Jenn's World

Pass

2011-12-29T18:55:00.000-07:00

I passed all my classes with a B+ average. Phew.

Now to do it all over again...

2011-12-17T00:02:00.003-07:00

December 17, 2011

Ugh. What a semester. In the past two weeks, I have completed three twenty-page papers and one eleven page paper and done four finals, which included two take-home exams (one of which ended up being twenty pages long) and two in-class (one of which had eighty questions). I don't think I've ever worked so hard or learned so much in a scant few months. On the other hand, I've never tried so hard only to fail either. I failed my data analysis final. I wasn't the only one--two other people (about a quarter of the class) got Fs or D-s. Which tells you something about the class, when three grad students can't pass the test and no one gets an A. The highest anyone scored on the final was a B-. It's possible I won't fail, if the teacher has mercy and moves us all up twenty points.

I don't know how everyone else in my program held up through finals week. Maybe because they're younger, maybe they're more driven and willing to sacrifice to meet their goal while I'm jaded and cynical. But I want to cry. I gave up so much writing time and potential opportunity only to fail and probably have to take a course again. I think this is the first time in my life where I've actually tried so hard to learn something but apparently been incapable of learning it. I'm used to being smart but this stuff just seems to be over my head, I guess.

I may drop out instead of trying again. Or I may try a program that doesn't demand I spend 30 hours a week on homework.

Oh well, I'm taking my cousin to a book signing with Brandon Sanderson tomorrow. Hopefully that will cheer me up.

Feed (pretty hefty spoilers follow)

2011-09-18T14:07:00.005-06:00

September 18, 2011 -- 2:08 p.m.

Been awhile since I've posted a book review. I haven't been able to find my camera with the Worldcon pictures in it. My mother must have put it somewhere strange when she unpacked the suitcase I borrowed.

Anyway, I've read several books lately that I think merit a mention. First off, there's Feed by Mira Grant. Up for a Hugo, but lost to Connie Willis. Full of zombies. This review is full of spoilers, so if those bother you, stop reading now.

One of the cool things about this book is that it isn't really about the zombie holocaust. Most zombie books take place during an outbreak, and don't really look at the aftermath because its anti-climactic. Don't get me wrong, I loved World War Z and its ilk, but it's nice to see a zombie book that focuses on human beings getting on with their lives after seeing their world get taken apart.

In the aftermath of a cancer/cold-curing retro-virus gone wrong, a brother-sister blogger team gets invited to follow a presidential campaign. The candidate is trying to take things back to normal with real campaigns stops and 'press the flesh' visits, despite the fact contact with the live virus can turn you into a zombie.

I liked the female protagonist especially, and enjoyed the banter. This is an excellent study for writers on how to write characters with great quirks and great voices. Also, on how to get background info dumps across without being boring.

Still, the heavy exposition makes the beginning go fairly slow. Unfortunately, there's a lot of repetition, some of it intentional by the author (you'll be as sick of the finger-prick tests as the characters before the end). I think you could easily have trimmed out 50 pages and not have missed anything. Did we really need the eye-rollingly mustache-twirling parents, for example?

But the flip side of so much exposition is that the worldbuilding is fabulous. The society the characters are operating in feels intensely, hauntingly real. Mira Grant's put a lot of thought into both the science and the social implications of her world.

I wish Grant had put the same time into the motives of her antagonists, who are evil just for the point of evilness. Oh sure, there's some gloss of rationality put on their villainy. For example, the aforementioned parents--who adopt the twin protagonists for a ratings boost--supposedly are unable to form any close bonds with the children they've been living with for more than ten years because they're busy grieving for the loss of their original biological child. I just don't buy it, or buy that the protagonists would be such well adjusted people if they're basically living in a paparazzi-centered fish tank. We all know how messed-up the British royal family are, and this sounds almost as bad.

The book's other antagonists don't even get token glosses of rationality. Even when he's doing his wind-up speech, the main villain doesn't point to anything specific when he's explaining why he felt the need to get his megalomania on. If we'd seen just one concrete example of what he was so pissed-off about, it might have made it all feel less comic-book monologue to me. Especially since his machinations never seemed necessary, since we never got a sense that the events swirling around him would justify his dastardly plan. A close presidential race doesn't feel very close to the reader if we never see the other side.

The vagueness of the antagonist's motives was possibly intentional, modelling modern politico's tendency to get take in by empty-yet-powerful rhetoric. But at the end of the day, I felt the villain character was an overly-generalized swipe at a certain segment of the population. Satire looses its sting if it's too easy.

Also, plotwise, all the characters seem to do a lot of holding the idiot ball.

"Sure! I'll totally take orders from a guy who doesn't let me see his face or tell me his name! I'll totally trust that he'll take America back to the state it needs to be, even though I have no clue who he is or how he's going to do it!"

"Yeah, there was an assassination attempt on the presidential candidate a few weeks ago, but after one member of his family dies, we're not going to check and see if this death might have something sinister behind it. Even when the evidence is out where a reporter can conveniently step on it and we've been inside, cleaning the facility anyway..."

"Ooh, I'm an evil henchman rigging a bomb to explode in a hero's trailer. And after I do that, I'm going to kill the occupant's pet and leave it right where he can see it. If he finds a dead animal corpse, he'll totally stick around while the trailer explodes around him, right? It's not like EVIL HENCHMAN 101 teaches us about leaving everything the way we found it if we want our victim to get properly caught up in an explosion..."

The other issue that annoyed me was the book's treatment of the blogger/traditional media divide. I feel like this book came out of an atmosphere that's five, ten years old. I don't think there's the antagonism there once was, especially since print/web journalists make the hop back and forth all the time. The idea that all the Presidential campaigns but one would not include bloggers seems bizarrely retro. The idea that there will still be newspapers in thirty years in itself seems bizarrely retro, especially since going outside in this world is a hazard. What would the insurance premium be for a paper boy?

Even if I do buy the idea that the zombie apocalypse causes all the old flare-ups between reporters and bloggers to surface, I couldn't possibly think it would cause future presidential candidates to ignore online media. There are some things--including publicity seeking--that won't change, even if the world is ending.

Ah well. These are small pet peeves, and almost got me to stop reading, but I'm glad I didn't. After a slow-fuse start, the book ends with an explosive bang. Feed has a lot of great action, great humor, and great fun. I got the rug completely yanked out from under me twice by fantastic plot twists that had me jumping around in my seat. I'd totally recommend this book to people, especially people who love zombies. I would never have written about so many of my negative comments with this book if it hadn't been nominated (and almost won) a Hugo. It just wasn't on that level for me.

The frustrating thing is that this book could so easily have moved from 'good' to fantastic with a more believable antagonist and a few more red herrings. I think, in another few years, this author's books are going to be at the top of my wishlist every year. But it's not in that category yet.

Ten Minute Poem

2011-08-31T18:24:00.003-06:00

Aug. 31, 2011 -- 6:31 p.m.

Well, grad school is more time-consuming than I expected. It's a little daunting to be surrounded by A-students who've been in the full-immersion class environment more recently than I. I'm used to competing with other slackers, not younger, more mathematically gifted versions of myself. I'm used to being at the top of the class, not the back. It doesn't help that everyone else attended BYU and so already seems to know everything about the campus while I'm stumbling around lost wondering what big hunk of brown brick I'm supposed to be going to. I wish there was a shuttle from one end of campus to the other. Getting from parking to my classes is pretty intense in the heat/humidity (yes, Utah does have a little of that.)

Anyway, first assignment due this weekend. We'll see if my writing/analysis ability is still any good. I've forgotten how to do simple things, like citations and mathematical proofs.

I'll try to post pics from Worldcon this weekend. It was awesome, but the kind of awesome that's hard to form into words. Mostly a sense of community. You can wander over to someone and strike up a conversation with people who share your loves, instead of looking at you with confusion and pity. And so many of my idols. E.G., I hung out at the Tor Party before the claustrophobia got to me and someone walked up and started talking to me and it was Lois Bujold. Lois Freaking Bujold just started talking to me like she's an ordinary person and not a goddess of awesome. In my own personal pantheon of Gods, anyone with a wheel-barrel full of literary awards is certainly able to pull a fiat lux out of nowhere and make it bright enough to blind my ass.

All the authors/editors had the same advice for breaking in. Write. Write some more. Write a lot more. Don't follow trends. I keep hoping if I collect enough chips of wisdom, I can cash in for a book deal, but it doesn't work like that. I understand, but I still can dream that someone somewhere will have the magic word that I need to hear.

The writing group with Louise Marley and N.K. Jemisin went well. Both of the pros had some hard things to say, but they were good hard things that I needed to hear. I'll take some of their advice and ignore the rest, but it was cool talking to them. Louise Marley grew up in one of the towns I used to cover with the newspaper I edited. Small world.

Anyway, until I post pics of me sitting in the Iron Throne, here's a poem I wrote in ten minutes, because that's all the time for writing I've had this week. I'll try to lock myself in a closet this weekend, where considerations of calculus don't tread on my creative synapses.

TEN MINUTE POEM

The pencil of Black Moods

is scribbling in my ear.

It makes thick, jagged lines

Whispering as it carves straight into

The pink lining of my cochlea.

From above, its scratches look like

Yarn after the cat’s been in the crochet drawer.

Or maybe letters formed by a two-year-old,

Who abandons things midway to go chasing after orange Jello.

Half-formed memories flow, twisted and taunting,

Belched out by the tip of the dark lead

Pressed against my eardrum--

The next-door neighbor to my brain.

The pencil of Black Moods

is scribbling in my ear.

Scribbling, scribbling…

Good thing I have an eraser.

Playboy Feminism

2011-08-06T20:55:00.004-06:00

August 6, 2011 -- 7:55 p.m.

I enjoyed reading Linda Holmes' takedown of producer's attempts to sell the new show 'The Playboy Club' as 'female empowerment'.

I hate the fact some people conflate 'low neckline' with 'female empowerment'. There is a distinction. Female empowerment is the right to be able to do what you want with your breasts. If you want to be celibate? Sure, if it makes your life happier and more fulfilling. Wanna be a stripper? Sure, if it makes your life happier and more fulfilling.

(And I have met some very smart, well-adjusted strippers. And some not-so-well adjusted ones.)

The point is, it's every woman's decision, and you have the right to make it for yourself, hopefully for the right reasons. I feel like a lot of teenage girls let themselves get pressured into doing dumb things because there's this assumption that you have to do something to satisfy a man's expectations. That if you flirt or let someone take you out to a really expensive restaurant, then he's entitled to kiss you, to f*** you. That's not the case. Your sexuality is your own, nobody else's, and you don't owe anybody anything.

But in and of itself, sexuality is not necessarily empowering. It's especially not empowering if it perpetuates the idea that a woman's value is determined solely on the basis of her bra size. Appearance is only one facet of a person's personality, male or female. It's a big, important part in terms of dating and your professional life, but you bring more to the far more to the table, even if you're only a 34B.

Of course, maybe the Playboy Club was counting on the publicity generated by their stupid marketing techniques to drum up bigger ratings. If so, I think it's a failure, since the people who pay attention to feminist blogs probably aren't going to watch it anyway.

(Read an excerpt from Gloria Steinum's expose on the Bunny Clubs here.)

Sickness and Health

2011-08-03T13:31:00.004-06:00

August 3, 2011 -- 12:33 p.m.

Ugh. It's amazing how the end of writing a book can leave you so frustrated, tired and depressed. It's like reaching the end of a marathon without the runner's high. There's the brief moment of joy and then...thud.

I can't bear to begin revising it at the moment. I'm bursting with creative energy though, even if I'm lethargic. Maybe I'll churn out another short story.

What I really want to do is start working on an epic fantasy about a city made entirely of mist but I probably ought to go back to the one I was working on during Brandon Sanderson's class, since it's already partially finished. New shiny ideas always seem to win out over dull old ones in terms of distraction.

It's also interesting how illness can strike two similar people in different ways. Monday, I woke up so dizzy I was barely able to stand up, so I spent the day napping and felt better after the sea-sickness passed. I wanted to nail the room down and say YOU! SIT! STAY!

But a family member of mine who works at a law firm felt fine...until he passed out in the middle of a deposition, banging his head a face times on the way down. The red scabs on his face looks like he got in a bloody beer brawl instead of a brawl with a table. He felt fine, afterward. Refused to let them take him to the hospital. I joked that he was the beginning of a House episode.

I figure we had the same illness and it just manifested in two different ways. Perhaps another symptom is me not particularly feeling like writing about the rest of my Hugo votes, though I did get them in on time. Oh well, maybe later.

In the meantime, in honor of all the Doctor Who nominees, here's the 1960s classic, 'I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas with a Dalek...'

Hugo Voting (Graphic Novels, Related Works, Fan Artists)

2011-07-30T14:14:00.004-06:00

July 30, 2011 -- !:15 p.m.

" 'I think he's saying we have to keep talking to to ourself for the sake of exposition.' "

" 'That's going to kill efficiency.' "

" 'It'll be hard on the fourth wall, too.' "

-- Dialogue from Schlock Mercenary

Since I put so much time into writing last month, I won't have time to review all the Hugo categories, unfortunately. I'm trying to stuff what I can into the last few days.

GRAPHIC NOVELS:

My favorites:

1) The Unwritten

2) Grandville Mon Amour

3) Schlock Mercenary

4) Fables

5) Girl Genius

I'm not a graphic novel reader per se--I've read the high watermarks of the genre, such as Watchman and some of Frank Miller, but other than that, my background mostly consists of manga. Compared to manga, American comic books are surprisingly dense, word-wise. I was surprised to also see some of the art wasn't as fantastic as I was expecting. It was definitely better than I can do, just not what I was expecting.

Despite my vote, the clear consensus favorite in this category is Girl Genius, which has won every year since the graphic novel category was introduced. But I like a little variety in my winners. This was the first sample of Girl Genius I've ever read, so I got dropped into the middle, but the characters were vivid and I like the art. The colors really pop and there are some nice moments. That is one high-quality web comic. Still, the lack of ability for a n00b like me to get in immediately would have tucked this one lower down on my list anyway, though maybe not quite so low down.

On the other side of the coin, I was surprised to find myself really enjoying The Unwritten. From page 1, I was practically set against it. You have a really pretentious (in my eyes) literary introduction talking about how the book is a groundbreaking look at the way we tell stories, and that we should consider it more of an anthology because the stories weren't intensely related plotwise but we shouldn't worry about that and we don't even need the mystery solved because the ideas are so awesome...

Anytime someone has 1) a plot with a mystery 2) has someone saying the mystery doesn't need solving in the intro is always going to get my danders up.

So between that and the poor scan quality that makes it difficult to read the blog posts which are mixed with the comics in a Watchman-like combo, I was prepared to give this graphic novel its thirty pages and then give it a miss.

But the thing is--I couldn't. The premise is interesting, the idea is interesting, the dialogue is great, and when I put the book down, this was the only graphic novel I was itching to see the sequel too. Mostly because the story ends on a cliffhanger, unfortunately. It gets minus marks for that. But I love the mix of surreality (is that a word?) and banality, adult humor and childlike enchantment. It's very meta and interesting.

So what's it about? Well, picture if J.K. Rowling had one son and named him Harry Potter. And little Harry Potter has to grow up in the shadow of the books, especially after his father disappeared. And little Harry Potter gets stuffed in jail after he mass-murders a house full of people. Only he claims he was framed, but the prison warden doesn't believe him and sets Potter up to be killed because he feels like Potter ruined his children's childhood by bloodying the Potter name.

Oh, but all the weird fantasy stuff? Yeah, it might be real.

Bet you didn't see that coming (rolls eyes.)

Okay, so maybe some of the twists aren't the most original. (Visiting the Third Reich? There goes that whole Nazi time vortex thing again)...but I'm all for comics that have little girls shouting the latin phrase for eye-poke while eye-poking a boy who just told her to come sit on his wand.

Naturally, adult content warning. It's wonderful, the way the author managed to capture the different narrative styles whenever it starts a character in another world/book. The flashes of the fake Harry Potter narrative feel a lot like Harry Potter, just like the narrative voice for the Beatrix Potter/Winnie the Pooh parody at the end is also spot-on-awesome. It reminded me of the South Park Christmas Critter episode, with less Jew-baiting.

My second favorite graphic novel was Grandville, which boosts my favorite art of the bunch. Some people might look at the animals and bright colors and call it cartoonish, but I like a little color in my art.

Grandville one features an alternative history where humans are (mostly) replaced by humanlike animals. A detective starts looking for a dangerous terrorist who has a Jack-the-Ripper penchant for killing prostitutes. So it's like Sherlock Holmes...if Sherlock Holmes was a giant badger. A mystery, shootouts, damaged damsels and political connivance -- this is pulpy, good fun. While the Unwritten shoots for great heights and sometimes misses, Grandville Mon Amour delivers exactly what I wanted. This is one I wouldn't mind owning in paper, and I'll have to look for it next time I'm at my local comics shop. Check out the youtube ad for it here.

I like Howard Taylor, and Schlock Mercenary makes me laugh (not to mention be impressed by the sheer content--I'm 400 pages in and still not finished), but Grandville and the Unwritten appealed to me more this time around. Maybe another year.

Fables has gotten really good critical reviews, and it has an interesting concept, but I couldn't get into it, perhaps because this is another one where I was dropped mid-series. I'll try to read it again when I have more time.

BEST RELATED WORK

This is a really tricky category, because its so wide open. How do you compare a set of book reviews to a biography of Heinlein to a podcast on writing? It's like evaluating apples and orangutans.

I looked for criteria to judge on but found diddly-squat. We're just supposed to pick the best, whatever that means.

Well, two of the entries specialized in offering advice to new writers, which is great, but I wasn't sure that's what the Hugo celebrates, so sorry, Writing Excuses. We'll kiss and make-up in the morning.

In the end, I'm going with 'Chicks Dig Timelords', which is a collection of female voices dealing with Who and Who fandom. It contains many different voices--from new fans to old fans, costumers to voice actors--but all of them share a love of the campy, wonderfulness of Dr. Who. But I found it interesting beyond Who-dom, because it was also about carving out a female space in a male-world, one which (according to some of the writers) were full of 'Get Rid Of Slimy girlS' society, especially since the shippers were polluting their pure Who with romance.

Anyway, I don't have much of a dog in this fight, but I enjoyed the discussion, the reminiscences, and the spunky voices of the essayists kept me turning the pages. The collection contains entries from several other Hugo-nominated authors too (such as Mary Robinette Kowal and one of the authors of Feed) so it's not just fem and queer-lit professors.

It hits my sweet spots (feminism and science fiction) as well as capturing an interesting moment in pop culture history about a silly, bubble-wrap and tinfoil show that managed to capture the imagination of a generation.

My doctor is still Tom Baker though. You just can't beat that scarf. His fashion sense shaped my fierceness into what it is today. ^_^

FAN ARTIST

I thought about skipping this category. I'm probably skipping the fan writing one just because I don't have enough awareness of the community to know what offers the most merit. But the artist who drew xkcd is nominated, and I don't think people who live off their art count as non-professional, so I figure I'll try and counter the legion of fans who will vote for him, even though I like xkcd.

But I liked Maureen Starkey's stuff, and some of the other artists too. Though some of the scantily clad females look very cold.

Anyway, that's my first round of Hugo pics. Now I'm working through the short stories, novelettes, novellas and other vision stuff. More later.

Skin Farm

2011-07-29T19:18:00.004-06:00

July 29, 2011 -- 6:18 p.m.

Draft v. 1.0 is...

DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If that's not worth a few extra exclamation marks, I'm not sure what is.

I need to iron out some inconsistencies, esp. in the ending, then it's off to alpha readers, followed by query time.

And then the merry-go-round starts all over again. A writer's life, eh?

One Hundred Thousand Kingdoms Review (Hugo Reading)

2011-07-21T14:34:00.004-06:00

July 21, 2011 -- 1:35 p.m.

I just got cool news. I signed up for the writing workshops at Worldcon and one of my workshop leaders is going to be N.K. Nemisin, which makes the timing of this review fun. It will be interesting to see what she has to say about my work, because while she's an awesome author, from what little I've read of her work, our styles will be completely, entirely different. It made me wish I'd submitted something a little more surreal/descriptive than Skin Farm, which is fun but very...well, plain-spoken. Purposefully so, since the main character is illiterate.

The other writer working with our group is Louise Marley, who I've never heard of before, but her body of work looks interesting. I'll have to pick on up before I go.

Anyway, onto The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: (shouldn't be any spoilers)

HTK came out with more hype for any debut fantasy novel I've seen than Name of the Wind. Because of all the news swirling around it (and because the name made me expect Hundred Thousand Kingdoms = hundred thousand potential novels...), I was expecting some new sword and sorcery along the release of a new NoTW or a new Scott R. Bakker series sort of thing.

What I got was entirely different.

From the get-go, there's conflict. A child whose own mother even never wanted her born. A dangerous new world floating above the crowds, full of people who titter behind their hands at the protagonist, Yeine, who seems to have been brought only to serve as a sacrificial lamb on a chain. A lamb who might not even survive the day, for as night falls, she's being chased by a ravenous half-man, half-beast through glowing corridors, some of which will respond to her very thoughts.

In the back of the book, Nemisin lists her influences. Octivia Butler is among them, which doesn't surprise me, because this book reminds me of Butler's Patternist series in terms of style. The plot also strikes me as Butler-ian. Black girl from 'barbaric' (ironic air quotes applied) matriarchal backwater gets invited to rich white people's court by her maternal grandfather after her mother (who fled the court to marry the protagonist's mother) is murdered.

I point it out the race because it's there, but it's subtle. It's more about the characters than race/class politics.

I like how Nemisin manages to blend a lot of elements into one, not-too-big book. There's a mystery (who killed the protag's mom and why?) politics (need to manipulate one faction against the other) and religion. That last is especially intriguing, and builds the backbone of the work. If John Milton's Lucifer and a few of his angels were kicked out of heaven, confined inside mortal bodies and given to one hierarchical family to be used as weapons, it would be a bit like this book.

Since family conflict and religious conflict are two of what I love to see most in fantasy literature, this one hits most of my sweet spots. My only quibble was that I'd like to see more try-fail from the protagonist, who has gods at her beck and call. It seems like, with all that power, she could try to do something more. I understood that she was a) in a new place, b) limited by the fact everyone else around her also could command the gods and c) that none of her scurrilous family could be fatally harmed by said god-weapons, but still, I would have liked to see her try more, even if it meant failing. One scene in particular would have resonated more if the villain had caught a god-weapon spying on her instead of just singling him out because she wanted to hurt someone.

That passivity reminded me a little of Butler as well. In books like Dawn, she'd put the characters in situations where they were completely helpless (or only had the illusion of free will) and make her readers squirm. I loved that style when I first read it, but am a little less enamored of it now, maybe because I feel far too helpless sometimes in my own life and I read (like the blog says) for escape. For the belief/illusion that one person can be powerful and potent. And the protagonist in this book is powerful--but not because of her choices, but because of what others made her.

The obligatory romance also wasn't my cup of tea. Since being sexually assaulted, I don't have much truck with women falling in love with men who could violently hurt them even if, theoretically, the men 'didn't mean to.' But I understand that my taste is not everyone's. Also, I wished I could have seen a little more of the female gods.

That said, this book was tremendously awesome. I enjoyed the book a lot and thought it was beautifully written. The setting was fantastic fun. From the first pages, I was hurtling through, hungry for more. I almost started reading it again from the beginning as soon as I put it down.

The style is definitely on the literary side, which I love to see in fantasy, because as much as my own style is pretty simple, I like to see variation in a genre. One of the interesting things Nemisin does is, instead of a straight narrative, the character is constantly engaging in asides--sometimes from her present self, sometimes from her future self looking back--very complicated, but it never lost me as a reader even though Nemisin's juggling so many balls.

I especially enjoyed the conversations the protagonists had with 'herself.' You'll understand what I mean if you read the book.

For a sample of her style, take this excerpt from one of my favorite scenes (Minor spoiler, naturally. Well, kind of, since it's out of context):

[I]n that sliver of time, I felt the power around me coalesce, malice-hard and sharp as crystal.

* * *

That this analogy occurred to me should have been a warning.

* * *

Rish swung. I held still, tense for the blow. Three inches from my face Rish’s fist seemed to glance off something no one could see—and when it did, there was a high hard clacking sound, like stone striking stone.

Rish drew his hand away, startled and perhaps puzzled by his failure to put me in my place. He looked at his fist, on which a patch of shining, faceted black had appeared about the knuckles. I was close enough to see the flesh around this patch blistering, beading with moisture like meat cooked over a flame. Except it was not burning, but freezing; I could feel the waft of cold air from where I stood. The effect was the same, however, and as the flesh withered and crisped away as if it had been charred, what appeared underneath was not raw flesh, but stone.

If that bit made you want to read more, go pick up Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

I can tell already that choosing Hugos is going to be like picking teeth out of my spine. I also watched Doctor Who's version of the Christmas Carol, nominated as a short, and loved it, even though the science was complete bunk. (Proper frequency, my foot...) I thought it was a new twist on an old classic, and who doesn't like seeing Dumbledore as Scrooge? Or a shark pulling a sleigh? This is must-see Christmas watching, along with Futurama's X-mas episode and the Grinch Who Stole Christmas (the cartoon, not the Jim Carrey version).

Hugo Reading!

2011-07-18T17:23:00.005-06:00

June 18, 2011 -- 4:28 p.m.

So I've finally had time to begin my Hugo reading.

I haven't actually read any of the previous books by this year's Hugo nominees, so it's exciting and kind of disorienting for those books that plop me down mid-series. From discussion boards, Ian McDonald seems to be the inside favorite, but Connie Willis won the Nebula, so I wouldn't count her out yet.

