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Lots of stuff has already happened, but new stuff has now started happening at a decent rate. I’m afraid one of the minor design elements in this volume so far is that which someone becomes comfortable with is what they realize is impermanent. That wasn’t planned, by the way. It’s just intruding itself into my awareness. But not all that’s lost stays lost and sometimes what’s discarded or vanishes is replaced by something something else.
Limits of Power has many funny moments (I think you’ll agree when you get there) but so far Book V is being fairly unrelentingly serious. I think it’s the outside world…the illnesses, the suicides, etc. But a book without some leavening in it is a dull loaf of a door-stop, so it’s time I put my mind to it. I’ve been re-reading Surtees’ Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour right before bedtime to raise my humor level and I think it’s working, though it’s not showing in the wordage yet. Maybe I just need a recalcitrant horse. Either Multum in Parvo or ‘Ercules will do.
So far the week’s scenes might have labels like “Arian Puts Her Foot Down” and “Dorrin Has Three Surprises in One Day” or “No, This Squire’s Not Ready for Knight-School Yet.” Unfortunately, the generator of much of Limits’ humor is hors de combat for awhile, and may not even reappear in this series. All the characters are…wait a minute. Who’s that behind the arras? Surely he hasn’t gotten over his last adventure so fast? He has?
Come here, little boy…see this fancy cap? With bells on? Would you like to play awhile in it? And some ribbons perhaps? And this toy horn? Oh, wherever you like, loud as you please. And here’s a nice sticky candy apple. Mess? I don’t care about mess. Of course you can bring your puppies inside….
NOW we’ll see what happens…there’s always one lively character around somewhere.
Comment by Gareth — July 25, 2012 @ 4:16 am
I’m always in awe of people who can write humour. Some people are born raconteurs who can describe anything with humour – if I say the same words it isn’t funny – now how do you capture that on the page??
Comment by Iphinome — July 25, 2012 @ 5:22 am
I’m terribly worried about that foot. Once you put one down it becomes easy to misplace.
@Gareth Try using this corollary of Occam’s razor, other things being equal, an absurd explanation is funnier than a more plausible one.
For reference see the works of Eugène Ionesco
Comment by Sarah Stapleton — July 25, 2012 @ 6:14 am
Is the jester/joker connected to The Trickster in this context? (A certain key character has had a preference for his trickster god over, say, Gird; I find his consternation amusing.)
Comment by tuppence — July 25, 2012 @ 7:59 am
Three Men in a boat is my favorite bedtime soothing recourse for humor. Son of the noble few pieces of humor which is still more than amusing a century later. An amazing amount of funny writing isn’t after some time
Comment by Jenn — July 25, 2012 @ 10:23 am
You could always have one of the Verrakai children sneak a live chicken into the kitchen. Just don’t expect any nice meals for the next week or so.
Comment by Richard — July 25, 2012 @ 5:50 pm
Like father like son?
Comment by elizabeth — July 26, 2012 @ 5:55 pm
Gareth: Sometimes when I write something I think is funny, other people laugh. Sometimes they don’t. I’m not a natural comedian, but everyone gets lucky once in a while.
Iphinome: Arian’s foot is fine and the guilty parties are now chagrined to realize how stupid they were being and are trying to figure out why they didn’t realize before.
tuppence: You’re so right about the aging of humor–it’s both time making some jokes hard to figure out, and our own aging which changes out sensitivities.
Jenn: Farin Cook would have that chicken’s head off in no time (hope no kid got in the way) and a junior would be told off to take it out, clean it, pluck it, and have it ready for the pot pronto.
Richard: ??? Not sure what the reference is too, though I agree many sons are like their fathers in the mischief division.
Comment by GinnyW — July 26, 2012 @ 9:58 pm
I have generally found humor to be a quirky kind of category. Some things will set everyone laughing, some things only set me laughing, and some things leave me wondering what everyone is laughing at. Very often it can be highly contextual, which is why things that are funny in one generation are just weird in another. I wonder if what you sense is missing is the joy? Joy?
