The Mythcreant Podcast

We’ve all been there: The plot is going well, but your hero is solving problems too easily because of their cool magic powers. Couldn’t you fix it by making their society ban cool magic powers? Technically, yes, but there’s a lot that goes into such a decision. Why would they ban something as useful as magic? For that matter, why would everyone be organized into factions based on their birthstone? As you may have guessed, we have some thoughts. Show Notes History of Standardized Spelling  History of Prohibition  Landman Scene  Banning Dance   Are Flamethrowers Banned?  The Prime Directive  Pen Pals  A Private Little War  The Eugenics War Ad Astra per Aspera  General Order 7 Plus One  Divergent  Stalin’s Vanishing Photo  Fourth Wing  Transcript Generously transcribed by Aiden. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [opening theme] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I am Chris… Oren: And I’mOren. Chris: This is a secret podcast because we live in a culture where vocalizing is forbidden. Oren: Ooh, so scandalous. Chris: It goes back to the great singing wars, where two kings got in a big fight over who had a better voice. So, to prevent that from ever happening again, everyone decided: no talking. But we’re very brave rebels, because we think that we should be able to talk and it makes us outcasts and we’re hunted. Oren: It’s also somehow… we’re actually very good at it, despite supposedly being in a culture where no one ever talks. Don’t worry about that part. Chris: We had this awakening a couple of years ago where we discovered talking for the first time and it was very profound. Oren: But, we decided to invent English. So, honestly, maybe we are the bad guys. Chris: [laughter] Oren: You had a blank canvas of infinite choices and you decided a language that spells “GHT” to be either silent or an “F” sound. Why are you like this? Chris: [laughter] It is funny that there was a period in time when the first English dictionaries were being created, where some people writing things down made some very arbitrary decisions about how they wanted to spell things, sometimes just to match other words that were also spelled very strangely, and that’s it! Standardised spelling is only a couple of hundred years old. Oren: And that’s how we got to where we are today. Personally, I know that if I was going to make an unrealistic world where things are forbidden, what I would do is I would have one faction that just won’t shut up about free speech and just screams about it, and every time someone mildly criticizes them they scream about free speech and then when they’re in power they immediately start trying to ban peoples’ speech. If I wanted it to be really unbelievable, I would do that, is what I’m saying. Chris: Oh, no! Oren, too real! Oren: That’s just an unrealistic fictional expectation, Chris. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Chris: I mean, I do think there’s a fun conversation (and sometimes not fun conversation) to be had here about which things are realistic for culture to forbid and which things are not. Oren: What it comes down to is, you have to think about who is trying to forbid this and why. That’s what it comes down to and people try to forbid things all the time and there are various reasons they might do that. Sometimes, these are good reasons, like the taboo against teachers dating their students: this is a good thing to have. Some authors don’t understand that some taboos are a good thing to have and they think that if it’s cool and rebellious to break taboos against interracial dating, it must be cool and rebellious to break student-teacher dating taboos and it’s like no, that taboo exists for a reason; it’s because that is an inherently unequal relationship. Also, often it’s just they want to control people. You ban stuff that you don’t want people doing. That can be a good motivation, it’s just a question of who has a vested interest in doing this, right? Like banning talking is extremely unlikely just because it would be unworkable and would almost certainly fail, even if someone tried. Chris:  The other thing about why would somebody do this, again is the unworkability. Some things are just too burdensome. You could have tyrants, but people do have to choose to obey. And if everybody is universally unwilling to obey because it’s just too much, then it’s not going to work out. Like Prohibition in the United States: that wasn’t the most unreasonable law. We’re learning more and more that even a tiny bit of alcohol is bad for you and apparently, before Prohibition, the thing that people don’t realise is that we drank a lot more. It actually did something good in that it reduced how much people drank. But, at the same time, it was completely unworkable because nobody was willing to actually follow it. Oren: And of course, it caused a huge spike in organised crime; to some extent it invented organised crime. Prohibition is complicated and the idea of it just being this silly idea that nobody liked and then that we got rid of after a few years is overly simplistic. But it is a good example of how there are things that are just too ingrained, too successfully bad. At least in some cultures, right? It’s culturally different. There are cultures that have largely abandoned alcohol, it’s just not ours. Chris: [laughter] And again, maybe it comes down to how much people drank before Prohibition: a ridiculous amount. Some other things that are just unworkable, that are still things that fiction likes to feature is forbidding emotion, or love, or – and we talk about this all of the time – magic. Oren: Yeah, I’d love to ban magic. That’s just a thing everyone does, because you need your hero to be mistreated for something cool and awesome and not a boring sad reason that people actually get mistreated. Chris: Don’t get me wrong, if you actually wanted to make banning magic to be something that could happen and you only have cosmic horror magic that always lashes back and does terrible things, or if you quit gains, that could be plausible. But, most magic that people have, it’s not what people want. They have their cool, pressed mages. Oren: And you can come up with narrower circumstances. There are situations in which certain kinds of magic might be banned. Of course, often what authors will do is they will set up very good reasons for that magic to be banned and then be like, “oh, but it’s wrong to ban that magic.” Is it though? You made a pretty compelling case for it earlier. You an also have situations where it’s roughly parallel to the modern attempt to ban renewable energy, where there is a very entrenched group of powerful people who rely on one kind of magic and they see another kind of magic as a threat. They might try to ban that; that could happen. Chris: Definitely one group banning things from another group or something to protect their interests, that is very realistic. Again, as long as it’s not at the unworkable level; it’s what many stories want. Oren:  Even in those situations where there is one group doing it for their own interests, very often, if the thing they’re trying to ban is useful, they will still find ways to use it. There was this infamous scene from the show Landman where this guy just spouts a bunch of oil industry propaganda for five minutes. He does make one point that is true, which is the oil industry doesn’t have any problem using wind turbines when it is practical for them to use turbines to get oil out of the ground. They just don’t want you using wind turbines to power your house, because they want you to keep buying their oil. Chris: Some examples of things that have actually been forbidden: dancing is something that has been forbidden in some cultures. River dancing, an Irish form of dancing, comes from dancing being banned and them dancing covertly. Sometimes, forbidding dancing is religious: dancing is too enjoyable and it leads to sin. If there is an oppressed group, their oppressors will do all sorts of things to reduce their morale, and banning dancing is one of their ways of trying to reduce enjoyment. So, that’s where that comes from. Banning any kind of weapons; banning martial arts; banning specific cultural practices, especially if we’re trying to compel the culture to assimilate, or adopt a new religion. Mingling and marriage between two different groups: that’s a popular one. Sometimes goods are rationed, particularly in times of war. And of course, we have things like immigration. Oren: Trying to keep out people who are not part of your in-group is a pretty universal experience with predictably tragic results for everybody. My favourite – and I think you could also do something like this with magic – is when countries get together and agree to ban certain weapons. They almost never do this with weapons they still use. Chris: [laughter] Oren:  Like, flamethrowers are kind of illegal under international law and a big part of the reason is that they have really bad press, but also, we have bombs and missiles that do the same thing from further away. So, we don’t really need flamethrowers anymore. So, they’re an easy one to check of your list to improve your image. Chris: One of the funny ones that we do see a lot in Star Trek is the Prime Directive, which is very strange, because it’s based on outdated ideas of ethics and it’s basically there again to create weird plot complications: “Oh, no! It’s forbidden for us to stop Lesley from being murdered by weird planet that murders people for stepping in their garden area.” No, we can’t save this civilization from this… there was a big volcano… there was an entire planet that has a natural disaster and literally everyone’s going to die and they decided to do a conflate of whether it was okay to save them. Oren: Yeah, they’ve done that multiple times. The one that really draws attention  is the episode “Pen Pals” when the planet is kind of going through mass earthquakes. That’s the one where they have their debate about whether it would be okay to intervene, and obviously the answer is yes. So, Picard is like, “what if it was a war?” And, it’s like, I don’t know Picard! Maybe if the situation was different we would do something different! Chris: [laughter] Oren:  It’s the biggest non sequitur ever. Chris: It’s especially funny, because usually the justification they use for the Prime Directive, which applies to species that don’t have war capabilities yet – and so they’re fairly isolated on their own planet – is that they should not interfere with their development and let that society develop on its own. But, if the entire society is going to die, I don’t see the value in not interfering. [laughter] Oren: This whole idea is derived from two things: 1) it’s derived from a reaction against US military adventurism, which, fair enough: that was pretty awful. The war line is how Star Trek originally envisioned this, although hilariously, in their first Prime Directive episode – I don’t remember if they actually used the word “Prime Directive”, the episode is a private little war – they decide they are going to intervene and arm their side in this proxy war which is kind of funny in retrospect. But, it also comes from a reaction against this idea of, “well, we need to help who don’t have the same stuff we have so we’re going to help them by flooding their economy with consumer goods.” That often can have really bad consequences. They’ll get TVs for the first time, but their healthcare system will collapse. That sort of stuff can happen, but that’s complicated and hard to talk about in 45 minutes so what you end up with is these bizarre straw man situations where no serious ethicist would say, “yeah, you should probably let that species die in the name of noninterference.” [laughter] Chris: [laughter] Another thing that I find interesting is that in the Star Trek world, the Federation band eugenics, which I do think is believable, but  the reason that they ban eugenics seems very strange, which is, oh, there were some eugenics wars. Do you know what the details about these eugenics wars are? Oren: I don’t find that especially unbelievable. This is really complicated because there’s a huge amount of real life ethics tied up in this question. Because, unlike a lot of Star Trek’s moral dilemmas, this one is actually based on stuff that we might be able to do soon. I should point out that pretty much all countries that I know of currently adhere to rules that ban you from altering the genes of unborn children, aside from some occasional circumstances to prevent really serious disease. That is a thing we do in real life. It’s not unbelievable to me that if you add a bunch of people who were genetically engineered to be better and then they try to take over, and that caused a bunch of problems that we would ban the technology for that reason. Chris: Maybe part of the issue is that we don’t need a really elaborate backstory to explain why they banned eugenics. One reason for banning things is just sometimes, at a society level, something causes lots of problems even though theoretically, it could be done without harm. Definitely with eugenics, you could definitely see that there could have been irresponsible eugenics practices that ended up dong a lot of damage which just encourage them to ban it altogether. Oren:  We should specify what we’re talking about here, which is sci-fi gene editing, to give you essentially superpowers. Because, in real life, eugenics is a lot bigger than that. Chris: In the context of Star Trek, it is just genetic modification. They call it eugenics, whereas in real life, you get into really creepy stuff. Oren: In Stark Trek, I don’t know: that’s a really complicated one. It’s a little weird to me that in the Federation, you ban this practice because you think that’s it’s just too dangerous to be allowed. But it’s always struck me as odd that if it can do that, if it can give you that kind of superpowers, are there no other factions willing to do it? I don’t know. We see a lot of amoral factions in Star Trek. It’s also struck me as a little odd that the Federation, which is supposedly fairly moral , treats people who have been modified – without their consent, of course; this all happens when they’re babies – so badly and there doesn’t seem to be any serious pushback against that. That’s a little odd to me. I don’t know. The genetic engineering episodes are complicated and often end up being about something other than genetic engineering in the first place. So, it gets kind of hard to judge. Chris:  It is one of those things that it doesn’t feel like there’s necessarily a lot of thoughtful discussion on the issue in Star Trek. Oren:  I mean, their most recent attempt was kind of hamstrung by the fact that they can’t change it, because canonically it has to be in place for Deep Space 9 to happen. So, they had this weird episode where they argued about it for 45 minutes and then didn’t reach any conclusions. [laughter] What’s really funny in Star Trek is the occasional… in the original series they’ll do like, you’re forbidden to go to this planet. If you go there we’ll kill you. Oh, okay. Calm down! Chris: [laughter] Oren: The one that is always, of course, used to power all kinds of stories is characters who are banned from associating with each other. This is typically used in a romantic context, but not always. It’s one of those ones that can make sense, but you have to think about what it means and what you are saying with it. If you have people who are banned and you want it to be from two roughly equal sides, you know, you can do that. You can have feuding families or you could have nations that are very hostile to each other, you could have that sort of thing. But, other than that, its kind of hard to have this and be on an equal playing field. Again, if you have a setting where Jews and gentiles aren’t allowed to date, it’s not because Jews are held in high esteem. Chris: It’s going to be a very loaded topic. Oren: And I’ve seen this a few times in stories where they’ll have like, our two groups aren’t allowed to date. But, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of prejudice just between the groups. And it’s like, well the reason they’re not allowed to date is because of the prejudice between the groups, right? Chris: It’s because the more powerful group doesn’t want their bloodlines, or whatever, to be tainted. It’s inherently extreme bigotry at work. Unless, again, there’s two factions who are just outright enemies. At a smaller scale, you could also have patriarchy, where we’re trying to control women and who they’re exposed to, to control what babies they might have. Usually, there’s a lot of oppression dynamics there, unless the two groups are just outright enemies. Oren: As a default for an author who isn’t looking to make some really big, deep statement, I usually advise something that’s analogous to feuding families, that is just easier and it doesn’t require as much complicated justification. Especially during the YA dystopia boom, which has been over for a few years at this point. But, you’ve got some really weird ones. Chris: Plus One. Oren: The novel Plus One had the… society is split into the nightshift and the dayshift because of the 1918 flu pandemic? Sure… Chris: [laughter] Oren: You get the ones that are like, you’re divided up among your Myers Briggs personality test results. Chris: Yeah: Divergent. Wherever anybody is in a different faction based on their personality trait, and how dare you have more than one personality trait! [laughter] Oren: I’ve met some hiring managers who think that way. But, in general, that’s kind of silly. That really complicated, arbitrary factor: it’s at best going to take a lot of explaining. It’s usually easier to just be like, well these two characters are from families who hate each other. It worked for Romeo & Juliet, it’ll work for you. Chris:  With something like Plus One, it feels like that elaborate setup where there’s a day population and a night population and ‘ne’er the two shall meet’ was trying to create some novelty in the world. For me, I would prefer the novel to be created by something that feels plausible, but I cant say that it never helps a book to be successful to have something wild. Like with Divergent, one of the reasons why it was popular, even though so ridiculous, is everybody loves a little online personality test. Oren: Stories where they ban the history are a really interesting one. Or, usually where they try to be like, no, this history doesn’t exist, right? This certain thing never happened. Chris:  Certainly plausible that someone would try. Oren: And it does happen. In some cases, there are examples of governments that have just tried to pretend things never happened. That’s the famous photo of Stalin with all of his cronies, and each version has one fewer crony in it. That sort of thing, that does happen. It’s difficult; it requires a very high degree of control. It’s usually easier to subvert history and paint a narrative that is favourable to you than it is to outright ban it. Who knows where we’re going now? But, for most of the US’s history, it’s very rare that we just straight up pretend that something didn’t happen. What’s more often, is that we pretend it happened in a way that is more favourable to us. As long as the majority feels like that supports their interests, that works out okay. In a ln a lot of fantasy settings, that isn’t what writers want, because I guess they feel like that’s not big enough of a twist. So, you end up with something like Fourth Wing, where there’s this reveal that, oh, there’s actually a secret other group of enemies that we have to fight, and it’s forbidden to know about them for some reason. I didn’t read the sequel, so I don’t know what the explanation they gave there is. But I am extremely sceptical. Chris:  Sounds like those enemies aren’t that far away. If it’s history that there’s no living evidence for it walking around, and you don’t have mass communication in this setting, so we can just burn all the books and wait a number of generations… forbid people to talk about it: I feel like that works a lot better. Fourth Wing has, like, the enemies are there; you can go see them if you just fly in your dragon a little ways. Oren:  It also brings up the motivation question. Why would a militaristic government try to hide the existence of a bunch of inherently evil enemies who it is okay to kill? That’s exactly what they want. That’s perfect. Most governments have to make up one of those. Chris:  Now that we’re seeing all the effects of misinformation. I suppose if you had a cyberpunk dystopia, aka the real world – Oren: [laughter] Chris: – you could have a situation where a tyrannical government says, “no, that’s not real!” and there’s so much fabrication, it’s not that the information doesn’t exist, it’s that it’s really difficult to sort out what’s real from what’s not real. So, it might be treated like just another conspiracy theory. Oren:  At least from my understanding of conspiracy theories – and I’m a hobbyist – the conspiracy theories that have the greatest reach are the ones that subvert what really happened. Like, you do get some people who’s conspiracy theory is that Covid never happened. That is a thing that some people genuinely believe. The much more widespread Covid conspiracy theories are that it was a bioweapon from China, or that it existed but it wasn’t really that bad and that it was really the vaccines; that sort of thing. Those are the conspiracy theories that tend to stick better because people remember that Covid happened; it’s harder to tell them that it didn’t happen, because they remember it. But, it’s easier to convince them that, actually, these people you already don’t like were responsible. That’s a lot easier. Chris: I do think that how distant something is in time really matters. Because, sometimes what happens is the storyteller just wants people to forget something that was only two generations ago. You know, your grandparent was alive then and could tell you. In some cases, it’s more plausible if you just make it a little further back in time, so it’s not in living memory and hasn’t been for several generations. Oren:  Well, I think with that, we are going to go ahead and ban any further discussion in this podcast. No more of that’s allowed. Chris:  If you want to support our brave efforts to talk, you can support us on patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And, before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. There’s Ayman Jaber: he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. There’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek; we’ll talk to you next week! [closing theme]

Speculative worlds have a lot going on, which is why we love them. Cool magic and meticulous technology, it’s what we live for. But oh, wow, is it hard to explain, especially at the beginning. That’s when you need to hook readers with something exciting, but if you don’t establish at least some of the world, confusion will reign. Thankfully, we’ve got some tips which are not at all based on our own difficulties!  Show Notes Ann Radcliff The Blade Itself  The Devils  Exposition  The Final Architecture  Shield of Sparrows  The Alchemyst  Lightlark When the Moon Hatched  Elantris Religion For Breakfast Children of the Light Transcript Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [opening song] Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. Chris: And I’m Chris. Oren: And a quick logistical note: sadly, Bunny will be out for a while. She had a very exciting opportunity. That means she just doesn’t have as much time for podcasting. So we hope to have her back in the future, but we just didn’t want it to seem like she disappeared suddenly. She’s still around Mythcreants. Hopefully we will still see her at some point. So that’s that note out of the way. Now, Chris, I have a problem. Chris: Hmm? Oren: My world is inside a snail that’s running laps around an infinitely dense salami stick, which was made from the Great Galactic Boar. And I need to explain all of this right away, because my protagonist is a salamibender whose power is dependent on where the snail is in its laps and is activated by recounting the boar’s great deeds. How do I explain this all in my opening fight scene? Chris: Ugh. I’m in this opening bit and I don’t like it. Oren: It is your fault, Chris. Your story did somewhat inspire this topic. Chris: And yours! Oren: Yeah, mine too, but I’m cheating. It’s easy. I took the easy way out. Chris: So, people may be interested to know that Oren and I have been each working on a new novel, and very much in parallel; we’re about at the same stage, which has been very interesting, and sometimes doing similar things. And that has given us the opportunity to see how we’ve both planned out our openings, dealing with worlds that are pretty complex. Oren: Yeah, see: your world is complex because it has an intricate magic system that is inextricably tied to the plot and upon which everything depends, and it has consistent rules that people can learn. My world is complex ’cause it’s full of silly bullshit. We are not the same. Chris: I mean, it is interesting. Your world is very novel, I would say, and has lots of really interesting things going on. Is it intimately connected to the plot? I mean, I know that it is, right? Like any good fantasy storyteller, you make sure that it matters that we’re in that particular world, but at the same time, it’s not quite so tightly connected, which I think makes it easier for you to more slowly introduce the world. I think my world is actually less complex than yours, but everything is so consolidated and dependent on everything else that I kind of have to introduce everything all at the beginning, or else there can be no plot movement until you understand the mages working for mage organizations fighting a magical disaster. Oren: I think you should just let people be confused. I’ve decided to become one of those people who’s just like, “Don’t worry about it.” Chris: Oh, don’t want to hold their hand. Oren: Yeah, don’t hold their hand. Just, like, dump everything on them. I already understand it. So they should be able to, right? It’s not like I have an advantage ’cause I’ve been talking to you about this story for the last year, right? It’s probably fine. Chris: Yeah. No, it’s going to be a whole other ball game when we get beta readers who have not heard anything about our stories. Already, I’ve had a funny experience where I am playing around with more historical language and one convention, because I’ve been listening to Anne Radcliffe, who’s a really classic gothic novel writer, and she frequently describes things by saying, “Oh, you know, the eye would follow this or that,” right? And it means one’s eye, a person there who happens to be looking. So in my opening paragraph, which is a little too ambitious as it often is, I have mentioned, “Oh, well, you know, the watchful eye will see this.” But I think, for people who are completely unfamiliar with that convention or what I’m doing, they’re like, “It’s like an eye of Sauron.” It’s now in the setting! Oren: waaaaaa Chris: The watchful eye! It’s like, “No, no, no!” Oren: That’s the reason why they can’t take the eagles to Gondor at the end. It’s ’cause of the eye. Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. Chris: The all seeing eye. It’s like, “No, no, that was not… there’s not a big eye in the setting.” Again, another reminder that when you have your opening paragraphs and people know literally nothing about the world, everybody’s trying to impress with their opening paragraph, but the wrong metaphor, people may not know it’s a metaphor. They may think that’s literal. We’ll see what happens when the beta readers look at it. Oren: Whereas my story, because my story is just full of silly bullshit, all I need to do is start with a scene which is fairly contained and doesn’t require you to know everything at once. So, you know, my opening scene introduces… we got a talking raven and our characters are here to break a curse for them. And talking animals. Pretty standard concept in fantasy, right? Lets people know we are in a fantasy world, but doesn’t take a huge amount of cognitive resources to figure out. And if they’re paying attention, they might notice the Norse theming, but they don’t need to yet. And I don’t need to explain that this city is made out of the bones of a giant serpent and that my protagonist is an einherjar, but who is weird and ostracized ’cause she didn’t die in traditional battle the way the other ones did, right? That I can… I can work that in a little later. Chris: Right. Because the immediate problem is curse-breaking, which, you know, people know what curses are from other fantasy works and various things, so that doesn’t take explanation. Oren: Yeah. The biggest problem that I actually have encountered so far is that one of the characters is a dwarf, and that has certain implications that I do not want the audience to have. Like, I don’t want them to think that this is… Chris: Right, it’s not Tolkien, it’s not D&D. Oren: Yeah. So in that case, I focused on trying to describe the unique way that dwarves look in this setting to try to signpost that, like, “Hey, this isn’t Gimli.” You don’t expect Legolas to be around the next corner. Will it work? Who knows? I guess we’ll find out eventually. Chris: I mean, that is one of the reasons why I advise, if your world has both fantasy and scifi elements, to try to introduce them together, if possible, so you don’t set completely wrong expectations about what kind of world it is. Just because the risk is, if you introduce fantasy elements and people are like, “Okay, this is a fantasy world,” and then suddenly you have a robot walking around, that could feel really random and contrived. Because they haven’t seen enough of your world to be like, “Oh yeah, everything, all the fantasy elements are robotic. You know, that unicorn over there is also a robot. I just wasn’t told,” or whatever it is that you’re doing to unite those things together. So if you introduce them at once, it helps set those expectations. I do think it’s worth talking about… Okay, every story has its own unique requirements, but there are some things that we generally try to introduce pretty early on in most stories. So things like who the main character is and the very general type of world, which just means: Is this like a historical-ish fantasy world? Is this future/scifi? Some very broad strokes, which I think is one of the issues you’re having, actually, with the dwarf and just the fact that your character’s a fish out of water. Oren: And just generally knowing the genre of a story is helpful to me if it’s like a setting-based genre. One of the things that was annoying about reading The Blade Itself is that, from the prologue, I actually couldn’t tell if this was fantasy or science fiction, because the guy is in a forest and he has a melee weapon of some kind, but it doesn’t describe what he’s fighting. There are bad guys, but I have no idea what they are. And he has a kind of modern-sounding name, which made me wonder if he was supposed to be like a crashed pilot or something. And eventually you find out, no, this is a fantasy setting. But it was weird how long it took. And the main reason I think was that it just refused to describe what his enemies looked like. You know, they’re just called the Shanka. It’s like, “What is that?” What does that look like? And it just does not say. It is just a blank void that he’s fighting for, like, the entire intro. Chris: And then we find out they’re basically just goblin/orc generic. Oren: I think they might be lizard people. I don’t know. Chris: Oh, are they? Oren: Maybe? I forget. But they’re basically… they fill the same role as orcs, right? They’re, like, a generically evil humanoid race that we can kill and not feel bad about. Which, regardless of whether I think that’s a good idea to have in a story, if I had known that’s what they were, I would know we were in a fantasy setting and that would help me set my expectations properly, whereas, since I didn’t know, I was feeling disoriented and having a harder time tracking things, ’cause every time something was introduced, I had to think, “Okay, is that being introduced as a scifi element or as a fantasy element?” And I don’t know which one it is. And that just took a lot of extra work. Chris: I mean, otherwise at the beginning, if I did an example rework where I added information in there, I have an information management series, and in the last one, as an example of how you work an exposition, I made some tweaks to that opening. Because, you know, having the main character fight some of these… what are they, Shanka or Flathead? They’re also called… Oren: Shanka. Yeah, they use those terms interchangeably. Chris: That’s the other issue, is there’s more than one term for them, which is a very bad idea. Whatever they are. It’s not a bad way to open, especially just since we’re out in the wilderness, we’re just doing a one-on-one fight. I mean, information-wise, that’s not too hard. Starting with action does make working in information a little more, you know, complex, because you don’t want to just pause a fight for a paragraph of exposition. You want to keep the pacing pretty tight. But if their information needs aren’t too high, you know, that can still work out okay. But it just feels like Abercrombie’s not trying. Not trying to tell us what we need to know. Oren: I’ve only read two Abercrombie books, and they both had this problem. The other one was The Devils, which was to a lesser extent, but in this one, the issue was that I was struggling to figure out, “Is this a fantasy setting or an alternate history setting?” And I eventually figured out it’s alternate history, but it’s really hard to figure that out, because it talks about a lot of things that are just made up, but then it also has the Mediterranean, like a real ocean, and then it mentions, you know, Ravenna and Venice, which are real cities, and I still have no idea how the timeline in that world is supposed to have shaken out. That took me a while to figure out what was going on. Chris: I mean, I’m a big fan of doing a lot of micromanagement when it comes to introducing information. So if you’re introducing something in your world, like I’ve got one of my major organizations, for instance, you know, there’s a lot of things about that organization, but it can really help to just word by word, you know, exactly what do people need to know? What do they not need to know? You don’t have to juice everything about that world element at once. And again, I always emphasize a particular focus on names, because names are the hardest, because people have to memorize them to understand them. And so simply not naming something, whether it’s a particular place or an item or anything that you’ve just given a formal name that somebody would have to learn and then recall later, is really helpful. So, you know, if you’ve got your city that’s, like, in these bones of the World Snake, for instance, you could just start with, like, “Oh yeah, everything’s made of bone,” and wait then, for instance, to talk about the rest of the city, which is really cool. Oren: My favorite is occasionally an introduction will introduce things wrong. Just like tells you something that just ends up not being true later, and I always wonder what’s going on there, you know? Did the author revise things later and forget to change the prologue, or does the author think something else is going on? I recently finished the Final Architecture trilogy, which you did a critique of the prologue, and that prologue is not only confusing, the information it does give you is the wrong information. Chris: Is it untrue or is it just not relevant to the book? Oren: Both. For one thing, it’s spoilers, I guess, for this book, it’s really coy about the Intermediaries and acts as though Solace, the POV character, doesn’t know what they are, but by that point in the timeline, the first Intermediary is already famous, and we find this out much, much later. So the idea that she wouldn’t be able to make that connection is kind of silly. So I don’t know why we acted so coy about the Intermediaries. Then… that’s the one that’s just kind of straight up wrong. Then it also just sets the wrong expectations, because in this prologue they blow up one of the big evil alien monster things. They just destroy it, and this sets the idea that it’s possible to destroy them with enough effort and they never try that again in the entire series. Instead, their strategy for defeating the bad guys is all based around trying to psychically get them to go away, a thing which happens off-screen after the prologue, and I’m just baffled. Chris: Right. That’s so damaging to the story too, then, because didn’t you spend the entire time like, “Well, why don’t they just blow them up?” Oren: Right, I was wondering that the whole time! Why are none of them thinking about trying to blow these things up? It’s not like it would be easy, but it seems like it’s at least worth considering, since none of your other options are working. And I just… at some point, I think Tchaikovsky just changed his mind and decided, “No, this is not going to be a book about blowing up the monsters. It’s going to be a book about psychically convincing them to leave.” Which, okay, but why didn’t you change the prologue? It’s so confusing when they start talking about that as something you can do, ’cause this happens in a time-jump-like prologue, then time jump to first chapter, and in that time jump, they first come up with the idea of using psychic powers to get the monsters to leave. Chris: I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if Tchaikovsky thought that it was suitably dramatic for the intro and just wasn’t thinking about how it would affect tension or distract readers. Oren: Yeah, that’s possible. Chris: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. Something that some writers do is they just want dramatic lines in their opening, and whether those lines are accurate, you know, this is… I often talk about the inflated hook, right? Where somebody says something really dramatic that just turns out to be completely untrue as soon as you start the next chapter. Oren: “I wonder what would happen if I jumped? Would anyone notice?” Chris: Yep. Oh, man. That’s from Shield of Seiros, and it just turns out that this is a thing that she’s done a number of times, so questioning “What would happen if I jumped?” turns out to be very silly. And you know that by the end of the first chapter. Another one I keep thinking about is The Alchemist, where there’s a chapter that ends with the character being like, “And then I saw, you know, a crime that changed the whole world.” Then it turns out the next chapter, a guy’s, like, stealing some books or something. Oren: Yeah, that changed the world forever, technically speaking. By the Butterfly Effect. Every action changes the world forever, Chris. That’s just, like, logic. Chris: And it’s just a really… you know, a really dramatic statement. And it’s clear that some writers are doing this on purpose, right? I guess they’re just not thinking about the experience of when you find out they just lied. Oren: Yeah. I mean, I’m sure in their