StableEquilibrium

Musings, announcements, occasional poems, a fair amount of my outre perspectives

[richardgarfinkle]

My Books

My Books

Here are links to all of my published books.

Fiction

Recent Works

Eros Takes A Bow. https://www.amazon.com/Eros-Takes-Bow-Richard-Garfinkle-ebook/dp/B08PTJDW81/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=7Bnr9&content-id=amzn1.sym.3a079c4e-f938-40c9-a0ed-01ef0e9528e9&pf_rd_p=3a079c4e-f938-40c9-a0ed-01ef0e9528e9&pf_rd_r=140-9635554-3300466&pd_rd_wg=wP6MG&pd_rd_r=5e3be6b3-e13f-40f5-9be7-3c9002a63e36

Audiobook of Eros Takes A Bow (Narrated by OSPRed) https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Eros-Takes-a-Bow/dp/B0H46JGD8F/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0

The Polyrhythmic Constellations Triptych

The Mills of God https://www.amazon.com/Mills-God-Polyrhythmic-Constellations-Book-ebook/dp/B0G54HVKK3/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=2O696&content-id=amzn1.sym.f8e88413-4697-42ea-9bf7-b28eb886330d&pf_rd_p=f8e88413-4697-42ea-9bf7-b28eb886330d&pf_rd_r=140-9635554-3300466&pd_rd_wg=vL14m&pd_rd_r=235d0e5f-8f22-4fab-8594-46bf0b035d6d

The Teeth of Evolution https://www.amazon.com/Teeth-Evolution-Polyrhythmic-Constellations-Book-ebook/dp/B0G5BSSLHM?ref_=saga_dp_bnx_dsk_dp

Turning The World https://www.amazon.com/Turning-World-Polyrhythmic-Constellations-Book-ebook/dp/B0G57SQGLW?ref_=saga_dp_bnx_dsk_dp

Early Works

Celestial Matters https://www.amazon.com/Celestial-Matters-Richard-Garfinkle/dp/0312859341/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=SMOmK&content-id=amzn1.sym.3a079c4e-f938-40c9-a0ed-01ef0e9528e9&pf_rd_p=3a079c4e-f938-40c9-a0ed-01ef0e9528e9&pf_rd_r=140-9635554-3300466&pd_rd_wg=DMQ50&pd_rd_r=26542686-505c-4660-b4ef-3c591ee1d18c

All of an Instant https://www.amazon.com/All-Instant-Richard-Garfinkle/dp/0312866178/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=AZoTd&content-id=amzn1.sym.f8e88413-4697-42ea-9bf7-b28eb886330d&pf_rd_p=f8e88413-4697-42ea-9bf7-b28eb886330d&pf_rd_r=140-9635554-3300466&pd_rd_wg=sTEKH&pd_rd_r=138d630f-501c-49f8-833b-803874a9d244

Two By Two, Souls Fly https://www.amazon.com/Two-Souls-Fly-Richard-Garfinkle-ebook/dp/B005E1JDA8/ref=sr_1_11?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.EsiiJjx12n1q22jBbfZ8L_V7gbHDkoVE4IoyUZ_cIes64h7BDyUHMRnbOsGrdX8un_lx1MFt9NlFTKfuyLQpXN1nCtXDGNDB0_UQME396DaFgJJHWYtJ15iu9ERJSIhEn2OauhaN82NyDtGpeQmi97E2W7BLpTRo4xlUrPScXgMzcRmJgkt1SAf2D_apSnry.wQBr09Ts0bkvvJpCTj16XxX8HVNwFpbEKvurvfC5eSg&dib_tag=se&qid=1783693208&refinements=p_27%3ARichard%2BGarfinkle&s=digital-text&sr=1-11&text=Richard%2BGarfinkle

Wayland’s Principia https://www.amazon.com/Waylands-Principia-Richard-Garfinkle-ebook/dp/B0053DLJOA/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=35Uec&content-id=amzn1.sym.f8e88413-4697-42ea-9bf7-b28eb886330d&pf_rd_p=f8e88413-4697-42ea-9bf7-b28eb886330d&pf_rd_r=140-9635554-3300466&pd_rd_wg=MpHti&pd_rd_r=172fe583-2f6e-4c00-aacf-ec1b17b1b573