Though seeing a WWII travel book made me feel like writing a story where a history professor comments: "You know, why do time travelers never seem to end up in Africa? Isn't that a little weird?" And then having it turn out there's some sort of time-nexus that will automatically draw all time travelers to WWII where they will be given the opportunity to kill Hitler only to a) have something go terribly wrong or b) alter their own futures in a horrible way. And the time travel nexus was created by aliens who wanted to mock us.

Well, what else could explain how the time travelers ALWAYS end up there, except when they're going to assist with the assassination of J.F.K. instead...

As a postscript, apparently China banned shows about Time Travel. Odd.

(Spoiler-Free) Review of A Dance with Dragons

2011-07-14T20:15:00.005-06:00

July 14, 2011 -- 7:17 p.m.

Woo! It finally came. In my younger years, I would have read this book straight through in one day, 1000 pages or no, but now I'm made of less stern stuff. I had to fit it into two.

The hardcover is beautiful. I just liked holding the book. I almost didn't want to read it, because it looks so pristine.

So what about the contents?

As always, George R.R. Martin is a fantastic worldbuilder and storyteller. It's easy to get swept away into Westoros. Between the return of old favorites characters, the addition of new favorites and the thickening of the plot, there was a lot here to love.

On the other hand, if you're new to Martin, just picking up his books after seeing the TV series, this probably isn't the place to start. Because this is dense, and the pacing can be a little frustrating.

Like its brother, Feast of Crows, this is a turning point in the series. This feels like it's going away from the mystery/political conflict that drove the first few books and becomes more of a travelogue. So there's a heavy heaping of wonder--I appreciated the idea of a medieval/magic leper type camp especially--along with lots of legends to unravel, but I think fans may miss the tightly wound plot of the first few books. Earlier, most of the storylines took place on the same continent and you could see more direct reactions on how characters' decisions affected one another. This time around, the threads here feel more spaced out.

There's definitely also a sense of 'darkest before the dawn.' We're hitting the middle of the series, which means that characters are going to suffer. And some of them suffer hard. There are no good choices, and some of the bright spots that used to lighten the tortured characters' souls are missing. Maybe fewer heads roll here, but it felt to me that this book offered fewer servings of hope than any other book in the series. And pretty much every plot ends on a cliffhanger, so don't expect too much satisfaction on that score. Though, since I've been studying G.R.R.M. for years and know his tricks well, I'm pretty sure I know where 90 percent of those cliffhangers are going to end. Yet he does manage to keep me guessing.

With all that said, would I still recommend A Dance with Dragons? Absolutely, if you don't mind dark fantasy. I feel it was worth the wait. While I may not see where everything is going now, the skill with which Martin handles his twists and turns convinces me that we are in capable hands. This book is a page-turner. About 400 in, I found myself struggling to put the book down. It kept calling, even when I had better things to do. I may not have liked this one as much as Storm of Swords, despite their comparable length, but it's still George R.R. Martin. And he's still fantastic. And some things are best savored slowly.

Still, I think the next book will be a test of fire. I think everyone was expecting more character convergences, but there wasn't much of that. If G.R.R.M. truly intends to end it all in two more books more, everything needs to be turned up a notch.

Neil Gaiman Interview

2011-07-12T10:49:00.003-06:00

July 12, 2011 -- 9:51 a.m.

There's a great Neil Gaiman interview over at A.V. Club. You should go read it, if you liked American Gods. Go on. I'll wait.

"'[B]estseller' can be a publishing category as much as it can be anything else. It means that the book is going to be on certain shelves, pushed a certain way. Back then, it mattered. I don’t honestly know that it matters anymore. The whole shape of bookselling has changed. Back then, it meant that your publisher would pay for your book to be on the table by the door when you went into a Barnes & Noble or a Borders. There would be those tables, and the publisher is paying for it to be stacked on those tables, rather than back in a particular area. So I knew that because I was being published as a bestseller, I could be a lot more cavalier with my genre distinctions. And I hoped that people who would like it would find it. And I think eventually they did."

While you're reading that, I'll be watching this awesome fake movie trailer.

Adventures in Seattle

2011-06-29T15:15:00.003-06:00

June 29, 2011 -- 2:16 p.m.

Updates from the hermit.

Seattle is lovely this time of year, but full of pollen. I keep a spittoon nearby for the purposes of expactoration. Makes me feel like Gaston, or Mulan. What is it with Disney men and spitting, anyway? We had a cherry pit spitting contest back in Montana as part of Polson's cherry festival. And yet, surprisingly, spitting was not considered the height of masculine virility.

My family went to eat Chinese food to celebrate my younger brother's acceptance into UW/my other younger brother's first third of his summer law internship/my acceptance into grad school. As traditional, we ordered the weirdest things we could find on the menu. (At a previous Chinese restaurant, this led to my discovery and addiction to moss soup, which is very good). This meant 'pig ears' and something literally called 'Blood and Guts Stew' for my brother. The cook came out of the kitchen and asked him if he liked it. When he said he did, she went away shaking her head at the crazy Caucasian. We needed her to interpret what the different meats were. I thought the whole thing tasted vile and the intestines felt far too jiggly going my throat. But my brother gobbled down all the wobbly blood cubes (thickened with corn starch, maybe?) and wished there were more. I'll stick with my eggplant, thank you very much. It was quite good.

Pig ears are...well, pretty much like you'd expect. Very chewy. Like nibbling on someone's ear, only you're eating it. (Insert generic Mike Tyson joke here. *Baddabing!*)

Skin Farm is at 70,000 words and counting. It'll probably clock in around 90k. I did a good push but then wrote myself into a corner, but I think I've got a way to write myself out again. I got signed up for writers workshops at Worldcon. I need a new perspective, I can't quite decide whether my first chapter is too exposition heavy or not and I've tainted my writing group. The workshop looks at 8,000 words, so I spent time editing the first three chapters (AGAIN. I swear I've got the things memorized by now!).

I'm still toying with the idea of self-/e-publishing the book. I'm definitely feeling dubious. It seems to me that the best strategy is to wait until you have a sufficient collection to post several books at once and then hold sales trying to entire readers to get the whole series. I've been researching how authors with similar books have been doing, and the answer is pretty hit or miss. The ebook market seems to currently deal with a certain narrow demographic that I suspect will widen over time. One potential problem is categorization. Skin Farm has a young protagonist, but it seems like every other book in Y.A. is a romance first, a science fiction book second. So people looking to read books with male protagonists and limited smooching (Think James Dashner's Maze Runner) might not be shopping in that category. I might have better luck labeling it adult sci-fi. After all, Ender's Game has a young protagonist but adults love it too.

I wish Amazon had more sub-genres. Science fiction/fantasy as a category is much too broad.

Yesterday, I also wrote a 5,000 word short story, a re-write of the classic Cinderella fairy tale that came to me in a dream. Only in this version, she kills everything she touches and uses a glass knife to frame her evil stepmother for murdering Prince Charming's father. Rell's fairy godmother is a glass blower. I wasn't able to work in the step-sisters, but ah well. It's probably a better story idea in theory than in practice, but it felt good to work on something else. When I edit it enough that it makes sense, perhaps I'll post it. Whenever I write short stories, I go into 'fairy tale mode', meaning a lot of jumping around people's heads, heavy narration, and very shallow POV, so it probably isn't very salable, but it was fun to write.

Good Day

2011-06-14T01:18:00.005-06:00

June 14, 2011 -- 12:21 a.m.

Good day. I managed to get 3000+ words on Skin Farm done. I also wrote up a 500 word synopsis. I have trouble with synopses, as I think everyone does. I can write ones that are about eight pages long or ones that are about a page long, but no in between. The short one, I cheated by doing the 'and they were tested by various challenges' kind of summary, but I can't think of any other way to do it. For some reason, God's Play seemed easier to shortly summarize even though it was a longer book. I'm not sure why.

There's a part of me that feels guilty for not writing more since I have a bunch of spare time at the moment, but there's only so much I can do before the well goes dry. I have to accept that I can't write at a breakneck pace all the time. I have my limitations.

It helps if I'm writing dialogue or action, then the words just fly by. It's also easier to write beginnings. As I get toward the end, it's harder to punch the keys because of worrying about past chapters and because of the looming sense of import. Your book is almost done. Is it any good? You'd better make it good and choose every word carefully, because the ending will make or break everything that's gone before. Maybe the beginning is important, because it gets people hooked, and maybe the middle is also really important, because it KEEPS people hooked, but the end is the last taste a reader will get of your style, of your philosophy, of your everything.

Which is why endings make me nervous.

***

I'm re-reading Katherine Kurtz's Deryni series. I liked it more when I was younger. It came out of a different age. I've become used to modern conventions, like magic systems with more rules. There's a lot of 'Camber learns a new spell' that can feel deus ex machina. Still enjoy it, though. Like old, familiar friends who've come to visit after so long.

CONduit 2011 Report -- Are Vampires Hurting Our Girls?

2011-06-04T21:36:00.006-06:00

June 4, 2011 -- 10:11 p.m.

It's interesting how two people can have two completely different interpretations of a story. For example, my eyes widened at CONduit last weekend when Dragonlance author Tracy Hickman referred to the old folktale Bluebeard as a 'feminist empowerment story'.

In the story, a woman ends up married to a nobleman who tells her she may go into every room in his mansion except the basement. Of course, she goes into that basement while he's away and finds his dead wives hanging on hooks. Before she can escape, the nobleman comes home and tries to kill her, but she delays him long enough that her brothers save her.

I used to love this story, probably because the key the woman uses to open the basement door turns blood red when she uses it and won't scrub clean. Because I was that kind of kid. Bloody keys are cool.

So I've known this story for a long time, and I've always thought of it as a variation on the 'pandora/eve motif' where a woman is punished for her curiosity. The moral of the story is don't disobey your husband, or he might turn into a sociopathic maniac and kill you. A quick browse on the internet reveals that this interpretation is the most prevalent among folklore scholars...or at least among students attempting to sell their papers online. (This is one thing that bugs me on essay-selling web sites--the writing/analysis is usually so poor that if you did buy one and use it, you'd get a bad grade. If you're going to make money selling essays, you ought to at least be selling quality essays.)

However, Hickman's contention is that the Bluebeard story is actually a feminist cautionary tale about abusers. Don't marry someone who's perfect except for the fact he murders people, because the beast will come out in the end.

Now arguing about the legitimacy of an interpretation is somewhat silly--after all, what's the definition of legitimacy? By who's metric do you judge? Hickman's interpretation may have more substantiation than mine, because the female isn't punished at the end for her curiosity--she escapes death and is rewarded by retaining her dead fortune's husband. And Bluebeard killed his first wife even though she couldn't have found the room with the bodies, ergo curiosity may not have been what killed her (although Bluebeard could still have been using the room for something else he didn't want discovered.) So the female character could have been in danger regardless.

But it was more interesting to me how two people could view the same story and take completely different messages away from it. In extension, Hickman served on a panel talking about the modern romantic interpretations of vampires, which basically degenerated into bashing Twilight. (Which bugs me. Not because I like Twilight, because I don't, but because bashing on Twilight is too easy/popular. I never like people who shoot fish in a barrel--that's why I stopped watching South Park. Making fun of Paris Hilton is not a difficult feat of comedy. Same with the Daily Show and it's target on stupid right-wing nutjobs. It's better when it focuses on the nutjobs within the government, instead of the nutjobs commenting on the government.)

Anyway, Hickman views the vampire romance genre as bad because it suggests the monster--the traditional vampire seducer/rapist etc.--can be tamed and loving. He believes it tells women that it's okay to live and love abusers who hunger for blood because love conquers all.

My response, on the other hand, is that the vampire romance is an extension of the traditional romance genre's 'bad boy' with a supernatural twist. That twist gives heaps of wish fulfillment because the (mostly) ordinary girl (stand-in for the reader) is special enough that she's chosen to be privy to a secret world that her peers aren't. Whether it's Sookie Stackhouse or Rachel Morgan, she has a special access to a world of wealth and magic that ordinary mortals can only dream of. Every woman wants to believe they are that special enough to have that kind of access, and every woman loves the hint of danger that comes with the bad boy motif, with werewolves instead of bikers.

Because of my worldview, I tend to look at the vampire romance genre with benign amusement, viewing it as no worse/better than any other romance genre involving a lovable rake. I used to enjoy the books, until I felt the concept got too trite and predictable. Tracy Hickman, on the other hand, views the whole paranormal subgenre as very dangerous indeed.

The point is: Two people can have different ideas about the world, and their interpretations may not touch anywhere.

I was going to segue into stories about bad con etiquette, which seems to be getting worse every year, (including someone having an actual phone conversation during the vampire panel when Tracy Hickman was speaking. A REAL CONVERSATION.), but I've decided to try to be more understanding of other people's worldviews. Even if that worldview includes changing a baby's diaper during a lecture on the carpet two feet in front of my sneakers.

Mojo

2011-05-02T15:17:00.002-06:00

May 2, 2011 -- 3:18 p.m.

Bah.

I've lost my mojo.

I said to myself, 'I'm going to spend the whole summer writing and revising. By the end of it, I'm going to have two great novels, and they'll be ready to send out by the time I start my grad school classes, and everything will be so peachy!'

And then...there was...meh.

This hasn't happened to me for awhile. It's been few weeks since I was able to do something remotely productive. I've been able to do little things--write a scene here, revise one there, but mostly I have a big plate of jiggly-squat.

It's possible that I just got burned out trying to do so much last quarter and I need a break. Maybe I need a change of scenery. Maybe I'm just stressed out because my car isn't working, I got moved to a different ward, I just saw my potential workload next year (staring at a school schedule that has advanced statistics/price theory and 9:30 a.m. makes my heart go thud), a single girl in a relationship crazy subculture all heated up over the silly pageantry of the royal nuptials, etc....

But whatever it is, except for small things, there's so much wonder and happiness and joy in my life right now, yet it all feels like it's sitting there at a slight remove. Kind of like when you're at this great party but all you want to do is go home and sleep.

I think it circles back to one idea: Good things stress me out, because I feel like, being so lucky, I'm obligated to do something wonderful to offset the fact I'm not living in a gutter or burning because my husband didn't like my dowry. I'm one of the luckiest, happiest, richest people who has ever existed in the history of the world, and nothing I can do will ever be superb enough to make up for that fact.

We're preprogrammed to root for the underdog. So what happens when we wake up one day and realize that we are the overdog? We're the enemy team in all those dumb sports movies. We don't deserve the success or joy that life handed to us on a platter, and we can never live up to the burden of being awesome enough to deserve our largess.

I think I can't write because I'm too afraid. Too afraid that no matter what comes out, it will never be good enough to justify my existence. At least, in potentia, the pages I write are perfect. Not so when they come out of my fingers.

My friends, my writing groups would make derisive noises at me, reading this, because I do write good things. But are they good enough?

This is the problem with authors' tendency to conflate their work with themselves. If my work = me and my work = not good enough, then, by the associative principle...

Well, you get the picture. The thoughts are stupid. But they're there, lingering in my lizard-y subconscious. I don't want to fail, but I don't know how to succeed either, because the thresh-hold for success to justify my happiness is so outer-space impossible that I would have to be Neal Gaiman on a Gandhi cracker to even brush my fingertips along the bar.

Or maybe it's something else that's making it so hard to look at my books with anything but revulsion. I hope writing all my thoughts down in a nonsensical internet screed will help me overcome this sense of ennui and fear that is clouding my creative processes.

I miss the days when writing was fun. How do I get the fun back?

Game of Thrones and Gender

2011-04-17T23:50:00.007-06:00

April 18, 2011 -- 12:29 a.m.

I haven't had a chance to watch the entire first GOT episode yet, but I did take time to start browsing the reviews and see what critics were thinking.

A mix of good and bad, mostly. And a bit of the expected pooh-poohing of the fantasy genre by mainstream critics. I have no problem with the critics who disliked the show...from the first clip of the first episode, I kind of had a "well, this is pretty good but also a little meh" feeling, partly because some of the acting didn't live up to the gorgeous scenery and cinematography, and partly from fannish gripes: ie, it seems like they de-awesomified Catlyn, I could shoot a bow and arrow better than Bran when I was his age, etc. Stupid complaints, really. It looks like they went above and beyond--I saw a documentary talking about how the right-handed actress for Arya had to learn to do everything left-handed and I was like, Really? Even I'm not obsessed enough to care about that. Besides the acting, there were also some odd...SQUEEEEE! TYRION! OMG! SQUEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway. (*Brushes off soiled dignity*)

But when critics go outside the show and start criticizing the audience for fantasy novels, I start getting a little pissy. I thought this kind of talk would lose some of its steam after Return of the King's Best Picture Oscar.

Par example, from the New York Times:

"The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half."

Um...(*raises hand*). Isn't it a little patronizing of said reviewer to decide what females do and do not enjoy? And, of course, it couldn't possibly be that a reviewer from the New York Times who scoffs at the entire fantasy genre might be moving in different circles than those who enjoy such literature. Or perhaps she thinks she can recognize a fantasy fan by sight? Because we save our dragonlance t-shirts for the conventions, we must not exist?

I don't have the surveys on me, but between 40-60 percent of fantasy readers are female. I suspect G.R.R.M.'s demographic tips male because of his cruelty to the characters, but if you look at Tolkien's fans, I bet it's a different story. Just because female nerds are still more socially stigmatized than their male counterparts (this may not be true--but I know I certainly draw funny looks every time I plop down at a M:TG table) and so don't wear our geeky cred so openly, doesn't mean we don't exist. [I've actually been thinking about trying to found a sci-fi/fantasy book group at my local college, coincidentally enough.]

I haven't bothered to send her an angry email. The internet backlash has already begun. (I wrote this before perusing the web to see what fire has been unleashed, and the Huffington Post does a better job of summing up the stupidity of this review than I do.) I figure the review writer will just ignore the electronic tempest or say she was using rhetorical hyperbole to make a point (I have a stuffed unicorn named Hyperbole, by the way. Speaking of nerdness). But I thought I'd make my representative stand on teh internets, anyway. If you don't like the show or the fantasy genre, fine. If you don't like the feminist implications of Martin's work, fine. But don't assume that a group that you obviously have no knowledge of is a cul-de-sac of white, horny, pimply Comic Book Guy lookalikes dressed in elf ears just because that's what your television has told you. Because we're all around you, girlfriend. Fat and thin, near-sighted and not, socially awkward or well-adjusted. And some of us don't like being talked down to by reviewers who assume that everyone of a single gender will share a single opinion.

***

In other news, I get to go to grad school. And they gave me a scholarship and research-assistanceship that means I won't have to pay a cent for tuition. We turned in our final for Brandon Sanderson. I finished 80,000 words in three and a half months, and turned in another 10,000 word outline. Yay me!

Interview btw Rothfuss and Sanderson + 8-bit Horribleness

2011-03-18T20:07:00.005-06:00

March 18, 2011 -- 8:08 p.m.

There's a fun interview between Pat Rothfuss and Brandon Sanderson. I particularly liked it because it focussed a lot more on the writing process than the material they're writing.

Also, check out Dr. Horrible the 8-bit game.

2011-03-18T06:24:00.005-06:00

March 18, 2011 -- 6:24 p.m.

They've cast the lead role for Hunger Games. Jennifer Lawrence. She's a little too...um...boobsy for your average starving 16-year-old, but it is Hollywood after all. The book has an interesting and realistic mixed message about commercialized teenage beauty (manufactured beauty is evil but...ooh, look at my pretty dress!) So hiring such a pretty actress could potentially add another layer of meta-subtext to the film. Looking at her, you can definitely see why Peeta and Gale might fight over the woman. We'll see what Miss Lawrence looks like as a raven-haired archer.

Of course, I recognize I'm adding another level of meta-critique to my own blog post by giving my reaction to her casting based on appearance alone, but I've never seen any of the movies she's acted in. The clips of Winter's Bone I saw online looked like she was a creditable actress.

I didn't realize the director they chose also directed Pleasantville, one of my favorite movies of all time, less for the story--though I did enjoy the portrayal of teenage sexuality, particularly how it didn't take the easy way out and just go 'sex is good, adults are bad' like so much modern media--and more for the cinematography and the creative use of color. He was also able to coax a really memorable, strong performance from then relatively unknown actress Reese Witherspoon. I hope he brings a similar touch to Hunger Games. I'm looking forward to seeing who they cast for the other groups, especially Haymitch. I've always pictured Haymitch being played by the actor of Javert who did the Les Mis 10th Anniversary 'dream cast' tv production. The problem with most older actors is they don't look beaten down enough. Nicholas Cage would make a surreal choice for the part. I suspect the director won't cast any big names, but Cage would certainly bring the crazy.

FUN FACT: Reese Witherspoon played a teenage girl in a movie called "Twilight," which was released the same year they released Pleasantville. Thanks, Wikipedia!

Mouse Me!

2011-03-17T03:58:00.003-06:00

March 17, 2011 -- 4:04 a.m.

So I was watching Nostalgia Critic and found out there's a mouse named after me in Secret of Nymh 2. Jenny McBride, the mouse.

Weird. It would be more awesome if the movie looked better.

This has happened to me before. For instance, the local a capella singers once did a stage group where they staged a fake date with one "Jennifer McBride" who was one of their members doing a drag thing. It was a little surreal.

Of course, the Nymh mouse is not nearly so cool as Neil Gaiman as a...well, I'm not sure what he's supposed to be.

'Neil Gaiman, what are you doing on my falafel!' has been my catchphrase since I accidentally stumbled onto this episode when I was too lazy to turn the channel after watching Red Dwarf reruns. (Why does my local PBS affiliates run Sesame Street/Arthur at midnight anyway? Bit past the kid's bedtimes, one would think.)

My Heart Atwitter

2011-03-11T11:07:00.004-07:00

March 11, 2011 -- 11:07 a.m.

Guess who this is referring too.

Guess who is freaking out and shrieking maniacally at her walls.

Three Million Dollar Idea

2011-03-09T23:10:00.002-07:00

March 9, 2011 -- 11:10 p.m.

Too hilarious. Newbie writers...it doesn't work like that! Don't be that guy!

Application

2011-03-01T14:39:00.006-07:00

March 1, 2011 -- 2:40 p.m.

Finished my application to grad school. Got my GRE scores, too. I got a perfect score of 6.0 on the essay writing sections and decent on the verbal and quantitative -- 720 and 710 out of a possible 800. Reading other people's scores on the internet depresses me because so many people seemed to get perfect everything.

I'm so tired. The application process really stressed me out. It seems like the schools try on purpose to make it difficult and frustrating. Proof that you really want to go there, I guess. I'm not at all confident I'll get admitted because I know I messed up one of the forms, but I'm so sick of everything that if I don't get admitted because I submitted form A instead of form B (almost identical, but B has to be signed by two people instead of one) it will almost come as a relief. Part of me would rather get a part-time job selling hot dogs than try and start another career. I'm trying to get a degree that involves more math in the hopes that, if I haven't managed to publish a novel by the time I get out of school, then my job won't make me too tired of writing to write. I wasn't capable of coming home from work as a full-time reporter and then work on a novel. Too much writing.

Days like this make me want to go move in with one of my friends, who pays no rent because that he lives in a solar-powered van parked in some random forest. He doesn't have to buy much food either because he goes dumpster diving. I went with him once and enjoyed it. It gives one a real hunter-gatherer thrill. If you ever actually do it, you'll be amazed at how much stores throw away. There's so much waste in our society! Plus, if you go to places like Trader Joe's, you get really good food that's just, say, one day past an expiration date. Eating organic for zero cost! Yay! I didn't much care for rooting through moldy produce, though.

I paid my registration fee for the fantasy convention in Reno. I'm looking forward to it. A bunch of people in Brandon Sanderson's class are carpooling up together. I'm still looking for other people to share a hotel room with.

Ugh. I have a midterm this week. If it were just one week later, my life would be so much easier.

Speaking of math, apparently someone else shares my love of turning writing into charts and trying to break it down mathematically. You can read about it here. Ancient Greek detective stories is one of those ideas I wish I had thought of.

Ursula Le Guin's Morals

2011-02-21T00:24:00.003-07:00

February 21, 2011 -- 12:25 a.m.

Ursula Le Guin posted a satirical response to Harper's new decision contract clause that polices writer morals.

Wow...Ursula Le Guin blogs. Who knew?

Top 10 Insights From LTUE 2011

2011-02-20T22:45:00.009-07:00

February 20, 2011 -- 10:45 p.m.

Beautiful cover for Karen Mahoney's Iron Witch. It would stop me absolutely dead in the bookstores. Everything is perfect, from the curve of the arm mirroring the swirls on the background to the biggest drops of color coming from the jewels in her hand.

I thought we'd see more witch in high school stories along with the Vampire craze. I always loved Willow best of any Buffy character. It frightens me a little that Buffy the Vampire Slayer started its run 13 years ago. I'm getting old... (*weep.)

I went to LTUE and enjoyed it. I was in a cranky mood part of the time so I was more Scrooge-like than I usually am, mostly because some authors tended to drop into English teacher mode, which is "Let's define things" instead of "Let's talk about writing" (The first twenty minutes of the Dystopian panel, I'm looking at you!!!)

My joy was not assisted by questions from a certain class of writers who seem to be shouting "Look At Me! Look at ME!!!" during Q&A. IE, asking, "My book is about this, is that okay?"

My response to my fellow audience members is, "Will you stop writing your book just because I say no?" If so, you're not cut out for this life. And if you'll write it anyway, regardless of the answer, why ask the question? Why seek validation from authors who haven't actually read your work?

