Dorothy Winsor

I'm reading Juliet Marillier's Daughter of the Forest, which I'm enjoying so far. It's a retelling of the fairy tale about six brothers who are turned into swans. The MC is the seventh child, a daughter. It's in first person with an adult narrator looking back on herself at 12. That gives the writer some room to play because you can have childish perceptions but then pull back a little and have some adult insight too.

YA writers often try to break girls from the societal good girl mold by making them into kick-ass fighters. There's nothing wrong with that, but sometimes I wonder whether we only see girls as interesting if they're in typically male activities. This MC is wild and brave but not a warrior. I like that.

The wording is also nice in some places. A captive is brought in and we get

all I could see through the press of bodies was the bright burnished gold of his hair, and the big fist of the man that gripped it, and the way the prisoner held himself tall, as if he were the only person in the world that mattered.

I love that last part.

ETA: The crazies where I live let their pet zebras and parrots ride inside the car when they go to the bar. No rooftop for them!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwCuL_E8wxA

Good lord, is it Eurovision time again?

Today is the most annoying annual event in my neighborhood--the mass garage sale. Many of my neighbors sell their excess junk, and people pour in from all over. The streets are already clogged with cars, parked along both sides and creeping between. Worse, people are strolling down the middle of the streets. We have sidewalks! Use them!

I live in the very back of the neighborhood, and there's only one way out. I think I have to stay home until mid-afternoon when things clear out.

Meanwhile, in an event like one set up as an echo in a novel, Mr daw is at his mother's in NJ, staging a garage sale today.

Sigh. I gave up reading another novel today. My kindle tells me I'm 11% through with it, and I'm bored to tears. The story sounds like it should be my kind of story, but the writing feels very distant to me. And so far at least 2/3 of the pages have been filled with history or story-telling rather than the actual story in front of me. It's very inert.

Reviews on Goodreads tell me lots of readers LOVE this book. I guess that's good. Different books for different readers. But I want one to love too!

ETA: I thought about this some more, trying to analyze why it bored me. Here's what happened: Again and again, characters would sit down and tell one another some story about the history of their lost land, a history some of them had lived through. So it was basically an undramatized flashback. A flashback works best if it's dramatized and if it comes at a point when the reader is dying for the information. Think of the scenes in Paris in the middle of "Casablanca." But these stories happened early in this book and I certainly wasn't wishing for them. I had no reason to. Who cares? The author might as well have written one of those horrible prologues in which the history of the fantasy world is laid out.

And these stories interrupted the forward flow of the plot at a point where, as a reader, I was just getting to know the characters and situation. They made everything skid to a halt.

In a scene where characters are talking, writers have to provide some sort of background activity so you don't have free-floating talking heads, like something out of an old Twilight episode. But that activity is much better if it does double duty, not only grounding the talk but also forwarding plot, character, or theme.

I'm listening to a mystery in which the writer uses random background actions. The character scratches her nose or puts down her tea cup and it matters not at all.

What you want is stuff like a character's life is spinning out of control, so she obsessively cleans the house. Or people are at dinner and there's tension (because of course there should be tension in every scene) and instead of just passing the peas and taking a bite of steak, they stab their forks at their food (or one another) or refuse to pass the peas until someone actually asks for them.

Audio books really make me notice stuff like this because I hear them slowly word by word rather than sliding my eye down the page until I get to something meaningful.

ETA: I had to stop listening to that book. It was like being in a conversation where someone spouted endless trivia while you waited for them to get to the point. That means I have to go to the library for a new audio book. It's either that or listen to the radio, which is boring.

I went to two events this week associated with Mr daw's employer. First, they held a Taste of Iowa event at a local food coop. Here's some of the food on display or being served, including beef Wellington on a stick, which doesn't sound plausible but was fabulous.

( Read more... )

Then last night, we went to a party thrown by one of Mr daw's younger colleagues. Included in the entertainment was something called inflatable jousting. Here's what it looked like.

( Read more... )

Sad to say, I've realized I live in a state that's up for grabs in the November election. That means the political ads have started already. They're horrible. They spin and lie, so they tell you nothing. They just spread anger and hatred and general bad vibes.

