Herding the Dragon

Being Prolific--a quote

2012-01-27T10:56:00.000-08:00

Once again, the universe intervenes to make sure I know what I need to know, based on what's on my mind right now (this is as close as I get to spirituality, really, but it totally holds up to real-life experience). A link from Krissy Brady took me to Write To Done, which I actually read, but somehow I missed this. And now I have it, and it's comforting:

"How Much Do You Need to Write?
To write 100 books (75,000 words per book) over the next 30 years, you need to be writing 1,000 words per day (writing 5 days a week, 50 weeks per year). At a brisk but comfortable pace, that’s an hour a day.
If you want to write 100 books in the next 10 years, that’s 3,000 words a day.
Being prolific is closer to possible than you might have believed."

I already write about 1000 words a day, when I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, and when I get up on time and buckle down (which I have not done that well this week). I can totally do this, you guys! 3000 words is not really that much more, once I get going...

Thank you, universe!

British Science Fiction Association Award short list

2012-01-27T10:41:00.000-08:00

Best Novel
Cyber Circus by Kim Lakin-Smith (Newcon Press)
Embassytown by China Mieville (Macmillan)
The Islanders by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
By Light Alone by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
Osama by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)
Best Short Fiction
The Silver Wind by Nina Allan (Interzone 233, TTA Press)
The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell (Asimov’s, July)
Afterbirth by Kameron Hurley (Kameron Hurley’s own website)
Covehithe by China Mieville (The Guardian)
Of Dawn by Al Robertson (Interzone 235, TTA Press)
Best Non-Fiction
Out of This World: Science Fiction but not as we Know it by Mike Ashley (British Library)
The SF Encyclopedia, 3^rd Edition ed. John Clute, Peter Nicholls, David Langford and Graham Sleight (Gollancz website)
Review of Arslan by M J Engh, Abigail Nussbaum (Asking the Wrong Questions blog)
SF Mistressworks, ed. Ian Sales (website)
Pornokitsch, ed. Jared Shurin and Anne Perry (website)
The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the New Doctor Who (Foundation Studies in Science Fiction), ed. Graham Sleight, Tony Keen and Simon Bradshaw (Science Fiction Foundation)
Best Art
Cover of Ian Whates’s The Noise Revealed by Dominic Harman (Solaris)
Cover and illustrations of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls by Jim Kay (Walker)
Cover of Lavie Tidhar’s Osama by Pedro Marques (PS Publishing)
Cover of Liz Williams’s A Glass of Shadow by Anne Sudworth (Newcon Press)

China Mieville is popular this year, and I have a vested interest in Paul Cornell, and I know John Clute and Graham Sleight. I'm a little pissed about the Unsilent Library though, for entirely personal reasons--I found out about the book two months after its CFP, and I missed getting to be part of it!

The winners will be announced at Eastercon in April.

The most literate cities in America

2012-01-26T11:50:00.000-08:00

(From Shelf Awareness)

"the statistical survey released annually by Central Connecticut State University President Jack Miller, and "based on data that includes number of bookstores, library resources, newspaper circulation and Internet resources," USA Today reported. The top 10 for 2011":

Washington, D.C.
Seattle
Minneapolis
Atlanta
Boston
Pittsburgh
Cincinnati
St. Louis
San Francisco
Denver

Of note, I think, is that none of these cities are in Florida, where I am, but a few are on my list of potential places to move to.I love the idea of ranking cities by literacy--here, we live in the only nice area in our city, but the closest book store is a (wonderful, huge) used book store four miles away. The closest B&N or Borders or whatever? No idea. Haven't found it yet. And there isn't a single boutique bookshop or local bookshop or anything else like it that I've found here.

Which is why, if we stay, I'm opening a bookstore when I'm done with college and have paid down my loans a bit.

I don't understand cities that don't read.

The spectre of productivity--again

2012-01-26T11:41:00.000-08:00

Last night, I was roughly planning out my big ol' ambitious meta series that starts with the next book on my to-write list, the one I want to start next month, in about a week. The one I accidentally started plotting during a class this past Rez. And it turns out that the meta series, as I have it set up, requires something like sixteen novels and three collections of short stories, arranged in three interconnected trilogies and a quatrilogy.

That's fine, except that I'm also starting a different trilogy, finishing a standalone that might be the start of a triad, and I have several definite standalones that I want to write, too. Not to mention academic work and experimental things. So how can I devote myself to sixteen novels that tell the same story?

And that brings me back to productivity, that issue that is always haunting me. I'd thought I was happy with the idea of being able to complete three books a year, taking three months on each, and the remainder months for resting and revising. That would be exponentially more productive than most writers (at least, those that are only one person).

But then I started crunching optimistic numbers last night and I thought, if I wrote four pages every single day, I could have a 60k novel done in two months. If I wrote seven pages a day, that same amount of time would give me more than 100k. That would be six completed novels a year.

How awesome would that be?

But I think I'd go crazy. The ol' book factory would just shut down. I think I'd ruin myself.

So the only answer, I guess, will be that I'll have to live for a very long time and do the best I can. And I'll have to remind myself of this every time I start thinking I'm not writing fast enough.

Genres of the Future

2012-01-24T13:55:00.001-08:00

Originally posted on Twitter, then on Tumblr, now here!

Asian American Epistolary Mundane Dystopia
Decadent Autobiographical Romantic Mormon Techno Thriller
Paranormal Microfiction (“there was a ghost”)
Picaresque Elizabethan space opera
Inspirational lesbian postapocalyptic slave narratives
Horrific amateur sleuth novel of manners
Juvenile Alternative History Erotica
Allegorical Horror Pop-Up Book
Cyborg Recursive Pastoral Speculative Impromptu Haiku:

It stared at the grass
Blood and oil mixing inside
It stared at the grass

Philosophical Stream of Consciousness Bodice Ripper
Culinary Coming of Age Historiographocal Metafiction
Ectopian Wuxia Mannerpunk
Autobiographical Post Human Slapstick
Sensual Medieval Retro Future Ecothriller
Realistic Cutting Edge Luciferian Whodoneit

Anyone who writes me a story in any of these very narrow genres will be my hero for all time. Tag it “genres of the future” so we can find it.

In the interests of having a more integrated life, lemme talk about TV for a minute

2012-01-22T10:12:00.000-08:00

My friend Kristina recently came clean about her Full Metal Alchemist fandom, and it's inspired me to bring up the topic here, too. Cuz the fandoms, I have them. Like, a lot of them. And I get tangled up in the mess that is distressingly deep emotional attachments and investments in people that don't really exist*, but the reason I love these shows so much is usually the writing, so I feel I can talk about them here for a post.**

See, I'm a writer. You may have noticed. And because of that, I can't excuse bad writing on a show unless there's something else going on that takes my attention away from the bad writing, and that's not as common as you'd think. Usually, if I don't like an episode of a show I'm reviewing, it's because something was hinky in the writing or the editing so that it didn't make sense in the context of what I've seen before (and then I start thinking I could be a really good continuity nazi for them, and why won't they just hire me already?).

I like character development. That's where the story is, and it's all about the story. Even slow character development, if it's done well--witness the number of shows I love that come from CBS, who have a really well-oiled pattern that shows follow, wherein things change believably and dramatically, but slowly, and over the course of, like, a decade (I'm looking at you, Tony and Ziva / NCIS***). But the best shows are the ones that are clever. Good characters, unexpected plotlines, emotional development as well as good back story--shows like Doctor Who, Sherlock, Firefly. Even X-Files, which, in my mind, seems to be sort of at the beginning of the whole idea that a show can be literarily good, and sort of misses it about half the time while somehow still keeping the hooks in you until it's stunning and mindblowing again. I've been rewatching it; it still holds up, and its good episodes are still fantastic.****

I watch a lot of TV. Like, a lot.***** But because I watch a lot of TV, I now have a pretty solid grasp on how TV works, and I can usually call what's going to happen. The good episodes, the best, are the ones that surprise me. Steven Moffatt and Joss Whedon continually surprise me, and JJ Abrams does about two thirds of the time. Rockne S O'Bannon always has something interesting to say. I'll watch shows by these four people no matter what they're about, and if I really like them, I'll watch any show the actors later move on to--hence, Suburgatory for Alan Tudyk, Castle for Nathan Fillion (and now just because it's a good show). I watched V even though I didn't like it.I watched Ringer for Sarah Michelle Gellar, until I got bored and other shows started.

It's all about how the show is written and how that writing is executed. There are levels of good writing, of course, but there has to be something about the show that I really connect to, and that's usually the first hook. Then I fall for the characters--almost exclusively because of URST******, because apparently that's all that interesting to me, week to week these days. But what keeps me around is the character development. A lot of the shows I watch are shows where they have a weekly problem to solve, and after a few seasons, that gets boring. Law and Order never caught me because it's all about the case, and the characters matter less. Also, it takes itself way too seriously. I watch for characters riffing off each other and navigating emotional minefields and coming together to be stronger than they were apart.

And that's in the writing.

And that's what I have to say about fandom. I may have wandered off the path I meant to keep here...

* I try really hard to separate the real person and the fictional in my mind...which usually results in devouring all the interviews I can find so I can see what they're really like...
** This will not become a TV blog. I already have columns on three different sites for that. And a Tumblr. But sometimes, things splash over.
*** Because I'm an old lady like that.
**** Though it's possible that I'm biased, I try to watch them with my mad television critic skillz now, to see if they're really good, and I think they are.
***** In any given week, I review any or all of the following, and watch them even if I don't have time to write up the reviews: Castle, HIMYM, Hawaii Five-0, 2 Broke Girls, Suburgatory, Person of Interest, Bones, The Mentalist, Big Bang Theory, Fringe. I watch Doctor Who, Sherlock, Game of Thrones, Primeval, Hell on Wheels, Downton Abbey, and True Blood when their short seasons come on. Until they ended, I watched Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures, and will likely rewatch them if they're on. I watch Remington Steele every night. I watch entire afternoons of History Channel and Science Channel and Cooking Channel. I rewatch Firefly whenever it airs. I watch Supernatural when I can't sleep at night, and I've been slowly working my way through X-Files, Farscape and SG1 for various projects. A lot of TV.
****** Almost exclusively. Sherlock doesn't really have that, until recently, though the louder fans insist it's boy-boy URST, which I find amusing, but was never all that invested in. I can't see Martin Freeman making out with Benedict Cumberbatch. My imagination isn't that good.

Book Lust: A Long, Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan

2012-01-20T12:31:00.000-08:00

What a great way to remake sleeping beauty! Even if it does sound remarkably like a story I came up with and started writing but never finished and now need to change because it's already been done... Still, this sounds awesome, and it have a beautiful cover, and I want it.

(From Anna Sheehan's webpage)

A Long Long Sleep

Rosalinda Fitzroy has been asleep for sixty-two years when she is woken by a kiss.
Locked away in the chemically induced slumber of a stasis tube in a forgotten sub-basement, sixteen-year-old Rose slept straight through the Dark Times that killed millions and utterly changed the world she knew. Now her parents and her first love are long dead, and Rose — hailed upon her awakening as the long-lost heir to an interplanetary empire — is thrust alone into a future in which she is viewed as either a freak or a threat.
Desperate to put the past behind her and adapt to her new world, Rose finds herself drawn to the boy who kissed her awake, hoping that he can help her to start fresh. But when a deadly danger jeopardizes her fragile new existance, Rose must face the ghosts of her past with open eyes — or be left without any future at all.

Book Lust: Vernacular Eloquence by Peter Elbow

2012-01-20T12:19:00.000-08:00

What a great idea for a writing book: writing doesn't have to be hard!

(From Shelf Awareness, of course)

Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing

by Peter Elbow

The passage of No Child Left Behind in 2002 was meant to improve American public school students' chops in several core subjects. A decade later, many experts doubt this or any other reforms have succeeded in teaching kids to write. Some insist that our children aren't learning to write at all--or worse are writing "onli in txt msgs lol."
In Vernacular Eloquence, Peter Elbow notes that the reason many people don't write is because writing scares them. Schools teach writing as if it's hard, and turn it into a high-stakes endeavor. "Everybody knows" writing is harder than speaking, often precisely because it's not speaking; it's communication in a language nobody actually uses in daily life. It doesn't have to be this way, though: Elbow argues that much of what is good in speech--its directness, its clarity, its "flow"--can be applied to writing.
Vernacular Eloquence spends its time equally between building Elbow's arguments as to why the best parts of speech can and should be harnessed for writing and explaining how teachers, parents and students can do so. Elbow bases both sections on his experience as a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, teaching writing to students who often arrived with a fear that they couldn't put pen to paper effectively--even though they could speak eloquently.
By encouraging students to "speak onto the page," we can escape the fear of writing and the stilted voice that fear creates. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Literary Cricket
Discover: A friendly guide to writing that's as easy as speaking--literally.

Video: The end of Labyrinth

2012-01-19T10:05:00.000-08:00

Just so you all know, my psyche is built on the contradictions and power plays inherent and implied in this scene. Also, I feel bad for Jareth.

Idea: Found-object stories

2012-01-19T09:38:00.000-08:00

Darcy Pattinson has on her blog right now, an idea that seems like all sorts of fun: Found object stories. I've seen found-object art--we had to do some in one of the art classes I took--and I've done found-word poetry, where you either pull words from a hat, or you take a block of non-poetic text and black out words until a poem is left. But I'd never thought of found-object stories.

The way she describes it is like this: go somewhere and observe until twelve unrelated things catch your attention--and then write a story that has all twelve of those things in it, regardless of where they fit together or how weird they are. The point is to get a strange story that surprises you, something you never would have written before.

And I think it's a great idea.

Word List: 100 Beautiful Words

2012-01-19T08:16:00.001-08:00

From WoW...

Ailurophile: A cat-lover.
Assemblage: A gathering.
Becoming: Attractive.
Beleaguer: To exhaust with attacks.
Brood: To think alone.
Bucolic: In a lovely rural setting.
Bungalow: A small, cozy cottage.
Chatoyant: Like a cat’s eye.
Comely: Attractive.
Conflate: To blend together.
Cynosure: A focal point of admiration.
Dalliance: A brief love affair.
Demesne: Dominion, territory.
Demure: Shy and reserved.
Denouement: The resolution of a mystery.
Desuetude: Disuse.
Desultory: Slow, sluggish.
Diaphanous: Filmy.
Dissemble: Deceive.
Dulcet: Sweet, sugary.
Ebullience: Bubbling enthusiasm.
Effervescent: Bubbly.
Efflorescence: Flowering, blooming.
Elision: Dropping a sound or syllable in a word.
Elixir: A good potion.
Eloquence: Beauty and persuasion in speech.
Embrocation: Rubbing on a lotion.
Emollient: A softener.
Ephemeral: Short-lived.
Epiphany: A sudden revelation.
Erstwhile: At one time, for a time.
Ethereal: Gaseous, invisible but detectable.
Evanescent: Vanishing quickly, lasting a very short time.
Evocative: Suggestive.
Fetching: Pretty.
Felicity: Pleasantness.
Forbearance: Withholding response to provocation.
Fugacious: Fleeting.
Furtive: Shifty, sneaky.
Gambol: To skip or leap about joyfully.
Glamour: Beauty.
Gossamer: The finest piece of thread, a spider’s silk.
Halcyon: Happy, sunny, care-free.
Harbinger: Messenger with news of the future.
Imbrication: Overlapping and forming a regular pattern.
Imbroglio: An altercation or complicated situation.
Imbue: To infuse, instill.
Incipient: Beginning, in an early stage.
Ineffable: Unutterable, inexpressible.
Ingénue: A naïve young woman.
Inglenook: A cozy nook by the hearth.
Insouciance: Blithe nonchalance.
Inure: To become jaded.
Labyrinthine: Twisting and turning.
Lagniappe: A special kind of gift.
Lagoon: A small gulf or inlet.
Languor: Listlessness, inactivity.
Lassitude: Weariness, listlessness.
Leisure: Free time.
Lilt: To move musically or lively.
Lissome: Slender and graceful.
Lithe: Slender and flexible.
Love: Deep affection.
Mellifluous: Sweet sounding.
Moiety: One of two equal parts.
Mondegreen: A slip of the ear.
Murmurous: Murmuring.
Nemesis: An unconquerable archenemy.
Offing: The sea between the horizon and the offshore.
Onomatopoeia: A word that sounds like its meaning.
Opulent: Lush, luxuriant.
Palimpsest: A manuscript written over earlier ones.
Panacea: A solution for all problems
Panoply: A complete set.
Pastiche: An art work combining materials from various sources.
Penumbra: A half-shadow.
Petrichor: The smell of earth after rain.
Plethora: A large quantity.
Propinquity: Proximity; Nearness
Pyrrhic: Successful with heavy losses.
Quintessential: Most essential.
Ratatouille: A spicy French stew.
Ravel: To knit or unknit.
Redolent: Fragrant.
Riparian: By the bank of a stream.
Ripple: A very small wave.
Scintilla: A spark or very small thing.
Sempiternal: Eternal.
Seraglio: Rich, luxurious oriental palace or harem.
Serendipity: Finding something nice while looking for something else.
Summery: Light, delicate or warm and sunny.
Sumptuous: Lush, luxurious.
Surreptitious: Secretive, sneaky.
Susquehanna: A river in Pennsylvania.
Susurrous: Whispering, hissing.
Talisman: A good luck charm.
Tintinnabulation: Tinkling.
Umbrella: Protection from sun or rain.
Untoward: Unseemly, inappropriate.
Vestigial: In trace amounts.
Wafture: Waving.
Wherewithal: The means.
Woebegone: Sorrowful, downcast.

