This week's novel is This Savage Song, young adult urban/dystopian fantasy by Victoria Schwab. I read this one because I liked A Darker Shade of Magic so much that I figured I would delve into Schwab's other series.
In the mega-city of Verity, acts of violence create monsters and the city is divided between Harker, the mob-boss like ruler who keeps the monsters from attacking people who have paid for his protection, and Flynn, with his armed militia to fight back the monsters and his trio of Sunai, especially scary monsters who take the souls of sinners with their music. Kate, Harker's daughter, wants to be ruthless as her father to earn his respect. August, one of the Sunai, wants to be human.
The world building here happens in an oddly slow way. The book starts with Kate burning down the chapel at her boarding school in the country because she wants to get thrown out and sent home. It pulled me in without knowing that her father's a mob boss or that her home is crawling with monsters. Those things you find out a little bit at a time. You get to know August for a chapter or two without learning he's Sunai, just that he's confined to his apartment building and his dad and older brother are fighting monsters. But the world building grows and grows: there is geography that's important, and there's the history of the fall of the United States and of the civil war inside Verity, and there are three different kinds of monsters who work and are created in different ways. With every piece of world building we're fed, the situation changes a bit and there's a moment of readjustment. Every so often it fells like the story drags as you wait for information, but on the whole it works to keep the focus on the characters.
I like both Kate and August, who react in reasonable ways and are fairly rational people. They each have clear motivations and drives, but beneath that have layers of fears and vulnerabilities.
I also like the lack of a love story. Kate and August grow to care for each other, but they don't acknowledge or act upon any romantic feelings. They're friends. They help each other because they like each other, not out of the expected obligation to bend over backwards for the person you make out with, and not because lust drove them to act.
It was fun and I look forward to the sequel.
***
Next week: Spontaneous, contemporary YA with spontaneous combustion, by Aaron Starmer.
December 13, 2016
December 10, 2016
Thinking About Short Stories
With my current project writing short stories, I'm piecing together ideas about plot and learning a fair bit about myself.
The first thing I learned is that my natural medium is definitely novels. I come up with back story and character quirks that would add dimension to the characters or enrich themes or affect the plot eventually, but in a short story there is no "eventually." There's only the now, and those quirks are just hanging there, extra and unneeded.
A friend of mine once told me that short stories are like a spiral. He didn't elaborate on this metaphor, and it didn't make any sense to me without an explanation. (A short story is also like a chicken. It's also like the color yellow. See, those mean nothing.) So this week I looked it up, hoping someone on the internet would have a better explanation--or any explanation.
So think of an atrium with a spiral staircase around it. The ancient, magical tree in the middle of the atrium is the point of your story. As you climb the stairs, you spiral around it, seeing the magical tree from different angles, but still focusing on the tree. So in a short story, everything you say, everything that happens, is an investigation of your theme, but from different angles. Therefore, all the details, the quirks and the back ground and the world building, have to relate to the point of your story.
Another friend of mine has a podcast, where in last week's episode he shared some advice and helpful questions that he'd heard. The advice was this: everything under the sun has already been written, so don't worry about making the plot too complicated. Stick with a simple plot and let the strength and originality of your characters carry the story and make it original.
I like that. I need a simple plot that I can tell in a sentence or two, and then the rest I can fill with characters and details and world building, as long as those details stay on target, focusing on my magical tree in the atrium and not wandering off the spiral staircase and down a hallway.
So I started thinking about simple plots, and the examples that help me are all pretty silly.
1. Picture books. I have a toddler, so we read a lot of picture books. We read a lot of the same picture books over and over and over, and my toddler is starting to get annoyed with me when in the fourth repeat of "Pierre" I start analyzing the plot instead of doing the funny Pierre voice. (the first two read throughs are for reading, the third is for "where's the dog? There's the dog!" and the fourth is apparently for me to talk to myself.)
2. Fables and fairy tales. I've been thinking about the structure and tone of fairy tales off and on for the past year, and thinking about how that structure and tone relates to the tall-tale oral tradition, so putting this into practice has been fun. I have a friend (the same friend with the podcast) that wrote a writing workbook for children using fables as a model. Bad friend admission: I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I think I'm going to bust it out this week.
3. Shaun the Sheep. This is a claymation TV show with seven minute long episodes that revolve around a herd of sheep, the dog that looks after them, and the farmer who has no idea the sheep have any adventures at all. Actually, "adventures" is kind of a strong word. In one episode the sheep refuse to take baths because there's no hot water, so they sneak into the farmhouse and siphon the hot water from the farmer's bath. That's the plot. The fun and the charm of the show is in the sheep's attempts to run and hide from the dog so they don't have to take a bath, and in their attempts (that both succeed and fail) to sneak into the farmhouse and distract the farmer, and in the way they have a pool party in their hot bath at the end.
I've been keeping these in mind this week as I've worked, and I've been keeping in mind that I'll need to go back during the editing process and either ax large portions of my stories or twist them until they can do more to help the story along, until they can be part of the spiral staircase looking at the atrium, and until they can pull their weight.
The first thing I learned is that my natural medium is definitely novels. I come up with back story and character quirks that would add dimension to the characters or enrich themes or affect the plot eventually, but in a short story there is no "eventually." There's only the now, and those quirks are just hanging there, extra and unneeded.
A friend of mine once told me that short stories are like a spiral. He didn't elaborate on this metaphor, and it didn't make any sense to me without an explanation. (A short story is also like a chicken. It's also like the color yellow. See, those mean nothing.) So this week I looked it up, hoping someone on the internet would have a better explanation--or any explanation.
So think of an atrium with a spiral staircase around it. The ancient, magical tree in the middle of the atrium is the point of your story. As you climb the stairs, you spiral around it, seeing the magical tree from different angles, but still focusing on the tree. So in a short story, everything you say, everything that happens, is an investigation of your theme, but from different angles. Therefore, all the details, the quirks and the back ground and the world building, have to relate to the point of your story.
Another friend of mine has a podcast, where in last week's episode he shared some advice and helpful questions that he'd heard. The advice was this: everything under the sun has already been written, so don't worry about making the plot too complicated. Stick with a simple plot and let the strength and originality of your characters carry the story and make it original.
I like that. I need a simple plot that I can tell in a sentence or two, and then the rest I can fill with characters and details and world building, as long as those details stay on target, focusing on my magical tree in the atrium and not wandering off the spiral staircase and down a hallway.
So I started thinking about simple plots, and the examples that help me are all pretty silly.
1. Picture books. I have a toddler, so we read a lot of picture books. We read a lot of the same picture books over and over and over, and my toddler is starting to get annoyed with me when in the fourth repeat of "Pierre" I start analyzing the plot instead of doing the funny Pierre voice. (the first two read throughs are for reading, the third is for "where's the dog? There's the dog!" and the fourth is apparently for me to talk to myself.)
2. Fables and fairy tales. I've been thinking about the structure and tone of fairy tales off and on for the past year, and thinking about how that structure and tone relates to the tall-tale oral tradition, so putting this into practice has been fun. I have a friend (the same friend with the podcast) that wrote a writing workbook for children using fables as a model. Bad friend admission: I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I think I'm going to bust it out this week.
3. Shaun the Sheep. This is a claymation TV show with seven minute long episodes that revolve around a herd of sheep, the dog that looks after them, and the farmer who has no idea the sheep have any adventures at all. Actually, "adventures" is kind of a strong word. In one episode the sheep refuse to take baths because there's no hot water, so they sneak into the farmhouse and siphon the hot water from the farmer's bath. That's the plot. The fun and the charm of the show is in the sheep's attempts to run and hide from the dog so they don't have to take a bath, and in their attempts (that both succeed and fail) to sneak into the farmhouse and distract the farmer, and in the way they have a pool party in their hot bath at the end.
I've been keeping these in mind this week as I've worked, and I've been keeping in mind that I'll need to go back during the editing process and either ax large portions of my stories or twist them until they can do more to help the story along, until they can be part of the spiral staircase looking at the atrium, and until they can pull their weight.
December 6, 2016
Pivot Point Review
This week's book is Pivot Point, a young adult novel by Kasie West.
Addie lives in a compound for people with special abilities, where she lives a surprisingly normal life doing normal high schooler things, except that some of the football players are telekinetic and her dad can tell when she's lying and her best friend is always offering to erase her bad memories for her. Addie's gift is that, when faced with a decision, she can look into the future, living out the two two options. When her parents announce they are getting a divorce and her dad is moving out of the compound to live with the norms, they leave Addie the decision about where she'll live. She then lives out both possibilities, both of which have love interests and adjustments and high school shenanigans.
Even though this has a high concept sci-fi set up and even though half of the characters have powers, the novel has its roots firmly in contemporary YA. The people in the compound have abilities, but since they all have abilities and they all know everyone has abilities and they've all grown up in a culture of people with abilities, it's almost a non issue. It's just side notes that the cheerleaders are using their emotion powers to make the crowd excited at football games. It's so normal to Addie that it's not a big deal on which the narrative focused. Instead, the focus is on the characters' interactions as they do normal teenager things.
In fact, it's kind of like two contemporary YA stories as she lives through both time-lines, with the chapters switching back and forth. In one she's a new girl, trying to make new friends, discovering that the football players from her old school are purposefully injuring good players from other schools, and hearing through ever more infrequent phone calls about how her best friend's life is imploding. In the other story, she's wooed by the popular quarterback, has great times with her best friend, and deals with her newly terse relationship with her mother.
This is a story about Addie and how she wants to live her life, and her life is a mostly fluffy romp where most of the conflict is relateable teen drama. She doesn't have world shattering problems, and uses her power in an analogously low-stakes way.
It would be a completely different book, but I do wish she would use her powers to solve murders. Having lived through both time-lines, she (and the reader) get enough of the information to piece together what happened in a murder case happening in the background. Any one time-line only gets half the story, but together she gets the full picture. It seems obvious to me that she should report what she knows and stop it from happening. She argues that failing to live out the future exactly as she's seen it will cause the whole thing to fall apart, therefore all she can do is decide which of her two choices she'll make. But I would argue that she could report a crime and then do the search again to see that she hasn't messed up anything too badly.
My other hesitancy about this book is the emphasis put on football. I'm from Texas. Football was a big thing. My school was not this into football. The players were not in a clique that all the ladies pined for and could get away with anything because football. Maybe it was because our football team sucked, or maybe it was because everyone was a nerd (including the players), but for me the trope of the popular football players who rule the school rings false and feels like a cliche.
That's probably just me, but there was an awful lot of football for not being a novel about football.
***
Next week: This Savage Song, urban fantasy by Victoria Schwab.
Addie lives in a compound for people with special abilities, where she lives a surprisingly normal life doing normal high schooler things, except that some of the football players are telekinetic and her dad can tell when she's lying and her best friend is always offering to erase her bad memories for her. Addie's gift is that, when faced with a decision, she can look into the future, living out the two two options. When her parents announce they are getting a divorce and her dad is moving out of the compound to live with the norms, they leave Addie the decision about where she'll live. She then lives out both possibilities, both of which have love interests and adjustments and high school shenanigans.
Even though this has a high concept sci-fi set up and even though half of the characters have powers, the novel has its roots firmly in contemporary YA. The people in the compound have abilities, but since they all have abilities and they all know everyone has abilities and they've all grown up in a culture of people with abilities, it's almost a non issue. It's just side notes that the cheerleaders are using their emotion powers to make the crowd excited at football games. It's so normal to Addie that it's not a big deal on which the narrative focused. Instead, the focus is on the characters' interactions as they do normal teenager things.
In fact, it's kind of like two contemporary YA stories as she lives through both time-lines, with the chapters switching back and forth. In one she's a new girl, trying to make new friends, discovering that the football players from her old school are purposefully injuring good players from other schools, and hearing through ever more infrequent phone calls about how her best friend's life is imploding. In the other story, she's wooed by the popular quarterback, has great times with her best friend, and deals with her newly terse relationship with her mother.
