http://365tomorrows.com/05/27/invader-guilt/

http://365tomorrows.com/?p=4074

Author : David Hartley

We’ve longed for this, the end of all times, echoed the rampant philosophers, baying for the choicest sound-byte to sing the species out. I flick the radio off, return us to silence. Better that than cloying intellectual redemption. I look to you, to your belly where propagation lies, wondering again what flush of nonsense brought about that defiance, wondering again if that is a baby pushing against your rags or a statement. You smile, as if that alone could reverse things, however much I wished it could.

Outside, the liquid creak makes itself apparent and your smile dies; closer now.

‘Shall we?’ I say. You are already rising, one hand cradling the bump of ambiguous potential, the other limp by your side, grasping for nothing. No weapons now, no point. No more bows and arrows, no lightning.

Together we lift away the rug-door and bow out to the balcony. There are two of them in the courtyard below, inspecting every brick, every wire and lump. Each touch is cautious; when something crumbles they whine and try to push the bits back together again.

Your hand slips into mine, grips. I purse my lips, whistle.

Creak, squeak, chatter, snap, they wheel on us and we stand firm; representatives of a fragile race at the weary end of its tether. It is almost immediate now; flails retracted, whip-limbs recoiled. Armed only with inspection fibres, softly, slowly, they creep, scuttle, and scramble up, over, and all around us. Their eyes, such as they are, have faded from scanner red to sky blue, an imitation of the expanse above perhaps.

They caress for hours and we resist squirming under the tickles. They spend a long time poking and measuring your bump, returning to it each time the rebellious unborn kicks or fidgets. I watch each grope from the edge of my sight, hands running cold with sweat. They inspect that too; catching drips, drinking it maybe. But we hold on tight, force of will, and not one touch hurts or discomforts.

Invader guilt, they have called it. A sudden cease of destruction replaced by this unease. No victorious mothership, no enslavements, just a mute confusion, a hasty sheathing of tendrils. We had been war-torn before they arrived, waging our own myriad paths of destruction across the globe, bending hell to cause devastation for obscure reasons. Perhaps, after all, they were just trying to join in. Trying to make a good first impression.

Our friends cease their inspection and we retreat. Throughout the night they build and build and build. By morning, a new Starbucks stands in the courtyard and they are gone.

http://ravelledsleeve.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/rationalising/

I have been rationalising my shoe collection, in an attempt to find the slip-on sandals I wear round the house in hot weather (finally unearthed at the bottom of a heap in the very back corner of the wardrobe).

I have filled a black sack with things to go to the shoe bank: two pairs of boots which won’t zip up over my calves any more, several pairs of shoes which rub or pinch, a pair of ankle boots which leak like sieves. A couple of pairs have had little enough wear they can go directly to the charity shop, because they were bought as part of special-occasion outfits and not worn everyday.

What’s left just about fits at the bottom of my wardrobe.

Four pairs of sandals (though one set are hiking sandals and another the ones I just wear as slippers in summer).
Two pairs of shoes I can definitely wear to work without tights.
Three pairs of shoes I might be able to wear without tights and can definitely wear with.
One pair of shoes which definitely need tights and are much more wintery.
Two pairs of smart boots.
Three pairs of casual boots (one of which is my purple DMs which I never wear but love too much to get rid of).
Two pairs of plimsolls (hi-top Converse, low-top Ethletic).
Merrell Mary Janes, which I hope to manage to wear in this summer.
Little velvet dolly shoes, only worn as slippers.

Outside the wardrobe I also have slippers, walking boots, trainers for walking to work, and wellies.

That still seems like quite a lot, but it’s definitely an improvement!

http://365tomorrows.com/05/26/moving-forward/

http://365tomorrows.com/?p=4072

Author : D. R. Pinney

The other side of Ray’s bedroom door was the universe. A brilliant collage of billions of galaxies spreading out through all of infinity just over the threshold. The sight of it was so staggering that he fell back, an insane scream rising but failing to escape, like in a dream. He must be dreaming! When he realized there was no possible way that something like this could occur in the waking world his scream of unabashed terror left his lips as shameless, uproarious laughter.