Book Lust: The Man Who Planted Trees by Jim Robbins

2012-01-18T09:41:00.000-08:00

I do love a book about people who get up and do something about what's wrong with the world, that I do. There's the chance in any of these books that they could get overly-preachy, but I think I won't stop reading them just because of that.

This book just might save the planet.
What would happen if you unplugged the filter of your aquarium? One week later, would the water be clear or would it be murky? And the fish—would they still be alive? According to David Milarch, the charismatic tree planter at the center of The Man Who Planted Trees, trees are the earth’s filter. Without them—and without a systematic effort to find the most resilient trees and plant them where they are needed most—the fate of our planet could be in jeopardy.

In The Man Who Planted Trees, New York Times science writer Jim Robbins follows the ten-year odyssey of David Milarch, a Michigan nurseryman who survived a near-death experience, had an otherworldly visitation, and has taken upon himself the mission of saving the trees of the earth—and the earth itself. It is a mission that many once-skeptical scientists now say is looking smarter every day.

Where's Sami?

2012-01-16T21:58:00.001-08:00

It's like Where's Waldo, but with me. (picture from Mike Arnzen)

Poetry: Tanka, Lune and Sijo

2012-01-15T11:34:00.000-08:00

I've been trying (and mostly failing, lately) to write at least one and preferably three haiku a day. I happened to stumble across a Call for Cthulu Haiku, and I sent some to them, but they said they were also looking for other forms that were related to the haiku. Forms I'd never heard of, so I looked them up, and you get to reap the benefits!

Tanka is like an extended Haiku. A Haiku has lines set up with five syllables, seven syllables and another five, and the Tanka extends that by adding two more lines with seven syllables.

Something like:

The sun rises young

And ages as it crosses.

I'm one day older

But am I a day wiser?

And just how wise is one day?

The Lune is an attempt to make the Haiku more fair. See, Japanese has way more syllables than English for the same amount of meaning, so it's basically cheating to give an English writer that much space*, so a writer tried to make it more fair and closer to the space you'd get if you were writing in Japanese. So a Lune has three lines of five syllables, three syllables and another five.

For example:

The bird calls on high

I shoot it

Does that make me mean?

There's a variation on the Lune that was caused by misremembering while teaching it to children, so it's got five words, then three, then another five, and that makes it much easier.

You name the sky blue

Does everyone see

The same blue as you?

And then there's the Sijo. It's Korean, rather than Japanese, and it has three lines, too, but each line has thirteen to fifteen syllables, so each line has almost as much info as the whole of a Haiku. Just make sure the last line has a twist that changes the meaning of the first two.

Like so:

If the morning comes sooner than it did yesterday,

How will I know you are still the girl I knew then,

When the dawn came at precisely six o'clock each day?

...only with a better twist.

I'm really enjoying this. I need to see what else I can do about these forms, really study them and see if I can make something authentic and pure with them.

And there you go! New poetry forms to play with. Let's see what you've got.

*I know, you've never thought of seventeen syllables as a lot of space before!

Rez Four down!

2012-01-15T10:39:00.000-08:00

Only two more to go, and I've sort of had the realization that I'm already Doctor Ten here--"I don't want to go!" I want this to be my whole life, all the time. I want everything to always be like this.

This rez was so magical. Seriously, that's all I can say. Well, that's not really true, because this is a post and I'm going to tell you everything ever. But first and foremost, it was magical. Every rez has been better than the last, which surprised the crap out of me because the first one was so mindblowing, what with the immediate absorption into one of the kindest and most helpful mini-societies I've ever found (like when I first went to ICFA, but where I already have a place designated). This term, there was none of the underground grousing that seemed to surface before, and the whole week was full of laughing. I can't remember the last time I laughed so much.

I spent most of the first bit with Chris, who is all sorts of great, and much more engaged and open than in previous times. Jo and I had piles of snuggles. Jenn saved my life. Alot. Kristina taught me how to play a whole song on a harp, how awesome is that? I didn't get sick at all, and I didn't miss any of the required evening events OR any of the suggested ones.

Classes were awesome, even though I wasn't really enthusiastic about any of them based on the titles alone. Shelley gave me hope that I actually can revise this sucker (as soon as I've done typing it up) and Scott ("famous horror author Scott A Johnson!") made me question the crap out of my ecology, but I think it's getting better because if it, so that's a win. Anne came up and thanked me personally for the last class we took online (Classics of Fantasy), which sort of threw me because I was sure I wasn't doing that well. And Tim is as wonderful and supportive and whip-cracking as ever.

High points:
- Did I mention I learned a freaking song? On a harp? I can't get over that!
- I managed to blow Scott away with the truth behind what's happening in my story. What is it? You'll have to wait until it's done, and see for yourself!
- Anne and Scott and Tim talk about me when I'm not around! I find this both validating and abjectly mortifying.
- Eyeball-stalking new friends around all the social events.
- Heather! And Lauren! And Kaelyn! And Symantha! And Erin! And Jason! There are so many awesome people there, I just can't get over myself. I need to get to know these people better with the cliched power of a thousand suns.
- Kathleen Pynn hugged me and thanked me for coming to her reading even though we've only spoken maybe once, and she was so sweet about it!
- The speakers, Sophie Littlefield, Rachael Herron, and Juliet Blackwell were amazing.
- "And then the bat flew out of the potty-hole and hit her in the hoo-ha." Look for that as the last line of a whole anthology of stories written by us Shu-ers.
- "Sexy Boinky Cheese Planet". Look for that as the name of my upcoming specfic mag, to be launched probably in the summer so I can tell everyone next term to send me stuff (and so I can figure out how to do layouts).
- Bobcat!
- We sang Journey songs in the lobby. It was amazing.
- Sy learned how to totally kick ass, martial-arts style and I filmed it.

Writing Life: I desperately want these redone typewriters

2012-01-15T09:33:00.000-08:00

I mean, look at them! They're beautiful! (from Fab.com)

I'm old enough (somehow, or maybe I should say poor enough) to have originally written all my papers on an old portable typewriter. It had a handle and a case and the old definition of portable was not what it is now, because that thing weighed about as much as I did. It was rickety and it didn't have replacement ribbons, so we had to rewind and reink them, but it was mine, and I typed up those papers and my first few stories one letter at a time and loved it.

But these things are beautiful. And even though what I really need is a new computer, what I want is one of these typewriters. The problem, of course, is that they cost as much as a pretty high-end computer, since they're one of a kind and hand-redone, but just look at them!

Video: The Hunger Games trailer spoof

2012-01-14T10:13:00.000-08:00

Our next all-program book for school is The Hunger Games, which I actually bought, like, a year ago and never had the chance to read. And now, here it is assigned to me and there's this movie coming out, so there's all these great pop-culture tie-ins around. Like this one:

And this one:

Book Lust: The Child Thief by Brom

2012-01-03T11:16:00.001-08:00

The Child Thief
By Brom
Paperback | Kindle
HarperCollins Voyager
Release date: August 27, 2010
The prologue to artist Brom‘s novel The Child Thief begins with a girl who is afraid of an abusive stepfather, which leads into the appearance of Peter Pan, who has come to “save” this child from the certain doom she faced at the hands of the malevolent step-parent. But in Brom’s world, things are not as clear cut as they seem. When people grow up, they often start to see the odd perversity in the idea that a teenage boy who is perpetually young can bring little boys to an island with no grown-ups (and seemingly no problems), which ties into the whole Michael Jackson and Neverland Ranch issues. But in this version of the tale, Peter Pan is about as similar to his Disney incarnation as Robin Williams is to Justin Bieber.

More here...

Best Spam comments

2011-12-31T11:39:00.000-08:00

Periodically, I go over the comments on the website, and I get rid of all the spam, which is most of them. But sometimes the spam is amazingly badly written, and here's three of the best:

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All of these were from pages like About Me or Profiles, not even from the posts themselves!

Short Stories!

2011-12-31T10:56:00.000-08:00

(pic borrowed from BookPeopleBlog. It's the wrong genre, but it's a great pic, don't you think?)

I have a personal love of short stories. They're novels in miniature, and often times, they tell stories that couldn't really be made any longer than they are. Good short stories are complete, whole, polished. They're like poems, but in prose form.

One of my goals for the next year is to get back to writing a short story a week. I did it for almost three years, and then somewhere along the line, I stopped, and I don't really know why. It was fun, and it was a nice way to take a break from the bigger projects and do something else without having to stop writing or leave the project for extended amounts of time. And it gave me lots of potential publications, quickly.

But I think I need to start reading more of them again so I can get back into the habit of thinking in short story form.

Over on Cheryl Morgan's blog, she linked to this group of Australians who try to read as many of the year's production of SF and F short stories as they can, then they review them and offer recommendations. Of the year end lists that were up recently, several were from Clarkesworld, where Cheryl Morgan works, so she linked to those, where you can read them online.

“The Book of Phoenix (Excerpted from The Great Book)” by Nnedi Okorafor (Alisa, Tansy)
“Staying Behind” by Ken Liu (Tansy)
“Frozen Voice” by An Owomoyela (Tansy, Mondy)
“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu (Mondy)
“Tying Knots” by Ken Liu (Mondy)
“Diving After The Moon” by Rachel Swirsky (Mondy)
“Ghostweight” by Yoon Ha Lee (Mondy)
“Silently and Very Fast” I, II, III by Catherynne M. Valente (Sarah)

Two of those were ones I previously linked to, and I thought they were wonderful. Likely the rest will be, too!

Cons and Confs

2011-12-30T10:43:00.000-08:00

My friend and fellow writer and fellow SHUer Kristina Elyse Butke just posted about going to conventions. I miss conventions. All the way through undergrad, I went to MegaCon in Orlando every year, and a few of the smaller Cons that came to this area. I went to Rennfaires, which I think are basically the same thing, only outside and for a different sort of nerd. I once traveled, alone, through the DC airport and subway system, to meet people I'd only met in person once* so that we could all drive six hours north to go to a Steampunk and Victoriana Convention** that was brand new that year.

And I miss that.

I want to get back to conventions, and get involved in more conferences.*** It's vitally important to be known by the people in your genres now, and as I really like going to these things, I'm perfectly alright with all of that. It's the costs that are a problem for me. Transport is a problem, too, but an easier one to handle.

My goal is to be able to attend at least one Con or Conf a quarter. I's prefer, really, to attend one of each. But that equals about as much as I make in a year, currently, so that's off the table for now. Money's too tight, and I really hate worrying about money like this.

I'm getting distracted again.

The point is, this year coming up, I'm going to try to ease back into conventions and conferences. I know there's a writing conference on the college campus not far from here in August, and one in November at my old alma mater. I know there are a few intermittent fan conventions up here once in a while, I just can't remember when they are, so I'll have to look them up again. But it's a place to start, and I think it'll be awesome.

* Hi, Lyssabard and the Doctor! I miss you!
** SalonCon, which I think is now defunct until the economy improves. At least, it was the last time I heard about it.
*** On the Conference side of things, I attended ICFA and presented there every year for six years, and now I've missed two, probably going to miss this year, too, and it breaks my heart. I fear I've been away too long and everyone I know will be moved on. I also attended and presented at Slayage 4 and I hope to get to Montreal for Slayage 5 this year coming up.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T10:48:00.000-08:00

I haven't really celebrated Christmas as Christmas in several years, but this year that's exactly what I'm doing, and it's comforting and nice--especially since my year-end has been so poor and stressful. I hope everyone has what they want in some form today, and if you don't celebrate Christmas, I hope those who do don't cause you too much trouble. That whole militant-holy-day thing that's been going around is just all sorts of dumb, as far as I'm concerned. Ruins the whole point of the day.

Anyway.

We're now a week from the new year, and I'm convinced that it can only be better. I'm too stubborn to let it not be. I'll be finishing my book and starting the next one, sending it out to agents, hopefully then sending it out to publishers. It's my last full year of the MFA. It's my first full year as a full-time freelancer, and I have all sorts of ideas about how I can expand my business and my income so I can keep up with it. Look for new projects on the horizon!

H is going to try volunteering for personal enrichment, and I think I'll probably do the same. I like feeling useful to society, and it'll be nice to get out of the house and out of my own head once a month.

I have so many ideas. I can't even tell you.

---
Right now, however, I've been allowing myself two days of Not Working. It makes me go a little stir crazy, so I've been all over the Tumblr as I watch holiday specials, but the biggest thing I've gotten out of BBCAm's holiday viewing is this idea of what I want to do overall: I want to be the girl version of Chris Hardwick. I want to have a major presence in the Geek Community. If, when I get my books published, I'm suddenly in demand for interviews, I want to be on The Nerdist. I want to also be on Craig Ferguson, Conan O'Brian, and Graham Norton, but I've wanted these things anyway--that's how I'll know I've really made it!

And now it's time to stop dreaming and get back into the festivities, so Merry Christmas! I hope your year-end is fabulous! I'll have my year in review up in about a week.

Video: The Elements of Style

2011-12-20T11:12:00.000-08:00

I apparently can't get enough of silly white guys rapping about writing. Here's another!

The Elements of Style from Jake Heller on Vimeo.

Book Lust: Barnheart: The Incurable Longing for a Farm of One's Own by Jenna Woginrich

2011-12-20T09:17:00.001-08:00

No picture this time, but look how sweet it sounds:

"Barnheart: The Incurable Longing for a Farm of One's Own by Jenna Woginrich (Storey Publishing, $14.95, 9781603427951). "This is the delightfully entertaining story of a young woman who longs to own her own farm. Woginrich wants to plant her garden, raise chickens and sheep, and play her banjo--all excellent pursuits, but hard to do while holding down a nine-to-five job and struggling on a rented farm. By sheer determination, she finally gets her own farm and everything that goes along with it. Written with great humor, and sure to be enjoyed by those with farm envy!" --Sherri Gallentine, Vroman's Bookstore, Pasadena, Calif."

Also, while looking for a pic, I found this piece of awesome:

2011-12-19T10:58:00.000-08:00

It's from here: http://ajlarrieu.blogspot.com/2011/08/this-is-your-brain-on-revision.html, and based on this infographic alone, I'm willing to read anything this woman as to say.

Revising: Savvy Authors gives me a roadmap

2011-12-19T10:50:00.000-08:00

(this is someone else's work, and I thank them for it; mine isn't nearly as neat or as in-one-place, but this pic gets the point across, I think...)

So, I'm butting up against my first really real revision. The previous three novels I wrote (Those That Shall Never See The Light Of Day*), I basically got to the end and saw that they were not good, cried some, and then wrote another novel for a totally different story. This one, MARRIED TO THE WIND, I'm pretty sure is still good**, and as it's my thesis, even if it wasn't, I'd still have to revise it until it was.

I've been balking a little, I'll admit. It's a lot of pages, and I still have to type probably half of them. It's a lot of characters and a lot of story, and I'm wondering now why my brain always veers toward Epic and whether I can manage to write my next novel with only two characters and one setting***.

But Savvy Authors posted an article today that gives me hope: A five-step plan for fixing a 'hot mess'. The steps:

1. GMC: Goal, Motivation and Conflict.
2. Turning Points.
3. Condensing.
4. Expanding.
5. Which brings us to scenes.

I think I'm going to revise longhand the way I wrote longhand. It makes more sense to me when I can push the coffee table out of the way and commandeer the whole floor and see, literally, what it looks like. I'm going to make paperwork, so I can track what I'm doing. I'm going to save the cut scenes in their own files, and I'm going to post the really good ones as Deleted Scenes on the website. I've already bought a whole pack of red pens, and I think I'm going to get highlighters and new manila folders and those great big paperclips I do so love. And I have several people who are going to take this raw piece of novel and mark it all up and send me their marks. Then, I will retype it all from scratch, and make it shiny for sending out. Everything up to this point will go into a file box, I will label it, and I will archive it.

Of course, since I have a plan, it'll likely not go like that at all. But at least I have a plan now!

* There's one that's basically Pern fanfic; it has been abandoned in favor of a totally different story using the original ideas and a whole lot more new ones called SONG OF THE DRAE. It's a trilogy. The first chapter of it got me into grad school, and then I decided to start something new instead. There's another that was about the third attempt to write that particular book, and is still lingering around, but has been absorbed into a bigger thing: The Agency Cycle, which is interlinked with The Aetherium Cycle and comes at the same problems from a different PoV. And there was the love of my life that didn't work, TWO-THIRDS QUEEN, which will likely be either prised apart into five separate books, or will be redone as my crowning glory when I'm 80. No one will see it as it is until after I die.
** I still love it, and I still want to write it, so that means it has to be good. Right?
*** I can't. The next book I have planned started out with two characters - Ember and Sparks - and one setting - Mars - and wound up being about saving a dying colony and reworking reality with advanced science. ::sigh:: I'm cursed with awesome as the Troublemakers like to say.

Free Books Alert: Small Beer Press

2011-12-17T09:52:00.000-08:00

Small Beer Press makes some awesome, out-of-mainstream books, and they've got a few for download over on their site. In various formats. For free.

I die with glee, because two are Kelly Link, and I can never get enough of her strange and beautiful stories. One is also John Kessel, who I haven't read, but I've heard him speak, and he's fabulous at it, so I hope his stories are as artful.

So go get them! Free books!