I practiced my pitch to the editor of a small press and got shot down, which was expected. I didn't think my story quite fit her line, and she agreed with me. Good practice. Hopefully I wasn't annoying. It really is hard to sum up a story in 15 words or less. Unfortunately, the words you say in front of a mirror aren't always the words that come out of your mouth, either. And there's the strangled, fast, sweaty tone. This was my first time ever doing it, so I'll give myself a little leeway.

My worst fears are confirmed that agents/editors are being glutted with post-apocalyptic stories like Skin Farm. I would have been able to finish and query my book much sooner if I hadn't gone back and revised my first novel, so I'm a little frustrated I may have killed a book just because of poor timing. I will make sure I try the regional presses when I query in hopes that they may be less swamped. I need to read more locally published books to see if I fit in with what they're selling. James Dashner and Brandon Mull both started in local publishing, as did Ally Condie.

My friend/fellow writing group member Stephen will be posting videos of some of the lectures and panels, so anyone who didn't get to go can still get some insight. My favorite panel was probably when author John Brown broke Hunger Games down scene-by-scene and chapter by chapter, showing us the mechanics behind why Katniss so easily grabs both our attention and our sympathy. I love working with other people to strip away the smoke and mirrors behind good books. He said he'll post his slides on his website, here. It's full of good advice for new writers.

Anyway, here are my Top 10 insights from LTUE:

10) If you want your books to do well internationally, you might want to create characters from different races/backgrounds.

9) Part of the reason urban fantasy is so popular is because of its low learning curve. It's easier for readers to get into the world because everything's the same, except for one significant change, (IE, witches are real). Not everyone has the time or desire to understand the thick, complex otherworlds of your B.A.F.S.

8) Author Paul Genesse uses the Myers-Briggs personality archetypes to help shape his characters. Too technical for me, but I've never heard that method before. Probably because I put the I in INTJ.

7) From John Brown's Hunger Games lecture. Every single book only has a small audience. Even for big-time authors like Stephen King, while millions of people pick up his books, even more people hate him/don't read him. So whenever you write a book, your audience is going to be relatively small. Ergo, you should take other people's advice with a grain of salt NOT because they're wrong but because they might be the wrong target audience. (For example, Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson weren't fond of Hunger Games because they'd seen the story before, while the teenage audience that carried it to NYT bestseller status hadn't been exposed to The Most Dangerous Game/Battle Royale. My younger brother hates Wheel of Time and G.R.R.M.)

6) New authors are frequently advised to put their characters in pain. In response to a question, "How dark is too dark?" James Dashner said that too dark is when a character's pain is meaningless. You can torture your character, but don't do it for no reason. I asked a similar question to Brandon Sanderson in his class. I asked, "How do you create a necessary sense of progress while also making your characters face miserable amounts of set-backs?" The answer was to give your characters successes with one hand and kidney punches with the other.

5) From Dave Farland's lecture: When it comes to editing, don't try to tackle everything in the first go-around. He separates his own editing process into multiple stages. I know I waste too much time with line/syllabic editing early on, so it's advice I should listen to. The problem is, I never do.

4) To quote John Brown: "Manure is Gold. Cherish your crappy ideas." In a brainstorming session, we looked at stereotypical, boring ideas and turned them into interesting ones. We were dealing with ghosts. I think my favorite two were, "Ghost Labor Unions" and "A People-Whisperer" (ie, the only ghost in a ghost society who can talk to people). Either of these could make an interesting book. I came up with the idea of a ridiculous Pro-Wrestler's ghost. Think of Hulk Hogan's ghost haunting an arena, trying to scare people. Go on. Try not to laugh.

3) There's a reason big totalitarian governments are so common in dystopian stories. Because a) they make sense from a world-building perspective, since tyrannical govts logically arise after great economic/social stresses. b) they create easy sympathy with the character, because an all-oppressive government turns them into an instant underdog. If you want your novel to have the same sort of menace but don't want to use a government, find something else that has that same atmosphere of oppression. I like this advice because it transcends genres. Threats to your heroes should always feel oppressively, well, threatening.

2) Turning old tropes on their head can be good advice, but consider your audience. Larry Correia's wife got sick of goody-goody Tolkein rip-off elves, so he created "Trailer Park Elves" for his book, Monster Hunters International. But Dan Wells once pitched a story about vampires who were a twist on the trope because they were total, absolute losers and was told that you can't sell novels about vampires who...uh, suck...to an audience that loves vampires. So the advice is be original, but know your audience too.

1) Some babies have really big lungs. Seriously, lungs must make up half an infant's weight. I can't think of any other reason so much sound can exude from something so small.

I'm done!

2011-02-10T08:10:00.004-07:00

February 10, 2011

I'm done with the GRE. I ended up with a good score -- 1430 or so evenly split. I think so, anyway. I'm not entirely sure since I skipped through that screen kind of fast because I was just glad to be done. I think, ironically enough, I got the same verbal score on the GRE that I did on the SAT even though I studied a lot harder this time. Looking at the estimated percentile breakdowns, it looks like I'm probably going to end up in the top 5% in verbal, but only the top 25% in math. You have to get a ridiculously high math score to get in the top 5% in math. Stupid fellow overachievers.

It was weird. I wasn't feeling stressed out at all before the test, or during the writing part, but when I started on the rest of the test itself I broke down nervously and completely. They really should give you longer breaks, and maybe give you the option to break your test up over two days. 3+ hours is a long, painful time to sit, and the one minute breaks between the verbal and math sections wasn't long enough for me to go to the bathroom, especially since I had to go through the whole security/gestapo thing every time I came back to the room. I guess they were worried I'd pull a Michael-Corleone-in-Godfather moment, except with test answers instead of a handgun.

I think I'd get a better score if I did it again, although the marginal improvement is probably not worth it. Especially, I think I'd do better in math. I ran out of time in math, estimating and clicking wildly. I answered the final question with less than 5 seconds left on the clock. All in all, I found the test material useful for helping prepare for the test, but unfortunately the test prep material tends to use the same vocab and similar math questions and so doing them, I fell into a sort of rhythm, and then the actual GRE used different words and different sorts of math problems so it threw me off. I found the majority of real test questions harder than their counterparts in the study material--something to consider if anyone else needs to prepare for this monster.

The testing experience wasn't helped by the fact that the computer program uses one of the oldest, oddest fonts I've ever seen on a faded screen that made it hard to see. I spent thirty seconds trying to decide if the thing on screen was a "7" or an upside-down capital L, and looking back, I'm still not completely sure. The only thing that let me know is that I couldn't think why anyone would use an upside-down capital L for anything. Anyway, the font reminded me of the old DOS computer days, because it was so highly pixelated.

As to the writing test, well, in the analytical essay, the real world examples I used tended to be on the obvious side, and I realized I'd contradicted myself halfway through, which wasn't good, but it was too late to change things, so hopefully the testers won't notice that part. Fellow nerds will be happy to know I started and ended my essay with Star Trek quotes. I didn't have time to edit so I have no clue how well-written it was, though it felt good while I was writing it. I suspect I knocked the argumentative essay out of the park. I ended that one with a pune, or a play on words (anyone who's not a Terry Pratchett fan probably won't get that. You can read about it under literature here).

At the end of the test, I thought I had bombed terribly, so the 700+ scores that splashed up on the screen came as an incredible relief, even with the upside-down L font.

I wish I could sleep for a week.

A Truly Profound Question

2011-02-07T06:52:00.003-07:00

February 7, 2011 -- 7:01 a.m.

From The Onion's review of Orson Scott Card's book, Lost Gate:

Ever notice how nobody ever writes a series about a young boy with an amazing knack for toilet cleaning and tax reform?

Now that's a writing prompt.

"I knew we should have played Chutes and Ladders"

2011-02-06T11:52:00.005-07:00

February 6, 2011

Community did a AD&D episode last week. A lot of TV series have done a one-off episode involving D&D, but I can't remember seeing one this fun in awhile. Part of it was the little details. The orchestral Enya type music. The dramatic fade-ins. The loving craft of someone who knows the community. Odd, that they were doing 2nd edition, but that's the one I grew up with so I liked it all the more. I haven't had a chance to play since third came out. It's hard finding a group with the right chemistry who has the necessary time to burn.

I especially loved Pierce's throne created out of crates and traffic cones in imitation of a traditional bad guy's throne of bones. Or whatever. Wondered why the players weren't the ones rolling the dice.

Anyway, it was fun but a bit raunchy, so not for the youngins. Catch it on hulu if you have time.

I went to a book sale at the Provo Library and loaded myself down with like 20 books. Hard to resist at $1 a pop. Some of them were old favorites. Mistborn. Anne McCaffrey. Some of them I've never seen before but looking interesting. I'll tell you if they're any good.

School is going well. I had my first test last week and scored a 95%. I wish I had more time for extra-curricular activities. The book I'm writing for my creative writing class is going reasonably well. I've done 20,000 of the 50,000 required words. I'm frustrated because the book looks like it's going to be far bigger than is remotely marketable for a new author, but so is any epic fantasy I try to write. How can I write something less than 200,000 words when all the books I read, study and love are that long? I'm going to finish it anyway, for fun and practice. And who knows? Maybe I'll get lucky. What I should probably do is separate two of the characters off into their own book, but I don't want to. They all fit so nicely together. The world is too complicated, though. I'm trying to find ways to simplify it.

It's weird because this is the first time I've tried writing POVs separately. The syllabus told us to pick one character and write them all the way through. In some ways, it's helpful because I'm getting to know this one character very intimately. Unfortunately, it's also making me lose confidence in the book, because I can't imagine how I can make any character as deep and interesting as the one I'm currently writing. Also, I'm not sure how I'll make the other characters' voices distinct from hers, since hers is close to my natural internal style. I think the only way I have a shot at doing that will be to write those characters separately from start to finish as well and then do the interweaving after, which will mean keeping track of what information should go where. Sigh.

I admire Brandon Sanderson even more now that I've watched his lectures. He's incredibly intelligent and thoughtful. I suspect he sees me as a strange, spastic girl who talks too much and has a tendency to be less than tactful. For some reason, when I get around good authors, my brain short-circuits and I behave oddly. And since I always behave oddly, that means I behave REALLY oddly. I wish I had better control over my mouth. Sometimes, when I get nervous, it's like I develop temporary Tourette's.

Well, I expect he's met worse.

I take my GRE Weds in Salt Lake. I got sick of studying and so haven't for awhile. I need to review again, to remind myself of formulas and strange vocab. My practice scores have gotten much better though. I think I'll get a good score. Whether I get a great score depends on the day. Cross your fingers for me.

Orson Scott Card

2011-01-19T15:29:00.002-07:00

Jan. 19, 2011 -- 3:35 p.m.

Orson Scott Card had a stroke over the holidays. He writes about it here. I'm impressed he can maintain his sense of humor: "I solemnly promise not to croak with any of my book series unfinished."

Dancing With Ogres

2011-01-10T19:12:00.004-07:00

January 10, 2011 -- 7:33 p.m.

I had my first dance class since the sexual assault today. It was easier than I expected. Ballroom's so formal compared with Argentine Tango, it's like dancing neutered. I was a little annoyed that no one asked me to dance, but whatever. Not the kind of people I'm interested anyway since they left the poor, heavily-accented Chinese exchange student who sat by herself in the corner out in the cold. Hard enough to be alone in a foreign country, to barely speak the language, without being surrounded by people who avoid you because of your accent.

So anyway, I'm feel self-pitying at the moment because it's a pattern. I never get asked out on a second date, never get asked out on a first one, either. Something I'm doing, possibly body-language-wise is driving people off and it's frustrating because I have no clue what it is.

I wonder if it's a Utah thing? In Oregon, I wasn't any Bella (groan) but I didn't have trouble finding company if I wanted to. Here, it's like I'm a grape Popsicle in Antarctica--nobody's interested.

Anyway, dancing's a lot like riding a bicycle. It's coming back to me fairly easily. As is the fact that I'm such a klutz, sigh.

I also went to my first meeting of the science fiction magazine run by the university. Only some people don't seem to realize that, since the story I read had no speculative elements whatsoever. We also got a poem that read like someone's suicide note, which is sad. I wished there was something I could do for the poor kid. I also wondered what on earth prompted someone from South Carolina to send his suicide poem to a Utah science fiction magazine. Gotta be one of the most desperate cries for help ever, and the rejection letter he's gonna get probably won't help him. I had the sudden realization that, if I ever become an author, I'll have to deal with depressed lonely teenagers sending out letters to me about how lonely they are. And I still probably won't know what to do. There are some things you just have to work out for yourself.

If there's a school shooting involving said submitter in the next few months, I'm going to feel really guilty. There was some discussion as to whether we should report the poem to...someone...since it also expressed anger toward the people around him. But who do you talk to? And isn't there some kind of submitter-submitted privacy clause?

Oh, and here's a little tip to writers: If you send a story to a fantasy magazine with the line "It's hard to be a straight-A student when you're living with an ogre" and there's no actual ogre in the story, you're going to have one very disappointed reader.

Stupid metaphorical ogres.

Zombie Christmas

2011-01-07T21:26:00.000-07:00

Awesome.

Classes

2011-01-07T19:49:00.006-07:00

January 7, 2011

So busy. For Christmas, I went to Seattle to visit my family. Including my father, who I haven't seen. He had an emergency gall bladder removal a few weeks ago and seems to be doing well.

Went back to school this week. Feels weird, being a student again. Also feels weird how easy it is to slip into that mold. Listen to lecture, take notes. Like riding a bicycle. More on that below.

Still studying for the GRE. Oddly enough, the verbal section I'm having the most trouble on is reading comprehension, mostly because when they ask me to figure out authorial "intent" or what is implied but not said by the passage, I'm out to sea. Who cares what the author intended when they wrote it? Who cares what's implied? If it's not stated explicitly, then it's either a) not important, b) a failed piece of writing, so I don't pay attention to it. So they're testing my ability to read between the lines, and often what I pick up between the lines is something completely different than they what they pick up between the lines.

Anyway, I have the most success if I pretend I'm a complete idiot and just pick the most obvious thing.

Between that and the absurd vocabulary (anyone care to argue that my ability to define what a Mansard roof is going to be important to my future studies?) I've become even more certain that the GRE is a waste of time and money and needs to be torn apart and rebuilt to the ground up if it's to be remotely diagnostic. Right now, it just measures how much people are willing to jump through hoops.

The arithmetic is still difficult for me. I've come to the conclusion that my score in math is most likely going to be determined by how awake I am on test day. Then there are the times when the test books are just being smart aleck-y. For example, they'll show undefined figures (figures that look like triangles, parallel lines, circles, etc.) but not explicitly define them as such, and you're supposed to work them out anyway, until you come along to one problem where they show two straight lines parallel to each other and then say: "Oh, but we never told you they were parallel, so technically you can't work out the answer! Psych!"

I am putting this off to bad test book copyeditors and hoping that the GRE will not do the same tricks on me, but it is really frustrating to have them play games like that. We should be being tested on real knowledge, not how well we can respond to trick questions.

***

On the whole, I'm expecting to enjoy my classes, though I do have grips. In one of the classes, I'm pissed about because the teacher is having us submit the homework through the book's online software. Sounds fine...except you can only get a key to the software by buying a brand new textbook with a brand new activation code. So effectively, this completely destroys the used textbook market. If you buy a textbook, it cannot be effectively resold because you have already used the unique code. So you're left with a $70 book that you can't resell and you're unlilely to look at ever again. Between that and the $30 device I have to purchase to participate in extra the class credit, I am spending $100 on things I will probably never need in the future, especially since the teacher seems to be teaching directly out of the book, ergo reading it is probably unnecessary. At U of O, for these kind of classes, I just checked out a textbook when I needed it, then put it back. I can't do that, since the library codes are useless. Moreover, the ebook for the textbook is almost as expensive as the real thing, so there's not much savings there.

So kudos for the textbook publisher on figuring out how to extract money I wouldn't have to ordinarily spend, but boo on the teacher for making me put my savings account through the ringer for no necessary reason. It will definitely be noted in my end of class review. I'm financially advantaged, but I've got a savings account because I'm a cheap, money-grubbing miser and I intend to stay that way.

***

I had my first Brandon Sanderson class yesterday. I was glad I'm officially signed up as a student--there must have been fifty non-student people clawing for the chance to listen. Sanderson used my hat to draw names of the lucky people who'd get to audit--although it was too small to hold all the slips of paper. Brandon Sanderson also mentioned he'll do public lectures in the future, so they'll hopefully those who won't get to enroll able to see everything. I suspect a lot of the content will be similar to that expressed on writing excuses.

My first impressions are positive, although a bit disappointed. I was hoping for a little more intimate situation, like with my teachers at Oregon, but those were classes of about 15 students...much fewer than the classes here. I understand why things are this way, and I like the idea of dividing a larger class into critique groups based on fervor (I'm in the most "hard core" group). I was very glad because I was concerned that the class was going to be divided randomly, and I was worried that I'd get in a group with less experienced people, who might not offer as useful comments. Sanderson also seems to be taking a different approach by emphasizing word production--by the end of the quarter, we're supposed to have produced 50,000 words. I don't know if I could do that if I were a full-time student, but since I'm not, I should be able to bag that out, especially since it's first draft quality (much like this blog post--I'm too lazy to take out the typos). Still, it's going to be a challenge. I'm looking forward to it. He's recommended that you do all the POV scenes from one character, straight beginning to end, just so you can practice all stages of writing, which is good logic but may be beyond me since my POVs tend to be so interconnected, separating one out will likely end up in an ending that doesn't make sense without information contained in the other POVs. But I'll give it a go.

I was originally planning to post my class notes online, but my grandmother said she thought that would be illegal. I don't see the harm, personally, unless it somehow undermines the authors' appearance fees, but I wouldn't want to get sued. And I could see opening myself up for liability by doing something like accidentally writing "[the author] hates fags" instead of "[the author] hates lag." Stupid example, yes, but the point is there.

There's also this train of logic--if someone posts notes from 'x' workshop, others might be less likely to take the workshop because they think they know it all already, ergo the authors earn less money, ergo, I'm depriving them of income. I don't necessarily believe this, but I'm not willing to piss off authors who might.

So in the end I won't post notes, or my notes from Scott Westerfield's appearance here, most of which was repeated on Writing Excuses, anyway. But if you want to play along by trying to write 50,000 words in three months, be my guest.

News

2010-12-09T09:01:00.003-07:00

December 9, 2010 -- 9:07 a.m.

Publisher's Lunch Weekly had deals from local author Brandon Sanderson, giving us some detail about the books coming from him in the next couple of years.

"No. 1 NYT bestselling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson's MISTBORN: The Alloy of Law, an original, standalone short novel set in the universe of his Mistborn trilogy, and THE RITHMATIST, set in an alternate-history America where magic users (called "Rithmatists") battle wild chalk creatures, introducing a student at the Rithmatist academy with great interest in but no ability to use the magic, but when students start vanishing, it's up to him to expose the sinister figure behind the disappearances, to Tor, for publication in 2011 and 2012, respectively."

It'll be fun to see another Mistborn book. I'm reserving judgment on Rithmatists, but it sounds interesting. Hopefully, it has something to do with arithmetic or rhythm, otherwise its kind of a silly name.

In other news, my friend Frank, from our writing group, was an honorable mention in this quarter's Writers of the Future contest. So congratulations!

Borders and B&N, Unite!

2010-12-06T12:34:00.006-07:00

December 6, 2010 -- 12:41 p.m.

Book News: Borders' owner just made a proposal to buy Barnes and Noble. Will their powers combine to form an arch nemesis to Amazon?

Posters on the Wall Street Journal web site scoff and say the move is just to pump stock prices. I would be surprised at the move, personally. Borders is shutting down stores at the moment, so why would they try to absorb a huge chain?

Personally, I've been doing my Christmas shopping at Hastings, which is one of my favorite chain used book stores. Powell's is nice also, but Hastings has the advantages of used video games and used DVDs too. There's a big conversation in the gaming community about how buying used video games is immoral because developers don't get their money. That applies to books, too. I feel a wee bit guilty about denying my favorite authors their percentages (less about the game developers) but I am a poor student. They got their fee once, too, from the original owner. You wouldn't complain it was immoral if someone read a book and then gave it to someone else, would you? And which would an author rather have, their book in the trash, or their book in the hands of a fervent admirer who shows it to her friends and tries to convince them to buy it, too?

I presume that most authors are in favor of the used book industry, regardless of the fact they don't profit, but it would be interesting to find out. Used book stores have such a happy fuzzy reputation, I suspect most authors would be stoned on the spot if they dared to speak out against them.

The only problem with used books is that when I see trade paperbacks for $2.50, I end up bringing home 30 of them, and I never read them because I have too many. I must have twenty books on my shelf calling to me, and I keep buying more for "market research."

My baby brother turned 20 yesterday. I still remember wrapping his 1-year-old body in a blanket and stuffing him under an overturned laundry basket weighed down with my mum's aerobic weights, because he was so annoying. When I came back, he'd stopped moving, and I was terrified he'd suffocated, but no, he'd just fallen asleep, happy as a clam that his big sister had played with him. Unfortunately, he is big enough I can no longer do that. Though I have tried.

I love my family so much. Speaking of which, a delayed thanksgiving post: when I asked my grandfather what he wanted for his birthday/Christmas, he told me, "for you to find an agent and a publisher, and to get into grad school with good scores on your GREs."

If everyone had grandparents like mine, I don't think the world would have any crime or any war. We'd all live happy lives climbing lollypop trees and singing happy songs. I am so grateful for my family, who believe in me even though I categorically refuse to let them read my novels. I am tentatively planning on showing some them the first part of Skin Farm. We'll see if they think I've been wasting my time.

Bad Writing

2010-12-03T23:15:00.005-07:00

December 3, 2010

Still sick. No fun. I hate the isolation this causes. I see it as my moral obligation not to spread germs, but I haven't left the house in a week and I miss non-family social interaction. Even for me, grand solipsist that I am (see, still studying for the GREs), I like the occasionally company of someone my own age from time to time.

Dad had gall bladder surgery last weekend but now he's okay. It was edging on gangrenous when they took it out, so I'm glad they caught it before things got more serious. I hate the suddenness of these things. Why can't life hand you your schedule of medical emergencies in advance so you can properly prepare?

Today, I've been musing about the phrase "bad writing." I've had people talk to me about the bad writing in books. I've seen it on amazon reviews all the time. The funny thing is, it's a phrase the doesn't actually mean much, yet everyone seems to expect everyone else to understand what they mean.

I've been thinking about this because I was talking about books with a friend who hated Hunger Games because of its "bad writing." The vagueness of the phrase can refer to style, or to characterization, or to a dozen other nitpicky things. Usually an author is good on some points and not so good on others, yet if the particular aspect you care about as a reader is lacking, all of their good points get wrapped up in the term "bad writing". And often, even more ironically, sometimes it's a term that's used not about the writing at all, but about something else, like the choice of subject matter. If it's something you disagree with, then it's bad writing, too.

And then things get even more complicated, because sometimes the author does bad writing on purpose. Does that turn bad writing into good writing? Does that mean we judge should weigh intention while trying to judge if something is bad or not?

I thought about it somewhat while reading the criticism of Dan Wells' Serial Killer book on Amazon. It amused to me to see some people complaining that the protagonist's sociopathic tendencies are "bad writing" when it was a deliberate choice on the part of the author. I don't know whether it realistically represented a sociopath's perspective or not, not being a sociopath, but I wonder why people tend to dismiss things they don't like as "bad writing" instead of saying, "I didn't like the author's choice to do x". Not liking something is fine. But I wonder where we got the tendency to group everything we don't like under bad writing, because it's a universal trait. Maybe I felt a little touchy because some people on Amazon seemed to be equating bad writing with anything that has elements of fantasy.

So the moral of the story is, bad writing isn't always bad writing. Except when I use the term, because everything I don't like IS bad writing, even if all these other people using the phrase are crazy-kins. (/End irony.)

Cough! Aurgh! Splat!

2010-11-13T01:54:00.003-07:00

November 13, 2010 -- 1:57 a.m.

I was going to write a review of Percy Jackson and compare it to Harry Potter today but I ended up sick with the flu, and sitting up makes me feel like vomiting. Hardly a situation conductive to cogent thought. I could barely even watch my beloved figure skaters do their pretty lutzs at Skate America. Oh, Daisuke Takahashi, your babies would look so refulgent in the verdure of my viviparous womb!

(See, I'm practicing, right? No, not avoiding studying for the GRE. No, not me).

I blame my sickness on trying to multiply decimals without a calculator--a feat I have not performed since junior high school but which is apparently centripetal to my future education. The GRE people prove they are not entirely bilious idiots by planning to allow calculators in the revised version of the test...which kicks off in August, long after the grad school deadlines have passed, alas for moi.

As always, the math story problems are slaughtering me. They have been my nemesis for about two decades, keeping me out of that coveted 95th percentile. The fact I haven't taken a math class in 5 years hasn't helped, either, but I swear to all that I apotheosize, I will conquer all things quantitative!

The blogo-writing world has semi-exploded in response to an (intentionally?) inflammatory article at Salon.com which calls NaNoWriMo a waste of time and energy, basically pointing out that there are too many writers feeding the vanity presses anyway and we shouldn't be celebrating/promoting the production of junk. Carolyn Kellogg does a good job in refuting the analysis in her article at the LA Times' book blog, using skills that I will hopefully be able to imitate on my GRE argumentative writing sample. (You'd think I wouldn't sweat the writing samples, but I suppose one of the symptoms of my flu is advanced paranoia.) Other writers (like John Scalzi) have also condemned the article, rightly.