heads it makes sense. I could be wrong. I doubt most authors are that calculated about it. Chris: I’m sure they’re thinking about just that they’re selling it, right? That they’re creating drama in the narrative. It just… and I don’t know, maybe some readers aren’t critical enough to think about it, or if you go away at the end of the chapter, and the next chapter, maybe you forgot what was promised earlier and are not keeping track of how accurate things are, I don’t know. But people are different. Some people notice those things a lot more than others, but yeah, I’m not a fan anyway. Oren: Well, I mean, I personally think you should definitely write your book with the assumption that people will not notice when you’re being dishonest to them, because you know that’s a really great strategy. Trust me, it works fantastically. Chris: Another thing that’s interesting to think about is I’ve seen a number of books lately that to solve world complexity, they have basically an opening teaser, or even like a full prologue, which is just a bunch of world exposition. Oren: Yeah, they do that for some reason. I don’t know who’s letting them. Chris: I mean, it’s a good question. I do wonder if this is happening because, you know, readers report being really confused in the beginning, you know, and ideally that would be sorted out… Again, I don’t know what everybody’s process is. I know that there are a number of really popular authors that do have a huge crew of fans, like fifty, a hundred people who are their beta readers that can help them sort out all of the confusion issues. But obviously not everybody has that. And so, I do wonder if sometimes, you know, an editor looks at it, but beta readers don’t. And an editor’s not always… Again, they might be too close to it. They might not always know. Or another thing: always keep in mind, whenever you are tempted to blame an editor for mistakes in somebody’s novel, you don’t know what it looked like before the editor changed it. So there could be a book that needs multiple rounds of editing. The editor did their best to fix confusion issues, but there were still some left. Oren: Plus thanks to Anne Rice, we have a very public example of how authors sometimes just ignore their editors, and if they are established, they can do that. And, you know, I appreciate that she wrote about it on Facebook, so now we know. Otherwise it’s all behind the closed doors, right? Probably not a great experience for her editor. This post will be out by the time the podcast drops, your critique of Lightlark. Isn’t that the one that its initial publication did not have this worldbuilding prologue and then the more recent ones did? Chris: Yeah. So we found other copies of it that didn’t have world information, but the copy that I looked at had basically all the elemental magic factions listed up front and then a teaser/prologue, it was short, that explained some previous events in the world. And the funny thing about that is that that teaser was extremely confusing, so I don’t think it solved anything. My theory is that it just didn’t get the amount of vetting that the rest of the novel did, except for the first chapter also just had really blatant confusion issues where the pronoun refers to a different person than it should, that kind of thing. So I don’t know what happens there. Again, maybe it was more confusing before it was edited, and it had so many issues that not everything was ironed out. But that was particularly funny because it looked like they added that to avoid confusion, but it was really confusing in itself. Oren: Yeah, I would love to know if that’s why they added this. Like it’s also possible to me that they added this because someone decided that this was a faction thing they could use for marketing. Like, “Ooh, which of the magic types are you? Personality test!” So we gotta put that up front, right? That’s one possibility. But I could also just see them getting a bunch of reviews being like, “I love this book, but it’s confusing,” and then someone making the decision, “All right, put a magic guide at the beginning of it. That will make it less confusing.” It’s like, “No, it won’t. But I see why you thought that.” Chris: Yeah. I mean, both When the Moon Hatched and Lightlark have these world prologues that are just missing basic information. Like, whoever wrote them just doesn’t know how to communicate the basics, right? is just leaving them out. When the Moon Hatched just lists off a bunch of dragons and where they live, and it’s a whole bunch of proper names that you can’t remember, and it doesn’t tell you how all these things are related, so it’s just very confusing. Whereas the Lightlark intro will just be like, “Oh yeah, and the island is about to explode” or whatever. It’s like, “Wait, what?” Oren: What… what island? Chris: “Where did that come from? You didn’t introduce that.” And so they’re banishing it. Like, “What? How does banishing it solve this problem?” Some really, you know, basic things that, again, if the author is writing these, sometimes it’s easy to overlook things that are just obvious to you, right? You don’t know what’s obvious to the reader. You know, again, it’s always better if you can just explain things in the opening chapters themselves, especially since you can’t count on readers to read your little world intro. But if you’re going to add a world intro to avoid confusion, man, you need to at least make sure it’s clear, okay? That has to be very direct. It’s just got… it’s got to be, no matter what. Oren: Yeah, but then we would have so much less fun stuff to critique if they did that. So have you considered that we’re actually hurting ourselves with this advice? I actually think they should have more confusing worldly stuff at the beginning. Like, I want my next epic fantasy to just start off with a long explanation of childrearing practices in this world, with a bunch of proper nouns that no one ever explains, and then I want that to never come up in the book. I just… that would make my life easier. I would have so much more content if we did that. Chris: A contrasting example I want to bring up is the teaser for Elantris, Brando Sando’s first published novel, is his debut, although this is apparently the sixth novel he wrote. Oren: Whoa. Baby Brando. Chris: Baby Brando. And this one also has a world teaser, and I can see why they felt it was necessary. I ultimately concluded that I wouldn’t use it. At least It’s not confusing, first of all. At least it’s not Lightlark or something like that. But the thing about it is that the first chapter of Elantris starts right in the thick of the main character getting this very world-specific curse, right? He wakes up and, you know, notices he’s cursed. So it gets in the story right away and I thought that was a great way to start. It’s very intriguing. And this curse, has to do with this magical city nearby, that was once beautiful and then fell into darkness. And there’s these people who randomly become magical and then they go live in the magical city. The city fell. Those people were once blessed and now they’re cursed. That’s kind of how it works. And so the teaser is intriguing, right? And if you’re interested in the worldbuilding, it’s not a terrible way to advertise the book. It’s like, “Oh, it was once beautiful, the city of the gods,” you know? And then has like a little [23:22], and then it ended. Dun dun dun… Oren: Yeah, that’s when they took up austerity measures. Chris: But then, when you look at the first chapter, some of that information is just explaining what the city is, is just repeated again. And I think ultimately, when you look at what’s necessary, again, it’s… I like to get into that micromanagement. The details really matter here. And we didn’t actually need to know very much about the city or the blessing it used to be, to understand that the main character is cursed. We could just say he’s cursed and talk about the curse, and then be like, “And because of this curse, they’re going to throw me into the Fallen City,” and again, we don’t recommend, for long periods of time, not telling readers something that the main character knows. But for short periods in the beginning, it can be used for curiosity, right? So then it’s just like, “Oh, the Fallen City, what’s that?” And then you could go into its history as the main character is thrown into the city. So the details of the city’s history and the fact that this first used to be a blessing, we don’t actually need that to understand this first plot event. Oren: Yeah, we just need to know this guy’s been Kafka’d. He woke up and he’s been cursed, and it’s basically the same as being a giant bug. Don’t worry about it. In fact, I think that’s how he should introduce it in the story. You’d just be like, “Hey guys, I got Kafka’d. Uh, it’s just like that book you didn’t read but have heard about in the memes. Don’t worry about it.” Chris: So anyway, it’s a nice contrast where the teaser is easy to understand, but also isn’t really necessary, because the opening chapter does a pretty good job, and with a few little small tweaks would do a little better yet, whereas Lightlark probably needed it, but it’s also very confusing. Oren: Yeah. Game of Thrones is one that is interesting because, on one hand, its world is actually pretty simple. If you look at it just from a magical and geological perspective, it’s like, okay, you’ve got what’s basically England, but you made it way bigger on the scale slider, right? And then you turned it upside down. So it’s not really that complicated and it’s pretty generic high fantasy times, but gritty. But the part that is complicated is all of the noble houses and all of their beefs, and that would be very hard to just jump right in. And that’s why we start with just one beef between the Starks and the Lannisters, who are also like the most diametrically opposed of the great houses, so they’re the easiest to tell apart, and as a result, it just eases us into how complicated these various relationships end up being. Although even then, it’s still a little too complicated for Martin’s own good, because there end up being entire noble families who are theoretically important, but get no real focus for most of the books, like the Dorne. The poor Dorne. They get nothing. They’re just hanging out. They get one guy. That’s it. He was played by Pedro Pascal, though, so that is in their favor. Chris: Yeah, I mean, political intrigue and the factions involved in that is some of the most complex world stuff. But yeah, it’s definitely helpful, if you’re doing faction conflicts, to just start the story with two. Basically, the more simple and memorable you make each faction, and the fewer people you introduce in each faction, the quicker you can introduce new factions. Oren: That’s the eternal contradiction with factions, is that you don’t want them to seem like caricatures, but you do want them to seem like caricatures a little bit. Otherwise, they’re hard to remember. It’s like the same traits that make them seem like two-dimensional caricatures also contribute to them being distinct and memorable. So yeah, you got to figure out a way to balance that. Chris: You know, it reminds me of… there’s this video being passed around recently, where a historian who focuses on religion on YouTube decided to do a video about how fictional religions didn’t feel quite realistic. And he has some interesting things in there, but the first thing is basically, “Oh, you know, real religions are much messier and have a blend of all of these different beliefs from these different time periods and cultures.” And it’s just, you know, there’s a reason why fiction doesn’t do that. Oren: Yeah. Could you imagine trying to introduce all of the complexities of Christianity to someone who’s never heard of it before? Chris: You know, I have a fictional religion, and just the idea of, “Okay, first I got to introduce these different cultures that each had their other religions at different time periods, and then I got to show how they’ve melded together into the religion characters currently practice,” and it’s just… no, that is not happening. It’s just too much. It’s too much. I mean, I suppose if religion was like, I was super focused on religion and my main character was just doing religious things for the whole book, and it was an in-depth exploration of the belief system, right? I might be able to manage something like that, but if it’s just one element of the story, even if it’s fairly important, that’s probably going to be beyond reach. Oren: But what you need to do is just take the Wheel of Time approach, where everyone has the same religious beliefs, but there’s no church, except there is a militant arm of a church that does not exist. That’s the approach I think everyone should take. I think we haven’t upset the religious nerds enough, if I’m being honest. Alright, well, I think with that, we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [closing song] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

Unfortunately, we now live in a time when our democracy and basic freedoms are under assault from all sides. No single person can stop this, but everyone can help, and storytellers don’t need to be on the sidelines. The most important thing to remember is not capitulating in advance. Fascists and authoritarians want us to make it easy for them, but we don’t have to do that. If enough of us write stories that drive them up the wall, we might make a difference.   Show Notes I Wish the Ring Had Not Come to Me Workshops of Empire  Star Trek  Space Sweepers  Andor  The Acolyte  Superman Dune History of Voting Rights Curtis Yavin Nettle and Bone  Collective Action in Stories  Transcript Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [intro music] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris. Oren: And I’m Oren. Chris: So, I’m not gonna do any meta jokes this time. It doesn’t feel right for this topic that we’re gonna be covering this time. Oren: Yeah, well sign of the times. Chris: Sign of the times. I know. So, yeah, just in case you’re not an American and you don’t follow American politics—which feels like everybody does, given that we’re a superpower. So yeah, we’re not in a good political situation right now. We’re in the middle of an attempted authoritarian takeover. And when I say attempted, I just mean we don’t know whether or not it will succeed. Oren: Yeah. I would like to live in less interesting times if I had that option. Chris: Yep, yep. Oren: [snickers] Chris: I feel like that scene in Lord of the Rings when Frodo was like, I wish Bilbo had never found the ring, and I wish I’d never had to take it. And Gandalf’s like, We don’t have that choice. We can only choose what to do with the time we have. Oren: Yeah, I wish certain Lord of the Rings quotes were less relevant. Chris: [laughs] Yep. But anyway, there is hope. There is! Cause we don’t know what’s gonna happen. And our stories do matter. We may not have money, but we do have cultural influence, each one of us. And we know that our stories matter because there have been cultural forces and times in America’s history where people have aimed to stop storytellers from engaging in political expression. In particular the Cold War period when everybody was terrified that if writers talked about politics, we would all become communist. This was a real thing where apparently a lot of creative writing programs and universities were started to try to create writers that were American to counter Russian writers. Oren: Well, Russia did have a bit of an early lead in the literary legacy department, so we needed to catch up. Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So yeah, people think our stories matter because they do matter. But even with some of that resistance to adding politics to our stories, we have some great political stories. I think Star Trek in particular is a notable beacon of political storytelling, especially since it was written for everyone. We also have some really heavy reads of dystopian literature, but I love it when stories that are really pulpy and engaging also talk about politics. Which is one of the cool things about Space Sweepers. Oren: Before we get into the specifics of how you might write your story for a given effect, I do wanna say something that I think is the most important thing. If you’re trying to resist with your storytelling in any way, which is—if you don’t listen to anything else we say—is to not capitulate in advance. If you were thinking of writing a gay character or a story where an evil dictator gets eaten by piranhas or something, and now you’re like, oh, I don’t know if I should do that in the current climate. The most valuable thing you can do is to do it anyway. And I’m not even saying you should do that, cause that’s not always safe for everybody. But if you’re trying to resist there is. Chris: What we need the most right now is to normalize resistance and courage and to persist in using the freedoms that they want to take away from us. And then encourage everybody else to do the same. So, we don’t even need to change minds. We just need to bolster the courage of those who already know and care about what is right. Oren: Yeah, and that is the other thing, right? People are always wondering, what story can I tell that will convince people that fascism and bigotry are wrong? I’m not gonna say you can’t do that, but I will also say that it is just as if not more important for stories to energize people who already think those things are wrong. Your story might not change anyone’s mind. It’s very hard to change people’s minds. But it might make people who already feel that way more likely to do something or normalize the idea that they might do something. Stuff like that. Chris: Yeah. As they say: fear is contagious, but courage is contagious too. So that said, let’s talk about, what can you do? There’s lots of different things you can do. And you can do whatever fits you, whatever fits your story, because there’s tons of ways to resist. So, you don’t have to go immediately to writing about fascism. If you are really passionate about history, and knowledgeable about history, and that’s something that you’re really interested in doing, that’s fine. But that’s also something that is very intense. It takes more knowledge. It’s gonna be trickier. Don’t think that if you want to write something in resistance to fascism, then you have to depict fascism. You don’t need to. And in many ways it’s better to start with the positive. Oren: That’s the Star Trek way of doing it, right? It’s like, Hey, instead of having an episode where Uhura has to overcome racism to become an officer on the bridge, we’re just gonna show that she’s an officer on the bridge. No big deal. That’s just how it is. That was a pretty powerful act in the sixties. It’s hard to overstate how big a deal that was at the time, and to a certain extent how big a deal that is now. Because what’s the funniest thing to me about right-wing reactionaries is they get so much angrier about a visible black person than they do about a story straight up telling them they are evil. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. The amount of rage of something like the Acolyte, which to be fair did turn out to be bad, but there was rage about it way before that, right? Just because there was a trailer where there was a visible black woman that drove them into a froth compared to Andor which is a story about how they are the bad guys and how they’re evil. And they actually like Andor. Not universally, but in right-wing spaces, Andor is pretty popular. It’s wild to me that that’s how the dynamic seems to work. Chris: Yeah. It is interesting that many people in the alt-right have sort of embraced this idea of evil trolls as part of their identity. It is weird, right? You would think that nobody would wanna identify as evil. And I’m not saying that all fascists think that they are evil, but at some level they’ve chosen to embrace that. And this is why, when you do depict fascists, one of the tricks is, you don’t wanna make them look cool. A lot of times we like to have cool villains, but when it gets a little too close to home, then we just don’t want them to look cool anymore. Oren: yeah Chris: Which complicates this picture. But I mean, at least now we have an example since the fascists here are all a bunch of clowns. Oren: They are really bad at everything. Chris: [laughs] They’re really bad at everything. I’ve been fascinated by how that is a built-in part of this. That whenever somebody demands personal loyalty, all of the actual competent people don’t wanna work for that person anymore. And then they end up with a bunch of people who are just super bad at their jobs, but are selected because of their loyalty. So those things are very much connected. So going back to representation: Huge yes to representation. Just remember, Trump is trying to punish institutions for having diversity initiatives. So, we need diverse stories now more than ever. A big step that you can take is just diversifying your characters. And I know sometimes it is intimidating to represent somebody from a group you are not part of. But there are some simple things you can do. My general process for this is: Start by trying to match the roles in your story with a marginalized trait that makes it so that you’re avoiding stereotypes. And if you don’t know—let’s say you’re thinking about adding a black person or disabled person or queer person, and you don’t know what kind of stereotypes affect them—a lot of times you can just do internet searches on like racist movies, for instance. And just start reading what people say about stories that are problematic and you’ll start to see patterns, and things to avoid there. You’ll start to see people talk about stereotypes. That can be really a formative way to start if you feel like you don’t know anything. Oren: There is one thing about this that is kind of interesting to me—and I don’t wanna say it’s a good thing cause there’s nothing good about what’s happening now—but there is an interesting phenomenon that is less tenable now than it used to be. When there’s some modicum of progress, a bunch of the worst people you know will be like, okay, well there was a small amount of progress. That means progress is now the status quo, so I can rebel against it by being anti-progressive. And that’s just much harder to sell than it used to be. There was a period where it was like, diverse stories are the norm, so I’m gonna be cool and edgy by not doing that. Now the actual president is saying no more diversity. So, unless you love to lick boots, you’d better be punk and diverse is the message of that. Chris: Yeah, I get to be a cool rebel! You don’t wanna pick groups because you feel they fit the role. That can be actually a troubling sign. So, if you have nature people in your story, you don’t wanna pick Native Americans for that. Because if you try to like, oh yeah, that seems like it fits this marginalized trait, but a lot of times that means you are actively cultivating a stereotype. So you just try to, try to avoid that. Don’t put your lesbian couple in a role where they’re gonna die. So it’s a first, just trying to match the story role with the character of the right trait so that you’re not playing into those kinds of stereotypes and tropes that are problematic. And then making them feel like they are part of their group. It’s not about the big stuff, it’s about the little things. In this case, consultants don’t have to be expensive. You can find somebody who is knowledgeable to talk to you about your character and ask them questions. But it’s about little subtle things that are part of their daily life that kind of make them feel like they’re more part of their group. Having representation is better than no representation. If you feel like you’re not doing enough to make a black character feel black, or queer character feel queer, usually it’s better to still have them in your story. Oren: At least where we are now. Chris: If we had more representation all the time, that was great. That threshold might change. But right now, I would just err on the side of having that representation. But then you can look, it’s like, okay, this group of queer people, what are their favorite musicians? And have that person listen to some of those musicians. Those small touches are the things that you want to go for. As opposed to generally making the plot all about their marginalized trait, getting really personal about it, that you are getting into a little bit more sensitive territory and you don’t need it. So just go for little bits of flavor and you’ll be okay. Oren: Alternatively, and again, I find this morbidly amusing, is you can sometimes achieve the same effect just by giving your cool white dude lead some traits that the right-wing doesn’t like. To compare Superman to Andor. Both of them are at least somewhat political, like overtly. They have overtly political stories, but Andor is so much more political than Superman. Superman—mild spoilers—has a storyline about how it’s bad when US-allied nations murder civilians. That’s a good message. And obviously the right-wingers got upset about that. But Andor has several times that. It’s got the anti-prison system and anti-right-wing misinformation and anti-police state. And I can’t prove this, this is pure hypothesizing and speculation, but it really feels like the reason Superman set everyone off was that Superman is shown to be nice and kind of sweet and a little soft, which they’re like, Ew, girly. Whereas Andor is extremely grim and everyone’s hard and jaded and so there’s no fear of that in Andor. I’m not saying this to knock Andor. Andor is a good show. It’s just pretty obvious to me now what it is that upsets the right wing and what doesn’t. Just making your straight white male lead a nice supportive guy can be enough sometimes. [laughs] Chris: I mean, I really do think there’s so much we can do with men and masculinity that makes a huge difference. Authoritarian culture is about the belief that there’s some alpha male, who is inherently superior to others will swoop in, and take care of all of your problems for you. And you just have to be loyal to him. And that’s really what they believe and they find comforting, but that’s obviously extremely problematic and antithetical to democracy. But it’s scary to me that I can recognize this specific alpha male from our stories. All these stories where we have this super powerful male character that has to be the best, has to be the most powerful, more than any other man—and also women, but the emphasis is that he’s a lot more powerful than other men. Always knows what’s best and makes decisions for everybody else. That is authoritarianism as a cultural trait right there. Oren: And he is eight feet tall and three refrigerators wide. And eats 5 billion eggs. Chris: [Batman voice] And he talks like this. Oren: Oh man, I love it when we switch over to a male voice actor at the end of a romantasy novel, and you get to hear what the male lead is supposed to sound like. Chris: [laughs] Oren: It’s like, okay man, are you speaking through a subwoofer over there? What’s going on? [laughs] Chris: But again, just allowing men to not be larger than life, perfect caricatures. Oren: Hang on, I’m gonna have to stop you at allow Men. I don’t think we should allow men. No more, no more allowing that! It’s done. We had our run. It’s over now. Chris: [laughs] A lot of fascism, a whole segment of it, is about making men manly again and being strong. And a lot of times nationalistic authoritarian cultures in general put a lot of emphasis on masculinity. Because that feeds into being militant. And that’s what they want. And so having men and glorifying men who are actually sweet and sensitive, and need support sometimes, and don’t have to be perfect, and are not there to just dick measure with every other guy in the story, that’s huge. That is a huge difference. Even if it seems strange, that does make a big difference. Oren: Yeah. If nothing else, it’ll make your story stand out these days. Chris: Did the Superman story put emphasis on Superman being an immigrant? Oren: A little bit. Chris: A little bit? Oren: Not a ton. I honestly think James Gunn made a bigger deal about that than it is in the movie. There’s a whole thing about how he’s not from here. Again, mild spoiler. Lex Luthor runs a troll farm that is clearly doing some rip from the headline stuff about how right-wing trolls operate. So again, there’s a little bit of that, sure. Chris: And I do think that some of the difference between Andor and Superman is just when it’s abstract ideas that people are looking at, it’s easy for them to have that cognitive dissonance, to detach. And just not think about what it means or assume that the despotic empire is the libs. [laughs] Even if it’s obviously not the libs. Oren: People are really, really good at rationalizing away messages that they don’t like in stories that they enjoy. And this isn’t just a right-wing thing, leftists do it too. I’ve seen so many essays from at least left-of-center people, trying to convince me that Tolkien’s not a monarchist. Cause they like Lord of the Rings. And it’s like, no, it’s okay. You can still like Lord of the Rings, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Chris: Or like Dune. Isn’t there a lot of leftists who like Dune? Oren: I’ll give them that one a little bit. There’s a little bit more in Dune than there is in Lord of the Rings, but yes. There is that too. But with Andor, I made a habit of looking in on right-wing spaces to see what they were saying about Andor, and there was some understanding that Andor was talking about them. But most of it was rationalizing. Like no, the Ghorman protests can’t be anything like real life protests because they aren’t waving Mexican flags. Here I found a tissue, I can put the tissue over the metaphor and now it’s not real and it can’t hurt me anymore. Chris: So that’s the thing about those metaphors and analogies: if it’s an abstract concept, it’s much easier for people to ignore it. But when you have a black person on screen, now it becomes very clear what you stand for. Oren: Andor is so fascinating because you would’ve expected it to make them mad because you’ve got Diego Luna there who is a Latino with an obvious accent. But no, apparently that doesn’t do it. While committing horrible acts on many groups of Latinos, they’re also willing to be like, ah, maybe this one’s okay. It’s a window into the right-wing mindset. [laughs] Chris: Yeah. It’s strange. He is a gritty anti-hero, right? Oren: Right. I think that’s what ended up mattering. Is that he was super gritty and everything’s gritty. And I think they liked that. Again, I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that or that your gritty story is inherently right-wing. I’m just describing the reactions that I see. Chris: So, what we’re saying is that fluffy bunnies are praxis. Oren: Yeah, exactly. Actually you should go and everyone go write cozies now! Cause cozies are the only way to resist! You heard that here on the Mythcreants Podcast! Chris: [laughs] Oren: See how many panic pieces about cozies we can generate. Chris: More ideas: Stories that are about valuing things that are being harmed. Like immigration. Stories about immigrants. And immigrants are not in one shape or size. There are all kinds of immigrants. The value of public services, obviously that’s a big deal right now. Value of free speech rights, and specifically free speech is such a weird thing because they’re always claiming that they want their free speech while trying to suppress our free speech. Oren: That’s easier to reconcile once you remember that they are liars and they lie constantly. Chris: I think it’s easy for people who are rationalizing things away, to rationalize freedom is us getting our way and you not getting your way. Freedom for them means imposing their will on somebody else instead of them, because again, it’s a zero-sum. Instead of their enemies imposing their will on them or something like that. Oren: Right, exactly. That is freedom in my mind when I get all of the cookies, the cookies are finally free. Chris: [laughs] But in this case, specifically the ability to criticize an authority figure is what I would go for in this free speech category. That’s important, the value of democracy and equality, which democracy depends on. And I think this is really key because we’re talking about things like the rise of fascism and authoritarianism. The thing that’s going on here is that democracy inherently is tied to equality because democracy is based on the idea that we are all equal, and that’s why we should all get a vote. And it’s easy because classism, even if it’s bad today, it is much better than it used to be. And so, it’s easy to forget how things were, and that people believed that God chose who was poor and who was rich and those were just at your inherent traits. Even when America started, only people who own property could vote. Only white men who own property could vote. But to make our democracy better, in order to justify where everybody should vote, instead of a king should rule, we value equality. And so those two concepts are just inherently tied together. And that is why the right is abandoning democracy to some extent. At least some of them have come to realize that. They really don’t want equality, and so they’re turning against democracy. Oren: And this is also what they have all of the lies to rationalize it. Like, the illegal immigrants are voting, so actually we have to destroy democracy to save it! That sort of thing, right? They build elaborate head canons to justify all of it. Chris: Yeah. There is a lot of rationalization from some of them, but others absolutely know this and are deliberately trying to abandon democracy. Oren: This is true. So what I’m saying is that you should write a story about murdering Aragorn. You gotta do it. Chris: Speaking of that, because—what was it? The Thorn and… what was the Kingfisher story that got a Hugo award? Oren: Nettle & Bone. Chris: Nettle & Bone, right. Nettle & Bone is kind of like that. In Nettle & Bone—I think this is one of the reasons that it got a Hugo and was popular—is about how the main character wants to kill the prince that her sister is married to. Because she got married to the prince, but the prince was actually evil and not good. And now she wants to end him. And that is what the story is about. Oren: Very sympathetic premise. Chris: When we talk about monarchy and fantasy. I understand the pull towards monarchy in fantasy. I absolutely do. It’s nice wish fulfillment and also you have a character that automatically has the power to do things in your plot, which is also convenient. Oren: It is handy. Chris: But the romanticization of monarchy in fantasy is a bit dangerous and I think we should—I don’t wanna shame anybody for writing about things that bring them joy. My goal is to raise awareness about the implications of those things, so that everybody can choose to take whatever is the next step for them. Whether it’s writing a monarch character that has to fight other monarchs that are bad, instead of just being like, all monarchs are good. If that’s your baby step, that’s the next step for you, then good. Take the next step, right? I think that we should always embrace enjoyment and not shame people for enjoyment. But the more we understand about some of these patterns. Like the alpha male. Obviously, there are a lot of romantics right now that have these alpha male characters because some women love them. And I do feel like some of that comes from patriarchal propaganda. But again, the goal is not to shame anybody for what they enjoy. The goal is just to be more aware so that everybody can take whatever is their natural next step for them and do what they feel comfortable doing. Oren: There is some funny cognitive dissonance though when I’m reading some of these romantics where the author clearly wants to be progressive in some ways and it’s like, yeah, this is a world where gay romance is common and it’s not discriminated against. This character is non-binary. Anyway, here’s my love interest: Eight feet tall, three refrigerators wide, the biggest [duck quacking sound] in the land! And I’m like, Alright. Okay. Interesting that this is what’s happening now. Chris: [laughs] Oren: I do hope that when they convert some of these romantasies into movies—We’re really overdue for that. It’s weird that it’s only just starting to happen—I really hope that, however they cast the love interest, that they are accurate to the way they’re described in the book. Because then you would immediately realize that’s not really very attractive. [laugh] Chris: [laughs] Oren: This wall of flesh walks on screen and it’s like, hello, I’m Zaden. Chris: I mean, we talked about the fact that when men are described as buff—male love interests—that that can mislead you into thinking that women like guys to be buffered than they actually like. Generally, that bodybuilder shape with every little muscle popping out is not attractive. But the way that people describe love interests always emphasizing their muscles. The reader imagines what they want. The purpose of description is just to evoke the imagination. So it’s not always perfectly accurate. Oren: Well, it’s gonna be! When I adapt Shield of sparrows, don’t you worry! You’ll see! Chris: Oh gosh. And one other thing: I have an article on this, on portraying collective action and this in particular has come up because there are some people who are like, No, you shouldn’t have a single hero because in real life, we gotta work together to solve our problems. I can absolutely get that, and there’s definitely a place for stories about collective action, and I think that’s important too. Stories are inherently weighted towards having a single hero, but there are some ways to include collective action in your story and I have an article that lists some ideas for doing that. And it can be baby steps. Like you just have a hero that knows an activist group and works with them occasionally during the story, to your story is about the activist group or what happened. Oren: Or they can all be joined together in an unholy experiment.And now the collective is all one character. It’s good. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Chris: Yeah. No, you can have a hive mind. Why not? Oren: Yeah. All right. Well, now that we’ve suggested all protagonists should be replaced with hive minds because that is… Chris: Now my anti-authoritarian story has gotta be about the Borg trying to get that queen to go away. Oren: Yeah. Oh, that would’ve been great. A Borg revolution. I’d watch that. Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Oren: All right. Well, I think with that, now that we’ve come up with the coolest Star Trek idea, we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If you found this episode useful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And I do want to thank our existing patrons because stuff’s hard and we appreciate the support. Specifically, Ayman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And also Kathy Ferguson who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And we will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.