I swear right now not to watch TV in real time until after the election. If I tivo it, I can speed through those ads. But everyone around me is going to be a little grouchier for the next 6 months.

The new Sherlock Holmes series started last night. The updating of these stories works so well I can't believe it. If you missed it, here's the site to watch it online:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/watch/sherlock_belgravia.html

Also, I'm reading Cashore's Bitterblue. I bought it last week when it came out but saved it because once I read it, it's gone. I enjoyed it from the first page, and then my imaginary boyfriend Po showed up! Bliss.

Probably as a result of being engaged by these stories, my writer brain is pouring out ideas. There's a phenomenon in creativity research called "clustering," which refers to the way contact between creative people in any area seems to up the odds of extraordinary work being done. Think of dramatists in Elizabethan England, poets in early 20th century Ireland, physicists in Los Alamos, cryptographers in Bletchley Park, political philosophers in Revolutionary America. In my experience as a writer, good stories beget good stories.

I wonder if weak stories beget weak ones?

ETA: Thank you, Maurice Sendak. We celebrate you. Let the wild rumpus begin.

I'm home from the gym early because I dropped a 10-pound weight on my toe. I danced out of the way, so it just caught the side of my big toe, but there's some swelling. So I'm sitting here with it propped up and covered with an ice pack.

I see lots of writers picking at things they read, noticing what's wrong and what could be better. I do it myself, and I learn a lot thereby. It's a lot harder to see what a writer is doing right and learn from that, but at some point, that becomes crucial. At some point, most writers who are trying have stopped doing most of the wrong stuff but aren't yet doing enough right stuff.

I just finished the second book in Flanagan's Brotherband series. I could pick at this book, but I don't want to. Instead, I want to figure out what he's doing that makes me keep reading despite all the pick-at-able stuff.

And I think it's that the central character feels very real. Flanagan never for a moment doubts this character's reality and he never lets the reader doubt it either. That's harder than it sounds. It's so tempting to have the character do something convenient for the author without thinking about whether it's what that character would really do. My particular temptation is toward making them funny, even when a real person would be frightened or humiliated or angry or whatever.

So that's what I get from Flanagan today. What right stuff do you get from your reading?

Mr daw and I power-washed the deck today and had fine weather to do it. Now we need to haul out the deck furniture, and I'd like to get some window boxes to fasten to the deck railing. It's too windy for just flower pots. They blow over.

I go to the Y on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Friday. I know it's bad when I wake up on Tuesday or Thursday and instead of being happy, I'm sad because 24 of my 48 hours are gone.

The Y had a kids day last weekend and my teacher did drums with them. They are cute beyond bearing:

http://wcfcourier.com/video/#vmix_media_id=141954311

I finished reading Drowned Cities and liked it quite a bit, but it made me think about what counts as YA. I'm tempted to think that Drowned Cities is an adult book that happens to have a young MC because it's a hard read emotionally and politically, much bleaker than Hunger Games which is more heroic in tone. I'm guessing that a lot of YA readers will have trouble with Cities.

Of course, there's a fair amount of crossover between YA and adult readers, especially in spec fic, and doubly so with an author who's put out award winning adult books. Indeed, any time you see a YA book with big sales, you're seeing the effect of adult readers. You don't get those numbers with just teens.

But adults can have a hard time finding a book like Drowned Cities because of where it is on the shelves. That made me wonder a little. Where would Huck Finn be marketed today? Where would To Kill a Mockingbird be? When an adult writer works on YA, do they picture a reader like themselves? Maybe YA is a false category in some ways. I don't know.

My fellow Dragon of the Corn Sarah Prineas once talked about characters who are interesting in themselves vs characters who are interesting because of the situation they're in. I've been thinking about that lately and about what makes the difference.