Exaltations https://www.amazon.com/Exaltations-Richard-Garfinkle-ebook/dp/B004OL2XOW/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=jCE2g&content-id=amzn1.sym.3a079c4e-f938-40c9-a0ed-01ef0e9528e9&pf_rd_p=3a079c4e-f938-40c9-a0ed-01ef0e9528e9&pf_rd_r=140-9635554-3300466&pd_rd_wg=9lYk5&pd_rd_r=bc0e5f4c-a76a-4164-99ee-7199d45f4dfd

Unknowable Death https://www.amazon.com/Unknowable-Death-Richard-Garfinkle-ebook/dp/B0073G9YYW/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=xm08d&content-id=amzn1.sym.3a079c4e-f938-40c9-a0ed-01ef0e9528e9&pf_rd_p=3a079c4e-f938-40c9-a0ed-01ef0e9528e9&pf_rd_r=140-9635554-3300466&pd_rd_wg=0TN2d&pd_rd_r=d984e717-e3ec-4a2f-af42-1b4fdfe7c960

Nonfiction & Textbooks

The Muse of Coding. Computer Programming as Art. https://www.amazon.com/Muse-Coding-Computer-Programming-Art-ebook/dp/B0CKFJTV6C/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_author_smart_catalog_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=J4w1K&content-id=amzn1.sym.aec507cb-142c-4f68-9ae5-803b8e7b33f1&pf_rd_p=aec507cb-142c-4f68-9ae5-803b8e7b33f1&pf_rd_r=140-9635554-3300466&pd_rd_wg=LD0zn&pd_rd_r=ca6b29b5-da5c-4d3a-acbb-4b2f51de78d0

With David Garfinkle https://www.amazon.com/Three-Steps-Universe-Mystery-Matter-ebook/dp/B0028K303O/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_author_smart_catalog_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=1drNR&content-id=amzn1.sym.aec507cb-142c-4f68-9ae5-803b8e7b33f1&pf_rd_p=aec507cb-142c-4f68-9ae5-803b8e7b33f1&pf_rd_r=140-9635554-3300466&pd_rd_wg=Adjm3&pd_rd_r=67c26990-ff6c-4263-86b0-f062e164156d

X Marks The Spot. The Lost Inheritance of Mathematics (Currently undergoing revisions for a second edition) https://www.amazon.com/Marks-Spot-Inheritance-Mathematics-Recreational-ebook/dp/B08VPXP6HX/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_author_smart_catalog_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=S3lb1&content-id=amzn1.sym.aec507cb-142c-4f68-9ae5-803b8e7b33f1&pf_rd_p=aec507cb-142c-4f68-9ae5-803b8e7b33f1&pf_rd_r=140-9635554-3300466&pd_rd_wg=kUsxv&pd_rd_r=ab961963-95cf-457d-9f39-458010b78bdb

[comicaurora]

Scale of 1-10 how bad was this crowd scene to draw

honestly I used so many shortcuts drawing these background guys that it worked out to like a 3/10, but it's really good to hear that it looks way more high-effort than it actually was

[comicaurora]

2.8.3 - Aurora

me too, for this friday cliffhanger

see you on monday!

[achronalart]

Okay, I was not expecting this innocent-looking 1915 women’s fashion magazine to hold not only a debate strongly in favor of birth control, but also a BLISTERING demand for women’s suffrage!

Like, super passionately furiously angry blistering

Made me want to run out and march for women’s suffrage myself

(Description for the visually impaired:

Cover of the October 1915 issue of “Pictorial Review”, “15 cents a copy”, “$1.50 a year”

The left half of the cover is a pastel drawing of a little blonde boy in a white shirt and vest biting into a red apple.

The right half, in black text on yellow, says

Pictorial Review

The Fall Fashion Number

Showing many pages in colors of the newest Fall styles

In this issue:

What shall we do about “birth control”?

