was cli-fi mixed with cyberpunk, and while I can be lukewarm on cyberpunk in general, this was a cool setting. Maybe the most interesting expression of cyberpunk I’ve ever come across. 

But I was very interested in trying out the system. FitD games were the new hotness at the time (and maybe they’re still the current hotness, I wouldn’t know) because they let people role play heist plots.

Personally, I love a good heist film. And when someone creates a heist-oriented fantasy game that not only wins awards and gets raves all over the internet, it spawns a number of clones in other genres, well, I’m interested. I really wanted to try that.

Except once we started playing the game, it turned out that the thing that makes heist plots most appealing to me—that unexpected twist where the moment everything is going wrong turns out to be part of the plan all along, and how did I miss the scattered clues that would have prepared me for that twist—is utterly neutered. The surprise of that moment is replaced by a player saying “I spend two stress.” No surprise. No thrill. 

And it sort of has to be. How else can you play out this sort of story in this medium? And the fact that I stupidly held out hope that the game could replicate the feeling of the movie has to be yet another triumph of hope over experience. I should have kept my expectations low. 

For me, without that surprise, the game was all tension and no thrill. 

I can see why people like that system. Not only does it have some cool ideas, it’s very fussy and is full of little boxes to check. It’s a game for the bullet journal/to-do list crowd. To me, it seemed underpowered and all that fussiness made it feel like a resource management game, which I hate. Cool setting, but that ruleset was actively unpleasant on several axes.

Which is a shame. I like heists, almost as much as I like mysteries. If I could figure out a way to capture the essential parts of them in a way that felt manageable in a game, I’d be pretty happy about that game. 

But I’m not holding my breath. Not every genre works in every medium. 

By the way, I have two new Twenty Palaces novels out:

The Iron Gate

The Flood Circle

Two days ago, sales for The Iron Gate at Amazon crossed the 1000 copies mark. That’s print and ebook combined and it’s just the one vendor.

An ordinary sales run for traditionally published midlist sf/f can be between 2K and 5K, so that puts me on pace to be pretty average. That isn’t a bad goal for me at this stage of my non-career. It also assumes that sales will keep chugging along a pace that will let me pass the “You must sell this many copies to ride this ride” sign. Otherwise, I lose even the pretense of being midlist.

Some other works have done better. The Way into Chaos has sold nearly 14K at Amazon. Those would be respectable numbers at pretty much any publisher, and they don’t count the copies “sold” through the Kickstarter. It makes me wish I could take those numbers back in time to show the editor who rejected that novel because it was a fantasy, had a portal in it, but the protagonists didn’t go through the portal. Only the antagonists did. It was a story about being invaded, not about invading somewhere else. The editor called that “bad worldbuilding.”

Then again, that trilogy came right on the heels of the books Del Rey published, and which they marketed and publicized heavily. As of my last royalty statement, Child of Fire has sold almost forty thousand copies. It would have just earned out its advance if the contract didn’t call for basket accounting for all three books. To this day, those books from Del Rey outsell anything in my backlist that I’ve self-published.

So were the sales for The Way into Chaos so good because of residual effects of all that money and hard work Del Rey put into the Twenty Palaces books? No doubt.

Were sales so good because of that incredible Chris McGrath cover? Absolutely without a doubt. I’ve always known cover art is really important, but I’m thinking I should have put a couple of extra reallys in there.

And then there’s the very real possibility that this is just a slow fading of a career that never really took off. I have readers who enjoy my work, but it seems like there are fewer every year, as later books make readers lose interest without bringing new ones in. I used to think that my creative instincts could appeal to a broad audience, but now that I’ve been writing for a while, it seems not.

Not sure where I’m heading with this, except to say that I’m not going to stop writing and that I will write Twenty-One Palaces at some point. I’m grateful for the readers I’ve got. I’m grateful for the chance to write my books and a system that allows me to publish them in the face of widespread publisher disinterest.

But I still feel that my non-career is aging the same way that I am. Things don’t work as well as they used to. Everything is slower. It hurts more. People fall away, leaving you with a smaller circle. And there’s really nothing to do but work hard to slow the decline while also coming to terms with its inevitability.