Characters like Percy Jackson or Miles Vorkorsigan are interesting in themselves. Percy is dyslexic and it turns out that's because he's the child of a god who mated with a human and thus is programmed to read ancient Greek. His books' plots usually involve him fighting Greek monsters. Miles is born with fragile bones and a number of physical problems that render him out of place in his hyper-masculine society. He's forced to use his considerable wit instead. Both of them, then, have weaknesses that are also their strengths. They're in dilemmas that they're never going to escape, though they may come to terms. We still need a plot, of course. Character reveals itself in plot, but with this kind of character, the plot is really an excuse for the character to perform.

In contrast, a character like Harry Potter is interesting because of the situation he's in, and you can tell that because once he battles Voldemort, he's no longer very interesting. In that epilogue to the last book, he seems like just another middle-aged worker for the Ministry of Magic. Similarly, Austen's characters are no longer interesting once they're married. In her world, we've now reached the land of happily-ever-after and we're done. I'd say the same thing about Katniss Everdeen. She's not happily-ever-after, but her great role in life is finished.

Ideally, I'd like my characters to be both interesting in themselves and in an interesting situation, but that turns out to be difficult, particularly the interesting-in-themselves part. How does a writer go about creating that?

(Just as an LOTR fanfic aside, I'd also say that most Fourth Age stories suffer from the same loss of interest because the Quest has already succeeded. Until that point, characters like the Legolas I write about are interesting because of the future that awaits them, while characters like his brothers are more interesting in themselves because of the confluence of strength and weakness.)

I'm reading Bacigalupi's Drowned Cities. His Ship Breaker was one of the best books I read last year. This one is making me go slowly because there's some gut level violence and I'm not good with that. I need breaks to recover my courage.

Still, Bacigalupi is a wonderful writer. And one of the things I like is that he didn't sell his first four or so novels. Then he sold Wind-up Girl, which won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and Campbell awards, and Ship Breaker, which won the Prinz Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. You have to think that, say, his fourth book was probably good enough to publish. It shows you how arbitrary it sometimes is that some books get published and others don't.

Mr daw and I watched "Ides of March" from Netflix. That was depressing.

I seem to be naively hopeful about politics. I keep finding myself believing that there are good people out there, trying to make a difference. Not all of them, mind you. Some are stupid and/or evil. But I seem to be unable to be completely cynical.

This apparently marks me as a fool.

YA fantasy tends to fall into one of two categories: paranormal romance in a contemporary setting (dominant right now) and traditional sword and sorcery adventure. What you don't see much of is paranormal romance in a traditional fantasy setting. Why is that?

So I'm still dipping into this book about screen writing occasionally. (Screenwriting Tricks for Authors by Alexandra Sokoloff) Sokoloff describes a class she once took that was entirely devoted to premises or log lines (ie, one sentence description of the story, sort of like what you see in TV Guide). Each student had to come up with three log lines each week. The students all threw a buck into the pot and voted on which line was best. The winner got the money. I thought that was entertaining in itself.

She suggests coming up with three log lines each week just as practice for thinking up story ideas. She also suggests that you try to incorporate at least some aspect of the "high concept" story. The term "high concept" is hard to pin down, but the definition Sokoloff uses is that it should include one or more of the following:

topical idea that hits a nerve in society right now (environmental disaster, gun laws, whatever)
subject many readers will have experience with (Christmas with the inlaws)
exploits a primal fear (Jaws)
controversial or religious (Da Vinci code)
something that people will talk about around the water cooler (Hunger Games maybe)
a big twist

The idea of coming up with three story ideas a week seems overwhelming to me. I suppose they don't have to be ideas you'd actually want to write. Still, I may try it and see if I can do it.

Earlier this year, writer Jim Hines posted pictures of himself posing like women on book covers, his point being that most of those poses are ridiculous and objectifying. The captions he adds are great!

http://www.jimchines.com/2012/01/striking-a-pose/

Some commenters pointed out that men too are objectified on some covers. So today, Hines posted a series of pics with him in poses matched to romance covers.

http://jimhines.livejournal.com/628418.html

I found both sets of pics to be hilarious.

Hines is the author of a bunch of SFF novels. Here's his Amazon page.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=jim+hines

I'm reading Camilla Gibb's The Beauty of Humanity Movement, which is set in current day Viet Nam. I'm about halfway through. This is a seriously beautiful book with delicate and touching characterizations.