It's true that the original article sets up a foolish false dichotomy between reading and writing, but I will say that in certain sectors of the epic fantasy community, there are far more people who want to write 300,000-word books than people willing to plunk down the cash for 300,000-word hardcovers (outside of big names like GGRM). I suspect the proportion of wannabe writers to books published by the mainstream presses is higher in this genre than anywhere else, exception maybe romance. This is part of the reason the book I'm working on now is YA, where the market seems to have much more room for new writers. Being the internet, if anyone actually read this blog, I'm sure they'd take what I'm saying in a pejorative way, but allow me to exculpate myself: everyone should write epic fantasy if they want to. The merit of your ideas and your growth as a writer/human being has nothing to do with whether or not you are published, and it is quite possible that you will be. I love epic fantasy and read it and buy it when I can afford it. I am not saying don't write your epic fantasy, or that your epic fantasy isn't worth publishing.

In fact, I'm not entirely sure what I am saying, it's probably the flu talking, but the one thing in the Salon article I agree with is that it's a cool idea to pick a month and say, "let's read ten books this month." Not in competition with NaNoWriMo, but in conjuction with it, maybe in September? It would be especially salubrious for wannabe writers, who need to know the market they're entering into. And there's nothing better than closely analyzing other books to learn how to write. The basic tenets of grammar, plot, and character are all available for you to cadge from careful analysis of these texts. You don't have to memorize techniques out of context from some kind of writer's dictionary--as I am somewhat forced to do by the GREs--you have a nonpareil toolbox at your hand, one of almost infinite variety, weighing down the doughty shelves of your local library.

And I do think it's a tool that goes underused, because people tend to find their favorite authors and genres and keep to that niche for decades. Epic fantasy writers have stuff to learn from people like Robert Graves and Isabelle Allende, as well as stuff to learn from Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan.

So I would propose having a "Writers Read" book month (NaNoReMore?) where authors are required to read several books, some outside their favorite genres. And it can be like those things we had in elementary school, where if you turn in your book calendar all filled in, you can get a free pizza. Though I won't be paying for it, of course.

What am I writing for NaNoWriMo? I am not participating in it this year, unfortunately. I have far too much studying to do. (Sigh).

EDIT: No surprise, someone else has already come up with the NaNoReaMo idea.

On Style, and the GRE

2010-11-10T21:56:00.003-07:00

November 10, 2010 -- 9:57 p.m.

Blaarg. I've started studying for the GRE and man, it is rough. This is the first time I've ever studied for a standardized test. I usually score in the 89-93 percentile without trying, but it's been awhile since school and so I've decided to actually buckle down and try to do well. Plus, my college GPA is B+ territory, because I'm a lazy student (I learn, I just don't care enough to go to the trouble of proving to teachers that I've learned), so I could use a little boost when it comes to applying to grad school and internships.

Anyway, I thought the vocab part would be easy but I've been going through an old Kaplan study guide and discovering there are tons of words I am apparently expected to know but don't. Granted, I know most of them, but still, I wonder, why? What's the purpose of having a vocabulary so complex no one will understand you? I've never heard anyone use the word 'prolix' in my life. Or 'cavil.' Or 'orotund.' These are apparently important words, though, because my entire future might be hanging on them.

My journalism teachers taught as to write everything we could targeted at about a fourth-grade reading level. Lowest common denomination. All of my teachers acted as if it was a tragedy that we had to talk down to people, but as I advanced in my career I realized that there was a good reason for that. The ideas are more important than the words we use to tell them, and the ideas we present should be as clear to as many people as possible. That's one of the reasons I'm not so anti-cliche as many writers. If someone writes, "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," we all know what that means, right? It conveys the idea. Cliches are about the only time you can be sure that the reader and the author are sharing the exact same picture in their mind. Although, of course a clever writer would change the cliche so it still communicates the same meaning, but with a hint of world-building and humor. IE, "People who live in glass bungalows shouldn't throw lead-plated ostriches." Or something. Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett are masters of this.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is a high vocabulary is not an end-goal in and of itself. I think it's only useful in as far as it's...well, useful. Always go for clear communication of a new idea, instead of trying to use words that make you sound intelligent. If a reader stops and pulls out a dictionary, that's a bad sign.

Then again, I love reading Orson Scott Card because he uses big words like "corpuscular." And that's a cool word worth knowing. Some other good words I've discovered through the GRE learning process--jocose , turgid, peregrination, philogyny, mordant, moribund, volant and mendacious.

I also learned I've been using the word 'querulous' wrong all my life. I always thought it was a synonym for tremulous. Whoops. Hope that word isn't in any of the drafts I sent agents...

Vasectomy

2010-11-08T20:20:00.006-07:00

November 8, 2010 -- 8:23 p.m.

Random book titles sometimes come to me. I have no clue what they're about, but I'd love to read them. Today, I'd love to see: I Got Lost on my Way to a Vasectomy (And Now I Can't Find my Pants.)

Vasectomy is just such a great word. Unlike many of the words on the study guide for the G.R.E., which are just well, annoying.

WoT pumpkins, a good query

2010-11-08T14:50:00.003-07:00

November 8, 2010 -- 2:50 p.m.

Love these Wheel of Time pumpkins by LynnKitty (from Brandon Sanderson's Tweet page). Very well carved!

In other news, it's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I'm not participating because I'm in the middle of the book which is the trickiest part so I don't mind if it goes a little slowly. But maybe I will next year.

There was a bit of a comment flurry on Evil Editor's page about writing query letters before your work is done. Personally, I always write my query before I'm done, sometimes before I start writing the book. It's a way of giving myself direction and nailing down the book's selling points/voice.

NOTE: I didn't say I sent the queries before I finished writing. I just have one for personal reference so every time I get yanked off on a subplot that doesn't matter, I can go back to the query and say, okay, am I taking away from these promises I've made in the query? Or does this entertaining tangent add and make the story better?

While query letter writing comes naturally to me--it involves the same skills I learned in journalism school--hook, summarize, explore consequences. In newspaper writing, we have a thing called "inverted pyramid" which means you have to pick the most important/interesting issue in whatever you're exploring and put that first, then sort all the other facts out also based on their importance/interest, with the goal being to NOT let the reader stop reading until they reach the end of the article (the least interesting part). But I think most people don't have that summarizing/sorting training, so that's why they have a hard time figuring out how to write a good query letter. Wow, I used far too many /'s in that paragraph.

Anyway, the best example I think I've ever seen of turning a bad query into a stunningly good query is HERE. The transformation is incredible--one of these books sounds boring, and one of them I would yank off the shelf in a heartbeat. And she points out exactly what she did wrong at first--create a laundry list of plot points, without making them interesting to us. Most authors tell you that interest comes from conflict, which is true, but it also comes from caring about a character. As far as I've been able to see, most bad queries fall into two categories: Too much information about a character's background, and not enough about what they're doing, and too much information about plot, and nothing about why it should matter to us. I'm not going to link to examples of horrible queries because they might end up as big name authors and ridicule me one day, but I think if you go to Evil Editor's site, or read through the listings at Query Shark, you'll quickly see what I mean.

I had a dream three nights ago that I needed to make a change to my query for my fantasy novel. That it was crucial for me to add a third paragraph containing more plot information. And I knew exactly how to word it and everything. Unfortunately, when I woke up, I forgot everything. Since my query rate is 25% positive responses, I'm not sure if I should mess with a winning formula or not, but my subconscious insists on it, so perhaps I'll pull it out and look at it again.

Anyway, I'm not going to have a writing prompt, but you might want to try writing a query for your current project and see if it doesn't give you a clearer picture of your work. Plus, then you can sit on it for awhile and perfect it, while you're perfecting your manuscript. My query for Skin Farm was pretty stinky at first, but now I like it...even if it's probably too short on details. Because I'm definitely trying not to fall into the third query trap I didn't mention: Too much world background--a disease that strikes almost every fantasy writer at some time in their lives. Pity these poor creatures, for they know not the boredom they cause.

Towers of Midnight

2010-11-03T22:38:00.004-06:00

November 3, 1:38 p.m.

So much to blog about, so little time! I'll fill in gaps another day. I have notes from Scott Westerfeld's lecture at the Provo Teen Bookfest, a cartoon appearance by Neil Gaiman, and other goodies like that to comment on. I also had a first date with a guy that I enjoyed a lot, but I guess he didn't have fun since he hasn't called. I wonder, sometimes, how people can perceive things so completely differently? I wish my radar in this area was more well-attuned.

But I don't feel like writing about any of that now because I just finished a) revising a novel b) reading Towers of Midnight (I got number #60 and went to the release party dressed as Moiraine). So now I've got a headache, but I have to respond to the book before I can sleep.

Spoilers below, but I can say non-spoilery that I liked Towers of Midnight better than The Gathering Storm. Brandon Sanderson seemed to hit the characters better and the style is less jarring. Sure, there's sometimes a strange choice of words, especially when it comes to adjectives, that jerks me out of the book, but I think he has a better handle on all the characters, especially Mat--though he's still a bit clownish. Sanderson continues to do the best job humanly possible, and I can't think of any author that could have done better at capturing the world and the style.

Reading it also struck me with a sense of sadness. As I took the book and flipped through the pages, just catching hints of story here and there, I realized I could only do that for one more book--see sentences out of context and have no clue what they meant. For only one more book, I'll be able to read and speculate without knowing what happens. Then, all that's gone.

Sanderson mentioned at the signing that Harriet is thinking about putting out a more complete WoT encyclopedia after Memory of Light comes out. My response to that is kind of--what's the point? I enjoy reading the glossary because I'm hoping to get secret clues and hints about what happens next. After the WoT ends, I'll stop caring about these people ever again. I'll never get into an argument about who killed Asmodean again--something which Sanderson said was answered in this book. It must have been in the part I read when I was doped up on pain meds, holding my eyes open with my thumbs and trying to read. Or very subtle. I guess I'll find out the answer on the forums.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is it's like the finale of Lost. Or of Harry Potter. How many times did I read the series before the final book came out? Four or five times. And how many times have I read it since? NONE. Because the anticipation was half the fun.

And when Memory of Light comes out, it'll all be over. And it's not like I don't want it to end, and I think Sanderson will give us a more satisfying conclusion than either of those series', but it will still darken my life a little.

Anyway, onto the details.

***THERE BE SPOILERS HERE. AVERT YER EYES, MATEY.***

I never realized how much I loved old angsty Rand until he was gone. I followed a sad, lonely shepherd boy who had to fight against the world and his own personal problems for fifteen years, and suddenly the angst is gone and deus ex machina, he can spot darkfriends with a glance and turn mold into bread. From a writerly perspective, this is an example of why characters need flaws. I loved the old Rand, and now I don't really care about him. It's kind of weird. And it's nothing I'm blaming on the authors--narratively, I can understand why it had to happen--but still, it's a bit like losing an old friend. We'll see if Mr. Perfect grows on me. This book wasn't really about Rand, so I can understand why it didn't offer him much in the way of a character arc, but it still feels too easy. I look forward to the challenges that will test him in the final book.

The Verin letter thing is stupid. She didn't give redundant information to someone else? Why? Why? Why? That's just dumb and unbelievable. If that was in Robert's Jordan outline, it should have been chucked out. Really. Also, some of the political manuevering in the book struck me as subpar. None of the Aes Sedai remembered that Rand was a monarch? I know it's hard to create characters that outsmart me, but these are supposed to be women who live hundreds of years, and who have been forced to practice craftiness by finding ways to get around their oaths. The Aes Sedai are masters of politics! COME ON! This was the same thing I struggled with when it came to Verin's black ajah oath, that the wording was so transparently, obviously easy to break with suicide, I decided that this must be intentional on the Black Ajah's part, so they could torture members to death for their information. But every time I see the Aes Sedai three steps behind the reader, it breaks the wall of disbelief a little. I also have a hard time buying the fact that Elayne can bribe three Cairhein nobles and the throne is hers, but that's really a plotline I'd like over with, so I'll give that one a pass.

Perrin's character arc was exceptionally well-done, although I was minorly frustrated by the chronological displacement. (Tam is in two places at once! And then he disappears for the rest of the book! Say hello, Tam! Good-bye, Tam!) I'll wave that off as a necessary evil. The writing in the Perrin arc also felt the closest to Jordan's own--I suspect a lot of it may have been Jordan's, but I don't know.

Sanderson also hit Moiraine's voice spot-on, I thought. Preachy but lovable. I'm SO glad to have her back. The eye-losing Mat scene is also pitch-perfect.

I hope Farstrider's background is a little more explored. Maybe the rest of the fandom unraveled this already, but the only thing I remember about it was Ishamael's whispers back in...book one, was it? Anyway, it's fuzzy. And Luc. Seriously, why was he so evil again? Tigraine deserved better.

What's up with the Black Tower? My theory--we've just found out what happens when you distill a channeller through 13 Myrdraal and 13 Black Ajah. Welcome to Stepford Tower.

I totally called Danelle being Mesaana. Go me.

I'm glad Graendal survived to get a better punishment. She was my favorite Forsaken. I always figured she'd be the last one standing, and would crawl away from the last battle and reinvent herself as an evil farmwife. Or something. Possibly, I thought she might end up on Rand's side at the end as "redeemed" (ie, saw that Ishamael was cray-cray and switched sides), but I'm glad she didn't. And pitting the Whitecloaks and Perrin against each other was just her style. How many forsaken are left out now?

Oh, I read on the forums that Sanderson put the murderer of Asmodean in the Glossary. SHAME! I CALL SHENANIGANS!!!

Well, whatever. It was still a good book.

Fantasy Writing Class

2010-10-25T00:29:00.004-06:00

October 25, 2010 -12:31 a.m.

Just registered for Brandon Sanderson's fantasy writing class for next quarter. So excited! So many good things happened to me in a very short time that I am woozily excited.

Weep with jealousy, lesser mortals!

---

PS: Blogger's color alga rhythm is failing. The dates on my screen show red, but they turn out black. I don't know the html for adding red, so you'll have to suffer with me until blogger figures it out.

Entertaining web site

2010-10-22T22:43:00.004-06:00

October 22, 2010 --10:44 p.m.

I've been too busy to blog, but I've been thinking about it. Alas, too busy. Working on a revision of God's Play. Trying to finish Skin Farm. Outlining a new book in my head. No rest for the weary.

I found an entertaining website, which supposedly tells you what famous writer your style most resembles. I'm not sure how success it is--I stuck in two pages from four different chapters in four different viewpoints and got four different results. Cien is Anne Rice, Rachell is H.G. Wells, Sathain is Douglas Adams (WHAT?), and Ravke is James Joyce. So either I have extremely good character differentiation or, more realistically, I use such a wide-ranging vocabulary that my word choice is pinging the algorythms.

Of course, I like to think of it as me writing like myself--a distinctive style that is a blend of all the authors I love and admire.

I also won a book from Tor's contest--a book about vampires fighting Nazis. Cool! But I'm also annoyed because I just had an idea about a vampire doctor serving in WWII after I read about them sending freeze-dried, powdered blood plasma to the front. Vampires could snort it like cocaine.

Training and Trains

2010-09-07T17:41:00.004-06:00

September 7, 2010 -- 5:41 p.m.

No writing prompt this week, because of the holiday. And my laziness.

I went to see How to Train Your Dragon in the $1.50 theater (because it's cheap, and a starving artist needs to cut costs) and was pleased to see them do a father-son relationship well--and no father killing. It defeated my expectations, because I half-expected some touching reconciliation scene over their deathbed. I'm glad they didn't do that.

Of course, by giving so much time to father-son issues, the requisite female was pushed aside to a basic cypher, but I can live with that. It was a good movie, if predictable plot-wise. Some worldbuilding holes were big enough to drive a snowplow through, but I enjoyed it anyway. I want to read the book now, because I heard it's completely different from the movie and I want to see the differences from off screen to on screen adaptation.

I had my friend Jack from Oregon here for a night. He's going on a motorcycle trip to Colorado. Quite the ride, but he seemed to be having fun. He especially liked seeing the salt flats, which are ghostly. I haven't seen a good salt flats setting in modern fantasy. I may have to use that.

The Writing Excuses podcast did an episode on third person limited viewpoints, and had a writing prompt similar to mine as last week. Great minds think alike, eh?

Tor's got the book trailer up for the next Wheel of Time book. I'm not a big fan of the actress they got to play Moiraine--she looks way too young and the horse doesn't look delicate enough--but it's getting me really excited for the release. Although the Thom-Moiraine lovey-dove thing weirds me out still. It struck me out of nowhere the first time I read it, but then, looking back, I saw the inevitable. But it still strikes me as weird. The latest ebook cover features Egwene battling Seanchan, which is cool, although it looks much too traditional wizard-on-dragon action for me.

I also watched a documentary following the actor who plays Hercule Poirot taking a trip on the Orient Express to get into character for PBS' Masterpiece Mystery adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie. He got to drive the train! How cool is that! I didn't realize that they ripped off a car from the Express to serve as a setting when the Germans capitulated in WWI. The Parisians displayed the car proudly...until Hitler invaded and, as turnabout, used the same car as the stage to dictate terms when France surrendered to Germany.

I also didn't realize the personal costs back then. To reduce the Orient Express' journey into Italy by half a day, they blasted a new route through the mountains, costing 60 lives. I never realized it was so dangerous, and I wonder if a measily half-day was worth all the deaths.

I also like the spy stories from the Orient Express, which was an easy way for intelligence agents to cross borders. One English man, posing as a butterfly enthusiast, made butterfly sketches that were actually a secret code detailing Balkan fortifications and helped the Brits out during WWI.

This is why I love history. So many fascinating stories. One day, I will incorporate the sketch artist as spy into a story somewhere.

Writing Prompt--Two Points of Views

2010-08-31T15:03:00.005-06:00

August 31, 2010 -- 3:04 p.m.

I'm reading a book that features the POVs of multiple siblings. As soon as I saw that, I sat back and started waiting for the father to die. It took 100 pages for him to kick the bucket, but kick the bucket he did. After George R.R. Martin did that so wonderfully in Game of Thrones, other authors have tried imitating it with various levels of success. Most of them end up failing. At this point in time, I'm so jaded, I prefer the authors who kill the father off pretty quick, or make it so obvious he's going to die, you're interested in the how, not the actual event. Books whose only twist is that the father dies bore me, because I can see it coming from fifty miles away.

The amazing thing is, when I read Game of Thrones the first time, I didn't see it coming. Looking back, I'm not sure how I missed it. Fantasy books are like Disney moives--if daddy's there at all, daddy's going to die so that the kids can go on adventures. Mommy is sometimes left alive--perhaps because our social views of women allow for a more passive female character. Mom is helpless, but dad, if he were alive, would do something, so we have to kill him for the sake of the plot. I've heard discussions of "orphan syndrome" related to middle grade and young adult fiction, but not in fantasy as a genre. The only example I can think of at the moment where the dad didn't die is Wheel of Time.

I think why Game of Thrones succeeded in the whole orphaning is because George R.R. Martin is such a wizard with slight of hand. He had us focussed on the mystery, the politics, the threads going on in other realms... (the wall, Daeny). We were so busy wondering if Cercei was going to kill Robert or Jaime was going to kill the children or what that we didn't notice the main character's death sneaking up on us.

So, if you're going to kill a father-figure in your book, at least give me a mystery to distract me while I wait for the inevitable assassination/beheading. Better yet, maybe you can let a father live, occasionally.

August progress report: I'm currently reworking a revision of God's Play; adding occasionally to Skin Farm, which is now two-thirds done; and plotting a new epic fantasy novel called City of Murderers, which may be my next project. I have more projects than I have patience to write. I'm listening to Terry Pratchett audio books and the aforementioned father-killing novel, which so far has been a demonstration of incredibly poor writing. I keep wondering if it's a translation, because many of the sentences make absolutely no sense. Terry Pratchett, on the other hand, is brilliant, and even more brilliant when read in the dry, British accents of Nigel Planer.

WRITING PROMPT #17

Title: Agree to Disagree
Genre: Any
Type: Character

So I had a dream. I don't remember the content, but I do remember this--I was watching something, something significant. I woke up and rolled over and went back to sleep. I repeated the same dream, except this time, I was someone different. And it showed. The changes in my perception were slight, but important. My actions were slightly different as well. Both character perceived each other's reasons for doing things completely inaccurately.

This happens in real life. Three people will remember the same conversation differently. They will also remember the same event differently.

I want you to take two characters through a scene. Any kind of scene--an argument, repairs to a space station in orbit, a battle against a red-skinned monster with three tongues. Write the scene from one POV, and then write the same scene from the other character's POV. How accurate are each character's perceptions? You can have them be diametrically opposed, if you want, but I think this exercise is more interesting with two characters who view the same things with only slight differences.

You can do this one of two ways. If you're like me, a discovery writer, then you write the two scenes and then compare them to gleam the differences in personality and such. If you're an outliner, you might come up with a list of major differences between how the characters see the world and try to work them into the text.

Burglars

2010-08-27T12:18:00.003-06:00

August 27, 2010 -- 12:20 p.m.

Since I did my week's book review on Weds (yes, now that my vacations are over, I'm going to try and be better about the blog schedule), I figured today would be a whatever today.

This whatever is that there are burglars prowling my neighborhood. They've hit two houses in the area in the past two weeks or so. As far as gossip can be trusted, they are a man and a woman team in a truck and trailer who apparently watch houses for a while before breaking in. They're smokers--unusual enough to stand out, in my neighborhood--and are dumb enough to leave cigarette butts inside the houses they rob, so with luck, the police will be able to use DNA to identify them.

However, these aren't your ordinary smash and grab thieves. They apparently have some kind of device that can grab the access code off automatic garage door openers. So they watch a house to determine when nobody's home, use their device to trigger the code to open the garage door, bring their trailer inside and then load up on electronic stuff and drive away. No having to carry expensive electronics out in plain sight, or anything like that. Relatively low risk, unfortunately.

A couple of my friends from Oregon were robbed a few years ago. Even though they got most of their stuff back, they're still traumatized. Homes are a place of safety for most people. Even though we logically understand that this safety is an illusion, when that illusion is stripped away, it hurts people deeply. There was a show a few years ago on Discovery, I think called "To Catch a Thief" that showed people how thieves would break into their houses so they'd get better security stuff. I found the show morally questionable because I worried it taught more people how to burglarize than how to defend themselves, and also because it focused on suburbanites who lived in areas where burglaries were usually as frequent as a rain of mashed potatoes. Fear-mongering, pure and simple.

But getting back to the point: Anyway, the people I live with expressed worry, but I told them I thought we were reasonably safe given the burglars' modus operendi (no house is completely safe, but in this case it's one of those, I-don't-have-run-faster-than-the-bear, just-faster-than-you situations, so we just have to look less appealing than the house next door). There are a lot of reasons our house is a bad place to hit. Our movements are not very predictable and my car's almost always in the driveway, so it makes an efficient decoy. We're also located at the top of a hill, making it both visible from below but and hard to see down at the same time. If you have a lookout stationed at the top of the hill, you're only get a few seconds of warning, and you aren't going to do much better if you station watchers at the junctions of the nearby streets because there are so many of them. There's just not a good way to watch all the methods of approaching the house, while remaining out of sight yourself at the same time.

Anyway, I found it strange that my subconscious had already started planning how to rob my own house, enough that I could explain why it was a bad idea. I wonder if it's just writers who do that, or everyone. I love reading about heists (low tech and high tech) and complicated assassination plans (Day of the Jackal was awesome), not because I plan to rob or kill anyone, but because they're interesting puzzles. When I went to a campaign stop by a Presidential candidate once, I thought, "How would I bypass security? How would I kill this candidate? Could I get away with it?"

That's why I've watched the news stories around dead spy Gareth Williams with such interest. Because there's a part of me that thinks what if I were a counter-spy and wanted not just to kill him, but to completely impugn his good name, how would I do it? After all, if you give police a lurid answer that nobody wants to look into that closely, it would be a good way to chase people off the scent, right?

Well, just because occam's razor usually works in real life doesn't mean it works in fiction.

Maybe I think about this stuff because I have a naturally criminal mind, but also because it's interesting, pitting my intelligence against theirs. In everyday life, I will try to plan terrorist missions and put limits my budget and my means, trying to figure out what will cause the maximum effect with the minimum commitment of resources. Some times, I frighten myself with how easy some of the things I think of could be. Good thing I'm on the right side. And I guess I'll be an invaluable asset to the resistance movement when the Canadians invade.

Does everyone do this, or am I just crazy?

PS: Yes, of course I've figured out the best way to rob my own house. No, of course I'm not dumb enough to post it on the internet.

Mockingjay Review (Mild Spoilers)

2010-08-25T14:44:00.004-06:00

August 24, 2010 -- 2:46 p.m.

I just finished Mockingjay and...boy, did it blow me away. It completely beat my expectations. Though not perfect, it was great. I couldn't put it down and now I'm going to go back and read it again from the beginning.

But first, I thought I'd do a review. There are spoilers, but probably not the kind that will wreck the book for you, so read at your own discretion.

I was right about the cheerful cover being completely wrong. From the picture on front, you would expect Katniss to rise up over conflict as something pure and beautiful. You would also be wrong. This book is the darkest of the three, without doubt. And when I think a book is dark, you know that it's dark.

After an admittedly rocky start with a patchwork of flashbacks that left me wishing Scholastic had hired me as copyeditor, we find Katniss Everdeen in the bowels of District 13. Suzanne Collins manages to confound my expectations. Contrary to my worries that the new district would be a magic wand to erase all Katniss' problems, instead we're introduced to a new kind of dystopia. One of supply shortages and secret tortures and rigorous schedules tattooed on your wrist every morning. Instead of being offered a clean choice between good and evil, Katniss must decide between bad and worse.

These are the decisions that make readers sweat. These are my favorite kind of decisions to read about, and to write about.