I love Kate Beaton

2011-12-16T12:56:00.000-08:00

She's delivering more classic lit realness:

Click click click. And then go to the website to see all her wonderfulness.

Book Lust: Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing the way we eat, one hunt at a time by Georgia Pellegrini

2011-12-16T11:23:00.000-08:00

This book looks awesome. I mean, the trailer itself is food-porn and the girl seems smart and sassy enough to pull off the idea. And I do so love a good food book. "I'm an omnivore who has solved her dilemma"--beautiful.

Some quotes from Salon.com's "TV and the novel: A match made in heaven"

2011-12-16T11:10:00.000-08:00

I kind of love this article. The whole idea that writers get to have control over their work, that they get to contribute more story to the world they created, that they get to create this new entity that is a merging of books and Tv--and that TV is better off because of it... I love all of it. Here are the best quotes. It's about half the article, really:

"The Faulkner acquisition is only the latest prize in a literary shopping spree for HBO and other television companies. The premium cable network is currently at work on adaptations of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad, and Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods,” in addition to its ongoing series based on the novels of George R.R. Martin (“Game of Thrones”) and Charlaine Harris (“True Blood”). Fox will be turning Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” into an hour-long dramatic series, as well, and Salman Rushdie is at work on an original show, “Next People,” for Showtime. The novel and television are commingling as never before. And it’s about time."

"Television and the novel, while not exactly soul mates, have a lot more in common than the novel and theatrical film. Yet any novelist can testify that the second most common question he or she hears from readers (after “Where do you get your ideas?”) is “Who would you like to see playing [main character] in the movie?” Fantasizing about the film version of a favorite book seems to be very common, but you have to wonder why. Rarely are a book’s most devoted admirers satisfied by the film"

"Most movies conform to a three-act structure (some screenwriters will insist that it’s actually a four-act structure), a form with a proven ability to hold audiences’ interest through a single viewing. Novels, meant to be read over multiple sittings, have more freedom. Trimming a novel like “Bleak House” to fit the three-act format alters the fundamental shape of the work, often subtracting from the novel the very roominess and complication that made you love it in the first place."

"A television series, however, has the time to spread out and explore the byways and textures of a novel’s imagined world. Furthermore, while theatrical film is a medium in which the director reigns, in television, as Rushdie told the Observer, “the writer is the primary creative artist. You have control in a way that you never have in the cinema. ‘The Sopranos’ was David Chase, ‘The West Wing’ was Aaron Sorkin.”"

"Literary people wrote off TV as a “vast wasteland” — a fair cop, it must be said — with occasional oases like “Twin Peaks,” the groundbreaking serial drama created by the eccentric film auteur David Lynch. After one thrilling season, Lynch’s relationship with ABC went south, and so did the show, cementing the notion that the medium itself (rather than the broadcast network system) militated against quality and originality."

"The influence moves both ways; Egan has said that “The Sopranos” was one inspiration for “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” The novelist Mark Danielewski (“House of Leaves”) recently signed a $1 million contract with Pantheon Books for a serial novel, “The Familiar,” to be published in 27 volumes, with a new book appearing at four-month intervals. Although this naturally reminded quite a few observers of Charles Dickens, who published his novels in serialized installments, when interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, Danielewski said that he’s thinking in terms of five-book “seasons,” citing the television model."

"Franzen recently told New York magazine that he was plumping up “The Corrections” for the HBO adaptation: “Minor characters in the book are becoming very substantial characters in the show, too. It’s fun. I’m coming back to the book as a stranger, essentially 12 years after I wrote it, and I’m filling in blanks that were deliberately blanks, but I’m having the pleasure of filling them in.”"

Success! La Casa Azul opens in Harlem!

2011-12-14T09:41:00.001-08:00

Ages ago, I posted about a nice-looking lady on Kickstarter who wanted to earn enough money to open the only bookstore in her neighborhood in Harlem. Well, she did it!

La Casa Azul Bookstore to Open in East Harlem

La Casa Azul Bookstore will open next spring in New York City’s East Harlem neighborhood at 103rd St. and Lexington Avenue. Owner Aurora Anaya-Cerda secured the retail location after receiving financial support from more than 430 bibliophiles, East Harlem residents and book industry members who contributed to the bookstore’s '40K in 40 days' campaign (Shelf Awareness, September 16, 2011).

World Book Night: Thirty top picks announced

2011-12-14T09:38:00.000-08:00

This is becoming one of my favorite ideas, and the number of books I've read and loved represented here only makes me happier about the whole thing:

The 30 World Book Night U.S. titles for 2012, in alphabetical by author, are:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (Ballantine)
Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger (Da Capo)
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (Beacon Press)
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (Tor)
Little Bee by Chris Cleave (Simon & Schuster)
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)
Blood Work by Michael Connelly (Grand Central)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Riverhead); a Spanish-language edition, La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao (Vintage Espanol), will also be made available.
Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo (Candlewick)
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (Vintage)
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger (Grove Atlantic)
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick (Algonquin)
Q Is for Quarry by Sue Grafton (Berkley)
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead)
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving (Ballantine)
The Stand by Stephen King (Anchor)
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (Perennial)
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss (W.W. Norton)
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (Mariner)
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (Mariner)
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (Perennial)
My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult (Atria)
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (Picador)
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (Back Bay)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (Broadway)
Just Kids by Patti Smith (Ecco)
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Scribner)
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (Knopf Books for Young Readers)

Book Lust: There Is No Dog by Meg Rosoff

2011-12-14T08:58:00.000-08:00

The book in question in my last post. Look how neat it sounds:

YA Review: There Is No Dog

There Is No Dog by Meg Rosoff (Putnam, $17.99 hardcover, 372p., ages 12-up, 9780399257643, January 24, 2012)

October snowstorms on the East Coast. Tsunamis in Japan. Katrina, Irene. Sometimes it feels like a lusty 19-year-old must be in charge. Well, in Meg Rosoff's (How I Live Now) wildly imaginative novel, that's exactly who's running the show. His name is Bob, and he landed the job of Earth's creator and keeper when his mother, Mona, won it in a poker game.

For those of you of faith, please hold your concerns for a moment. Adolescence is a pivotal time for exploring questions of religion, doubt and faith. This book allows teens to ask those questions from a safe distance, and with a sense of humor. Besides, Bob has a responsible, experienced "assistant," Mr. B, and also "an odd penguiny sort of" pet called Eck to lend some compassion to the proceedings. Mr. B more than compensates for what Bob lacks in maturity and consistency. Mr. B begins his days with the exact same breakfast, reads through the Earth inhabitants' prayers, and makes sure Eck (the last of its kind) gets something to eat. And at Bob's urging, Mr. B creates a species: the whale. He thinks about them daily and tries his best to protect them.

Conflict A arises when Bob sees Lucy...

Author Crush: Meg Rosoff

2011-12-14T08:55:00.000-08:00

Just read this lady's answers and see if you don't suddenly love her, too:

From Shelf Awareness:

Meg Rosoff: Confronting the Big Questions

We spoke with Meg Rosoff during her recent visit to the U.S. from England, where she now resides, to promote her new YA novel There Is No Dog (reviewed below). The book depicts God as a sex-starved 19-year-old smitten with a human named Lucy. Its content got her blackballed from an event this fall in Bath, England. Here she discusses the roots of the idea, and the surprises that evolved with its flowering (or should we say, "de-flowering").

Where did this idea come from?

My husband's a painter and he happened to be home doing some drawing one day and listening to Radio 4, the English equivalent of NPR. They were doing a program about all the actors who'd ever played God in the movies. My husband said, "Why is it that it's only old white guys who get to play God? Why not a teenager?" And I thought, "Oh a teenage God! That explains everything."

Book Lust: Craft Inc by Meg Mateo Ilasco

2011-12-14T08:28:00.000-08:00

This book trailer just made my morning. It's so cute and sweet and exactly what I'd want my craft business to be like. Only, like, mine will be made of sterling silver and will involve more fire. But that's a project for another day. And this book will be available for that day.

Book Lust: Books I want from Geeks of Doom's Holiday Gift Guide

2011-12-13T11:28:00.000-08:00

Despite my ever-growing backlist of books I haven't read yet, there are always more that I want to read, and Geeks of Doom has given me several this morning. To whit: Chick rock stars, Ursula LeGuin, underground publishing, my newest Future Husband Chris Hardwick, and Goths. I couldn't be happier with this list.

I’m In the Band: Backstage Notes from the Chick in White Zombie
By Sean Yseult
Paperback
While people nowadays are familiar with the name Rob Zombie, thanks to his success as a director of horror films like House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects, and his reboots of the Halloween movie franchise. But before he was a filmmaker, he fronted the metal band White Zombie, the band people were always surprised to find out had a “chick” bass player. Sean Yseult, who co-founded the New York City-based band with then-boyfriend Rob Zombie back in 1985, released a book called I’m In the Band about her time as bassist and co-songwriter, complete with tales of hardships from the road, and what it was like to constantly be mistaken for a groupie instead of a band member, hence the book title’s play on Pamela Des Barres famous groupie tell-all I’m With The Band.Yseult, who is also an artist who did many of the band’s unique artwork, also includes artwork, rare live and backstage photos, backstage passes and ticket stubs, tour diaries, and songwriting notes. This photo book would make a great gift for a music fan, but also for people who’d love an inside look at not only how a underground NYC band struggled their way to success in the 1980s and 90s, but also the difficulties a woman musician encountered in that scene and how she dealt with it. Highly recommend!

The Wild Girls
By Ursula K. Le Guin
Paperback | Kindle Edition
The Nebula award winning Wild Girls is printed for the first time by this title from PM Press and master science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin. The Wild Girls tells the story of two “dirt children” who fight for freedom in a world filled with injustice of every variety. Le Guin studies themes like love, violence, freedom, and social order in this riveting science fiction story. The Wild Girls also features the corporate publishing criticizing essay “Staying Awake While We Read” which analyzes and deconstructs the need for capitalism and corporations in literature.

On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S.
Edited by Sean Stewart
Paperback
The underground press in the sixties became a not only the voice of a generation but also a nation in turmoil. Angry with the lack of negative coverage of global events independent press grew from 5 major paper to over 500 and spread like wildfire globally. On The Ground tells the stories of the people behind this movement with interviews and anecdotes told by people who were in the center of this political and social explosion.

The Nerdist Way: How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life)
By Chris Hardwick
Hardcover | Kindle Edition
For the creative types in your life, The Nerdist Way is the perfect book for the passionate and obsessed. Described as a self help book for nerds, Chris Hardwick shares his knowledge of how to focus your passions and obsessions into common achievable goals. The Nerdist Way is a great and hilarious book for fans of nerd and geek culture.

Encyclopedia Gothica
By Liisa Ladouceur
Hardcover | Kindle Edition
Anyone who identifies as a Goth but wishes that people would stop asking what that means now has a book that they can point people to. Including illustrations from the talented Gary Pullin, Encyclopedia Gothica is the essential Goth reference whether you’re wondering who Sisters of Mercy are or what absinthe is (and why Marilyn Manson has his own brand of the green stuff).

Link: Unionizing the 'Freaks'

2011-12-13T11:03:00.000-08:00

First, though: Guys, I just had my 400th post and I didn't even realize it! That's almost half a thousand! Look at me go!

Here's why we're here, though:

Occupy Amazon Y2K: Unionizing the 'Freaks'

"[Jeff] Bezos once bragged in a Wall Street Journal interview that he told temp agencies to hire the 'freaks.' The assumption at the time was that Bezos wanted creativity. But his creative staff wasn't coming out of the temp agencies, the warehouse recruits were. And I never met a 'freak' who wouldn't throw over a decent wage to work somewhere lousy if they felt they belonged. These were people who wanted to be a part of something. They wanted to be valued for who they were, rather than what they produced. I often wondered if what Bezos really figured out was that if you gave freaks a home, they would give you everything they had--their best ideas, their longest days, and their rights on the job. And that's what they did."

--Author Vanessa Veselka (Zazen) in an essay for the Atlantic headlined "In the Wake of Protest: One Woman's Attempt to Unionize Amazon"

As someone trying really hard to get my name out there, it's definitely a saddening thing that Amazon is turning into an Evil Empire. It was so idealistic and charming before. I really don't know what else to say about this other than that it's sad, but I'll keep my eyes open for further developments before I start releasing books through them, that's for sure. I don't cotton to Geek Abuse. Or Employee Abuse. These are things I can't abide.

Something like this happened in Borders when I worked there. We kept getting mysterious flyers placed between books and in places where only employees go, telling us to unionize, and it was not pretty. People got fired for even talking about unionizing, which seems ridiculous to me. People wouldn't need unions if businesses treated them like assets. But that's all I'll say about that; I don't feel informed enough to open that kettle of worms.

Amazon is taking over the book world

2011-12-10T10:48:00.000-08:00

Now they want to offer monies to get writers to put their books in the lending library. Which is good, I guess, and their description of rates seems pretty high and decent, but I'm starting to get a little uncomfortable with how much of book-ness is getting taken over by Amazon. Maybe it's the weather making me paranoid. Or the Terminator movies and their warnings about Skynet. Or the fact that I like books the way they are.

Anyway, here's what they say about the numbers:

"The monthly royalty payment for each KDP Select [the name of the initiative] book is based on that book’s share of the total number of borrows of all participating KDP books in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. For example, if total borrows of all participating KDP Select books are 100,000 in December and an author’s book was borrowed 1,500 times, they will earn $7,500 in additional royalties from KDP Select in December. Amazon expects the fund to be at least $6 million for all of 2012, in addition to the $500,000 allocated for December 2011. Enrolled titles will remain available for sale to any customer in the Kindle Store and authors will continue to earn their regular royalties on those sales."

Doesn't that seem a little high? Overly optimistic? I wonder if people borrow books more than they buy? Would it be worth it to do something like this?

Joe Hill's Horns coming to the big screen

2011-12-10T10:45:00.000-08:00

I was supposed to read this for October for a reading group I'm in, but I somehow didn't find the time, what with all the other books I have to read. But I did buy it, and it's sitting on my Kindle, waiting patiently for me to graduate and be able to read my own books again. I've read very little of Joe Hill's stuff, but I follow him on Twitter and I like what he has to say about the world, so I'm sure I'll like it.

And it's great that he's getting his book made into a movie. I always get that English Major kneejerk reaction that someone should read the book first, but I know that movies get people to read things they never would have thought of before, so it's all good. Here's what Geeks of Doom has to say about the deal:

"

Joe Hill has certainly come a long way since he was torturing his on-screen father (played by Tom Atkins) via voodoo doll in the classic 1982 horror anthology Creepshow, which was partly willed into existence by Hill’s real-life father, Stephen King. In 2005, Hill followed in his father’s footsteps and became a best-selling author with the short story collection 20th Century Ghosts, his first book published after spending previous years writing stories for various literary magazines. Two years later, Hill published his first full-length novel Heart-Shaped Box and early last year he released his second novel, the horror-tinged, Gothic crime tale Horns. Now Horns is about to become a bonafide motion picture with a noted horror filmmaker at the helm.

Alexandre Aja, the French director of High Tension and the well-received remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and Piranha, has signed on to direct the film adaptation of Horns for Mandalay Pictures, with Hill serving as an executive producer on the project and Scott Bunin writing the screenplay.
Horns tells the story of a 26-year-old man who wakes up one day suffering from a hangover only to discover horns growing out of his head. Believing the horns’ sudden appearance to be connected to the murder of his girlfriend he sets out to solve the mystery."

Book Lust: The Future of Us by Carolyn Mackler and Jay Asher

2011-12-10T10:38:00.000-08:00

This sounds like all sorts of neat, if it can keep from getting preachy. But think of the possibilities of a story like this...

The Future of Us

by Carolyn Mackler , Jay Asher

In this perceptive, often humorous novel, Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why) and Carolyn Mackler (The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things) tap into the obsession with the future that possesses high school juniors Emma and Josh.
On Sunday, May 19, 1996, Josh walks next door to give Emma a CD-ROM with 100 free hours of America Online. Somehow, with her download of AOL, she also receives Facebook--which hasn't been invented yet. In a funny scene, Josh and Emma try to make sense of it ("Why does it say she has three hundred and twenty friends? Who has that many friends?" asks Josh). They also quickly discover that they can see their futures, 15 years from now. At first they think it's a hoax, but then they realize that it's impossible for someone to alter their "walls" so frequently. Josh likes his future--at least initially--because he winds up with a beautiful and wealthy classmate. Emma, however, continues to find fault with hers.
Teens will recognize themselves in Josh and Emma's behavior--the enslavement to Facebook, status updates and wall postings. The solid foundation of the neighbors' lifelong friendship anchors the novel, and teens will savor knowing more than the narrators--from the ins and outs of Facebook to the chemistry they'll recognize between Emma and Josh. Their story serves as a cautionary tale, that to live for some perceived future goal sacrifices life in the present. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness
Discover: A romantic comedy about the risk of sacrificing moments of happiness in the present by living for the future.

Girls like Genre Films, too!