‘Man,’ he thought, getting to his feet, ‘I must’ve fallen asleep downstairs with Star Trek on.’ It made perfect sense to him. When the conscious mind finally gives in to its exhaustion the subconscious acts goes into hyperdrive, dissecting all its backup data it received that day in wild and marvelous ways.

All day and night Ray had been filing his taxes. The new software he downloaded was supposed to make it easier but it only pissed him off worse than ever and the hideous glow of the screen gave him a troll-sized migraine.

Every few minutes he would look away from the blasted thing to the Trek marathon on one of the local broadcast station. He’d never been a Trekkie or Trekker growing up and all the series’ blended together in a Menagerie (wasn’t that the title of an episode?) of alien diplomats, planets that looked like southern California, phaser blasts, torpedo’s and cyborgs. He didn’t watch it because he cared much for whatever was happening on screen, it simply offered a little escape from the monotony.

At one point, when the concept of time had slipped from him, he looked up and saw a ship, which wasn’t the Enterprise, cruise through a vibrantly colored, unnamed nebula, sending the cosmic gasses spiraling out into space. The image was tranquil and surreal in the gloom of his dinky apartment.

He thought he remembered thinking, ‘There’s more out there than taxes and dead-end jobs. There are planets where they live for the beauty and awe of the universe that we ignore by filing taxes and downloading software,’ but wasn’t sure, he may have said it out loud.

All his life he had dreamed of doing things the people around him thought impossible. That didn’t necessarily mean space travel, maybe just Earth travel, he’d even settle for coast to coast travel. There were mysteries in the world he wanted to be a part of. But couldn’t. He had to be practical, that was what the world told him to do. Too many nights he wondered what would happen if he just tried it, took the first step forward.
Given the extreme pressure he had been under his subconscious had a LOT of room to stretch and really try things out once he finally surrendered to sleep.

He regarded the expanse of the incalculable number of worlds and possibilities they held with a wonderment he had never known. This was the sort of thing the word beauty was meant for and yet it fell embarrassingly short.

For a moment he hoped that he wasn’t dreaming. He hoped that he could step away from this comparatively minuscule space into the vastly enormous outer space. Perhaps he could catch a ride on a passing comet and visit the most distant burning emerald in the sky.

The notion filled him with enough pure white excitement that he felt he might fly there on his own.

“What the hell?” he said. “If this is a dream there’s no harm in trying.”

He closed his eyes and stepped forward.

http://www.paksworld.com/blog/?p=1592

Remember how I said I was impressed and grateful that NewEditor (hereinafter known as Editor) had read through the whole monster pile of the preceding books?    The proof is in the editorial letter I just received this afternoon.  WOW.  As in,  I have landed in the lap (OK, laptop or desktop or whatever) of another great editor.  An editor who is going to help me make LIMITS and Book V better than I could possibly make them on my own.

It’s not that I doubted her editorial skills before,  especially since (like anyone who’s been in the business this long) I inquired delicately of people who’d worked with her and got rave responses.   But with so much backstory to get through, and all her other work, I wondered how much she could grasp of the whole Paksworld mythos, having to read at top speed.    And there’s also the chemistry thing.   Sometimes it’s not the book, the writer, or the editor…but just a lack of spark between editor and book, or editor and writer.

I actually felt better when she moved the book’s pub date (and had clearly moved it already–I think that email just did a dive into electronic limbo)  because to me that meant she wasn’t rushing.     And now…now I’m sitting here having thought (before I opened the email) that I was just too tired to face anyone’s editorial letter this evening…and once I’d read it bouncing a little and thinking “I should get right to this…and this…and this other…”

I’m not knocking FormerEditor off her pedestal in my mind…after all, she edited the first Paks books and taught me a lot in the process, and working with her again was sheer delight.   I credit her with a lot of my success.  Nothing will change my opinion of FormerEditor.

