The  Bulwer-Lytton awards results are out.

I like this one:
And this one:
And this one:

The Druids by Ronald Hutton.

This book actually will tell you quite a bit about what is known about the ancient Druids:  rather little, actually, and much of the evidence admits of many interpretations.  Not that that stopped anyone from confidence.  Which you will learn about in rather more detail, because it is the main subject of the book:  the fascinating subject of what modern people have done with the idea of Druids.  The ancient Druids are brought to explain what, if anything, actually substantiates the various types of druids, which gives it another interest, in watching how evidence can be put together, and picked apart, in support of various historical theses.  It also discusses the evolution of ideas about pre-history, including how the Druids came to be viewed as the latest of pagan religions in Britain, but also in the context of discussing the types of treatment the Druid has gotten, over the centuries.

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I have become rather like King Midas, except that everything turns not into gold but into a circus.

Albert Einstein

One of my favorite topics when advising people on how to crit stories is to warn them about critting grammar unless they got it down cold.

Maybe next time I'll refer them to this.  Goes into much more detail that I do.   (And it's from a law professor, no less.)

Books tend to change on re-reading, and not just because the reader has changed.

The biggest switch is between the first reading and the second (which is why I try not to review books until I've read them twice). 

Reading at a more leisurely pace, you get to notice more.  (such as technique and how it's used; once you're no longer insatiably curious about the information, you can notice the info-dumping), but what you notice above all else is clues -- or lack thereof.  Because you know the ending, many, many, many things should be fraught with dramatic irony.  A character's plans don't take into consideration several facts to be revealed later.  A character hysterically sobbing over a death is not only grief-stricken but consumed with guilt.  The obvious villain slipped in a few clues that he was not as evil as he seemed earlier than the great revelation.

Sometimes the books are better because the dramatic irony deepens them.  Sometimes they're just about the same because what they lost in suspense they made up in irony.  And sometimes they just go flat because there was nothing to them but the suspense.

No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.

Carlyle

A lot of writers, constructing their religions, make the gods absolutely dependent on human belief.  Some invoke the obvious reason:  the gods were made by belief. 

And I hate, hate, hate it.

I think the worst case was Harry Turtledove's Case of the Toxic Spelldump, where the main character purports to be a Jew.  Goes to the synagogue, even.  He's an idolater.  He explicitly thinks that his belief (lumped in with others) creates that which he worships.  Silly, silly, silly.

But it's seldom better in explicitly polytheistic systems.  It seldom allows the Powers That Be to be noticeably numinous.  And, oddly enough, it tends toward the gods acting like three-year-olds.  Despite the obvious problem of -- if the humans made them like this, why oh why are the humans any better?

When kings the sword of justice first lay down,
They are no kings, though they possess the crown.
Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things,
The good of subjects is the end of kings.

Daniel Defoe, from "The True-Born Englishman"

Of course, there are times when it is easy to drop one thread and move to the next.  That is, when the thread hasn't caught on fire.

So I sit staring at the sheet of paper trying to figure what any of them are doing.  Even when all -- let's see, both sets of knights, the royal official and his men, the sorceress/thief and the band of sorceresses, and the cultists -- six factions all started out with clearly defined motives that are passionately desired.

Fortunately what this story smells of is dramatic irony, so I have the prompt:  who could woefully mistake what someone else is up to?  And the side-issue of keeping all six of them yoked together into the same story helps.  And that I know there are two more factions involved, so I can herd them all toward where they can hook up with that one.

When outlining a story, I tend to start with a moment.  or an event.  or, if I'm lucky, a whole sequence of events -- though there I have to usually file off serial numbers.  But then I have to build.  What are these characters like, that they did this?  What events led up to this, and what events would logically stem from it?

And what else can go with it?  (Which helps determine its length as I pontificated here.)

And this is where the smell of the story comes it.  Its feel or its taste would be good metaphors as well, 'cause it's an entirely intuitive process.

I've got two outlines I'm switching off at lunch time.  I was thinking about throwing a random piece of magic in one of them, and concluded -- no.  It didn't feel right.  This particular story needed a tightly built world -- even if not built, at least implied in a lot of mundane detail -- or its moral dilemmas would not be strong. 

Now, the other one smells of magic.  Very strongly.  Mostly magical objects, I'm not sure there are wizards in it at all, but magical cobblestones and stairs, even, and more and more objects.  Right left and center.  In the first hour of the story the heroine gets to walk through summer, spring, winter, and fall.  Which helps explain why the heroine starts off with two of them herself.  Of course, what appears where is not quite so clear yet.  Especially since there's some "stuff happens here" where the kidnapped heroine learns that the kidnappers are honorable men acting out of desperation.  (This one has moral dilemmas, too, but they don't need the mundanity to work.)  But I am looking for some magical objects that would give her a chance to learn.

There's one disadvantage to an organic outline writing technique.  It's that you can get to following some character so intently that you forget to come up for oxygen and thinking -- hey what about the other POV characters?