The Marriage and Divorce Problem in England

Short Stories by

Cora Harris

Harris Dickson

Mary Heaton Vorse

Charles G.D. Roberts

Mary Stewart Cutting

Gertrude Brooke Hamilton

[richardgarfinkle]

Competent larger than life villains only exist in fiction. All real life evil is cartoonishly incompetent. It's their fanboys who talk them up in fake histories.

[richardgarfinkle]

From Agatha Christie's Poirot short story "The Augean Stables" describing a politician,

"The man obviously wanted to tell him something—and as obviously had lost the art of simple narration. Words had become to him a means of obscuring facts—not of revealing them. He was an adept in the art of the useful phrase—that is to say the phrase that falls soothingly on the ear and is quite empty of meaning."

This also applies to phrases that enrage and are empty of meaning. Too many people are saying things only to soothe or enrage.

Too many people never learned and many others have forgotten that language can be used to share things to think about, to play with, to be inspired by and make use of.

Too many are using language only to soothe or enrage and are only listening to what other people are saying only to be soothed or enraged.

The arts of language are excellent at showing the complex insides of things, of revealing the anatomy of thought and action. Using them for a momentary spike of feeling is a waste of what those arts are good for.

[comicaurora]

2.8.1 - Aurora

When last we left our heroes…

and so it begins

[comicaurora]

more unwinding!

[achronalart]

Pencil sketch of a d12

[comicaurora]

First time asker. How or where did you learn to write? I’m perpetually stuck and your work feels like what I’d want my work to look and feel like. If you respond, thanks so much!

Fascinating question. I really appreciate the implication that I'm not still learning to write.

The short answer is by reading and watching and overall consuming stories written by other people. The stories that move you are also the stories that inspire you, and inspiration is direction that helps you figure out what you want to pursue. When a story hits you with a moment that cuts right to your core, you might want to figure out why that moment hit you so hard, what parts of it worked, what parts of the rest of the story built up to it, how it's doing that. Possibly even more vitally, when a story is absolutely losing you, chase down what's broken about it and why that might be happening. Once you start seeing how stories are put together, it becomes a lot easier to build your own.

It's not enough just to read. Writing can't be done in a vacuum. You have to read what other people write in order to write your own works, but you have to also go out into the world and experience it in order to build worlds of your own. Writing is an act of creation, but it's also an act of consumption; you the writer are consuming the things that you've learned and experienced and turning them into something new. You can't do that on an empty stomach. Step zero of writing is touching grass.

Writing makes you hungry, and hunger gives you direction. If fantasy inspires you, that might give you the direction of researching folklore and mythology and the other pillars that inspired the great works in the fantasy genre. A love of battle anime might turn into a pursuit of martial arts. Mystery novels might lead you into forensics or psychology or anatomical study. The things you love reading about are connected to other things you'll probably love learning, and once you learn them they'll become foundational substrate in your mind from which your own stories can grow.

Sometimes the harder question isn't how to write, it's how to stop writing. Storytelling is a hard habit to break, arguably impossible. The majority of us do it mostly unconsciously or in times of stress - catastrophizing, fears, anxieties are us telling ourselves scary stories about worst case scenarios. What if the worst possible thing happened, or this nightmare played out; what if I fell here, what if this killed me, what if they hate me, what if they gave me reason to hate them, what if I woke up and a scary guy was there? Our minds concoct stories constantly and compulsively, usually unprompted. Learning to recognize this for what it is is a very useful first step in the pursuit of writing on purpose.

It's easy for these stories to compel us when we spin them, because we're our own captive audience. The hard part of writing is figuring out how to take that story out of our heads and get it into someone else's instead. This is where the craft of writing comes into play, and it's again best learned by reading. How do the stories you experience influence your thoughts and feelings? What methods of phrasing and framing do they use to comfort you, intrigue you, gutpunch you? What matters to the writer to communicate with specificity, and what are they leaving up to you, their audience? Why did the writer choose to do it like that? How would you do it?

Once the story is out of your brain and into a first draft, editing and constructive criticism become possible. Step one was "make it exist", steps two through forever are "make it good." You intend your story to impact in a certain way, but you won't know how well you've succeeded until you see how other people take it. Not all critiques are equally useful, so at this stage it's mostly good to find people whose perspectives you trust and value and listen to them. Once the story exists in its final form, disregard this step and stay out of your story's reviews. Those aren't criticism of your writing process, they're buyer testimonials for readers. They're not useful for you.