No matter which way she turns, Katniss' choices will lead to bloodshed and death. One scene close to the ending is an epitome of useless gore. While the final pages may suggest hope (and possible a prequel involving Haymitch, PLEASE-PLEASE-PLEASE!!!), the unforgiving decisions the characters make before the last resolution will leave you wondering if history is doomed to repeat itself.

Collins' writing shimmers when it comes to pastoral moments--a ring of dancers taking what joy they can in the midst of war, for example--but she really shines when it comes to the violence. Which you'll find here in gobs of delicious, blood-rending horror. No, Katniss doesn't end up back in an "official" arena, but she is forced to kill and watch people die in a variety of ways. I was somewhat disappointed given the technology-heavy world of the Capital that so few high-tech weapons were showcased. I didn't quite buy the in-world explanations for the limited use of aircraft and WMDs, but you have to admit that close quarters combat does make for great reading. I particularly enjoyed the toys I did see--including a voice-activated bow with incendiary arrows. Guess what I'm putting on my Christmas list?

A sly reference to Farenheit 451 also made my dystopia-loving heart beat a little faster.

On other military matters, I was disappointed that--despite previous' books build-up of the Capital's insurmountable armies--there were very few military details about how the impoverished outer districts overcame the better-armed central government. But as a tactical buff, I can never get enough about that stuff, and the Hunger Games triology has never been about that.

So what is it about? In my opinion, it's about how we as a society see violence. How we glamorize it (even in book form, which makes Hunger Games all the more ironic, since it's criticizing our arena-watching tendancies while forcing the book's audience into the role of spectators at the same time). While the previous books have explored violence for entertainment value, this book explores violence for propaganda value. Katniss has always been exploited as a symbol, but never so obviously and tastelessly. The rebellion does what the capital has--put makeup and full body-polishes on murder and gruesome death. Think Wag the Dog, post-apocalyptic style.

But while decrying the exploitation of violence for power, the book also manages to rack up an impressive bodycount. My only other major disappointment was the way the death of one of the characters was handled. Apparently, it took place between books, but it is rarely discussed or thought about. It's possible I missed mention of it in my admittedly quick read, because Katniss' lack of grief over this particular individual seemed strangely out of character.

The love triangle is, of course, still in force, although it's the part that interests me the least. Unlike previous books, Gale takes off from the page. While before, I considered him a cardboard cypher, more obsticle to Peeta than actual living being, this time he's a living, breathing character and I can see why some girls on the forums were rooting for him. Collins has a gift for dialogue that rings true in Gale's mouth.

While Gale takes center page, Peeta--kidnapped and in the hands of President Snow--takes a bit of a sideline in the process. Peeta fans may not enjoy the twist his character takes, but I loved it in the way only a fellow writer can. Curse you, Suzanne Collins, you diabolical genius!

It's nice to see the character development of Katniss over the series. I may have enjoyed reading about the decisively temptestrous heroine from the first book, but I still liked the indecesive, temptestrous heroine from the third. While the romance is interesting in and of itself, it's really a stand-in for a choice between two different worldviews. Anger and vengeance, symbolized by Gale; and forgiveness and peaceful reconciliation, symbolized by Peeta.

Though of course, neither character is strictly bound by that nature in the book. Both characters break their assigned molds, making for some of the most riveting moments in Mockingjay. And whenever anyone gets too sure of themselves, Collins is there with a curveball ready to throw them off their stride.

In the end, the choice isn't black and white. Katniss is part Peeta, part Gale, and all herself--a lonely girl hurt by choices that are far too big for any one person to shoulder.

----
PS: Collins is on book tour. You can find her schedule here. I may make it over to Washington for a signing in November, if I'm feeling ambitious. Also, Publisher's Weekly has an article on the marketing on Mockingjay. Definitely worth reading if you're thinking about marketing strategies for your own book.

Mockingjay Release (No Spoilers)

2010-08-25T09:51:00.004-06:00

August 25, 2010 -- 9:52 a.m.

Haappppy Hunger Games Day! (in an 'Effie' voice).

I'm back from Oregon just in time to grab Mockingjay, the final book in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy. I was sick this weekend, too sick to make it to the midnight release party, but I slogged over to Barnes and Nobles with a wealth of gift cards this morning fifteen minutes after it opened only to find out they were out of copies. OH NOS!!!!

Except then I saw they still had boxed sets of all three up front. So I grabbed one. I don't own the other two, so that worked out all right. I'd rather have paperbacks (easier for my hands to hold, I've been suffering from mild wrist pains lately--don't know what I'll do when Way of Kings comes out) but hardbacks will have to do. I couldn't wait even another day for more books to come in.

It's hard to describe the depths of my black despair when I found out they were all out. And then, when I found the boxed set, I went skipping through the parking lot. Yay!

Before I read the book, I wanted to celebrate the event. Because there's a part of me that's sure the book can never live up to what I want it to be. I doubt it will be a trainwreck, but whenever a series I love ends, I'm usually more disappointed than satisfied. Like certain TV shows of late, the end of a series often ends with a whimper, instead of a bang. I'm still surprised they divided the Harry Potter 7 movie into two. After all, most of that book was spent with the main three wandering through London wondering what they should be doing. Why do we need two movies of that?

Anyway, I suspect Mockingjay will be an entirely different book. Catching Fire relied on a lot of retreads from the first book. Not a bad thing. I found the repetition satisfying, although having President Snow allow condemned contestants an open, uncensored forum really strained my sense of disbelief. He needed to go to the "evil dictator school of logic." And I found the whole "Oh, District 13 does exist" thing annoying, since it's a bit of a magic wand. I hope the author doesn't wave it to make all the problems go away.

But I can't see Mockingjay relying on the arena/arena rigamarole a third time, so this book will have to be entirely different than the others. Will we still have a way for Cinna to show off his fashions in post-revolutionary district 13? Will Effie's bizarre hairstyles feature a return appearance beneath the toxic-bombed ashes? We'll see.

One thing that amazed me in the pre-release chatter was the number of teenage girls arguing about whether Katniss should end up with Peeta or Gale. It's always amusing that, while I'm interested in the technology, the survival, and the politics, other people are interested in the romance. That shows a book's greatness, that it can satisfy audiences on more than one level.

Speaking of which, seriously, why would anyone vote for Gale? I don't get that one at all. Peeta is nasueatingly perfect, but Gale has had hardly any screen time. He talks big, but he hasn't done anything, except get the tar flogged out of him for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A lot of people seemed to think Peeta or Gale will die by the end of the book, to make room for the other, but I don't think that's necessarily true. It could happen. If it does, I'm betting Gale would die to save Peeta.

Part of me hates the monogamist conceit this was built upon. Why can't she have both? Gale can be her kept boy in the remains of district 12, and Peeta can be her husband away from home when she's made queen of the new capital.

Katniss dying would be kind of a cool ending, but I think that would annoy too many people. I don't think Suzanne Collins' editor would let her get away with it.

Guess I'll get to find out! I still wish the third book was a different, more dangerous color. I'm not a fan of the randomly broken swirls on the cover, either. The first two books looked more dramatic.

Weird Walk

2010-08-10T02:07:00.004-06:00

August 10, 2010 -- 1:30 a.m.

I have found the secret to getting agents to ask for partials: Go on vacation. If you are in a place where you cannot access your novel, badda-bing, the requests come in.

I dreamed last night I enrolled in a school of ninjas. I fought evil. It was awesome.

I had a weird experience I thought I would write down. I was walking up from the MAX (Portland's metro) to the house of the friend I'm staying with and I managed to get completely turned around. I wasn't thinking about my surroundings because a) of above partial request b) I don't have any sense of direction. By the time I figured out I was lost, I saw a familiar landmark and thought I knew the direction I should go in. Only then it turned out I didn't and, in trying to get out, I landed smack dab in the middle of a set of gated communities and couldn't get out.

Anyone who knows me knows I'll do this. I get lost walking across a street. Ask me how many debate rounds I missed because I got lost. Actually don't ask, because it's happened so often, I stopped keeping track.

It's after midnight. I've walked two miles. I'm a little annoyed at myself, but not particularly worried. Every street I go down ends in another frickin gated community. I go toward an apartment complex downhill figuring the apartments will open out onto a main road and I can find my way back to the MAX station and try again. Unfortunately, there are some twenty buildings, and I pick the wrong direction and find myself wandering from stairwell to stairwell staring up at six-story complexes.

My cell phone got no reception up there, but I managed to find a few bars in the middle of a park, with the sprinklers attacking me full blast. I call my friend, but the reception gives out, though not before my friend gives me a general idea that I should go downhill.

Anyway, I find some girls out on the porch of their apartment and ask for directions. They cannot believe I walked up the hill. It's just a hill, but they make it sound like Mount Everest. They are freaked out and certain I am on drugs. They offer to let me call my friend but my phone has reception again so I do it myself. He's got mapquest up and can give me directions, all I need is the address and a point out of the complex.

Except they cannot believe that I can walk my way home alone in the dark. They are certain that muggers are going to find me and get me. I roll my eyes and point to the fact we're surrounded by mini-mansions and there are like two streetlamps to every house. This isn't downtown Portland. This is suburbia central. How many muggers would be waiting to jump out at pedestrians at midnight on a Monday anyway? Those would be some pretty bored muggers, since I hadn't seen a single pedestrian for an hour. No victims = no muggers.

The kicker--the women don't know their own address OR how to use mapquest. Who lives in that kind of neighborhood and doesn't know how to use mapquest? She kept saying my address was turning up the map to Arizona but that was because her DEFAULT STARTING LOCATION was in Arizona and she didn't know she needed to change it. She thought it was because the address I'd given her was a lie and I was casing her apartment for a burglary or something.

Anyway, they eventually talked my friend into coming out to get me, which I feel horrible about because it's midnight and seriously, I can walk fine, I just need to know where to walk, but he is very nice and comes and the girls wait with me to make sure I'm not kidnapped by all the horrible muggers out on the streets.

It was very strange because they kept asking me my age, if I was sober and "why did you walk up that hill" -- repeating the same questions five or six times. I wonder why they thought my answer would be different, if the fifth time I would say, "Ooh, your clever tactic of asking the same question over and over again has led me to confess that I'm actually on heroin!"

I tried explaining that I knew my friends lived on a hill so I walked up the hill thinking it was the right hill but that seemed an unsatisfactory answer. At least one of the girls was mentally challenged, I believe. She took the book I was carrying from me (Janny Wurts' Traitor's Knot) and started reading it aloud. It was very strange. I felt like I had wandered into a Kafka book. The girl told me I'd inspired her to read Tale of Two Cities.

It turned out I was on the wrong hill--the one next to it was the right one. So all it took to get back to where I should have been was a five minute drive, and probably a fifteen minute walk. I should be grateful that the women were trying to look after me, but I was left feeling bemused. The whole time, they were so afraid of me. Only one of them would talk to me at first. The rest dashed inside their apartment, beset with terror. Of a 5' 4", 120 pound girl who has arms like spaghetti noodles. I suppose I could have been packing a gun. They mentioned some kind of security at the apartment, though I didn't see any.

It's good to know that I'm not the worst victim of suburbanite's terror out there. I am grateful to them for their help. It took bravery to overcome their fear of me, even if it was...somewhat misplaced.

Drafting of Beautiful Reality

2010-08-02T13:19:00.004-06:00

Free afternoon snuggling with a friend's laptop while on vacation. Time to write!

I thought I'd put it here for now, because the large amount of spam on my email will otherwise have it buried.

BEGINNING: Beautiful Reality

THESIS: One-legged boy who works as an assassin when all minds are linked by computer must go into the computer to rescue his sister from the computer mafia.

INSPIRATION: Want to experiment with present tense. Also, Inception. Good movie, but it could have been better, done more. I liked it, but I also felt a little disappointed because all the buzz made me think that it would be so much better. I think if I had walked into the theater with zero expectations I would have been blown away. I can't put my finger on what's missing...I think all the twists and turns in Dark Knight. I could kind of see the plot coming, down to the end, and Leonardo DiCaprio didn't feel like the right actor to carry the lead to me. And it had some moments of extraordinary visual beauty, but nothing like the wonder of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Still, it was one heck of a summer movie. It's nice to see original films (not remakes and sequels) and movies that don't assume that their audiences have the intellectual capacities of five year olds. I was additionally amused because an excerpt Brandon Sanderson read from the Way of Kings involves a gravity fight. Great minds think alike. I wonder how many stupid people will accuse him of ripping it off.

ANYWAY... typing

CHAP 1: Gepetto

In my dreams, I have two legs. I'm not a freaky Pinocchio waiting for some blue fairy to sweep in and turn me into a real boy. My knee doesn't end in a massive net of tubes and sticky bio-flesh that smells like burning plastic and looks like a robotic turd.

In my dreams, I have real skin and muscles. Real veins pulsing with real blue blood.

In my dreams, I don't have to kill people.

In my dreams, I can still run.

***

But now I'm limping, pushing my hand on a warm doorplate smeared with the grease of years. Pressed by the sweaty fingers of men who came in nervous but left relieved or maybe never left at all. The bartender inside looks like a bent wire, with his copper skin and bald head, swollen joints and bones that stick out. The papery skin of an old person.

His eyes widen when he sees that I'm young, fourteen (though he probably thinks I'm younger, people always think I'm a child and it makes me mad), and his smile deepens.

I'm so sick of dealing with Marvy's pedophiles. Is there anyone working for him who's not a pervert?

"What'll you have, boss?" the thin bartender asks, though his slurring lips make the "s" sound like "f" so it comes out as "boff."

Two Geisha clones in the corner giggle and flutter coal-black eyelashes at me. Their faces are half-hidden behind razor-lace fans that buzz with enough electricity to stop a human heart. Despite their stupid platform shoes and the white, stretchy kimonos that make me think of cocooned skin-bugs, I know that Marvy never hires a Geisha bodyguard unless she's killed someone. Their lips are painted, wet and red as blood.

"I don't want anything to drink," I say, trying to ignore the way their eyes tickle the back of my neck. I can't look afraid. Not yet. "I want a girl."

The pervert looks disappointed.

"My sister," I quickly say, sickened by what kind of girls the people who come into Marvy's bars usually want. "She's gone from the Pave."

The bartender scratches his earlobe, which has a big hairy black mole dangling from it. This time, his grin does not look so friendly. He knows the Pave is Marvy's private hostage preserve. The metal detector didn't go off at the door, so he knows I'm not carrying steel, but plastic explosives, or wooden swords or guns made from processed carbon could all be slicked past the booby examine. I could be carrying a thousand things in my black trenchcoat and pair of teal green sneakers.

"Marvy knows where she is," I say. "I want to see him. Now."

The bartender jerks his head. "He's in back. But the question is, does he want to see you?"

"He will," I said. "After all, I'm a Skinner."

The bartender's look is sadder this time. He thumbs a door open in the wall. The wooden slats slide apart, and I can smell Tooth Fairies--the menthol cigarettes that Marvy loves. "Back there," he says.

The door is dark. I go inside.

***

Marvy is younger than the bartender, but still old. I have to look at him through the walls of the glass tube that dropped down on me from the ceiling. Protective custody. If Marvy leaves me in here, I'll suffocate. But I'm his best Skinner, so sure he won't. Or almost sure.

He looks at me with small black eyes almost completely buried in the fat flesh of his forehead. Crinkles around his lips and nose make him look like he's smiling even when he's not. For a fat man, he moves with an almost birdlike grace, his sausage fingers deftly picking roast snails out of shells smothered in garlic and olive oil. His black, pressed business suit is clean because he never spills a drop. The snails make little wet crunching noises as they vanish between his wormy pink lips.

"Tommy, my boy," he says affectionately, reaching out as if he would tousle my hair if not for the glass barrier between us. Everything else but me and his table is in shadow, while we stand in two squares of yellow light. I hear hushed laughter coming from the other tables. And soft, nervous coughs.

I wonder how many other men have heard those coughs before they died.

I glare at him. "I want my sister, Marvy."

Marvy's eyes widened. "Well, I don't have her in my pocket."

"You have her, Marvy. When I went to visit her flat in the Pave, she was gone."

"I had her transferred. She's doing some work for me."

I swallowed. I knew what that meant. The whorehouses. Young women stacked in rows of pods, their minds trapped in virtual reality while men used their empty bodies. Or their bodies were controlled by pleasure computers or prostitutes whose own bodies were too old and ugly to attract clientele. They called the sub-Contracted bodies "Gloves."

"The debt's almost paid off," I say to Marvy. "You were going to let her go soon."

"And this will make the payments go faster," Marvy replies. "Frankly, kid, I'm doing you a favor. It'll be quicker this way. And it wasn't as if she wasn't giving it away for free."

If the glass wasn't between us, I would have thrown myself at him and torn his nuts off. "Put her back, Marvy. I've paid you enough for that much."

Marvy shrugged. "Your work hasn't all it should be, of late. I thought you could use some extra incentives."

I shiver. He knows.

Marvy takes out another Tooth Fairy and lights it. He sits back, puffing contentedly. "You know, I got into the business about your age, Tommy."

"I don't want to--"

"Listen!" Marvy cuts me off angrily. "I'm trying to teach you something. I was thirteen when I began running drugs for my father. Weak stuff. Black Cream and Pleasure Diadems, mostly. But the shit scared me half to death. The things it was doing to people. To customers I knew. There was this one woman who came at me once, tearing her hair out. I mean literally tearing her hair out, pulling out thick, dirty brown clumps that she'd shove in my face. She had lipstick on, but only on her bottom lip, smeared over her chin. By drool.

"I wanted out, but my father wouldn't let me stop seeing her or any of the other people we helped mess up. He said to me, 'Marvy, my son, sentiment can get you killed in this world.'"

Marvy leans forward, his fat gut swelling over his knees. "And he was right. Because when three men with crowbars starting beating the crap out of him, trying to find out where I was after I taught their punk ass brother a lesson, my father refused to talk, and so they beat him to death. He died to protect me."

Marvy leans forward and looks me in the eye. "Do I look like my father, Tommy? Do I look like the kind of man who'd do that, Tommy?"

"No," I say.

"Shit no. Because I'm not. When kidnappers sent me my wife's fingernails I said, 'to hell with it.' That's all I have of her. Her fingernails."

He taps his neck, and I realize for the first time that he's wearing a tight gold band around his neck, half-hidden by his enormous, stubble-covered jowls. Ten white slivers dangle from it on little golden chains. I can just make out the old flecks of red paint.

"I'm not like that," I say, revolted. "I'll never be like that."

"You will be, Tommy," he tells me. "Lack of sentiment. That's what makes you such a good Skinner."

He gestures. The glass tube around me goes up. But before I can do anything but suck in deep lungfulls of fresh air, two men with huge bionic shoulder muscles come and grab me by the arms. They haul me up by my arms so I'm on the toes of my one remaining foot, the weight of my entire body hanging on my shoulders. It hurts like hell. I can see one of them out of the corner of my eye. Brutish face. The empty, slack eyes of a Glove. Marvy always switches the minds of his bodyguards, because it's easier to deal with pain if it's not your own body. Though it makes them slow and stupid, too.

They have matching tattoos on the centers of their foreheads. Blue, swirling things that glowed in the bar's old light.

"In fact," Marvy continues lazily to me, reaching out to pinch my cheek, "you're too good. I've decided you'll work for me, or nobody, Tommy. I'm not going to train you anymore only to have you turn around and become the tool of one of my enemies. I want a Contract." The capital was audible in his voice.

"You saying you won't tell me where my sister is unless I agree to work for you for life?" The idea of wearing his tattoo like his goons did, of being fully and completely owned by this man, made me feel sick and dizzy.

"That's right, genius-boy," Marvy says. "You kill for me and only for me. For the rest of your life. It'll be better for you too, this way. Forget your sister and whatever lies she told you about me. I'm a good man, and you're too good for her. She's past. Together, Tommy, we can create the future."

"And if I say no, you'll kill me?" I ask.

"No," Marvy says, but I can tell he is lying. "I'll give you a week to decide."

His dismissive gesture sends the two men carrying me out through the bar. Past the knobby, pervert bartender. Past the Geisha clones who look at me with wide, dark eyes. They dump me on a trash-covered sidewalk. They give me a kick in the hip for good measure, so it hurts when I have to struggle up. One of them is going to take my artificial leg and play keep away but the other one tells him we can play with me later.

They wouldn't do that to me if they could see what I was capable of. If we were in the Mindplay...

Well, we weren't. When it came to ripping people's minds out of their bodies, I was a giant. But in the real world, I was just a cripple.

A cripple with one week to find his sister.

***

Locating the body was easy. My sister's new Cube was actually slightly larger than the rooms at the Pave, and the bed she slept in was soft and well-tended by nurses. Women in tight white shirts came to roll her over every three hours, to monitor her temperature and make sure her bowels were always sparkling clean.

Penrose looked like she was asleep, her cheeks full with the faint pink blush of a Flash addict. Her brown hair hung around her shoulders in dark, curly waves. Unlike the last time I had seen her awake, it looked clean and fresh. The same color as our mother's.

I couldn't touch her, of course, not through the plastic sack-bubble covering her body, floating up and down with her breathing. The body's immune system is always weakened when someone goes into deep mind-sleep.

I put my hand as close to hers as the nurses would let me. I could feel the heat of her skin through the plastic. Unnaturally hot, but I couldn't see a drop of sweat on her. Nobody was home. Her mind was asleep, unable to regulate her simple bodily processes. The computer tubes jammed down her throat did everything for her. Told her when to breathe. Made her eat. Even stimulated her bladder so she'd know when to pee.

I hated looking at her this way. It was like looking at a doll.

"Visiting hours are almost over," a nurse tells me.

I glare at her, but she has the no-nonesense eyes of a bureaucrat who would call the police on a boy who just wants to spend some time with his older sister.

"All right," I say. "Can I have a few minutes alone with her?"

"No," she says.

I sigh and turn back to Penrose. A lot of sisters would abandon their brother, if they had a defect like mine. She would probably have been better off if she had. She wouldn't have gone into debt for my medical bills after I got run over. She wouldn't have had to start selling Flash to get cash to pay off ruinous interest from Marvy. And then...she wouldn't be addicted.

She should be in a music school somewhere. She used to sing to me, when we were orphans huddled under the tracks of the Monorail, listening to the hiss of New Jerusalem's flag as it snapped in the cold wind. Chapped lips and stomachs with nothing but water inside. That had been our life, until she sacrificed everything she had to make it better.

It was better. At least we had something to eat, now. Although she'd never know it. She'd grow old and die like this. Dreaming.

Unless I could save her.

The nurse pulls at my shoulder. "Time to go," she says curtly.

I nod and let myself be pulled away.

--end of chapter one--

Just so you know, that took me approx. 45 minutes to type. Like I say, I'm a fast typer!

The tense thing probably isn't working as well as I thought. I was thinking present tense would make the whole thing feel more dreamlike, but I think it's just distracting.

I think it sounds better in my head than on paper. My first drafts always tend to be a little heavy on the melodrama.

Wedding

2010-08-01T16:53:00.004-06:00

August 1, 2010 -- 4:53 p.m.

Attended my friend's wedding yesterday. Saw oodles of people I haven't seen in forever, most of whom I barely recognized. I had a lot of fun catching up. And dancing. And singing karoke, which like I can be convinced to do like NEVER. If I track down someone else's pic of me swing dancing, I'll be sure to post it. I think I felt more light on my feet and beautiful than I have since...

Of course. I haven't danced like that since I was sexually assaulted.

Four years ago was it? Gee how time passes. I will have to take a dance class when I get back. It's always frustrating to think you've driven away all the lingering ill-effects only to find something you didn't know you'd lost.

As expected, there were bittersweet feelings, too. Mostly frustration that I can't be everywhere and that I will never be able to be as deep a part of the lives of the people I care about as I once was. I miss the days when we were all trapped together in a boring town and there was nothing else for us to do but hang out with each other.

Anyway, the bride and groom looked beautiful and happy. I wish them good dreams in their new lives to come.

I'm back! And gone!

2010-07-26T15:47:00.003-06:00

July 26, 2010 -- 3:47 p.m.

Back from Hawaii! Now off to Oregon. I'll tell about the Maui trip another time. I have some really cool pictures of this garden that had insane plants. Like, stuff you'd expect to see on Mars if it had water. Sea turtles were everywhere and SCUBA diving rocks and three different kinds of dolphins rocked the side of our PWF tour boat. Oh, and white chocolate macadamia pancakes with coconut syrrup? TO DIE FOR. I miss fresh pineapple.

Well, I guess that was my trip. Read one of the most horrible pieces of fiction I have in awhile. It was supposed to be a black comedy, if black comedy is defined by stupid suburbenites whining but never doing anything about their crappy lives and jumping into bed with anything that moves. Oh, and their kindergartner boy has his eye shot out in a school shooting at the end. Are you laughing yet?

I'll be back in two weeks, after an old friend's wedding. I'm going to try and see lots of people I haven't seen since high school, which will be for the win.

Skin Farm is about 80 pages from reaching the 80,000 word mark now.

WRITING PROMPT #16

Title: Place
Genre: Any
Type: Setting

So many of the great books have at least a side-trip to fun foreign locations. In classic fantasy setting-based travelougues, journeying strange places and meeting strange people is all you do. Gotta love the weird alien planets, too. I've been pouting because I can't find my copy of Dune, the epitemy of a great setting.

Unfortunately, a lot of the epic settings of the present just don't feel very epic to me. Maybe because I'm a jaded reader and I've seen it all done. Blah blah forest blah blah blah space suit. You know what I want to read? A fantasy novel set in Afganistan! There's probably one out there, but I haven't read it yet.

