Fire, Kristin Cashore’s recent companion to Graceling, was one of the books I’ve most been looking forward to all year, and what an absolute joy to read.

Cashore’s characters have realistic, complicated emotions that you don’t usually see in fantasy novels for any age. There are any number of girls capable of kicking ass and taking names in recent fantasy novels, but Fire is so much more than that, a young woman who is strong and fearful and determined and sad. And Cashore is as sharp as anybody writing about the intersections of sex, power, desire, and responsibility.

It’s a romance that’s compelling without being gooshy, and matter-of-fact about sex while tastefully fading everything to black. But I love a good side of morality-play along with my action-adventure-fantasy-romances, and I’m most drawn by Fire’s gradual journey towards coming into her power, figuring out how it can be used for good instead of just for evil. Her coming out of her shell, towards relationships with the Love Interest but also his family, and her guards.

She’s asking big questions: how do we use the power that we have responsibly? How do we use the desire that we have responsibly? And Fire is so real and so beautiful, trying to stumble towards answers.

I love Stephen King’s On Writing, and I’ll cheerfully endorse about 80% of the advice in it (which is high, for a writing book!), but it does bother me when he says he doesn’t plot, that plot is too artificial, that he just puts his characters in a tough situation and lets them sort it out.

Truth is, I have yet to read a Stephen King novel with a really good ending, so I’m inclined to be skeptical.

The trouble is, as a writer you have control over every aspect of the situation. You have control over the situation itself. You have control over the flow of information. You get to decide where the iceberg is, who knows about the iceberg, and what they do with that information. And without the iceberg, you have only half a plot. The difficulty in plotting is making sure the iceberg is exactly where you need it to be.

Without making your readers feel railroaded.

Because when you have a spectacular coincidence, suddenly people remember that none of this is real. It’s just words that a person thought up and wrote down, and it’s all completely arbitrary. There’s nothing wrong with being postmodern and going for that effect on purpose, but I’m not going to care about this love triangle or that person trying to survive the North Dakota wilderness if I keep thinking that they’re fake people.

So you plant the trap, but you kick leaves over it and make it look real. You build the house that looks, from a distance, like it belongs there in the forest.

Time is the universe’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. So too with plot. What does it change if that discussion happens when your main character is angry and frustrated enough to hear the worst in things? What does it change if that discussion happens after she finds out one crucial piece of information? You can’t abdicate responsibility for these decisions. You try things out one way, and then another, cutting out what doesn’t push your characters far enough and also what pushes them in ways that aren’t subtle enough. You try until you’re sick of trying, sick of considering how one decision ripples out onto another.

And this, I think, is one of the things that beginners have to learn. It’s why books sometimes get harder, instead of easier, to write. It’s easy to glom onto the way it really happened, or the way that you know from TV and movies, or the way that seems most dramatic or surprising, and get wedded to that even if it contradicts common sense, linear causality, and your characters’ personalities. It takes experience to slow down, look around, and back off the first thing that leaps into your head. It’s why I can’t do NaNoWriMo anymore.

It’s not an easy thing. But if it were easy, it wouldn’t be so much fun.

Cass in A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend is a cyclist. Me, not so much, especially in high school. Raleigh, North Carolina, has its share of cyclists, and on weekends you can see spandex-clad packs zooming down the sides of highways. But it’s a city that’s built for cars. Big houses on big lots, strip malls, cul-de-sacs. There wasn’t so much as a gas station within two miles from my house, and it was seventeen miles to high school… seventeen miles on the bus, even when I was a senior. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 25.

The freedom that I wanted, when I was in high school, was nothing more than the freedom to go to the mall, the bookstore, the library, without waiting for a parent to be able to shuttle me around.

It wasn’t until I went to grad school in Chapel Hill, NC that I fell in love with cycling. They had a pretty good bus system, and I used it a lot… well, that was the year I broke my arm and then my ankle, so I had to. On my bike, I could get to school! I could get to the grocery store! I could get to the mall, sometimes, though it was five miles away and up a really steep hill!

There’s this new blog I’ve been reading, Amsterdamize. It’s trying to raise these questions of how we can integrate bikes into our daily lives, so that they’re not just a fun weekend toy for people who like to wear spandex, but a valid method of transportation, for running errands, for going to school, for going to work. In a lot of cities, that’s really hard to do because of the sprawl or the bad bike lanes or just the attitudes of drivers towards cyclists. But rolling down a hill with the wind in my face is one of the best things in the world. It’s good for me, it’s good for the environment… so why not try to move towards a world where that’s easier, and safer, and more convenient?