“an image of a blue sunrise over a crater on mars…that’s weird“ It appears that the foreshadowing has taken NEW AND UNPRECEDENTED LEVELS DID ANYONE ELSE NOTICE THIS
WHAT
“Princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light”
aRE YOU KIDDING M E RIGHT NOW
Hello???
“I dreamt that you were gone! That magic stayed, but you were gone!”
How are we so clueless?!?!?
I freaking hate Diane Duane. I’m never writing anything ever again, I give up.
so first off, I’m pretty sure the sunrise bit was added in the NMEs, meaning it’s not quite as mind-blowing as we might think.
but that doesn’t mean the rest of it isn’t. i love rereading the bit where Nita first reads the manual after taking the oath. almost everything that’s described turns up at least once later on: the mason’s word, transcendent pig, fireworms, alternate universes (applies to both the dark manhattan as well as TWD and AWAl), the tree’s battle, even timeheart. the only things I don’t remember coming up later are the Horseman’s word and “bridling the Nightmare”. clearly, those are being saved for later books xD
And even bridling the Nightmare, well… Nita does a little bit of that every time she dreams, doesn’t she?
A little how-to guide for foreshadowing:
(a) Write a lot. The more you write, the better and more active your “writer’s subconscious” becomes. The better trained it becomes, the less frequently it will introduce something to the page that won’t be useful later.
(b) Read a lot. (But you were doing this anyway, yeah?) This gives your writer’s subconscious raw material to work with and develops your (and its) critical faculties. (It’s also fun, and good for you in the general sense, but that’s neither here nor there.) Read all kinds of things, both those you’d normally enjoy and those you think you won’t. You will find useful background or source material, exactly what you didn’t know you needed, being put into your hands from the unlikeliest sources.
(d) Learn to trust the writer’s subconscious. It is routinely a significant source of genuine foreshadowing (i.e., the kind that catches even you by surprise) and the resonances that are at the core of effective fiction. Often it will act as the pipeline for material you don’t yet consciously know you’re going to need, or aren’t yet factually or thematically equipped to process (or process fully). Take occasional notes on what you catch it doing, as your conscious mind is possessed of a kind of stubborn pride about its own modes and means of function and will occasionally try to jettison less-consciously produced material as somehow less valuable. Don’t let it pull this shit with you. Work to own your whole creative process, not just the parts that make sense in the so-called “waking world” or can be justified logically.*
(e) Store your notes carefully. You are a custodian of potentially valuable raw material that won’t be secure until it appears in finished work. Using paper? Have at least one copy of your notes stored off site, with a friend, a relative, at work, whatever, and refresh this copy at least every couple/few months. Working electronically? Store in the cloud and on paper. Paper doesn’t crash and won’t care if the WiFi’s down. (At the electronic end, increasingly I use Evernote, as with millions of users it’s now safe enough to trust not to vanish suddenly There’s nothing so frustrating as a note platform that suddenly goes belly-up.)
(f) Seriously, review those notes periodically. Especially, be guided by them when outlining / assembling raw material for future drafts. The scheduled, habitual review is really important. I promise you, you will forget stuff. And there are few things as crazy-making as discovering halfway through a novel, while wrestling futilely with some piece of character business, that not only did you predict/anticipate this particular problem two years ago, but its solution. You’’ll just want to kick something. Be kind to yourself and do your homework.
…That’s it. Now I’m going to go off and look at my notes, because it’s been a few weeks…
*Equally, though, don’t allow carefully-built narrative structures to be run over roughshod by ill-controlled subconscious-sourced themes or character business. If you’ve got a “runaway Muse”, ninety-nine times out of a hundred what it needs is to be taken out back and shot, as all too often deferring to your “Muse” is just a way of declining to take full responsibility for your less-conscious production. Here as in a lot of other places in life, mastery lies in balance between two mechanisms (or among more). It’s your writer’s brain: run it. If you let it run itself it’s unlikely to get anything done.
“like in a video game when you unlock a new ability!” i’m laughing so hard
picture kit and nita collapsed in a heap after their first joint spell, fred hovering uncertainly above them, and seemingly from nowhere there’s a little chime sound and a booming voice goes “new spell unlocked!” with golden cursive text and a “+10 magic experience” that hang in the air beneath fred for a moment before disappearing.
now picture that a) being a totally normal wizardly experience and b) occurring after every major new spell in the books i’m w h e e z i n g this is great
Having grown up in DC, statues of various dead guys on horses are basically background radiation, or they were before I became Hamilton trash and started noticing them again. Now it’s like every time I turn around there’s a Founding Father looking at me like I personally disappointed him, and it’s getting a little unnerving.