But Editor clearly has a feel for the project, cares about the project, and also has the clear-sightedness and…um…guts to see what’s not working, what’s tangled, and (in one case) what Needs to Go Away.  (You will not miss it.  Trust me on this.   I won’t miss it.   The scales have fallen, and now I can see the cheap gold paint is peeling, the plaster beneath has cracked,  and the “rubies” aren’t even glass, just plastic.   We all have bad days.  That’s why Editors are so important.

Also on the good news front today, the green socks are off the needles and on my feet.

Seven Stories Press, 2005, 317 pages

Shori is a mystery. Found alone in the woods, she appears to be a little black girl with traumatic amnesia and near-fatal wounds. But Shori is a fifty-three-year-old vampire with a ravenous hunger for blood, the lost child of an ancient species of near-immortals who live in dark symbiosis with humanity. Genetically modified to be able to walk in daylight, Shori now becomes the target of a vast plot to destroy her and her kind. And in the final apocalyptic battle, her survival will depend on whether all humans are bigots-or all bigots are human.

http://ravelledsleeve.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/try-again/

http://ravelledsleeve.wordpress.com/?p=1589

The pattern for my rugby-inspired socks, Try Again, is now available from the p/hop website in return for donations to MSF!

I’ve written a blog post there if you want to read more about them.

• sauteed eggplant, red pepper, Vidalia onion, scallions, and fresh oregano (possible later add-ins: spicy green olives, tuna)
  
• roasted garlic
  
• baked sweet potato slices with cinnamon and cayenne
  
• spicy peanut noodles
  
• sauteed Vidalia onion, white mushrooms, tiny shiitake mushrooms, Chinese broccoli, and pressed tofu with Szechuan spicy sauce
  
• baked ricotta with pumpkin, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and a touch of honey
  
• sauteed kale with roasted garlic, sweet potato, and spicy ground turkey

Wow, a TV show finally gets it right!

The series finale of Awake was stunning, and actually made it a perfect miniseries! (Also, it was one of the very few times I’ve ever seen that kind of ending work.) Well done, everyone involved!

Originally published at Nicholas Kaufmann. You can comment here or there.

We just watched the latest (I think) episode of Legend of Korra, “The Aftermath.” I’m continuing to really enjoy this show for a number of reasons.

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD

Pacing: One of the things that bugged me was the love triangle between Korra, Mako, and Asami. It felt, not necessarily cliche, but easy. It’s an oft-repeated trope, one that could push characters into more cardboard, stereotypical roles and — if other shows are any example — drag out for far too long.

Instead, Asami’s character quickly developed more depth and conflict. The plot moved along, changing her role in the story. The conflict between Korra and Asami progressed through conflict into understanding and sympathy. I loved the quiet moment at the end where Korra tells Mako, “She’s going to need you.”

I’ve seen that pacing elsewhere, and I appreciate that the show doesn’t seem to get bogged down. There’s always a sense of movement.

Lin Beifong continues to be awesome. In many ways, I think she’s my favorite character. Partly because she’s an older woman kicking all sorts of ass. Partly because she, more than anyone else I’ve seen, seems to take full advantage of her bending abilities. The firebenders throw fire. Earthbenders throw rocks. Beifong, on the other hand, manipulates metal cables like Spider-Man, grows blades from her armor to punch through mechs, and seems to push the “What else can I do with this?” angle.

Complexity: The scene with Tahno’s character really jumped out at me. This is a character who’s introduced as a full-on asshole. He’s arrogant, he cheats, and you really wanted Korra to kick his butt in the tournament. Instead, the White Falls Wolfbats won … and thus became the targets of an Equalist attack.

In the next episode, you see Tahno without his powers, and he’s utterly broken. Korra feels for him. She knows what he lost and how close she came to losing her own bending. It was a fairly short scene, but that’s all it took.