But that's just me. Most people want to read books about places they would actually like to visit. So if you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be? Why there? If it has to do with social connections, it doesn't count. Pick somewhere where you don't know anybody. Pick what you think sounds really cool about that setting and expand it, incorporate it into your world. Now write about your exotic fantasy-land vacation. Go wild. Talk about stuff that will never ever come up in the novel, because your character is a million miles away, but this tourist will see it.

Avatar was a success largely because it had a cool setting that was beautiful to look at. Can you replicate the same emotions? The same feeling of strangeness? Or will you try and evoke a different emotion, terror or awe?

Away I go.

2010-06-17T06:41:00.002-06:00

June 17, 2010 -- 6:43 a.m.

Tomorrow I'll be in sweet, sweet Maui. I DRINK YOUR TEARS OF JEALOUSY!

But maybe The Onion's parody of publishers and vampires will cheer you up.

My favorite line: "[On] the same date three rival publishers will release novels featuring a bad-boy mummy, a bad-boy cyclops, and a bad-boy Mayan vision serpent."

I'd read the one about the Mayan vision serpent.

Books Reviews: The Lies of Locke Lamora and Paper Mage

2010-06-15T01:30:00.005-06:00

June 15, 2010 -- 1:31 a.m.

It's amazing how a little thing like an argument can completely throw off your mojo for an entire day. It destroys time you don't have, and leaves you frustrated because there's no way to resolve a conflict. Most of the time, you have to forgive, forget and move on, even though you crave the satisfaction of the other person admitting that you're right.

But enough of that. Anyway, here's the promised book reviews:

The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch

For writers, there are two types of books in the world--The books that make you think, "I wish I had had that idea because I could have done it so much better." And the books that make you think, "I'm so glad I didn't write that book, because otherwise I couldn't have gone along for the ride."

The Lies of Locke Lamora is definitely the latter. But what else would you expect from a Campbell award winner that the master George R.R. Martin himself graces with a blurb? (Speaking of which, a Game of Thrones preview is up on HBOs web site. If you're a fan, go check it out.)

Locke Lamora is a thief who steals too much. In a city of glass and canals, where gladiators battle sharks and thieves are ruled by hidden gods, Lamora is a conman who plays both sides against the middle. He's ostentatiously working for a man who is the fantasy version of the Godfather, yet at the same time he's stealing from the upper class nobles that the Godfather has declared off-limits. He's kind of a Robin Hood...except that he keeps the money.

Lamora is on track for pulling off his largest heist ever, until a mage in the service of a mysterious vigilante decides to blackmail Lamora into helping his revenge scheme against the Godfather figure and the nobles both.

Who doesn't love the fictional antics of a conman? This was a guilty pleasure for me. Yes, I got my credit card number stolen once and it sure as hell wasn't funny then, but that doesn't stop me from loving Lamora as he goes on his merry, rampaging way. It's always easier to sell me on righteous thieves than righteous assassins, even though the assassin character was very popular in fantasy for awhile. It's one thing to rob rich people of their money, it's quite another to kill them, and I thought that of lot of assasin books, much like the "pimp" phenemonon that inexplicably gripped pop culture, glorified a lifestyle that, in actual reality, was very sordid and exploitative. However, because I enjoyed Lies so much, and he only ruins people instead of murdering them, I guess I have to set my principles aside. It helps that the class conflict in the book is so demarked. It's also amusing that, though Locke Lamora steals, he doesn't really know what to do with the money afterward.

This book crackles with tension and suspense. Granted, not every twist and turn was unpredictable, but it's rare for a book to startle me so frequently and to such good effect. Lynch has mastered "the surprising-yet-inevitable" art of the twist. I found my jaw dropping in the middle of the novel, and I was cursing by the time I had to set it down and go to bed.

Like the Da Vinci Code, most chapters ended with a hook to drag the reader forward. Except in this book, for me, they always succeeded. What made this feat even more impressive is that the book utilizes an unusual structure, spacing chapters about Lamora and the other character's pasts in between chapters that propelled the main narrative forward. In other words, Scott Lynch could keep me wanting more even when I knew that the stakes were low--no character deaths, just a lot of info-dumping. Yet I loved every page.

Besides being a master of colorful characterization, Lynch also has a deft hand with description. Few of the details of his world struck me as stock fantasy set dressing leftover from the LOTR movies.

Lamora is also notable for not having much of a romantic subplot. This is strictly a buddy comedy. Well, in some parts, a buddy tragedy. There is a love plot in the sequel--a book which might even be superior to the first--but (SPOILER ALERT...Scroll over the text to see it) it's pretty obvious from the beginning that's it's going to be a case of women in refrigerator syndrome--a term propagated by comic book readers and applied to the love interests of superheroes who are fated to die for the sake of the plot.

Be warned, for those of you who aren't a fan of adult language, Lamora has it's fair share of it. It's not meant as a book for children. Also be warned that the second book ends on a cliff-hanger, and Lynch's blog suggests he's been having problems that may delay the third book for some time.

But if Hunger Games was the best book I read last year, I suspect The Lies of Locke Lamora will be my favorite of 2010. I read it back in February and haven't found another book that even comes close to toppling it. Lamora was fresh and exciting in a genre that so often embraces clones. I can't wait to read the sequel, and depending on how the rest of the series goes, "the Gentlemen Bastards Sequence" might even be up there with the works of George R.R. Martin and Robert Jordan.

***

Paper Mage, by Leah Cutter

I don't know if there's ever going to be another book where the magic system is centered entirely around origami.

Xiao Zen is a female paper mage struggling in a fantasy world reminiscent of Imperial China. She folds paper creatures to bring them to life. Her family is disgusted by her profession because they believe it will harm Zen's chances of marriage, but her manipulative aunt sees it as a way to guarentee herself immortality. Zen herself isn't sure what she wants and struggles throughout the book to come to terms with her talent, her feminity, and her duties to her family.

I'm putting this book next to the Lies of Locke Lamora because they both use a similar narrative system--one chapter on background, one chapter on the present, alternating throughout the book. While structurally similar, the purposes are quite different. Lamora, though populated with a large number of memorable characters, is a plot-driven book, and even the background pages give you a dallop of mystery. Paper Mage, on the other hand, is a character driven book, where the suspense comes more from the character's decisions than from anything about the plot. Because I'm not as much a fan of character-driven fiction as I am of plot-driven fiction, this didn't necessarily always work for me as well as Lynch's book did. For example, Xiao defeats the big bad evil warlord in the middle of her book, not the end, which honestly left me scratching my head a little.

Cutter is excellent at capturing a culture not her own. I'm not used to being in character's heads who are so alien from me. I think a lot of fantasy readers are so used to female characters who embrace the modern tennants of feminism, so it's surprising when we see a woman so firmly torn between career and family. And one who often believes that she is made less by the soft squishiness between her legs. Her attitude frustrated me to death sometimes, but also helped me see into a world that is admittedly very far from my own.

The setting itself is interesting. I loved the tidbits like part-rat/part-dragon monster, and how Zen has to find creative ways to defeat things with paper.

Paper Mage is an impressive study in characterization and cultural exploration. Writers can learn a lot about using foreign cultures and different ideas in this book. But if you're expecting a lot of suspense, swordfights and flashy fireballs, this is definitely not a book for you.

2010-06-12T02:52:00.004-06:00

June 12, 2010 -- 2:46 p.m.

Ugh, I meant to write that book review today, I really did, but I've been sick all day.

I passed my Scuba certification with flying colors. Whether it was the dramamine, the decongestant, the ginger, divine intervention, or bloody-headed stubbornness, I didn't struggle with vertigo or sea-sickness.

However, now I have water stuck in my inner ear with the result that I am very dizzy and can't take three steps without falling on my face. It's weird because I feel like the water is so deep, it's trying to leak out of my sinuses. I don't know if it actually is or not, but it feels like its gushing around the inside of my face. Not pleasant.

In the meantime, I'll probably write a book review on Monday instead of a writing prompt. Because I really do want to point out two interesting books.

But that'll probably be my last post for awhile, because I'm off to Maui in six days.

Vomit

2010-06-09T23:26:00.004-06:00

June 9, 2010 -- 11:19 p.m.

I'm tired. I've had a discouraging couple of days.

Mostly, I'm disappointed because scuba diving, which I really enjoyed, may not actually be a hobby I'm capable of. We had our first open dive yesterday, and I had to sit out half of it because I got so sick. I came very close to vomiting all over the water, and the waves were very small.

I was fine until I got to an underwater platform at 20 feet or so. Then, I tried to swim off it to a neighboring platform and suddenly I was just sick and dizzy and I couldn't see anything. I wasn't scared, because I knew I could just bob up to surface and be fine. But I did feel very sick. I tried to figure out how I would throw up with my breathing apparatus in my mouth, because I was worried that I would breathe in my own vomit and choke. And I wondered where everyone had gone. I could see how easy it would be to get lost underwater.

Part of it was that my partner did not stay with me like he should have, and I was looking around for him and I couldn't find him. So I got dizzy and turned around because I was trying to find him and he'd already swum ahead about thirty feet or so away when I was expecting him to be right beside me. Part of it was, even though I felt like I was fine boyancy-wise, someone told me I should put more air in my BCD so I did and I bobbed up like a cork, too fast. I didn't have enough weights on me, which didn't help.

That's the worse thing about having people look after you. Sometimes, they don't respect you enough to think you know what you're doing. They make things worse by distracting you and trying to protect you--and they yanked me by the shoulders and told me to do their way. Yanking me around does not help my stomach.

I can dope myself on anti-nausea drugs and maybe pass the open water dive--the instructor says its very common for people to suffer from intense vertigo the first time--but the point is, out in the sea, there will be more waves. And I will be sick. I thought that being under the water would make it better, but it doesn't.

I mean, I threw up in a yacht on Utah Lake, for christsakes. I throw up when I'm nervous. I throw up when I dance. I throw up riding in the car. Some days, I throw up for absolutely no reason at all. I live on a steady diet of Tums. I don't know if it's ulcers or what, but I've always had a weak stomach, and it interferes with so many things in my life. I've never bothered to go to the doctor because I don't think they could make it better, but maybe I should.

It's so frustrating to try so hard, to want something so badly, and then to fail because of something that is so completely out of your control.

Tomorrow, I try again. I will try to eat more mild foods and take more pills. Hopefully, it will be better.

Prompt: Puzzled

2010-06-07T16:14:00.003-06:00

June 7, 2010 -- 4:19 p.m.

I enjoyed my trip to the sand dunes with my family. I wish we could do something as fun every week. I think I'll be picking sand out of my shoes for the next decade.

So I just finished Da Vinci Code, which I had never read before. I read it so I could see what the fuss was all about. Spoilers abound in the post because, you know, it's like...old news.

I wasn't a fan. I'm glad the book brought more people to the bookstore than who normally would come, but I didn't like it. It was a little slow for a thriller. Give me the short, soft stylings of Lee Child any day of the week. That man can do more with the phrase "he said nothing" than any other author can do with a paragraph of emotive description (including myself.)

However, I'm not going to criticize it, because writers living in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and you can't really argue with success.

Other authors have used "the right blood" concept, even if I haven't seen it linked with the holy grail except in fringe literature. It seems odd that the "importance of blood" fantasy trope occasionally migrates over to popular literature. Another book I read that involved blood had a quest to find a descendant of Hitler. Then they found his little granddaughter, who was about 8 or so, and the heroine shot her on sight because she had Hitler's charisma. And the hero was absolutely okay with murdering a child because she had the same blood as her father. I may be wrong about the age, but even if she was a young adult, she still hadn't done anything yet. I think she was in the middle of saying how evil her grandfather was when the heroine shot her, too.

My attempts to figure out what that book's name was led me to all sorts of interesting information, including a web site that says Angela Merkel is Hitler's daughter via artificial insemination. The evidence: A doctor of Hilter's was allegedly carrying around a vial of his sperm around Eastern Germany about the time Angela Merkel was conceived. Also, they share the same birthday.

Wow, who knew I was Jesse Jackson's illegitimate daughter? After all, we were both born on Oct. 8.

I wonder sometimes why people demonize politicians with really ridiculous arguments when ordinary arguments will do. I remember receiving all sorts of crack email during the last presidential election telling me Obama was the anti-Christ signalling the end of days. Well, I'm still waiting for that apocalypse.

Did I ever tell you I saw a PBS special on the 2012 Aztec calendar thing, and one professor talked about email he had received from a mother asking if she should poison her children in 2011 so they wouldn't have to suffer it? WHY ARE PEOPLE SO INSANE!

But back to the Da Vinci Code: I was amused that, when the book won a plagerism settlement, the judge added codes to his opinion. I'm not sure an American judge would have gotten away with being that flippant. Unless they're Scalia. His dissents are so fun to read, even if I rarely agree with them.

What can writers learn from Da Vinci Code's popularity:

• I did admire Dan Brown's penchant for research, even if not all of it was accurate. The way he planted enough facts that sounded plausible in the beginning of the book made the later leaps of logic feel more solid.

• He placed strategic hooks to draw readers on. He had a mystery pulling at the reader in every chapter, and he added another layer on it every time. If I wasn't always absolutely enthralled, I could at least see that it was meant to be enthralling. Red herrings also abounded. I was absolutely sure the French inspector dude was "the teacher."

• Any press is good press. The controversy surrounding it probably spiked interest in the book. I was amused when I read the Catholic web site debunking the Da Vinci Code because it says, "Its publisher, Doubleday, released it with much fanfare in March 2003 and heavily promoted it. As a result, it debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and has remained on it since..." Which implies readers had nothing to do with its popularity. I bet publishers wish they had the power to create a Da Vinci Code level seller with every book. But the publicity surrounding it, both at its launch and later, did, undoubtedly, help.

• Sometimes an unusual theme or wacky theory can be really powerful, if it makes good watercooler chat. I often think that it's very difficult to create a completely original work because at least one person has done anything you ever tried to do already. Well, I have never seen a thriller based around the descendents of Christ, holy grail and goddess-worship symbology before. I would never have expected to see those elements in a best-selling book. I'm not sure picking a loony, delicious gossip-worthy theory and structuring a book around it could actually work again, but who knows?

But the bottom line is this: people like puzzles. The same people who do the cryptograms, crosswords and sudokus in the newspaper read a lot of books. If your book doesn't have a good element of mystery in it, you're missing out on a chance to entrance the reader. Every time you can add a puzzle--even if it's something small, like the evil character's motivation--you make it that much harder to put your book down.

WRITING PROMPT #15
Title: Puzzled
Genre: None
Type: Whatever

Pick an element: character, setting, world-building detail, plot, etc. and add a puzzle. It can be anything--a puzzle about a character's true identity. A word anagram that will give away the final location of that magical McGuffin. A cryptic sentence left in a mad scientist's diary. The bad guy's motivation. See if you can withhold something until the end, and drop enough clues to leave the reader guessing and hungry for more.

What makes an interesting puzzle to you? Do you like word games? Number mazes? Whatever you do like, see if you can combine it with some other element in your book to make a good mystery. Little or big, both can be useful.

Psyche!

2010-06-04T02:54:00.001-06:00

June 4, 2010 -- 2:48 a.m.

I'm probably not going to post today after all because I'm taking my cousins camping this weekend and I didn't have time to do it today. So...book review next week, eh?

WHAT I'M READING NOW: The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

CONduit Report

2010-06-03T00:16:00.006-06:00

June 3, 2010 -- 12:16 a.m.

Well, it's Weds. somewhere, right? I got caught up in some expected yardwork today when the sprinkler system went down, so this post's a little late. But here it is...

Ah, CONduit. The Salt Lake City Con where you can attend a writing panel on How to Get published, stay for a belly-dancing performance and learn the basics of detecting paranormal activity...all in a single night. This year's theme was space pirates. There's such an ecletic mix of gamers, artists, anime fans and writers, if you go to CONduit and don't come home with at least one new friend...it's probably your deoderant.

Of course not everyone's friends are as cool as the Dread Pirate Roberts. But hey, you can't all be as awesome as me. Relax. Don't strain yourself. We wouldn't want to be setting the bar too high now, would we?

Anyway, I had a lot of fun. I even introduced myself to some new authors who's advice I have been listening to for a couple years now, and found out that Larry Corriea and John Brown are every bit as nice as they seem to be. And Provo Library doesn't carry a copy of Larry Correia's book, FOR SHAME! Some regular faces were absent (I missed Howard Taylor's jokes) and some of the local authors didn't stay long, but I still went home with a belly-full of advice and a bucket-full of motivation. I chucked out about 40 pages of text on Skin Farm yesterday (and by chucked out, I mean typed out. How much is decent enough to merit staying in the book, we'll see). Brad Torguson recognized my face from previous conventions and came to talk to me and introduce himself without prompting. I also managed to avoid all Lost spoilers, miracle of miracles. I'm still a season behind, grumble.

My question of the con was: How do you deal with form rejection? And boy, these authors had experienced a lot of it. I didn't quite ask every author there, but the ones I missed I'm sure would have had the same advice. Keep your chin up. Work hard. Throw stuff at the wall. Something's bound to stick eventually.

In some ways, there were a lot of depressing moments at the con, because some of the authors haven't had much upward career movement since last year. Barbara Hambly, our guest speaker, has had a whole ton of success over the years--our library has a shelf almost dedicated to her exclusive use. But after she'd "made it", quit her day job, worked full time as an author for decades, she ended up getting chucked out by her publishers (and this time, I do mean thrown out) and forced to find a job at the time in her life when many people start contemplating retirement. So...you can make it, and still not be safe from the terrors of the 9-to-5.

The funny thing is, the community college she's teaching at wouldn't let her teach creative writing, because she didn't have a masters in English. Ha!

Anyway, a lot of advice we got was the kind of thing you've heard before...ie, don't send your query letter on perfumed paper, or dark paper...(part of me groans at people's ignorance)...but there was some new stuff too, like that sometimes the "no submissions" policy at publishers is just a shield and if you send a manuscript to someone anyway, you might get a bite with comments. Not something I'll try unless I have a few Writer's of the Future awards under my belt, but interesting nonetheless.

Barbara Hambly--who is a really interesting woman, she talked about her ghost sightings and her student's reactions to her numorous tattoos--advised me to start with character when writing a historical novel and then work outward, since I'm finding the whole historical setting bigger than I can chew. She also told me her WoW server (not mine, alas) and that she plays on Thursdays.

Another thing: One of the distinctions between M.G. and Y.A. involves spheres of influence. In a M.G. book, the biggest influence on a main character tends to be family. Often kids saving their parents or having to make due without their parents or fighting their foster parents or wishing they had parents, etc. In Y.A., that influence has shifted over to friends. It's less about family and more about that cute boy with the locker three feet left of the girl's bathroom. Friends in trouble that need rescuing instead of parents. Anyway, I'd never thought of it that way before.

I also learned there's a new subgenre called "New Adult" which is for college-aged folks. Not quite adult, not quite young adult. I'm not sure how you'd go about marketing such a thing and whether its a viable sub-genre since college kids are pretty much adults, but it'll be interesting to see if it develops. I can see how there are some unique "college" issues that would make for great reading. I haven't seen a shelf for it in bookstores, but it's been awhile since I went walkabout in a Barnes and Noble.

James Daschner also told me not to worry that I've missed the bandwagon with post-apocalyptic. They're still hot, which is good because I hope to get queries out on Skin Farm by Christmas.

Anyway, I went to readings, a Wheel of Time panel, and other events, and saw pirates and armed knights carrying signs "WILL FIGHT DRAGONS FOR FOOD." James Daschner gave me a copy of the first few chapters of the sequel to Maze Runner (signed) which made me squeal a little. I squealed a lot when Brandon Sanderson told me the first Wheel of Time signing for Towers of Midnight will be at BYU again this year. I'm picking out my sleeping bag already, you losers. That #1 signed copy is MINE!!!

But more importantly, I came home with so many story ideas, I'm not sure what to do with them all. I'm beginning to wonder if I might not actually be a secret Y.A. author in disguise. I think of myself as gritty, but Y.A.'s gotten pretty gritty of late, and most of the characters that spring into my mind are young, if not high school aged. Probably because I am trapped into a perpetual state of immaturity. There would be some advantages--Y.A. authors are less penalized for genre-romping, so I could write historical fantasy and dystopian science fiction under the same pen-name--as well as a wider audience and bigger paychecks. Sounds good to me.

Next year's COnduit will be superhero themed. The guest is Tamora Pierce. They've already got the website up for next year. I've never read anything by her, but I like some of her book titles. I find myself scratching my head and wondering where to start. Usually I study an author's career in chronilogical order but reading 26 books by the same author is a little dauting.

UP FRIDAY: Double book review! The Lies of Locke Lamora and Paper Mage.

Status Update

2010-05-31T12:27:00.002-06:00

May 31, 2010 -- 12:27 p.m.

Yeah...so...

Ever since my laptop broke, I've been really too busy to blog, but I went to the CONduit and Larry Correia inspired me to try to do a little better. We share an anti-authoritarian streak which I find delicious.

Part of the problem is my life is very boring at the moment. I spend a lot of time perched over a keyboard or perched over a book, reading and usually loving it. For example, I just finished I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells--fabulous, in a creepy way. I cannot believe it took him so long to break into the business because he is obviously very talented. Also, Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself which is a must-read for any epic fantasy writer because of his fantastic sense of humor. More on that when I do reviews.

The bottom line is I'm recommitting myself to blogging three times a week. Monday, you'll see a traditional writing prompt. Friday will be a book review. And Weds will be...whatever I feel like. The exception will be this week because this is a holiday. You'll just have to figure out what to write yourselves.

In real life, I've been looking for a part-time job and helping my grandfather out at the business from time to time, and with the yard work. My laptop is working again, but I realized that I have to bite the bullet and buy a new one. The battery is very bad and needs replacing, but my model is so old I'm having trouble finding something compatible. I've found batteries on the web that SAY they're compatible, but in my laptop, the socket is just about in the exact middle of the battery, and in all the pictures of all the others, the socket's about two inches right of center.

Also, there's the fact that I could buy a non-crummy used laptop for only about twice what it costs me to get a new battery. So I'll scrape the money out of somewhere.

I'm also planning on going back to college for a graduate degree. Journalism isn't for me--I used to be a newspaper editor and reporter, and neither will make me happy in the long term, even if I was good at the reporting part. So I need to figure out a new career, hopefully one that gives me time for writing. At the moment, I've settled on professor because I miss the ivory tower. My favorite courses in college were all about the Political Science, so I'm going to take that second major and turn it into a masters. BYU doesn't have a poli-sci masters degree, but they do have one that combines politics with statistics and economics, which sounds right up my alley. I'll study hard and actually care about my GPA for the first time EVER in hopes of one day getting a graduate degree in political economics from an ivy league school. If I can't get a professorship right out of the door, maybe I can work for the government. But I think I'll thrive in the publish-or-perish setting.

Anyway, to apply to this program, I need a better grounding in statistics and to brush up on my economics knowledge--I took micro and macro in college, loved macro so much that the professor tried to woo me to change majors to economics because he thought I'd have a big future in it, god I wished I had listened--so my tentative plan is to apply for admission to those undergrad classes during BYU's winter semester. Maybe I'll take a couple of creative writing classes, too. I've always struggled with creative writing classes because...well...usually I'm the best in the class by a large margin. I'm sure I sound arrogant, but it's the simple truth. The other students read my stuff in awe and say, "This is soooo ready for publication," and then I send it in and reap the form rejections.

But hey, there's nothing wrong with continual positive encouragement.

Coming up on Weds!: Reports from CONduit. Including a picture of me and the Dread Pirate Roberts.

PS: Trying to break into the market? Check the up-and-coming agents listed in Agent Kristen's post about her early days. One of them, Suzie Townsend, did a breakdown about what's hot in YA. It's eight months old, but I bet a lot of her advice still applies. Especially in the don'ts...

Updates

2010-05-17T23:53:00.006-06:00

May 18, 2010 -- 12:06 a.m.

Busy, busy, busy!

I know I haven't been getting to the blog lately, but I haven't been getting around to much of anything, honest. I've been taking intensive SCUBA diving lessons that run 6 hours a night (plus an hour commute) and keep me up long past my bed time.

The weird thing? I thought I was going to be claustrophobic and hate it, but by the end of the lessons, I seriously love it. I love swimming around in the bottom of the pool, seeing everything and never having to come up for air. It's so peaceful and beautiful. And I love watching other people. Especially the men and women in my class who've been married for awhile. Underwater, everything is magnified. Every gesture seems tender and romantic, even if it's not.

It's a whole new world, and I love it.

In the mean time, I have a goal to finish a first draft of Skin Farm by the time we leave for Maui (late June) but I don't think that's going to happen since I've been hovering around the halfway point for some time now. But I had a revelation today that fixes the problems I was worried about, so yay!

I also have a goal set up to revise the first thirty pages of God's Play by the time we go down to Maui. I think it can make it even more awesome. But completing new book is top priority over revising old, at least for now. I don't want to lose the Skin Farm mojo.

I'm really disappointed I didn't get to go to Children's Book Day at the Provo library. Rick Walton was there. He was in my mother's critique group. I used to sit by their knees when I was a wee thing, listening, and sometimes bringing my own children's stories into read. I had a story about a little girl who has an invisible monster at her side who keeps eating cookies and she gets blamed for it. In the end, she learns to love the monster for who he is, not scold him for who he isn't. It was cute and quite good-- I have an entire box devoted to the stuff I wrote when I was twelve, including my first novel. Which was about a girl with magical powers. Go figure. One day, when I'm a rich and famous author, I'll publish it.

Writing dream from last night: I'm at CONduit, the sci-fi/fan writing con at Salt Lake. There's a workshop that I think is on the writing. Actually, when I get there, I find out it's INTERPRETIVE DANCE. We're going to be acting out a summary of the first part of our novel in front of a panel of Utah writers, which includes Brandon Sanderson.