Although: as a result, I sort of want to write a magical realism thing where that can really happen. Where if you do something they would have disagreed with strongly enough, the statues climb down off their columns and lumber down Mass Ave to the Russell Building or the Capitol, where they stand on the sidewalk, arms crossed, glaring into the window of whoever’s just introduced legislation that offended them. They don’t speak, or attack anyone, or damage anything– well, they do tend to bump their heads on low-handing streetlights, sometimes, but that doesn’t count. Mostly they just stand there, mournful, accusing, for everyone to see.
Sometimes lawmakers can talk them around, convince them they’re not actually betraying the political ideals of their predecessors. Politicians who are good at this tend to have much, much longer careers than the ones who aren’t. Politicians who piss off the wrong statues seldom get reelected.
George Washington rarely budges, and when he does it’s front-page news, nationwide. Madison’s always been easier to talk around than most. Hamilton spend more time off his plinth than on it, but he cools off fast. Jefferson holds grudges, to the point that hardly anyone worries too much about making him mad.
It’s not just politicians, either, and they don’t always come to life in anger. Joan of Arc’s bronze horse will shiver to life in Malcolm X Park, sometimes, and carry her off to join protest marches, when she thinks their cause is just. Gandhi walked with Iraq War protestors. The Spirit of American Womanhood, outside Constitution Hall, danced on the day that Roe v. Wade was decided, and when Obergefell vs. Hodge went through, Eleanor Roosevelt taught a clumsy Lindy to Baron von Steuben.
Lincoln has only risen from his seat once since he was put there in 1922, and that was to nod in solemn approval at LBJ from the White House lawn.
Some cities rarely put up statues, and many have taken theirs down. Paris has a great many artists and writers memorialized, and curiously few politicians. In London, during the Blitz, Nelson shinned down his column to help dig people out of collapsed buildings, until he was broken to pieces himself; he stands atop the column again today, reassembled, but has never moved since. In the last months of the Soviet Union, a desperate Communist Party had the statues of Moscow chained in place. These days, Monument Avenue in Richmond is punctuated with a long series of empty plinths and bare columns.
PLEASE tell me someone’s made a sketch of one, or a bunch of, sibiks. I need a picture of a baby, puppy-like octopus like, right now. 😂 Because as I’m reading, there’s a crowd around Kit asking for saltine crackers and the picture in my head is stinking adorable. ❤️
Via the excellent Ursula Vernon.
You didn’t tell me I’d get punched in the heart in the first chapter!
I drew for five hours straight tonight and the only acceptable thing that came out of this time was my warm up doodle of the Lone Power and It’s large bird sis. Enjoy!
She said stones are capable of thought. They had to be: any object with sound
could think. Something about the waves trapped inside of rock, memory –
of time.
I doubt that wizards would have been responsible. (Seriously, that’s about the only theory that isn’t mentioned on the book’s Wikipedia page.)
Would a wizard be able to read it? Maybe not. Codes and ciphers can be cracked by wizardry, but first you need to at least suspect that’s what you’re looking at: and a lot of people with that skillset have hit the ms. and come up empty. So I for one am willing to assume something else is going on there.
But a smart wizard’s initial take on the challenge would most likely be to get cozy with the book and ask it directly, “Hey there, what are you about?” This could produce an entire range of responses from annoyed stonewalling (”You think I’m gonna spill the beans to just anybody who comes along? Think again, buddy.”) to immediate delighted capitulation (”I am so glad you asked me that! Thank you! What am I, just some thing to be analyzed??”) …But getting into a relationship with the ms. would seem to be the best approach. Might take a while to get results, but nothing good ever seems to happen quickly…
…But it would be a challenge regardless, I’m sure. It takes a good while to get into a relationship with just a regular book. And this one, I’d think, could be presumed to have Issues. 🙂
A wizard might have a tricky time of it, but I’d still put money & chocolate on Carmela cracking the darned thing
I doubt that wizards would have been responsible. (Seriously, that’s about the only theory that isn’t mentioned on the book’s Wikipedia page.)
Would a wizard be able to read it? Maybe not. Codes and ciphers can be cracked by wizardry, but first you need to at least suspect that’s what you’re looking at: and a lot of people with that skillset have hit the ms. and come up empty. So I for one am willing to assume something else is going on there.
But a smart wizard’s initial take on the challenge would most likely be to get cozy with the book and ask it directly, “Hey there, what are you about?” This could produce an entire range of responses from annoyed stonewalling (”You think I’m gonna spill the beans to just anybody who comes along? Think again, buddy.”) to immediate delighted capitulation (”I am so glad you asked me that! Thank you! What am I, just some thing to be analyzed??”) …But getting into a relationship with the ms. would seem to be the best approach. Might take a while to get results, but nothing good ever seems to happen quickly…
…But it would be a challenge regardless, I’m sure. It takes a good while to get into a relationship with just a regular book. And this one, I’d think, could be presumed to have Issues. 🙂
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