You’ve created a world where loads of nameless extras and faceless NPCs get roasted to death each morning, where everything is terrible and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Surely that’ll be tense, right? Uh oh, your beta readers are still reporting boredom. That’s because while dark content can influence tension, the two are not synonyms. Listen as we discuss what the differences are, why authors often get them confused, and how you can actually use one to boost the other.  Show Notes Tension Agency Children of Blood and Bone  The Devils  Suicide Squad  Inverse Ninja Effect The Blade Itself  Fourth Wing The Ghoul A Fire Upon the Deep Transcript Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music]  Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. Chris: And I’m Chris. Oren: So for this story, I’m gonna be talking about some really cool, dark, exciting things. Like there’s gonna be body parts and people burning to death… No one we care about, of course. Chris: So does this story introduce new characters because it killed off all the old ones? Oren: No, I just told you, it’s not gonna happen to anyone we care about. Chris: Ohh, I see. Oren: I’ve just gotta introduce a bunch of randos, and they’re all gonna die horribly. And that’ll be really exciting, right? That’s the same thing as tension. Chris: Yeah, sure. Are we also gonna have our protagonists participate in a big tournament where they’re in a lake? And it’s full of slaves that are, like, drowning around them, but they’re just trying to win, and they don’t care about the slaves? Oren: They wanna win. You know, winning the slave murder cup is important to them. [laughter] Don’t worry, we’ll say that there’s a thing they need that is in the cup, and there’s nothing else they could do to try to find another way to get it. It’s just not possible. Chris: Yeah, I mean, there’s just slaves dying everywhere, but they can’t do anything about it anyway, so… Oren: Yeah. So enough giving crap to Children of Blood and Bone, because I now wanna give crap to a different book that I’ve been reading. It’s Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils, which is basically Suicide Squad, but in fantasy, is the premise. I did see some Redditors complaining that this book has Joss Whedon dialogue, which is just the perfect example of brain rot in literary discussion. Because now any book where the characters are irreverent and sarcastic is labeled as Joss Whedon dialogue. Chris: That is giving Joss Whedon way too much credit, okay. He did not invent being witty and irreverent and self-aware. Oren: Yeah, no. If characters make fun of the thing they’re doing, you have to pay Joss Whedon money. [Chris laughs] He invented that idea. No one else has ever done it. It’s just Joss Whedon. I just find that very funny. But, an actual problem that this story has, with some minor spoilers, is it has a serious tension issue, which you wouldn’t expect from Abercrombie, because his stories are really dark and full of death and murder. So how could there be a tension problem? And it’s because of the thing I just mentioned, or that’s one reason. There are others. But for this podcast, the reason is that when we have these big fight scenes where there’s lots of blood and guts and death, it’s just happening to somebody else. It’s like we give them a bunch of disposable guards so the guards can all die badly. And I’m just sitting here being like, okay, when are we gonna get through the nameless guards to someone who actually matters? And it takes a while. Chris: And again, there is also the inverse ninja effect. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Right? It’s just, when you escalate everything so soon, and again, it does feel like the guards were added just so that they can all get killed, but that also just makes people more meaningless, and pretty soon you have to add more and more fighters in all of your scenes. Because we know that having fifty people around doesn’t mean anything. Oren: Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s another problem with this story is that after the first fight, the actual suicide squad, not just their nameless guards, is basically invincible, we’ve established, because they’re so powerful. So later on, there’s problems where it’s like, “Oh no, some bandits attacking us!” It’s like, yeah, I think your invincible squad of fantasy superheroes can probably handle it. So that’s its own issue, but it is weird. It felt like they were given these guards and then we had to contrive a way for them to be ambushed, to get rid of the guards. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: But I think you’re probably right. I think it’s the other way around. The guards were put there so we could have a bunch of nameless mooks who could die horribly. Chris: Yeah. I mean, knowing Abercrombie. [laughs] Oren: Yeah. Chris: I mean, I’m not familiar with this work, but I still remember in The Blade Itself, he has a whole POV from a torturer guy. Oren: Yeah. Although, I’ll give him credit for this, at least in that POV, he was willing to have bad things happen to his POV characters. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: He wasn’t just inflicting it on nameless mooks. That torturer character has been himself horribly tortured, and is like all kinds of messed up from it in ways that you don’t normally see fantasy heroes get messed up. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: He doesn’t have, like, cool badass scars. He has ugly, seriously debilitating scars. You almost never see that. And I didn’t enjoy that book, but I did respect Abercrombie for being willing to do that. Chris: I mean, if you go dark, then be dark. Oren: Yeah. That’s kind of how I feel. If you want this level of darkness, you should be willing to inflict it on your main characters. Am I going to enjoy that? No. But I’d rather have that happen than just cooking a bunch of extras in the background. [laughing] Chris: Yeah. You know, as opposed to Children of Blood and Bone, which is what I was talking about earlier with the tournament where the slaves are dying all around them. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: That was one of the books that inspired me to write by post on grimdark sauce,as I call it, where it’s weird because the scenery is extremely grimdark, but the story itself is not really dark, because nothing bad happens to the characters that you are actually following and actually care about. Oren: Yeah. Chris: That’s the one where when they need to escape, it feels like all of the soldiers attacking them just, like, pause so they can climb on the back of some giant cats and get away. Oren: Yeah. And that one is weird too because it does things like assure both the characters and the reader that, like, her grandpa will be okay, don’t worry about it. Which is kind of at odds with how dark everything else is. And, spoilers for later, but it turns out that’s wrong. It turns out their grandpa is not okay. And also then the protagonist eventually does get captured and tortured, but – by this point we’re so late in the story that now this feels like a jarring change. Like the story is breaking its promise to me, but also she is remarkably unscathed from her bout of horrible torture. Like she has the standard cool fantasy hero scars from horrible torture. Not the, like, this person’s body will never be the same scars that the guy from The Blade Itself had. Chris: Yeah, so in any case, let’s talk about the difference between darkness and tension. Oren: Yeah. There is something of a connection. The connection’s not entirely made up. Because if your story is super light, it is harder to create tension because for something to be tense, you generally need to have something serious at stake. And that requires a certain level of dark content, right? Not necessarily a lot, but some. Chris: I mean, I do think tension, particularly high tension, does make the story darker to some degree. And we can even call it one dark emotion or one dark aspect. But when we call stories dark, it can mean so many different things. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Tension by itself only goes so far in making a story dark. And also tension is just very specific. It’s a very specific emotion that’s that sense of uncertainty over whether or not something bad will happen, and so you gotta do something to keep it from happening. That’s what tension is for. It’s a very motivating emotion, and because of that it only goes so far in being dark. Whereas a lot of times when you get the really dark stuff, it can even kill tension because it tends to get really hopeless and gloomy. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Like no matter what we do, the whole world is gonna end. It’s like, okay, that’s very dark. It’s not actually tense though, because we know the world is gonna end, and so we kind of have to come to terms with that. Oren: Yeah. It’s like, you’ve a hundred percent established the world’s gonna end, so, all right. Uh, that sucks, but I’m not on the edge of my seat about it anymore, right? Chris: Yeah. Also, that’s the thing about having tragedy, and again, we’ve talked before about writers – what they actually want as their story continues is to make it escalate and have it more exciting and tense, but instead they just make it darker by having bad stuff happen.  Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: But having bad stuff happen does not necessarily raise tension, especially if – well, I mean, it’s already happened, so we’re not worried about it happening, right? So if you randomly kill off a character and then make readers really upset about it, that might not actually raise tension. That might just be sad. Oren: Right? And there are different ways this can go. If you kill off a character who is in certain respects, at least, similar to the surviving characters, that can raise tension, because you have actually shown that you are willing to follow through on the threats to characters. Is that a good thing to do? Eh, depends. Sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes it’s not. It depends on how load-bearing that character was. Chris: And also like what type of experience you really wanna create. Let’s say you kill a character in a way that specifically shows that you are willing to violate plot shields. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Nobody has a plot shield. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And I think that’s what is most likely to raise tension. As opposed to if you kill the character that’s three weeks away from retirement? [laughs] That’s not gonna raise tension, because you’re just showing that you are actually following plot conventions in who dies. And so that’s not gonna make any of the characters who seem to have plot shields feel at risk. But generally, unless you are doing a really dark story, and that’s the kind of experience that you’re creating for people – it’s, like, horror, it’s really dark fantasy, that kind of thing – I generally find that it’s not good tension, right? Oren: Hmm. Chris: The average person who’s reading a nice old adventure story and wants some excitement doesn’t often want to genuinely worry about their favorite character dying. I think when I’ve seen that, that can actually be sometimes a little too intense for people. And so usually even with plot shields, people can buy into the story scenario and the idea that, “Oh no, people could get hurt” without that extra meta-knowledge of like, no, this author might really do it. And adding in, let’s say you want them to believe that this character can really die, I do think that it gets very intense if you add that second meta element on top of it where you think it actually could happen. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And is a little bit more stressful. So, again, if you have a dark-loving audience, then anything goes at that point. But for kind of the average exciting story, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that. Oren: Yeah, and of course there’s also, you have to consider the cost of losing that character to begin with. Because if it’s going to accomplish this goal of making it seem like other characters could die, then that character needs to be effectively a main character on their own. Like,  it doesn’t work to bring in an extra and tell us about their backstory really quickly. Or introduce a small child, and be like, “Aren’t they cute? Look at their big child eeeyes…” [Chris laughs] Look, that doesn’t work. So if you are actually going to accomplish this, you need a character that was doing something similar to the other characters, which means it is going to cost you for them to die, right? Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: Because theoretically, people enjoyed reading about them. If not, you have a different problem. Chris: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And people will get upset. And some people, that will be their favorite character, and they’ll rage quit. And I mean, again, that’s why we recommend killing off characters like protagonists so rarely. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Basically only in very special circumstances, or again, if you’re just going with grimdark, if that’s what your story is sold based on, and you want your stories to be really unpredictable, and anybody could die, and that is the experience that you are selling to your audience, and they know what they’re signing up for, then sure, there’s a niche taste. Everybody likes something different. But in general, that’s why we do it so rarely. And again, so I kind of hinted at the beginning, there are some TV shows that end up reducing tension because they kill off so many characters that nobody wants to get attached to characters anymore. Oren: Yeah. If you’re like, “It’s not safe, you can’t grow attached to anybody, you know, you’ll have to cry.” It’s like, all right, well, I guess I won’t then. [both laugh] Especially once you’ve killed so many characters, there’s nobody left. It’s like, all right, well, all the characters we started with are gone. I’m not starting over from day one here. I don’t got that kind of time. [laughing] Chris: But yeah, when it comes to bad things happening – again, we talked about showing readers that you’re not gonna follow plot shields, which again, would be a niche thing to do, not a thing that everybody should be doing. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: The other situation is if you have something bad happen that then creates a new problem. It’s basically starting a new child arc of some kind that can raise tension. So rocks fall, destroy the town, and now we have to find someplace for everybody to take shelter. Okay, we’ve created a new task, avoiding further disaster. But the disaster that just happened that made everybody sad, that does not create tension. Oren: Yeah. Because what it is, tension is largely the fear that something is going to get worse. And once you establish a baseline of badness, it’s like, all right, well, that’s the baseline. Chris: It’s very forward looking. It’s always about what happens in the future, not what happened in the past. Oren: Right. Chris: What happened in the past can be useful for establishing what could happen in the future. If we see a pattern of killings, then we would be worried that it would happen again. So that can be useful, but it’s always forward looking. Oren: And this is why long extended descriptions of your fantasy city are likely to be boring, regardless of whether it’s a shining beacon of light or super grim and gritty with murdered people around every corner, because that’s just the status quo. That’s just how things are right now. You’ve set that baseline. Now it’s up to you to show me the possibility that things might get worse. Chris: Yeah. I think another thing that you can do – again, if your story is real dark and intense – then another place where they can be complementary is if you do show a horrible thing happening to somebody, and you’ve got, like, body horror, or what have you. And then you threaten the same thing for another character. Seeing how bad that is viscerally, I do think, again, does make those stakes feel more impactful. So that could potentially raise tension. So if you show a serial killer in gruesome detail doing their thing, and then the serial killer starts stalking another character, those gruesome details could make a difference. Because when it comes to stakes, it’s not just objectively how bad it is. There’s also an emotional element, and if you illustrate it in more detail and make it feel more real, the stakes do become more impactful. And you can also have characters imagine what could happen as another way of getting more details. Oren: Yeah. And that brings to mind the presentation of whatever it is. Because that matters a lot. If you have things that could potentially be really bad, but you summarize them or you don’t give them the gravitas they deserve, well, even though objectively that would be really bad, it doesn’t feel like it’s a real thing. Fourth Wing has this problem. In Fourth Wing, the protagonist’s life is technically in constant danger because of the murder school that she’s in, and all the murder that happens there. But it’s also summarized, right? Like almost all of it happens in summary, and all the solutions are kind of off-screen. There are only one or two instances where she really feels like she’s in danger. Even though technically she’s in danger the whole time. Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think I found that book a little more tense than you did. Partly probably because I liked Violet, the main character, better. Oren: Sure. Chris: I know that you just didn’t feel any attachment to her. So yeah, there were things that were summarized a little too much, but I generally found that book to be still pretty tense.  Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Because it did have a number of deadly challenges and high-stakes moments. But yeah, there were definitely some things that I would’ve liked to have seen more on-screen with her proactively troubleshooting instead of having it skim by. Oren: And that of course does bring another instance, because we’re talking about how much we do or don’t like the main character. That makes a big difference too. You need to have some attachment to a main character for there to be tension over what happens to them. And in dark stories, this can sometimes backfire because a lot of authors are like, “I’m gonna be dark and edgy. I’m gonna have my main character be a dick.” Like, all right. Well, now I don’t care what happens to them. [both laugh] You know, like, I might even want something bad to happen to them. Because they’re such a jerk, I wanna see them get some karmic justice. And if that’s your intention, that maybe – I’m not gonna say that couldn’t work. I’m just saying I have seen a lot of authors who have arrived at that situation accidentally. They clearly did not mean for this to happen. They want me to be worried that their jerk-ass puppy kicking protagonist is gonna get eaten. And it’s like, no, eat ’em. Definitely eat ’em. I’m mad at him from two chapters ago. Please eat him. You know? [laughing] Chris: Yeah. I mean, readers and audience in general are probably more sensitive than you think to character misbehavior. Anytime one character is hard on another character, readers can react pretty strongly to that, even if it’s something that is meant to be relatively harmless, like ignoring somebody, or running away when they ask for help. Oren: Yeah. Chris: As opposed to like these grimdark heroes who might just be, like, killing people. Alright, so in Fallout there’s this Ghoul character who has too much candy. Oren: Yeah yeah. Chris: But he also has a very charismatic white guy actor. And so people like him anyway. And the breaking point for me with his character was when he just shoots and kills a young man, maybe like a teenager or something. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: And the kid was attacking him first, but only after being severely provoked. So our like cowboy Ghoul character comes in and was like, “Hey, by the way, I just murdered your brother, ha ha.” [laughs] And this is just a teenager who – again, the Ghoul is super capable. So he is more than able to just defend himself without killing somebody who’s upset that, you know, his brother got murdered. But that’s the kind of behavior that I would expect to see all the time for a lot of protagonists in really dark works. And yeah, after that point it would be hard to feel tension. I certainly was hoping something bad would happen to the Ghoul. Oren: Yeah, I wanted the Ghoul to die. And that’s the thing, is that I’m sure when some people hear that, they’re gonna be like, “Oh, well why would you want the Ghoul to be nice? He’s not a nice guy.” It’s like, yeah, I mean, sure, if he’s that big of an asshole, that’s fine. He can be a villain. I’m just not gonna be happy if the story ends by making him seem like the new main character, which is what happens in the first season of Fallout. Now Lucy is kind of tagging along with him. Chris: Mm-hmm. If a character gets bad karma, but they also get their comeuppance, that helps to balance the karma, and it also does take off the edge when it comes to reader resentment, right? So if we say, see the Ghoul do something bad like that, then something bad happens to him as a result of his decision, that mollifies the audience, and actually can make him more likable. But the Ghoul just keeps getting candy. And there is some – he did have a tangle with Lucy where she got the better of him because he sold her to, like, a meat shop or something. [laughing] There was one instance in which he got some level of comeuppance, but most of the time he just doesn’t. And that’s part of the issue. Oren: The thing about the Ghoul that I found most funny is that he’s basically invincible. Like, except for that one time when Lucy is able to get the drop on him somehow, but in pretty much every other scene, he’s invincible. But the idea of just robbing these people who have all the medicine he needs, apparently that never occurred to him. Like, he was willing to almost die from this lack of medicine, because I guess we’re just supposed to assume that robbing these guys would’ve been impossible. But we see him take out like a whole squad of Brotherhood soldiers in power armor, so I know he could do it. Don’t pretend he couldn’t do it, show! Chris: Yeah. I did not like seeing him take out that squad at the climax. That was, I was so mad about that. Oren: It’s too much. He’s too good. That’s just some bullshit is what that is. Chris: Yeah. But anyway, if you wanna have an edgy character that maybe readers are not gonna like, that can negatively impact the tension. So that’s something else to think about is that that emotional investment in the characters is kind of required so that we want them to succeed, and we don’t want bad things to happen to them. [laughing] Oren: Yeah. Chris: Another thing to think about is, again, we’ve occasionally talked about the difference between conflict and calamity. So basically, when you have a conflict, you’re showing a character struggling to kind of solve a problem against something that opposes them. And we call that something the antagonist, and sometimes the villain. And again, there could be more than one antagonist. The point is that at least one character is struggling. But the key about the struggle is that if that character is, like, standing there passively, or is tied up, or otherwise it doesn’t feel like they can do anything, it’s not really a struggle anymore. They are not struggling.  Oren: Yeah. Chris: And we have seen some stories where it seems like the writer is trying to write a conflict, but just doesn’t get the kind of character agency part of that. And so what happens is often, in this case, lots of bad or supposedly tense things happen really fast, and it doesn’t feel like the character has the ability to respond. And they might not be tied up. It might just be, again, there’s a little bit of over-summary, but like things happen fast. We don’t get the feeling that this is an interaction the character is having where they can intervene, and they can change the outcome. Oren: Yeah, it feels like a cut scene is playing in the video game. [Chris laughs] And like you can have tension in scenes where the character is not doing anything. It just tends to be kind of specific and specialized, and it’s usually based on the possibility that they could. I think Chris has mentioned the possibility of a scene where the main character is, like, sitting on the couch playing video games, and a serial killer is sneaking up behind them. They aren’t technically doing anything, but there’s a sense of tension because we’re like, “Oh no, they could get stabbed! Or maybe they’ll notice the serial killer.” But if they’re sitting on the couch, and then just like a bunch of aliens rampage through the town, and they’re just sitting there and being like, “Well, I guess I’ll either die or I won’t, because maybe the aliens will kill me.” I don’t think that’s very tense. I just – not for very long, all right. Maybe for a short amount of time. Chris: Right. So what happens when it keeps going, and the character doesn’t intervene for whatever reason, is that the antagonist actually starts to look like a wimp. Because at that point, all should be lost if the protagonist is not intervening. So let’s say we have this serial killer sneaking up behind the character on the couch while they’re playing a video game. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And they’re not doing anything. But we know they can. But let’s say the serial killer just keeps hanging out, and for some reason still has not killed our protagonist, has not done anything. They’ve been playing their video game for this entire scene, but for some reason the serial killer still hasn’t killed them yet. After a while, it’s just like, “You’re not actually gonna kill them, are you, serial killer?” Oren:  Yeah. No, you’re just hanging out. You’re just watching ’em play. Chris: They’re still fine. So you must not have it in you to kill them. [laughing] That’s a weird example. But like this happens in – I think the book Fire Upon the Deep is where I saw tons of these. Of stuff just happening, and there’s one scene when they’re on some sort of space station with some, I don’t know, hills or outdoor landscapes, and it’s all collapsing, and they’re trying to get to their ship while the landscape crumbles around them. But this keeps going, and we keep describing landscape crumbling, but the protagonists aren’t really doing anything special. I mean, I guess they’re running, and they’re not dead yet. So I guess it’s meaningless that the landscape is collapsing, right? Oren: Yeah, NBD. [laughing] Chris: Because if they’re not doing anything effective to ensure their survival, and whatever’s threatening them still hasn’t killed them yet, then the threat must not be a big deal. That’s basically how it works. But if you see these scenes, again, where lots of bad things happen in quick succession, and there are no protagonist actions, that’s just gonna kill the tension. It’s just gonna feel like none of it matters and get boring, even if it’s supposed to be exciting, even if it’s specifically written to feel threatening and exciting. That’s why you need that conflict where the character comes in and intervenes. What you want is like the serial killer is chasing after the character, and the character crawls away, barely… Oren: Yeah. Chris: And they managed to make it in the closet just in time and shut the door. But now the serial killer’s got an axe, and they’re breaking down the door. And then the protagonist just finds something else to just barely scrape by. That’s what’s tense, right? Because we can see that the protagonist is just barely managing to take actions that avoid them being killed, and therefore, the antagonist also, what they’re doing matters. Because the protagonist has to respond in order to stay alive. Oren: And this is why I always have to laugh at this weird agency discourse that rears its head every once in a while. Because almost guaranteed, someone will point to a horror story and be like, “Well, surely you can’t say that agency is required, because these characters were disempowered. And that was still fun.” It’s like, yes. Or yeah, maybe not fun is the right word, but you know, still a good story. But being disempowered doesn’t mean there’s no agency, it just means things suck. [laughing] Chris: Yeah. Generally, when the character is very reactive, that feels disempowering, even if they have agency. So in this case, they’re attacked by the serial killer, and now they’re reacting to try to keep this serial killer from killing them, as opposed to that turn that usually happens towards the end of a horror movie where they’re like, “Now I gotta bring the fight to the serial killer.” And the final girl grabs a weapon and decides she’s gonna be badass now. That’s the change from reactive to proactive, and it does feel very empowering. By the way, I do get this question a lot when I talk about agency, they’re like, “Well, what if I want my character to be disempowered?” It’s like, “Well, then you make them reactive.”  Oren: All right. Well, now that we’ve firmly established what those terms mean, I’m sure everyone will always use them the same way we do forever, and we won’t have any problems. Chris: [laughing] I’m sure we’ve put an end to agency discourse forever. Oren: Yeah, it’s done now. Chris: It’s done. Oren: And, so, appropriately, we will now call this episode to a close. Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