This is a story about Addie and how she wants to live her life, and her life is a mostly fluffy romp where most of the conflict is relateable teen drama. She doesn't have world shattering problems, and uses her power in an analogously low-stakes way.
It would be a completely different book, but I do wish she would use her powers to solve murders. Having lived through both time-lines, she (and the reader) get enough of the information to piece together what happened in a murder case happening in the background. Any one time-line only gets half the story, but together she gets the full picture. It seems obvious to me that she should report what she knows and stop it from happening. She argues that failing to live out the future exactly as she's seen it will cause the whole thing to fall apart, therefore all she can do is decide which of her two choices she'll make. But I would argue that she could report a crime and then do the search again to see that she hasn't messed up anything too badly.
My other hesitancy about this book is the emphasis put on football. I'm from Texas. Football was a big thing. My school was not this into football. The players were not in a clique that all the ladies pined for and could get away with anything because football. Maybe it was because our football team sucked, or maybe it was because everyone was a nerd (including the players), but for me the trope of the popular football players who rule the school rings false and feels like a cliche.
That's probably just me, but there was an awful lot of football for not being a novel about football.
***
Next week: This Savage Song, urban fantasy by Victoria Schwab.
November 30, 2016
The Unexpected Everything Review
This week's novel is The Unexpected Everything, contemporary YA by Morgan Matson.
Andie's father is a politician, who lives mostly in Washington, leaving Andie to mostly fend for herself under the lax supervision of distant relatives. But then a scandal hits her dad's office, losing Andie her competitive and coveted summer internship at Johns Hopkins Medical and causing her dad to move back home. With no summer plans and awkwardness at home, Andie ends up having a summer she never expected with her friends and a boyfriend and a dog walking job.
About half way through the book, it felt like the story had been told. Andie and her dad sat down an had a conversation about their grievances and expectations, and set themselves on a path to heal, and I LOVED IT. So often I find myself screaming at characters in books to "Just have an honest conversation, damnit! There wouldn't be a book if you had better communication skills!" My family's gotten used to it. I blame it on therapy. So this was fantastic. Andie also settles into her dog walking job, which she at first thought was a dozen steps down from the internship she had planned for six months. And she and Clark, the cute, awkward boy with the grand pyrenees, get over their awkwardness and settle into Andie's first meaningful romantic relationship.
That's at the half way point. Now, in most rom-coms, this would be the end. The goals of dating and appreciating what you have and patching up a relationship with family have been met.
It turns out that Clark is a writer (a bestselling writer even though he's a teenager. Just roll with it) and he's having trouble writing the next book in his series because he wrapped up the story in the last book. That problem mirrored my mid-point question of where is this going to go next? What are they going to do now?
It makes sense that most rom-coms end here, because what comes after is hard work to maintain relationships and--in peace time--fluffly trips to the mall or the waffle house. And that's what the second half of the book is: vignettes of friendships and relationships and fights and apologies and stumbles and jokes. There's of course an emotional climax where everything falls apart as they reach the end of summer, but the way the problems compound makes sense, and it's still mostly fun summer times.
I also appreciated the female friendships. Andie has three best friends and their interactions and relationships are front and center here. They support each other and complain to each other and bicker and have inside jokes. Again, they honestly try to work through their problems with each other. It was great. And then it was not great. Because, you see, they are torn apart by a dude. And the dude is the biggest tool you've ever seen. I don't get it. It was disappointing, but at the same time, you could say it wasn't really about the dude, but about how one of the friends is unwilling to talk it out.
Talk it out, y'all.
***
Next week: Pivot Point, light YA sci-fi by Kasie West.
November 26, 2016
Dive into the Trade Paperbacks
I won the Goodreads challenge of reading 50 books this year, and I've read enough to post reviews for the rest of the year, so I'm going to spend the next little bit reading comic books.
Here's what's on the reading list and an honest account of what I know about them going in:
Here's what's on the reading list and an honest account of what I know about them going in:
- Saga- Two aliens from different races are in love despite how their people are at war. They have a biracial baby, who she breastfeeds like it ain't no thing. I approve!
- All New Wolverine- Hugh Jackman-esque Wolverine was cloned, but his DNA got goofed up. More specifically, his Y chromosome got goofed up, and the mad scientists responsible said, "Pft. Whatever," and just duplicated his X chromosome. All New Wolverine is just like Hugh Jackman Wolverine, only female. She kicks ass and takes names and hangs out with one of her preteen clone sisters and an actual wolverine named Johnathan.
- Journey into Mystery- Loki was deaged or reincarnated or something. When Thor finds him, he's a teenager with no memory of his evilness, but everyone else is like, "Loki's evil. Get rid of him." And Thor's like, "No! He's my brother and now he's adorable!" Loki has a tumblr.
- Sex Criminals- When some people reach orgasm, time stands still. They use this skill to rob banks. There's important discussion about the guilt and confusion and fear involved in sexual awakening. But mostly there are dick jokes.
- Sandman- There's a magic guy who controls dreams. Hijinks ensue? We only have the fist volume, so I will need to get more from the library.
November 22, 2016
Across the Universe Review
This week's novel is Across the Universe by Beth Revis.
A friend of mine has mentioned this book several times, but--thinking she was talking about that movie where they covered a bunch of Beatles tunes and this was the novelization of that or something--I had no interest in it at all. I apologize to everyone shaking their head at me now, and I admit I was very wrong.
When her parents volunteer to be cryognically frozen for 300 years and wake up on a new planet, Amy decides to be frozen along with them instead of living without them. However, someone wakes her up early, and she finds that the people who stayed awake during the voyage and formed a generational ship have also formed a little dystopia full of secrets and lies. She uncovers the ship's many secrets with Elder, the teenage boy destined to be the ship's next leader.
This book has all the dystopian tropes. All of them. And they are all Plot Twists.
What happens to the old people who go up the the fourth floor when they get too old and then are never heard from again?
You're right! That's what happens.
Several things crop up, where my first response is "that's not how science works." Like how the engine runs on uranium, and it's all all good because once they use the uranium, they can re-enrich it back into usable uranium. "That's not how uranium works," I say, and assume that the author is taking liberties with radiation because no one ever bothers to understand radiation. But then, it turns out I was right. That's not how uranium works and the engine is losing efficiency*. What you've been told is a lie! Plot Twist!
In retrospect, this is actually a clever use of the genre. The story used my expectation and my underestimation to hide twists in plain sight. It made pseudo-plot-twists where I saw them coming but then second guessed myself and then was surprised.
The novel says some pretty uncomfortable things about race and mental illness. The leader of the ship insists that "The first cause of discord is difference" and therefore everyone on board is "mono-ethnic."** When Amy shows up, she's simultaneously feared, reviled, and fetishized. Her differences cause disruption and the leader is proved to be right. There's of course a lot more to it than that, but it all keeps getting simplified down to how she has different colored hair than everyone else.
Then there is a perpetuation of the stigma that it's shameful to take drugs for mental illness, then the idea that if you're mentally ill you're inherently different from normal people and will never be like them, and then to top it all off there's the favorite "I'm not crazy, everyone else is crazy, and they're keeping all the not crazy people in a mental hospital."
I did like the description of the freezing process. It's terrifying and gripping, and it was a great start. The story just didn't maintain that level of excitement.
Let's end this review with this quote, which can give you an idea of what this book is like: cliché and cringe worthy.
*Still wrong about inertia tho
**Really? That's weird. How did they manage that? They say it's because over generations they all melded together into one race, but could that really happen on this time scale? Did they start out only sending one ethnicity into space? Did they kill everybody else? Maybe it's a Plot Twist!
***
Next week: The Unexpected Everything, contemporary YA by Morgan Matson.
A friend of mine has mentioned this book several times, but--thinking she was talking about that movie where they covered a bunch of Beatles tunes and this was the novelization of that or something--I had no interest in it at all. I apologize to everyone shaking their head at me now, and I admit I was very wrong.
When her parents volunteer to be cryognically frozen for 300 years and wake up on a new planet, Amy decides to be frozen along with them instead of living without them. However, someone wakes her up early, and she finds that the people who stayed awake during the voyage and formed a generational ship have also formed a little dystopia full of secrets and lies. She uncovers the ship's many secrets with Elder, the teenage boy destined to be the ship's next leader.
This book has all the dystopian tropes. All of them. And they are all Plot Twists.
What happens to the old people who go up the the fourth floor when they get too old and then are never heard from again?
You're right! That's what happens.
Several things crop up, where my first response is "that's not how science works." Like how the engine runs on uranium, and it's all all good because once they use the uranium, they can re-enrich it back into usable uranium. "That's not how uranium works," I say, and assume that the author is taking liberties with radiation because no one ever bothers to understand radiation. But then, it turns out I was right. That's not how uranium works and the engine is losing efficiency*. What you've been told is a lie! Plot Twist!
In retrospect, this is actually a clever use of the genre. The story used my expectation and my underestimation to hide twists in plain sight. It made pseudo-plot-twists where I saw them coming but then second guessed myself and then was surprised.
The novel says some pretty uncomfortable things about race and mental illness. The leader of the ship insists that "The first cause of discord is difference" and therefore everyone on board is "mono-ethnic."** When Amy shows up, she's simultaneously feared, reviled, and fetishized. Her differences cause disruption and the leader is proved to be right. There's of course a lot more to it than that, but it all keeps getting simplified down to how she has different colored hair than everyone else.
Then there is a perpetuation of the stigma that it's shameful to take drugs for mental illness, then the idea that if you're mentally ill you're inherently different from normal people and will never be like them, and then to top it all off there's the favorite "I'm not crazy, everyone else is crazy, and they're keeping all the not crazy people in a mental hospital."
I did like the description of the freezing process. It's terrifying and gripping, and it was a great start. The story just didn't maintain that level of excitement.
Let's end this review with this quote, which can give you an idea of what this book is like: cliché and cringe worthy.
"He doesn't like 'disturbances,'" I tell Amy. "He doesn't like anyone to be different at all. Difference, he says, is the first cause of discord."
"He sounds like a regular Hitler to me," Amy mutters. I wonder what she means by that. Eldest has always taught me that Hitler was a wise, cultured leader for his people. Maybe that's what she means: Eldest is a strong leader, like Hitler was. The turn of phrase is unusual, another difference between us, another difference I'm sure Eldest would hate.
*Still wrong about inertia tho
**Really? That's weird. How did they manage that? They say it's because over generations they all melded together into one race, but could that really happen on this time scale? Did they start out only sending one ethnicity into space? Did they kill everybody else? Maybe it's a Plot Twist!
***
Next week: The Unexpected Everything, contemporary YA by Morgan Matson.
November 17, 2016
NaNo: week ???
It is a complete failure on my part that I've yet to tell you about my exciting National Novel Writing Month project.
There's a challenge out there called The 30 Day Monster Girl Challenge. It's an art challenge with a list of thirty kinds of monsters, and the challenge is to draw a different monster girl every day for thirty days. I'm doing this challenge a bit differently, and I'm writing a short story about a different monster girl every day for thirty days. I did change the list a little bit because the last handful of days don't specify a particular monster, so I've replaced those with monsters from The 30 Day Monster Girl Challenge 2. This also means that for the first time (excluding Camp NaNos) I'm going full rebel and not writing part of a first draft of a novel, but rather first drafts of short stories.
I have many reasons for this, and I hope to get a few things out of it:
However!
You may notice that I am amazingly far behind on this project. It's embarrassing. The reason is that the last month has hit me with blow after blow, and I've yet to be able to recover before it smacks me down again. I started off November in the hospital, where I stayed for a few days when I had big plans to get a tumblr up and running to do a daily blog of my progress and possibly post the stories as I went along. I also had plans to make myself (for lack of a better term) a NaNo advent calendar: a new, brief, funny thing about writing every day for motivation. Alas! There's always next year.
