Rhetoric and Logic

The fantastically etched and silvered Sallet of Philip the Handsome, attributed to Domenico Negroli,

Length: 16 in/40.7 cm

Width: 9.8 in/25 cm

Height: 8.3 in/21 cm

Weight: 5.9 lbs/2680 g

i will spell color as رنگ and measure distance in parasang. i would watch buzkashi on the steppe all day while drinking ayrag with my yurt mates. i'll have khorkhog every day that's worth 5 dirham. i would go to naadam festivals every year. i am also more likely to meet tatars, Ibn al-Fuwati, Shams al-Din Juvayni and Hülegü Khan.

How can I do this as a MAN?

Do we ever think seriously about how amazing it is that in Discworld, no female character ever gets fridged for the ‘benefit’ of a male character’s story arc?

I mean, it may not seem like a big deal until you remember these are actually 40 books and how incredibly common this is as a plot device in mainstream media.

Let’s take Sybil Ramkin (also known as dragon goddess of my heart) as an example. The one time she plays damsel in the series is in Guards!Guards when the King (actually dragon, actually Queen. Or maybe not. We shouldn’t presume on their gender identity) is going to eat her, and that’s because she was knocked out stone cold by several guards. Once she’s freed, she proceeds to kick ass and take names like you would expect from a dragon breeder, and you can also appreciate the fact that she kicks off probably the most practical courtship in the history of fantasy as a genre.

(also there was that time she knocked out a werewolf with a steel bar because they were holding her captive and apologized afterwards I swear to gods this woman)

And she is never fridged. Think about how easily most male authors would just go, ‘You know what? The protagonist isn’t having enough angst. Let’s kill his love interest.’

Then, tuppence more and up goes the donkey.

And she is such a positive force in the story! We start out with Vimes seemingly as a clichéd anti-hero cowboy-cop, the kind you’ll find in anything from Lethal Weapon to The Maltese Falcon. He is an alcoholic, utterly miserable and deems himself basically worthless. And then something (a combination of Sybil/Carrot/Vetinari support/scheming and Vimes’ own barely contained rage against the universe) kicks him in the pants and he gets character development like wowza! and we end up with a Lawful Good, incredibly clever (it never ceases to sadden me how he thinks he isn’t really that intelligent) protagonist with probably the strongest moral code I have ever seen in a fictional character. I mean, it had a mental/physical manifestation, for gods’ sake.

And they have this most elusive of fictional things; a marriage free of unnecessary drama and full of mutual respect and kindness, and she does her own thing with the dragons while he solves crime (she tends to help, though) and never is she killed off to 'advance’ his development as a character.

Because a) that would be a really gross (although frustratingly common) thing to do and b),

(This story was serialised in 25 daily tweets from MicroSFF, December 1st to 25th, 2014. Here those tweets have been collected to give the full story.)

Moa woke to mooing. She wrapped her blanket around her like a shawl, put her feet in her clogs, and went to milk the cows.

Life moves slowly in winter. Moa took the milk to the cold cellar and returned to bed, to wait for sunrise. It didn’t come.

The sky above the smoke hole in the thatch remained dark. Moa’s family would not wake from their sleep, despite her crying.

Moa dried her tears. Then she hung the lamp from the door on the billygoat’s horn, filled his panniers, and lead him east.

They made good progress through the snow. Soon they came to the bridge over the river. “Hello,” Moa called. “Master Troll?”

The troll climbed up. “Where’s the sun?” he said. “I can’t sleep in darkness.” “I’ll find out,” Moa said. “Will you help?”

They reached the mountains, and climbed slowly, carefully. When they reached the summit, they saw a faint light in the east.

“Is that light small, or far away?” the troll asked. “It is in the valley,” Moa said. “Unless there’s a hole in the world.”

Moa filled the lamp, then led the way down the mountain. I’m not afraid, she told herself. I have a billygoat and a troll.

As they drew nearer, the troll stopped. “Listen!” There was a low, rumbling sound. Moa looked at him. “Not me!” he said.

The light, and the rumbling, grew stronger. At last they could see a huge wolf, holding a shining globe as large as Moa.

“What do we do?” the troll asked. Moa hesitated. The wolf was bigger and scarier than the troll. “Let’s ask it. Politely.”