The relationship between Tenzin and Lin Beifong is another interesting example. Their history, the contrast of their apparent discomfort with how well they work together in a crisis … I have no idea where that’s going, but I like the dynamic, and at this point I’m trusting the show not to go somewhere overly cliche with it.

While there are certainly characters who seem flat-out Evil, at least at first, I appreciate that things generally aren’t presented in a simplistic black-and-white way. Neither people nor power are simple, and this show respects that fact.

The Animation: This is a very pretty show, particularly in the way it portrays movement and the grace of the different benders. I get done watching, and other cartoons suddenly seem clunkier.

Trusting the Viewers: I was trying to figure out how to phrase this last bit, and “trust” is the closest I can come. I’ve never seen a single episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but it hasn’t stopped me from enjoying Korra. It doesn’t surprise me that they wanted a show that could welcome new viewers as well as old, but it struck me that there just isn’t a lot of exposition or hand-holding, period. There’s no talking down, no assuming that things will be too complicated or difficult to understand. Elements are explained as they become relevant to the story.

I know there are things I’m missing from Avatar, but I can catch up on my own, and I like that they don’t slow down the story to spoon-feed information.

In Conclusion: Okay, I get it. I’m officially a fan, and I have added Avatar: TLA to my list of things to catch up on (when I find the time).

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

http://365tomorrows.com/05/25/technobabble/

http://365tomorrows.com/?p=4070

Author : Bob Newbell

“Captain,” exclaimed chief engineer Chen, “the quanto-gravitetic drive has been hit! If we don’t reverse the polarity of the phase rectification circuits within the the next three minutes, the magnetometric decouplers with be completely de-energized!”

Captain Rodriguez frowned. The sneak attack from a hostile Fomalhauti starship had taken out the SS LaForge’s primary warp field initiators. “Chief,” said the captain, “I need power from the quantum instantiation generators routed to the tachyonic transmitter array.”

“But, Captain,” Chen replied, “there’s no way the Heisenberg manifold can take that kind of punishment. The magnetohydrodynamic conduits will undergo an exponential quantum re-entanglement feedback before the Bussard ramjets can possibly compensate.”

The LaForge shuddered as she was struck by another Fomalhauti barrage.

“Captain,” said the ship’s navigator, “we just lost the monopole capacitors! The ship’s superluminal transrelativistic flux inversion sensors just went offline!”

Rodriguez slammed his fist on the armrest of his command chair. The situation was untenable. “That’s it!” he roared. “Chen, I want you to channel an anti-meson stream directly into the turboencabulator, even if it means sacrificing the entire photino containment chassis!”

Another shudder. Another Fomalhauti direct hit.

“Sir,” said Chen, “if I open the anti-meson stream to full power, then I can’t guarantee the singularity transducer won’t undergo a quantum tunneling cascade that will make every superconducting isoprocessor on the ship suffer a causality paradox.”

“It’s a risk we’ll have to take,” said the Captain. “Now, I want all the ship’s quark inverters set to–”

Captain Rodriguez never finished his sentence. A Fomalhauti missile destroyed the LaForge killing all aboard. A subsequent investigation by the United Earth Interstellar Defense Force Committee on Combat Operations resulted in a new engagement protocol being implemented. In all hostile encounters with the Fomalhauti that came after, all UEIDF starship captains were required, until such time as hostilities had ceased, to limit his or her orders to the words “Return fire.”

http://www.stevestreeting.com/2012/05/24/apache-to-nginx-part-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=apache-to-nginx-part-2

http://www.stevestreeting.com/?p=3145

Well as planned and as discussed in my previous post, last weekend we switched ogre3d.org from a dedicated server running Apache, to a virtual private server running Nginx. How did it go?

Well, surprisingly well in fact. I say ‘surprisingly’ not because it was a casual throw-of-the-dice affair – I did a lot of preparation and testing – but because I’m old enough to know that nothing ever goes completely to plan, and we didn’t have any (cost effective) way to test the full server load ahead of turning it on. So as the DNS update slowly propagated across the globe last Saturday, I was sitting nervously at my desk watching the server load with my fingers crossed.