2011-12-10T10:30:00.000-08:00

According to The Mary Sue (which if you're a girl and you're a geek, you should be reading every day), Fandango did a poll of what movies were most anticipated, and they've released their results. I'll let Mary Sue take it from here:

Here are the most anticipated blockbusters according to Fandango.
According to Men:
1. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
2. The Avengers
3. The Dark Knight Rises
4. The Bourne Legacy
5. Men in Black III
According to Women:
1. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2
2. The Hunger Games
3. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
4. Dark Shadows
5. The Avengers
And when asked which remake they were most looking forward to…
According to Men:
1. Total Recall
2. The Amazing Spider-Man
3. The Great Gatsby
4. Snow White And The Huntsman
5. Mirror Mirror
According to Women:
1. Snow White And The Huntsman
2. The Great Gatsby
3. Mirror Mirror
4. Total Recall
5. The Amazing Spider-Man
It doesn’t come as a surprise that the majority of men respondents don’t care about Twilight but besides their inclination toward the next Bourne film in the blockbuster category, men and women are both really interested in genre films.
In our recent reader survey, we asked what upcoming movie release you were excited about and well, obviously we’re a nerd site but our top results were…
Women:
1. The Avengers
2. The Muppets
3. The Hunger Games
4. The Hobbit
5. The Dark Knight Rises
Twilight and Dark Shadows were among the lowest.
Men:
1. The Avengers
2. The Dark Knight Rises
3. The Hobbit
4. The Muppets
5. The Adventures of Tintin
Twilight and Men In Black 3 were among the lowest with them.

The point here is that girls like genre films as much as boys, even if the particular ones are different. I'm always distressed over the popularity of Twilight, but that's more of a personal thing (I just don't see it; comment if you want a rant). As for me, I'm looking forward to these, from the lists above, in no particular order:
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
The Avengers
The Dark Knight Rises
The Hunger Games
The Adventures of Tintin

... in no particular order other than how they appeared on the list above, anyway. I already saw the Muppets, and I loved it, even with it's over-nostalgiafication. And two of this list are fiercely close to my geeky little heart and the vows I have sworn to Joss and The Moff.

Video: Just Glue Some Gears On It (And Call It Steampunk)

2011-12-10T10:20:00.001-08:00

This'll teach em. It's also my latest New Favorite Song.

John Dixon rocks

2011-12-05T09:12:00.001-08:00

Just so you know. Here's what he has to say, copied wholesale from the Thrillerfest website:

" The First Two Said No

By John Dixon
The first two said no.
They were both really cool about it, explaining they weren’t actually repping young adult titles anymore, and both offered referrals to agents who did rep YA. I jotted down the recommendations, thanked them, and moved on, turning once more to the daunting yet oh-so-exciting event that was AgentFest.
This was my first AgentFest—my first ThrillerFest, for that matter—and I’d come to New York with fairly humble hopes: if I could get one agent interested in seeing pages from my newly finished manuscript, a YA thriller I then called PHOENIX ISLAND and have since re-titled DISSIDENT, I’d count the experience a success.
But turning back to the room full of agents, editors, and hopeful writers, success seemed a long shot. I was 0 and 2 on the day. Gulp."

Read the rest Here!
And read his blog, Books and Boxing, here!

On being Prolific

2011-12-05T08:54:00.001-08:00

I'm very concerned with my prolificality.* I have, literally, almost thirty books plotted out enough to just about start writing them**, and they keep getting more friends as I go and discover that this book that I thought was a stand-alone is actually a trilogy, and this one that I thought was an epic is actually at least five concurrent books, and so on. I also have dozens of articles and reviews to keep up with, and I write poetry*** and short stories, and this month I'm starting on an ebook and a emotobook. I'm fiercely interested in all those new ways of getting writing out to the public, and of getting my name known and people wanting to read my stuff****. I have Things To Say.

So I always want to be sure I'm writing enough. But what's enough? No matter how long the list of daily accomplishments is, I always feel like I should have sent off another story, I should have revised another chapter. I kind of think it has to be that way, so I don't get complacent. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to look into more ways to be more prolific.

Hilary Rettig, on Savvy Authors, offers seven points that help:
1) Overcome Perfectionism.
2) Resource Yourself Abundantly.
3) Manage Your Time.
4) Cultivate Effective Work Processes.
5) Overcome Internalized Oppression and Ambivalence.
6) Avoid and Overcome Traumatic Rejections.
7) Create an Empowered Career.

And, of course, she offers discussions of what each of those means and how to use them effectively. They're all good points. They're also all things I already know, but you know what? My brain can only hold a certain amount of info at a time, and I really need to be reminded of these things. So there you go. I think I'm going to write them down by hand and hang them over my desk.

How do you stay productive, and how can I steal--I mean, adapt--your methods?

*Is that a word? It is now!
**They're listed on a page called The Pipeline. I'm sure I've mentioned this before?
***I always write 'poetry' as 'powertry' the first time I type it. Slip of the finger? POWER-try. Really, subconscious.
****Because if no one's reading it, I'm kind of wasting my life, no?

The Look-In-Store-But-Buy-Online Problem

2011-12-05T08:37:00.001-08:00

I think everyone has done that at some point. I, personally, prefer to buy in store, because more often than not, the book I didn't know I want is the one down the shelf from the one I came in looking for, and often there's no real reason why I like that one based on my buying preferences, so there's no way Amazon could have suggested it. And I like just being around a room full of books like that. But there's also the issue of how many times I haven't been able to afford the books, or I can't get to the bookstore (there isn't one in this neighborhood), or I need them in bulk for school, and it's just cheaper.

This article talks about that, and around a quarter of people look at books in a store and then buy them cheaper online. So I was just thinking, what if there was a way to sell books online from your own store? Like, each book could have its own QR Code or something, and if you save it for later, you can buy the book online, but through the store's own website, or the store's affiliate site on Amazon, so even then, they make a little money off the sale they actually did make?

It's a little half-baked still, but I think I could come up with something by the time I can have a store of my own--the current goal is within ten years, depending on getting out of debt first.

"Survey Confirms One Lousy 'Showroom' Dynamic
Some 24% of people who bought books online said they had looked at the book in a bookstore first and 39% of people who bought books from Amazon said they had looked at the book in a bookstore first, according to a survey conducted by Codex Group and quoted by the New York Times. The October survey focused on buying decisions made by consumers in the previous month.

Read More..."

Books as Art

2011-12-05T08:14:00.001-08:00

Shelf Awareness again, because it really is just chock-full of stuff. In this one, a discussion of the way books as objects can survive if they reposition themselves as something special. eBooks are about convenience, and that won't go back, barring some fundamental collapse in our world (I'm thinking, like, a post-apocalyptic situation), so if print books want to keep going in the worse-case-for-print-scenario, they have to be about how pretty they are. How people want to hold these really good books in their hands and give them as gifts and display them on their shelves.

I kind of love this idea. I mean, I adore supremely-cheap short-term paperbacks*, but I also love a book that's meant to be beautiful. I can't stand ugly covers--there are people paid in traditional publishing to make covers, and a poorly made cover is inexcusable. Almost any book could have a beautiful cover, even with ugly subject matter, so there's absolutely no reason that I can see why those graphic designers who make the covers shouldn't be able to show off their artistic chops. And it might just save books for a while longer. Once all of them are digital, it'll make the ones still in print even more special--the good ones will be preserved. And I love the idea that only the best books will be printed. How often have we run across books that are just bad and gotten mad that something good wasn't printed because that bad one was?

"Dressing Up Print Books for E-Competition
It's a transatlantic trend: both the New York Times and the Guardian investigate the efforts by many publishers, in the age of e-books and e-readers, to improve production values of printed books, making them more elegant and even adding illustrations to fiction. As the Times summed up: "Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions--deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading."
Read more...""

*Like those 150-page pulps that no one makes anymore and I want to revive. Contrary, again.

New Ways to NaNo

2011-12-05T08:08:00.001-08:00

This article from Shelf Awareness just captivates me. A kid in highschool spent a whole month's free time sitting in a window of a bookstore, writing a book. From a writer's point of view, I love it because it's showing off people writing (which I think more people need to actually see, regardless of that skit from Family Guy about guys writing in public*). And from the point of view of someone who would one day like to open a bookstore**, I think it's a great way to get people paying attention. Especially if there's an element of performance art about it. I'm thinking, printing the pages and sticking them to the window, so that gradually, the writer is obscured by the words. I'm thinking, on non-NaNo days, having poets write spur-of-the-moment poetry, print it off, and hand it out to the people in the store. I'm thinking getting in with a school drama club and having people act out scenes as they're written, regardless of how raw they are, and especially if they're writing in one genre and reading in another.

And all of these ideas because of this one brave kid who sat in a window for a month.

"NaNoWriMo Results: We Have a Winner
National Novel Writing Month concluded last Wednesday, as did Aaron Larson's stint as a "living display" in the front window of Dragonfly Books, Decorah, Iowa. The local high school senior spent his free time during the month working on his novel in public view, DecorahNewspapers.com reported.

"In October, I was browsing NaNoWriMo's website and discovered that they had a program of sorts called 'Come Write In: Independent Bookstores,' which independent bookstores could sign up for as a way to invite NaNoWriMo writers to their stores so the writers could work on their novels in that bookstore environment during November," Larson recalled. "I love Dragonfly Books and drop by there pretty often, so I mentioned the program to Kate [Rattenborg] and she decided to sign up for it. It was actually her idea to set up the desk in the window; I thought writing in the window would be a lot of fun and hopefully get people curious about NaNoWriMo."

Larson expressed his gratitude to Kate "for letting me come in to write every day--it was very generous to give me a whole window all to myself. I encourage anyone who loves books and reading to come check out Dragonfly Books; it's one of my favorite places to go and I practically consider it a second home.""

*Or was that in American Dad? They show them back to back, and they have largely the same jokes, so they sort of blur in my head.
**Against the trend, I know. I'm contrary like that. It'll likely make me burn off my fortune...assuming I ever get one...

Short Stories for You: The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees and The Book of Phoenix, Excerpted from the Great Book

2011-11-29T10:59:00.000-08:00

This morning, I got the email feed update from Cheryl Morgan's blog, and there was a link there to these two stories. Both have made it into this year's best science fiction anthology, and it's more than deserved. Here are my thoughts, in case you wanna know:

The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees by E Lily Yu
This is a beautiful story, told like a fairytale, but obviously about some time similar to now, and allegorizing the world we can recognize. It cheerfully tackles totalitarian imperialism and anarchism both, and shows the strengths and failings on either side of the divide. And it's about bees! It's a little sly, a little arch, a little innocent, a little joyful, and a whole lot artistic and poetic. Don't be surprised if lines from it show up as titles of short stories I've written.

The Book of Phoenix, Excerpted from the Great Book by Nnedi Okorafor
I've been hearing this neat lady's name for a while now, but I'd never read any of her stuff before. This is weird and dystopic, but also full of that strange sort of beauty that's terrifying--the sublime, if you will. It perfectly illustrates the Fantastic Deathwish AND the modern ways of getting around it. I love the framing, the artful use of repetition, the subject matter. And even though the cultural context is not mine, the ending feels like something I'd write--it's a good argument that Epic can be done on a short story scale.

So go read these stories. You'll love them, I promise.

TVKing won an award!

2011-11-29T10:49:00.000-08:00

This is one of the sites I review for, and they've just been awarded with third place in the Yorkshire Graduate Entrepreneurship Awards! We're still a startup, and we're already getting awards. Go us!

My reviews are here. The main site is here. And you can even find links to legal online TV watching on it. You can read about the award here.

And here's a video, featuring my boss and the owner Chris Ramsden being all knowledgeable of the market and English.

Look what I just found on the Google Plus: The evolution of punctuation!

2011-11-28T13:59:00.000-08:00

I'm such a nerd. But my dash is awesome and here it is! From Jaana Nyström.

"Question Mark ?
Origin: When early scholars wrote in Latin, they would place the word questio – meaning “question” – at the end of a sentence to indicate a query. To conserve valuable space, writing it was soon shortened to qo, which caused another problem – readers might mistake it for the ending of a word. So they squashed the letters into a symbol: a lowercased q on top of an o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and the q to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.

Exclamation Point !
Origin: Like the question mark, the exclamation point was invented by stacking letters. The mark comes from the Latin word io, meaning “exclamation of joy.” Written vertically, with the i above the o, it forms the exclamation point we use today.

Equal Sign =
Origin: Invented by Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde in 1557, with this rationale: “I will settle as I doe often in woorke use, a paire of paralleles, or Gmowe [i.e., twin] lines of one length, thus : , bicause noe 2 thynges, can be more equalle.” His equal signs were about five times as long as the current ones, and it took more than a century for his sign to be accepted over its rival: a strange curly symbol invented by Descartes.

Ampersand &
Origin: This symbol is stylized et, Latin for “and.” Although it was invented by the Roman scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro in the first century B.C., it didn’t get its strange name until centuries later. In the early 1800s, schoolchildren learned this symbol as the 27th letter of the alphabet: X, Y, Z, &. But the symbol had no name. So, they ended their ABCs with “and, per se, and” meaning “&, which means ‘and.’” This phrase was slurred into one garbled word that eventually caught on with everyone: ampersand.

Octothorp #
Origin: The odd name for this ancient sign for numbering derives from thorpe, the Old Norse word for a village or farm that is often seen in British placenames. The symbol was originally used in mapmaking, representing a village surrounded by eight fields, so it was named the octothorp."

Is this for real?

Movie review from a writer's perspective: The Muppets

2011-11-28T06:30:00.001-08:00

If you don't like this movie, you have no soul. Just saying. It's funny, sweet, silly and charming, and it's lovely.

Which isn't to say it doesn't have issues. On an emotional level, it totally delivers, and it's wonderful, and I want to see it again, but from a writer's point of view, it's a little sloppy. The nostalgia thing, to quote my friend Nick, shoots itself in the foot. We get that they aren't together anymore, that they aren't relevant to today's people the way the were in the 70s*, after the first few minutes. Why else would it take Walter, who comes from an idyllic land-of-the-lost small town to bring them back together? After that, it's just hammered into us over and over, and it never quite makes it to a big "We're Back!" moment at the end. There are hundreds of people waiting to see them and welcoming them back, sure, but they failed to raised the money and the theatre was given to them by a deus ex: a head wound that changes a personality out of nowhere.

This issue can be fixed by a series, though. If there's another one after this, where they have to relearn how to be fully relevant, and the nostalgia thing is minimized, then we can write it off as 'getting it out of their system'--as part of the return process. They get together again because they remember how it was and they miss it, but they stay together because they recognize how it is now.

Another problem I had: I love, love, love metafiction, and the awareness that something isn't real. But it was used too heavily here, so that it became another belabored thing, rather than a sparkling bit of cleverness like it was in the beginning. Of course, the puppets have always been about beating a joke to death, but we need to see here, where people who have never seen them before are doing so for the first time, that it's something more than that.

And while we're on it, did they seem a little... naive to you? Sesame Street was for kids; The Muppet Show as definitely for adults, with adult guests, adult topics, adult jokes, and this subversive, sharp wit under all the silliness and lame, easy laughs. It feels like that was missing a little here.

And this says nothing about the treatment of women and their portrayals. Or the fact that between Gonzo and Piggy, they should have been able to at least start raising the money themselves...

But you know what? This is mostly all after-the-fact criticism. While watching it, everything was perfect. It was funny, silly, and once they got back to the theatre, everything was as it should be. It all worked out, because they are wonderful, and we went to see the movie because we knew it all along. Now, if Jason Segel can just continue single-handedly reviving puppet culture**, things will go swimmingly.

Favorite parts:

"You don't have to pretend for me anymore."
Camilla and the chickens shaking their tailfeathers to "Forget You".
Those Rockettes who just lived in the closet, waiting for Richman to need backup singers and dancers.
The Moopets (even if they are strangely racial and begging for a paper to be written about them...or because of that).
When Mary put her foot down and went home. Good for her!
"I don't know why I'm not hosting this, either."
Walter's act at the end.
The way no one even questioned that there were Muppet around, like they're just another variation on what someone can look like, even if some are animals.
The trailers! Brave makes me want to perm and dye my hair and looks like a loveletter to Scotland; The Borrowers (or, I guess, the Secret World of Arriety or something) looks wonderful, and I have yet to see a Miazaki film I didn't love; the Pirates movie from Ardman, based on some truly ridiculous books that I love...Next year is going to be great for Sami-themed movies.

* All the names, and the 80s Robot make it look like the Muppets were an 80s thing. They were a 70s thing, which is why the Electric Mayhem are all hippies. The 80s belonged to Muppet Babies and Sesame Street. I'm just going to assume, though, that the Show itself went on for, like, six more years at the theatre after it went off the TV.
** "Vampire musical!"

Thankful, the writing edition

2011-11-25T10:52:00.001-08:00

As a writer, I'm thankful for:

The fact that I was able to go back to school, and that I could do it before my accepted application lapsed.
That I've met wonderful people there, all of whom are talented and dedicated, and have already done wonders with my work.
That I've had such amazing crit partners* and mentors**.
That I was able to keep going on this book, and now it's almost done.
That I have so many people who want to read it already, even though it's sort of still full of holes and definitely a rough draft.
That I discovered ICFA and all the fab people there, who gave me my first writing job and without whom I might have not bothered starting this whole writing career thing.
That I met the great people at Slayage, for most of the same reasons.
That there are always more books to read.
That I have The New York Journal of Books and Albedo One who want my reviews.
That I've been able to get a little movement on the freelance career, enough to encourage me to keep going.
That most of the people involved in judging competitions are really nice and very honest and informative about the whole thing.
That even though I constantly have dreams where I lose a hand, it hasn't happened yet*** and even if it does, I can still write because of how modern tech works.

I have a lot to be thankful for, and I thank all of you who have a hand in this list!