Coffee also.

[comicaurora]

Do you have any advice for organising your characters as you develop them? I enjoy writing the ever-controversial fanfiction (not Aurora, don't worry), but I find it difficult to organise my thoughts on who an original character is even though I can imagine what they do, their role in the story, etc.

I suppose I'm asking if you just write a character raw or have some sort of master dossier on their personalities, histories, and [SPOILERS], or a secret third thing? How do you distil a character? Do you, or does story come first?

Maybe that just sounds like "How do you write?" or "How do you move from a concept to a formal construct?" but I've recently been alarmed by the "Created Using Generative AI" on Ao3 and I refuse to use it, even for 'structure/continuity' so while I'm at it, I thought I'd ask you about your process.

This is an interesting question and I'm not sure I fully understand it. When I build characters I don't have a specific method for organizing their traits - I don't mix up qualities between characters, I don't lose sight of who's got a dead mom vs who's got a code of honor or a lot to prove. It's not an unattributed list of character qualities in my head, it's all firmly under the umbrella of each individual character's disparate facets. They could be broken down into character reference sheets or bulletpointed bios, but I've never felt the need to do that; most of my character details are in miscellaneous notes files scattered across fifteen years of irl time.

The trouble you might be having is seeing characters as lists of qualities rather than networks of interconnected forces and consequences. A character can have a bullet-pointed list of salient character traits (strict personal code, unsociable attitude, has a cool sword) but in my experience it's more useful to consider what aspects of a character's life have shaped them and how. What things have happened to them, and how has that thing affected them, and how does it inform how they react to future things going forwars?

I don't lose sight of who's got a dead mom because that dead mom informs every aspect of their character, from their skittishness to their guilt to their difficulty getting attached to their angers and fears and the lengths they'll go to for the people they care about. I know who's got a code because I know why they have that code and the limitations they place on themselves in all circumstances to make sure they follow it. It's not an isolated bulletpoint, it's a facet of their larger character-ness as a whole. It's much harder to forget or misplace something when it's anchored to so many other things.

[achronalart]

So there I was, innocently skimming this 1919 "Ladies' Home Journal" magazine, when THIS leapt out at me.

1919 Pencil illustration by F.R. Gruger for the story "Harold Child, Bachelor" by Arthur Crabb in the September 1919 issue of "Ladies' Home Journal" magazine.

A seated elderly lady speaks to a young gentleman in spectacles, accompanied by a young lady:

"There are Styles in Vampires Which are Not Easy for Susceptible Young Men to Recognize at a Glance"

(capitalization is original to the text)

[richardgarfinkle]

Characters are Bundles of Pasts

Whatever I’m looking at or using or seeing someone else look at or use, I feel the need to understand. I like to know what’s going on inside and what can be done with it outside.

The more prevalent and in use something is, the harder it is to understand, because too much of what goes on with such things is unquestioned and presumed upon.

As a result many of those things have taken me sixty odd years to get a handle on and many I don’t really have a sense of at all.

As a writer and reader of fiction as a maker, GM, and player of RPGs and as a viewer of movies, TV shows and various other videos, I have been struggling for a long time to get a sense of what characters are.

I’ve known since I began writing that characters are not people. This can be seen by examining certain basics.

Characters speak in monologue and converse in dialogue. People don’t. If you look at a transcript of an actual human discussion, you will see little that resembles either monologue or dialogue.

People actively adjust and change what they are doing very rapidly in ways that are difficult or impossible to put into words. Characters follow paths of action until they encounter something that might alter their trajectory.

These are ideas I had forty odd years ago. I’ve done a lot of stuff involving characters since then and I’ve picked up and discarded a variety of models for what they are.

One more fact bubbled up over time that I think is vital. We don’t have problems interacting with characters at different times in their lives or when their lives are reinterpreted by different writers, actors or players. We may disagree with those reinterpretations but we mostly don’t have problems with the fact that they can be reinterpreted.