When I got out of the hospital, my family ganged up on me to make me nap instead of write. This is a real thing that happened. The month continued on, being rude to me, until finally (and I've had it, so it is finally, or so help me God) Lennard Cohen died, and as well as I'd been holding it together, that was the last straw and I turned into a blubbering ball of tears.
Come on, life. I'm already down. Stop kicking me.
In terms of NaNo, I'm likening it to a marathon. Let's say I trained for a marathon and I was in great shape, then suddenly broke my leg. The cast came off the day before the race and I was technically all healed up, but when I went to go run, I mostly hobbled along, winded and sweaty, chanting, "No, no, I got this. I got this. I got this."
I've also let the blog get away from me, if you hadn't noticed. I've eaten up all the book reviews that I'd written ahead of time and scheduled to go up. So I have a plan now to every day do some work on the blog and write 500 words of my NaNo project until I build up my endurance and get the blog under control and can write 1,000 words a day of my NaNo project. Then when December starts, I'm going to pretend it's my own personal NaNo (Solitary Novel Writing Month, or SoNo) and buckle down and fly.
It's a bummer missing out on all the community and enthusiasm of real NaNo, but on the scale of things that have been bummers this month, it's pretty low.
There's a challenge out there called The 30 Day Monster Girl Challenge. It's an art challenge with a list of thirty kinds of monsters, and the challenge is to draw a different monster girl every day for thirty days. I'm doing this challenge a bit differently, and I'm writing a short story about a different monster girl every day for thirty days. I did change the list a little bit because the last handful of days don't specify a particular monster, so I've replaced those with monsters from The 30 Day Monster Girl Challenge 2. This also means that for the first time (excluding Camp NaNos) I'm going full rebel and not writing part of a first draft of a novel, but rather first drafts of short stories.
I have many reasons for this, and I hope to get a few things out of it:
- Plotting. Although world building and characterization come easily to me, plotting is and always has been a weak point. I want to force myself to write stories with a beginning, middle, and end for practice and to make myself feel better about my abilities.
- Back to writing as opposed to editing. Sometimes I'm in the mood to edit. Right now is not that time. It's been so long since I just wrote something new and it's freeing.
- Back to short story beginnings. The Firebird story was an experiment for me. It's about six story ideas mushed together and it's not how I usually go about writing a novel. All but one of my novel length stories have started as short stories that I later expanded into a novel, either making the short story the first chapter or using the structure of the short story as an outline. I want to go back to this tried and true method in hopes that
- One of the stories will spark something in me and become my next novel length project.
- Back to writing as opposed to editing
However!
You may notice that I am amazingly far behind on this project. It's embarrassing. The reason is that the last month has hit me with blow after blow, and I've yet to be able to recover before it smacks me down again. I started off November in the hospital, where I stayed for a few days when I had big plans to get a tumblr up and running to do a daily blog of my progress and possibly post the stories as I went along. I also had plans to make myself (for lack of a better term) a NaNo advent calendar: a new, brief, funny thing about writing every day for motivation. Alas! There's always next year.
When I got out of the hospital, my family ganged up on me to make me nap instead of write. This is a real thing that happened. The month continued on, being rude to me, until finally (and I've had it, so it is finally, or so help me God) Lennard Cohen died, and as well as I'd been holding it together, that was the last straw and I turned into a blubbering ball of tears.
Come on, life. I'm already down. Stop kicking me.
In terms of NaNo, I'm likening it to a marathon. Let's say I trained for a marathon and I was in great shape, then suddenly broke my leg. The cast came off the day before the race and I was technically all healed up, but when I went to go run, I mostly hobbled along, winded and sweaty, chanting, "No, no, I got this. I got this. I got this."
I've also let the blog get away from me, if you hadn't noticed. I've eaten up all the book reviews that I'd written ahead of time and scheduled to go up. So I have a plan now to every day do some work on the blog and write 500 words of my NaNo project until I build up my endurance and get the blog under control and can write 1,000 words a day of my NaNo project. Then when December starts, I'm going to pretend it's my own personal NaNo (Solitary Novel Writing Month, or SoNo) and buckle down and fly.
It's a bummer missing out on all the community and enthusiasm of real NaNo, but on the scale of things that have been bummers this month, it's pretty low.
November 15, 2016
The Paper Magician Review
This week's novel is The Paper Magician, YA fantasy by Charlie N. Holmberg.
Upon graduating top of her class from magic school, instead of going on to bewitch metal to make firearms as she'd dreamed, Ceony is ordered to become a magician who bewitches paper, because the country only has a handful of Folders left. Ceony moves in with Thane, her new teacher and master Folder, and learns that paper magic is more than just decorative. She can animate paper craft an origami animals, make ghost images of stories written on paper, and make cold confetti snow. When Thane is attacked by someone who bewitches human flesh, Ceony goes on an adventure to save him, taking her on a dreamlike trip through his heart.
Honesty hour: I read this because the animated paper craft sounded similar to something in the Firebird story and I wanted to check it out. It turns out that there's a moment where the two stories both have a paper craft dog. I went "Well, crap," and added it to evidence that I should abandon my story. But while visually, the dogs may be similar, the magic works differently and the dogs emphasize such different things and function so differently that I decided it wasn't so bad. Everything under the sun has already been done, and I'm sure that there are at least a dozen other magic paper dogs out there, so I'm not going to let it get me down.
As for the book itself, I found the whimsy charming. The imagery was delightful, especially the origami fish that swam through the air or the paper airplane that can carry a passenger while not looking any more complicated than a standard paper airplane.
The journey through the heart is strange, especially since the book starts slow, gets moving abruptly, and then bends what's real and what's figurative. I was reminded of the dream logic in Inception, complete with malevolent ex-wife and "we need to keep going!" attitude. I may have made several foghorn noises while reading. But under this drama, there's still something sweet about traveling through someone's heart and seeing their hopes and fears.
I did not buy the romance, and I'm a bit skeeved out by it. Teacher/student romantic relationships generally make me uncomfortable, especially in this case were the power dynamics are so horribly lopsided. In addition to that, they scarcely interact outside their teacher/student relationship, except for when Ceony tromps about in Thane's heart and learns all his deep, dark secrets. Her deciding that she loves him comes out of nowhere, and Thane just seems kind of amused by her obvious crush on him. I feel like if she ever addressed it directly, he would not be down with it and would try to let her down easy, but as long as she keeps her crush to herself and acts like a grownup he can ignore her so she can save face.
I know I'm wrong about that extrapolation. And I know there are two more books in this series that probably prove me wrong in ways that cannot be disputed, but I'm going to pretend.
***
Next week: Across the Universe, YA sci-fi with all the dystopia tropes in space, by Beth Revis.
Upon graduating top of her class from magic school, instead of going on to bewitch metal to make firearms as she'd dreamed, Ceony is ordered to become a magician who bewitches paper, because the country only has a handful of Folders left. Ceony moves in with Thane, her new teacher and master Folder, and learns that paper magic is more than just decorative. She can animate paper craft an origami animals, make ghost images of stories written on paper, and make cold confetti snow. When Thane is attacked by someone who bewitches human flesh, Ceony goes on an adventure to save him, taking her on a dreamlike trip through his heart.
Honesty hour: I read this because the animated paper craft sounded similar to something in the Firebird story and I wanted to check it out. It turns out that there's a moment where the two stories both have a paper craft dog. I went "Well, crap," and added it to evidence that I should abandon my story. But while visually, the dogs may be similar, the magic works differently and the dogs emphasize such different things and function so differently that I decided it wasn't so bad. Everything under the sun has already been done, and I'm sure that there are at least a dozen other magic paper dogs out there, so I'm not going to let it get me down.
As for the book itself, I found the whimsy charming. The imagery was delightful, especially the origami fish that swam through the air or the paper airplane that can carry a passenger while not looking any more complicated than a standard paper airplane.
The journey through the heart is strange, especially since the book starts slow, gets moving abruptly, and then bends what's real and what's figurative. I was reminded of the dream logic in Inception, complete with malevolent ex-wife and "we need to keep going!" attitude. I may have made several foghorn noises while reading. But under this drama, there's still something sweet about traveling through someone's heart and seeing their hopes and fears.
I did not buy the romance, and I'm a bit skeeved out by it. Teacher/student romantic relationships generally make me uncomfortable, especially in this case were the power dynamics are so horribly lopsided. In addition to that, they scarcely interact outside their teacher/student relationship, except for when Ceony tromps about in Thane's heart and learns all his deep, dark secrets. Her deciding that she loves him comes out of nowhere, and Thane just seems kind of amused by her obvious crush on him. I feel like if she ever addressed it directly, he would not be down with it and would try to let her down easy, but as long as she keeps her crush to herself and acts like a grownup he can ignore her so she can save face.
I know I'm wrong about that extrapolation. And I know there are two more books in this series that probably prove me wrong in ways that cannot be disputed, but I'm going to pretend.
***
Next week: Across the Universe, YA sci-fi with all the dystopia tropes in space, by Beth Revis.
November 8, 2016
The Magician King Review
This week's novel is The Magician King, the sequel to The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Maybe I should have stuck with The Magicians.
Quentin, now a king of Fillory just like he's always dreamed of, is bored with having everything he's always dreamed of and is itching for a quest. He sets sail to find the golden keys and save all magic, but it still doesn't satisfy his need for adventure. Meanwhile, we learn about Julia's struggles after she was denied entrance at Breakbills. Her life falls apart under her obsession with magic until she finds an underground magical society.
I have two issues with this book, and when they're juxtaposed, they make each other worse.
First is the story's portrayal of women. This didn't bother me in the first book, because it was all from Quentin's point of view and therefore Quentin was sexist rather than the narrative or the author being sexist. In this book, the perspectives are split between Quentin in the present, and Julia in the past. Also, in the first book, the three female characters fit into the tropes of "demure and will sleep with Quentin," "screechy and will sleep with Quentin," and "aloof and won't sleep with Quentin," but it wasn't obvious that those were the only categories of female characters we were going to get. When new female characters in this book started slotting into those roles, and when the "will/won't sleep with Quentin" issue became a bigger, more direct focus, this became more obvious.
I was nearing the end of the novel, thinking about how I would have to write the previous paragraph of this blog post when WHAM! Sexual assault! Until that point the violence and sex had been pretty tame, especially in comparison to the first book. This was out of nowhere. It was graphic.
"But Julia can't be a strong character unless she has overcome sexual assault! It makes her stronger! Right? Right?" Ugg. This is such a dude-bro trope and I hate it hate it hate it.
And this horror show happens right along side my second complaint: that Quentin's journey, his problem that he needs to overcome is his perpetual angsting that his quest isn't questy enough. His life is so hard.
In a way I can see it, because as a reader his quest doesn't do it for me. It's random and anticlimactic. The search for the golden keys is more along the lines of wandering around until they stumble on them through luck or fate or what have you. The stakes--that magic will disappear from the multiverse--never feel dire or urgent, and the exciting part of the endeavor to save magic happens elsewhere. In fact, finding most of the keys happens off screen. And in the end, when Quinten uses the keys to unlock the door, he has to ask if it worked because he can't tell, and an omnipotent side character has to tell him yes, it worked.
Was that a spoiler? I don't care.
It's purposefully reminiscent of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but the whimsy of the Narnia books preserved in Fillory and the structure of the quest doesn't work with the tone of Quentin's woeful superiority complex or Julia's dark and edgy flashbacks.
I do like Julia's online depression support group, which requires prospective members to follow a long series of clues and puzzles before they can join. I also like the underground magicians, how they have day jobs and can focus their studies as much or as little as they want.
The various strands of the story do click together in the end, but not nearly as neatly or intricately as in the first book. In fact this makes the first book look all the more impressive.
It was a disappointment with moments of rage.
***
Quentin, now a king of Fillory just like he's always dreamed of, is bored with having everything he's always dreamed of and is itching for a quest. He sets sail to find the golden keys and save all magic, but it still doesn't satisfy his need for adventure. Meanwhile, we learn about Julia's struggles after she was denied entrance at Breakbills. Her life falls apart under her obsession with magic until she finds an underground magical society.