*Carrie Miller, Jessica Vann, Kime Heller-Neal, Alexa Grave.
**Shelley Adina, Timmons Esaias.
***Knock on wood.

Goodbye, Anne McCaffrey

2011-11-25T10:36:00.001-08:00

When I was eleven years old, I was home sick one day. I'd already read all the books I had, some of them more than once, and I was bored with the limited stories meant for eleven year olds. I wanted a longer book. A better book. Something more complex and more interesting.

I went to my dad's bookself--mom's was all full of romances and mysteries, and I's already read all the Victoria Holts that looked good to me--and went looking for something cool. I found Dragonflight.

I know you aren't supposed to judge a book by its cover, but look at that cover! Not only dragons, but a sky the wrong color with another planet in it, and people riding on the dragons! How could I not be utterly entranced?

My dad had the first five books on his shelf, and I read them all. Somewhere between the end of Dragonflight and the start of DragonQuest, I started writing my own stories. As the new books came out, I added them to my collection, and when I turned sixteen, my dad gave me all of his copies as well as the newest one. Over the next decade or so, I picked up some of her really early stuff, the Freedom series, the Tower and the Hive series, the first of the Ship series, the first of the Powerlines series, a few short story collections. They were all good, but none of them were as obsessive to me as the Pern series.

Anne McCaffrey taught me to write. She was the first writer whose work I really saw a progression in, from the really early stuff to the much more complex and detailed newer stuff, and my first novel was supremely derivative of the Pern books and will never see the light of day. When she passed off the series to her son, I mourned; he isn't as good as she is. His books are problematic, and if she's gone, I fear they'll only get moreso.

I'm glad I got to meet her once. She was doing a book signing in Orlando right after I started going to Flagler, and my bf at the time drove all the way up to get me and all the way back to the bookstore, then took me home that night, with an armful of signed books. I was dumbstruck. She was the first known author I ever met, and I couldn't remember my own name when it was suddenly my turn to be front of the line. I bought duplicate copies of books I already owned so she could sign them, because I couldn't bear the thought of missing out on her being there because all my books were in a storage unit back at my mom's place.

There's a joke in my house that almost every one of my several hundred books is next to an Anne McCaffrey book. It's not quite true, but I do have a whole bunch of them. And I'll keep them. They're basically romances on another planet, but they're also, especially the Pern books that were running through the whole time, a history of how books were written since the late sixties. They're the first I read. And they're good stories. Maybe, if I have a chance this break, I'll re-read that first one, in her honor.

Goodbye, Anne.

State of the Sami, end of November 2011

2011-11-21T12:14:00.000-08:00

November's almost over! When did that happen?

I have my first and final drafts of my Final Paper due this week, and then I'm done being a Four and in limbo before becoming a Five in January. I have a few short weeks to catch up on stuff before the new term carries me away again. We're done with readings in the genre after this, and we have a class on how to teach genre fic, which I wasn't looking forward to all that much before, but now... Well, now I think teaching is more of an option than it was before, since my confidence and my knowledge base is higher than it was. Maybe if H decides to go to a higher school, I'll see if they need a writing teacher or a writing coach somewhere nearby. If he doesn't maybe I'll do the same around here.

MARRIED TO THE WIND continues apace. I think I'm really close to having a decent rough draft*. I just started the seventh notebook (I write long-hand initially), and that scene was one from the night before the final battle, ending dawn before. Things are getting tense, and revelations are starting to pile up. I think some peoples gonna die. Or wind up unconventionally paired. Which ever.

Once this month is over, I'm starting work on my first emotobook! I finally have a story that I think will work well enough, and since I'm doing a short, it only has to be about 120 pages, so, a novella. I can write that in a month, I think. Or near to. I want to send it off by New Years. The problem I was having was that I wanted to have a totally new idea, something that isn't connected to any of my other stories, so that the legalities aren't tangled as I keep publishing. I think I have it, now.

I'm also going to start on an ebook that I can publish directly to Kindle--a nonfic with help for writers who need organization. That'll probably wind up being about the same size, but a lot of the pages will be worksheets I've already created for myself and have been using to keep myself organized, so I hope to get that done in a month or two also.

And I need to catch up on BIRDSONG. I now owe Storiad something like six chapters, since the book sort of fell by the wayside when things got all end-of-term. I want it done before the half-way point of next year so that I can edit and publish that, too.

Oh! And the point of that comic up there: Through December, I'll be rewriting my Farscape paper and getting a head start on my Stargate paper. And probably looking for other papers to get involved with, too. Because I like academic work, and I think TV Studies need to be continued.

And next week, I have something like eight deadlines for anthologies, competitions and litmags that I want to try to get to, if I can. At least a few of them. I heard back on "The Sky A Perfect Shade of Blue"** and "Surprised"***, both in the negative way, so they need new homes while I'm at it.

So that's my next month or three. How about you?

* Not yet a first draft, since there are still spaces where I knowingly skipped scenes to get it going, but a complete beginning-to-end story that someone could read.
** A short story about a clone assassin. Non-linear and somewhat post-human, and I really like it.
*** A mini haiku-cycle about being startled by love.

Meme: Who do you write like?

2011-11-17T15:03:00.000-08:00

This is based on a segment of Married...

I write like
Isaac Asimov

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

School Post: That 80s Flavor

2011-11-16T16:35:00.001-08:00

I'm probably going to get stoned, but there's something about 80s fantasy novels that bugs me, and that's the biggest impression of Anubis Gates that I came away with: it's got that flavor. Since I've never been particularly good at putting to words what that flavor is, I'm going to try and delineate it here, and maybe unclutter and de-vague-ify by brain a little in the process.

There is much to love about the 80s. I grew up wishing I could live in a fantasy movie from that decade, and some of my favorite authors (mostly Robin McKinley and Peter S Beagle and Jane Yolen) created some wonderful books then, but there's also this wall that I keep running into in books I should otherwise like, and it's something to do with how people are depicted and how the action plays out, I think. Anubis Gates had that feel, and so did The War of the Flowers, even though that came out in 2003, and The Mists of Avalon, and a lot of those million-book franchises, and several others. I think the wall has to do with the tone of the books, and the topics, and the way the modern and the archaic are mixed--there's a discord that makes it very hard for me to like the books, even when their subject matters are things I like.

It's in a lot of the early Urban Fantasies* and a lot of the Feminist Fantasies I've run across; it's like the purpose of the book is something other than telling the story, and that makes it unlikable to me. It doesn't jive with my sensibilities in a way that's very basic and really hard to get around.

Anubis Gates piles of things I usually love, Gypsies, old gods affecting the modern world, time travel, the Romantic poets, but in the end, it came down to this feeling that the book gave me, that there wasn't a place for me and the way I think in it. Maybe that's what the problem I have with these books is: they're so determined to be what they are, that there's a brittleness to them, a rigidity that I don't like. Almost a condescension, like everyone in the book, and even the narrator, thinks they're all smarter than me, or more valid than me and my opinions. Even the dumb books.

And a lot of these books have this unpleasant bleakness. Everyone is moving around sure they're going to die or that the world is, and that it's probably deserved, because it's all so unworthy anyway. It's offputting. Now, Anubis Gates went into everything thinking how cool it was, but the villain was still hanging around trying to reset the world because it had changed too much and gone too wrong. It feels...I don't know, too broad? Too cliche? Too convenient?

So my basic reaction to Anubis Gates was one of frustration and isolation. There wasn't any space in for me, no place where I could get myself into the story, and it didn't much matter to me what happened because of that. I might want to blame it on the mixing of science and fantasy, but that's not really it because there are plenty of things I love that do just that. It's that elusive flavor of books like this one. It's the language, the tone, the set-up, the shape of it. But maybe it's none of those things. Does any of this make sense? Can anyone help me understand what's bugging me about these books?

~:)

Works Cited:

Bradley, Marion Zimmer. The Mists of Avalon. Alfred A Knopf, 1983.

Powers, Tim. Anubis Gates. Ace Books, 1983.

Williams, Tad. The War of the Flowers. DAW Books, 2003.

*Not so much the newer ones, which I actually really like and will probably write after I'm done with this current WiP.

From Shelf Awareness: Bookstore Speakeasy

2011-11-15T11:25:00.001-08:00

This sounds like the most awesome idea. Books and booze at once, and in a classy, secret sort of way that should make everyone involved feel special to be part of it. Here's to hoping they can get enough buzz to stay open!

Cool idea of the Day: The Bookstore Speakeasy

Today Williams & Graham Booksellers opens in Denver, Colo. The store will stock "cocktail books, the works of famous drunken authors (think Hemingway) and bar tools," Westword reported. More important than the titles, however, is a bookcase with a hidden handle that opens into a hallway leading to a "Prohibition-inspired speakeasy." There will be no signage or other indication that the bookstore is mainly a front for a bar.

Williams & Graham hoped to open earlier this year but had construction and liquor license delays. "There are still some finishes that need to be done, and we've got about 1,000 books coming in in the next day and a half, but we're opening," co-owner Sean Kenyon said. "I would bartend on a sawhorse if I had to."

Williams & Graham is located at 3160 Tejon St., Denver, Colo. 80211.

Video: The Doors sing Reading Rainbow

2011-11-15T10:54:00.001-08:00

If you follow all my various social media outlets, you're probably sick of this song already, but I'm not, so here it is in all its glory. New favorite song.

From NPR: How to name your first novel

2011-11-15T10:32:00.001-08:00

I just found this post and it's like that game where you pick your stripper name or your superhero name by combining things, only for books. Here's the post, and then my suggestions after:

If Your First Novel Will Be A Busted Romance
[ANY OF THE SEVEN DWARFS]: A Love Story
If Your First Novel Will Be A Harrowing Historical Account
The [A COLOR] [REPEAT THAT COLOR] [A FLOWER]s Of [A CITY IN EUROPE]
If Your First Novel Will Be A Withering Teenage Quasi-Memoir
How I Flunked [YOUR WORST ACADEMIC SUBJECT] But Passed [THE FIRST MUSICIAN YOU SAW IN CONCERT]
If Your First Novel Will Be A Workplace Satire
At Least They Left Us The [A PIECE OF OFFICE MACHINERY]
If Your First Novel Will Be A Quirky Woman's Story From Someone Else's Point Of View
[A CHILD-CARE-RELATED TRANSITIVE VERB]ing [THE NAME OF YOUR PATERNAL GRANDMOTHER]
If Your First Novel Will Be A Quirky Man's Story From His Own Point Of View
[THE FIRST NAME OF YOUR MATERNAL GRANDFATHER] Reads The Works Of [CLASSIC AUTHOR]
If Your First Novel Will Be A Miserable Story Of One Person's Suffering
My [A FRAGILE OBJECT] Is [A WORD THAT MEANS "BROKEN"]
If Your First Novel Will Be Self-Consciously Ironic And Self-Congratulatory
[A COMIC-BOOK SOUND EFFECT WORD] Goes [A NEIGHBORHOOD IN BROOKLYN]
If Your First Novel Takes Place In Gorgeous Locations
The [ANY COUNTRY] [ANY COMMON SOCIAL EVENT] Chronicles
If Your First Novel Is Intended To Launch A Giant Moneymaking Franchise
Everything Starts With ["1" OR "A"]
1. Grumpy: A Love Story
2. The Green Green Roses of Vienna
3. How I Flunked Math But Passed Bush (which sounds a bit like it's becoming a lesbian story...)
4. At Least They Left Us The Stapler
5. Babysitting Amelia
6. Robert Bruce Reads the Works of Yeats (which actually makes me want to send him a book and get his reactions now...)
7. My Eggshell Is Shattered (too obvious?)
8. POW! Goes... um, I don't know any neighborhoods in Brooklyn...
9. The Slovenia Birthday Party Chronicles
10. A1

School Post: The Mosaic

2011-11-14T11:55:00.001-08:00

Anne Harris wrote:
Early on in Anubis Gates, Coleridge makes a speech in which he states, "-- no piece can be judged inadmissible, for the more stones, bright and dark, that are added to the mosaic, the clearer our picture of God."

Replace the word God with genre and argue for or against the assertion.

My first reaction is to say YES and run with that, but now that I'm trying to organize my thoughts into a proper discussion, I don't think it's that cut and dry. I do think it's true that adding the books up equals a genre, and the ones that are obviously not the same define something of the edges of the genre, but I think when you take this approach to the issue, you also wind up with a big muddy mess of a continuum. And it's a three-dimensional continuum, too, because not everything will slot nicely into a left-right axis, some books will be closer to the top of the bottom, closer to something in front of the main line or behind it.

I guess this is probably what the discussion of God is meant to lead you to: it's always bigger than you think it is, always going in different directions and coming to different conclusions. But the conclusion I always come back to in these arguments is that there's too much variety for the traditional definitions anymore. We need something more three dimensional. I imagine, like, the tag clouds on the snazzier blogs, and the inter-dependence of the ideas and topics and authors and history all linked and depicted in some way where you can see the flow as new books pop up.

But I digress. I'm all up on one of my personal hobbyhorses again. The point is that each book does add to our understanding of genre, one way or another, but the picture it builds up is not something cut and dry as black and white squares.

~:)

School Post: Anubis Gates and Time Travel

2011-11-14T11:39:00.001-08:00

Anne Harris wrote:
Is time travel inherently a science fictional or a fantastic concept?

Realistically, time travel is a fantasy idea, since we haven't figured it out yet--or even if it's something we can ever figure out. But in practice, it seems like it's usually a scifi idea, one of the things that SF has latched on it and claimed as its own, regardless of the fact that there's plenty of time travel in fantasy. Well, in historical fantasy--The Outlander books come to mind, and this one I'm about to start called the Stone In The Meadow, and that movie Kate & Leopold. And one with Jane Seymore that I saw once when I was a teen, I think. But in all of these cases, the time travel is just a prop-- it's how the story happens, but it's not about what made it happen. In The Anubis Gates, it feels like a science fictional take on time travel: it's caused by magic, but the magic is very methodical, and the result is explained with science and uses science of a sort to be used, and then it's integral to the plot afterward. It's not just that someone fell through time and lived in the past and never knew why or how; it's that someone intentionally stepped through after years of practice and study and scientific explanation.

I think, overall, the line between SF and F is not really as solid as we'd like to think. In general, time travel is science fiction, but it's not entirely, as shown here. I bet there are books were fantasy things happen to science fictional worlds as much as there are books like this one where science-fiction happens to fantasy worlds.

~:)

On cookbooks and series

2011-11-13T12:32:00.000-08:00

Every morning, I read through my emails, and a lot of them are feeds of writing blogs. I used to read these in reader, but I find I spend more time on email, so it reminds me to actually read them. This morning, there were two posts that struck home.

Women on Writing - The Muffin: The Joy of Cooking

This is just a quick article about the fact that she collects cook books, but rarely actually cooks with them. I totally do the same thing. I just got rid of almost half of my cook books when we moved because this house is so much smaller than the one we had, and it was hard...but I really don't cook from them that much. I read them like food-based stories. I use them like text books to teach me new techniques that I then adapt to whatever I'm actually making. I use them like correspondence lists to show me what flavors go well together and how to cook and prepare certain things. But when I actually need a recipe, I usually go online and find one quickly.

What I should do is archive them all. I should scan them and figure out how to put them somewhere searchable and cross-reference-able and free up that space. But I like those books. And I don't have a scanner. And so the battle of the cookbook continues.

The Creative Penn: Writing a Series

Just this morning, I was trying to map out the one series I know I have a little so I could maybe start working on it after this current book is done, and I discovered it's actually two series. Well, two metaseries--two linked but mostly independent collections of smaller trilogies. This world that I created for BEACON is getting all over the place, and now contains the Beacon stories, the Jolene stories, the Year and A Day stories, the Family Furst stories in the Aetherium Cycle and the Wolfe and Raven stories, the Darkhorse stories and the Black Sheep stories in the Agency Cycle. Apparently, my subconscious really wants to talk about this world and this reality.

This isn't to say that this is all I'm going to write. I'll do my best to not get locked into contracts to only write one thing--I have other things that want to get written along the way, like EMBER, which is a different trilogy, SEA KING'S DAUGHTER, which is a stand-alone-maybe-novella, the DEAD COZY series, and such. I have a lot to say. A lot of stories to tell. But, you know, contracts are as they are, and I don't know how much leeway I have there. I just hope they don't kill me with the need to write three books about the same thing all the time.

Anyway, the article gives seven good tips on how to avoid the problems I can already see myself facing, and so it was perfectly timed.

The naming of names

2011-11-09T17:45:00.000-08:00

Today, we had a long conversation about what we'd name a baby if any of us happened to, say, find one on the side of the road or something. H didn't like most of the names A did, and vice versa, and I think they both thought I was crazy for the fact that I want to name my kids like French royalty.

But names are something I think about a lot, what with this whole writer thing. I'm always coming up with new names, and they seem to be a pretty even split between entirely made up and repurposed. I like my made-up names to have a flow to them, I like to like how they sound when I say them. The main characters in MARRIED TO THE WIND are named Annissa and Ardeth. They fit well together, I think, and they sound nice out loud, in case I have to give talks about them and say their names a lot. The main character of my previous novel, THE TWO-THIRDS QUEEN, which I need to severely rewrite and haven't yet, was Rilla. Her name is actually something else, though; it was meant to be ugly because she was unwanted: her full name is Rillaprina ven Tollori det Tolka. Rillaprina just sounds like a frumpy sort of name, I think.