No matter your book’s plot or genre, a lot of its words will be spent on narration. Rather than treating narration as an amorphous blob, it’s important to understand the different elements that make it up. That way, you’ll understand whether the story has too much description relative to action or when you need to add a bit of exposition. This week, we’re discussing what makes the different types of narration tick and also apparently referring to the Hugos as something that will still happen in the future. That’s just the nature of recording your episodes ahead of time! Show Notes The Five Types of Narration Dialogue  Description  Summary  Action Ministry of Time  Alien Clay Star Trek: First Contact  Shield of Sparrows  Crescent City Transcript Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [intro music] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris. Oren: And I’m Oren. Chris: Did you know there are five types of lines in a podcast conversation? Oren: Really? Five specifically. Okay. This sounds real. Chris: Exactly five. Uh-huh. Yeah, there’s, uh, informative lines, uh, joke lines. Subtly trying to correct what somebody else says lines. Oren: That one is pretty important. What about non-sequitur lines where I talk about spaghetti for five minutes? Chris: That definitely happens. Oren: There have to be sandwich discord lines, right? Like surely that has created a sixth category. Chris: Oh yeah, that’s good. And our fifth time can just be laugh lines where we’re laughing in response to each other. Oren: What about opening bit lines? Is that already covered by one of the types? Chris: I don’t know. That might be part of the informative line, or is it its own? Oren: There you go. You sorted it all out. Chris: See, I’ve got it. I’ve cracked the code. Now all we have to do in a podcast is just pick one of those lines, but like every time before we say something, we need to pick a line type. It’s gonna go well. Oren: Press it and then get some auto-generated suggestions. What could go wrong? Chris: Sometimes I do feel like that when people sort things into types, that it’s just kind of silly and arbitrary and like, okay, but what are they for? But at the same time, in many cases, it is really helpful because it takes something that’s sort of big and amorphous and makes it a little bit less amorphous, makes it less vague. So that you can get inspiration from different types or it can be ways of thinking a little bit further about it and kind of understanding it a little bit better, that kind of thing. Just like when we have turning points, we break it down into different types of turning points, that really gives people ideas for what they can do for their turning point. And so, five types of narration is just me breaking narration down into what I see as the sort of natural divisions, and they have some overlap and fuzzy areas. But I do think that it is important for every manuscript to have some text in each of these categories. And when we get manuscripts very frequently, one of them could be missing altogether, one of them could be underused, and that’s actually a really big problem. Whereas of course, they can be overused too, and that’s when people start to get bored. Oren: As an enlightened centrist on the topic of categorization, I believe that you should do it when it’s helpful and you shouldn’t do it when it’s not helpful, and I’m sure that that distinction is very easy to tell and there aren’t any arguments over it. With these particular types as outlined in the Five Types of Narration Every Novel Needs by Chris Winkle, I find these helpful because when I am working with a client, it is useful to be able to tell them there is a certain kind of narration in your work that needs strengthening, and I can tell them what it is because we have a term for it. And because these categories at least generally correspond to actual things in the work, these are useful categories that I can tell them as opposed to, we just made some up about how your categories are aura writing and spiritual description, and that would be meaningless. I could tell them to work on their aura writing all day and they wouldn’t know what to do with that. But I can tell them to work on their description and I can, you know, describe what that is if they don’t already know it, and then I can help them that way. And I don’t have to just say, work on your word craft. Just make it better generally. Chris: And I should mention that I think almost all of these terms come from the writing industry in general. I’m not sure I’ve made any of these up, like internalization maybe, but people talk about internal narration, I’m sure of it, all the time. So I’ve just put it into a neat list. We do look at narration. It always does generally fall under one of these types. Now, the other thing being dialogue. Which is not technically narration. Oren: The secret sixth category. Chris: Secret sixth category. As strange as that may sound, ’cause narration means that you have a narrator, whereas dialogue is also something that appears in live action, in a play or a movie when action is unfolding. So it’s technically not narration. We can talk about it a little bit, but unlike the other types of narration, it’s also optional. You can totally have a story with no dialogue and have it work just fine. The other ones, I think they’re gonna be problems if you leave them out. Not that people don’t try. Sometimes people try with some of them, but at least for a novel, when you have a really long work, I think you can do a lot more experimental things if you have just a piece of flash fic or a real short story. But I think any novel that tries to skip one category altogether is gonna run into serious trouble. Oren: I was just gonna say that I think a novel, it would be tough to do one without dialogue, but possible, whereas I don’t see how you could do a novel without one of these types of narration. I just don’t see how it’s possible. Chris: Okay. Should we get started? So number one is description. Oren: I refuse to describe what that means. I won’t do it. Chris: Description is anything that is focused on building a sensory experience that kind of grounds you in the story world, obviously, what things look like, what they sound like, what they feel like. When it’s something that is there not to really build sensory splendor, but just to say, oh, this happened, like somebody shot somebody else, I might not call that description anymore, then I would call that action. But if you have movements that are part of the scenery, like birds flying between the trees, that’s not like an important event in the story, that’s scenery, then I would call that description. Description is pretty frequently neglected in the editing manuscripts we see. Oren: I wrote a book where it was neglected. My description’s average at best. I got no stones to throw. Description, much like some of the others on this list, is one of those things that people often have horror stories about, books that went on way too long with their description. We always make fun of Tolkien for that, and rightly so in some cases. And so as a result, that sometimes makes writers think that they should skimp on it. And also it’s hard to know what’s good description and what’s just going on and on. Chris: The thing I remember in a lot of epic fantasy books is they arrive at a new city and there’s two, three paragraphs telling me exactly what the city looks like, and I oftentimes can’t understand it. It’s boring. I start to skip it. That’s not great. But I do think description is often best when it’s intermixed with other narration instead of in big chunks because it does not move the story forward. It helps with immersion, it helps the story feel real. And when the story feels real, emotion is stronger and the story feels more impactful and that’s great, but the story also can’t move forward. It is stopping to smell the roses, which means that nothing is gonna happen. And so when you have big chunks of it, you end up putting the story off in some way. It’s also great for emphasizing what’s important in the story. Oren: Generally speaking, you describe things that are important more than things that are less important, because otherwise it feels like you’re wasting time. Partly it’s just down to expectations. Like if you describe a random guard with a lot of description, it makes it sound like that guy is important, and if he’s not, your audience is gonna feel misled. But it’s also just a question of being efficient. If you try to describe everything in lots of detail, your book will never get anywhere. So you focus on the things that matter. Chris: But what you do wanna do though, when you are in a scene, is to give readers a sense of the environment and a sense of place. And so a lot of times what I see in manuscripts is there’s just a new scene and a new place, and I have very little idea of what that place looks like, but also just what it feels like. A lot of times it’s about atmosphere. Are we in this sterile clinic with white walls and you can smell the disinfectant? Is that the kind of place you’re in? Or out on the beach and we can hear the waves and smell the salt. Can you smell salt? People talk about smelling salt. I’m not sure I can ever smell salt. Oren: I don’t know if it’s salt, but is a smell I associate with the ocean. Chris: There is a kind of a fishy smell, maybe seaweedy smell. Oren: There is a fishy smell. I don’t know. There’s a different scent that I don’t think of as fishy when I smell it when I’m near the ocean. And maybe that’s salt. I haven’t stood near like big piles of salt to try to figure out if they smell the same. I just know that’s the smell that I associate with the ocean and I have not smelled it, or at least I don’t remember smelling it when I’ve been near, for example, the Great Lake. So I associate that with salt water, regardless if that’s what it actually is. Chris: And if your character is like talking to other people, is everybody sitting around a campfire? Sitting around a table? Is somebody behind a desk? The basics of making it feel like you can imagine the scene. And you don’t wanna get too specific. You don’t wanna pin every aspect of the layout down. It’s about giving enough that readers can fill in the blank, ’cause they have a kind of idea of what kind of place it is, what position people are in, that kind of thing. And especially if you are introducing a fantastical world, like non-earth, then it becomes extra important because I’m curious, I wanna know, what do people dress like? What do the buildings look like? And again, you don’t have to spend tons of words describing every aspect of the building, but it’s a huge difference whether they’re like castles or shanties. Again, it’s about giving enough imagery that you can kind of create that feel, instead of having that blank void. Oren: The next one is action, which can get a little hard to tell the difference because again, we mentioned if you type out that someone is punching someone, did you not simply describe a punch? But it’s, I would say, different because it’s a fundamental difference in what you are portraying to the reader. It’s not a question of what it looked like. You are now describing an action, and if they don’t already know what it looks like, telling someone that a punch happened is gonna create some image in their mind, but not much. If they don’t know what anyone looks like, it’ll just [be] clothing mannequins punching each other, which is funny, but maybe not what you want. Chris: Action is about moving the story forward. These are the events of the story, basically, is what it’s for. And so of course it can be all kinds of things. It can be fights or people hugging each other or having conversation or landslide, rocks fall, everyone dies, any of those things actually happening, but the idea is that it’s a thing that somebody could actually watch. So if you were at a play or looking at a movie, it’s something that you could directly observe That’s action. And obviously its big benefit is that it moves the story forward. It is the main thing that readers are looking for in the story, is to see action unfold, but it also is just kind of weak by itself. Everybody has action. Action is not something that people leave out entirely as far as I know. I suppose there could be some experimental flash fic out there, but it also, when it stands alone, oftentimes it is very rushed and there’s no context that makes it matter. So there can be action, but nobody cares. Oren: I would say that action at least has the greatest potential to carry the story forward, but it doesn’t automatically do that, I would say. If you describe a bunch of random things your character is doing that has nothing to do with your plot, like a random encounter they get into where they’re investigating a murder and on the way to investigate a murder, they get jumped by an alley-worm and the alley-worm’s not related to the murder at all. Nothing about the murder plot changes and they fight the alley-worm. I wouldn’t really say that advances the plot just because by the end of it, you’re not any further along on the murder plot than you were before, just one dead alley-worm now. Chris: It does need the support of a story to be meaningful for sure. So action by itself is not necessarily gonna be brilliant. And you can tell when you’re overusing it, mostly because it starts to become more and more meaningless. If it doesn’t matter to [an] arc that’s happening. If it doesn’t make a difference to that arc, then pretty soon, even if it seems like it would be exciting, it’s going to cease to matter. So you can have a whole bunch of people with swords running and stabbing at each other. And if there’s like no story hook around that, then it could be boring ’cause it needs that story support. Movies and plays often really do have to work hard to try to deliver the information that people need to know. For instance, why is a character doing something? What are they thinking? What’s their plan? Why somebody is doing something is just very important information. And if you have a viewpoint character, that’s usually filled in with other aspects of the narration. Without that, a lot of times people are just confused or even what is happening, not just why are people doing what they’re doing, but even like, what is going on here are some very basic things that readers absolutely need that action cannot supply on its own. Another thing, I talk about this a lot because I just see it a lot in manuscripts, is also making sure that your action does not become summary, which we can talk about next. But basically when you’re in a scene and you want all of the really important moments of the stories to be scene, just to make sure that the story time does not unfold faster than reading time. And if you’re a speed reader, then definitely read out loud time. If you can read it faster than you can act it out on stage, that’s not good. That means you’re in summary and you’re rushing too much. So when people have too much action, not enough other things, they’re very likely to kind of summarize in that way. You just gotta get more detailed and step through the scene slower with smaller actions. Whereas if you have a lot of stuff like people opening the door and walking in and walking out and other little in-between bits, then you may have too much action and you should just try to cut to the chase. Oren: The third vital type of narration is summary, which, you can actually save a lot of time if you just use for the whole story. It’s actually pretty easy. It can usually take just a couple pages and you’re done. Chris: No. Oh no. Yeah, I’m sure that’s what whoever wrote Ministry of Time was thinking. Oren: Oh gosh, oof. Chris: I shouldn’t be so mean to her. It’s her debut work. She did get nominated for a Hugo though, and who knows? She might get it. So she’s doing pretty well for herself. Oren: If you wanna be mean on the Hugo list specifically for having too much summary, you should just be mean to Alien Clay. Chris: I’m sorry, Ministry of Time. Alien Clay is definitely the book that deserves my ire. Tchaikovsky! Oren: It’s like, Alien Clay is literally a book told almost entirely in summary, it is real weird. Chris: And that guy has two books that [are] nominated for Hugos too. Of course the other one is much better. The other one I understand. Oren: One of them’s good and actually deserves to be on the list. The thing about summary is it’s an important tool because a lot of stuff’s gonna happen in your story that is not that interesting, and it would take forever to write it all out and it would be boring if you tried, so you summarize it. The travel between important scenes, you know, your character, spending all day, cleaning the house in preparation for someone coming over. Stuff like that, that is important. You need to summarize it. I have occasionally read manuscripts where the author didn’t know to do that and it was bad. You gotta stop when something important is happening. Chris: But you gotta stop. And with summary [it’s] interesting because it’s still relating events that are at the current timeline of the story, shall we say, but sometimes it’s not really anchored in time. Sometimes it’s like, oh, over the next month, sometimes these things happened. There’s no specific place or time. We just know that this was kind of a trend that happened at some time during these passing moments. And other times it can get very specific. And then in the first week this happened and the second week this happened, but sometimes it’s just unanchored and if it’s ever un anchored and talking about general trends or often this happened instead of like a specific moment, then you definitely summary. Otherwise, that rule about story time versus reading time I think is a good way of judging whether something has veered into summary territory. One thing about it though, is that kind of like borderline, is it action? Is it summary? That is generally not a good area for your narration to be in. I think sometimes you might want it if you have, for instance, a scene and then you just want to skip over like 10 minutes while somebody’s waiting or something, then it might be useful there. But what I sometimes see also in manuscripts is there’s tons and tons of summary and the reason is because the summary isn’t actually summarized enough. Oren: There’s too much information. You spent the day cleaning the house, and you could have just summarized that by saying, I spent the day cleaning the house. But instead you’re like, first I cleaned the living room and I found five dust bunnies. And then I went to the dining room and I found several old raisins. And sometimes details like that can be nice, but if you’re doing a lot of it, ehhhh. Chris: If you find that you have a lot of summary, and again, sometimes you need a lot of summary, but for me, three paragraphs is when it’s time to like, check in. Do I really need three paragraphs of summary or should I condense it down? Is this important? Should I just cut it, or is there something actually important going on here that should actually be in a scene and I should make like a conflict outta that. So the thing about summary is it is very low immersion. It keeps you very distant, and so nothing that happens in there feels very real. So it’s not gonna be very interesting and it’s not gonna be very impactful. The whole point is to just get stuff over with quickly, especially if you have things like, realistically, my character has to do this, or else it’s just unrealistic. Well, nobody’s gonna believe that they didn’t try to go ask somebody for help, for instance, but it doesn’t matter because they’re gonna ask somebody for help and that person’s just gonna say no. And it’s not gonna make any difference. That’s the time when you’d be like, okay, I summarized. They went and called the administrator and be like, Hey, can you help me with this? The administrator’s like, no. Oren: Don’t worry about it. Chris: And then you could just move on. It’s good for that. It’s good for that kind of connective tissue. And in many cases where you have summary, another option is to just cut out and skip forward in time. But skipping forward does need a little bit of text to make sure that the transition is smooth, people can get a little disoriented, and summary still gives you some kind of sense of what happened. It has advantages over a jump. Sometimes a jump is better. Oren: Well, the one that gets me [is] summarizing large amounts of time passing, because obviously you can’t show all of that or even most of it, or even a fraction of it sometimes if it’s a long time. But at the same time, I just can’t get away from the fact that people change over long periods of time, even if no single event is worth pointing out as a scene. And so it feels really weird to me to summarize like several years passing because now it’s like, okay, the character should realistically be different now, but if they just act different from the reader’s perspective, it will seem like they changed for no reason. Chris: I think that’s gonna be a lot easier if you do something to prepare readers for the jump. If you have to do a several year time jump, the character will be like, all right, I guess I’m gonna be here for three years until the portal opens again. And then they start working on, I don’t know, building their hut in the wilderness or something and just start kind of grinding away. And then you jump forward and you see that they’re like, hut now, and they know how to live in this wilderness and they’re getting ready for the portal to open or something. We kind of have a little bit of preparation for such a big time jump like that. Again, we’ve talked about the expected trend rule. It follows an expected trend. It can be summarized. Otherwise, it’s too important. I was talking about the three-year time jump. Ah, geez. I have to wait three years for this portal, and I guess I better set up my hut. What you would expect from there on out is for the character to slowly kind of build up their life in this place and figure out how to patch their clothes or make the clothing they need, figure out their food. Make themselves [more] utensils. It’s expected that those things will happen, and so then therefore you can jump past them. So next we got exposition. Oren: Probably the most contentious one on the list, actually. Chris: I did notice something recently among literary writers, which I think is really funny, and I hope at some point somebody can explain to me why this is. But I’ve noticed literary writers seem to have two modes, which is, one is like the no exposition ever, and the other mode is like all exposition and summary all the time, and it’s such a strange thing. Are they like in two warring camps? I’m now fascinated and I want to know what’s going on here. But generally for the purposes of engaging readers, we want some exposition, but not too much exposition. Basically, exposition is kind of how you fill in the cracks when you need information that [you can] not work in, in other ways that are engaging, we should say, what is it? Oren: Yeah. What is, who knows? Chris: Well, maybe it’s the beginning of a story. I’m just kidding. There’s a stage, an exposition stage, that if you follow some story structures, like Freytag’s pyramid, they’ll be like, and it starts with exposition, and that’s probably where the name of this narration actually comes from. It’s like the explaining part. But exposition is anything that is just unmoored from the current timeline of events. Oren: It’s when the narration just tells you stuff that you need to know, or maybe you don’t need to know if it’s not good exposition. Chris: For instance, summary we talked about sometimes some things aren’t really tied to a specific time, but at the same time, oh geez. It’s not time to talk about time. Oren: We don’t have the time. Chris: We don’t have the time. That’s from First Contact, the best Star Trek movie in my opinion, but I’m sure Oren disagrees. Oren: That’s a hot take. We’ll come back to that later. Chris: Any case, at least with summary, we generally have like a time period that’s in the sequence of events of the story moving forward. Exposition is not the story moving forward anymore, although otherwise it can look just like summary, but instead it’s gonna be maybe back in time, or it’s gonna be things like just plain facts that have no specific time, like the world is round, for instance. So it’s basically just extra information that does not otherwise fit into the story, the sequence of events. And that means that’s a lot of different things and it’s very flexible and you will need that flexibility. But it’s also one of those things where a lot of times we wanna try to do stuff with other types of narration first and then use exposition where it is needed. And so that also means it takes a lot of skill to figure out when to use exposition and when not to. Oren: Also, a big part of it is honestly trying to arrange the story so that you don’t need more than the optimal amount of exposition. I deal with authors all the time who are trying to figure out, my story needs all this exposition. How can I deliver it in such a way that it won’t be boring? And it’s like, well, you probably can’t. Your story needs too much exposition. This concept is too complicated and it takes forever to explain, and it’s counterintuitive. There are better and worse ways to do exposition, but often you just need to control how much is necessary. Chris: Making your story too complex, when you kind of exceed your complexity budget, what happens is that you need tons and tons of exposition to try to explain it all, and readers are confused anyway. And there’s just no way of rescuing it at that point. It’s just gonna be too much. So that is why you just have to proactively simplify everything as you go and make sure that the story is only using what it needs. If you can combine two characters, you should, sometimes you need a minimum number for believability, but even then, if you have a whole ship crew, a lot of times you just try to make people blend into the background. So they don’t take space. You have to simplify to avoid having way more exposition than readers can actually handle. And then also when you plan scenes, scene planning is really important. Scene design is absolutely vital. And knowing how to write a good scene, it means factoring in what readers need to know, but also not letting that override other concerns, making sure you still have a good conflict, that it moves the story forward and we’re not just there to stare at things, so we get information, especially ’cause exposition can often give information a lot faster than showing it in the scene. We see some people who are kind of anti exposition purists and oh man, their stories feel so emotionally dead because you need information to react [to]  ’cause the reader needs to understand the context so that they can emotionally react to things happening. And when you take out too much of that information, metaphors can only do so much, okay? Word craft can only do so much to bring out emotion. You need story and context. And without exposition, it’s not working. Oren: I need to know what’s happening. Otherwise I can’t judge it and I can’t build any emotion around it. Chris: So real quick, we have one more. Oren: Yeah. The last one. Chris: Internalization or internal narration. Oren: Well, this one’s easy. We’ll just do it internally. No one has to listen. Chris: This is thoughts and feelings of your viewpoint character or your main character. If you’re running an omniscient and you’re kind of following one character around and yeah, it’s emotionally important. You wanna understand that character to get to like them, you wanna know why they’re doing what they’re doing, what the plan is, and all of that without enough internalization, that’s gonna hurt emotion. And then messes with the viewpoint too. Like I’ve had some stories that just don’t have enough internalization and it is jarring whenever I find out who the viewpoint character is, because they kind of didn’t feel like the viewpoint character. Oren: You don’t get to know them, you don’t understand how they think, which is like, I thought we were here to read a book about a character. Come on, show me the character, please. Chris: Internalization is also usually a doorway into exposition. Like you start with the character thinking and then they’re reminded of something and then you kind of lead into exposition. So if there is no internal narration, then usually exposition is also lacking, which is a problem as we mentioned. Oren: I would recommend though, if you’re like me and you’re working on some kind of very close narrated story that has a lot of internalizing, maybe you’re using a first person retelling narrative or what have you, I would recommend reading Shield of Sparrows because it will be a wake up call for how you can have way too much of that. Chris: If you write in first person, especially a first person, like a retelling, like a retrospective viewpoint where it’s a future first person looking back instead of staying in the moment. But Shield of Sparrows isn’t a retelling. It’s in the moment and it’s still too much. Anybody can be too verbose, but first person tends to get people in the mindset. It tends to encourage a casual conversational narration that tends to lead onto going on too long. So find that book that is for you just too much. Oren: I haven’t read that many authors who have had too much internalizing, but it does exist. It can happen. And Shield of Sparrows taught me that. It’s like, no, please, I don’t need another aside what you’re thinking right now. We’ve already had three of those in this scene. No more, please. Chris: The thing that gets me is during dialogue, because a lot of times authors really wanna explain not just what the viewpoint character is saying, but actually what other characters are saying. So this other character will say this subtle line, and then the viewpoint character will think like a translation of it for the reader. Oh, that must mean, here’s a deep [hint] and flavors of meaning behind this one line. It’s like, oh, come on. I understand the impulse to do this, but it slows the dialogue way down and just ruins the pacing. And that’s just something you should be showing. Show it by describing their body language and what they say, instead of telling exactly what they mean all the time. Oren: But what if the character that I am translating for is a really skilled actor who brings across their meaning so subtly that it can’t really be captured consciously. It’s just subconscious signals. Then can I do it? Chris: Well, they can just look into each other’s eyes and read their mind. Oren: Yes. Perfect. I’m glad we figured that out. Chris: Or characters thinking about their response. Like somebody just straight up asks them a question and then they think about their response for like several paragraphs and it’s like, uh, that person is waiting for you to answer the question. Oren: You could make that a thing. You could make them like, clear their throat, be like, yeah, are you okay? And they’re like, oh, I’ve been thinking for quite a while. Oops. Chris: Sometimes they do do that, but just be aware that any type of narration, when you put in more narration, it gives a reader a sense of passing time because well, reading it takes time. So time is passing for them. So the more narration you have, the more time passes, and so there’s this one scene in Crescent City where I think Bryce grabs a doorknob and is [about] to walk down into the stairs or through the hall or through a doorway or something, and there’s so much exposition at the beginning of Crescent City. She thinks about something and it goes in paragraphs of exposition, and then she still hasn’t crossed the doorway. And I’m like, she is just hanging out in that doorway, thinking really hard for several paragraphs. Oren: Yeah, she’s just hanging out. You’re trying to bust her for loitering. What are you, a cop? Well, with that, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: And if you found that informative, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [outro music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