I have two issues with this book, and when they're juxtaposed, they make each other worse.
First is the story's portrayal of women. This didn't bother me in the first book, because it was all from Quentin's point of view and therefore Quentin was sexist rather than the narrative or the author being sexist. In this book, the perspectives are split between Quentin in the present, and Julia in the past. Also, in the first book, the three female characters fit into the tropes of "demure and will sleep with Quentin," "screechy and will sleep with Quentin," and "aloof and won't sleep with Quentin," but it wasn't obvious that those were the only categories of female characters we were going to get. When new female characters in this book started slotting into those roles, and when the "will/won't sleep with Quentin" issue became a bigger, more direct focus, this became more obvious.
I was nearing the end of the novel, thinking about how I would have to write the previous paragraph of this blog post when WHAM! Sexual assault! Until that point the violence and sex had been pretty tame, especially in comparison to the first book. This was out of nowhere. It was graphic.
"But Julia can't be a strong character unless she has overcome sexual assault! It makes her stronger! Right? Right?" Ugg. This is such a dude-bro trope and I hate it hate it hate it.
And this horror show happens right along side my second complaint: that Quentin's journey, his problem that he needs to overcome is his perpetual angsting that his quest isn't questy enough. His life is so hard.
In a way I can see it, because as a reader his quest doesn't do it for me. It's random and anticlimactic. The search for the golden keys is more along the lines of wandering around until they stumble on them through luck or fate or what have you. The stakes--that magic will disappear from the multiverse--never feel dire or urgent, and the exciting part of the endeavor to save magic happens elsewhere. In fact, finding most of the keys happens off screen. And in the end, when Quinten uses the keys to unlock the door, he has to ask if it worked because he can't tell, and an omnipotent side character has to tell him yes, it worked.
Was that a spoiler? I don't care.
It's purposefully reminiscent of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but the whimsy of the Narnia books preserved in Fillory and the structure of the quest doesn't work with the tone of Quentin's woeful superiority complex or Julia's dark and edgy flashbacks.
I do like Julia's online depression support group, which requires prospective members to follow a long series of clues and puzzles before they can join. I also like the underground magicians, how they have day jobs and can focus their studies as much or as little as they want.
The various strands of the story do click together in the end, but not nearly as neatly or intricately as in the first book. In fact this makes the first book look all the more impressive.
It was a disappointment with moments of rage.
***
November 1, 2016
Weight of Feathers Review
This week's novel is The Weight of Feathers, fantasy with traveling circus acts and rival families, by Anna-Marie McLemore.
The Palomas are a Hispanic family of traveling performers, where the girls dress like mermaids and swim for an audience. The Corbeaus are a French-Romani family of traveling performers, who wear giant wings and do acrobatic stunts in tree branches for an audience. They hate each other. When they end up preforming in the same town, Lace Paloma ends up being unknowingly rushed to the hospital by Cluck Corbeau, and when her family finds out that a Corbeau touched her (to bring her to the hospital), she's banished from the family. Lace sets out to remove the curse she thinks Cluck cast over her so that she can return to her family.
The two cultures presented here are rich and deep. Not only does McLemore show cultural traditions that feel authentic and respectful, but she also shows generational differences within the families and cultural differences between those born into the families and those that married in. It gives both families a sense of place in a larger world.
I enjoyed the performances much more than I thought I would. I've talked before about how much atmospheric magic leaves me unfulfilled, but this framed the atmospheric aspect in a way I really liked. Yeah, people come and watch mermaids swim around and there's no big finale or show stopper or rising tension or anything, but this story describes it like watching fireworks. The applause comes and goes in bursts. This is relatable and understandable, and I buy it completely.
The love story was also nice and refreshing. It's a star-crossed lovers scenario with the addition that she knows they're from feuding families while he doesn't, so I was waiting for them to have a falling out when he inevitably discovered the truth or for her to back out at a crucial moment because what would her family think?? But that didn't happen. They weren't overly enraged or biased against each other, and at the same time they weren't ready to throw everything away for a fling. They were both reasonable, listening to each other and putting things in perspective. This is remarkable considering the feuding families trope and how unreasonable the other characters act.
Speaking of which, the families in this blow my mind with how unreasonable they are. The Paloma matriarch engages in what can only be described as gross victim blaming when she banishes Lace, and the rest of the family just goes along with it. Meanwhile, Cluck's mother treats him like dirt because he's left handed and has red feathers growing out of his head instead of normal black feathers growing out of his head like the rest of the family. It's cruel and insane. Love your children unconditionally, you jerks! I think this was supposed to emphasize how superstitious the families were, but it pushed it past the realm of believability, which says something when the characters have feathers and scales.
***
Next week: The Magician King, the sequel to The Magicians by Lev Grossman.
The Palomas are a Hispanic family of traveling performers, where the girls dress like mermaids and swim for an audience. The Corbeaus are a French-Romani family of traveling performers, who wear giant wings and do acrobatic stunts in tree branches for an audience. They hate each other. When they end up preforming in the same town, Lace Paloma ends up being unknowingly rushed to the hospital by Cluck Corbeau, and when her family finds out that a Corbeau touched her (to bring her to the hospital), she's banished from the family. Lace sets out to remove the curse she thinks Cluck cast over her so that she can return to her family.
The two cultures presented here are rich and deep. Not only does McLemore show cultural traditions that feel authentic and respectful, but she also shows generational differences within the families and cultural differences between those born into the families and those that married in. It gives both families a sense of place in a larger world.
I enjoyed the performances much more than I thought I would. I've talked before about how much atmospheric magic leaves me unfulfilled, but this framed the atmospheric aspect in a way I really liked. Yeah, people come and watch mermaids swim around and there's no big finale or show stopper or rising tension or anything, but this story describes it like watching fireworks. The applause comes and goes in bursts. This is relatable and understandable, and I buy it completely.
The love story was also nice and refreshing. It's a star-crossed lovers scenario with the addition that she knows they're from feuding families while he doesn't, so I was waiting for them to have a falling out when he inevitably discovered the truth or for her to back out at a crucial moment because what would her family think?? But that didn't happen. They weren't overly enraged or biased against each other, and at the same time they weren't ready to throw everything away for a fling. They were both reasonable, listening to each other and putting things in perspective. This is remarkable considering the feuding families trope and how unreasonable the other characters act.
Speaking of which, the families in this blow my mind with how unreasonable they are. The Paloma matriarch engages in what can only be described as gross victim blaming when she banishes Lace, and the rest of the family just goes along with it. Meanwhile, Cluck's mother treats him like dirt because he's left handed and has red feathers growing out of his head instead of normal black feathers growing out of his head like the rest of the family. It's cruel and insane. Love your children unconditionally, you jerks! I think this was supposed to emphasize how superstitious the families were, but it pushed it past the realm of believability, which says something when the characters have feathers and scales.
***
Next week: The Magician King, the sequel to The Magicians by Lev Grossman.
October 25, 2016
All of Us and Everything Review
This week's novel is All of Us and Everything, a quirky family drama by Bridget Asher.
The Rockwell girls were raised by their single mother, who always claimed that their father wasn't around because he was a spy. All grown up, Esme's husband just left her and her teenage daughter, Atty, for a French dentist, and since he worked at a private boarding school, Esme loses her faculty apartment and Atty loses her spot at school. Liv just got out of rehab, and decides to find a new husband by browsing the engagement announcements and poaching. Ru ran away to Vietnam in hopes of sparking an idea for her second book after her first book, based on Liv's failed teenage romance, became a huge success. They all converge back home to discover that their father really was a spy, to make him pay reparations for his absence and his secret involvement in their lives, and to learn to be sisters again.
Omnipotent third person narration is used in this story, where the point of view shifts from a close third person narration focusing on Liv to one focusing on Esme to one focusing on Ru to one focusing on Esme again, sometimes in the span of a single page. Now, this is often used sloppily and gives me a sense of confusing vertigo, but here it worked because it emphasized themes and characterization from a fundamental level. The sisters are all self-involved in a "now let's talk about me" kind of way, and the bouncing perspective underscores that, making it feel like they're interrupting one another to refocus the story back on themselves. It also shows how little they know and understand one another. One character will guess at what another is thinking, then the perspective will switch and we'll see that they were completely wrong. It's even more interesting in that this technique fades out when they speak honestly with each other, the narration becoming a more distant third person.
The characters are all a bit bizarre, which in some cases is the only thing that makes them likable. But it does make them likable. And their strangeness and their quirks come from somewhere real, that is to say that given their backgrounds, their eccentricities make sense.
The thing I enjoyed the most was Atty's tweets, which are primarily used as comic relief. But they also show how Atty's on the outside of a lot of the drama and therefore able to have a running commentary.
Next week: The Weight of Feathers, fantasy with rival traveling circus acts, by Anna-Marie McLemore.
The Rockwell girls were raised by their single mother, who always claimed that their father wasn't around because he was a spy. All grown up, Esme's husband just left her and her teenage daughter, Atty, for a French dentist, and since he worked at a private boarding school, Esme loses her faculty apartment and Atty loses her spot at school. Liv just got out of rehab, and decides to find a new husband by browsing the engagement announcements and poaching. Ru ran away to Vietnam in hopes of sparking an idea for her second book after her first book, based on Liv's failed teenage romance, became a huge success. They all converge back home to discover that their father really was a spy, to make him pay reparations for his absence and his secret involvement in their lives, and to learn to be sisters again.
Omnipotent third person narration is used in this story, where the point of view shifts from a close third person narration focusing on Liv to one focusing on Esme to one focusing on Ru to one focusing on Esme again, sometimes in the span of a single page. Now, this is often used sloppily and gives me a sense of confusing vertigo, but here it worked because it emphasized themes and characterization from a fundamental level. The sisters are all self-involved in a "now let's talk about me" kind of way, and the bouncing perspective underscores that, making it feel like they're interrupting one another to refocus the story back on themselves. It also shows how little they know and understand one another. One character will guess at what another is thinking, then the perspective will switch and we'll see that they were completely wrong. It's even more interesting in that this technique fades out when they speak honestly with each other, the narration becoming a more distant third person.
The characters are all a bit bizarre, which in some cases is the only thing that makes them likable. But it does make them likable. And their strangeness and their quirks come from somewhere real, that is to say that given their backgrounds, their eccentricities make sense.
The thing I enjoyed the most was Atty's tweets, which are primarily used as comic relief. But they also show how Atty's on the outside of a lot of the drama and therefore able to have a running commentary.
Teddy quickly turned to Liv. "What are you up to these days?"***
"I'm trying to perfect my Zen." She said it so seriously that Ru laughed, thinking she was going for deadpan.
"What's funny about that?" Liv asked Ru.
"That was the laughter of joy," Ru said quickly.
Liv's eyes flicked around the table, as if she dared anyone else to mock her Zen.
No one did. It was quiet a moment. Atty Instagrammed her plate of food, and as if that were some kind of prayer, they all began to eat.
Next week: The Weight of Feathers, fantasy with rival traveling circus acts, by Anna-Marie McLemore.
October 18, 2016
Every Heart a Doorway Review
This week's novella is Every Heart a Doorway, post-portal-fantasy by Seanan McGuire.
Children disappear into other realms, sometimes they're gone for years, sometimes they spend years in another world and return just a moment after they left. Some worlds are fantastical, some horrifying. And when these children return changed an unable to adapt to the life they once had, they're sent to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, a boarding school that tells the children's parents that they'll help the children overcome their delusion, but where they tell the children that everything they experienced is real. They just need to learn to move on.
This is a collision between two concepts I really like: the "after the fairy tale" story and "these people need therapy." These kids come back and of course they're going to have problems. They've left the world where they felt they belonged behind and now they may never get back. No one believes them, and they don't relate to their lives or their parents. So I love that the Home for Wayward Children has group therapy after dinner, with people who believe them and help them work through their loss.