As for repurposed names, the main character of my next (probably next) book is Ember. She's a created person who lives on a failed Mars colony, and the name ties into her purpose. If you have a character with a purpose, whether they fulfill that purpose or not, it helps to keep you focused on that starting point to have their name in some way connected to what they are. Also, I like the word Ember.

I very rarely call anyone a common name. I mean, how many Johns and Marys are there in the world already? Millions, and that doesn't help someone stand out--unless the point is that they don't stand out, like John Smith in one of my side projects, a book I need to rename because Cat Valente just put out one with the name I wanted.

And the naming of books! A book has to have a good name, a distinctive name. It's like naming anything else--you want it to say what it is and what you hope it'll be, you want it to be evocative of the sort of book you're writing, but you also want it to be something unique to this one thing. MARRIED TO THE WIND tells you exactly what this book is about without giving it away, I think. I hope it can keep the name as it goes through editors and publishers next year. Probably next year.

I like to name short stories with long names. I'm currently shopping "Down the Wazeri River on the Way to Garra Pomor", which is about 3000 words, and "Letter to Elise on her 21st Birthday" which is shorter still. I just sent off one called "And the Sky A Perfect Shade of Blue". It amuses me to have the shortest fiction with long titles. My book titles are usually shorter; a lot of the new ones I've added to the pipeline are one-word: EMBER (and it's brand-new-still-unplanned sequels BURN and ASH), SPOOK, HOUSEWIFE, BIRDSONG (which is being written in segments over on Storiad).

I'm by no means a queen of naming, but I have a system I follow. Mine are usually double entendres, or commentaries on what's happening in the book, or references to something I like. You should come up with a system, too. Every book has a name. You just have to find it.

This is what a book looks like:

2011-11-08T12:49:00.000-08:00

Specifically, On the Road, when mapped by chapter and color-coded by character. I wonder what Married to the Wind would look like done this way? Now I kind of want to do it and see...

Click on this beast and look at it up-close and personal. It's gorgeous.

Book Lust: The Love Lives of the Artists: Five Stories of Creative Intimacy by Daniel Bullen

2011-11-08T12:41:00.000-08:00

This one really is lust. And love. And creativity. The more I realize that I have to figure out how my brain actually works rather than trying to make it work the way other peoples' do, the more interested I become in these books about creative people. They always make me feel like I'm slow on the uptake, that I've been dithering around when I should have been making a whole lot of interesting stories for my biographers, but they also make me feel like I can go out and be unusual. That being unusual is the source of everything wonderful. Now, to find the money to actually buy this one...

The Love Lives of the Artists: Five Stories of Creative Intimacy

by Daniel Bullen

The creative personality tends to be restless, always craving and searching for new experiences to enrich the soul and thus deepen one's art. In The Love Lives of the Artists, Daniel Bullen examines the intersection of art and amorous love in the affairs of five artistic couples who had "open relationships" at a time when the sanctity of marriage, as an institution, adhered to more conventional expectations.
Artistic and erotic freedom is at the core of this complex, philosophically insightful book. Bullen has chosen partners who were both creative artists: Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Lou Andreas-Salomé and Rainer Marie Rilke, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe. Their narratives chronicle often contradictory commitments, fidelities and infidelities as partners in each couple took and/or tolerated lovers (not always of the opposite sex) and justified their actions as necessary requirements to inspire and augment creativity and intellect. Bullen also examines the artists' personal histories, focusing on circumstances that may have led to such liaisons.
These pairings shattered the limitations of traditional romantic partnerships. They also influenced individual artistic development and often led to personal fulfillment. There was a price to be paid, however, and carefully chosen letters and journal excerpts document how Bullen's subjects were forced to grapple with issues of fear, rage, jealousy, cruelty, self-loathing, loneliness and, in some instances, destruction. In the end, their experiences of liberation and despair ultimately forged emotional turmoil into self-awareness and great art. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines
Discover: An insightful, in-depth exploration of the role of intimate love as an influence on creativity.

Counterpoint, $28, hardcover, 9781582437750

Book Lust: Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, Bronte's Grave by Simon Goldhill

2011-11-08T12:36:00.000-08:00

Just reading about this book makes me want to go on a quest to see all the places where writers lived and died and see what I can make of them--and then write a book about it.

Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, Bronte's Grave

by Simon Goldhill

Literary tourism has been a lucrative business since the Victorians--especially in the United Kingdom. But why do readers come in droves to authors' birthplaces and homes? What magical experience do we expect when visiting the places they walked (and sometimes--though not always--wrote)? Simon Goldhill (Love, Sex, and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives) tackles these questions by traveling to five famous authors' houses-turned-museums, exploring--and satirizing--the myth of literary pilgrimage with equal parts scholarship and skepticism.
Goldhill's journey takes him down the length of Britain--from Sir Walter Scott's Edinburgh mansion, built by the author to promote his public image, to Freud's office in London, an unsettlingly meticulous re-creation of its counterpart in Vienna. Along the way, he visits Wordsworth's Dove Cottage, the Brontë parsonage and Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon, musing on the idea of place as inspiration, the contrast between a writer's private life and constructed public persona, and the connection between literary and spiritual pilgrimages--the shared impulse to follow in the literal footsteps of one's heroes. Though unmoved by the sterile, velvet-roped atmosphere of the Brontë home, and annoyed by gift shops stuffed with overpriced tchotchkes, Goldhill does have a few epiphanies by journey's end--including the realization that he's actually enjoying his pilgrimage.
Part travel memoir, part literary inquiry, with a large dose of history and frequent dashes of dry humor, this book will appeal to bookworms, Anglophiles and anyone who loves to visit historical sites but rolls their eyes at the overpriced rubbish in the gift shop. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes , Tea and Dreams
Discover: Wryly funny, deeply thoughtful musings on literary pilgrimage--why readers visit writers' houses, and what, if anything, we gain by it.

The continuity of books

2011-11-08T11:19:00.000-08:00

I just got this little story in an email from Kevin at FreePrintables.net, a site I use all the time and get the email updates from:

"When she was a little younger, my daughter's favorite books were the Ramona Quimby series. They're books about the adventures of a precocious little girl. In one of the stories, Ramona wants to have a party, but it's not her birthday or any other holiday, and she knows there's no way that her mom will let her have a party for no reason. So she just invites all her friends over for a party one Saturday -- without telling her parents first. Her parents, suddenly confronted with a houseful of excited kids, could hardly say no at that point.

This is what I was thinking about while I was putting the final touches on the new invitations for PrintInvitations.net, and my new printable birthday cards site, BirthdayCardsPrintable.com. I mean, maybe Ramona is right -- why should you need a reason to have a party? Being with friends and having a celebration shouldn't require a reason, right?

This might be a little silly, but I feel a special connection to those books because -- besides having read all of them to my daughter a dozen times -- they take place in Portland. In fact, not too far from my house is Klickitat Street, the real-life street where the fictional Ramona lived. And now CQ, my younger daughter, is about old enough to start enjoying those books. I bet I'll be reading them another dozen times before too long."

It got me thinking about books and how we relate to them. I've been reading A Short History of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James and I've just made it into the decades when I started reading, and I keep stumbling across books I read as a kid and a teen that I'm extremely gratified to find here, because I was convinced that no one else had ever read them, but they left marks in by brain. Books like Owl in Love, which I've never seen in a book store, and I don't remember how I got it, but that I read about ten times one year.

I think we all carry around lists of books that were influential to us when we were growing up--or, at least, we should, and if you're reading a writer's blog, it's likely that you do. I always assumed that I'd collect up and hard these books and then pass them down to my kids. I haven't managed to--a lot of them on my list are hard to find, or get lost in moves, or have to be removed for space reasons--and I haven't had any kids yet, but I have a twelve-year-old niece, and a few times a year, I send her boxes of books that I liked and I think she'd like, with little regard for 'reading age' and that stuff. I read whatever I wanted when I was a kid, and I think she should, too. When I do have kids, I'll do the same. The Illiad at eight? Sure, no problem. Harry Potter at twenty-four? Why not?

If I ever get a permanent place to live and still haven't had those kids yet, I'm going to dedicate a box in a closet somewhere to the books I want them to read. If I never have kids, I'll donate them to a kid's library or something so kids can still have the effect of having these books sink into their psyches.

Here are the books on my list for kids (and a few newer ones I wish I'd read as a kid):

Book Lust: Darker Still by Leanna Renee Hieber

2011-11-04T13:03:00.000-07:00

This sounds like a really interesting book. Dorian Gray and Pride And Prejudice with Jekyll and Hyde? I'm there.

View larger image

Click here for a special excerpt of Darker Still!

The Picture of Dorian Gray meets Pride and Prejudice, with a dash of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

New York City, 1882. Seventeen-year-old Natalie Stewart’s latest obsession is a painting of the handsome British Lord Denbury. Something in his striking blue eyes calls to her. As his incredibly life-like gaze seems to follow her, Natalie gets the uneasy feeling that details of the painting keep changing…

Jonathan Denbury’s soul is trapped in the gilded painting by dark magic while his possessed body commits unspeakable crimes in the city slums. He must lure Natalie into the painting, for only together can they reverse the curse and free his damaged soul.

Hello Blog

2011-11-03T10:45:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me that I haven't actually been blogging all that much. So here's an actual blog post.

I'm not doing NaNoWriMo exactly this year. It never works in November, and I seriously doubt I'll have the time this November especially, so I'm not worrying about it. I'm going to work on finishing Married To The Wind instead. I have that last part (well, like, second-to-last-part) done, and that's the climax, so I know what I'm aiming for now. But, see, I sort of skipped all the escalating drama and the tying-together-of-storylines beforehand when that ending came out of my brain all unexpectedly, so now I'm filling those gaps. I know, pretty much, what happens there, but I didn't write it, and now I have to go do that.

I know most of it, that is. Apparently, there are zombies I didn't know about.

It never ceases to amaze.

I've also started to write haiku again. I wanted to get back into poetry, and I think haiku are a nice, clean, simple way of getting my brain to write in that direction again. They take very little time, and they're fun. This morning's was:

     Long wait is over
     Will they be happy or no?
     Bones is back tonight."

Silly, but that's what happened. I want to write them every day, if I can. Then, I'll start getting into more complicated poetry forms. I have this book that's, like, two inches thick, all about the various forms and their variations, and I guess I'll work my way through it. Of course, my life is sort of lacking in grand poetic drama right now, so I'll have to start living in some way to feed that fodder.

I just registered for school. I'm past the half-way point now, and there's no more reading classes. This makes me very sad, but I didn't want to burden myself with another class I don't need, so I'll have to pick nine novels of my own to read next term.

I'm still feeling like I'm living pretty much the life I want. Unfortunately, it's still not paying me anything livable, and that means I still need to get a so-called 'real job', and that makes me sad. day jobs take away from all the writing I need to do.

Book Lust: Bento's Sketchbook by John Berger

2011-11-03T10:25:00.000-07:00

This sounds like an absolutely enthralling read, and I'm kind of sad that I didn't think of writing a book like this. I mean, how awesome would it be to do the research for a book like this? How life-changing?

Also, what was in Spinoza's sketchbook, and why did it go missing?

Review: Bento's Sketchbook

Bento's Sketchbook by John Berger (Pantheon, $28.95 hardcover, 9780307379955, November 8, 2011)
In a book that invokes the thought and spirit of the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, artist, novelist, critic and activist John Berger (Ways of Seeing) offers an idiosyncratic glimpse at what inspires the human impulse to draw and uses that as a springboard to explore an impressive array of artistic, cultural, political and highly personal subjects.
Sprinkled throughout the book's brief sketches are excerpts from Spinoza's writings, mostly his Ethics. Berger relates that the philosopher himself was known to carry a sketchbook that was never found when he died at age 44, and he tries to imagine what that book might have contained, recalling that Spinoza was a contemporary of Rembrandt and Vermeer. To accompany his musings, Berger offers a generous selection of his own striking drawings.
Berger is well-known for his leftist political leanings, and his political critique of "this new politico-economic circle which today encourages the constant human capacity for cruelties that obliterate the human imagination" is unsparing. "Hope today is a contraband passed from hand to hand and from story to story," he concludes, asserting that "to protest is to refuse being reduced to a zero and to an enforced silence."
But Berger presents more than abstract musings on art, philosophy or politics. There's a rollicking account of his encounter with a humorless security guard at London's National Gallery, as his attempt to make a sketch of Antonello's 15th-century painting Christ Crucified ends with his ejection from the museum. He tells the moving story of a Cambodian refugee--an artist--he met while swimming laps at a pool in Paris and of the Japanese paintbrush he gave her that she used to render an elegant painting on rice paper of a bird perched on a bamboo stem. "When you enter the drawing, however," he writes, "and let its air touch the back of your head, you sense how this bird is homeless. Inexplicably homeless." And he offers the poignant story of Luca, a French aircraft mechanic whose post-retirement dreams of taking his wife to all the destinations he visited during his career are shattered by her dementia.
Characteristically, Berger steers away from direct answers to the mystery of the artistic impulse or the many other questions he poses in this short book. "We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others," he writes, "but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination." But the value of this impressionistic work lies less in those answers than it does in exposing us to new ways of encountering the world. --Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: John Berger invokes the spirit of Spinoza as he tries to open our eyes to new ways of looking at the world.

The University Bookstore Press in Seattle will publish the best NaNoWriMo book in WA

2011-11-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

Anything that gets people publishing more is okay by me!

Cool Idea of the Month: A NaNoWriMo Novel Will Be Published

The University Book Store Press of the University Book Store, Seattle, Wash., will publish the best novel written by a Washington State author participating in National Novel Writing Month. "Obliterate the Empty Page" is co-sponsored by the Richard Hugo House, the Northwest Independent Editors Guild, the Pacific Northwest Writers Association and the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.

The winning book will be stocked at University Book Store, and the winner will receive 10 complimentary copies and be the featured writer at an author event next year. Participants who finish will be eligible for special pricing from University Book Store Press.

The University Book Store is hosting related events during November, including two evenings of "uninterrupted writing" for NaNoWriMo participants. "We'll have all of your writing needs: tables, power for your laptops, writing references, and coffee. Lots of coffee."

World Fantasy Award Winners

2011-11-02T12:11:00.000-07:00

Reported by Shelf Awareness, because this is basically a Shelf Awareness fan blog lately:

Awards: World Fantasy Winners

The 2011 World Fantasy Awards winners are:

Novel: Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)
Novella: "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon" by Elizabeth Hand (Stories: All-New Tales)
Short Story: "Fossil-Figures" by Joyce Carol Oates (Stories: All-New Tales)
Anthology: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer & Carmen Gimenez Smith (Penguin)
Collection: What I Didn't See and Other Stories by Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer Press)
Artist: Kinuko Y. Craft
Special Award, Professional: Marc Gascoigne for Angry Robot
Special Award, Non-Professional: Alisa Krasnostein for Twelfth Planet Press
Life Achievement: Peter S. Beagle and Angélica Gorodischer

From Shelf Awareness: Book Trends that Need to Go Away

2011-11-02T12:07:00.000-07:00

And I fully agree with all of these:

Book Trends that 'Need to Go Away'

Want to start a fight about current trends in the book world, or at least spark a heated conversation? You might begin by introducing the "10 literary trends that need to go away" as compiled by onlinecolleges.org, which noted that "these really exist as quite ghastly little numbers, poisoning beloved bookstores and libraries for far too long." The 10 conversation starters:

Lackluster graphic novel/comic book adaptations
"Self-help" guides doing more harm than good
Bandwagon-jumping
Self-indulgent celebrity memoirs
"Revolutionary" diet plans
Celebrity authors who just can't write
"Women's literature" with reductionist views of women
Remixing the classics
Assuming genre fiction has nothing to say
Dismissing all self-published literature

Book Lust: Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

2011-11-01T11:12:00.000-07:00

More interesting-looking history books! I haven't read history books since I was researching the Apocalypse for that paper I still need to get published, but it's something I've always enjoyed doing. I miss them. And the science books I used to get to read so much. I love the fact that I get to read piles of Fantasy and SciFi, but sometimes I just want a teeny more time to get something a little more isn't-the-real-world-cool-ish. Hence this list.

From Shelf Awareness, again.

Civilization: The West and the Rest

by Niall Ferguson

Ever wondered how a group of bickering nation-states in Western Europe rose to dominate the world? Niall Ferguson has a surprisingly modern answer for you: there's an app for that. Six, to be precise. In his 11th book, Ferguson (Empire, Colossus, High Financier) explains how six "killer apps" have enabled the West to dominate "the Rest" for 500 years--and how the Rest may be catching up after finally "downloading" them.
Ferguson gives readers a sweeping yet surprisingly detailed refresher course on the rise of the West, weighing the contributions of each "killer app": competition; science; the rule of law (and property rights); modern medicine; the culture of consumption; and the Protestant work ethic. He explores the contrasting leadership styles of Western countries, comparing the effects of British and French colonialism in Africa, wondering what would have happened if the Spanish had landed at Plymouth Rock and the British had dominated the Incas and Aztecs. His arguments cast a wide net, touching on topics from isolationism in the Ming dynasty to the present worldwide popularity of McDonald's and blue jeans.
Readers may argue with Ferguson's assertion that the West is past its peak, or take issue with his amoral analytic approach to colonialism, labor issues and recent economic policies. But this cogent, often witty book provides a wealth of information to discuss and will certainly achieve its main aim: sparking conversation. How many parents and teachers--and historians--wish there was an app for that? --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes , Tea and Dreams
Discover: A thorough examination of six keys to the West's rise and domination, which may hold the seeds of its imminent destruction.