There was one early blip beyond the Tikiwiki shortlink compatibility issue we already knew about – occasionally there was a transient 500 error on the front page of the site (or occasionally in one of the sub-pages), which I eventually traced to the WordPress cacheing plugin we used. I still don’t know why it happened, or why it would randomly appear and disappear (it didn’t sync up entirely with the cache expiry, but maybe it was a combination of time-related factors and which nginx/php-fm process managed the request at the time), but disabling the cacheing eliminated it and did not seem to significantly affect the server load. More investigation on that one at a later date, but for now the site managed just fine without it.

The best thing from my perspective has to be the memory consumption behaviour of Nginx & PHP-FPM. The VPS we’re using actually only has 768MB of RAM – not very large for a fairly busy site with almost entirely dynamic content (because the community forums / wiki are the most popular parts). But I knew that it was easy to add more RAM if I needed it later on Linode, so I figured I’d give it a try and see whether the hype about Nginx was true.

As the traffic started to build, the memory dropped quite significantly, quickly sitting at less than 100MB free. But here’s the awesome thing – despite bouncing around below that level quite a lot, sometimes into single figures and therefore making me really anxious, it never once got into the kind of swap-space thrashing behaviour that Apache so often did (and which was prone to killing the site performance under load spikes). I’d done my sums so I was fairly confident I’d budgeted correctly for the number of Nginx processes and the PHP-FPM pool, but I don’t think I could have got it that accurate – I do wonder if either of them or both are smart enough to figure out how to behave in low memory situations on their own. Either way, the result is that I’ve never seen it eat any swap space yet, despite grazing the horizon frequently. The result is a very, very efficient system. Result!

CPU wise, there’s little to be concerned about too. Here’s the graph for a typical 24 hours:

To be fair, CPU was never a problem with Apache either, until it got into swapping problems.

From a user perspective, things have been great. We’ve had lots of comments saying the site feels snappier than it did before, despite that fact that by the raw numbers, it’s running on a less capable machine. It doesn’t get much better than that.

So, my conclusion here is that Nginx, PHP-FPM and APC make an awesome combination for running a busy site on a cost-efficient configuration. It also illustrates to me how far things have come – when we tried a VPS in 2005 with lighthttpd (still on Linode even then), the site was destroyed in no time at all, and certainly when running Apache even our fully dedicated server with extensive performance tweaks was not capable of handling unexpected spikes particularly well.

Most of the docs & online comments say that Nginx is really designed for serving static content or being a reverse proxy, so you should be careful of what you expect from it for other purposes, but coupled with PHP-FPM and APC my tests show it can definitely be a great server for dynamic content too.

http://www.paksworld.com/blog/?p=1590

Here’s a space for those of you who enjoy speculating about Paksworld and the future possibilities of the storyline.    It’s here so that those who don’t want to read speculations that may turn out to be spoilers can avoid it.  (So–if you hate spoilers, do not read this thread.  OK?)

Keep in mind that this is for YOUR speculations.    We need to keep a kind of wall between your speculations and my planning, for various legal reasons, so I won’t be reading this thread myself.   If anyone has complaints about behavior on this thread, contact me offlist through the website, but be sure to use a subject line referencing this space, and in the body remind me who you are, and then what the problem is.    If trolls show up, or someone’s being rude or abusive–let me know.   Otherwise, this is your sandbox.

http://365tomorrows.com/05/24/blue-for-you/

http://365tomorrows.com/?p=4067

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

“Hey you! What the hell do you think you’re doing to my daughter?”

“Not hell, Daddy. Heaven. Heaven!”

Wendy’s daddy was a Detective Inspector and things got a little difficult for me after that. Couldn’t go anywhere without being pulled over. People stopped inviting me out because wherever we were would get raided. After the sixth cavity search in a fortnight, I enlisted as I had no future in Sussex.