“Excuse me?” The wolf turned to look at the three of them. “No, excuse me,” it smiled. “Did my rumbling belly wake you?”

Moa couldn’t stop the question: “Are you hungry?” The wolf laughed and looked from her to the billygoat. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

Moa did not know what to say to that, but the troll pushed past her. “So bright,” he said, then curled up and fell asleep.

“Do you know where the sun is?” Moa asked. “I caught it,” the wolf said. “Is that it?” “In a sense.” “But why?” “To eat.”

“You can’t eat the sun!” Moa rushed in and hugged the glowing sphere. The wolf smiled and lifted his paw; the sphere rose.

The sphere was warm and soft. Moa held on, terrified, as it slowly floated upwards. The wolf stood, mouth open in a grin.

Far below, Moa could see the troll sleeping, and the billygoat standing forlorn. The wolf looked up at her. Then he leapt.

The wolf seemed to grow as it rose, maw gaping wide. The enormous jaws enveloped Moa and the sun, then closed around them.

Darkness fell over the world, and the ground shook when the wolf landed again. The troll stirred, then woke. “Not again.”

The troll took a firm hold of the wolf’s tail and yanked it, hard. The wolf raised its head to the sky and howled in pain.

When Moa saw the jaws open, she bent her knees, pushed hard against the wolf’s tongue, and jumped, the sun ahead of her.

Once she was clear of the wolf’s teeth, Moa shoved the sun up and away. She watched it rise as she was falling, and smiled.

Tradition Bucket Making

I thought there was something wrong with my keyboard...until it started typing by itself.

Not so fast, it wrote. You can't get rid of me that easily...

I furiously pressed my backspace but nothing was working.

You keep my changing my character. The font kept changing rapidly. But you just LOVE to write my death scene, don't you?

The screen began to glitch, colours flashing and breaking before my very eyes.

If I can't exist...then no one can.

A single textbox stood in the middle of all the chaos.

Delete work?

"NO!"

It is necessary to be depressed in the wake of the destruction and even more necessary to be shattered. The details of your actual reality slip and slide out of sight just like the details of your manuscript. One day you remember your opening line and the next it has been broken down into sentence fragments that, no matter how you rearrange, don't have the same impact. That fucking text box lingers in the air, haunting you from behind corners and tucking itself into the sun's rays so that it can gloat over you each morning.

But you are a creative. The weight of your grief softens as you knead its edges, dough in the hands of an agile imagination. Your manuscript is gone, but the experience of it hums through your hands. There is a day that the loss of your heart starts to feel more like a shedding of skin. A story starts to form under your tongue, bitter with the ghost of your last (and first) but growing sweeter with each detail you add.

Writing is a dam breaking. You're exhausted from work and there's some food residue in your hair and you're meaning to take a shower but then you're at your computer and the sound of keys chatters over the roar of the water you're wasting. You heart races and you hardly know what you're typing, so lost in the tempest of what you've always been meant to do. The words flow like a river after a flood, murky and jagged and laden with debris, but undeniable. Real. Inevitable.

After what must be hours, the words trickle and drip. Your eyes burn and your fingers ache. There is a contentment burying under your sternum that feels different than before. Solid and alive. You go to get a glass of water.

It is only after you eat and drink and shower that you dare to approach your computer again, a hiker testing a log bridge that's not on the map. What you've written might be shit. Will you be disappointed? Relieved? Will the phantom of your first work awaken the grief and drag you back down?

You open the document and read the first line. The silence of your dark room pounds against your ears. For a moment, you can't process the words. You blink and scroll down. Yes, the rest you remember. You were almost in a fugue, but the characters and the setting make sense to you. You know you typed them.

When you move your mouse, the cursor refuses to follow.

A horrible dread crawls up your spine to cradle your nape. A frigid finger runs down your arms. Your hands are frozen on the keyboard. No. They're gone. They deleted everything, made sure everything was gone. How could they still be here?

Slowly, without your input, the document scrolls back to the top.

Ready to try again? The font undulates and quivers, growing larger point by point until the question fills the page.

"Please," you whisper.

Your new story highlights itself. A cry sticks in the back of your throat. Hours of work disappear in a soundless blink.

There's also the other stuff here!

The Curve of the World by Vonda N. McIntyre