Imagine this scenario: two characters start the story fighting but end it kissing. Sounds completely implausible, right? Surely, this could never be a trope that single-handedly keeps BookTok afloat! But if you were to try writing such a story, how would you do it? This week, we’re talking about what it takes to write a successful enemies to lovers romance, which of course starts with a debate over what exactly an enemy is. This is still Mythcreants; did you think we weren’t doing sandwich discourse? Show Notes Bully Romance Shield of Sparrows  Fourth Wing Personality Clashes Friendship Rifts Mara Jade  Spinning Silver  Crescent City The Cruel Prince  This Is How You Lose the Time War Gul Dukat Kira Nerys  Sorsha Madmartigan Transcript Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is… Bunny: Bunny. Chris: And… Oren: Oren. Chris: I’m afraid we have a new podcast nemesis. They’re constantly making snarky jokes at our expense, which, excuse me, is our brand.  Bunny: Ah! The nerve. Oren: We hates it.  Chris: I know, right? And these jokes, they’re really deep cut, like they’ve been listening to every episode. So clearly the only way to settle this is to challenge them to a podcast-off. Where their hosts come on our podcast and our hosts go on their podcasts. To fight. Of course. Just to fight.  Bunny: Yeah. We’ll get ’em. Chris: Nothing else. Nothing else going on here. We don’t even like them.  Oren: Well, what else could be going on here? I don’t even know.  Bunny: We hate their guts and they hate ours, and that’s all there is to it.  Oren: That’s all it will ever be.  Bunny: We are just enemies.  Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Chris: It’s interesting how we managed to make podcasts into people. Look, don’t wanna make a romance joke about the actual hosts of this podcast. So that’s what we’re left with. This is what we resort to. So we’re talking about enemies to lovers.  Bunny: We have had, by this point, multiple meta podcast romances in the setups of our episodes, I believe.  Chris: It happens every time we cover romance. [Laughs] Oren: It’s just something that needs to happen, okay? That’s just a ritual we have to perform now. Otherwise, the machine spirit will be angry.  Bunny: Yes, it’s true. It’s true.  Chris: It’s true. Podcast will take her revenge. We do not offer her proper tribute. Okay! So, enemies to lovers. So first, what are enemies?  Oren: From what I can tell, it’s when a man treats a woman like shit for 200 pages and she occasionally doesn’t like it. That’s been my experience with enemies to lovers books.  Bunny: That’s pretty mean of her. She should apologize.  Oren: She kind of went too far. I think we can all agree, right?  Bunny: Yeah. Oren: I found out recently there’s a subgenre called “bully romance” that maybe that’s what these books should be filed under. But then I looked up more of it and apparently that subgenre generally involves a big groveling scene where the guy admits he was wrong and begs forgiveness. Which, whether you like that or not, is more than some of these supposed enemies to lovers books have. So no, they can’t be bully romances. They don’t meet that bar. They’re too far down.  Chris: So Oren is thinking about Shield of Sparrows, which I read the beginning to do a critique post that is now out, and then Oren was like, “But I have to read it. The title is so good.” And I’m like, “Oren, this is not a good book.” He’s like, “No, but the title, it calls to me.”  Bunny: Oren, the title is not even that good.  Oren: I like that title. I’m sad that that’s the book that exists, is the one that got that title.  Chris: So he got it in audio and since he had it, I was like, “All right, I guess I’m listening to it too.” So we both listened to the entire book. Bunny: Trapped into listening to Shield of Sparrows.  Chris: And it’s advertised as enemies to lovers, but no, he’s just the biggest jerk. Then suddenly his personality changes partway through. Then he just kind of stops and then we just completely forget about it. So there’s no amends at all of any kind.  Bunny: So this is the one where she pretends she’s gonna jump off a cliff at the beginning?  Chris: Yeah. Mm-hmm.  Oren: Well, no, she’s not pretending she’s gonna jump off a cliff. Chris: She is going to. But–  Oren: The book is pretending that it’s a possible suicide, is what the book is pretending, but it’s actually just her jumping into the water, which is a thing she does regularly. So, that’s fun, I guess.  Bunny: Standing dramatically on a… cliff.   Chris: So she’s like, “What will happen? Will I fly, or will I fall?” And it’s like, you’ve done this before. Do you think something different is gonna happen than last time?  Bunny: I stand over the lap pool, goggles in hand. What if I jumped?  Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Chris: But this book is advertised as enemies to lovers and if I’m being fair, there are a lot of blurry things. It’s pretty common in romance for the lovebirds to hate each other at first. And knowing when it goes far enough that you call it enemies to lovers can be kind of hard. I’ve been in that situation before.  But, at the same time, this is just clearly not it, because it’s not going both ways. He is mean to her for literally no reason. I suppose this is kind of spoilers for chapter three, but it’s so obvious I’m not really worried about it. But basically in the beginning, the idea is that her sister is in this elaborate arranged marriage to become the crown princess of another nation. And of course we quickly swap that so that it’s her instead.  Oren: For reasons.  Chris: And the love interest is called the “Guardian.” He eventually gets a name, but not for a very long time. Basically chose her and decided that we should play switcheroo and she clearly doesn’t like it. So then after he basically forces her to get in this arranged marriage, not just asking her dad, but pressuring her dad into it. Then he’s just really mean and resentful as though this is her fault. That just happens and she probably never fights back and he just comes and just makes a point of following her around just to insult her some more.  Bunny: Oh my gosh.  Chris: So, it’s pretty unsatisfying.  Oren: And I have read a few other books, there is supposed to be a conflict between the lovebirds and it is not equivalent. This is, I think, the most extreme I’ve ever seen it. Where it’s like, that’s weird. It’s really weird how awful he is. And then he just suddenly stops and we never talk about it again. I am happy to say that’s a bit of an outlier. Bunny: They should have an equal number of dislike and an equal ability to get under each other’s skin. They should probably be on the same level, for instance, so that if it was a boss and an employee, that would be a weird dynamic. They should be able to punch evenly at each other rather than up and down. Chris: This goes back to what we were saying when we were covering banter, right? About how do you make the banter not… If you want them to be enemies, you may want them to be mean at some level. At the same time, there’s some ways that you can do that, that it seems fair and some ways where it just seems gross. Having them both doing it and being on the same level with each other is an important part of that. Otherwise, again, you’ve got more bully dynamic. And I’m not into that. I understand other people are into that, but having him grovel afterwards seems like the least you could do if you’re doing a bully romance. And also, what are the taunts about? One of the things that makes this so gross and makes him so unlikeable, this Guardian guy, is the fact that he makes frequent sexual remarks about her that feel inappropriate. She had a fiancé that they broke off that engagement, to force her. And then he decides it’s a great time to be like, “Are you spreading your legs for this other guy?” And it’s like, he was her fiancé, and you decided to take her away from him. This is weird. Again, a weird thing to get mad at and also makes it feel punching down because it’s a man talking to a woman. And luckily, this setting is actually surprisingly sexually liberated. Which, the kingdom is supposed to be patriarchal, so it’s a little unrealistic, but whatever. But nonetheless, the real world context is that kind of thing is just really gross. And so any kind of using slurs or punching down, it’s just always gonna feel particularly bad. Oren: Maybe this isn’t the expectation other people have, but when I see a book or any story advertised as enemies to lovers, I expect them to be enemies.  Chris: Okay, so what is an enemy? Now you gotta define it.  Oren: People who work at cross-purposes. That’s my basic definition of an enemy. I know a lot of people I don’t like, almost none of them are my enemies. They’re just people I don’t enjoy spending time with. I’ve only in my life had two or three people who I would consider even mild enemies because we were working at cross-purposes.  One guy at a place I used to work really didn’t like me, and the rumor is that he was the reason I never got a job higher up. Who knows if that’s true, right? But if it was true, he was at least mildly my enemy. There are a couple of other people like that, but it’s very rare. Most of the time I just don’t like somebody.  Bunny: You mean it’s not enough for me to get my dog’s leash tangled in the leash of a cute guy, and then we stumble into each other and the dogs wrap around us and I’m like, “Oh! Well I’d never.” And he spills his coffee on me and he’s like, “You got in my way.” Oren: Technically the dog is your enemy now. I’m sorry about that.  Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Oren: You are enemies of the good boy.  Bunny: Oh no, there’s no coming back.  Chris: Okay, for instance, here’s an example that I think works, I don’t think you have to super lean into the cross-purposes if you have other stuff going on. So, Fourth Wing, Violet and Xaden, I think that qualifies as enemies to lovers. They do warm up pretty fast, so they’re not enemies for that long. But at the same time, what they have is family history. Once they’re in school and they realize that they both are actually pretty good people, they don’t have cross-purposes anymore, but they think that they might. There’s mutual distrust because of a background where their family members killed each other during this rebellion that happened.  When she goes to Dragon Academy… Actually, it’s really funny ’cause it’s just so tropey, so blatantly obvious. Where it’s like, “Oh, and last thing, don’t go anywhere near Xaden Riorson.” It’s like, okay, that’s the love interest, huh?  Oren: Don’t do it.  Bunny: “So, I went near Xaden Riorson.” Chris: And immediately, “Oh wow. This guy, he’s so hot. He’s the hottest guy I’ve ever seen. Look at how hot this guy is. And what?! He’s Xaden?”  Bunny: “Xaden… who…?” I do think you can slot the types of adversarial relationships into a couple different buckets. And the one that you’re describing there is one that I’m calling “political factions,” where they’re part of adversarial factions with opposite aims or that they have bad blood, like… Romeo and Juliet isn’t enemies to lovers, but it is the “Montague/Capulet” dynamic. Or if Dune had a romance between the Harkonnens and Atreides, that would qualify. Oren: There’s a lot of fanfic about that, so sure.   Bunny: I’m sure you could find plenty on AO3. Officially. And then I think that’s also shades of the competitive rivals, for lack of a better word. Which is where it’s more circumstantial dislike, and they’re working against each other for a goal that they can’t both win. So both wanna be the concert master of the orchestra, or the starting quarterback, or they’re both competing for the same grant. I think that qualifies.  Chris: I think if you make rivals, you really gotta have them compete over something. To make it intense enough. But I think you could have a situation where there’s just kind of deep personal history that’s kind of bitter.  Bunny: I call that one “sworn enemies!” Deep interpersonal conflict! They’ve been wronged or they’ve wronged each other, or there’s a big misunderstanding. I feel like this one is difficult to pull off if they have a bad history with each other, because what you don’t want is for one of them to have had a very good reason to cut off the other one. If one of them has gone too far.  Chris: It’s the same with personality clashes. You can do a good personality clash that creates interpersonal conflict, but a lot of writers have trouble just not making either character a jerk. So I have an article that lists ideas for personality clashes where they can both be a little bit wrong. And, for personal history, I have one that I put out recently that’s how friends can have a rift between them, and that one’s meant for them to make up. But you could probably take some of my list there, for a past breakup and use something like that if you need ideas for how to have them have bad blood in their background and to make them both a little wrong. So it’s not just one person’s terrible.  Oren: I’ve noticed that, at least in successful stories, maybe this is just because the books that I read tend to have romance as a side plot. I’ve noticed that there are way more enemies to lovers in TV shows that I watched, than in books. I was really struggling to come up with ones with examples from books, but I think of TV shows, it’s like, “Oh, Catra and Adora, Buffy and Spike.” But it was pretty easy to find some, and with books, I was like, “Uh, Luke and Mara Jade, I guess?”  Chris: I think Spinning Silver, Miryem and the Staryk qualify. So that’s a situation where the reason I think it qualifies, is Miryem does kind of get him back at some point. As opposed to, there’s another romance in there that has some similar dynamics, but isn’t as good, between Irina and this prince. And at that point he’s got an evil demon in him and is doing bad things ’cause of his demon and she’s just, surviving. And that does not feel like enemies to lovers.  With Miryem, first the Staryk comes just like, “Hey, you can, basically metaphorically turn silver into gold.” Well, no, it’s literal but not magical. It’s not really metaphorical. “You could literally turn silver into gold. That’s useful to me. I don’t really care what happens to you as long as I get this gold because my kingdom needs it.” And then after he’s basically put her through enough, she finds a way to escape that ends up getting him in trouble. So she’s able to throw her own punches.  Oren: That would meet my working at cross-purposes definition from earlier. This part is kind of interesting. So on a whim, I decided to look up and see if the first Crescent City book is advertised as enemies to lovers because I wouldn’t describe it that way, but the two characters don’t like each other when they first meet, and sometimes seems to be all it takes.  It’s not advertised that way, which is interesting. Although it is advertised as “fae.” Which seems like false advertising to me. There are some fae in there, but none of them are the romance interest. Chris: In that setting isn’t everybody fae? Everybody magical? Oren: No, they’re all called “Vanir” for some reason. Might as well take a random Norse term, I guess. The main love interest is like, an angel, and the main character’s brother is fae. And admittedly, her brother is written enough like a rival romance interest that I kind of wonder if originally that’s what that character was. Chris: Interesting.  Oren: I didn’t like it. Her brother is really possessive of her. Granted, so is the love interest. So, whatever. But it was weird. It was like, this doesn’t really feel like a brother character to me.  Bunny: I don’t know how these are arranged, but if you look up enemies to lovers and then just go to the first Goodreads page that shows up, the very top one is The Cruel Prince, followed by Fourth Wing. Chris: Yep, yep. The Cruel Prince. I also did a critique of that, but didn’t get introduced to the love interest. Isn’t that one a bully romance? Maybe?  Bunny: I can’t help you there.  Chris: A romantasy I’m sure, because romantasy typically has some really high stakes, lots happening alongside the romance. So that’s where I would expect to see at least some enemies to lovers.  Bunny: “Danger boys.”  Chris: Mm-hmm. But anyway, obviously romance starts, you establish they’re enemies, generally working at cross-purposes. Usually they also dislike each other at some level. And then the next thing that has to happen is, you have to force them together. Oren: And I do wonder if maybe that’s also part of the reason why I tend to see this more in TV than in books. Because I think in TV we are just more willing to accept contrivances to get characters on screen together at the same time. This is my new working hypothesis. Whereas with books, I have often struggled to find reasons why the protagonist and the antagonist should be in the same space, even when I’m not trying to make them fall in love. I just need them to interact a little bit.  Bunny: TV series also have more time to unspool that. That might also be part of it.  Chris: This is again, what we talk about with the, I commonly call the “push and pull” romance, where you need something that pushes them together and something that pulls ’em apart. And a lot of romances, they are already into each other and it’s tough to figure out reasons why they can’t get together yet.  But if we start with enemies, then the first thing you need is something that actually forces them together. And that’s something that usually just has to be at the center of the story, has to be important to the plot. It’s not easy to think of that last minute. Need to be in the same room. So an alliance of necessity, even for enemies. Introduce another enemy, give them a common enemy so that they have to work together. Trap them in a place together, called “trapped in a labyrinth.” Or they get trapped in a haunted castle, something. Bunny: An elevator. Chris: [Laughs] Hopefully not a whole novel in the elevator.  Oren: I can see it working if they interact a lot because they’re going head to head in in various conflicts a lot. I can see that working as a way to build romantic chemistry. Now you need to be careful that the mood fits what they’re doing. It’s probably not gonna be good flirting if this is a super serious, gritty story about trying to protect refugees. It’s gonna seem real weird if your characters are flirting while fighting over that.  Chris: If they’re already classmates or coworkers, that’s certainly a lot easier. “Oh, they have to share a class.” Even then, it can be useful. Like, we have a competition in school. They butt heads. Then because they were fighting, they both get in trouble and then they do detention together.  Oren: That’s classic. They gotta clean the school or something. And then the school sends them to do something that is irrationally dangerous, that a school would never do, and then they have to bond. Bunny, Chris: [Laugh] Oren: There. We solved it. We figured it out, guys.  Bunny: Or the “buddy cop” thing. And we have a whole episode on that, where they have a run in and they dislike each other and, “Oh, you got in my way during this caper.” And, “Oh, you shouldn’t have, you were the one who got in my way.” And then the boss summons one of them into the office and is like, “I’ve got a new job for you. And you’ll be working with… [Dramatic Gasp] That person you butted heads with.” Uh oh!  Chris: Yep. An authority figure who can–  Bunny: They’re like, “Fine, we’ll work together. But. Just. This. Once!”  Chris: –Authority figure who can put them on the same team of some kind is helpful.  Bunny: I do think they need to have face-to-face time when they’re doing something other than hitting swords together, because then they can see each other in a different context. But I do like flirting while they’re hitting swords together. That is fun.  Chris: Why do enemies to lovers if they’re not gonna flirt while they’re fighting with each other? [Laughs]  Oren: First one then the other, right?  Chris: You could probably have a situation where they’re in competition or fighting and it goes too far and they’re actually sorry, and then they talk to each other. That would be a little bit trickier to finagle. But I do think that something that forces a little bit more conversation besides them just opposing each other is helpful, anyway.  Oren: I do think there should still be some challenge and obstacle to them getting together because it’s possible to go too far in the other direction. And that was my main beef with This Is How You Lose the Time War. I think that’s the title? Chris: Yep, yep. Oren: Because technically we have two characters on opposite sides of a fight, but the fight doesn’t matter to either of them. [Chuckles] They have no attachment to their cause. Chris: That book, honestly, it doesn’t really have any tension. It’s just one long love letter. It’s just poetry. It’s an interesting work, but the plot doesn’t really function particularly well because you don’t really understand what’s happening at all. You can’t anticipate what they can and they can’t do. Everything is made up as the characters go along, and things just kind of happen, but it doesn’t have what it needs to create an actual tension or a sense of obstacles. But it’s very pretty. That one is kind of an odd case.  But certainly if you do something like, their factions decide to make up with a marriage alliance, and what do you know? Now they are supposed to get married to each other. You’re gonna have to switch… Again, was why I think it’s helpful to also have some kind of personal history, or dislike, or something where they butt heads without all of those external factors. So they have that to get through.  And also, it’s not as much fun if they’re technically at cross-purposes, but they’re really nice about it. That could be a fun dynamic, but that’s not really what we’re going for usually with enemies to lovers.  Bunny: That’s the “Aziraphale/Crowley” dynamic.  Oren: You usually want some kind of hostility, otherwise what are we overcoming here?  Chris: And then of course once they are forced together, usually having them work surprisingly well together is a good way to start to get them to warm up to each other. Oren: Then you gotta remember your basic romance fundamentals. They still gotta be better together than they are apart. They gotta have things that draw them together, that sort of thing. Can’t just be like, “All right, well now we’re stuck together and we used to fight, but now we kiss instead.” Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Bunny: No, they have to kiss. But in kind of an angry way. That’s how you know. Oren: That’s exactly right. If one of them is the villain, you wanna make sure that they haven’t crossed the moral event horizon. That’s why it would’ve been a bad idea for Dukat and Kira from Deep Space Nine to be a couple. It’s a little unclear if that was ever actually a serious idea, but you hear various behind the scenes reports that that was something they were considering. And thank God they didn’t do that.  Chris: That would’ve been bad.  Oren: That would’ve been real bad. And the reason is that– Bunny: Oops, all genocide. Oren: –Dukat, even before he became a full villain, had overseen a horrible military occupation that was just too evil. He can’t be a good romance interest for Kira after that.  Chris: I also think the actress objected to that.  Oren: I’ve seen different accounts of it. The most recent one I looked up, the writers talked about it and were like, “Yeah, that was never a serious idea, but it had been suggested by someone at some point.” And there were some episodes that made fans wonder if they were going in that direction. But your villain doesn’t necessarily have to have been a genocide guy to have crossed the moral event horizon. There are less extreme ways that they could become too evil to have a good romance with.  Chris: Just coming to mind ’cause we were talking about books versus movies… And obviously some of the enemies to lovers we have seen have actually specifically been TV shows like Adora and Catra. And TV shows have usually a lot of time to develop characters if they have the same cast. Not anymore… Oren: Now it’s a lot less. Chris: [Laughing] But once upon a time they did. They got enough episodes. Whereas I’m thinking of Willow, the original 1989 movie, which still is a surprisingly good movie. Has held up pretty well, and it has this romance between Madmartigan and, ah man… Oren: Sorsha. Chris: Sorsha. And I honestly think that they do a really good job of finding ways to have them interact and build chemistry despite the fact that they are on violently opposing teams. Where, first she captures him, then he captures her. If you need a way to force them together, having one side capture the other and then use him as a hostage or compel them to help in some way, can be one way of doing that while keeping up a lot of the antagonism. And we have a whole scenario where they have a love potion, but luckily they don’t get too creepy with it. Bunny: I still get a little creepy with it. That scene gave me the willies. Chris: Where he goes in and starts spouting love poetry to her in her tent. When he is supposed to be grabbing the baby and running.  Oren: At least she’s not using it on purpose to try to seduce him. That’s where the bar is on love potions. Chris: The fact is that she didn’t use it on purpose. He had another reason for going into her tent, I think is also important. He didn’t actually go into her tent to creep on her. He needed to get the baby back and then saw her and the love potion took effect. There’s some things that make it better than most instances.  But in any case, they have this back and forth, and then later he takes her hostage and it kind of gives them exposure to each other. But they didn’t have a good way in the movie, and I think partly ’cause they just didn’t have enough time, to get her to realistically come over to the other side. So she just spontaneously watches him kill a dragon and then she’s like, “That’s hot.” [Laughs] Oren: She’s into it. [Laughs] Chris: She just instantly is on the other side. It’s real weird. So, do think that books have the advantage there. But sometimes, if one side is supposed to be, “Oh no, we’re the baddies,” you’re gonna need time to give that character their own incentive to realize that or leave. Oren: They need to believably change sides, and with her, she went from being into Madmartigan as an enemy to suddenly deciding that that overrode her previous loyalties. Chris: To her mother. And her mother’s evil. But at the same time, she clearly wanted to please her mother before. She was clearly going for motherly approval. And something in there to help her reevaluate that. And it could have been caused by Madmartigan. If they’d had time. But that would’ve really helped that plot.  Oren: We needed another couple episodes worth of time to make that believable.  Chris: I do think with novels, one of the helpful things about enemies of lovers is sometimes, people can run out of obstacles. And so it does extend the amount of time that you can have their romance last, because they started out as enemies. And then once you get them past that, you have to introduce new obstacles. But that’s still more than if they started out, liking each other better. So it gives them more distance that they have to get across in order for the romance to happen. And that takes time. But a novel often has a fair amount of time, especially if you’re not splitting it into a million viewpoints. Oren: All right, well, with our evergreen advice to not split the story into a million viewpoints, we will go ahead and call this one to a close. Chris: If you enjoyed this podcast, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and there’s Kathy Ferguson. Who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

You shouldn’t have any problems keeping up with the references we make in this podcast. You just need to watch several TV series, a bunch of movies, read a nine-book series, and also study Irish history for some reason. Some books feel that way too, with characters making all kinds of pop culture references that readers might or might not have context for. And what should you do when your fictional world needs pop culture of its own? We’ve got some tips, and also some deep cut Star Trek lore, as always. Show Notes The Perils of Pauline Musketeers of Pig Alley Jolene The Irish Unification of 2024 The Troubles  Feed The Expanse  Post-Avatar Depression Ready Player One Artemis  Kaiju Preservation Society  Snow Crash Toss a Coin to Your Witcher Shield of Sparrows Murderbot Dead Cat Tail Assassins Holonovel  Neuromancer Environmental Storytelling Transcript Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [Intro theme]  Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me is− Oren: Oren.  Bunny: And− Chris: Chris.  Bunny: And, you guys, lately I’ve been realizing that like every time we criticize a popular story, I feel like Pauline. You know what I mean? Chris: Oh yeah, totally. I definitely know who Pauline is.  Bunny: I keep expecting Blinky Bill to show up. Like, come on, we’re gonna end up on the train tracks if we’re not being careful.  Oren: Is Pauline Jolene’s cousin? Is she also worried that someone will take her man?  Bunny: No. You know, Pauline? Pauline stole Jolene? Oren: There are sapphic versions of that song, so don’t even worry about it.  Bunny: Yeah, what if we start feuding with another podcast? It could turn into a real Musketeers of Pig Alley situation, right?  Oren: Yeah, absolutely.  Chris: Yes, absolutely.  Oren: Were there also− How many Musketeers, did it say there were three but actually four? That’s a Musketeers reference I get.  Bunny: I know one of them’s called the Snapper Kid.  Chris: Wait, one of the Musketeers? Bunny: This is one of the Musketeers in The Musketeers of Pig Alley, which was a 1910s movie about gang violence.  Chris: Oh yes. The very classic Musketeers of Pig Alley. Oren: Look, it’s old. It must be good. That’s just how these things work.  Bunny: And The Perils of Pauline, which was another 1910s TV serial, and I bring these up very cleverly because we are talking about pop culture and fiction. And one thing that fiction referencing pop culture often does is that it is set in the future and pretends like pop culture from a hundred years ago is still the hot thing on everyone’s mind. Oren: It’s the Star Trek thing where they’re like, ah, the greatest people in their field: Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Gababoobadeeboo! And then you−our new character that we’ve just met−it’s like, wait, hang on. Who is that one in the middle? That’s just some rando that’s a Star Trek person. Chris: At least Star Trek tries. I still remember when they got in big trouble with the UK or Ireland because they added an event.  Oren: Yeah, the Irish Unification of 2024.  Chris: Created a political incident where that episode was taken off the air in certain countries.  Oren: That was a big deal at the time. That was not a good thing to have on TV.  Bunny: Oh my gosh.  Chris: And that’s, again, just because they were trying to make a list of important events, and they needed something to happen in the future, and they made the mistake of choosing something real.  Oren: Personally, I don’t think that was a mistake. I think that was on purpose. Chris: You think they were trying to make a political statement?  Oren: I think so. Nowadays we tend to−this is vastly oversimplifying it−but we tend to think of Ireland as a pretty peaceful place. But let’s just say that when the episode we’re talking about was made, the violence was a lot more recent than that. Chris: Wow, okay. (not sarcastic) Oren: So, I think that was on purpose.  Bunny: Most people only learn about the troubles in Ireland from like, I don’t know, Peaky Blinders.  Oren: A lot of people think about that era as being way longer ago than it was, which is interesting. But I do suspect that Star Trek episode did that on purpose. Bunny: Fascinating, I look forward to your manifesto on this.  Oren: There we go.  Bunny: Anyway, drop in the comments if either anyone got my timely references to The Perils of Pauline and Musketeers of Pig Alley.  Oren: I was worried because Disney Plus keeps trying to give me this new show called Pauline to watch, and I was like, is that what this is? Should I have watched that?  Chris: Oh no, there’s all this buzz about a show! Quick, we gotta go watch it! Bunny: Ugh, exhausting. I’m glad I’m not in some sort of position where I would be expected to keep up with TV shows because I’m on some sort of podcast and then just simply don’t. Oren: We hates it, Precious.  Bunny: So, the topic of this podcast is pop culture and fiction, both referencing real life pop culture and creating your own pop culture. And I struggle with this a lot−which is why I decided to lead an episode about it−because most references to real world pop culture and fiction feel really cringey and obnoxious to me. And, most folks do not spend a lot of time fleshing out their own pop culture if it’s separate from real life pop culture. But I do think hypothetically, probably, both can be done well.  Chris: One thing that I’ve seen a lot of in recent years, for obvious reasons, is shows especially that want to, or sometimes books though, that want to replicate internet culture in some way. Right? Within the story. And a lot of times it is bad. I still laugh at the Mira Grant book Feed, because the main characters are bloggers, but they’re really big bloggers. Like the top social media influencers we have today except they’re blogging, and they follow this politician who I think is−they say he’s a Republican, but it doesn’t feel like the audience is for Republicans. It’s one of those really optimistic works where you see, “I’m totally unbiased because I have a good Republican character, and see how reasonable he is?”  Oren: This was a little more believable in 2012 than it is now, but even at the time it did raise my eyebrows a little. Chris: So then they’re following along and covering his campaign, and unfortunately I know about blogging, so when Mira Grant comes up with titles for their posts, I know how bad they are, and that no one would click on them. And then they’re like, this blog post about this politician’s campaign is “number three” on the internet. And I’m like, what do you mean “number three”? Bunny: You know, when you open “The Internet”, it says “Trending”.  Chris: By what measure? In what way? And the idea that “number three” would be some political campaign and not a cute cat or porn or something…? Oren: I have so many questions about A) how they’re measuring that, and B) what gross stuff did they have to remove from the rankings? Chris: That one is just classically funny. But more recently, there’s stuff where people have content that goes viral when it obviously wouldn’t go viral. I mean, that one’s a tough one. If you want something to go viral in your story−because things only go viral if they’re really surprising−they have to be different than anything that’s come before, for the most part. So if it was possible to replicate, people would be doing it on purpose all the time. Instead, people who do make content to go viral, usually just spam tons and tons of content, and wait for something to be picked up a little bit.  Oren: One of The Expanse books ended like that. The big climactic ending was that they had like a viral crowdfunder. Chris: Wait, didn’t a character invent crowdfunding?  Oren: Yeah, a character basically invents crowdfunding.  Chris: That always cracks me up, when somebody events something in another world that exists in our world.  Oren: Again, this was early enough that crowdfunding wasn’t as big as it is now, but it definitely existed, and so it was very funny that A) this person invented crowdfunding, and B) their crowdfunding campaign went viral because they needed to save their daughter. And this is a space system that has 10 billion people in it. How many of those 10 billion need to save a child? And they’re trying to crowdfund that? Because that’s the world we live in today, where everyone’s crowdfunding is “I need to save this young child”. And often they’re real and horrible, and then sometimes they’re fake and horrible. So the idea that that would be enough to cut through the noise is absurd.  Chris: I will say if you want something to go viral, I think your best bet realistically is to set up some sort of societal context where something is going on, where people are just primed for this content, right? There’s a big controversy already. There’s a big news event. There’s a big tragedy. And then this content comes up as the perfect representation. You know? For instance, an image that goes viral because there’s a hurricane. And it’s a dramatic image of that hurricane. Or people are mad about something, and something happens that is a perfect representation of what they’re mad about. That kind of thing can kind of give it the leg up in making it feel more likely that people will be passing this around than just, “Oh, I did something funny. I made a funny noise, and it went viral!” Bunny: One of the reasons people do include pop culture references is just immersion, right? They grew up in the 2010s, and or they grew up in the 1910s and love Pauline and Peril. They might naturally reference these things. I do think that’s one of the less common reasons, though, at least in terms of explicit references. Explicit meaning direct references. You’re naming the specific thing rather than just being like, “Ah, that serial of times when a woman gets into peril” in a vague sense. Actually saying the name of the thing. I don’t find very often that authors do that to be immersive. Usually, they’re doing that as a shorthand for saying this thing is like this other thing. Or for humor. I think those are the two main things.  