I'm working on an outline now where the story is rife with dramatic irony.  Usually, when I come for oxygen I can think of a way where another POV character is misinterpreting what goes on, or a scene where I can show that this one misinterpreted something.  But I can also think of a couple of scenes that would logically have occurred earlier, since I'm writing this story in chronological order.  (Thus far.)  Which is not helped by the fact that I write in longhand.  (With gel pens in pretty colors.  My muse finds them an inspiration.)

But it can still be interesting in the manuscript, when I realize that I have to add another POV thread.  Scuttling back and forth in the manuscript to ensure that the scenes get slotted in suitable locations. . . .

Don't believe it?  Read all about here.

No, really, go read it.

Only three mortals have gone down to the Underworld and returned safely:  Orpheus, Hercules, and Houdini.

The Lightning Thief, The Sea of Monsters, The Titan's Curse, The Battle of the Labyrinth, and The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan

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Stealing deriving your mythology from a single real-world source has its advantages -- as with your monsters -- but one thing it doesn't prevent is a clutter of contradictory myths.  How many places was Jupiter born?  Is Apollo or Helios the god of the sun?  Does Persephone come up from teh Underworld for the summer, or do the spirits of the dead always find her presiding as the Queen of the Underworld?

Indeed, a world where the myths are too tidy and neat comes across as thin.  Partly because there are generally too few myths, but the schematic nature doesn't help.

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It's good advice, not calling a rabbit a smerp -- but it's very easy to push it too far.  I wouldn't believe a small, furry herbivore that hops -- and has short ears -- as a rabbit.

This problem is, if anything, even more prevalent when dealing with societies.  Your culture has slavery, say -- mostly debt slavery, and the overwhelming number of slaves are used as household servants, since they have peasants to work the fields.  But if you use the word "slave" you know that a good chunk of readers are going to switch onto "antebellum South".  Fortunately, there are other terms.  You don't even have to invent them:  bondsman, thrall -- perhaps even serf, though you might want to watch the baggage on that one, too.  Well, maybe you don't have to invent them.  You might not want the baggage even with those, and then you have to invent your own.  Then you really need a good ear.  Otherwise you end up, from distaste for all the baggage that all the terms for "practitioner of magic" have, creating a term like "magic-user."

And magical creatures have baggage too. Wrote a story based on some Eastern European fairy tales and had it critiqued.  Some of them refused to believe that the place where a dragon lived was cold.  Others -- despite my having indicated its size many times -- declared that the dragon was too big to do one thing I had it do.  I don't think I could change its name, but you have to deal with baggage.

A prince who is not wise himself cannot be wisely counseled.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

A house has been split up into flats, and Coraline has moved into one with her parents.  They have eccentric neighbors -- two actresses who read tea leaves, and a man who claims to be teaching a mouse circus -- but there's very little for Coraline to do.  She explores the garden and (when it rains) the house, which is where she finds the door that opens to nothing but a brick wall.

Except that one day, she finds it doesn't open to the brick wall but an image of the house.  An eerie image, where her mother and father have buttons for eyes.

And the plot then starts to twist and convolute and lead you down some interesting byways before it resolves.  Knowing some British folklore may lead you to see some interesting parallels with the other house, as well.

An eerie and enchanting tale.  And the cat's cool.

Philosophically pondering the gods who act like two-year-olds -- and badly brought up ones at that.  The works that feature them tend to have two problems.

One is that badly-brought-up two-year-olds do not make convincing personality for the Powers That Be.  At least, writers seem unable to juggle the necessary power and the personality to keep them from clashing.

And the other is that it is like introducing a Sage to your work:  you have a wonderful chance to show off the depths of your shallowness.  Because when the gods act like two-year-olds, I find that the rest of the work tends to not be much higher in level. 

Your human characters act better than your gods?  Which is to say, better than badly-brought-up two-year-olds?  That's setting the bar kind of low.  Can't you raise it a little?  Except that with these writers, I often look at the human characters and conclude -- they can't.  These human heroes can only look impressive when set against infantile gods, and the writer shows no signs of being able to produce anything better.

Indeed, sometimes, the tone of the book is a smug superiority over the gods -- like being superior to badly-brought-up two-year-olds is something to brag about. 

One thing in world-building is that a lot of writers -- particularly those with cross-world travel in their worlds -- say that "technology" doesn't work in the magical world.  Just because it's magic.

I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.  If your gunpowder doesn't explode, you should be dead, and your fire shouldn't be burning; they all run on the same process.  If your watch doesn't run, lightning shouldn't strike -- or else that mill shouldn't be grinding grain and the carts going to it should not have their wheels turning.  Technology doesn't use some fundamentally different processes than everything else.

And, anyway, what is technology?  Why is the steam engine technology and the water mill not?

And worst of it, it's never caused.  If Lud the Purple had cast a spell to ensure it, it would have to be motivated -- with difficulty -- and defined, and I would be very suspicious if people didn't try to pry around the edges.  But it's treated as a natural aspect of magic.  As spontaneous as the sun rising.  Selectively turning off the laws of nature for certain applications developed after a certain era leaves the question of why.