Way to be responsible, Home for Wayward Children!
I also love that the boarding school has standard academic classes (like math) in addition to electives about mapping the different worlds that people have gone to. And the different worlds are so varied and creative. We get snip-its of the children's adventures and each one could be its own novella. (In fact I think McGuire wrote some prequels.) The narrative spends very little time on these classes, because that would be dull, but they are acknowledged, and I appreciate that.
Way to be responsible again, Home for Wayward Children!
It's super short, so you should check it out.
***
Next week: All of Us and Everything, a quirky family drama by Bridget Asher.
Children disappear into other realms, sometimes they're gone for years, sometimes they spend years in another world and return just a moment after they left. Some worlds are fantastical, some horrifying. And when these children return changed an unable to adapt to the life they once had, they're sent to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, a boarding school that tells the children's parents that they'll help the children overcome their delusion, but where they tell the children that everything they experienced is real. They just need to learn to move on.
This is a collision between two concepts I really like: the "after the fairy tale" story and "these people need therapy." These kids come back and of course they're going to have problems. They've left the world where they felt they belonged behind and now they may never get back. No one believes them, and they don't relate to their lives or their parents. So I love that the Home for Wayward Children has group therapy after dinner, with people who believe them and help them work through their loss.
Way to be responsible, Home for Wayward Children!
I also love that the boarding school has standard academic classes (like math) in addition to electives about mapping the different worlds that people have gone to. And the different worlds are so varied and creative. We get snip-its of the children's adventures and each one could be its own novella. (In fact I think McGuire wrote some prequels.) The narrative spends very little time on these classes, because that would be dull, but they are acknowledged, and I appreciate that.
Way to be responsible again, Home for Wayward Children!
It's super short, so you should check it out.
***
Next week: All of Us and Everything, a quirky family drama by Bridget Asher.
October 15, 2016
My Critique Partner Saves the Day Again
I've been down about the Firebird story lately. I've been in the part of the creative cycle where everything is awful and pointless. I've been unenthusiastic about it and even less enthusiastic about working on it.
So This week I sent my critique partner and best friend for life an e-mail asking for a pep talk, and then asking if she'd read some of what I have and tell me if it was worth salvaging. Her response was extremely helpful and reignited my excitement for this project.
First, she pointed out what she liked and what was working, which helped me because I could focus on the good aspects. Then she pointed out some things that weren't working, all of which were easy changes--such easy changes that I was pumped to go and change them.
Then there was the problem she pointed out without knowing she'd pointed it out. On page five she says, "oh, well, they can just do X to fix this." X being, of course, the secret climax. OOPS! That won't work. So I figured that she had answered my question of whether this was salvageable.
Then I got to thinking: this wouldn't work with a secret climax. X needed to be overt and discussed by everyone, which means conflict would have to come from elsewhere and characters' motivations would have to change. Like if So-and-so was pushing for this, and What's-his-face wants to do that...Oh wait, that will totally work.
So!
This requires another rewrite. My plan at this point is to spend the next two weeks planning out the rewrite in excruciating detail, just figuring out exactly what needs to happen. Then I'll be able to step back from it, write a first draft of another project in November, then come back to the Firebird story without losing my place. That's the plan.
So This week I sent my critique partner and best friend for life an e-mail asking for a pep talk, and then asking if she'd read some of what I have and tell me if it was worth salvaging. Her response was extremely helpful and reignited my excitement for this project.
First, she pointed out what she liked and what was working, which helped me because I could focus on the good aspects. Then she pointed out some things that weren't working, all of which were easy changes--such easy changes that I was pumped to go and change them.
Then there was the problem she pointed out without knowing she'd pointed it out. On page five she says, "oh, well, they can just do X to fix this." X being, of course, the secret climax. OOPS! That won't work. So I figured that she had answered my question of whether this was salvageable.
Then I got to thinking: this wouldn't work with a secret climax. X needed to be overt and discussed by everyone, which means conflict would have to come from elsewhere and characters' motivations would have to change. Like if So-and-so was pushing for this, and What's-his-face wants to do that...Oh wait, that will totally work.
So!
This requires another rewrite. My plan at this point is to spend the next two weeks planning out the rewrite in excruciating detail, just figuring out exactly what needs to happen. Then I'll be able to step back from it, write a first draft of another project in November, then come back to the Firebird story without losing my place. That's the plan.
October 11, 2016
Where Futures End Review
This week's novel is Where Futures End, YA sci-fi by Parker Peevyhouse. This one was recommended to me by the Chicago Public Library in their list "Inspired by Bradbury: Teen Science Fiction."
In a series of interconnected short stories, this novel tells the history of Earth's connection to "the other place," an alternate dimension. It tells about first contact, how people came to accept that it was real, and the effect it and the people of the other place had on life on Earth.
Although this is sci-fi at heart, with an alternate dimension and aliens, it's presented with the traditional trappings of fantasy. In the first story, Dylan, the first person to go to the other place, is a child and thinks that he had an adventure in a portal fantasy. He names it "the other place" and talks about princesses and castles. He describes his powers of persuasion in terms of The Jabberwocky, his powers are his "vorpal" and they go "snicker-snack." The rest of the Earth picks up his vocabulary, and talks about the other place as if it's a realm of magic. The overlap between the two genres, and the edges where they don't quite overlap, where aliens admit that they're more science-fiction-y than they've led people to believe are really cool and an interesting twist on both genres (in that they didn't have to be twisted that much).
Each story has its own themes and ideas that I latched onto. Dylan uses his powers to impersonate his more popular older brother, and uses the disguise to attend classes at the private school from which he'd been expelled. Epony questions her public vs. her private persona and relates that back to the aliens, who can change their appearance and what people think of them just as Dylan can. Reef lives in a time where people swarm to Seattle to try to cross into the other place and people without strong vorpals (like Reef) are left behind, turning the city to a slum. In response, those left behind create a virtual game world overlayed on top of the city they can see (like Pokemon Go but more). It turns their slum into a fantasy world with gilded buildings, monsters, and quests. I would read a full novel about any of these. They each left me wanting more.
However, even though each story held together on its own, themes were dropped between stories and I'm not sure I buy the drastic social changes that took place between time periods. It was also a little preachy at times about global warming and social media use, but those were brief.
It was a fun read with a lot to chew on.
***
Next week: Every Heart a Doorway, post-portal fantasy by Seanan McGuire
In a series of interconnected short stories, this novel tells the history of Earth's connection to "the other place," an alternate dimension. It tells about first contact, how people came to accept that it was real, and the effect it and the people of the other place had on life on Earth.
Although this is sci-fi at heart, with an alternate dimension and aliens, it's presented with the traditional trappings of fantasy. In the first story, Dylan, the first person to go to the other place, is a child and thinks that he had an adventure in a portal fantasy. He names it "the other place" and talks about princesses and castles. He describes his powers of persuasion in terms of The Jabberwocky, his powers are his "vorpal" and they go "snicker-snack." The rest of the Earth picks up his vocabulary, and talks about the other place as if it's a realm of magic. The overlap between the two genres, and the edges where they don't quite overlap, where aliens admit that they're more science-fiction-y than they've led people to believe are really cool and an interesting twist on both genres (in that they didn't have to be twisted that much).
Each story has its own themes and ideas that I latched onto. Dylan uses his powers to impersonate his more popular older brother, and uses the disguise to attend classes at the private school from which he'd been expelled. Epony questions her public vs. her private persona and relates that back to the aliens, who can change their appearance and what people think of them just as Dylan can. Reef lives in a time where people swarm to Seattle to try to cross into the other place and people without strong vorpals (like Reef) are left behind, turning the city to a slum. In response, those left behind create a virtual game world overlayed on top of the city they can see (like Pokemon Go but more). It turns their slum into a fantasy world with gilded buildings, monsters, and quests. I would read a full novel about any of these. They each left me wanting more.
However, even though each story held together on its own, themes were dropped between stories and I'm not sure I buy the drastic social changes that took place between time periods. It was also a little preachy at times about global warming and social media use, but those were brief.
It was a fun read with a lot to chew on.
***
Next week: Every Heart a Doorway, post-portal fantasy by Seanan McGuire
October 8, 2016
Moon Rant
People get science things wrong. It happens. But sometimes they'll get a fact wrong, and something small explodes in my brain, and I have the need to explain gravity or radiation or government funding or lab safety. But the big one that gets me every time:
The Moon.
I don't want to be judgmental, but...well, I am. That's on me. I'm sorry that I'm judging you folks that are wrong about the Moon, because I know that people should not have ignorance held against them, especially over topics that have no bearing on anyone's life.
But it's there. Like right there. All the time. Has been your whole life.
The worst perpetrators are picture books and lullabies, which I've read and sung a lot of lately and I'm sure my son is tired of hearing about the Moon. So I'm going to tell you about the Moon, and when you go to write or illustrate a picture book, you can know how the Moon works.
1. The Moon is not only up at night.
There's this idea that I see constantly that Sun=day and Moon=night. The Sun being up does make it day, but the Moon part of this is bogus. The Moon is up all night only during the full moon, the rest of the month it rises later and later, rising at midnight and setting at noon for the waning quarter moon, rising in the morning and setting at night for the new moon, rising at noon and setting at midnight for the waxing quarter moon, then back to the full moon again.
People tend to think the Moon is up only at night because A) the Moon is fuller when it's in the part of its cycle that has it up during the night, and therefore it's brighter and easier to see, and B) just like the stars, it's harder to see the Moon during the day because the Sun is so bright.
So when in your story you have a fingernail sliver of Moon rising at midnight, my first thought is WHAT?! SOMETHING CATASTROPHIC HAS HAPPENED! The same with characters not being able to see at night because it's the new moon and the new moon doesn't give off any light. No, they don't have any light at the new moon because the Moon isn't up. Also, if you're going to have a sacrifice under the new moon, that's at noon.
2. The phases of the Moon are caused by its position relative to the Sun and Earth.
Not because the Earth is throwing its shadow across the Moon. That's called a lunar eclipse and it looks very different. Related to that, a total lunar eclipse can only happen at the full moon and a solar eclipse can only happen at the new moon. If your story has a solar eclipse with a crescent moon, there is something HORRIBLY WRONG because in order for that to happen a second sun would have had to appeared.
The phases of the Moon depend on where the Sun, Earth, and Moon are in space.
Half of the Moon's surface is always illuminated. That's the side that is facing the Sun, while the side not facing the Sun will not be lit up. This is not to be confused with the "dark side of the Moon", which is the side of the Moon that does not face the Earth (The same side of the Moon always faces the Earth. It's cool), and we therefore can't see it from here, making it mysterious or "dark." This gets confusing because sometimes the dark side of the Moon is literally dark because it faces away from the Sun, and sometimes the dark side of the Moon is lit or partially lit because it faces or partially faces the Sun.
Note that no matter where the Moon is in its orbit, the side of the Moon facing the Sun is always lit and the side away from the Sun is dim. This is also true for the Earth, where the dark part is night and the light part is day.
The different Moons drawn here represent four different moments in the Moon's orbit around the Earth. (The Earth does not have four Moons, and the Moon makes a full orbit of the Earth about once a month.)
This shows how the Moon's position in space makes it look different for a person on the Earth. See their thought bubbles as they look up at the Moon? The Moon hasn't changed all that much, but a person's perspective of the Moon will change.
Now, looking at these diagrams, it seems like the Moon ought to go through all its phases every day, so why is it a quarter moon when it rises and still a quarter moon when it sets that night? That's because these diagrams are a bit misleading: the Moon orbits the Earth about once a month, while the Earth is in the middle there spinning, spinning, spinning away.
One day in the life of the Moon would look more like this:
Note that the Moon rises around noon and sets around midnight. Also note that that red stick person is going to see a quarter moon from every position where it's possible to see the Moon.
The Moon.