Oren: Pop culture jokes are pretty popular. I’ve found that they tend to work better in movies than novels because movies get stuck in development hell all the time, but at least in theory, a movie can come out on a shorter timescale, and you can edit the script to make different references before you start filming. And that can be a little bit easier, whereas a novel will often be stuck in your drawer for 10 years. So the references are more likely to age much faster.  Chris: I have evergreen articles where I couldn’t help referencing something going on that day, and when I look back at them I’m like, yeah, I probably shouldn’t have done that. It just very quickly feels dated, and fiction, again, takes a really long time to go through the publishing process often. I do think it works better when you feel like the story is actually about that time period in some way. If it’s an 80s period piece basically, then it makes sense to have a lot of 80s references in there. That feels like that story is meant to capture a certain time, a certain year, and there’s a purpose towards all those references, even if they’re a little out-of-date. I think that works a little better than if you have a piece, it feels like it’s supposed to be a little timeless, but then there’s random pop culture references from that year in there. Oren: Although, it is funny because what you’re really doing is making references to things that people in the modern day associate with that time period. Or at least that’s what most people are doing. It would be really funny to do a 2008 period piece and have everyone talking about Avatar, the James Cameron movie. No one talks about that anymore. The moment a new one comes out, we immediately forget about it. But it was super popular! Everyone was seeing it. But I don’t think that would evoke that time period in the same way that the campaign of Barack Obama would. That’s the thing people associate with that year. Bunny: And since you’re talking about classic 80s, I have to shit on Ready Player One a little bit. Which is one of those cases which−Okay, at least Ready Player One has an in-story justification for why everything is 08s-ified, which is that its creator built the platform on 80s worship. But this is probably patient zero of the pop-culture-hasn’t-advanced-at-all-since-pretty-much-the-eighties. Chris: Because this is a future that worships the 80s.  Bunny: The premise is that the creator of the virtual world really liked the 80s, and he’s designed a quest for control of the virtual world after his death that is centered on 80s references. So people spend their life devoted to studying obscure crap from the 80s, and we never see anything that suggests the 2000s existed. Or anything past 1995, maybe. There is nothing new. It’s all just 80s, 80s, 80s used in the laziest way possible, because most of it−and this is a trap that a lot of pop culture reference falls into−is instead of describing something, using a reference to describe it. Instead of describing something, you say it’s like the other thing. So if you don’t know what the other thing is, then you’re kind of adrift. And Klein, the author, will also do this in the vaguest possible way. Instead of describing colorful details, like the haircuts that people have, he’ll be like, “A variety of 80s haircuts”.  Oren: Oh, that’s nice.  Bunny: At one point he goes to a club, and I think the exact phrase is that he performs a variety of 80s dance moves. Which, like, great, if this is supposed to be a love letter to the 80s, can’t you be more specific? Chris: That’s definitely a show don’t tell issue there.  Bunny: That is a huge issue with over-reliance on real-life pop culture. You’re telling people what to think.  Chris: With the 80s hairdos, it’s also particularly funny because they’re not hard to describe. The US in the 80s, noted for having really curled, high volume, just lots of hair everywhere. Bunny: Yeah. Big hair. Hair helmet.  Chris: Big hair.  Bunny: Perms. You could rattle them off, so it’s insulting to the reader that he didn’t bother to add 10 extra words. Other books do this, too. Artemis by Andy Weir had something similar where our character is looking at the moon bases, and she was like, “They looked like the moon bases from every pop sci-fi pulp book.” Okay, thanks.  Oren: Those actually look pretty different, depending on which book you’re reading.  Bunny: She at least describes them as round, right? They’re bubbles. But at one point she does look at them and is like, (robotically) “They look like they’re from a sci-fi book.”  Oren: The bright side is that something like Ready Player One in book form is pretty rare in my experience. The nostalgia fests are much more likely to happen in movies, right? Because movies are really expensive, and people who make them are super risk averse, so they want to keep doing stuff that they know their target spending audience already likes. That’s why we have another Jurassic World movie, even though there is nothing left to do in that franchise. And it made a lot of money! So they were right.  Bunny: Go figure.  Oren: But in book form, there doesn’t seem to be a huge reason to do that, has been my experience. You’ll occasionally get authors who are a little obnoxious with it, but in general, I would say that at least in speculative fiction, which is the genre that I pay attention to, people are constantly pushing the envelope. When I see the books that are popular now, that’s very different from what was popular a few years ago.  Bunny: For sure. I think that if you do want to reference pop culture in your book, and your book is set in the real world and stuff, and you do it intentionally that you can for lack of a better word time lock your book. If you’re not trying to set it in vague “now” or five-minutes-in-the-future sort of stories that I’d argue probably most stories set in the present day do where it’s “now”! But if you want your book to be set sometime recently, but definitely a fixed time period, you could do something like what Kaiju Preservation Society does, which is that it’s definitively set during the pandemic. It makes references to the pandemic. It is set during those years, and so when it makes pop culture references−which I also find annoying, but at least they don’t have that problem−it makes sense because we know when we are. So it’s not going to age weirdly, because it’s fixed.  Kaiju Preservation Society kept doing this thing where the character would reference pop culture and the other characters would be like, “OMG, you did not! Wow! You named the Kaiju Bella and Edward? You did not. Whoa, you call yourself a Deliberator? That’s from Star Crash. Wow, I got that!”  Oren: Yeah, they’re proud of their references.  Chris: They’re very proud of that. I think Scalzi ended up writing Kaiju Preservation Society because of the pandemic. He had a rare incident where he wasn’t able to get out the work that he had been planning to write and had to tell his publisher that it wasn’t happening. And ended up writing Kaiju Preservation Society instead. So, I think part of the reason for setting that during the pandemic is that it was very much a product of the pandemic too. Bunny: Doing that was a good choice, too. With the backstory on that book being what it is, and in terms of keeping the pop culture grounded in time as well.  Chris: Should we talk about speculative pop culture? You want to make something up?  Bunny: Yeah, I feel like it is relatively rare in terms of going into a fantasy book and then the speculative world having a defined pop culture of its own− Chris: Although you should toss a coin to your witcher Bunny: −you’ll get vague references to that. Does Witcher do that?  Chris: Yeah, Witcher has−again, in books, it’s harder, right? Whereas in an audio-visual work, we can actually have music. So, for instance, Toss a Coin to Your Witcher is a song that the bard character in Witcher sings that got really popular online. And that one was good because it fit the setting. I think if you’re gonna have pulp culture in your setting, you should start with what is the actual primary method of mass communication that people use? And if you have a low-tech setting that’s before widespread literacy, then basically what you have is people coming, meeting, and talking to each other. So having a song in the story where the bard’s like, “Hey, can you please give this other character some money?”, basically the bard Jaskier will make songs out of Geralt’s adventures, and then they sing that at taverns and stuff. So that’s fun.  Bunny: Considering what kind of mass media−quote unquote, because this will depend on the communication level of the world−people experience is definitely the first step you should take. What are people experiencing?  Chris: We’ll talk more about Shield of Sparrows in the next episode, but one of the funny things … that world is just not thought through. One of the things is that there’s newspapers, and it’s like, what? This is like a medieval− Again, we didn’t have novels in Europe until about the 1800s. You know, lots of them. Because that’s the point at which the printing press had advanced enough. And of course there’s also a chicken and the egg issue with printing and reading. If there’s nothing, people can’t buy things to read. They have no reason to learn to read. But also before they are incentivized to learn to read, we need to make printing cheap enough, and for a long time that was not true. Books were too expensive. So there were a number of different things that happened. But one of them was that the printing press made printing cheaper, and we finally had novels.  In this fantasy book Shield of Sparrows, it’s just that the books still seem to be pretty rare and expensive, but at the same time, there’s newspapers.  Oren: There are a lot of anachronisms in that book. One of the ships is named Cannon, as in the weapon, and this is not a setting with gunpowder. So… whatever. What does that even mean?  Bunny: It’s just a cool word that we made up.  Oren: It’s just a fun word that we thought might sound cool as a ship name.  Chris: But basically if you’re making a world and you’re anchoring it to real world technology levels, and it’s European-ish, we’re looking at the 1800s for books and printing to become more common. The earlier you get before that, the less people are literate and the less you’re gonna have printing and newspapers and have pop culture through that way. At that point, it’s a bard comes to town and goes to the tavern, and everybody’s excited and ends up singing the same song in town. And that’s their pop culture! Bunny: Or if you have a court or something, they’re all watching maybe the same play. Everyone’s attending the new kabuki production.  Chris: Traveling theater! Bunny: Yeah, theater!  Chris: Traveling band doing some theater and comedy and jokes and stuff. And then people go and see that together.  Oren: For me, when I’m looking at a setting, if it’s in any way a modern setting, I know that there is no possible way I’m gonna be able to communicate the complexity of real world pop culture in a book. I don’t have time to go into all of the references that we use in real life that you need to know a thing to understand them. I would have to explain the entirety of the MCU if I was telling a story set in the modern day to someone who didn’t know what the MCU was. It would be ridiculous. So I do my best to come up with something, some of the more prominent aspects that are easier to explain and use that to hint at the idea that there’s more, but we’re not focusing on that right now. We’ve got a plot to do.  Bunny: Right. I think that’s why it’s relatively rare. It’s because a lot of in-universe entertainment isn’t super relevant to the main story, or it’s just fluff and flavor. And, honestly, I love when there’s fluff and flavor about the universe’s pop culture. I like that Murderbot is always watching telenovellas, even if they’re not relevant to the plot. It’s a fun worldbuilding detail, and of course there are telenovellas.  Oren: I really liked how in the show other people had seen them and that became a plot point in a few points in a few areas. I thought that was very neat.  Chris: The show writers were really good at leveraging and making it part of the story.  Bunny: Another book that did in Universe Entertainment was The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, where the main character really likes pulp novel penny dreadfuls, essentially, and ultimately uses these to convince a couple gods to not kill her. Being like, “Hey, in this−” this is spoilers for the climax, I guess, “−in this penny dreadful, this scenario happened, and you wouldn’t want the scenario to happen here, would you? Because that would be bad.” I was like, that’s fun. You don’t see a lot of these stories within stories unless they’re serious folklore that’s relevant to the foundation of the world or whatever. Oren: I would also say that another option, if you’re just trying to make something that is to help readers understand the world and to feel like it’s a living place where people do things, is you can create pop cultural trends that are similar enough to things that are in the real world that readers can kind of get it, but not being exactly the same. Nowadays we’re inundated with superhero movies, right? And that’s a feeling that people will have. And you might not necessarily want to have your setting have superhero movies, but assuming that it has this level of mass media, your character could very easily talk about how all the advertisements for the next hollow films are this specific genre because that’s what’s popular right now and I feel like I haven’t seen anything that isn’t that for a while. And that’ll get across the same feeling. Chris: I would like to see more sci-fi settings where there’s pop culture that is in new mediums. Something that doesn’t translate to the internet or TV or radio or print, right. It’s like everybody sends each other these weird telepathic messages, and now we have telepathic memes. Oren: We make fun of Star Trek for seeming culturally stagnated because they only ever listen to classical music or watch movies that are in Paramount’s IP archive.  Chris: And that they pass around electronic tablets like they’re pieces of paper. Oren: They have a big stack of iPads they pass around. (laughing) No, but they also do, you know, the holo-novels were interesting, right? The series went on, and we saw that there were people who made these as−if not a job, because it’s the federation, you don’t necessarily need to work at least−as a serious passion. And that was an interesting concept. I liked that. Chris: That was good.  Oren: I’ve seen enough sci-fi where it feels like when they want to make something futuristic, they just take something that’s vaguely East Asian, and they’re like, “There! That’s the future now.” And it’s like, okay, I know we all read Neuromancer when we were kids, but maybe we could move past that a little bit. Bunny: And what gets popular in a society says a lot about that society. One thing I really like in games and stuff−which again, this is easier in games because there’s not so much… if it’s an open world game, you expect to be able to find things in that world, whereas in novels space is more at a premium and you can’t just throw things in that someone can run past and go “oh, ha ha”−but I love when games have artifacts around that you can find. Or posters for futuristic movies that don’t exist. You can be like, oh, this is an interesting look into this greater world that I’m just running around in.  Oren: It’s environmental storytelling, isn’t it?  Bunny: It is. That’s what we in the biz call it. Oren: All right. Well, with that I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close, because I’ve been distracted by a very cool in-universe ad for a product that I’m gonna go stare at for a little bit.  Chris: And if you enjoyed any of our references about references, consider supporting us on Patreon. Oren: Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel−speaking of pop culture. And then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek, also pop culture. We will talk to you next week. [Outro theme]

You’ve finished a draft. Now what? Oh right, you have to show it to other people. If that thought made you groan, we sympathize. Getting other people’s feedback is often a real challenge, and once you have the feedback, what are you supposed to do with it? We have some thoughts on all that, and with any luck, they’re useful ones! Show Notes Beta Reading  Reader Feedback Bringing Back a Dead Character Contrivance  Branching Stories Joseph Campbell Transcript Generously transcribed by Ace of Hearts. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is…  Chris: Chris Oren: …and… Bunny: Bunny. Oren: All right, so good news. My story is drafted and I’m working on a new idea where I’ll just put it in a drawer to age for a while until it’s like wine, and then it’s better ’cause it’s just been in there for a while, and then I’ll release it. That seems like a good way to handle a story that you’ve just finished. Chris: Of course, the important thing is to write for yourself. With heart! Bunny: I love it when a book has legs. You know when you kind of swish it around on your bookshelf? Oren: If it doesn’t have heart, then the legs won’t work. This metaphor, it’s all working together. It’s all connected, man. Bunny: It’s deeper than you can comprehend. 10/10, no feedback, end the podcast. Oren: The topic for today is getting feedback on your writing, which, uh… is hard. And I don’t like doing it. I would prefer if I didn’t have to. Bunny: [sarcastic] But Oren, people don’t care about me. They’re not taking days off work to read my doorstopper! Oren: You know, that is a problem. I mean, getting people to read a super long novel is not easy. People have lives and they have work and stuff. Chris: I would just say that I get into writing so that I can just sit alone staring at my computer. This means that I have to communicate with people. Oren: The worst! Bunny: Yuck, yucky people! Give me feedback, but ew!  Oren: Beta reading is a huge part of this, and we will definitely talk about beta reading or whatever stage of reading you want to call it. One thing that I’ve been thinking about a little bit, even before beta reading, is when you are asking questions about your story and trying to get advice, like it’s not even finished yet. You’re asking about ideas or trying to brainstorm. A lot of authors kind of struggle with this, and this is not a roast. I’m not gonna make fun of anybody because it’s difficult to know exactly what to ask. It can obstruct you getting feedback and make it harder for you to get any useful information from people when you’re asking. Bunny: I definitely made the mistake back in the day when I was a mere commenter sending an essay to you both in a Q&A being like, “Analyze my magic system, please! Does this make sense?” You’re not gonna get feedback that way. And you very kindly wrote back and were like, schedule a consultation maybe. I was like, “oh, I’m an 11th grader. I don’t think I can do that, but thanks!” Chris: There’s another blog that I read for a while where the blogger decided to try Q&As and he would get a question and then, like… kind of roast the person a little bit on the blog post, and I just thought that was really mean! It’s like the nature of getting questions from the internet means you get a lot of bad questions. People don’t know what kind of questions you need. They can’t read your mind, so you have to be nice to them. No surprise, this person did not continue doing Q&As. I’m guessing people did not really like that. Oren: I have seen this a few times and it always just kind of bothers me. We recently had to shift the Q&A to patron only, just because it was taking up too much of our time. Before we did that, we would get a lot of the same questions and yeah, it can get annoying. You’re like, “why are they asking me this? I’ve answered this question a bunch of times,” blah, blah, blah. Chris: Over time our guidance, like, here’s our checklist where we try to give you advice, it gets longer and longer. Oren: But it does weird me out a little bit when I see big blogs – you know, to the extent that there are any of those left – answering questions and seeming annoyed that you asked them. You guys have the Q&A form! Bunny: And answering them gives you traffic too. Oren: If you’re tired of answering these questions, you could just not. You know, there are a few questions where when we get them, we’re like, we’ve answered this question before, and we just link to it. We don’t put those on the site. That is actually something that is an issue when you try to like, “Hey everybody, [huge block of text], now give me feedback.” There are situations where that is useful, but be aware of the context you’re in. Like that’s the sort of thing you do with a critique partner where you’re exchanging big blocks of text to review. Like, here judge my magic system and I’ll judge your politics system or whatever. Usually that’s not the sort of thing that you’re gonna ask a forum or a Discord channel or whatever. You wanna try to make these questions specific just because the chances that anyone’s gonna be able to give you very good feedback on something that long are pretty low. Chris: Yeah, I think it’s also important that people are signing up for the amount of work you’re asking them to do. So we have some guidance on our Discord server where Discord naturally limits the length of posts. If people are asking for advice on our server, it doesn’t get too long. But we have a rule about linking offsite, like off Discord. And expecting people to go somewhere else and read something somewhere else, and then give feedback. Because that’s just like an extra step that you’re asking people to do and who knows what kind of format it’s in on the other side, who knows how long it is, all those other things. And so the rules are just: tell people what you have for them to look at. Describe what it is, how long it is, the format it’s in. Anything they need to know about the experience. If it’s a horror story, obviously that’s important for them to know. And just get volunteers before you just vomit something huge right on a channel where people are chatting. That’s the last thing. Asking a lot of people who have not engaged with you and have not signed up for that. Oren: Like when you are asking for full feedback, that’s gonna be a whole thing. But for now, if you’re only looking for advice on this specific thing, pare down the information as much as you can and be abstract because chances are most of these people have not read your story. They are not gonna know any of the context. So if you get specific, they’re not gonna be able to answer your questions ’cause they don’t know the context. But if you try to give them the context, that’s almost certainly too much information. Bunny: Seeing walls of text, just a general rule of the internet: the longer the wall of text, the fewer people will read it. Chris: I mean, when we did Q&A, we specifically had a 300 word limit, and it was kind of like, okay, if you can’t explain the situation in 300 words, then it is just way too elaborate and lengthy for just a quick question answer. Oren: So for example, if I were J. R. R. Tolkien, and I wanted to know if people thought it was a good idea to bring Gandalf back in The Two Towers. I wouldn’t try to give the whole explanation for how he’s coming back, because again, that probably isn’t gonna mean anything to most people. They’d say something like, I have a major character who appeared to die in book 1, but we never saw his body. Would it be contrived if he returned in book 2 after going through a series of divine interventions off screen? And the answer is yes, it would be, and it was. You can kind of answer your own question that way when you abstract it and stop trying to add all of these excuses you’ve put in, sometimes that can help. Chris: One piece of context that is really useful for characters is just what is their general role in the story, because sometimes that can matter, like whether they’re a protagonist or an antagonist. That can come with some very different rules for what you need to do with, you know, side character, mentor, love, interest, those really general categories, they only take a second to put down. That is for anything about characters can be very relevant information. Oren: Stuff like, I’m looking for advice with the climax. Specifying where in the story you are can also be helpful. So anyway, that’s the basic advice I can give if you’re just asking for a quick question. The sad part of this is that the ability to know what to ask is something you will develop as you get better at writing. So there is a certain amount of the chicken and egg thing. Just focus on the most important information and don’t try to deliver everything at once. Chris: If you’re asking a character or plotting question and you’re at the point where you’ve learned some basics of what plot structure is, then that’s kind of the information that’s usually most useful to convey with your questions. Instead of like tons of specifics about everybody’s circumstance, the general like, oh, I’m at the climax, or I’m trying to do a surprise reveal, or I’m at the opening, whatever it is. What you learn is what you need to tell, which is why it’s so tricky. Of course. Oren: Beta reading is of course the big, you know, elephant at the end of the writing process as it were. It’s hard, but you gotta do it. So how do we pick our beta readers? Chris: Because a lot of people get feedback from other writers, it comes with its own upsides and downsides, and I think it’s worth comparing that a little bit. The thing about writers is it’s possible for them to have a better understanding of what you’re trying to do if you tell them, and that sometimes they’re knowledgeable, but they’re also just a lot more likely, I think, to try to give advice and that doesn’t necessarily make it good advice. Lots of writers love their writing groups and think they’re very helpful, and that’s great. Obviously, writers teaching each other is much cheaper than hiring an editor. We are, of course, always cringing because we hear things that aren’t a good thing for people to tell each other. Oren: You hear stories of people giving the most wild advice in writers’ groups, and I’ve also personally seen this, right? This is not just a thing where I’m depending on other people, you know, I’ve gone to writers’ groups and heard like, “you should drop that entire plot arc.” And it is like, wait, should you? You barely know anything about that plot arc. How can you suggest that? Chris: When we’re doing editing, we also ask a lot of questions about what the writer wants and what they’re trying to do. And writers helping each other are very likely to skip over that part and not pay attention to what kind of story the person wants it to be. We generally are supportive of beta readers because we feel like they are a little bit more malleable. They’re less likely to tell you what to do, especially if you ask them not to make suggestions and more likely to just tell you what they experienced. The downside of that, of course, is that it does leave you to figure out, this is what my readers are saying, but like what does that mean and how do I fix it? Bunny: I’m all right if readers ask prompting questions. Like, “what if” questions just to get me thinking. I think that can be super helpful. Maybe I’m biased ’cause I also try to do this when I read other people’s work. Like this is something that occurred to me. What if you did this instead of this? What if you did the reveal here instead of later? Like, I’m not trying to prescribe anything to them, but I’ve found that that can be a helpful consideration, like a way to get you the creative juices flowing because genuinely having other people’s perspectives and ideas can help you cook the story in ways that putting it in the single pot of your brain wouldn’t, I don’t know. Chris: And then eat the metaphor, mmm! I think communicating what you want obviously is really important, especially if you know you’re in a place where you really need positive- If you’re feeling really down and you really just need positive feedback. You know, for me, oftentimes I’m in a stage by the time I get to beta reading where those kinds of questions are no longer helpful for me and leave me wondering why somebody said that. Like, did you suggest this because you didn’t like something? That’s my biggest problem with suggestions is usually they’re not something I’m gonna do and that’s fine. But if a reader is bothered by something… and for some people, they just can’t help it. They don’t know how to express what they’re bothered by, right? They can’t identify what it is about the work, and so it’s easier for them to make a suggestion than it is to put their finger on why they’re making the suggestion. But I think the problem with suggestions is they have a tendency to replace the information that a writer often needs, which is, well, why did you make that suggestion? Are you a little bored here? Or something else? Bunny: And certainly when you’re giving your draft out to others to read, you need to know what you’re trying to get back from them. Overall impressions are good, but I’ve found that, you know, the more specific you can be, I guess this is a balance. You don’t wanna be super specific, but you also don’t just want them to read the story and then kind of circle it back and be like, well, like that’s also not super helpful to you. Oren: I do like a little more guidance than that. Bunny: I mean, I just had to do this recently and Oren, you were one of my beta readers for a script for this dinosaur game. Oren: Yeah, yeah, that was fun! Bunny: A couple other folks from the Discord read that, which was very kind of you. What we did for that was at the end of each, essentially, level of the script, we gave a questionnaire, and the questionnaire was surprisingly difficult to design because you have to be very careful about avoiding leading questions. Like we had a villain reveal and we wanted to get people’s thoughts on what they thought of the character that would be the villain. But you can’t indicate too hard that there’s something up with that character because that means that the reader will be like, “oh, there’s something up with that character.” Oren: You just say, hypothetically, if this character was important later, and then at the end you say, now please, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, beta readers, ignore what was just said. Don’t pay any attention to it. Forget you heard that. Chris: Yes. Uh, jury, just, uh, forget it. Oren: That’s how memory works. Bunny: I think we literally said, what do you think is the deal with this character? I think that’s how we ended up phrasing it. You know, another thing that is useful to get information from beta readers on is how much they understand unusual terms in the world, right? You wanna make sure that they’re on the same page as that. And we had a couple of unusual terms referring to the moons in the world, and so we wanted to poll beta readers on whether they knew what those things are. So you can say, what are X and Y? Or you could say, who are X and Y? I think we went with “what are,” because they’re moons. But if someone was like, oh, they’re characters and didn’t realize until the question that they’re what’s and not who’s, then you’ve missed an important piece of information. Oren: I have always tried to come up with some questions to ask for things that if there’s something wrong, it might be that the reader doesn’t specifically notice, so they won’t think to report it. So I tend to ask questions like, do you feel like you know what the characters look like? Does the outcome of this storyline seem to matter to you? That sort of thing. Those are informations that sometimes a reader, especially if they know what sort of thing a story needs, might think of, but they also might just not notice the absence. They might not notice that they don’t know what the characters look like or that they aren’t super invested in what’s going on here. So that’s the sort of question I found can be helpful. Chris: Certainly if you have any concerns, putting questions at the end makes them less likely to be biased while they are reading. Oren: Yeah, always at the end. I sometimes put them in between like sections if it’s something at the beginning, and I don’t wanna wait until they get to the end ’cause they might have forgotten by then. But you don’t ask them questions about something that’s relevant that hasn’t happened yet, unless you’re being sneaky about it. If you’re sneaky, that could change things. But you know, you don’t just be like, “Hey, what would you think if that character died later?” Bunny: I think I’ve also found that depending on the number of people reading your story, which is probably gonna be a small number, we were quite lucky to get as many people as we did reading that script. But I found that a useful rule of thumb is that if one person brings something up and maybe is confused about it, it might not be a big deal. Like, file that one away. If two people bring it up, take note. If there are three or more notes on that same thing, you’re probably gonna have to change it. And of course that depends on what the thing is, but as I’ve gone through writing workshops and stuff like that. That has been a helpful general guideline in helping me parse feedback and what I need to focus on most. Chris: Especially if you were in a writing group, people can be really opinionated and besides a writing group, oftentimes for people, the first person to look at their story is their significant other, and I know we all want to please the people close to us. But sometimes people, I think, put a little too much stock in that one person who can also have their own weird idiosyncrasies and personal preferences just like everybody else. Oren: [sarcastic] Chris, it’s not my fault that every story you give me is perfect and shouldn’t be changed. You’re trying to, you know, make this about my biases. Maybe you are the biased one. Chris: Every time I talk about how I wanna tweak something to make it better, Oren argues against it. I’m serious. My own stories. Bunny: Oren, that’s not your job! Chris: He is like, “no, it’s perfect the way it is.” Or like if I get editorial feedback from another editor, you know, I’ll be like, oh, hey, this editor made this like great point. And then I can tweet this and he will be like, “hmm, don’t change it! Editor’s wrong!” Oren: Sometimes they are wrong. Chris: Don’t change anything based on one person unless they, like, sometimes I get feedback from one person and it’s like, okay, I can totally understand why they thought this, and it’s just a little tweak, a few different words. I have no problem making a tiny change because it’s easy. For anything significant, one person’s opinion is not something that you should be making compromises for or significant revisions for because everybody is different and there’s just outliers all over the place when it comes to readers. Bunny: Except if I’m the one. My suggestions are enshrined and you must follow them. Chris: But one thing I just want people to look out for, if you have a writing group that meets together and talks where they influence each other, what can happen in there is you’ll get some people who are like, “Hey, I didn’t really like this thing, I felt like it could be different.” And then other people will reflexively argue against them. Like, “no, it’s fine! There’s nothing wrong!” The people who like something don’t actually out vote the other people. There’s no negating somebody’s experience, and that’s where we go to the Pareto improvement. We’ve got like several people who didn’t like something and several people who thought it was fine. Can you make a change that will please the people who didn’t like it without making it worse for the people who did like it? People typically have experienced this story alone first before they talk about it with other people. Somebody else’s vote of confidence doesn’t get rid of the people who didn’t have a perfect experience. Oren: It can also happen in the other direction. You can have someone be like, this part was really cool for these reasons. And if that person is charismatic, other people might just change their opinion to go along with what that person is saying. I have seen this happen so many times that I kind of don’t trust giving feedback in group settings anymore just because it feels like the first person to speak can really influence what everyone else says. And maybe that’s not true, but it certainly seems like it’s true. Even in a chat situation, I can just kind of predict how the chat’s gonna go based on who the first person to reply is. Bunny: For any faults I had, I will say that my senior thesis workshop group, in addition to being small, which helped, and moderated by the professor, had everyone read and annotate the section we were critiquing every day, and then write up our feedback and print it out so that once we get there, we have our initial impressions in hand unchangeable to hand over to the other person after we discuss it. So perhaps that can be a strategy. Chris: Yeah, that’s a good move. Bunny: If you’re worried about a particularly charismatic feedback giver trampling or manipulating everyone else, evilly. Oren: Narcissistically. Oh boy.  