That was twenty years ago. Earth is now just another backwater in an interstellar community that has been at war since before I was born. The Trangurians don’t like us; we’re carbon based life and that is heresy from their view.

“Incoming!”

The warning interrupts my trip down memory lane and I scramble out of the shower cursing as I dive into the nearest set of powered armour. No undersuit means bruises and sores, but chafed beats dead every time. I lurch to the viewport as the suit finishes booting. A Trang Yellowbird, nicknamed ‘Icy Banana’ as folk tend to get an odd sense of humour about things that kill so well. I see the crackles of green lightning around its main gun and am making for a weapons hatch before my thinking catches up with my survival instinct.

I’m not there when the death arrives; I’m hurtling toward the dark blue soil ten storeys below. I hit so hard the cloud of blue hides the curtains of light in the sky. The ground holds and I’m only waist-deep. I’m just congratulating myself when a couple of tons of the tower I vacated lands on me. Through the pain I feel the earth below me shift. Going down.

I’m past six feet under and still hellbound when I explosively emerge into open space and land spectacularly in a Trang patrol. I presume spectacular as the survivors have fled by the time I sit up to admire the splatter patterns that stretch three metres up the side of the bore-tank. Takes a couple of minutes to interface the controls and a few more to turn round, then I’m off to Trang central.

Two hours later I tear through the reinforced walls of their sub basement and arrive in the pit. Any prisoners taken by the Trang are made acceptable to their gods by the simple expedient of being carved until they look like Trang, then have their souls saved by being ground to paste. But they do like doing it Aztec style: en masse with an audience. This means that between grinding days they usually have a few of us locked up.

The place stinks but I don’t care. Never in a million years did I think rescuing her was possible. Wendy joined up a week after me and we stayed together through everything; until her squad got taken when their patrol ship went down a month back. I’d spent sleepless nights crying and cursing that evening so long ago, blaming myself for her decisions with that arrogant idiocy men seem so good at.

The crowd outside the tank thins as they stream down the tunnel. When they’re all away, I’ll reverse this thing all the way back so they have protection. Bore-tanks are assault class. Nothing can take them from the front. Then all my prayers are answered as a familiar figure leans in the access hatch.

“Come to take me back to heaven?”

I grin like an idiot as she crams herself in to sit beside me.

“Let’s get back to friendly turf first. Then we can work on that.”

1) Do I really think everyone should be barcoded?

 Of course not.  

 Seriously...you thought it was for real?   After hearing about responses to the photographer who thought everyone should be limited to just one photo a day, you still thought this was a dead-serious part of the discussion?   The term "Empress of the Universe" wasn't a clue that this was a science fiction writer making something up?   

 2) So why....?

 The format of "The Forum" has this sixty second idea thing in it.   I was told it was the entertaining, fun part of the show.   I interpreted that as "light-hearted interlude."  Participants are asked to come up with an idea--however impractical, impossible, unnecessary, and/or undesirable.   The BBC staff picks one and the person whose idea it was is then supposed to present and defend it.  

 I don't know about the others, but I tossed out several ideas over the phone, and they didn't seem to create any interest.   The idea is supposed to be related to the day's topic (there went my idea for putting solar panels on top of cars in all sunny climes...)   It's not supposed to be related to things the participant has already  given as points they might want to make in the main discussion (there went another idea or two, including an implant to manage aberrant brain chemistry in soldiers so they wouldn't commit stress-related  errors, have rage episodes, maybe even prevent PTSD) or points  put forward by the other participants when  their main statements are known (and there went something else I didn't even mention to them.)   When the first few got "Yes, but..." reactions, I thought "Oh, good, someone else's idea will be used."   I'd been told the right one would be picked on the weekend.  The weekend went by.  Whew.  Off the hook.