I don't want to be judgmental, but...well, I am. That's on me. I'm sorry that I'm judging you folks that are wrong about the Moon, because I know that people should not have ignorance held against them, especially over topics that have no bearing on anyone's life.
But it's there. Like right there. All the time. Has been your whole life.
The worst perpetrators are picture books and lullabies, which I've read and sung a lot of lately and I'm sure my son is tired of hearing about the Moon. So I'm going to tell you about the Moon, and when you go to write or illustrate a picture book, you can know how the Moon works.
1. The Moon is not only up at night.
There's this idea that I see constantly that Sun=day and Moon=night. The Sun being up does make it day, but the Moon part of this is bogus. The Moon is up all night only during the full moon, the rest of the month it rises later and later, rising at midnight and setting at noon for the waning quarter moon, rising in the morning and setting at night for the new moon, rising at noon and setting at midnight for the waxing quarter moon, then back to the full moon again.
 |
| Proof. The Moon during the day. Credit: David Jones |
So when in your story you have a fingernail sliver of Moon rising at midnight, my first thought is WHAT?! SOMETHING CATASTROPHIC HAS HAPPENED! The same with characters not being able to see at night because it's the new moon and the new moon doesn't give off any light. No, they don't have any light at the new moon because the Moon isn't up. Also, if you're going to have a sacrifice under the new moon, that's at noon.
2. The phases of the Moon are caused by its position relative to the Sun and Earth.
Not because the Earth is throwing its shadow across the Moon. That's called a lunar eclipse and it looks very different. Related to that, a total lunar eclipse can only happen at the full moon and a solar eclipse can only happen at the new moon. If your story has a solar eclipse with a crescent moon, there is something HORRIBLY WRONG because in order for that to happen a second sun would have had to appeared.
 |
| partial lunar eclipse. See how the shadow is not as definite as a crescent moon. ©bigstockphotophoto.com/hotshotsworldwide |
The phases of the Moon depend on where the Sun, Earth, and Moon are in space.
Half of the Moon's surface is always illuminated. That's the side that is facing the Sun, while the side not facing the Sun will not be lit up. This is not to be confused with the "dark side of the Moon", which is the side of the Moon that does not face the Earth (The same side of the Moon always faces the Earth. It's cool), and we therefore can't see it from here, making it mysterious or "dark." This gets confusing because sometimes the dark side of the Moon is literally dark because it faces away from the Sun, and sometimes the dark side of the Moon is lit or partially lit because it faces or partially faces the Sun.
Note that no matter where the Moon is in its orbit, the side of the Moon facing the Sun is always lit and the side away from the Sun is dim. This is also true for the Earth, where the dark part is night and the light part is day.
The different Moons drawn here represent four different moments in the Moon's orbit around the Earth. (The Earth does not have four Moons, and the Moon makes a full orbit of the Earth about once a month.)
This shows how the Moon's position in space makes it look different for a person on the Earth. See their thought bubbles as they look up at the Moon? The Moon hasn't changed all that much, but a person's perspective of the Moon will change.
Now, looking at these diagrams, it seems like the Moon ought to go through all its phases every day, so why is it a quarter moon when it rises and still a quarter moon when it sets that night? That's because these diagrams are a bit misleading: the Moon orbits the Earth about once a month, while the Earth is in the middle there spinning, spinning, spinning away.
One day in the life of the Moon would look more like this:
Note that the Moon rises around noon and sets around midnight. Also note that that red stick person is going to see a quarter moon from every position where it's possible to see the Moon.
October 4, 2016
The Brides of Rollrock Island
This week's novel is The Brides of Rollrock Island, selkie fantasy by Margo Lanagan.
This novel is a series of interconnected short stories, each from a different point of view and different point in time. Together, they cover the history of the rise and fall of the witch Misskaella's power and influence over the island. Her connection to the seals makes her an outcast and leads her family to mistreat her, so she strikes back by bringing a seal woman (a seal who sheds her skin and becomes a beautiful woman, who stays docile and submissive as long as she can't find her skin) to the island, who enchants everyone. Soon all the men of the island come to Misskaella for a seal wife and all the women of the island leave for the mainland. Only seal women, their husbands, sons, and Misskaella remain, making the sons' views of how the world works weirdly skewed.
I really liked how the magical weirdness permeated every aspect of the society on the island. When all the wives are seal women, all the meals on the island becomes more seal like. For instance, the wives cook "sea hearts," which are a kind of gross smelling thing in a shell that the boys have to collect. The boys associate red hair with men and black hair with women, they've never seen girls their own age and (on rare trips to the mainland) have even less understanding of how to talk to them than normal boys. The affect the seals have on the island also changes over time. In Misskaella's childhood, people had prejudices against families that had seal blood from long ago. The wives change from family shame to secret obsession to common place to shame again. It's quality world building: one change that affects everything in organic, mailable ways.
The short stories get at the situation from every angle: the sons watching their mothers' sadness without understanding, the men who seem reasonable until they're bewitched, the witch and her depressing motives (I cried), the human wives whose husbands abandon them for seal women, the human women from the mainland who think the island is unnatural. So you get to see it from several angles, most of which are sympathetic. But the glaring omission is that we don't get to hear from the seal women, who are essentially held captive. On the one hand, it's kind of neat that we don't get a chapter from their perspective because it maintains the alien qualities of their seal-ness. Maybe they don't think in ways that would translate to a chapter. But on the other hand, it feeds into the poor treatment of women at the heart of the book. The seal women aren't given a voice even in a book about them. Don't get me wrong, I don't think this sexism on the part of the author, but it's rather the author showing sexism in order to talk about it.
***
Next week: Where Futures End, YA sci-fi (or is it fantasy?) by Parker Peevyhouse
This novel is a series of interconnected short stories, each from a different point of view and different point in time. Together, they cover the history of the rise and fall of the witch Misskaella's power and influence over the island. Her connection to the seals makes her an outcast and leads her family to mistreat her, so she strikes back by bringing a seal woman (a seal who sheds her skin and becomes a beautiful woman, who stays docile and submissive as long as she can't find her skin) to the island, who enchants everyone. Soon all the men of the island come to Misskaella for a seal wife and all the women of the island leave for the mainland. Only seal women, their husbands, sons, and Misskaella remain, making the sons' views of how the world works weirdly skewed.
I really liked how the magical weirdness permeated every aspect of the society on the island. When all the wives are seal women, all the meals on the island becomes more seal like. For instance, the wives cook "sea hearts," which are a kind of gross smelling thing in a shell that the boys have to collect. The boys associate red hair with men and black hair with women, they've never seen girls their own age and (on rare trips to the mainland) have even less understanding of how to talk to them than normal boys. The affect the seals have on the island also changes over time. In Misskaella's childhood, people had prejudices against families that had seal blood from long ago. The wives change from family shame to secret obsession to common place to shame again. It's quality world building: one change that affects everything in organic, mailable ways.
The short stories get at the situation from every angle: the sons watching their mothers' sadness without understanding, the men who seem reasonable until they're bewitched, the witch and her depressing motives (I cried), the human wives whose husbands abandon them for seal women, the human women from the mainland who think the island is unnatural. So you get to see it from several angles, most of which are sympathetic. But the glaring omission is that we don't get to hear from the seal women, who are essentially held captive. On the one hand, it's kind of neat that we don't get a chapter from their perspective because it maintains the alien qualities of their seal-ness. Maybe they don't think in ways that would translate to a chapter. But on the other hand, it feeds into the poor treatment of women at the heart of the book. The seal women aren't given a voice even in a book about them. Don't get me wrong, I don't think this sexism on the part of the author, but it's rather the author showing sexism in order to talk about it.
***
Next week: Where Futures End, YA sci-fi (or is it fantasy?) by Parker Peevyhouse
September 27, 2016
We Were Liars Review
This week's novel is We Were Liars, contemporary YA by E. Lockhart.
Two years ago, Cadence was in an accident on her family's private island, where they vacation every summer. The accident left her with debilitating migraines and brain damage. But this summer, she's back on the island with her tight-knit cousins (called "the liars"), determined to figure out what caused her accident.
I loved the writing in this. Every so often, there would be carriage returns, turning the prose into verse with a lovely cadence. Then there would be bits like this:
But now comes the tricky part. Aside from its lovely language, (and "aww, you're so rich and privileged, that's so hard for you *pouty face*") I'm not sure how to talk about this book, because I think the summary on Goodreads did me a horrible disservice. It's hard to talk about this disservice without doing the same disservice to you, so I'm going to put my rant behind a cut and tell you that if you're interested in this book, you should go read it without Goodreads ruining it for you.
Next week: The Brides of Rollrock Island, depressing selkie fantasy by Margo Lanagan
Two years ago, Cadence was in an accident on her family's private island, where they vacation every summer. The accident left her with debilitating migraines and brain damage. But this summer, she's back on the island with her tight-knit cousins (called "the liars"), determined to figure out what caused her accident.
I loved the writing in this. Every so often, there would be carriage returns, turning the prose into verse with a lovely cadence. Then there would be bits like this:
He had hired moving vans already. He'd rented a house, too. My father put a last suitcase into the backseat of the Mercedes (he was leaving Mummy with only the Saab), and started the engine.Wow!
Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,
then from my eyes,
my ears,
my mouth.
It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps to the porch. My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.
Mummy snapped. She said to get hold of myself.
Be normal, now, she said. Right now, she said.
Because you are. Because you can be.
But now comes the tricky part. Aside from its lovely language, (and "aww, you're so rich and privileged, that's so hard for you *pouty face*") I'm not sure how to talk about this book, because I think the summary on Goodreads did me a horrible disservice. It's hard to talk about this disservice without doing the same disservice to you, so I'm going to put my rant behind a cut and tell you that if you're interested in this book, you should go read it without Goodreads ruining it for you.
Next week: The Brides of Rollrock Island, depressing selkie fantasy by Margo Lanagan
September 24, 2016
Firebird Mix Tape
I belong to the school of thought that mix tapes are very important. I used to make actual cassette tapes by rummaging through my parents' and friends' tapes and CDs and calling into radio stations and requesting deep cuts, then sitting by my stereo and waiting.
My latest tape is for the Firebird story. Lately I've been working on switching between not-writing-brain and writing-brain and making that transition time between them as small as possible. I don't have a lot of time and I need to make the most of it.
So this is what I've been playing to get in the right mindset. There's some overlap with my Necromancer mix tape, which makes sense since the Necromancer story was eaten by the Firebird story.
Listen Here!
*I'm using a live version that is not on YouTube
My latest tape is for the Firebird story. Lately I've been working on switching between not-writing-brain and writing-brain and making that transition time between them as small as possible. I don't have a lot of time and I need to make the most of it.
So this is what I've been playing to get in the right mindset. There's some overlap with my Necromancer mix tape, which makes sense since the Necromancer story was eaten by the Firebird story.
Listen Here!
1. What She Came For -- Franz Ferdinand
2. Gravedigger -- Dave Mathews Band*
3. Put Your Lights on -- Santana
4. My Mathematical Mind -- Spoon
5. If I Wanted Someone -- Dawes
6. 24 Frames -- Jason Isbell
7. Hurt -- Johnny Cash
8. Just Like Heaven --The Cure
9. Things Happen -- Dawes
*I'm using a live version that is not on YouTube
September 20, 2016
Bone Gap Review
This week's novel is Bone Gap, fantasy set in Illinois and prominently featuring corn, by Laura Ruby. This one was on the magical realism recommendation list, which, if you haven't noticed, I'm slowly working my way through.
No one in Bone Gap believes Finn when he says he witnessed Roza's kidnapping. He can't describe the kidnapper except for the unnatural way he moved, and everyone assumes she left the small town like everyone always does. Finn spends the summer after Roza's disappearance getting to know Petey, the beekeeper's daughter; avoiding his brother, who's mourning Roza's absence; riding a magical black horse that shows up in his barn one night; and fearing the man who took Roza.