Comment by elizabeth — July 26, 2012 @ 10:04 pm
It might be. Admittedly the two suicides in one day knocked me off-kilter, and from experience a close death affects me for more than a week or three. Other life stressors are also involved. But, bottom line, this book has to be right. However I get there. Sometimes a few days of deliberate goofiness is what a writer needs.
Comment by Annabel (Mrs Redboots) — July 27, 2012 @ 10:22 am
I liked the Halveric grandchild, who reminded me totally of my small grandson, who can just say his name now, but only just!
Comment by Karen — July 27, 2012 @ 1:50 pm
I may have a weird sense of humor (if such a thing can be considered to be anything but the norm — we all have things that we find funny but others don’t, and it’s part of being human ;-/), but I often find that the things that tickle my funny bone most are quirks of character that make characters seem human.
I loved Arvid’s discomfort in his fur jacket (actually I love Arvid, no matter what he’s wearing — although I definitely wouldn’t want to marry him :-P), no matter how comfortable and warm because it was so in character for someone who is, frankly, a bit of a dandy — if someone who tries to fade into the background can be a dandy — to worry that he smelled like sheep.
I loved Arian’s discomfort with Queenly robes because I could appreciate how a woman who has never traded on her wiles might feel uncomfortable in the role of someone who is judged less for her ability in a crisis than for her ability to fill out a dress.
These are only two examples of things that have made me smile, but I guess what I’m saying is that I often find humor in characters finding that their own expectations of the world have been somewhat limited, and find satisfaction as they challenge their world-view and their own personalities to grow.
I can understand how you might be concerned that a book that, at present, feels to you to be about characters accepting uncertainty as the norm might be lacking in room for humor for character growth, but in my life, that exact issue has been the greatest spur I’ve had towards character growth — and in the way, I’ve found countless reasons to laugh at myself.
Comment by Karen — July 27, 2012 @ 7:14 pm
By the way, have you noticed the Olympic headlines about the blind archer (shades of Stammel)?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/jul/27/im-dong-hyun-london-olympics-record
Comment by Richard — July 28, 2012 @ 4:23 am
Elizabeth (#6,#5): no matter.
You’ve certainly written stories with a strong funny side: that cannot just be luck.
Sometimes quiet humor registers subliminally and grows on one slowly. When I challenged myself to name something humorous from the DEED, I immediately came up with the lecture to the recruits: “This is a mule”. The moment I stop to think about it, that scene is funny. All character-driven as Karen says.
Comment by GinnyW — July 29, 2012 @ 3:50 pm
One of the problems with high fantasy is that it reaches a climax where the fate of world rests on the shoulders of the characters. Balancing the fate of the world and a sense of humor can be a bit tricky for the characters – Frodo was permanently wounded in the end, and it was Sam who sat on the doorstep of Mordor wondering how the story would end. I don’t know myself but I would think it would be even harder for the author. I think that I would oscillate between weight of the world on my shoulders heaviness, and just plain silliness, bizarre humor, and absurd juxtapositions.
On the other hand, editing the first draft to make a smooth story is WORK. So there might as well be rough places that get smoothed out in the process. You may be feeling confined because you have been working through the highly edited proofs for Book IV, which probably reads pretty well by now. Going back to Book V is like moving from your well-tended for years garden to that patch in the back where you always intended to plant roses, but never got the ground broken. Not finished at all!
Goof around. Play with things. Enjoy yourself. WE have not even read Limits yet. And we love snippets when they fall to the cutting floor.
Comment by Jenn — July 30, 2012 @ 9:40 am
Yes yes snippets and out takes.
Comment by Tracy — July 30, 2012 @ 10:39 am
One of my go-to books when I really need to laugh is “You’re Stepping On My Cloak And Dagger”, by Roger Hall. It’s about his experiences in WWII as a young officer in the brand-new OSS, and it’s all true, which makes it even better. Mr. Hall’s turn of phrase is more than felicitous, it’s downright hilarious, and his eye for human error is spot-on. If you need to laugh out loud, get hold of a copy…
Comment by Tracy — July 30, 2012 @ 10:39 am
And yes, snippets would be Very Good!!