I get up, wondering how the heck I'm going to explain the world of Skin Farm through dance. When I ask, Brandon says it's okay to read parts. So I figure, I have a killer first page, I'll start with that...and then I look down and find that I've dropped the pages, they're all out of order, and I'm starting in the middle. Then one of the members of my writing group (Stephen) tells me he's sorted everything and hands me a stack of papers. But when I start reading, I realize: THIS IS NOT MY BOOK. Not only that, but our old inkjet printer has smeared the ink around so I can't read anything in the first paragraph. I start reading anyway, and end up mumbling all the words but "starfish" and "arena" before my time expires and I have to sit down.

The worst thing is, through this all, Sanderson watches me with this expression of total patience and sympathy. It made me want to cry. He starts giving a critique about "hackeneyed dialogue" and I wake up. Thank goddess.

Keep in mind that I slept through the dream I'd had right before about my uncle fighting off a werewolf and failing. So apparently, being asked to do interpretive dances representing my work in front of a panel of authors is a worse fate than being eaten alive.

Brandon Sanderson is in my dreams because I finished Warbreaker two days ago. Very awesome. I love authors who incorporate humor into their work, since it's something I struggle with. I would have liked it to focus more on the class differences between the Pahn-whatev and the Hallandren, but everyone knows I'm more interested in building cultures than plots. I think that's my main problem. I get so excited about cultures and characters (ooh, they worship earthworms!) that I forget about everything else.

I wonder what's up with him and female perspectives, anyway? His only book where the main character is male (other than WoT) is Alcatraz. Or am I missing one?

BOOK I'M READING NOW: Green, by Jay Lake

Boobquake

2010-04-26T15:17:00.005-06:00

April 26, 2010 -- 3:17 p.m.

"Just a few hours into Boobquake day, in which lady activist-of-sorts Jennifer McCreight called upon women all over the world to wear revealing tops to refute the claim of an Iranian imam that promiscuity causes earthquakes, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake has hit Taiwan."

--From the National Post, via the New Yorker.

The background is: According to a Muslim fundamentalist, women's revealing clothing causes earthquakes and a bunch of women decided to show their clevage today to refute the statement.

While I don't deny the power of a good set of women's clevage, I figured this was a dumb idea because there are lots of earthquakes. Just because you don't hear about them or they aren't high magnitude doesn't mean they exist. For example, the U.S. Geological Service says there were 17,292 earthquakes last year. That's what, about 47 a day? And that was a slow year. We've had 4,896 in 2010, and it's only April.

Moral of the story: Think about your experiment before you do it, or risk confirming some looney guys' theory.

Besides, everyone knows that earthquakes are caused by the gays. (I'm joking!)

Monday is Funday

2010-04-26T12:18:00.002-06:00

April 26, 2010 -- 12:19 p.m.

There's an article on writing from the Tor blog worth reading.

I wonder how much money you need to make to become a "frillionaire?"

I feel that way sometimes. I have a hard time seeing things through, but my rigid journalism training pushes me up and over my writing blocks. Even though I may hate writing about that damn city council meeting, I have to do it so I make the best of it. I may despise my novel at the moment, but I'll keep plugging through until it's finished. That's why, for me, writing block almost never happens. I'll write something, acknowledge it's crappy, re-write it ten thousand times, and then maybe end up satisfied. It's actually an inhibitor in some ways, because writer's block is a warning siren. I bet I wouldn't have to revise so much if I had it more often.

I miss the newspaper world in some ways. Having a deadline always hanging over my head made it easier to write, which is why the strict structures of a writing group can be very helpful.

2010-04-24T00:41:00.002-06:00

April 24, 2010 -- 12:38 a.m.

I'm working on reading the Hugo nominated short stories. They're available for free online here.

Bridesicle sounded the most interesting, and the most creepy, so I read it. It's amazing in a really disgusting way. Definitely worth reading.

I'm glad it had a happy ending. And it makes me hope they NEVER invent the ability to freeze people.

Speaking of cryogenetics, if you're not a "This American Life" fan...WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU? If you are, go listen to this episode. Some things are too amazing to be fiction.

Me Want...

2010-04-21T07:37:00.002-06:00

April 21, 2010 -- 7:30 a.m.

I so would wear this.

My younger brothers fail to appreciate the awesomeness of Spiderpig. I think they just don't understand how epic it is.

Maybe they fail to understand the epicness of the Simpsons in general. For me, even though some more recent cartoons have surpassed them in humor (only to go down into their own abyss of repetition *cough* Family Guy), they all owe a huge debt to Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie. And unlike the more recent adult cartoons, the Simpsons had heart. It was about people who, more often than not, were trying to do their best only to have things go horribly wrong. The best Simpsons episodes weren't focussed around guest stars and gimics, but around the relationships of a family that wasn't too different from our own.

That's while I'll always be a Simpsons fan, even if some episodes/entire seasons make me wince and reach for the shark repellent...

In other animation news, I finally went to see Avatar. I was pleased by the animation and all the little touches that went into the story. The technology was wonderful, the scenary breathtaking. While nothing new on the story front--white man goes and becomes truest member of native culture--there were enough little twists to keep this interesting. Like the evil corporate dude was reluctant to commit a massacre and the main character started things in a wheelchair. I don't think Avatar will become the classic Star Wars is, just because there wasn't enough groundbreaking, either in terms of idea or plot. But for what it is, it's the best. Enough little flourishes and details that I could tell everything came out of love, and I'd put it at the very top of the "nature-worship" genre, which in general bugs me because it because it's so didatic. Nature = good. Technology = bad.

There is some irony, of course, given the high involvement of technology in this film.

Speaking of Spiderman, there's also supposedly a Spiderman Broadway muscial in the works. From comics to movies to Broadway. Weird.

Soylent Black

2010-04-20T02:36:00.002-06:00

April 20, 1010 -- 2:30 a.m.

Maybe this makes me a really bad person, but I find this typo hilarious.

I bet the proofreader is getting a ton of slack.

New Post

2010-04-08T18:44:00.004-06:00

April 8, 2010 -- 6:38 p.m.

So yeah, I've been busy. I've been putting up fences, spending time with the family, planning trips, cannodling with Fred, celebrating birthdays, reading books and writing Skin Farm. It's about a third done, and I finally have a handle on one of the characters that was giving me a hard time.

I haven't forgotten the blog. I just haven't put the time aside to work on it. I have like thirty books in the queue for review which I'll get to. I read a lot without writing anything because I'm pretty picky about my books, and I try not to write reviews if they're mostly negative. But I think for a few of the books I review, I'm less going to advocate reading them than pointing out the lessons writers can learn from them. Even if I don't particularly like a book, I can still learn from it.

Speaking of learning, you might want to check out "Ten Rules for Writers." I especially like Margaret Atwood's advice. Number seven on her list: "You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine."

Dream, Writing Prompt #14: Place of Peace

2010-03-08T06:28:00.010-07:00

March 8, 2010 -- 6:23 a.m.

I had an odd dream last night. I was biking and a friend of mine came up to me. I knew she was the servant of an old woman who lived in a house nobody but writers could see. She was a witch, but not the bad kind. A wise woman muse who offered advice to young writers. She lived there alone, except for her servant, her daughter/niece, who spent time reading, chuckling, and breaking wood for their shack's fireplace. I knew that this muse had given Robert Jordan advice in his youth, and that she had been his model for an aes sedai, because when I walked into her shack and saw her cloak on her hook, I saw not one, but many, all flickering because they contained all the ages and styles of the world, including Verin's brown vines. She had lived a long time, was very powerful, and very wise.

I would go to visit her as often as I could. Once, I accidentally led a boy to her, even though her location had to be secret. He followed me, desperate to talk to her, even though the road to her house is laced with broken glass meant to cut the unworthy. I'm not sure what happened to him. When I tried to follow him in, the muse's servant slammed the door in my face.

But one day, the servant came to me and told me I had to come, and to bring one of the people in my writing group. She warned him that the "life" of his story was in danger because it wasn't political enough. By which she meant that he wasn't exploring the tyranny of the government's effect on the 'little people' and he needed to do more with it. He needed to reflect on our own government and compare it to his, weaving its follies of history into his word. His story lacked Truth with a capital T, and so would fail.

I asked her what I needed to do. About how I was afraid I was just a wordcrafter, not a storyteller, because I can spin descriptions and make words dance in people's heads, but my stories are not as good as the writing deserves. About my concerns about whether I should continue on as I am, unemployed except for the small jobs, or try to find a job that will let me write and earn money at the same time. Her answer was mostly a shrug, that I should do what I think is best. Then she asked me to describe the stories I was working on, and I told her about the three, how I couldn't seem to settle on my next project because none of them felt right. She told me all my stories were good ones and the main thing I lacked was patience. Patience with myself, patience with others. Patience with the characters that hadn't yet found themselves in my text.

Then she stroked my cheek and said, "don't worry, if you work hard enough, you'll be able to take my place here one day."

And I woke up deliriously happy, because I knew that this is who I am and always will be, and one day, I will get to live in a wood-heated hut in the middle of the slums that no one can see, giving advice to young writers that can change lives. Coax happiness. Give thought.

***

A true dream, I think, advice to stay on the path I have chosen. People who read my writing later may be surprised to find out that I'm a Christian, because I write such blasphemous things about gods. Take the current epic fantasy I'm working on, where there are seven nations, each one's culture inspired by the seven deadly sins. Part of Christianity's domination of the western world came from the fact it absorbed pagan religions. In my world, it's the other way around, paganity won, but many of the Christian rituals are kept, because they were absorbed. This creates interesting contradictions that I'm still trying to work out (Like, why gods and goddess with such sexual natures would have priests so fully determined to censor everything).

I suppose it is my backlash against worshippers of the recidivist Goddess theory, which believes that there was once a goddess religion that taught peace and love and everyone was happy until the big bad male-centered religions came to suppress them, demonizing Eve and Pandora until all we have left of that religion are little fertility statues and memories of goddesses as bearers of evil.

I believe that there certainly was goddess-worship in the past and that it certainly was repressed, but I don't believe that it was the peace-loving, nature-worship that certain authors claim it was. So my goddesses are sexually-charged and as brutal as their male collegues. Perhaps because I am so full of emotional conflict and hatred and frustration, I sympathize more with the war bringers dieties than the mascots of peace. They are more...human.

But though I cannot explain god's interventions in certain lives, I believe sometimes he whispers peace and confidence to me through my dreams. I believe that it is not the wish-fulfillment of my subconscious, but a true message to keep on trying until I get it right.

So I have written my place of peace, of inspiration. What's yours?

WRITING PROMPT #14
Title: Place of Peace
Genre: None
Type: Self-exploration, Dialogue

If you could go somewhere to experience peace and confidence in yourself as a writer, somewhere to go and get ideas, where would it be? What would it look like? Who would be there? What kind of questions would you ask that person?

Some people are lucky enough to have places like this in real life. In high school, I had a bridge. And under it, I could lay back and just listen to people crossing and talking, and no one knew that I was there. I liked that. I'm a bit of a sociophobe, so being able to satisfy the human need for company without having the stress of having to act a certain way was very nice. I never had to perform for anyone, but I wasn't completely isolated either. That's my perfect place, where I can be with someone so completely that I don't have to worry about what I say or do. That I can be as bitter and vulgar as I want to be, and no one will judge me or think less of me.

Find your peaceful place, populate it with a muse, even if you'd prefer to be alone, and write to that person about a difficulty you're having with the story. Let your mind drift as you write the response your muse might make. Perhaps, by writing it out, you'll be able to find a way around your difficulties.

That's what I do. And I'm surprised how often it works.

Movie Talk

2010-03-08T06:07:00.004-07:00

March 8, 2010 -- 6:03 a.m.

History is made. The first woman wins best director award at the Oscars for the Hurt Locker. I never even heard of the Hurt Locker. It's all the more interesting because Kate Bigelow is James Cameron's ex-wife. I would have been surprised if Avatar won, just because of the stigma the Hollywood establishment tends to show against popular and genre movies. Avatar had a double doom. I was so amazed Return of the King got the nod just because the deck was so stacked against it. Reuters' write-up of why Hurt Locker one mentions that one of its producers got banned for campaigning...wonder what he did. I was surprised the award didn't go to Precious.

Another first in history: Sandra Bullock wins awards for "best actress" and "worst actress" in the same year. Red boots do not win audience hearts.

District 9, another sci-fi flick, was nominated for best picture as well.

I don't think there's been a time when two sci-fi pictures have cracked the top nominations, which I think says something about the genre's acceptance as art.

Superman Sex

2010-03-06T01:38:00.003-07:00

March 6, 2010--1:34 a.m.

You know you should go to bed when you find yourself reading Larry Niven's squicky, hilarious explanation of why Superman and Lois Lane could never actually physically have sex and you have an urge to write a story about an army of bullet-proof sperm taking over the world.

It's quite graphic. Be warned.

Night of the Living Trekkies

2010-03-05T22:59:00.002-07:00

From Publisher's Lunch list of deals:

"Kevin Anderson's NIGHT OF THE LIVING TREKKIES, a mash up mixing a zombie apocalypse with the enduring mythology of Star Trek, to Jason Rekulak at Quirk Books, by Scott Miller at Trident Media Group."

Zombies and Star Trek? Wow.

I think the Brunching Shuttlecocks need to update their geek hierarchy (see above).

Axe Cop and Wexter the Dinosaur

2010-03-03T08:13:00.005-07:00

March 3, 2010 -- 8:11 a.m.

If you haven't read "Axe Cop" yet, you should. It's a web comic. The story is written by a five-year-old and illustrated by his 29-year-old older brother. If you've ever played pretend with a five-year-old, you know what interesting things they come up with.

The fusion of good illustration and crazy/nonsensical five year old thought is plain awesome. After all, where else can you see a space-flying dinosaur with machine gun arms?

Places I want to visit

2010-03-02T04:55:00.005-07:00

March 2, 2010 -- 4:50 p.m.

Stunning photo of a glacier in Argentina. You can see the rest of his photos here.

Ironically, found it while doing a google image search for Maui Ocean Center marriages. I'm doing research for our family vacation to Maui, which will celebrate my grandparent's 50th wedding anniversary. The aquarium there has a shark tank, and you can get a Scuba diver waving a sign asking for a marriage proposal. It's a cute pic, but you can only see it if you download their romance brochure, here. You can also get married in the shark tank while scuba diving with "I do" signs.

I don't know if I want my wedding dress to be waterproof, but I do like the proposal idea.

If Fred, my invisible boyfriend, ever pops the question to me, it will definitely be down there. Too bad he's too broke to afford to fly me to Maui. Ooh, I want polynesian firedancers at my wedding...

Fred: "Seriously? Well, it won't be my fault if they light any of the guests on fire."

Writing Prompt #13 - Inhibitions

2010-03-01T17:48:00.005-07:00

March 1, 2010 -- 5:47 p.m.

Well, I finally plugged my nose and read my submission to Ender's Companion. You can tell reading it that it's not my normal clean, clipped style, especially with the frequent switching of tenses, but it's still not bad. Either they edited it to make it readable or I'm so amazingly talented, it shines even when I'm wasted.

WRITING PROMPT #13
Title: Inhibitions
Genre: Any
Type: Character

One of the side effects of alcohol is that it makes us do things we wouldn't ordinarily do--at least for most people. Some people live their lives exactly as they want, easily ignoring their inhibitions.

Sometimes, however, inhibitions shouldn't be ignored. Has your character ever done something in their past that they consider deeply shaming? Told their deepest secrets to a person who turned out to be an enemy? Had sex with someone they despised, or made promises to someone whom they later abandoned? It doesn't have to be because of alcohol. A moment of weakness, of despair, of foolishness. We all make mistakes, and some of them we regret for the rest of our lives.

What is the worst thing your character has ever done in his or her life? Remember, what you would consider the worst is different from what your character considered might consider the worst. Everyone has their own personal standards of honor. Mine are pretty flexible. I admit that I lie and cheated frequently throughout my education, because it seemed to be a victimless crime. Academia, for me, has always been a game, and it was fun to see what I could pull off. My sense of morality on that score is still pretty fluid, but on the other hand, there are things that matter to me. For instance, cheating by writing test answers on the back of my hand is no big deal, but the idea of plagiarism is abhorrent to me. I might lie to get myself out of trouble, but I would never make up a newspaper article from scratch, as one of my employees once did. For me, that is betraying a sacred trust.

Another example: most people my age pirate music, movies, whatever, and justify this to themselves based on "evil corporations." I pirated things in my day, but I never felt comfortable about it. I've since stopped the practice, because evil corporations are people too. And because my favorite thing to pirate was audio books, and I realized it was like stealing from my future self. Now I buy them legitimately.

But I've done other things that betray my own honor code that I'm deeply ashamed of. Things that really have hurt people, that I wish with all my heart I could retroactively go back and solve. The question is, what is your character's honor code? What is the worst possible thing he has ever done to betray it, and himself? Will his past mistakes come to haunt him in the present, or will they just shape him in a deeper, more meaningful way?

Way of Kings Cover

2010-03-01T17:36:00.004-07:00

March 1, 2010 -- 5:40 p.m.

The cover art for local author Brandon Sanderson's new epic fantasy series Way of Kings is up on Tor's website. It's by Michael Whalen so it's, of course, beautiful. Sanderson read us excerpts from the book at LTUE, and the parts I heard sounded like good writing. Unfortunately, of course all the ideas I had while listening were blatant copies so I hard to discard them, which was too bad. Some of the ideas were quite good, I thought.

Still not sure whether I'll read the book, because it sounds like the formatting is weird and I hate books I can't finish in a single setting. He said this new puppy's over 400,000 words long, which is freaking ridiculous. Longer than the Gathering Storm. I like reading epic fantasy as must as the next nerd, but I don't like the carpal tunnel that is going to come with it if I try and pick up the hardback monster. Wheel of Time is bad enough for that.

There's also a second choice on the Tor web page. I like the composition better, because it has that classic s-curve which so delights the eye, but it doesn't work so well with the lettering. It surprises me that the lettering is done separately BEFORE. I always figured they decided on the lettering after they saw the cover art. When I decided newspaper layout, I did them both at once, and it's hard for me to imagine developing headline lettering without seeing the image I'm going to use first.

My favorite part of this cover is the sky. Which is incredibly gorgeous.

NBC = Lose

2010-02-25T23:03:00.004-07:00

February 25, 2010 -- 11:03 p.m.

"To quote Mary Carillo’s former mixed-doubles partner, John McEnroe…”You cannot be serious!” NBC isn’t showing the second group of skaters because it needs to broadcast a feature about Carillo spending time with lumberjacks in Canada. And it didn’t break any ground, seeming like another excuse to put Carillo in a goofy outfit. Sorry skating fans, NBC thinks logs make better programming right now than skaters."

--From the NYT Liveblog of skating.

Wow. NBC did such a poor job of covering figure skating tonight, I'm not sure I'm ever going to watch their Olympic coverage again. That was ridiculous. Only showing the final group? Lara Lapisto must have had the skate of her life to make the jump from 10th to the top 6, given Rachel Flatt's clean program. Her free program score beat out Miki Ando and Mirai Nagosu. It's especially impressive because the NYT blog says she had technical difficulties. Akiko Suzuki managed to move up from 11th to 8th. They both must have had great programs. And what do we get? LOGGING. A few nights ago, they spent their opening ten minutes on a random plane flight. Because that's what we all tuned in to see, jokes about peanut packages.

WHAT WAS NBC THINKING????

Oh, and the people who've done the skating packages--those little clip films--need to be slapped. The riculous font ice dancing stuff was bad enough, but the whole "five days-three days-right now" thing was just dumb. Let's show a minute of people getting their pictures taken! Ooh! Exciting!

In the past, I've like the segments because they actually introduced us to people, but this year, they're just trying to get us all revved up with dramatic imagery and lame music. I don't know why NBC thinks it needs to turn figure skating into the superbowl.

And it's not as if NBC doesn't have multiple networks. Couldn't they pick one to show all the skating? They must not want to split the sponsors by dividing it between multiple networks. But since women's figure skating is like THE defining event of the winter games, the jewel of the advertiser's crown, why not show more of it? Showing so few skaters is just putrid. I mean, NBC just got smacked down by the Ol' Gray Lady, for goodness sake. And they deserved it.

Bottom line, I don't think I can wade through three hours of coverage about stuff I don't care about for figure skating anymore. I just can't. And I can't seem to download the software NBC tells me I need to watch the videos on their website, either, so they lose in multiple ways. I try to download it and it takes me to a blank page. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The only worse moment in NBC's coverage during this games that I can think of is the time they spent staying with a ski race when it was snowing. The entire time, the announcers said. "Well, fresh snow is death to the course, so none of these guys have a chance of medalling. Oh, there goes another guy, but he has no chance of medalling, either." And this went on for an hour...

Though of course, the lowest point EVER must have been when NBC barely covered the Hamm medal debacle in 2004. So I wasn't exactly enamored with their coverage in the first place. Too jingoistic.

It makes it worse because of the choice of skaters they showed. I get, they wanted to show it live for east coast viewers...but they chose to show the pre-recorded skate of Cheltzie Lee, who ended up in 20th, instead of the skater who was on the ice at the time: Kwak Min-Jung of South Korea, who scored almost 20 points better and ended up with the 12th best free program score. Perhaps because Lee's mother is American? One wonders why they bothered to show her score instead of another skater or...another logging segment.

This was the last straw. From one outraged figure skating fan to you, NBC: I hope the loggers paid you a lot for that little p.r. stunt, because you just lost any respect I had for you. And I didn't have much in the first place. Not even my beloved Scott Hamilton may be able to fix this wound...

ESPN is making a bid for the next Olympics. They say if they win, they'll show everything live regardless of what time it goes. Well, they've got my vote. Even if having the games in Sochi would put figure skating in the mid-afternoon, at least we'd get to see more of it. Bet they'd handle the online stuff better, too.

On the skating itself: The skates we did see went well. Kim Yu-Na rocked the house. I thought Rachel Flatt was underscored. If she'd been able to skate the whole program with the energy she showed at the end, it would have been even greater.

I wonder how long Kim Yu-Na will dominate? She's so young, and it doesn't seem like there are many skaters who can take her place. They talk about Mirai Negasu as a rising star...but when the 'risen star' is only a few years older, it's hard to take such talk seriously. Kim Yu-Na could probably take back to back golds, if she wants too.

I wonder what she does with all her money? That's the thing about getting by on $20,000 a year. The idea of getting $8 million a year just leaves me a little bemused. What would you do when you're too old to skate and have so much money sitting around? Would you work? Found a bunch of charities? Play golf all day?

Ladies' Night

2010-02-24T20:09:00.003-07:00

February 24, 2010 -- 8:03 p.m.

Glad to see such stellar performances from the women last night. Of course, the ladies' competition is almost boring because the favorite is so strong, its' unlikely anyone will give her any kind of run for her money.

I love Yu-Na Kim's short program. I was happy Mao Asada skated so well, since she's had problems this year. I don't know what they were talking about when they said Yu-Na's draw order was bad. As a competitor, nothing drowns out the nerves like seeing your arch-rival excel. It lifts you up, gives you something to concentrate on the fact that a whole bunch of people are staring at you and do you have parsley stuck between your teeth?

Or maybe that's just me.

Speaking of draw order--what the heck was up with the ice dancing finals? It takes all the tension out of it when you have the leaders go before the end. I don't know why they aren't just doing it in reverse-rank order.

Anyway, one skater I wished would do better is Akiko Suzuki. She's actually my favorite Japanese woman on the ice. She skates with such beauty and musicality. I was sad to see her not do as good as I know she can.

My heart broke for Joannie Rochette. I can't imagine how hard that must be to have all the media attention on you at the same time you lose your mother. She handles it with grace. She is such a sentimental favorite, I hope she medals. The U.S. girls probably won't be able to crack the top three, but I can hardly blame them with such strong competition. At least, hopefully, they'll be able to claim high spots so next year we can send more girls. Only have two present is annoying.

I was confused by the fact the network didn't show Russian skater Anna Leonova last night, who has an adorable spunk and a great short program. She landed in 8th.

I'm also mystified to hear the announcers call things "controversies" that really aren't. Like the U.S. silver medalist not taking first at the U.S. championship. That wasn't a controversy. Protesting a bobsledder's helmet ridges as illegal is a controversy. Protesting an offensive aboriginal dance is a controversy. Pluschenko's website labelling one of his metals a "platiunum metal" is a controversy. A judging decision that seemed surprising is not a controversy, unless it involves bribery. It's merely a surprise. Anyway, I've heard the announcer use mis-word the word two or three times. Every time she does, I want to whack her with a dictionary.

Speaking of mystifying, a skater from Israel qualified for the olympics but her country didn't allow her to skate. Why? Because she didn't place in the top 14 at Europeans. Apparently, Israel only wants to send athletes to the olympics who have a shot at the top.

One wonders how they're supposed to climb to the top if they don't get all the international experience they can get, if they don't get the olympic exposure that might allow them to pick up more sponsors, and might draw new Israeli skaters to the sport because little kids look up at the tv and say 'I want to do that.'...

Here's the NYT article about Israel's choice. There is just a missing piece here that I don't understand. I feel sorry for her...all that work, that sacrifice, and your own government kicks you in the head.

Contest, Ender's Companion

2010-02-23T14:41:00.004-07:00

February 23, 2010 -- 2:53 p.m.

I actually won something in a contest.

So unheard of, for me. I think the last time I won a random drawing was when I was in elementary school.