Book Lust: A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor

2011-11-01T11:08:00.000-07:00

Aside from the fact that this guy has a fabulously Scottish name and I already like him, there's the fact that these history-through-things books make me very happy. The first one I ever read was Much Depends on Dinner, and I was hooked. I'm currently trying to eke my way through the one about the home that Bill Bryson wrote, and if I ever get to write my memoirs, they'll likely be done through objects like this.

I'm so happy there's a new one, and this one seems awesome.

A History of the World in 100 Objects

Neil MacGregor - Author

From the renowned director of the British Museum, a kaleidoscopic history of humanity told through things we have made.
When did people first start to wear jewelry or play music? When were cows domesticated and why do we feed their milk to our children? Where were the first cities and what made them succeed? Who invented math-or came up with money?
The history of humanity is a history of invention and innovation, as we have continually created new items to use, to admire, or to leave our mark on the world. In this original and thought-provoking book, Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, has selected one hundred man-made artifacts, each of which gives us an intimate glimpse of an unexpected turning point in human civilization. A History of the World in 100 Objects stretches back two million years and covers the globe. From the very first hand axe to the ubiquitous credit card, each item has a story to tell; together they relate the larger history of mankind-revealing who we are by looking at what we have made.
Handsomely designed, with more than 150 color photographs throughout the text, A History of the World in 100 Objects is a gorgeous reading book and makes a great gift for anyone interested in history.

Book Lust: Sweet Invention by Michael Krondl

2011-11-01T11:04:00.000-07:00

Another good-looking food book! Man, I really need to get more people to pay me to read so I'm not expected to do anything else, and then I can read all these books I want to read. Also, I need to take my friend Anita's advice and figure out how to read faster with better comprehension. I bet I'll gain ten pounds reading this book, because reading about food makes me want to eat that food...

Sweet Invention

A History of Dessert

By Michael Krondl

COOKING
400 Pages, 5.5 x 8.5
Formats: Cloth, EPUB, Kindle, PDF
Cloth, $24.95 (US $24.95) (CA $27.95)
ISBN 9781556529542
Rights: WOR

Chicago Review Press (Oct 2011)

Take a sweet tooth safari through the ages

A social, cultural, and—above all—culinary history of dessert, Sweet Invention explores the world’s great dessert traditions, from ancient India to 21st-century Indiana. Each chapter begins with author Michael Krondl tasting and analyzing an icon of dessert, such as baklava from the Middle East or macarons from France, and then combines extensive scholarship with a lively writing style to spin an ancient tale of some of the world’s favorite treats and their creators. From the sweet makers of Persia who gave us the first donuts to the sugar sculptors of Renaissance Italy whose creativity gave rise to the modern-day wedding cake, this authoritative read clears up numerous misconceptions about the origins of various desserts, while elucidating their social, political, religious—and even sexual—uses through the ages.

Book Lust: The Kingdom of Gods by NK Jemisin

2011-11-01T10:59:00.000-07:00

I read the first one digitally, and devoured it. I need to buy a hard copy so that I can look at it on the shelf and hold it in my hands, I loved it so much. I haven't read the second one yet, and now here's the third one, and my life hurts. But the way she handles story, the way she's constructed her series... if Married becomes more than one book (and I kind of think it wants to), it'll be more like these, and less like a traditional trilogy.

From Shelf Awareness, of course.

The Kingdom of Gods

by N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin's first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, introduced readers to a world where gods and their creations interact freely. This is much-trodden ground in genre fiction, but Jemisin managed to bring an inspired voice to the subject, imbuing questions of relationship, identity, mortality, humanity, cruelty, jealousy, love and power with an unexpected poignancy. The second novel in the series, The Broken Kingdoms, reconfirmed her talent for compelling love stories, fabulously relatable heroines and convincing world-building.
The eagerly anticipated conclusion to the Inheritance Trilogy, The Kingdom of Gods, is in some ways a departure from its predecessors. The first two novels were narrated by mortal women, but here Sieh, the god of childhood, takes center stage with a differentiated voice and a new cast of mortals. Yet his story weaves in all the relevant characters and storylines introduced over the course of the three books, bringing everything together for a rewarding and satisfying conclusion. The Kingdom of Gods once again proves Jemisin's skill and consistency as a storyteller, but what sets her apart from the crowd is her ability to imagine and describe the mysteries of the universe in language that is at once elegant and profane, and thus, true. --Katherine Montgomery, book nerd
Discover: A world filled with vibrantly painted gods, godlings, demons and the even more fascinatingly complex humans who love them.

Book Lust: The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food by Adam Gopnik

2011-10-31T10:46:00.000-07:00

I love a good food book, and this sounds like a good one:

"Never before have we cared so much about food. It preoccupies our popular culture, our fantasies, and even our moralizing—“You still eat meat?” With our top chefs as deities and finest restaurants as places of pilgrimage, we have made food the stuff of secular seeking and transcendence, finding heaven in a mouthful. But have we come any closer to discovering the true meaning of food in our lives?

With inimitable charm and learning, Adam Gopnik takes us on a beguiling journey in search of that meaning as he charts America’s recent and rapid evolution from commendably aware eaters to manic, compulsive gastronomes. It is a journey that begins in eighteenth-century France—the birthplace of our modern tastes (and, by no coincidence, of the restaurant)—and carries us to the kitchens of the White House, the molecular meccas of Barcelona, and beyond. To understand why so many of us apparently live to eat, Gopnik delves into the most burning questions of our time, including: Should a Manhattanite bother to find chicken killed in the Bronx? Is a great vintage really any better than a good bottle of wine? And: Why does dessert matter so much?"

Book Lust: Mob Rule Learning by Michelle Boule

2011-10-31T10:27:00.000-07:00

I haven't come across this idea before, and though I do live a traditional conference and have always gotten piles of good stuff from the ones I've attended, I think I can see the benefit of something user-generated. And there's that thrill of almost-anarchy. And the possibility that you'd learn things that would never have gotten approved by a board... I wonder if there are any unconferences around here?

Mob Rule Learning: Camps, Unconferences, and Trashing the Talking Head

Michelle Boule / Information Today / CyberAge Books / $24.95 / 9780910965927 / 0910965927

Business/Training/ Meetings and Presentations / Trade Paper / On Sale: Oct 31, 2011

This is the first comprehensive book about the unconference movement. Author, blogger and Library Journal Mover & Shaker Michelle Boule explains why conferences and learning environments increasingly fail to meet the needs of professionals.

State of the Sami 10-29-2011

2011-10-29T11:21:00.000-07:00

We had out Halloween party last night and I got to talk to an old friend from undergrad that I don't see nearly enough. I told him that I made it to the end of this novel and that I'm a little afraid of it, and he said that that's probably a good thing-- it means that it's likely that there's something good there. He also said, with absolute certainty, that I could win the Hugo when I said I wanted to. It was startling--such confidence!--and incredibly gratifying. I really respect his brain and his talent, and if he thinks I can do it, maybe I can.

We also talked about ICFA, and I'm more sure than ever that I need to go back. I think I just missed the deadline for proposals, but I'm not too bovvered about that--I'm going into my revision year at school, and I have little to no time to add another project just now, and I don't want to make the time if I'm not sure I'll be able to go. I would have written something about Doctor Who and fairytales this year, I think. If the video game pays off this winter, I might be able to afford it. If not, I'll have to afford it on my own, which will require A New Source Of Income that can produce enough free cash for that. ICFA is like the promised land for me, I love it so very much and I feel incredibly happy that people I look up to know who I am because of it, but it's expensive.

This weekend (through to Tuesday) I have these submissions to make, based on my highly-optimistic calendar-making:

Cafe Doom's horror story competition
Funds For Writers' Essay Contest on Diligence
StoryQuest's short story competition
Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, an anthology
The Gothamist's real-crime based feature competition
Dragon Erotica, an anthology
Damnation Dames, an anthology on noir femmes
Faerie Horror, an anthology

Almost all of these are stories I need to write or finish. I also have a book review due, two articles, a meeting with the BC editorial staff, and catching up on TV reviews and my chapters for Storiad, and immediately after this clears out of the docket, I have to sign up for classes, and I'm going to start querying magazines to sell story ideas.

I'm a busy girl. But I'm also happier than I've been in ages.

I applied today for a chance to work with the Obama Administration as a writer or editor, and I think it would be amazing if I could get that job. I think I'm qualified, based on what the ad said, but there'll probably be hundreds of people applying each day. I'm staying hopeful, anyway. I could really do that, I think.

NYJB has some big things happening in the background that should be good for me, if they go off as planned. I hope.

So the gist of this long post is that I'm flat broke and overworked right now, but I'm optimistic and happy and I think I'm close to something good. Maybe the life I want to lead, and have wanted all this time.

Review: Fantasy: The LIberation of Imagination by Richard Mathews

2011-10-27T14:24:00.000-07:00

I first got this book when I was in my senior seminar class in my BA. Then, it seemed pretty dense and not all that interesting, and I didn't have much clue about how it could apply to my life or my work. The only book that I knew of that was denser and more academic was Carl Friedman's book on Science Fiction. So I was interested to see that this was on the reading list here in my MFA, because I already had it, and it'd save me a big chunk of my book-buying budget, but I didn't expect to enjoy reading it.

Man, was I wrong.

The book is still somewhat dense and scholarly, but it's also literally packed with the names of works to read and with extremely interesting and pertinent details about how Fantasy as a literature happened and what it means and where it's going. The discussion about the structure and meaning of the quest narrative unlocked a major door in the block I was having on the end of Married to the Wind, and all of a sudden, it all makes sense. The information in every chapter was invaluable in making the books we've been reading more interesting--Morris is hard for me to get through, but makes much more sense when you look at his hows and whys and his context.

This is not light reading. If you aren't used to scholarly writing, it might not even be easy reading. But it's worth it. It contextualizes my entire field, and I'm glad I never got rid of this book. Now it's full of notes and comments and I'll be going back to it over and over again.

School Post: The Wizard of Earthsea reaction / Language and Earthsea

2011-10-27T14:14:00.000-07:00

This is a slim book that covers a lot of ground in Ged's life, but what is most noticeable to me is the language. Even the most mundane things are spoken of as if they're mythic, because as far as this world is concerned, they are. It says at the beginning, that this is all the stuff that happened before Ged was a legend, but it's presented through the lens that he already is, and it's a neat sort of conceit. Because he'll be a legend, everything that led up to that point is part of the legend. So walking in the woods while getting rained on is beautifully rendered. Tackling the dragons is presented like Beowulf. Learning how to know the sames of things, which is really a lot of sitting around with books sounds like a myth. All his encounters with the shadows sound like ancient religious stories.

What's really interesting to me is that the further into the story we get, the closer we are to the legend he'll become, but the less of a legend he actually seems. At the beginning, he's all flush with power and overly confident, and that's maybe expected of someone who will grow up to save the world. But then he lets the shadow loose, and the rest of the story, he's determined to live simply and do what needs doing, and even though he's accomplishing these great deeds, he himself is more and more sort of stripped-down. All that bravado is gone.

And then there's the matter of the languages themselves. Each island seems to have its own language, and though we only get a few words of each, there's the idea that they all sound different, but also the idea that they could have come from linked roots. And all of them, apparently, came from the Old Speech, the first language in Earthsea. People once spoke it and dragons still spoke it, and wizards had to know the words of it to do their magic.

I got the feeling while I was reading this book that all of the above were related. That we're presented with a story that's told in the flowery speech of bards and storytellers, but it's about the things that happen in this plane of the older language--a way to convey the majesty of the previous linguistic world that no one knows any more except the wizards. And then, though that, to convey the real truth about how a person should be and what the world is really like. And all of this in such a short book. It's amazing, really, how we get this story of a kid growing up to be a mage, but really we're getting a patchwork of how the world is made and what it all means. And we don't even realize it when we're reading it. At least, I didn't, until I sat down to think about my reactions and what I could say about them.

And add another layer of language on top of all of it, I guess!

~:)

Holy Crap

2011-10-27T12:17:00.000-07:00

I think I just wrote the end of the book. I'm sort of stunned now. I have to go consolidate and start filling in gaps, but...but I just wrote the end.

Kindle Sale: God's Eye by AJ Scudiere

2011-10-27T09:40:00.000-07:00

I recently read and reviewed God's Eye for Albedo One. It wasn't my favorite book, but it had a lot of interesting things to say, and a pretty involving story that pays off well in the end.

Well, it seems that the publisher is offering the Kindle version for only $2.99 this weekend only (it's usually 4.99), so if you're looking for a new read, why not go pick this one up?

Get it here: God's Eye

All Hallows Read

2011-10-25T10:44:00.000-07:00

So Neil Gaiman had this idea for a holiday of book-giving. Being the wonderful, spooky writer he is, he picked Halloween. It's called All Hallows Read. And now I need to go find a bookstore*.

This is awesome on several levels. One, it's always great to pass along books, and anything where that happens is alright by me, as you may have guessed by reading this blog. Two, it's means specifically for scary books. I read almost no horror because I don't like gore and I'm easily emotionally traumatized, so I don't know what to read--and this holiday could encourage someone, once a year, to give me something wonderful that I would have overlooked before. Three, it's a new holiday, and I happen to adore new holidays. And Four, it's Neil Gaiman. Just about anything he does gets my vote, because I've never once been disappointed by him.

And of course, I've already got A Scary Good Book in my back pocket, if I can figure out how to gift people with ebooks...

*This morning, if you follow me on Twitter, you would have heard that I woke up with a need to open a bookstore here in lovely, bookless Riverside. Maybe this is why? I wonder how often people need a book and can't get one because the bookstores are all far away?

Book Lust: I Want to be Left Behind by Brenda Petersen

2011-10-25T09:49:00.000-07:00

I'm on a roll today with the book-avarice. But this one looks cool, too. You know, I think I'll never really be happy with the amount of books I can read until I can cram them all into my head at fast enough speeds to get them all--like Matrix downloads or fast like Johnny Five or the Doctor or something. Anyway, here it is:

See Larger Image

I WANT TO BE LEFT BEHIND

by Brenda Peterson
Item # 4432

Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-306-81804-2
Pages: 275
Copyright Year: 2010

In Brenda Peterson’s unusual memoir, fundamentalism meets deep ecology. The author’s childhood in the high Sierra with her forest ranger father led her to embrace the entire natural world, while her Southern Baptist relatives prepared eagerly and busily to leave this world. Peterson survived fierce “sword drill” competitions demanding total recall of the Scriptures and awkward dinner table questions (“Will Rapture take the cat, too?”) only to find that environmentalists with prophecies of doom can also be Endtimers. Peterson paints such a hilarious, loving portrait of each world that the reader, too, may want to be Left Behind.

Book Lust: Nerd Do Well by Simon Pegg

2011-10-25T09:37:00.000-07:00

Love me some geeky bios! And this one's a cutie.

Nerd Do Well
A Small Boy's Journey to Becoming a Big Kid
Hardcover | Paperback | Kindle
By Simon Pegg
Gotham Books
Release date: June 09, 2011

Book Lust: Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese

2011-10-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

From here:

Which I totally screencapped because I didn't want to have to rewrite all of that, but I still wanted you all to see this book. Doesn't it sound awesome? And it sort of hits home right now, what with me being unemployed and all...

Microlibraries

2011-10-25T09:14:00.000-07:00

More from Shelf Awareness, because we're going steady now. I just love the idea of all these little tiny libraries popping up all over. I like that this one has a library card--that makes it a little more special and makes it a little easier to ensure that people won't just denude the place and never come back. I also like that they have an emphasis on locally-produced things-- I was reading an article yesterday about the revival of zines since the internet makes publication and distribution so easy, and I think it's fabulous. Back in the 90s, I'd only just discovered zines as they were drying up, and I think part of why our litmag didn't last was because of that trend, but I had a huge amount of fun publishing it, and it was kind of amazing distributing it. And this little place encourages people to get on that bandwagon again!

Here's what it says:

"More Microlibraries Hitting the Streets
The microlibrary trend continues. Joining "free-for-all libraries" in Germany and "little free libraries" in the American Midwest is the KIDS Corner Library project in Brooklyn, N.Y., which was created by artist Colin McMullan, founder of the Kindness and Imagination Development Society (KIDS).

Poets & Writers reported that the original KIDS Corner Library, "first installed in 2007 in downtown New Haven, Conn.... found a new home last April on the corner of Leonard and Withers streets in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. A message on its door reads, 'Welcome! This library is meant to encourage us all to publish and share information about local resources, issues, events, the many personal matters we care about deeply.' Potential patrons are encouraged to contact the two librarians, McMullan and Gabriela Alva, for a library card and the code to the door’s lock."

"One day I walked to the library and found a box full of donations, very carefully chosen," said Alva, who is working on a Tumblr blog featuring images of all the library's holdings. "It had books, photocopied articles, CDs, and an amazing horror book. The reaction has been great so far."

McMullan has other microlibraries in development, including partnerships "with volunteer librarians such as Christine Licata in Manhattan. Located outside Taller Boricua/Puerto Rican Workshop at the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center, Licata's East Harlem branch specializes in recipes and seeds. He also envisions building a microlibrary in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, in cooperation with the Center for Book Arts, where he is a resident artist. And he has plans for a branch located between Brooklyn's Prospect Heights and Crown Heights neighborhoods," P&W wrote."