There is so much corn in this. It whispers to people, knowing too much in an eerie, almost sinister way.
Like corn in real life.
There's an awkwardness here, because in the first section of the book. The narration tells us that Finn is weird and the people in town know he's weird, but we get just Finn and Roza's point of view (and Roza is kidnapped and therefore not around, so she doesn't shed much light on the issue) and from inside Finn's head he seems to have his act together. He acts rationally, and the strange things he says seem more snarky that clueless. So it feels like the reader is being told something different than what they're shown, and it borders at times on frustrating.
But then we start getting some other points of view. And it starts to become clear that Finn's world view is skewed in ways that don't come through in a written medium. From Finn's view, he seems normal, and the reader doesn't get much hint that there's a problem. When the problem comes to light, it feels like a brilliant use of the written word, the style, and a fascinating manipulation of the reader's natural inclination to fill in gaps while at the same time Finn is filling in gaps. We see the world through his eyes and understand why he would never notice something was wrong.
All the themes here were fun--bees, corn, the night mare, some Orpheus and Persephone mythology-- but they never came together in a cohesive climax like I expected. They hint at each other, but never have a huge moment of connection or purpose. It bothered me that the corn never saved Roza or turned out to be evil or turned out to protect the town. It was just there, a kind of magical red herring. Maybe it bothers me because I really wanted the corn to be a focus, or maybe because the book set me up to expect there to be a purpose and I felt let down. Maybe it bothers me because I don't know what to think about this lack of purpose. Is it okay to have a neat idea in a story that doesn't support the main plot? Where do you draw the line between a detail that clutters the narrative and should get the axe in an edit vs one that sets scenery or tone or characterization?
Things to think on!
***
Next week: We Were Liars, contemporary YA on a private island with secrets of all sorts, by E. Lockhart.
No one in Bone Gap believes Finn when he says he witnessed Roza's kidnapping. He can't describe the kidnapper except for the unnatural way he moved, and everyone assumes she left the small town like everyone always does. Finn spends the summer after Roza's disappearance getting to know Petey, the beekeeper's daughter; avoiding his brother, who's mourning Roza's absence; riding a magical black horse that shows up in his barn one night; and fearing the man who took Roza.
There is so much corn in this. It whispers to people, knowing too much in an eerie, almost sinister way.
Like corn in real life.
There's an awkwardness here, because in the first section of the book. The narration tells us that Finn is weird and the people in town know he's weird, but we get just Finn and Roza's point of view (and Roza is kidnapped and therefore not around, so she doesn't shed much light on the issue) and from inside Finn's head he seems to have his act together. He acts rationally, and the strange things he says seem more snarky that clueless. So it feels like the reader is being told something different than what they're shown, and it borders at times on frustrating.
But then we start getting some other points of view. And it starts to become clear that Finn's world view is skewed in ways that don't come through in a written medium. From Finn's view, he seems normal, and the reader doesn't get much hint that there's a problem. When the problem comes to light, it feels like a brilliant use of the written word, the style, and a fascinating manipulation of the reader's natural inclination to fill in gaps while at the same time Finn is filling in gaps. We see the world through his eyes and understand why he would never notice something was wrong.
All the themes here were fun--bees, corn, the night mare, some Orpheus and Persephone mythology-- but they never came together in a cohesive climax like I expected. They hint at each other, but never have a huge moment of connection or purpose. It bothered me that the corn never saved Roza or turned out to be evil or turned out to protect the town. It was just there, a kind of magical red herring. Maybe it bothers me because I really wanted the corn to be a focus, or maybe because the book set me up to expect there to be a purpose and I felt let down. Maybe it bothers me because I don't know what to think about this lack of purpose. Is it okay to have a neat idea in a story that doesn't support the main plot? Where do you draw the line between a detail that clutters the narrative and should get the axe in an edit vs one that sets scenery or tone or characterization?
Things to think on!
***
Next week: We Were Liars, contemporary YA on a private island with secrets of all sorts, by E. Lockhart.
September 17, 2016
Mill's Mess
I'm researching juggling for the firebird novel. Here's a peek.
Mill's Mess
Not as fluid as I want it yet, but a good start.
Mill's Mess
Not as fluid as I want it yet, but a good start.
September 13, 2016
The Three-Body Problem Review
This week's novel is The Three-Body Problem, sci-fi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Liu Cixin.
In order to investigate a series of odd suicides in the scientific community, a mysterious government group convinces Wang Mia, a nanotech engineer, to join the Frontiers of Science, an elite group who philosophize about the nature of the universe. His investigation leads him into an apparently supernatural countdown, into a virtual reality game set on a world with three suns, and through the history of the Red Coast project (the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence). It all leads back to Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist, who witnessed her father's public torture and murder during the Cultural Revolution, an event that leads to the end of mankind.
This is some hard-core science fiction. It goes deep into the science, to the point where I started to worry that it would say something incorrect about the cosmic microwave background radiation and I would have to get irrationally upset and this post would be all about how angry I am about inaccuracies in the portrayal of black body radiation. Thankfully that didn't happen. In the book, the cosmic microwave background radiation does behave differently than it does in real life, but the line between the real science and the fictional stretch of that science is clear, and I appreciate that.
It tickles me that the book talks smack about COBE the way scientists talk smack about COBE. In fact, the portrayal of the culture around scientific research as a whole fits with my experiences, even given the difference in culture between China and the US.
Though the big thing that I like in this book is a point when Lui describes the radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and I got this chill of possibility. Yes. I could work at a radio telescope. That. I want to work for SETI. That's what I want to do with my life.
...
Oh wait.
Because, you see, first of all I'm an adult and second of all I tried doing that with my life and disliked it. But that feeling of opportunity, the excitement of exploration was familiar. It was the feeling I got looking at images from the Hubble or watching Contact for the first time. I haven't felt that feeling in a decade and that feeling alone would make me recommend this book.
There's an abundance of neat ideas here. Maybe too many, but they're all fun. Lui talks about science in the Cultural Revolution and what kind of political grammatical gymnastics they had to do to keep research alive. Lui talks about a system with three suns and all the different ways the suns can align themselves to destroy an orbiting planet. Lui talks about collapsing a proton into two dimensions and how a sentient proton could wreak havoc. Then there are the parables of the shooter and the farmer:
My skepticism comes, strangely, not from the misappropriation of science, but from the reactions of the characters. I'm skeptical of how many people would turn on the whole human race. Even though the book is set up that I completely believe that Ye would do it, I don't get the same level of background to explain the motivations of the background characters, so any understanding I have for her disappears for anyone else. I just can't buy it. I'm also skeptical that an alien society repeatedly destroyed--to the point where intelligent species have to evolve--would retain any history from previous cultures.
As a warning, this is translated from Chinese and you can tell. It's kind of like reading subtitles, complete with a bunch of "Do not misunderstand me"s. I found it amusing. The writing is definitely more focused on the science than on the prose.
***
Next week: Bone Gap, small town Illinois corn fantasy by Laura Ruby.
In order to investigate a series of odd suicides in the scientific community, a mysterious government group convinces Wang Mia, a nanotech engineer, to join the Frontiers of Science, an elite group who philosophize about the nature of the universe. His investigation leads him into an apparently supernatural countdown, into a virtual reality game set on a world with three suns, and through the history of the Red Coast project (the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence). It all leads back to Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist, who witnessed her father's public torture and murder during the Cultural Revolution, an event that leads to the end of mankind.
This is some hard-core science fiction. It goes deep into the science, to the point where I started to worry that it would say something incorrect about the cosmic microwave background radiation and I would have to get irrationally upset and this post would be all about how angry I am about inaccuracies in the portrayal of black body radiation. Thankfully that didn't happen. In the book, the cosmic microwave background radiation does behave differently than it does in real life, but the line between the real science and the fictional stretch of that science is clear, and I appreciate that.
It tickles me that the book talks smack about COBE the way scientists talk smack about COBE. In fact, the portrayal of the culture around scientific research as a whole fits with my experiences, even given the difference in culture between China and the US.
Though the big thing that I like in this book is a point when Lui describes the radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and I got this chill of possibility. Yes. I could work at a radio telescope. That. I want to work for SETI. That's what I want to do with my life.
...
Oh wait.
Because, you see, first of all I'm an adult and second of all I tried doing that with my life and disliked it. But that feeling of opportunity, the excitement of exploration was familiar. It was the feeling I got looking at images from the Hubble or watching Contact for the first time. I haven't felt that feeling in a decade and that feeling alone would make me recommend this book.
There's an abundance of neat ideas here. Maybe too many, but they're all fun. Lui talks about science in the Cultural Revolution and what kind of political grammatical gymnastics they had to do to keep research alive. Lui talks about a system with three suns and all the different ways the suns can align themselves to destroy an orbiting planet. Lui talks about collapsing a proton into two dimensions and how a sentient proton could wreak havoc. Then there are the parables of the shooter and the farmer:
In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: "There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters." They have mistaken the result of the marksman's momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe.I don't have much to add to these ideas, nothing to wax poetic about or relate in any meaningful way to other aspects of my life, but they're fun to chew on.
The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost over a year, makes the following discovery: "Every morning at eleven, food arrives." On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn't arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.
My skepticism comes, strangely, not from the misappropriation of science, but from the reactions of the characters. I'm skeptical of how many people would turn on the whole human race. Even though the book is set up that I completely believe that Ye would do it, I don't get the same level of background to explain the motivations of the background characters, so any understanding I have for her disappears for anyone else. I just can't buy it. I'm also skeptical that an alien society repeatedly destroyed--to the point where intelligent species have to evolve--would retain any history from previous cultures.
As a warning, this is translated from Chinese and you can tell. It's kind of like reading subtitles, complete with a bunch of "Do not misunderstand me"s. I found it amusing. The writing is definitely more focused on the science than on the prose.
***
Next week: Bone Gap, small town Illinois corn fantasy by Laura Ruby.
September 6, 2016
A Criminal Magic Review
This week's novel is A Criminal Magic, prohibition era fantasy by Lee Kelly.
Set in the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition has outlawed magic, meaning most magic shows and "shine" (an addictive drug created by magic) are controlled by mobsters. Joan tries to support her family by working as a performance sorcerer at the Red Den, a club owned by the Shaws. Gunn, who runs the Red Den has grand, vague plans about magic and reinvents the club into a grand immersive show every night, pushing his troupe of sorcerers to greater and greater heights. Alex is an undercover operative for the Feds who infiltrates the Shaws to figure out what Gunn is up to. Joan and Alex fall in love and begin to question their loyalties and how far they would go to protect what was important to them.
I enjoy the magic in this. Magic can do a great deal--create illusions, or produce objects, or create portals--but these things only last for a day. It's ephemeral, which works for creating a magic garden to hold a party, but causes problems when they try to distribute shine because in 24 hours it turns to water. It provides a good balance so the magic isn't too powerful.
Magic is often used to create scenery--beautiful and fantastical scenery, but still scenery. The most impressive immersive magic show that the troupe puts on at the Red Den is a sunrise. Now, I've seen some pretty great sunrises, but using magic to create something that doesn't have a finale or a surprise seems like a let down. I call this The Night Circus Problem: the magic is atmospheric, but leans more towards eerie than shocking. I also think about it in terms of lack of a Prestige (from The Prestige (and, yes, I know there's a book)). A magic trick has three parts: the pledge where you say you'll make a rabbit disappear, the turn where the rabbit disappears, and the prestige where the rabbit reappears. If you end the trick after the turn, the audience is left waiting, thinking, "But...where did the rabbit go?" Here I wondered, "Okay, the sun rose like they said. But...is the sun going to explode?" It felt incomplete, or like a waste of talent, especially here where a handful of their tricks have that finale moment. Joan makes feathers dance, then at the end turns them into a dove.
This is probably just me and my adolescent need for fireworks and glitter cannons.