Have I mentioned that my wife has become a marathon-running machine? Not only did she do the More Magazine/Fitness Magazine Half Marathon back in April, last weekend she and her friend Laura did another one: The Superhero Half Marathon and Relay in Morris County, New Jersey! Benefitting Meals on Wheels and the American Cancer Society, participants of the race were encouraged to dress up as superheroes, either established characters or one of their own making. Here’s Alexa as her own superhero, the Poison Dart (note the homemade frog symbol):

There are a bunch of fun pictures of the race itself and other costumes at Flickr! (Also, it was announced that they had created a new Guinness world record of most superheroes in one place with nearly 1,700 superheroes on site! Woohoo!)

Now Alexa is taking a much-needed break from marathons and resting up for the next one in October: the Divas Half Marathon in Long Island!

Originally published at Nicholas Kaufmann. You can comment here or there.

http://www.paksworld.com/blog/?p=1587

Since I already let this kitten roll out of the bag somewhere else, it’s loose here as well.    It’s spoiler-ish, but not a true spoiler, and it’s insight into how my mind functions on “deep logic” issues.  It’s slightly (but only slightly and not in essence) different from the version on the other venue.   However, if you fear even the faintest tinge of spoilerishness, maybe better skip this one.

I’m dealing with a chapter that stopped me in my tracks and made me back up and think harder.  I’ve been thinking harder for weeks about this chapter (while thinking in the forebrain about other things.)

And lo…there are currents in gnomish culture I’d never really thought about.

A friend of mine who’s traveled a lot has written about exiles and the cultural peculiarities that develop when people aggregate in their familiar communities but in new places, surrounded by other cultures.  Ex-pats, exiles, whatever the cause, from actual exile to seriously at odds with the government where they used to be to “it’s cheaper to raise the kids here than there,” some shrug and join into their new homes and some…don’t.

And when/if visited by those from the old country, their reactions can be unexpected.   Some are eager to hear all the news (and their motivations for this eagerness can vary from “Tell me how old Uncle George is doing” to “Tell me if the government has changed.”)   Some are uncertain whether the visitor has come to chastise them for staying away, or ask them how they themselves can get political asylum.   Those who are fitting in may be eager to encourage their visitors to join them, or want to brag on their success.

Gnomes have had a very stable, mostly secretive, society for a very long time…independent princedoms that communicate with one another (mostly about the Law, or warning of threats from outside) but do not have much close interaction.  Now they have an anomaly.  Arcolin, a human (and as a human, clearly outside the Law)  saved some gnomes who’d been made kteknik–cast out of Law.  Being human, he doesn’t realize all the implications of saving them and then saying “Yeah, sure, you can have those hills over there; we don’t use them anyway.”  (Not word for word, but in essence.)  He worries about what his human ruler will think, but not about what other gnomes will think–because he doesn’t realize the…um…stiffness…of the larger gnome culture yet.    He is by nature a warm-hearted and friendly person (though well able to maintain the dignity a commander needs) and like most humans thinks the gnomes are “cold.”   He was embarrassed when they kissed his boots (and is again every time it happens.)

When other gnomes find out about this…shock is a mild word for what they feel.  Some of this comes out in  Limits of Power, but what I’m dealing with is an aftershock of the shock, in Book V.   There would inevitably be tension between the rescued gnomes and other gnomes still “properly” living in established princedoms, gnomes who had never been outside the Law.  I had vaguely thought of joyful reunion with one’s own kind, but…not necessarily.

Today’s scene is tricky to write, but very different from an earlier draft, the one that the book itself made me toss.    I needed to spend time thinking about the roots of gnomish culture–what they believe they were created for, how this would shape their reaction to having a human save gnomish lives (rather than gnomes saving gnomes, quietly and without fuss.)

See?  Not so spoilerish after all.

Why did you choose to make Princess Danielle white in your princess books?

Isaac Vainio, the protagonist of your next book, is a straight man. Why did you decide to write about a heterosexual protagonist?

Jig the goblin is smart, resourceful, and in an admittedly nontraditional sense, rather courageous. What made you want to write about a strong male character?

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.