Comment by elizabeth — July 30, 2012 @ 11:50 am
Tracy: That is indeed a delightful book, and very funny. My copy is somewhere….glances around and shudders.
Comment by elizabeth — July 30, 2012 @ 11:51 am
Some will be coming. Just not today. Monday after convention weekend…mindblur.
Comment by elizabeth — July 30, 2012 @ 12:10 pm
Karen, I hadn’t, because I’ve been off at a convention and not following the Olympics at all. (Also, our TV wasn’t working before I left–several weeks of not working–so I’d almost forgotten about the Olympics.) But wow. Seriously WOW!
Comment by Elizabeth D. — August 7, 2012 @ 10:00 pm
I’ve been camping… but I have to comment (although late).
Sometimes I’m funny, sometimes not (more usually), but often the things that happen are funny when I do not intend them to be. Just the other day, I was thinking about mathematical probabilities, as in Tony Crilly’s book, “50 mathematical ideas you really need to know”. In Chapter 31, Probability, he shows that no monkey could have written Shakespeare randomly, because to be able to type “to be or” (not even getting to the end of the sentence), at one stroke a second, assuming 30 keys (no caps, just letters and numbers) would take more than 20,000 years to achieve. I worked out that to say “to be or not to be” would take longer than our sun has existed (more than 10 to the 19th power).
So, I figured that it would be an interesting probability problem to figure out the odds in our small world that, in the movie “Meet the Parents” there is a mother named Elizabeth with a daughter named Pamela, a (supposedly) Himalayan cat who is toilet trained (and a friend did tell us a joke about what if somebody had an urn with ashes… happened to be a writer friend…), and when we lived in an apartment and didn’t allow smoking, our friends would go up on the roof if they wanted to smoke, and my husband does speak many languages, and at the time had a smattering of a foreign language that began with the letter T, and although he has never done anything of the kind some of our friends assumed he must work for an intelligence agency and, because he used to do stage magic as a hobby and can do the “cold read” people assumed that he was a human lie detector. That movie was based on our life, and I think I know who provided the story. Frankly, I would rather that people had a good laugh at our expense than remember us as tragic figures.
(We won’t come after them for the money, never have and never will, but if they had paid us properly for our life’s story, there are a whole lot more funny things that have happened to us that they could have used as well.)
I’ve even come to find humor in some awful things. My pharmacy didn’t bother to stock one drug, so I had to go to the hospital pharmacy. At the hospital, they told me my number would flash when the prescription was ready, but a previous customer’s number was flashing continuously and I had to wait somewhere that wouldn’t give me a headache. When it was ready, I had to sign that I was paying through my credit card, sign that I had received the drug, sign that I understood and agreed with the privacy policy, and then check that I did not need counseling as a multiple choice box on one of those card-reader signature devices where the signature looks like spaghetti. In the parking lot, an old lady blasted me with her horn (I was on the side and not in front of her or near her), and a maintenance crew was making a repair with a magnesium torch right in front of the car as I was driving to the exit, so my ears and eyes were smarting. This was for the convenience of not having to wait days for my husband’s medicine; the hospital bent over backwards on the stuff that didn’t matter, while providing circumstances at the same time that would be as annoying as possible. Sometimes that kind of overkill is funny, but often people don’t believe it because the truth can be so awkward. Sometimes a serious situation can overshadow the humor: just that the over-zealous triple signatures happened in a hospital would make people not see the funny in it. To me, it is my present “normal,” and in that context I’m comparing it to going through a drive-through and having everything done much faster, while I shop somewhere else.
I love the circumstances in your books; humor and seriousness both have their places. Sometimes seriousness is needed, and really has a powerful reason to be prominent. I think your characters look around them, and their awareness of the juxtaposition of circumstances is enough to make situations humorous. Unsing the unsingers, who hatch plots even though they supposedly negate them? I don’t know, and I won’t get into spoiler speculation.