Bunny: Gaslighting, even. Oren: People react to each other, hot take! And sometimes that’s gonna distort the results of what you might otherwise get. Chris: They can be convinced to go along with what the other person says, or they can be almost intimidated into silence in a subtle way. It’s like, oh, everybody likes this, so I just won’t speak up ’cause I don’t wanna rain on everyone’s parade or vice-versa. Bunny: I don’t want to evaporate the rain. Oren: In general when it comes to beta readers, I do recommend screening your beta readers if you have that option to make sure that you’re getting the kind of reader who you might actually want to read your book. You don’t give your high seas pirate book to someone who doesn’t like boats, and you don’t give your courtly manners book to someone who is really big on action and gets bored without fight scenes. You might not always have that option because not everyone has a big group of people they can call on for beta reading, but if you can, definitely do that. That’s one of the big advantages of using people you know, as opposed to just going to an online critique site. Then you just get the Wild West. You have no idea what is motivating any of these people to say what they’re saying. Bunny: They might think Joseph Campbell has some good points. Chris: I know not everybody has the benefit of friends with similar tastes in books, but I do think that often if you do have those, that is the best source of feedback because their tastes are similar to yours and because they’re friends, your friends are more likely to read your book and try to give the feedback that you ask them to as opposed to whatever feedback they want to give, take a little time for you. That kind of thing. Oren: I mean, this is basically the place where you try to figure out how to give things back in these relationships, right? That is one of the reasons why it can also be useful to do this with writers. Even though as we’ve discussed, writers can have their own baggage. If your friend is a writer and you beta read for them, they can beta read for you. And you know, that is a very easy way to keep this a two-sided transaction. But your friends probably aren’t all writers and so, I don’t know, give them cookies or something, be a good friend and they’re more likely to want to help you. Bunny: They’re not writers. They’re mentally sound and have real lives. Chris: The other thing that I think can come up, again especially if you are encouraging people to ask questions, is what kind of changes you make to the work based on their feedback. One thing is don’t try to answer everybody’s questions in the work. Some people will wonder about things, but if you answer every question that people wonder about, you can add too much exposition to the story and just bog it down and tell things that most people just don’t need to know. If you do find yourself getting defensive and arguing with somebody, there’s something wrong and you may need to change what you’re doing. Obviously, we all get defensive sometimes. It’s totally natural, but I think the goal is to eventually get over the defensiveness, do what you need to do to do that, and then get curious about why they reacted the way they did by asking more questions and finding out why they perceived something the way that they did. Oren: If you work with the same people often enough, if you’re doing well and writing a lot, you can get a sense of, “this person is very critical” and “this person tends to be very praising” and you know, you can calibrate accordingly, right? That doesn’t mean you throw out the critical comments of the person who’s more critical or just disregard whenever the nice person praises your story, but you can evaluate them. You can know that maybe you should give a little more weight to when the nice person critiques something because you know that they really mean it. A little more weight to when the critical person praises things. You know, stuff like that. Chris: Definitely don’t put in exposition arguing with them. Bunny: Nothing is cringier than when you read a book and you’re like, I can hear the comment that spawned this little tirade and the narration about how all this makes sense, actually. Let me just give it a couple hundred more words and I’ll prove you wrong, invisible comment! Chris: I mean, if somebody’s confused and they just don’t know something, and they really do need information, that happens. But thinking like, “oh, no! Well, I can justify this by putting in more exposition.” It’s probably not gonna work. It’s just gonna make you look silly. When it comes to defensiveness, another thing when we select the people who are giving us feedback, and some of us have more control over that than others. Sometimes people get defensive because somebody is actually being a little condescending or a little rude. You know, I personally had an experience where I found that I didn’t feel the need to argue with almost any of my beta readers, except for these two guys, who turned out to be guys who were pretty close to me in my life, hence why they were beta reading. And I realized I couldn’t resist arguing with them because they were actually condescending in the way they responded, and so I just stopped using them as readers. Problem solved. Oren: That’s the right choice. And then, you know, you’ll also just have the occasional beta reader who’s not doing something wrong, but you’re still upset because they critiqued your story. And how dare they, frankly. The solution to that is to, you know, cry on your floor for a little while and then send them a nice thank you email. Bunny: With cookies. Chris: Yeah, go complain to a friend, loved one or whatever for a while, and then be nice. Oren: Well, with the evergreen advice to be nice, we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If you got some useful tips from this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

This week we have the pleasure of talking to a prolific author with lots of speculative fiction under his belt! That’s right, Jim C. Hines joins us to discuss his career and journey, from the early attempts at a magnum opus, all the way to his latest book about kite fighting in a world of eternal wind. Also, some of the strangest publishing drama you’ve ever heard. Show Notes Kitemaster Rise of the Spider Goddess Libriomancer  Goblin Tales Goblin Quest Book Cover Poses Magnum Opus  They’re Made Out of Meat Fighting Kites DAW Books Transcript Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.  [Opening Theme] Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is … Oren: Oren. Chris: And we have a very special guest today: Jim C. Hines. He’s published over twenty novels, over fifty short stories, and he won a Hugo Award for best fan writer after he took pictures of himself posing like the women on book covers! Oren: That was great. [Laughs] Jim: Thank you. Chris: And apparently, as I recall, that gave you some back pain? Jim: Some of the poses, yes. Trying to get both the chest and the backside on the same image. Um, yeah. You definitely need some ibuprofen afterward. Chris: Of course. ‘Cause the reader’s gotta see both boobs and butt. Jim: Well, of course! Oren: Look, the spine must be sacrificed. That’s just the way it works. Jim: Right. Oren: Well, welcome to our podcast. Jim: Thank you! Thank you for having me. Oren: So, we have some questions that we’re going to ask because you have written a lot of books and you have a very cool writing career, and we wanna know what you’ve learned over that time, and we wanna share that with our listeners in the hopes that we will all benefit from your wisdom. Jim: Wait, I was supposed to have learned something? Oren: Yeah. You know, they tell you that at the end, right? They’re like, “Hey, can you come tell people what you’ve learned?” And you’re like, scrambling. Eh? Probably something, you know?  Jim: So why didn’t you gimme a heads up about this thirty years ago when I started? Oren: First we have a term that we use a lot at Mythcreants that we call ‘the magnum opus.’ We use it ironically. It kind of means a mega project that is also usually the writer’s first, or maybe close to first, book that they start on. It’s really ambitious that they aren’t prepared for. It seems to be pretty common. Have you done that? Did you–when you were first starting off–did you have a magnum opus? Jim: Oh boy… All: [Chuckling] Jim: I had two, really. Oren: Oh! With the Magnum Opi. Jim: The first one, it was the first book I wrote. I was a junior in college and it was this grand fantasy adventure of my Dungeons & Dragons character. Chris: Yeah! [Laughs] Jim: His name was Nacor the Purple. He was just, very much the stereotypical cool elf character. And every night I would do classes or do some homework, and then go sit down and write more about this D&D character. And it was, looking back, terrible. It was full of cliché. It was sloppy, shallow world building. There was no real consistency. You know, he has a falcon companion that I think at one point becomes an owl. It was awful, but I didn’t know that. I just knew that I was having fun. I was loving getting into this character and writing all these cool action scenes and things that I thought were very dramatic and even emotional. And then – Oren: Well, it sounds like you discovered that the owl familiar had shape-shifting abilities and could become a falcon. That’s cool! That’s like a, you know, an emergent property, I would say.  Jim: Now, see, if I was writing it now, that’s exactly the BS explanation I would go for. It’s like, oh yeah, that’s totally, um … What I actually ended up doing with it, I think probably about ten years back, I had volunteered for a fundraiser that if, you know, if you raise this much or bid on this, I will read this awful fan fiction of my character while dressed as the character. Oren: Oh wow. Chris: Oh wow! That’s great. Jim: And then when I read it and posted the reading, people wanted to know more, which is like, really? My readers are masochists? What’s going on? So I ended up self-publishing it. It’s called Rise of the Spider Goddess, and it’s annotated. Chris: Oh. Jim: It’s the manuscript exactly as I wrote it. But then twenty-years-older and more experienced me doing the mystery science theater treatment throughout. Just all the snide comments, all of the, “Oh God, what was I thinking?” Chris: [chuckles] That sounds delightful. Jim: It was kind of fun. And, you know, I do like putting it out there as just reassurance that we all suck when we start and we get better. But it’s okay to suck when you’re starting out. Oren: This kids, is why you should never get rid of the novel draft, no matter how bad it is. You never know when you might need it for a fundraiser. Jim: Exactly. People might actually pay money to suffer through that. Oren: And you said there was another one? Jim: There was. There was a book called Hamadryad that I was trying to be … You know, this was a few years later. It was more ambitious. It was dealing with female characters and how they’re written and sexism and objectification and just getting into a lot of cultural issues. And I was totally not ready to write it. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oh man. We encounter so many writers that really wanna take on important issues, but you know, when you start writing, that’s the hardest time to take on something that’s, you know. It’s ambitious in its own right because it’s sensitive. Jim: Years later, the character came back in part of the Libriomancer books. But yeah, that was like ten more years of learning how to write, learning how to get a little deeper with the themes, learning how to not be completely heavy handed about it all. Oren: [satirically] I’m sixteen and I have just heard that religious discrimination is bad. I’m gonna write the quintessential novel about Islamophobia. Jim: [chuckles] Yeah. Oren: Right? Like, let he who has never done this cast the first stone. Jim: And it’s – I mean, you don’t wanna discourage it because it’s great that sixteen-year-old you has discovered this, and I’m very happy that you’re exploring. But yeah … Oren: It’s good that you want to, and then eventually you will learn the expertise and you can probably do something that will actually work a little better. Jim: Hopefully. Oren: Yeah. Like when I get clients who wanna do this, I always encourage why they want to and their motivations, and then I try to help them avoid the big mistakes that we all make. Right?  Chris: I mean, I try to encourage people to start by depicting the world they want to see. Right? Instead of taking on all of those difficult topics when they start. But yeah, no. We’ve all – my magnum opus was overly edgy and not trying to comment enough. So I’ve definitely done worse.  Jim: I think we’ve all been there, you know, one way or another. Chris: So, your list of short stories is very impressive. And I noticed going through your bibliography that the earliest one I spotted was Whisper of a Dream published in 1997, which is nine years before your earliest novel that you have listed. Jim: Yup. Chris: And it looks like you’re still writing them. So I’m always telling people to write more short stories, and I would just love to hear more about, you know, what you feel short story writing has done for you. Whether it’s, you know, your personal happiness or forwarding your career. You know, what you get from doing that? Jim: Oh, that’s a good question. When I was starting out, you know, mid ‘90s, that was the very common advice. That was what I was still hearing from the established writers is, “No, no. Start with short stories. Break in there, and then you’ll build your reputation, build your name, and then you’ll be able to sell a novel.” I think there was a shift going on at the time, and it didn’t really work that way anymore. Chris: I mean, if there was a straightforward path to success, everybody would do it and then it wouldn’t work anymore. [Laughs] Jim: Well, unless the path was hard. Chris: Yeah. It’s true. Very true. Jim: But yeah, it’s – most of the writers I talked to, it’s like, how did you break in? It’s, “Well, it’s a weird story.” Chris: Ooh, we love weird stories. Jim: It’s never just, oh, it’s a straightforward, “I did this.” It’s some weird circuitous mess. But that said, I mean, I enjoyed writing short stories. I learned a lot about structure, about plotting. Some of the basics of, just like, how to write dialogue, how to structure a paragraph; how to use a semicolon. It didn’t necessarily carry over directly to novel writing because a short story is a short story and a novel is a novel. And they’re different beasts. But some of the basic skills definitely helped when I started doing novels. And I still do them occasionally. I tend more toward the books because the books reach more people, they sell better. They, you know – I have children and cats to feed. But the short stories, they’re fun break sometimes. You know, it doesn’t take a full year for me to write one. I can explore ideas that maybe wouldn’t work at a hundred thousand words, but 3,000 words, this works great. Like, there is one that was a parody of Sesame Street where a werewolf shows up. Chris & Oren: [Laughter] Jim: I wrote it as a script for the show, and there’s just no way I could have done that at book length. But much shorter? This was fun. This was funny. It didn’t get too old by the end. This was great. You know, there are things you can do in the short format that you just can’t really do at novel length. Chris: It sounds like that, you know, was a good way to practice in your earlier years. Jim: To some extent, yeah. I do kind of wish I had started writing novels sooner, so I could have gotten better at that more quickly. But honestly, I can’t complain. You know, I’m happy with the short fiction output I’ve had. I’m happy getting my stuff out there in different … Oh! I’m blanking on words. Professional writer here. In different anthologies, different magazines. Just different ways for people to find the stuff. Oren: Well, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, because you’re absolutely right about there being some things that you can do in short stories that just would not work for novels. I’ve even run into a couple of clients who were trying something like that where it really felt like what they wanted was a short story that had a very cool high-novelty premise that works for, you know, about three or four thousand words and then it stops working. Jim: Yeah. Terry Bisson did They’re Made Out of Meat. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Yep! Jim: And it’s brilliant. And it can’t be – it would never work if you kept dragging it out. Chris: Yeah. Jim: But at that length, it’s perfect. Oren: I do have a short-story-related question before we go to the next one actually. Jim: Sure. Oren: Have you ever thought of doing like, an anthology of – and maybe you already have and this is an obvious question to Chris – but an anthology of short stories that are like, you know, they’re not chapters in a novel, but they have the same characters and take place in the same world. Is that something that you’ve looked at?  Jim: Sort of a mosaic style? Oren: Yeah. Jim: The closest I’ve come, there’s a – sort of a chapbook thing called Goblin Tales that’s got five of my goblin related short stories. Chris: And was that published after the Goblin Trilogy? Jim: After, yes. Yeah, I’ve thought about it. I’m not sure I would … I’ve never seriously wanted to dive into it, but it’s been at the back of my mind sometimes. Oren: Okay, cool. Thank you. I just, I’m always trying to find out information on that. ‘Cause that’s another thing that my clients are often, you know, looking to do and they want to know how viable is this in the market. And, you know, all I can tell them is, well, short stories are hard in general. Yeah. So I’m always trying to find more specific information on that. Chris: Yeah. I will say a lot of times when I see short stories on the market and anthologies like that, it is as a follow up to a novel. ‘Cause then you already have a fan base, right? And people are like, “Oh, I’m out of the Goblin novels. I feel sad. Oh, I can read some short stories! It’s a nice way to wean fans off of the characters once you’re pretty much done.” Jim: Well and sometimes, you know, you’ve written these books, you’ve written these characters. And you know, I find sometimes I just miss them. Chris: Mm-hmm. Jim: You know, I want to go back and play in that world again. Or there’s an idea that didn’t quite make it into the books, but we can put it into a short story and get it out there. Oren: Very cool. Alright, so my next question is when you were, you know, still learning, did you go through any periods of disillusionment when you realized you weren’t as far along as you’d hoped? Jim: Oh, I love that you phrase this in past tense. All: [Laughter] Oren: Yeah. Never happens to any of us in the present. Don’t worry about it. Jim: Right. No, that’s been there pretty much – won’t say from the very beginning. ‘Cause when I was writing that first really bad D&D magnum opus thing, I thought it was great. And my girlfriend at the time liked it, which looking back was probably another sign of her … questionable judgment. But – Chris & Oren: [Laughter] Jim: Then a few years into it, when I started submitting and getting all the rejection letters, there was definitely a lot of discouragement. And in some ways it was harder in those first few years because I didn’t realize how – well, how bad I was. Oren: Yeah.  Jim: I didn’t know how much I had to learn. I couldn’t look at my own work and see the problems. And then – I don’t know – five, six, seven years in, I guess it was like flipping a switch. And you know, maybe it came from doing some writing workshops, working with other people, learning to critique. I started seeing the problems and you know, this was in some ways very discouraging. But in some ways this was great because, oh! I can fix that. I can go in and make it better. But the discouragement, the depression, the feeling like I’m not as good as I want to be. That’s always there, off and on. Even now, thirty years since I started doing this, you know? I am currently working on the first draft of a new book. And my first drafts tend to be really bad. It’s just, you know, vomit up all the ideas onto the page. We’ll fix it later. Oren: As is the nature of a first draft. Chris: Right. I mean, I might argue that by their nature they … [laughs] Jim: Right. But as I’m sitting there writing it, I’m still having that thing in my mind, that voice that says, “Oh, so this is the book that everybody’s going to realize you’ve been faking it this whole time and all of your other stuff,” you know? “You’re this horrible, terrible writer that you’ve just somehow managed to fool people.” Oren: Well, I mean, it’s gotta happen to us all. Eventually, you know, eventually they will figure it out.  Jim: Right. We’re just trying to postpone it for as long as possible. Oren: I have a follow up question, because you mentioned that you gained the ability to see what was wrong and that motivated you to want to make changes and wanna fix things. Was that, like, your main way of getting through the disappointment or did you have something else going on? Jim: Ooh. Getting through the disappointments? Um …  Chris: Tell us your coping strategies. We need them. Jim: Ice cream. Oren: Very good, very good. Jim: Probably the worst: the first time I almost sold a book to a major publisher and I had gotten all excited about it, and then they pulled the offer. Chris: Ouch! Oren: Yeesh! Jim: And I crashed hard. You know, looking back at it, it’s like, no, Jim, you wrote a book that a major publisher, at least initially, wanted to buy. This is good. Chris: Right. It was a sign you were getting closer, but – Jim: But, no. It’s probably the worst writing depression crash that I’ve had. And it lasted a month or two and the coping mechanism that brought me out of it was the birth of my second child.  Oren: Wow. Jim: I don’t necessarily recommend this for every time you get a rejection. Chris: [Laughter] Oren: Yeah. You can see how that might have … other consequences! Jim: Right! That could cause other forms of depression and overwhelm. Chris: I don’t know. Maybe you can just create your own readership. Jim: [riffing] Oh honey? Chris: Eventually you’ll have enough. Jim: Yeah, I’m fifty-one. I don’t think that’s happening at this point. Chris: Thank you. That’s very touching. We have a lot of people – obviously a lot of writers go through this disillusionment phase. I think, because a lot of us are lied to, basically, by culture about what it entails. Jim: Oh, yeah! Chris: And so, you know, all of those movies about like, “Oh, just write with your heart!” Jim: Oh God. Chris: [laughing] And it just magically assembles itself. Jim: Just sit down and the words flow. And a year from now, you’ll be in your limousine with your agent sipping champagne as you drive to your book launch. Chris: Mm-hmm. And man, if we just treated it like other professions, you know? Jim: Mm-hmm. Chris: I think people would be so much better off. So yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. So we’d like to hear about your writing process. Is it different now than when you started? I’ve heard from many writers that over process, I mean, over time they tend to do a little bit more planning when they find something – “Oh, I wish I had accounted for that.” And then they plan a little more. Is that you? Or do you have a, you know – Is it pure chaos? Is it very orderly? What’s your style?  Jim: It’s definitely more chaos than I would like. I’ve gotta have an outline. You know? I learned that pretty early on. My brain is not big enough for a whole book. I can’t hold it all in my head. I don’t – if I just write from the seat of my pants, I meander all over the place and I don’t know where I’m going. The problem I run into is, you know, what my process has evolved into is I write the outline, then I start writing the book. Then I get about 10,000 words into the book and I realize my outline is broken. So I go back and I write a new outline. Then I write the next part of the book. Get maybe halfway through, maybe even two-thirds, if I’m lucky. Break the outline again and you know, repeat until you finally have a messy first draft that I can work with. But I would love to be able to get the outline right the first time! And I keep feeling like, okay, you’ve written twenty plus books. You should know how to do this. But I think part of the process with every book is learning how to write that book. Because whatever you figured out on the last one may or may not apply. Chris: I’ve certainly seen many books by authors where there’s one book that just does really well because the author just happened to fit in that perfect formula. And then you see them just make a slight change to the books and suddenly it doesn’t, you know, work together as well anymore. And yeah, right. Stories are so niche in how they work. So it sounds like for you, you feel like when you ride into a roadblock, it’s something that you could have accounted for in the outline as opposed to you came up with a new idea and then started wandering away from where your outline was. Jim: It’s a bit of both. Sometimes it’s realizing that what I put into my outline was stupid or obvious or boring. And sometimes it’s more like you were saying that, you know, the outline is perfectly fine but, oh! wouldn’t it be cool if this happened? Or this character that I didn’t think was very important is a lot of fun. I’m gonna write them another scene and see what happens. Yeah, there’s definitely some discovery to it, at least for me. Chris: Sounds like a good way for your outline to break; if you find something fun and you want more of it. Jim: Hopefully … yeah. That’s a good way of looking at it. Hopefully it’s breaking better. Chris: Yeah, and like going back to your outline, I mean, that just sounds like the right move. You know, you find something new and fun, you go back and you know, account for it. Yeah, that sounds great. I mean that would not be something that I would worry about, but certainly with other things, you know, again, sometimes people just take more and more notes every time they outline. But you know, it doesn’t work for everybody. Jim: And this, it’s a frustrating process a lot of the time. But, it seems to work for me. Readers don’t see all of the outlines and all of the drafts. They just see the finished product. So, however you get there.  Oren: Once you have the first draft, you know, the one that we’ve been describing is, you know, often very messy. Is there a single process that you go through for revision or is it different with every book? Jim: There’s not a single identical process. Usually when I finish the first draft. At that point, I have a much better sense of the story and what it’s about and who these characters are. So I’ll read through it. I’ll make notes. But most of the time I’m pretty anxious and eager to just jump in and start writing it again from page one. And I’ll use that first draft as sort of the new outline and the new basis. But now I know where it’s going and now I can develop and add in all the description, and start layering in theme and foreshadowing and inside jokes and all of that fun stuff. Oren: Yeah, we love it. Jim: Yeah. The second draft is so much more fun than the first draft. Chris: That’s great. Do we have time for maybe one more? Oren: Yeah, I think we have time for one more ’cause we wanna make sure … Chris: Any preferences, Jim? Do you have a preference for what question if we have time for one more?  Jim: I do not. Choose your favorite.  Oren: So we’ll go with our last question ’cause we wanna hear about your upcoming project.  Jim: Okay. Oren: Tell us the story of how you got your first ‘trad’ publishing deal for a novel. Jim: Well, that would be Goblin Quest. That was the one that I was talking about that had the very tragic backstory. Goblin Quest was weird. Most books take me about a year to write. I wrote and revised Goblin Quest in six weeks. Chris: Wow. Oren: Damn. Jim: I had just moved back to Michigan. I was unemployed. I had no social life. This is all part of it. But yeah, I wrote it and it was the book where I stopped worrying about what I’m supposed to be writing and just had fun with it. And then started sending it out to publishers, sending it out to agents, collecting all of the rejections and getting on with life. Eventually, a smaller publisher said, “Hey, we like this. We’ll pay you a small advance. We’ll do a library edition. We’ll get this book out there.”  And by this time, you know, it had been rejected by pretty much everyone. There were one or two publishers that had been sitting on it for a year and a half with no response. So I figured, okay, this is great. I’ll have a book. I did email those last few holdouts saying, “Hey, just letting you know, you’ve probably moved on long ago, but I got a deal. So withdrawing the book.” Another year passes, the book comes out from the small press and two months later the publisher who had had it at this point for probably two and a half years sends me an email with revisions saying, “These are the changes, these are the things we want you to work on.” Oren: Oh! Jim: “And by the way, we wanna buy this book.” Oren: [laughing] Oh no. Jim: And I just say, “Wait, what? No. I already – but you. I can’t.” But – And so for a while. There was this sense that – well, the small publisher put out a hardcover, but they didn’t buy mass market rights, so maybe you could take the mass market rights, maybe I can salvage this. I was able to get an agent through this, just by querying a few agents and saying, “Hey, I have a really weird situation and I need help.” Oren: Yeah. Chris: Yeah. Jim: And Joshua at JABberwocky – I still remember the phone call. You know, he called and said, “We’d like to help you with your problem.”  