The conclusion that I came to recently is that characters are bundles of pasts treated as a unified whole.

What I mean by a bundle of pasts is a collection of things the character experienced and things they did that matter in how we think about the character and their actions. These pasts also provide the source material for foreshadowing, dramatic and comedic irony and implication and ideas for fanfic, new interpretations and, of course, argument.

These pasts include things that are presented as present or future. The present of a character is not “what they are doing” it’s “what they will have done.” The future is not what they will do, but what past is now being foreshadowed in the past that is made relative to that future.

These are not the tenses that humans experience. Our present is where/when we can take action and experience what is actually happening to us. Character presents have a distance of framing narrative and a lingering sense of something being talked about that already happened.

Note that this can be a complex overlap when roleplaying a character. The player is experiencing an actual human present, but that present is being used to generate the past the character went through after the fact.

Writers, actors, directors, players and gamemasters can all plan for a character’s future but that planning is a matter of framing a possible future as a past they might go through that might become part of their bundle of pasts.

I’m still working through the ramifications of this as they play out in the book and game I’m now working on as well as everything I’m reading and watching at the moment.

Oftentimes when I start playing with an idea, it turns out I’m playing with everything. Which can be All Kinds of Fun.

[richardgarfinkle]

Worldbuilding as Exploration of the Interesting

I started reading SFF and comics in the 1960s. I started studying logic including modal logic in the 1970s. I started playing RPGs in 1976. The summer thereafter, inspired by a great High School English teacher, I read every epic poem I could get my hands on.

I started writing SFF in the 1980s. I started homebrewing RPGs around the same time.

For all of these the one thing that most held my interest was in building worlds that were internally consistent and which explored ideas that interested me in ways that I had not otherwise seen them explored.

I should probably say that for me, something is interesting if its implications and its interactions with other things are surprising and which keep growing and evolving as one explores them.

The stories and worlds that interested me were ones where the way things worked always mattered. And where those ways could in some form or another be picked up and played with.

I also enjoy it when supposedly incompatible models of things and world views could come together and be revealed to be aspects of a broader understanding which in turn lead to knew capabilities for playing.

Some people try to make art that they would enjoy. I’ve always tried to make art out of what I can infer from what I am interested in and enjoy. So that rather than trying to bring other people to my ways of thinking, I use is my thinking as a starting point for an open ended process that others can pick up and play.

This is how I world build for books and for games. One of my joys in GMing and writing from this approach is seeing what others do with what I’ve made.

[comicaurora]

I want you to know that "get less scared" Red kept me company during my PhD thesis defence (successful). A good reminder! I had her turned to face me the whole time 😅

HELL YEAH

[richardgarfinkle]

Congratulations

[comicaurora]

I had to pull up one of my book listings for a couple screenshots and it took every muscle in my body to not scroll down and read the reviews more than once

Anyway, if you've read the comic/print volumes, please consider leaving a review on one of the various online platforms (Amazon, B&N, etc)! It's extremely helpful for me and my publisher, plus it helps potentially outweigh any "I didn't read volume 1 so I'm confused and annoyed" that may or may not be present in the reviews I may or may not have read before exerting my Iron Willpower to tear myself away. Informed reviews are incredibly useful for potential readers no matter the star rating, and I promise not to look!

[richardgarfinkle]

Good reviews are often difficult for people to write because enjoyment of something is not a simple thing. It pervades the work and the experience of the work.

People who enjoy and would like to review, can and should simply say that they enjoyed the work a lot. There's no need to dig into particulars because joy is much bigger than unhappiness. It's good and helpful to share that one liked something.

[achronalart]

What colour would you pick for your OSP colour?

We actually had a family discussion about this! ^_^

After putting our heads together, we reckoned that I could be Infrared, as the sort of unseen behind Red. And an old friend suggested her father be Hard X-Rays, because he likes to understand the inside of things. X-Rays without the "Hard" sounds more nicknamey, though, so we might stick with that.

[richardgarfinkle]

Infrared is the unseen but felt color of warmth.

XRays are the shining sky at night.

I think we blend well together.