Goodreads, a wonderful website that's kind of like facebook for book lovers, is sending me a copy of "Battle Of The Network Zombies" by Mark Henry in the next couple of weeks, and I'll review it there. I signed up for the drawing because any books that feature zombies and journalism is probably right up my alley. Though they're sending it out before the book's official publication date to generate buzz, ironically it won't arrive until after. It's the third book in a series, so I'll have to jump in midway. I didn't notice that the author was a man until just now--I'm so used to reading paranormal romances by females that I'm surprised the author didn't use a pseudonym. It'll be interesting to see what it's like. It's also set in one of my adopted hometowns (Seattle). So that'll be fun to read.

Here's Publisher Weekly's snippet, as per Amazon:

Clever, fast-paced, and so delightfully trashy that it should have been printed on Hefty bags, Henry's third Amanda Feral novel (after 2009's Road Trip of the Living Dead) smartly skewers popular culture. Brilliant, bitchy undead diva Amanda is desperate for a fledgling reality show to succeed, because being paid to judge it is the only thing that can keep her financially afloat. When someone murders the show's host, a would-be playboy wood nymph, the show's contestants—a snooty Belgian ghoul, a werewolf drag queen, a pair of sirens, a down-home backwoods stripper, and a tentacled manicurist—are all suspects. Amanda's got to solve the case while attempting to rebuild a relationship with her werewolf boyfriend. Henry gleefully delivers a sharp-edged, snarky whodunit with some smart and funny twists.

---

In other news, I finally had the courage to open up the book I'm published in. Here is it. The Authorized Ender's Companion, published by Tor. I am the very first page of the Ender's Friends section on page 393.

I can't bring myself to read it, because I remember that it contains some very graphic, very personal information. I literally wrote the chapter on a whim when I was very, very drunk. This was before I was reconverted to the LDS faith, and I'm sure in the future I'll regard the essay as a very good reason not to mix alcohol and writing. You might accidentally end up published. Which is a fate no sane mortal wants.

But the parts of the book not written by me seem pretty good, and I'm learning things that not even a devout Ender-rite like me whose read the book so often that pages all have my inky thumbprints on them. So go out and buy it, if you're as rabid a fan as I am.

Writing Prompt #12: Beast and Beauties

2010-02-22T16:19:00.005-07:00

February 22, 2010 -- 4:17 p.m.

Well, looks like I got the top three pairs in the ice dancing right, if not the order. Davis and White's long program is good, but not quite good enough to beat Virtue and Moir. I'm okay with that, the Canadians skated well.

I thought the Russians' original skate was overrated. The nice thing about all the other skates was it caught the flavor of the folk dances they were doing, like Davis and White stepping right out of Bollywood, down to the delicate hand motions. On the other hand, the Russian's aboriginal dance looked like people who had never actually seen an aboriginal dance doing what they thought it might look like. At least they toned down the skin-color thing.

Meanwhile, I saw a PBS Nature Special on Beauties and Beasties, talking about various ugly and beauty creatures and why their appearances had evolved the way they did, and how the ugliness sometimes gave creatures functional advantages.

One of the species covered was the Viperfish, which has got to me about the ugliest, most terrifying-looking things in existence. Even though they're not human predators, waking up face-to-face with one of these would seriously freak me out.

WRITING PROMPT #12

Title: Beasts and Beauties
Genre: Any
Type: Description

Try to write descriptions of the Viperfish. They can be twisted into any context--maybe your land is being overrun by monsters with Viperfish faces. Try to isolate what makes them so ugly and terrifying. The thin yellow teeth? The large black eyes staring at you with their beastial hunger?

Use these pictures to inspire yourself to write a description that would make Stephan King shudder. Remember that human beings have evolved to find certain things instinctively frightening. Remember that, when it comes to creating creatures that can inspire your characters to greater heights of fear, and use your descriptions to terrify the readers as well.

Now in contrast, write a description from a Viperfish's point of view. When a Viperfish looks at an attractive Viperfish, what does he notice? The shimmer of her scales? The delicate ridges in her chin? Can you find the beauty in the ugliness? Can you convince your reader that this is the most fearful thing he or she has every seen, but also the most lovely?

Rejection Fun!

2010-02-19T12:40:00.004-07:00

February 19, 2010 -- 12:35 p.m.

Rejection is part of a writer's life. Here are some websites to cheer you up about it!

inkygirl (rejection factoids and rejection humor--see pic.), Rejection Slips for the Ages (excerpts from a book containing famous rejection slips,) Hooray! My First Rejection Slip (message board musings from authors on their first rejection slips.)

One thing I think it's important to stress in the electronic age is that a beginning author should NOT take out his/her frustrations about editors, agents, and rejection slips in the public--and permanent--internet sphere. You never know who's reading, and you don't want to be 'that one author' who reads far too much into a form letter. Most of the authors you see complaining on certain websites end up looking like they're completely clueless. And when an agent googles my name to see what else I've written...I definitely don't want him/her seeing obscene complaints about the last agent, or the last 79 rejections I've recieved. (Just an example! I haven't really got that many rejections)

I've learned discretion the hard way, when friends of mine have stumbled on things I've written on other blogs and been hurt, and pledge that I'll never be that stupid again. Don't drink and blog is a another good piece of advice.

So, as I begin my epic journey into the novel rejection-o-sphere, I pledge the only thing you'll see from me publically is stuff about...well, probably figure skating. While I may be weeping tears into my pillow, I know how to keep my mouth shut. I might brag about any nibbles I get, but I probably won't. I will keep a running tally, though that I promise I'll publicize after I hit it big. I like my query/synopsis combination, so I expect I'll get a bunch of partial requests...only to end in a lot of "not quite right for us" because the market is so brutal. I can't allow myself to believe I'll get published my first novel out. It's because of my supersticion--if you believe bad things are gonna happen, they're less likely to happen. It's only when you get your hopes up that you get kicked in the shorts.

I'm not sure when I'll start sending things out, because my list of agents in ranking was on my broken laptop, so I only remember a couple of the ones at the top. (Which I'll, for obvious reasons, keep secret. No reason to annoy anyone not on the list...though anyone in my top twenty or so would be fabulous.)

There was one woman at the conference sitting next to me who had a 100 rejection slips before she found an agent. I was impressed, and hoping that she wasn't being represented by a Preditor. I don't know if my psyche could take that much pounding. We'll see, won't we?

In the mean time, I've found it hard to begin a new project. The prologue for my next novel's wicked awesome, though. But I can't quite get a grasp on my new characters yet, or the setting. It doesn't feel like it has the same magic as the old novel. Hopefully, I'll be able to find whatever's missing and fix it. Everything looks good in the outline, on paper, but it's just not fitting together. I tried to work on a Y.A. novel but it didn't go well, either.

I dunno. Maybe I should try and write my mystery. Cleanse my pallet. I think that it's just my head isn't properly wrapped around something yet. It's hard to go from a plot you've been kicking around for years to a plot/world you've only been kicking around for a month.

Covers: Mockingjay

2010-02-19T12:17:00.003-07:00

February 19, 2010 -- 12:13 p.m.

In other news, I'm not such a fan of the Mockingjay cover for the last book in the Hunger Games triology, which will be coming out in August. (Can't...wait...must...bribe...publisher...)

The other covers have been intense. Black. Red. Mockingjay just doesn't fit the pallet. It looks too...pastel.

I meant to blog about it last week when the cover was revealed and the news was fresh. But I didn't. Sue me. I'll be happy to refund all the money you paid me to blog...

(The text at the top isn't mine, by the way, but part of the image. I didn't get promoted to work at Scholastic this week, alas.)

Lysacek Wins Gold!

2010-02-19T10:59:00.006-07:00

February 10, 2010 -- 10:53 a.m.

LYSACEK WINS GOLD!!!!!!!!

Yes, I got all teary-eyed. I thought Johnny Weir did far better than his scores merited (I was hoping his performance would propel him up to fourth). Takahashi also did well, but not as well as I would have wished. I felt bad for Oda--only thirty seconds left and the lace breaks. His Charlie Chaplain routine wasn't as energetic as usual. Patrick Chan did better than I expected. Good for him. I have no clue how he managed to beat Weir, though. Cause Weir's skate was incredible, best of his whole career. And one fall-out on a spin wouldn't outweigh the other mistakes, you'd think. I liked his new fir-free costume too. Looking at the breakdown, he did eight triples, all of them clean, compared to six from Chan. His technical score was 6.19 points higher than Takahashi's (only .3 higher than Chan, who got a lot of grade of execution bonuses)...so Weir lost it all on the performance mark. He got a 77.1 while Chan got an 82. Which puts him .8 behind to the performance marks compared to Lysacek and Pluschenko. Takahasi got a 84.5 in performance (he did do well--although it was his short program that did it for him. He was 5th in the free skate).

Really? And Johnny got a 77.1. REALLY?

Turns out the mistake on the spin only cost him half a point, by the by. Well, it still would have taken Johnny an awful lot of ground to make up to get in medal position, I do think he should have gotten a better second mark. I just don't get it. I don't get how Patrick Chan's mark was so high, comparitively. Though I could really see the potential in him--I liked last night's skate better than anything I've seen from him in the last little while. But not that much.

Bottom line--there must be something about this system that I don't get. (I'm not the only one--ask Pluschenko and his coach...)

I was surprised Lysacek and Pluschenko got the same performance marks, because I thought Lysacek had far more involved choreography, and Pluschenko definitely had the better jumps. Lambiel did fabulously...only .5 away from the bronze, so that's really good for another returned retiree. Pluschenko and his coach are upset, throwing fits at the judges, and some people are saying that the new system turns figure skating into ballet.

Elvis Stojko, for example. Though you could call him biased, since he was definitely always better on the jumps than the artistry. (He thought Daisuke should have been second, Lysacek third, too. Which is right out.)

I think they do have a point. The quad is undervalued, so it discourages skaters from taking the risk. However, that's the way the system does it. Don't blame Lysacek, blame a scoring system that rewards people who act conservatively. Then again, if Pluschenko would have put even one more of those fabulous jumps at the end of the program, he probably could have clinched it. I was so sure Pluschenko was going to win. But his front-loaded program really does annoy me. I feel like it's almost flipping off the judges--("yeah, all I need is my jumps so I'll just give a token salute to the artistry in the second half, and it's going to be sloppy").

Ice dancing starts tonight, and if there's any justice, the gold will also go to an American team (hopefully it'll go 1-2). However, I've seen a couple of news posts saying that the new scoring sytstem hasn't reformed ice dancing because it's still so subjective. So it's quite possible it'll go to the Russian world champions. Or the Russians because they're good, no seniority/favoritism involved. I wasn't all that impressed with them at Europeans. There's something that strikes me as wrong when you can come in at the end of a season yet score better than Belbin/Augusto (though of course, B&A weren't there, so it may have just been a happy-go-lucky judging panel).

Anyway, if you look at scores alone, it'll be the Canadians who'll win. They posted an incredible 204.38 at their own national tournament. Which...I'll put down to it being the national tournament. My picks would be: #1 Davis/White, #2 Belbin/Augusto, #3 Moir/Virtue. Though of course, this won't actually happen because having no Russian pairs on the platform will make the whole skating world faint. So the Russians will probably end in second, and Belbin/Augusto probably fourth, just because giving two medals to the Americans in ice dancing isn't allowed.

Okay, so I'm cynical when it comes to judging. How can I not be after Weir last night? Sue me. That boy skated his heart out.

Skating!

2010-02-17T09:18:00.009-07:00

February 17, 2010 - 9:13 a.m.

Ooh, I've been waiting for the men's figure skating competition all year! And it was worth the wait. Last night was in-flippin-credible. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. I don't think there's ever been a field this deep and this strong. And oh, the pain. Joubert. Abbott. Ugh, you knew the instant the kid stepped out on the ice, his face looked terrified. I wanted to reach through the screen and hug them all.

One oddity: watch how many skaters have dark eyes. For a minute, it felt like walking into Randland. Beautiful dark eyes, and of course expected from many of the ethnicities, but I was just startled and wondered if they reflected the figure skating population statistically.

I always change favorites from year-to-year. Last year, I loved Lysacek and Contesti for their long programs. I hoped they would ditch this year's long programs and go back to what I think of as "classic hollywood" and "spaghetti western" because this year's just aren't as strong for me.

But this year, after the Grand Prix, I think I was turning Japanese. Daisuke Takahasi wrapped my heart around his little finger, even if he didn't win. He's such a beautiful, passionate skater. And Oda's long program is fantastic.

And I still like Lysacek. It kind of frustrates me that he's so underrated. He's World Champion (I never get sick of the clip where he's fist-pumping coming out of his sit spin--victory in his home town must have felt incredible) and Grand Prix Champion. He posted the second highest total score for a program all year--beaten only by Pluschenko at Russian nationals (and everyone knows the scores at national championships are inflated.) Yet he doesn't get any of the sponsorship or love that some of the other figure skaters get. Maybe he has a nasty personality, or maybe he just doesn't get the respect he deserves, I don't know. Maybe no one wants to be represented by a guy with puffy sleeves and feathers on his wrists. When I saw his short program last night, I almost jumped out of my seat and cheered.

In contrast, I've always thought Patrick Chan is overrated. He seems like a nice kid, but there's room to grow, and I never bought into him being a favorite to win, despite the Canadian media's swoons. He just...didn't do very well this season. I hope he grows from it and that his country will lay off on the expectations. You can't expect someone who's struggled all season to win games against juggernauts like Pluschenko.

At any rate, however good my three favorites are (who ended up 2, 3 and 4), I doubt they have a realistic shot at Pluschenko. The man is just too good a jumper. I admire his take-no-prisoners on the ice attitude and got amused by NBC's package showing him as a villain, but he lacks so many of the things I love in a figure skater--the footwork, the spins--that I can't help hoping for an upset. Even if it's an unrealistic hope. Pluschenko is just too great in terms of consistancy--though he looked surprisingly vulnerable last night, didn't have his usual verve.

I suspect he'll come back with a vengeance Thursday. Hopefully my favs will still be able to walk home with silver and bronze.

One figure skating program that you won't get to see Thursday, but that I love, is from0 Ryan Bradley, the alternate for the U.S. men. He's not as good as Abbott, Weir, or Lysacek, but he's still a sentimental favorite of mine anyway for his long program. The skaters who can use humor in their programs are always golden in my books.

Dialogue

2010-02-16T13:30:00.003-07:00

February 16, 2010 -- 1:25 p.m.

A random piece of dialogue that came to me. Perhaps the opening to a romantic comedy involving nerds?

FIRST WOMAN: "Who would you rather do, Mario or Luigi?"

SECOND WOMAN: "Well, I've always had a thing for short Italian men in red overalls."

....

Which brings us to the question...what the hell is up with the raccoon suit, anyway? Everyone knows that raccoons don't fly. Thoughts?

So...

2010-02-15T05:11:00.002-07:00

February 15, 2010 -- 5:08 a.m.

Well, I was planning to cover the rest of the panels too, but my laptop decided to finally breathe its last gasp and die. I'm glad that it waited until my novel was done to do that.

I'll take it to a shop for repairs. Hopefully they can make it work again or at least get the data off. Most of my stuff is backed up, but some of it isn't.

Hope love, and laptop malfunctions. Naturally this will cut down on my blogging for awhile.

The Bob and Howard Show!

2010-02-11T13:58:00.004-07:00

And we're back!

I spent the past hour listening to Brandon Sanderson. Random trivia--he writes on beanbag chairs. Ooh, and I think he might have remembered my name, which is super-cool. But I'm not sure because I interrupted him. (Damn it! Whenever I'm around famous authors I seem to lose all my social skills...)

Any mistakes in transcription are mine, not the speakers. Don't blame them! There are undoubtedly errors, and I apologize and kiss your feet asking forgiveness.

We're with Bob Defendi and Howard Taylor (shclock mercaenary)! Both have only had four hours of sleep, but are inebriated on caffeine. Ah...caffeine. I'm on the nightshift at the moment, so I'm used to being in bed by now. So I'm in the same place.

Topic: Interesting side characters.

HT: I suggested: Building interest in side characters through improvisational theater.

Inspired by a couple reasons: 1)Said-character: Ranger named Lucas not right in the head. He loves killing demons. Loves teaching small children to mortal. 2) A role-playing game. Starts in a jail where the last thing we remember was the tavern. We'd gotten real dwarven ale...three days ago. At some point and time, I cleric, was I set the out house on fire three days ago. The Jailer and him had a conversation "It had it coming!" Holy fire would not have worked on that outhouse if it had been pure!

BD: There was a bidet joke in there somweher too.

HT: Now it;'s coming back to me!

BD: And we were playing with an impressionistic twelve-year-old too.

HT: So we had to hide the poop jokes.

... he goes on to recommend the Rifftrax to Twilight.

Anyway, what I was going to suggest is what we get from you a couple of suggestions--in just barest forms--a side character from your novel. And we'll figure out what's wrong with them. Not what's wrong with them in the novel, but why you wouldn't want to meet them in real life.

Suggestions: Xenobiologist who has unknowingly picked up a parasite.

Poop jokes ensue.

Xenobiologist Meet: 70yrold circus performer.

More poop jokes. Laughter.

Setting: Central Park after Dark.

BD is the circus performer, HT is the xenobiologist.

BD: What you're doing there at the book is illegal.
HT: What city am I in?
BD: New York. Or that's where I am.
HT: Uh, what planet am I on?
BD: Uh...earth...I don't know what planet you're on...
HT: Oh yes, yes, central park, New York. I'm testing the water solluble quality of the soil behind this bush.
BD: Usually you do this with pants on.
HT: I do have my pants on, they're those things around my ankles.
BD: No, you're supposed to wear them up.
HT: Like you?
BD: Yes. But maybe a little lower.
.......stuff I missed...
BD: Well, I'm out of poop jokes.
.....
BD: Nice boots.
HT: Yes they are. (Makes lightsaber voices) See, this is how I get back to my bus.
BD: I might have some work to do.
HT: Do you have creatures who need studying?
BD: Yes. And we follow them around and train them.
HT: Do you have bushes? Soluble bushes?
BD: Well, this time--
HT:The bush is very absorbant, but not very soluble. It doesn't dissolve in water.

Something about clowns and vegetables....? Can't hear for laughter.

HT: I was under the impressiont hat would dissolve them and then re-exrude them in a more soluble form.
BD: No, we just do it as a warning to the others.
HT: Clowns breed quickly, then?
BD: I've heard they're pretty quick...

HT: Should we pause to learn what we've learned about these horrible people. I have no idea what your grandfather did at the circus, but I hope he was better than Bob at it. So...I'm an alien, because that fascinated m.

BD: My grandfather and his mind went to WWI and WWII and only one of them came back.

HT: So what do you like to see in a good side character?
BD: Good dialogue.
HT: Well, we didn't have much of that.
BD: Well what do you like in a side character?
HT: Good dialogue.
BD: What's good dialogue?
HT: It's unexpected.
BD: Well, there was that.

HT: Improvisional theater is never no. It's never cutting people off. It's yes, AND. If you have a piece of dialogue and you say, 'no, you can't do that,' then you don't delete it. You take that piece of dialogue and you expand on it.

BD: Oh, you mean real characterization, not random crap. (Laughter) Orson Scott Card talks about how its more realistic to have people jump to conclusions without the full explanation.

HT: Talks about in late, out early. Prunes the dialogue from the front.

BD: It's easier to prune dialogue than art.

HT: Writers of graphic novels can re-write and re-write and re-write but webcomix don't have the luxury.

Introduces Jake Black of Writing excuses fame, BD's boyfriend. JB: "I called him a man-mountain of love ONE TIME five years ago in this very room and I can't live it down."

HT: Recommends more in-late-out-early.

BD: The problem with side characters is that there's so little you can do with them. I mean how much was Elf doing in the beginning?

HT: HAd to write it in early, then keep it around.

BD: You don't have time to make the character three dimensional. Make them two-dimensional. The problem is, the authors use the WRONG two dimensions. Side characters are unexpected and memorable. For example, BD is a side character in waitresses lives. They always remember him because he makes the waitresses pick his salad dressing for him because someone once prophesied the world would end if he picked his own salad dressing.

HT: I'll have ranch.

BD: I don't believe the world will end...but you never know.

HT: You are one of the most i nteresting side characters in my life.

Something about salad dressing and concealed weapons?

Q: How long does it take me to decide which side characters I'm going to focus on in a story?

HT: About three strips. If a side character does something interesting enough that it feels like it needs to be resolved, I feel like I've made a promise to his readers.

BD: Something about the kissing curse--(Read Schlock Merc )

HT: I can't fulfill it too soon. Minor arc-ties into a main arc.

JB: Where's the line in your view between a side character and a main character? Do you ever create chars with the intent of spinoff?

HT: Up until the point I hired a colorist, the idea of spinoff was one of those entertaining fantasies that I had no hope of fulfilling. But now I realized that the franchise still has a lot of legs on it. All of my minor characters are main characters in their own stories. If their story is driving the plot, they become the main character. That's what I love about my gig: I'm not leasing this from anywhere else. For the next five issues, I can say Spidermen isn't the main char, Mary Jane is! Because SM is boring. All he does is shoot webs and ret-con himself every six years.

BD: Game design--whether or not they have three dimensions. The extra dimension makes the difference. They're the main character in my head when I'm writing. Anyone who had a significant part in the plot, I know them in my head. Side Keepers are usually "Inn Keeper #7".

HT: There was the odd realization that my character in Bob's game, a barbarian keeps picking up pets. The day I realized Bob was plotting out plot arcs for my pets, I got a little disturbed. They were actual side characters with actual debt.

BD: Cat is a prophet prophecied to see all cat-kind. And he hates the dog.

Cat poop jokes ensue.

BD: Just because you put something in there for a reason doesn't mean it has to STAY in there for the same reason. The reason can change. Had a watchman who ranted about money. Everybody in my writing group loved him so much, he had to have a plot. Howard's cat was a morality test. Rescued the kitten from a hole in a rain storm. I wanted to see if he'd rescued it.

HT: It's a kitten? What would I do, kill it? There's no XP in killing kittens!

BD: Howard said to me after the game session, I thought this cat would mean for.

HT: Oh, crap. This is my fault.

BD: Got out an author board and came up a cat. He's the cat of darkness, going to save all-cat time.

HT: Okay, so we hd the obligatory Lolcats joke.

BD: Writing group...listen to them. A critique group said "she's the bad guy." No, BD said, "she's the main character." No, says the groupie--she's only programmed to BELIEVE she's a main character. Every time the writing group thought she was good, he tossed in hints to the bad, and every time they thought she was bad, he'd throw in hints she was good.

HT: Elephants can be taught to paint pornography. Go ahead. google that.

BD: Not on BYU's network!

HT: African elephants are nasty-tempered. They are not petting zoo or friendly animals. They will stomp you dead. I was talking about uplifting a species--moral gag after moral gag. The one thing everything agreed on was uplifting african elephants was a mistake. Intelligent = ten tons of bad temper that's smart enough to go shopping. But a bunch of people responded WANTING to see the elephants. No, I don't want to draw an elephant! The eye level...the size...the panels are so small! Went and whined to Sandra. The comic this summer was the elephant-kind masochism,--don't take that phrase out of context--elephants stomped the people in the logical combination. The head of great big robot also came out of HT's laziness.

Q: When do you know when you should assign a story task to a side char vs. a main char.

BD: When you're going to kill them. There's a follow-up--is it supposed to matter? If you're going to kill someone, there needs to be enough investment making them poignant. I have a problem with game design because I want a side plot/b plot in every adventure. But I can't control what they do. For example, can't make chars fall in love.

HT: And he just can't depend on it. Lucas is not going to tell a love story.

BD: Well, a love of killing.

Well...to answer the question...I think it has to do with logic. I hated space above and beyond because you spent 10 mil training to shoot. He shoots better. Story fulfillment...is it more satisfying? Sometimes, I find it really satisfying to have some cabby come and save the world. Some guy comes in and turns the light switch off and that just de-powers the bomb.

HT: Like Return of the Jedi. Lots of stuff got rendered irrelevent when Lando blew up the deathstar. I mean, the Emperor would have died anyway. We're feeling happy because Luke redeemed his father--which is really impossible when you think about the sheer amount of evil vadar has under his belt--when the real hero was Lando and that funny-faced guy.

BD: That's because the original sapped all the tension out of blowing the death star. It happened once before, so this time, you can leave it to the side character. Empire's Luke's story is really boring. See Eldest. Eragon = Star Wars. Eldest = Empire Strikes Back. But the thing that the script doctor did is he did all that exciting stuff when Han and Leia, and then he mirrored it with Luke. Han's cave w/ space slug. Luke's cave...see it borrows tension.

HT: You can get away with having the side character perform about any plot point as long as your plot structure supports it.

JB: You take a side char like Lando, and he has to fit in the parameters. He can't be a jedi. If you're creating your own world, it's okay, but in someone else's world, like Star Wars, you have to play by other's rules.

HT: For instance, limited char growth.

JB: References Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan.

BD: Yeah, I think there are going to be a lot of heads on the floor by the time he's done.

Those rules apply to the writer as well. Look at Ender's Shadow. BD likes it more than the original Ender's Game (HERESY!!!!) Since the ending couldn't be a surprise, the secret allows a different prospective because Bean has to do the emotional processing.

JB: Hey! I wrote stuff in the Ender universe! I got to play with Peter and Valentine! (He's been doing story consulting for the Ender comics, by-da-by)

Howard pimps Jake.

Q: How well do you need to know their backstory to write it effectively.

HT: If you don't need dialogue tags, you're good. If not, you don't have his voice yet and you may need to meet his dad. If the dialogue is interchangeable, then he's one dimensional, not two.

BD: Argument has to be coherent. Minor characters, side characters, if they have a quirk that's memorable, that's all they need.

HT: Like not ordering their own salad dressing.