Teaser Tuesday: “Seven Surrenders”

So this week I was reading Seven Surrenders, the second book in the “Terra Ignota” trilogy tetralogy, by Ada Palmer:

The premise of the “Terra Ignota” series in general, and of Seven Surrenders in particular, is that, after centuries of worldwide peace, Earth has begun to teeter on the brink of another world war, as a result of various conspiracies involving targeted assassinations, long-suppressed and equally long-simmering religious and gender conflicts, technological envy, and what’s essentially a top ten popularity list. (You may think I’m kidding about that last one, but I’m not.) Various factions are trying to avert this oncoming war, but it’s not really a spoiler to say that they seem to be failing.

“Get up. I won’t win this war without you. You know that.”

The first lesson you will learn when war reaches you, reader, is that our limits in civilian life, the point at which we are too tired, too distraught, too weak to go on, are not really our limits. I rose and saluted.

Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

Incidentally, Ada Palmer’s day job (if we can call it that) is teaching history at the University of Chicago, and since I have her on my author watch list at eReaderIQ, I occasionally get notified of price drops of her other books, for instance:

I’m sure this is a very interesting book if one is into reading about didactic poetry as it was interpreted by Renaissance scholars, but despite my once-frequent attendance at Renaissance Faires, I probably won’t be picking it up.

Meanwhile, in an effort to get things moving better on Blue Roses, I have decided to try putting together an outline! I haven’t done an outline since I was working on A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder some 25-odd years ago; by the time the book was finished, I found that it didn’t adhere to the outline at all, concluded the outlining process was (at least for me) a waste of time, and abandoned it. That worked out for the next few decades, but since I seem to need to do something different now, I’m going to give it another go. This time I’m using Scrivener’s Outline and Corkboard views to create the outline, rather than doing it longhand(!) on paper(!!) like I did with Crows.

I don’t know if this will work out, but we’ll see how it goes …