Michael Moorcock's tips for writing a book in three days

2011-10-25T09:04:00.000-07:00

I'm not at all sure I want to write a whole book in 3 days, since I can't even seem to write one in 30 days and it might literally kill me, but if I did, here's what Michael Moorcock has to say about such things:

From here:

How to Write a Book in Three Days

"If you're going to do a piece of work in three days, you have to have everything properly prepared."
"[The formula is] The Maltese Falcon. Or the Holy Grail. You use the quest theme, basically. In The Maltese Falcon it's a lot of people after the same thing, which is the Black Bird. In Mort D'Arthur it's also a lot of people after the same thing, which is the Holy Grail. That's the formula for Westerns too: everybody's after the gold of El Dorado or whatever." (Cf the MacGuffin.)
"The formula depends on that sense of a human being up against superhuman forces, whether it's Big Business, or politics, or supernatural Evil, or whatever. The hero is fallible in their terms, and doesn't really want to be mixed up with them. He's always just about to walk out when something else comes along that involves him on a personal level." (An example of this is when Elric's wife gets kidnapped.)
"There is an event every four pages, for example -- and notes. Lists of things you're going to use. Lists of coherent images; coherent to you or generically coherent. You think: 'Right, Stormbringer [a novel in the Elric series]: swords; shields; horns", and so on."
"[I prepared] A complete structure. Not a plot, exactly, but a structure where the demands were clear. I knew what narrative problems I had to solve at every point. I then wrote them at white heat; and a lot of it was inspiration: the image I needed would come immediately [when] I needed it. Really, it's just looking around the room, looking at ordinary objects and turning them into what you need. A mirror: a mirror that absorbs the souls of the damned."
"You need a list of images that are purely fantastic: deliberate paradoxes, say: the City of Screaming Statues, things like that. You just write a list of them so you've got them there when you need them. Again, they have to cohere, have the right resonances, one with the other."
"The imagery comes before the action, because the action's actually unimportant. An object to be obtained -- limited time to obtain it. It's easily developed, once you work the structure out."
"Time is the important element in any action adventure story. In fact, you get the action and adventure out of the element of time. It's a classic formula: "We've only got six days to save the world!" Immediately you've set the reader up with a structure: there are only six days, then five, then four and finally, in the classic formula anyway, there's only 26 seconds to save the world! Will they make it in time?"
"Once you've started, you keep it rolling. You can't afford to have anything stop it."
"The whole reason you plan everything beforehand is so that when you hit a snag, a desperate moment, you've actually got something there on your desk that tells you what to do."
"I was also planting mysteries that I hadn't explained to myself. The point is, you put in the mystery, it doesn't matter what it is. It may not be the great truth that you're going to reveal at the end of the book. You just think, I'll put this in here because I might need it later."
"You start off with a mystery. Every time you reveal a bit of it, you have to do something else to increase it. A good detective story will have the same thing. "My God, so that's why Lady Carruthers's butler Jenkins was peering at the keyhole that evening. But where was Mrs. Jenkins?"
"What I do is divide my total 60,000 words into four sections, 15,000 words apiece, say; then divide each into six chapters. ... In section one the hero will say, "There's no way I can save the world in six days unless I start by getting the first object of power". That gives you an immediate goal, and an immediate time element, as well as an overriding time element. With each section divided into six chapters, each chapter must then contain something which will move the action forward and contribute to that immediate goal. "Very often it's something like: attack of the bandits -- defeat of the bandits -- nothing particularly complex, but it's another way you can achieve recognition: by making the structure of a chapter a miniature of the overall structure of the book, so everything feels coherent. The more you're dealing with incoherence, with chaos, the more you need to underpin everything with simple logic and basic forms that will keep everything tight. Otherwise the thing just starts to spread out into muddle and abstraction.
"So you don't have any encounter without information coming out of it. In the simplest form, Elric has a fight and kills somebody, but as they die they tell him who kidnapped his wife. Again, it's a question of economy. Everything has to have a narrative function."
[On "The Lester Dent Master Plot Formula"]¹ "First, he says, split your six-thousand-word story up into four fifteen hundred word parts. Part one, hit your hero with a heap of trouble. Part two, double it. Part three, put him in so much trouble there's no way he could ever possibly get out of it. Then -- now this could be Lester Dent or it could be what I learnt when I was on Sexton Blake Library, I forget -- you must never have a revelation of something that wasn't already established; so, you couldn't unmask a murderer who wasn't a character established already. All your main characters have to be in the first third. All you main themes and everything else has to be established in the first third, devloped in the second third, and resolved in the last third." (Note: this last sentence is reminiscent of the classic three-act structure.) (Note 2: Lester Dent's Master Plot Formula is actually a bit more complex and specific than this. Here it is in its entirety.)
"There's always a sidekick to make the responses the hero isn't allowed to make: to get frightened; to add a lighter note; to offset the hero's morbid speeches, and so on.
...
The hero has to supply the narrative dynamic, and therefore can't have any common-sense. Any one of us in those circumstances would say, 'What? Dragons? Demons? You've got to be joking!' The hero has to be driven, and when people are driven, common sense disappears. You don't want your reader to make common sense objections, you want them to go with the drive; but you've got to have somebody around who'll act as a sort of chorus."
"'When in doubt, descend into a minor character.' So when you've reached an impasse, and you can't move the action any further with your major character, switch to a minor character 's viewpoint which will allow you to keep the narrative moving and give you time to think."

Book Lust: Shadowcry by Jenna Burtenshaw

2011-10-25T08:49:00.000-07:00

From Shelf Awareness:

"Shadowcry by Jenna Burtenshaw (Greenwillow, $16.99, 9780062026422). "The High Council of Albiom wants 15-year-old Kate Winters, but it's only after she's been captured that she discovers why: She has the ability to bring the dead back to life. Imagine what would happen if a ruthless megalomaniac forced Kate to create an army of soldiers who couldn't die. This dystopian fantasy is a page-turner of sensational originality." --Ellen Klein, Hooray for Books!, Alexandria, Va."

School Post Supplemental: The Wizard of Earthsea and feminism

2011-10-24T12:24:00.000-07:00

Anne Harris wrote:
LeGuin is widely regarded as a feminist fantasy author, yet in A Wizard of Earthsea, the women who speak are evil or at least troublesome, while those who are silent are good. How do we reconcile this apparent discrepancy? Or do we?

Maybe this was previous to her hard-core feminist writings or something, but I think the whole book itself is feminine, regardless of the gender of the characters. It's that eastern influence--macho-ness only leads to trouble here, and the best characters / best people in the book are thoughtful, calm, nurturing, in balance, in tune with the world, and looking for unity with themselves and the world. The theme is less about the western idea of being manly and more about the idea of knowing yourself and being mindful, which is probably gender nutral and sometimes considered feminine--a turning inward and looking at your own emotions and mental building blocks rather than looking out at the world and trying to change it to suit you. And, as I mentioned in my other response, the ocean is a feminine thing, and it informs almost everything about the book.

So I'd argue that whether it's feminist or not, it's still feminine, and so even though all the characters were boys and men, it didn't particularly read as a men's story to me. Or, alternately, maybe it's not feminist or masculinist so much as it's something in between. The only other novel I've read from UleG was The Left Hand of Darkness, and that is about gender fluidity, with much of the book being about people without gender most of the time. Maybe this is the same germ of an idea growing a different book?

~:)

School Post Supplemental: The Wizard of Earthsea and the Archipelago

2011-10-24T12:15:00.000-07:00

Anne Harris wrote:

We've talked a lot about the importance of landscape in fantasy. A Wizard of Earthsea has a strikingly different topography from the other books on our list. How does a fantasy set in an archipelago differ from those we've read so far?

In the other stories, the land is the determining factor, the thing everything is defined by, but here, it's the water. They're literally surrounded by it, outlined by it, shaped by it. To get from one place to another, they have to cross water and it's often dangerous.The sheer mechanics of moving about are different and require different skills than those in the previous books we've read--and so, they create a different sort of character.

I think that putting everything on separate islands rather than separate countries allows a sort of condensing of what would otherwise take up a whole world--here, each island can have its own culture and its own language and it makes perfect sense because even though they're relatively close, they're also fundamentally separated. It reminded me a little of NK Jemisin's Ten Thousand Kingdoms (and since she's in that discussion I linked in the open forum, that's probably intentional on her part), this idea of dozens of separate ways of living all side by side in a space small enough to travel around in in a reasonable amount of time. But this is even more separated than hers; you can't walk from one island to another. It says somewhere early on that there are few bridges--which I took metaphorically as well as literally.

And speaking of metaphor: water is generally considered a feminine, emotional element. Sometimes, it's taken to mean the subconscious, the source of all our emotional lives. And this is a world entirely saturated with this element. Since the story is about coming to terms with yourself and all your parts, being situated on an archipelago seems super-appropriate, don't you think?

~:)

Edgar Allan Poe: 5 Essentials for the Betterment of a Story

2011-10-24T10:35:00.000-07:00

Edgar Allan Poe: 5 Essentials for the Betterment of a Story

"In a recently-found treatise, he set down the following advice for bettering a story: *

Employ an unreliable narrator, preferably one who doesn’t know he is insane and has no recollection of such events as digging into a grave to rip out the teeth of his recently departed lover.
Include a beautiful woman with raven locks and porcelain skin, preferably quite young, and let her die tragically of some unknown ailment.
Use grandiloquent words, such as heretofore, forthwith, and nevermore. A little Latin will also enhance the text.
Do not shy away from such grotesqueries as inebriation, imprisonment, insanity, and men costumed as orangutans being burned to death.
When in doubt, bury someone alive.

* Poe didn’t really compose this advice, but, as he was fond of a good hoax, we hope he would be pleased by this affectionate charade."

Lovely.

Book Lust:

2011-10-21T10:27:00.000-07:00

How could I resist a book about tea?

From Shelf Awareness:

A Tea Reader: Living Life One Cup at a Time

by Katrina Ávila Munichiello, editor

As autumn arrives, many of us look forward to crisp fall evenings curled up with a steaming mug and a good book. This anthology of essays, stories and poems devoted to the art and comfort of tea is as warm and soothing as that hot cuppa.
A Tea Reader is divided into five "steeps," each illuminating a different aspect of tea: its effect on the individual, its ability to create fellowship, the formal and informal rituals attending it, the joys and hardships of careers in tea, and the travels of tea enthusiasts. Readers will connect with fellow tea lovers throughout history, from ancient Chinese poets to 19th-century authors to modern-day authorities. Rudyard Kipling details his visit to a Japanese teahouse; New Orleans tea seller George Constance rebuilds his shop after Hurricane Katrina tears it down; other writers recount the beginnings of their own love affairs with the leaf.
While the book's topic alone makes it the perfect gift for the tea enthusiast in your life, the selections all are also skillfully written, whether somber, joyful or educational in tone. Most share a contemplative, peaceful sensibility (often achieved over a cup of Earl Grey). So although at least a passing appreciation for tea will further readers' appreciation, any fan of good writing will enjoy sampling the contents... even, dare it be said, those who prefer coffee. --Jaclyn Fulwood, graduate assistant, University of Oklahoma Libraries
Discover: A collection of essays and poetry celebrating the uplifting power of tea.

Book Lust: Death Wishing from Laura Ellen Scott

2011-10-21T10:25:00.000-07:00

Sounds really strange and surreal...

From Shelf Awareness, as ever:

Death Wishing

by Laura Ellen Scott

Imagine a world in which you had the power to make a wish that would be granted right after you died. Set aside the fact that you would never live to enjoy your wish: What kind of legacy would you leave behind?
This is the premise of Laura Ellen Scott's Death Wishing. However, rather than wishing for peace on Earth or an end to hunger, the recently deceased have made wishes for orange clouds, the return of Elvis and everlasting cups of coffee. One man even (spitefully, one would imagine) wished for the instant disappearance of every cat on the planet.
Scott has conjured up an intriguing, original concept and plunked the story down in post-Katrina New Orleans; the addition of orange clouds, while intriguing, isn't even necessary to set the mysterious, otherworldly mood she so deftly creates. While some ramifications of the phenomenon of "death wishing" are examined--the murder rate quickly skyrockets, then plummets, when people realize that you can't force a self-serving wish out of someone when you're going to kill them anyway--it's Scott's brilliant job of eliciting sympathy for the creepy narrator, Victor (a divorcé who lusts after his adult son's girlfriend), that makes her debut novel truly magical. Despite all the weirdness, Victor's concern and loyalty to his loved ones during uncertain times shine as brightly as the hair on the revived Elvis in this oddly endearing tale. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend
Discover: A world in which your deepest wish comes true--you just have to die first.

State of the Sami 10-19-2011

2011-10-19T09:34:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to understand why so many writers have questionable hair. And questionable social skills.

This week, I turned in my self-evaluation for class. I also found the pile of sheets I use for tracking my goals and had to see how few of them I've accomplished, and how I've veered recently into other goals. I feel like I'm giving myself headaches with my ever-increasing focus on what I want to do, and yet, the harder I think about it, the less I feel like I'm getting done. The more I study, the less I know what I'm doing. It's hard to keep going some days.

And the specter of the day job haunts me.

But I have ideas now. I have competitions I can send things off to. I have anthologies I can try to get in. I have an idea of how I can start writing magazine articles. I still need time for all of this, and I'm shifting things around the way you shift those sliding tiles in that game where the picture is all mixed up and there's only a few moves you can make at any time. Most days, I feel like I'm making progress, even if it's not as much as I want. I'm starting to understand that it'll never be as much as I want.

But the novel is in it's last third, and I'm due to revise the opening this month. Next week, in fact. Soon, in fact. And I know what's wrong with the next novel and the first step on how to fix it. And I have a fairly organized side project up and running (Birdsong, on Storiad), and I have plans for other things to do, too. Book reviewing is going well. TV reviewing needs to be trimmed down, but it's also going well. School has been a pain, but I haven't missed any deadlines, and I've been learning stuff hand over fist this term--it's been all sorts of useful to me.

And now I have to stop procrastinating and navel gazing, and get back to work.

How're you doing this month?

Book Report: Free street-corner book shelves in Germany

2011-10-18T08:38:00.000-07:00

Look at this post from Shelf Awareness. I just love this slowly-building idea of open-air books. Someone told me that someone else did a study and the biggest thing that leads to new readers, according to whatever their parameters were, was a free sample. And what a great, communal, public way to get your free samples out there! I envision local writers sneaking their books up onto these shelves one at a time, and local book stores planting a few, and people involved in BookCrossing getting in on it, and everyone interested in books shifting the books around from one shelf to another all over town...

Anyway, here's the report:

Free Book: Take It or Leave It

In Germany, "free-for-all" libraries are " popping up across the nation on street corners, city squares and suburban supermarkets," the Associated Press (via the San Francisco Chronicle) reported. These public bookshelves are "usually financed by donations and cared for by local volunteer groups."

"This project is aimed at everyone who likes to read--without regard to age or education. It is open for everybody," said Michael Aubermann, one of the organizers of the free book exchange in Cologne. "We installed our other outdoor shelves last year and it's been working really well."

Even some booksellers are on board with the idea. Elmar Muether, acting branch manager at Cologne's Mayersche Buchhandlung bookstore, said, "We see this project rather as a sales promotion than as competition. If books are present everywhere, it helps our business too."

Public bookcases can sometimes have their drawbacks, though. In a New York Times piece headlined "Shelf-Obsessed Writer," Jami Attenberg chronicled her observations of a local café's "free bookcase," as well as the fraught experience of adding three of her titles to the collection, after which she "stalked my own books for five days."

Book Lust: Dear Creature by Jonathan Chase

2011-10-18T08:32:00.001-07:00

How perfect does this sound?

Dear Creature

by Jonathan Case

Lusts of the flesh, hungers of the soul, Shakespeare's immortal language and Cold War-era fear of "the other" merge in this gruesome, literate, wacky and charming graphic novel from Portland artist and writer Jonathan Case. A love story between a flesh-craving sea mutant and a fragile agoraphobe, Dear Creature combines sci-fi horror with wit and whimsy. Creepily original yet nicely evocative of both the themes of atomic-era America as well as its comics, Case's debut is a perfect marriage of storytelling and art.

Case depicts a California coastal town in the era of beehive hairdos and skinny ties, where Grue, a humanoid sea creature--created by atomic accident, natch--feasts upon the amorous teens always so plentiful at the water's edge. Bits of Shakespeare stuffed into floating soda bottles lead Grue to Giulietta, a post-war Italian immigrant trapped by anxiety on her family's docked boat. Strange, beautiful love ensues and Grue swears off the teen-eating, but the townsfolk are raising a ruckus about the murders and Grue must save Giulietta's scapegoated family to be worthy of her love.

Case's art employs a black-and-white realistic style that harkens back to classic romance and superhero comics but also to David Lapham's hyper-violent Stray Bullets. Likewise, the themes of predation and sex panic resonate with the story's time period but its wry, ironic tone and homicidal anti-hero are wholeheartedly modern. The love story of Grue and Giulietta is funny and horrible, sweet and repulsive, brilliantly drawn and told: an amazing debut. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic

Discover: A stunning debut graphic novel mixing an inventive mutant creature story with retro comic realism.

MyBlogGuest

2011-10-17T10:49:00.000-07:00

I'm trying out a new services that hooks up bloggers with guest bloggers, to see if I can help anyone out and if they can help me. It's called MyBlogGuest, and so far, it seems like a pretty good site full of helpful people, and since I'm working on getting my name out there, I figure, what can it hurt, right?

Check it out!