The deal with that publisher fell through. Chris: Oh. Jim: I went into my depression until my kid was born. But I had an agent now, and the agent was saying, “Look, you’ve done this once, you can do it again. Write the next book. We’ll still be here.” And I ended up writing another Goblin book ’cause I didn’t know what else to do. Oren: Well it did get a publisher’s attention, right? Jim: So yeah, why not? So the agent sent it out to some publishers and we got some interest from two of them. And one of them said, “I really like this book. It’s a lot of fun. But it feels like book two,” you know? “It feels like it’s a sequel to something.” And my agent said, “Well, it’s funny you should mention that, because we do still have mass market paperback rights for this first book.” And DAW Books ended up buying both of them. Chris: Oh, that’s great! Oren: Nice. Jim: So it eventually worked out even better. But it was just bumpy and ugly and not how I would recommend breaking in. Chris: At the same time, it sounds like you did the right things, right? Part of the trickiness of the situations, agents want you to have a publisher. Publishers want you to have an agent. Jim: Right. Chris: So you’re able to use what interest you got to get an agent, you know? That sounds like you made the right moves, even though it was hard. Jim: I was trying to. And when you’re new, you don’t know how – you don’t know what the rules are. Did I screw up by going to an agent? Did I … should I have not submitted it until I got the official rejection two and a half years later or … ? It was rough. I don’t look back and think, oh, I really messed up here. It was just messy. Oren: It does sound really hard, but – I don’t know if I would say it worked out. But I’m glad that it had a positive ending at least. Jim: I mean, in the long run, I think it worked out great. I have been very, very happy with DAW. Almost all of my books have been with them. You know, I’ve been with them almost twenty years now. So I’m pleased. Chris: That’s fantastic. Jim: Yeah. Chris: So do you wanna tell us about Kitemaster? Jim: Sure. Ironically, not with DAW. This one was a smaller press title, because it’s hard to summarize. It doesn’t have a nice pitch line like my next. My next book with DAW in October is Buffy the Vampire Slayer crossed with The Golden Girls. Chris: [laughing] That sounds very new. Jim: Right. But Kitemaster, it doesn’t have that punchy one-sentence summary. Chris: That ‘high concept.’ Jim: Yeah. It’s this fantasy world, which is very much built on my sense of wonder. It started out, just because I read something about fighting kites and thought, oh, that’s really cool. Oren: They are really cool. So, you know, good instinct. Jim: I know, right? So I built a world around that. Where wind is eternal, it never stops. And so all of the technology and magic is sort of wind based. And you have ‘kitemasters’ who can manipulate the wind and control the things that fly on it. And you have kiteships, which – the physics were a little tricky, but – if you put a kitemaster on and mix in a little magic, you can fly around on these ships with huge ‘kitesails.’ And you’ve got stars that don’t actually work like the stars in our world. They’re more of a river of stars that flow through the night faster or slower. It depends on the wind. Oren: That’s gonna make horoscopes hard. Jim: Yeah, they don’t do horoscopes. Oren: That sounds super cool though. Jim: And you’ve got dragons who are, like, half a mile long who live in the stars. And when a star falls, the dragons eat them to keep the stars from hitting the world. Chris: Oh, that’s cool. Jim: It’s all of these ideas that made me happy. That made me think, oh cool, I wanna see that. And then layered onto this is the story of Nial, who is a twenty-one-year-old widow who discovers that she’s a kitemaster, and gets drawn into this, you know, fantasy adventure to stop the queen who is raising an army of kitemasters to – without getting into spoilers – do very bad things. So Nial, she’s grieving, but she’s also fighting and learning and exploring. And there’s sort of a found family thing going on with her two friends on the kiteship. And it’s a book – it’s one that I’m very proud of. I think it’s one of the best ones that I’ve done. But it’s definitely not quite as commercial as most of my stuff. Chris: I’m looking at the cover and I really think that it kind of conveys that sense of wonder. Jim: Oh, the cover’s beautiful, isn’t it? Chris: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Looking over this very pretty landscape and – yeah! No, that sounds great. It sounds like a wonderful read. I certainly look forward to testing it out myself. Jim: Thank you! I hope you like it. Chris: Alright. Well thank you so much for joining us. Jim: Thank you for having me. This has been fun. Oren: Alright. Well I think that will about do it for this episode. Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s the professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.  [Closing Theme]

Award season is almost here, and as you can no doubt guess, we have… opinions. Specifically, opinions about the six novels on the short list for 2025’s Hugo award. Are these books good? Yes, and also no. They’re a continuum, you might say. And somehow, Adrian Tchaikovsky is on both ends of that continuum. How did he get there? If you listen in, you might just find out. Show Notes 2025 Hugo Finalists  The Familiar The Last Murder at the End of the World The Spellshop The Warm Hands of Ghosts Legends and Lattes Love Interest Beauty Pageant Graham Gore  A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking What We Do in the Shadows Murderbot The Mimicking of Known Successes Transcript Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.  You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.  [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is: Bunny: Bunny! Oren: and Chris: Chris Oren: So today we are discussing the six best books of 2024.  [Chuckling] Oren: This is a very objective measurement of the best books. It’s definitely not just the six that were chosen by a kind of limited audience popularity contest. Bunny: Look, one of them was pretty good.  Oren: Yes. So, this is our Hugo episode because there are six Hugos. And let’s just go around and say how many of them we read. Bunny, how many of them did you read?  Bunny: Two.  Oren: Okay. Very respectable. Chris, how many did you read?  Chris: Well, I might say three. But the reality is that I read … [laughing] … the truth is that I did not finish most of them. I finished two and then I started three more, and one of them I was just, no. Not at all.  Bunny: And one of them that you did not finish was on the list for some reason.  Oren: Just remember, because I would never brag, I’m a very humble person, but I did read all six and I’m therefore a superior being.  Bunny: Ah, so this was a shaming question. I see. I am firmly in third place here. In my defense, I read a lot of other things on the proto-Hugo List you made, your prediction chart. I was constrained by what was at the library because I’m glad I didn’t buy some of them.  Chris: Well, you did finish Ministry of Time, right? I feel like that deserves a round of applause. Bunny: Woo. Okay. Maybe I can get bonus points for Ministry of Time. I read Ministry of Time and The Tainted Cup and a bunch of others that didn’t end up on this list. Which is funny to me because there were many on there that deserved to be on the list more than Ministry of Time.  Chris: Yeah. This year we tried to guess–I should say mostly Oren tried to guess, and some of us added a few additional books–what books might end up being nominated, which is an interesting exercise. The book that I was most surprised to not get nominated was Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar.  It has a lot of things that I feel like Hugo voters like where it’s got a historical setting that focuses on marginalization and also has the kind of wordcraft that I would expect that Hugo voters would be interested in. I do wonder if the fact that it was so focused on the romance hurt it. Now there are a couple other Hugo nominees that do have romances but I feel like they’re less conventional romances than what’s in The Familiar.  Oren: Yeah. So, okay, let’s run through this real quick what those six books are. I mean they’re on the show notes, but just in case. So, the six are Alien Clay, Ministry of Time, A Sorceress Comes to Call, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, Service Model, and The Tainted Cup. So those are the six that actually got nominated for the Hugo. Then there are several others that we think maybe should have been on there instead.  Bunny: Yeah, certainly more than the existing one. I think that the other books from your list that I read, most of them, aside from Tainted Cup, which was the only one I could really wholeheartedly recommend, of the ones I ended up being able to read, I would’ve been a little annoyed if they had been nominated but far less annoyed than I was about Ministry of Time. Like Last Murder at the End of the World had a plot, things happened. The mystery, once it got started and you got past all of the convoluted worldbuilding, was fun. Ministry of Time was a slog.  Oren: Yeah. So, if I was going to modify this list, and again, this is already from a biased sample size, right, because I was reading books specifically because I thought they might be on the Hugo finals, but just based off of that sample size, I would axe Alien Clay and Ministry of Time, and I would replace them with The Spellshop and The Warm Hands of Ghosts. That last one, I think only I read. Chris: Probably why it wasn’t nominated.  Oren: Yeah, like I haven’t heard anyone talk about it despite it getting a respectable number of Goodreads views. But I liked it. And granted it’s also about World War I and about an aspect of it that I find really interesting, so, there’s a little bit of a targeted audience thing going on there. And I can see replacing A Sorceress Comes to Call with The Familiar. To me, I could go either way on that one. I don’t have strong feelings.  Bunny: I don’t know if I would put The Spellshop up there, but my feelings about The Spellshop are known.  Chris: I know you have different feelings about The Spellshop than we do.  Bunny: It’s not interesting enough. One of the funny things about the Hugos and any awards competition is that comparing these books to each other is always extremely funny, and I think it would be the strangest time for me to have to compare The Spellshop to The Tainted Cup. Like they’re just such different books. But you have to do that, right? You have to do that for the Oscars and stuff too, obviously.  Chris: And I voted for both of those to be nominated. It was pretty predictable that The Tainted Cup got nominated and The Spellshop didn’t. I do think that, just like romance, that cozies have a tough time and lighter stories have a really tough time getting nominated for the Hugos. Legends and Lattes did it because that one was kind of a big hit and a trendsetter, but I think cozies in general are going to, people just feel that darker stories are deeper, and it’s unfortunate, but it’s how it goes. Oren: Which is just funny because every so often there’s a think piece panicking about how light stories are taking over. It’s like, Calm down. Look at the ones actually winning the awards, friend. Chris: Yep, yep. Not actually happening.  Oren: Yeah. So, to me they have like a pretty clear scale of quality books where I just find Alien Clay and Ministry of Time to just be… I don’t get it. I don’t understand what we’re doing here.  With Alien Clay, yeah, it tells me that the author shares my politics mostly, which I guess is nice, but I can get that from reading his BlueSky account. There’s no story here.  Bunny: Nominating Adrian Tchaikovsky’s BlueSky account for a Hugo. That is innovative.  Oren: Yeah, there you go. I mean, I’m glad. I’m glad he’s anti-fascist. That’s good. That is a good thing, but I just don’t really think it has that much of an impact on his book.  Chris: For me, the funny thing, if we’re talking about Tchaikovsky, is usually I hear a lot of people refer to various writing as lazy, and I almost never do that. Generally, you don’t know what was going on with the writer. They were probably trying their best, got a lot on their plate already, but when I look at Tchaikovsky’s writing, you know, I don’t know if my perception is accurate, but the thing that really strikes me is it seems lazy and it’s like the only author where that is true.  Now, there are two Tchaikovsky books that were nominated, and one of them, I think, actually deserves that nomination. Just to add, make it a little more complicated. But Alien Clay…I did this love interest beauty pageant article on the site where I took out the introductory description of various love interests and kind of made it into a fun contest, and he describes the love interest when she enters the story as just dark and fleshy. And it’s just like, like how? How is she dark and how is she fleshy? Bunny: Me receiving a valentine that says, You’re dark and fleshy. That’s what I love about you.  Chris: I guess it’s creative in a way. I mean, maybe not the dark part, I suppose calling the love interest fleshy, but it also feels so slapdash. It doesn’t feel like you put in effort.  Oren: That’s basically the issue with Alien Clay, is that Alien Clay reads like a university lecture, and I’m sure its fans will tell me that was on purpose because the main character is a university professor, but it’s so dull and dry and it doesn’t feel like a story. There’s very little story. It’s just like, Hey, we’re hanging out. It sucks and it sucks a lot, but not in a way that feels dangerous or immediate, and then we win later, and don’t ask how, it just kind of happens.   Bunny: Look, the way to defeat fascism is to give in to a not at all suspicious hivemind.  Oren: Yeah, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Whereas Service Model, which has a very similar writing style, Tchaikovsky doesn’t really do immersive description as far as I can tell, but in Service Model, it works a lot better because Service Model is funnier, he’s using that very dry acerbic narration to make jokes, so it actually feels like it’s adding something,  and then Service Model also has a lot of novelty because we are really focusing on how weird these robots are in the way they make decisions and how that’s different from humans and that’s, to me, I think the big source of what made Service Model interesting. Whereas I didn’t feel like Alien Clay did anything with that. It was just, sure, there’s alien ruins, I guess, and that’s it.  Chris: Yeah, I mean, for books that get a Hugo, I just want to see that they have good knowledge of story structure and good storycraft. The Spellshop, for all it may have seem plain, I felt like it showed that. I felt like it showed a lot of deftness when it came to constructing a plot in a way that a lay person may not appreciate. Bunny: Are you calling me a lay person? I’ll have you know I’m an expert.  [laughing] Oren: It is kind of funny to me that most people who do a lot of reading or watching of movies or whatever, or any kind of consuming of media for a living, they almost always prefer weird out there stuff because they want to see something different. With Chris and I, it’s the opposite. It’s like, no, we want to see the basics done well because we almost never see that.  Chris: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I just want to see somebody who has nailed those foundations. And with both Ministry of Time and Alien Clay, they’re just like not there. I have not read Alien Clay. That’s the one I just said: No. Ministry of Time was one of the ones I did not finish, and it is just, oh, so much summary, so much exposition. I mean, we talked about it a number of episodes ago. It has the things that the literary crowd likes, but it does not, in my mind, show good storycraft fundamentals.  Oren: See, I did put Ministry of Time ahead of Alien Clay mostly because—despite the fact that it’s not a good book—there is at least a spark of passion for real life guy Graham Gore, historical figure. I can feel the author is interested in him.  Bunny: Oh, the author loves Graham Gore and this doomed expedition. Oren: Big fan.  Chris: We even have interludes where we go into his life. Oren: So, there’s something there, right? Whereas with Alien Clay, it’s like, it doesn’t feel like this story is passionate about anything. Bunny: If I could take the author of Ministry by the hand and be like, let me give you some advice about your ideas before you write this book I would say, historical fiction. Write it about this boat and this doomed expedition, but something goes fantastical and alternate history or something. You love this guy, let’s stick here. And not the tedious— Chris: But she’s writing what she knows and she has a super big crush on him, so she needs to write herself having a big crush on him.  Oren: Oh gosh. Bunny: It did sort of feel that way, especially since the character didn’t have a name. That’s very literary. Oren: To look at the books in the middle for a second because it’s easy to get obsessed with the two that are bad and then the two that are good. So, I find anything by T. Kingfisher, and this is A Sorceress Comes to Call, very funny because we know because of A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking that Kingfisher does know how to plot. She simply chooses not to most of the time. Chris: Yeah, we read A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking first, and I was like, oh, because I’d heard a lot about T. Kingfisher from other people who are fans, and I was like, oh wow, she is quite good. And then several books later, it’s like, okay, those books all have basically the same problem, where it turns out she really doesn’t like plotting. She just wants to build a collection of characters she likes hanging out. Just hanging out with each other. That’s what she actually wants to write and that’s what most of her books are.  And A Sorceress Comes to Call has a great opening. It has a fabulous opening. It is dark, but it’s very good. It is focused on abuse. And that abuse has a magical element in this story, and it’s brought to life so vividly and it’s really good. But the problem is as the book progresses, the characters just hang around and I mean, at this point, I have to say Kingfisher probably doesn’t really care about having the plot happen, but the characters basically spent a whole bunch of time talking about how they should have a plan and when they finally come up with a plan— and I’m bored at the lack of movement—when they finally come up with it, it is so bad. It is: Let’s do this and then maybe we’ll find out more about what the villain wants, even though it’s kind of obvious. And then when we find out what she wants, maybe then we’ll come up with a plan. So, it’s like a plan to come up with a plan.  Oren: That’s a good plan. Bunny: Matryoshka doll plan. Chris: And I just found that I almost stopped there. Like I took a break because I was so frustrated, and then I continued and then stopped later because I was frustrated.  Oren: It has a decent ending. It takes a while to get there, but it does have one. Kingfisher is too successful for plots now. It’s like if I ever become a successful author, all of my books will be weird airship terminology, and you’ll just be like, Oren, what is a keel corridor? You forgot to say what that is. What is goldbeater’s skin? Why are you talking about this so much? And I’ll be like, you can’t stop me! Anything I write will sell now!  Bunny: Well, the funny thing about A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking is that it’s two well-plotted books that are very different in tone stuck together. Oren: Yeah, but there’s baking in both of them. Bunny: That’s true. There is baking. There is continuity in the act that the protagonist performs. We have a mystery and a war story, and both are good on their own and yet they feel weird in the same book. That was my take on that book. Chris: I have to say, the way it comes together in the end is not quite right, which is common, though. That’s a lot of times the hardest thing in plotting, bringing the end together, and so even with A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, we can see some cracks there. At the same time, it still feels like it shows a lot of skills that Kingfisher does not show in her other books.  Oren: She doesn’t have to anymore.  Chris: She does not have to. There’s also just some fundamental things about the story that don’t quite work. It’s kind of misogynist, honestly, which is surprising from Kingfisher where we have this villainess who has tons of magical powers, but all she wants to do with them is seduce a rich man.  Oren: No, hang on. It’s even weirder than that. She doesn’t even use her powers to seduce rich men. She just also has a lot of magical powers. And then seduces men. Those are just two things that are true at the same time. They’re just unrelated.  Chris: The characters have a lot of debates: Oh, should we tell the guy that she’s seducing that she’s an evil sorceress? Nah. And so they have to come up with excuses for that. It just has a lot of fundamental things that are not quite working either, but it has a fantastic opening. I see why it got people’s attention. And also, Kingfisher has gotten Hugo’s before, or at least one Hugo before, so not terribly surprising, that this was nominated. Bunny: Look, can we make a pact that if one of us is being seduced by an evil sorceress, and the other two know about it, that they will tell the third one?  I think that’s just what friends do, you know? Chris: I think we can make that agreement.  Oren: No, we wouldn’t want to upset you. Don’t worry. Apparently, he wasn’t that seduced because (spoilers) at the end, when he finds out that she died horribly, he’s like, Eh. He has the most nonplussed reaction you’ve ever seen. And they never tell him that she was evil. They just tell him that she died horribly. And he’s like, oh, well, you know. So it goes.  Chris: So, let’s talk about Someone to Build a Nest In, because this is a pretty unique story. It’s not my favorite, but I think being nominated makes sense for this book. It stands out: it has a monster as the main character, who has a unique voice, it also features abuse, abusive family situation, it has queer romance.  I had trouble with it because after the initial novelty of the monster POV started to wear off, I didn’t have great attachment to the characters. As opposed to A Sorceress Comes to Call, where I like the characters pretty well, but the plot, it’s really sagging. Someone to Build a Nest In has a decent plot with twists and turns but the main character is a little on the selfish kind of hypocritical side and the love interest doesn’t have a lot of agency.  Oren: This is the thing I don’t get about the main character, is that it feels like the entire character portrayal of her, because she’s always talking about how humans suck. Humans are the worst. And it just kind of depends on you not remembering that she murders people when she wants a snack. And that’s not part of the story. She never does that on screen or particularly seems to want to, we’re just told that’s the thing that she’s done. And I don’t understand why. Why not just have it be that she’s only ever had to kill in self-defense since it’s not part of the story anyway? I don’t get it.  Bunny: Look, someone liked in What We Do in the Shadows.  Chris: She is put in a position where she’s on the defensive in the beginning of the book, but at the same time she’s so powerful that I can never quite feel sympathy for her. And so if she was more of an underdog and she was not killing people, if we didn’t hear about her escapades killing people, I feel like she would’ve been closer to Murderbot probably, and a character that I could get a lot more on board with. She’s still a very unique character. I’m sure some people love her, but I couldn’t quite. The novelty wore off and the attachment wasn’t there to replace it.  Oren: She definitely rubs me the wrong way because I’m just not into characters who are constantly going on about how humanity sucks. Because it’s like, I don’t know, man. You try to do better, you know, make your own species and show me how that goes. We’re doing our best here, all right. So that just always irritates me and the fact that she’s clearly the worst, except for during the story for whatever reason, it makes that hit harder.  Chris: But she has one weakness, because she’s too powerful, and then that weakness is negated. Oren: Right, because having weaknesses is hard. Why would we want that? It would be like if in the beginning of a Superman story, he said, Oh, my only weakness is kryptonite. And then someone fired a kryptonite gun at him, and then he’s like, Ah, but you see I also wear a bulletproof vest, so NBD.  [laughing] Chris: So yeah, there are places that it’s not as tense as it should be. Oren: Yeah, it does have a very cool twist at the end which I really liked. That makes it a lot better. It’s just like a lot of stories, we were talking about this a couple episodes ago, they have a strong start because we put a lot of effort into it and then a cool, exciting climax. And then there’s just a middle where stuff happens, we kind of mill around until it’s time for the ending. Bunny: I will say having not read the book that I would nominate it for a Hugo just for having a good title.  Oren: Yeah, I mean it’s a memorable title. It’s a hard to say title, though. It’s like, Hey, have you read Someone You Can Build a Nest In? That’s awkward. That takes like five years to say. Bunny: That’s better than The Mimicking of Known Successes, though. Oren: It is better than The Mimicking of Known Successes. It at least has something to do with the story. I started shortening it to Build a Nest, but even that doesn’t really work I don’t think.  Chris: But still I could give that one full points for creativity. I can see how it got nominated. Oren: I won’t be mad if it wins.  Chris: I won’t be mad either. Oren: I will be mad if The Tainted Cup doesn’t win, though. I guess I will be mad if any book but The Tainted Cup wins because The Tainted Cup should win because it’s the best one. But other than that, I wouldn’t be mad. Bunny: Despite it only having a single tainted cup. That’s not terribly important in the scheme of the book. It was very, very good. Oren: Relation of title to book is not high.  Bunny: There is a tainted cup that comes up at the end. I was waiting for the tainted cup to appear, but it did not play a prominent enough role for me to cheer when it showed up.  Chris: Well, it has gravitas, which is probably what they were going for. Bunny: It does. Thematic, I guess.  There were a lot of tainted things and a cup was among them.  Oren: It’s better than the working title, which was Sherlock Holmes and Watson, but it’s Roman Empire, Kind of, and also There’s Lots of Cool Plant Magic. Bunny: That would be harder to say than Someone You Can Build a Nest In.  Chris: Okay. The thing I don’t get about the setting is why you would do a somewhat Roman empire setting and then make up a bunch of titles of officers that are not real Roman titles but are still extremely confusing and hard to keep track of.  Oren: Yeah it does have too many ranks. Chris: Why would you do that?  Bunny: It absolutely needed the list of ranks at the beginning because otherwise I would not have been able to follow it. Chris: If they’re not real title, why not make them easier to remember and understand?  Oren: I was really confused when I was looking at the list of titles because it’s like, princeps, okay, well that’s a Roman rank. It’s not the rank they’re using here, but it’s Roman. Where are all these other ones from? Like, are these real ranks? I just don’t know about, did he just grab one from, you know, every country he threw a dart at? I don’t know. Is there a real place somewhere with the title immunis? Who knows.  Chris: It’s also not that Roman, honestly, the titles are one of the most Roman things in there, and they’re not real Roman. I feel like you could just take out the Roman element.  Oren: Yeah. I mean, it’s got legions and senates and patronage. It has some less blatant Roman inspiration.  Chris: Okay. But anyway, it’s weird. We actually really like this book. We’re just complainers. We’re just big complainers. Oren: That’s just how we do.  Chris: So I was talking about the few things that I have to complain about with this book.  Bunny: How this is on the same list as Ministry… It’s shocking to me. I guess Din doesn’t step back and think briefly about how racism is bad and then go about his day. I guess that’s the difference. Oren: Look, the Hugo contains multitudes, okay?  Chris: So this is a Sherlock mystery with a really cool bio-cosmic horror setting that really adds lots of novelty and is recounted in a lot of depth. I think also the wordcraft is pretty good and the description really helps bring it to life. I very much like the main character, Din, I find him very lovable and we’ve got the eccentric Sherlock that he works for in the background but she gets overstimulated easily, so she can’t go around to the crime scenes herself and so our Watson does that, and he’s basically the main character. Oren: And he’s also dyslexic.  Bunny: Yeah, it does a great job using its magic system, for lack of a better word, to also portray characters with disabilities or disability equivalents. So, Din is dyslexic and Anna has sensory issues. She gets overstimulated really easily and stuff like that, which I thought was very cool and well done.  Oren: It’s funny to me because I’ve gotten so used to weird portrayals of dyslexia that I didn’t recognize that he was dyslexic until Chris pointed it out. And I was like, oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense. And that’s not a knock on the book. Like I don’t think that Bennett needed to make it more obvious. It’s just, it didn’t occur to me because the last time I saw a dyslexic character in a big sci-fi property he was immune to time madness because he sees everything backwards already and it’s like, okay, I guess that’s what dyslexia is in Star Trek. [laughing] Chris: You’re making it weird, Star Trek. Bunny: The linguistic shift, let’s say. It’s not the same. Thanks, Star Trek. Chris: I will say the ending to the mystery is a little predictable for me anyway, but honestly, I would much prefer an ending that’s a little predictable to one that doesn’t make any sense. And my experience is it’s going be one or the other because a lot of times it’s just people are trope savvy enough and can see where things are going enough, it’s extremely difficult to have a super surprise ending that actually follows all the foreshadowing you put down. So even though there were some things about it that I predicted I was still pretty happy.  Bunny: And here’s the thing, is that something being predictable is often used as an insult to it but often what it means is that the foreshadowing was good and readers were able to tie the foreshadowing to the conclusion and that means that the conclusion followed logically from the foreshadowing. When people start calling something predictable as a universal bad then we get Game of Thrones trying to outsmart Reddit. [laughing] Oren: I would say that it’s an ending where you can guess what’s going to happen but it doesn’t feel frustrating because it’s not something where it feels like the characters should have guessed it already. And that is often the sign of a good mystery because we want to solve the mystery. That’s part of the reason we read mysteries in the first place. Chris: So, yeah, that one we’ve been passing around talking about it with our followers on Discord. It seems to be pretty popular. There’s no book that’s universally liked, but generally people have been very positive who’ve read it. So that’s a good read, as long as you’re okay with something that is a little dark, it’s not very dark, but people die in horrific ways, killed by plants bursting out of them and stuff like that. So if that’s okay with you then it’s a great read.  Bunny: And that’s not a spoiler because that is the first scene. Oren: At least some of them deserved it, though. Chris: Yes, true. Some of them did deserve it.  Bunny: Yes. It’s quite a good mystery with a distinctly okay climax and I hope that one gets it.  Oren: Yeah, it’s just a very good book, you know. It’s just good. All right, well, I think on that unusually positive note, we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close.  Chris: You can reward us for saying good things about books by supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/Mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.  [Outro music]