The story is told from alternating points of view: one from Joan and then one from Alex. In the first few chapters, Alex digs my opinion of him into a hole by being a dipshit. He never climbs out of this hole. He continues to be a dipshit. What was interesting, was that when Joan interacts with him in her chapters, he doesn't seem like a dipshit. All his internal dialogue about his disdain for everyone and everything is stripped away, and besides that he's on his best behavior around Joan. A similar thing happens to Joan to a lesser degree. When she's shown through Alex's filter, all her self doubt is stripped away and the lengths she goes to to make herself the best she can be pay off since Alex doesn't pick up on any of it. Since the reader gets these two views that don't quite align, they pick up on the fact that the characters don't know each other that well way before the characters start to understand it.
The characters also don't describe themselves, but are described by the other point of view character. This delay in giving the description would usually bother me, but here it works because it made sense that neither character would feel the need to describe themselves. I never felt uninformed. What they looked like mattered more to the other character (because they're dreamy) than it did to them.
The plot is fun and exciting, with lying and scheming and evil plans and juggling who knows what. But a lot of it feels like really bad planning. Alex talks the mob boss into getting hooked on a drug that causes paranoia. Joan agrees to figure out how to do impossible magic that centuries of sorcerers have attempted by Wednesday, because she won't let you down. Even though the troupe is essential to his plans, Gunn works them so hard that they start talking of mutiny. And then there's Gunn's theory that seven sorcerers working together are more powerful than any one sorcerer working alone, and they have to trust each other and work together, a theory proven by the success of the troupe. But then he goes and forms rifts in the troupe by giving some members extra privileges. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. A lot of the characters shoot themselves in the foot in this.
But they don't shoot themselves with glitter cannons.
***
Next week: The Three-Body Problem, Sci-fi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Liu Cixin.
Set in the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition has outlawed magic, meaning most magic shows and "shine" (an addictive drug created by magic) are controlled by mobsters. Joan tries to support her family by working as a performance sorcerer at the Red Den, a club owned by the Shaws. Gunn, who runs the Red Den has grand, vague plans about magic and reinvents the club into a grand immersive show every night, pushing his troupe of sorcerers to greater and greater heights. Alex is an undercover operative for the Feds who infiltrates the Shaws to figure out what Gunn is up to. Joan and Alex fall in love and begin to question their loyalties and how far they would go to protect what was important to them.
I enjoy the magic in this. Magic can do a great deal--create illusions, or produce objects, or create portals--but these things only last for a day. It's ephemeral, which works for creating a magic garden to hold a party, but causes problems when they try to distribute shine because in 24 hours it turns to water. It provides a good balance so the magic isn't too powerful.
Magic is often used to create scenery--beautiful and fantastical scenery, but still scenery. The most impressive immersive magic show that the troupe puts on at the Red Den is a sunrise. Now, I've seen some pretty great sunrises, but using magic to create something that doesn't have a finale or a surprise seems like a let down. I call this The Night Circus Problem: the magic is atmospheric, but leans more towards eerie than shocking. I also think about it in terms of lack of a Prestige (from The Prestige (and, yes, I know there's a book)). A magic trick has three parts: the pledge where you say you'll make a rabbit disappear, the turn where the rabbit disappears, and the prestige where the rabbit reappears. If you end the trick after the turn, the audience is left waiting, thinking, "But...where did the rabbit go?" Here I wondered, "Okay, the sun rose like they said. But...is the sun going to explode?" It felt incomplete, or like a waste of talent, especially here where a handful of their tricks have that finale moment. Joan makes feathers dance, then at the end turns them into a dove.
This is probably just me and my adolescent need for fireworks and glitter cannons.
The story is told from alternating points of view: one from Joan and then one from Alex. In the first few chapters, Alex digs my opinion of him into a hole by being a dipshit. He never climbs out of this hole. He continues to be a dipshit. What was interesting, was that when Joan interacts with him in her chapters, he doesn't seem like a dipshit. All his internal dialogue about his disdain for everyone and everything is stripped away, and besides that he's on his best behavior around Joan. A similar thing happens to Joan to a lesser degree. When she's shown through Alex's filter, all her self doubt is stripped away and the lengths she goes to to make herself the best she can be pay off since Alex doesn't pick up on any of it. Since the reader gets these two views that don't quite align, they pick up on the fact that the characters don't know each other that well way before the characters start to understand it.
The characters also don't describe themselves, but are described by the other point of view character. This delay in giving the description would usually bother me, but here it works because it made sense that neither character would feel the need to describe themselves. I never felt uninformed. What they looked like mattered more to the other character (because they're dreamy) than it did to them.
The plot is fun and exciting, with lying and scheming and evil plans and juggling who knows what. But a lot of it feels like really bad planning. Alex talks the mob boss into getting hooked on a drug that causes paranoia. Joan agrees to figure out how to do impossible magic that centuries of sorcerers have attempted by Wednesday, because she won't let you down. Even though the troupe is essential to his plans, Gunn works them so hard that they start talking of mutiny. And then there's Gunn's theory that seven sorcerers working together are more powerful than any one sorcerer working alone, and they have to trust each other and work together, a theory proven by the success of the troupe. But then he goes and forms rifts in the troupe by giving some members extra privileges. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. A lot of the characters shoot themselves in the foot in this.
But they don't shoot themselves with glitter cannons.
***
Next week: The Three-Body Problem, Sci-fi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Liu Cixin.
September 3, 2016
The Best Research Ever: Pie
While I was pregnant, my focus and attention span shrunk to the size of a walnut, and it seemed the only thing I was able to write about was food. I wrote long descriptive passages about smell and texture, flaky baked goods and tender meats and tart cherries and salted butter. An emphasis on food made its way into the firebird story, and for the first draft depictions of smells and taste and color worked fine. But now in the second draft, I'm shifting toward how it feels to prepare the food: the texture of pie filling before it sets and the strain in your shoulders as you roll out dough. I didn't know about these things first hand.
That meant it was time for The Best Research Ever.
I started making pie from scratch.
|
| ||||
|
|
This is the fruit pie phase of my research, where I learned to make pie dough, tried a couple of different top crusts, and learned about fruit filling.
Making and rolling out pie dough was not that bad once I knew what I was doing. You can make dough with lots of different kinds of fat: butter, shortening, straight up lard, or a combination of those. Butter is delicious, but shortening makes the dough easier to work with, so people usually go for a combination of the two. However, I don't know where they keep the shortening at the grocery store, so I just used two sticks of butter. The first attempt (the apple pie) was a mess of trying to roll it out, starting over and pressing it back into a ball, trying to roll it out, and starting over and pressing it back into a ball, but when I finally got it, it was amazing. Oh my God! I can make pie crust and it's really good!
The second attempt (the cherry pie) I got on the first try.
- The King Arthur Flour cookbook (which is great) told me that I needed to roll the dough out, rolling "in the same direction," so as not to confuse the yeast...WHAT DOES THAT MEAN??? How do you get a circle rolling all in one direction? How does yeast get confused? I figured out that it meant not to roll back and forth (roll it one direction, pick up the rolling pin and put it back at the start and roll again), and it's okay to roll up, then roll to the left, then roll down, then roll to the right to get a circle. But I still don't know what they're talking about with the yeast.
- "Lightly flour" is bullshit. I also think the concept of putting just enough water into the dough so it's almost falling apart is bullshit. I'm doing it wrong and grandmothers everywhere are waving rolling pins at me. But, these two changes to the instructions work together, because the massive amount of flour I dump everywhere probably evens out the extra tablespoon of water I put in.
- The King Arthur Flour cookbook also says to fold your pie crust into quarters, for easier transfer from the kitchen counter where you rolled it out, to the pie tin. That sounded like a great idea, but it went horribly wrong. There were big creases in my dough and then a quarter of it fell off and I had to patch it back together. Instead, if I roll the pie crust around the rolling pin, I can roll it out straight into the pie tin without threatening the crust's structural integrity.
Then there's the filling
- The worst part of making apple pie is peeling the apples. I used the biggest knife I could find to make myself feel better.
- When the instructions say to spoon the filling into the pie, they know what they're talking about. I just poured the cherry filling into the pie tin, and all the juice and sauce escaped down the sides and made a huge mess.
- If you don't know what a rhubarb is, it's tart so the strawberry and the ice cream we added mellow it out. It looks like celery except it's red and you even cut it an peel it the same way. It's available frozen at most grocery stores. I didn't know what to do with frozen rhubarb, so I called around to likely places and asked if they had fresh rhubarb. Those were fun conversations. Whole Foods had both organic rhubarb and regular rhubarb. This pie was unanimously voted the best pie.
- I thought I had this down and went to make a mixed berry pie because the baby loves strawberries and I feel the need to mix it up a bit for him instead of giving him an adult sized plate of chopped strawberries for lunch every day. But then they threw me a curve ball. For the cherry and the rhubarb pie, you mix the filling and then let it sit for a half hour for to thicken from the presence of the tapioca. I was expecting the same thing for the berries, but no. Now I had to simmer the mixture until it thickened even though I'd put the tapioca in. WTF? Why is it different? Aww, Geez, did I do this right? Ack.
Then there's the top crust. I didn't get fancy on the first attempt. I put down a regular old top crust on the apple pie, cutting plain slits in it to vent it. For the cherry pie, I tried a lattice, which looked wonderful, but was not nearly enough crust for my crust loving family. So for the strawberry rhubarb pie, I tried a tighter weave, and also tried a plaid design. For the mixed berry pie, I dove into the realm of cookie cutters. The top crust is made of a hundred or so stars that I cut out of the dough.
- Beaten egg yolk gets the two crusts to stick together. I learned that I should brush it on the edge of the bottom crust BEFORE I put down the lattice. I had to peel up the edges of the lattice and brush underneath and tempt fate that my lattice wouldn't crumble apart.
- Keeping the bars of the lattice even is tricky. I got out a pizza cutter about half way through the cherry pie top, but my strips ended up thicker on one end than the other. I saw people on the internet using a ruler and scoffed. For the strawberry rhubarb, I got out a ruler.
- There's a point after you mix the dough where you pat it into two disks and stick it in the refrigerator for a half hour so that it will stay round when you roll it out. The book said "at least a half hour" so I figured I could mix the dough during the baby's morning nap, then stick it in the fridge and roll it out during his afternoon nap. No. That is not how it works. It got way too hard and cold in the fridge and it had to thaw for about an hour before I could roll it out, and when I did it had a lot of trouble staying round and kept falling apart. This was the strawberry rhubarb pie where I attempted a fancy top crust because I'd had such luck with my previous attempts and I was feeling good about myself. It did not go well. If that picture looks like a Pintrest Fail, that's because it is! It still tasted good though, and I totally think I could pull it off next time.
- Apparently, you are supposed to inherit cookie cutters from your grandmother or something, because I looked all over the place for little cookie cutters and couldn't find them. We had to make a trip to a fancy kitchen store on the north side. There they told me that pies are an autumn thing, so all the cookie cutters for pies are autumn leaves and pumpkin shaped and and themed for holidays. I was trying to make a mixed berry pie and looking ahead to the key lime and lemon meringue I want to make later, so this autumn thing didn't make a lot of sense to me. Oh well, I got some mini cutters that have stars and hearts and moons, and a set of autumn leaves, one of which could pass as a lime leaf, so we're all good.
More research is necessary.
August 30, 2016
Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here Review
This week's novel is Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here, contemporary YA by Anna Breslaw.
Scarlett Epstein writes fanfiction for the TV show Lycanthrope High and is devastated when it gets canceled. She's not very popular at school with her reduced price lunch and her C average, so most of her friends are online in the Lycanthrope fandom. Worried she's about to lose her friends, she starts a new story populated with characters from her high school: her best friend, the boy she has a crush on, and the girl that bullies her.
First, story time! My teenage niece came to visit one summer. At the time, she was super into The Hunger Games to the point where she and her best friend skipped school to dive to Dallas to go to that creepy, ironic mall tour that the movie cast did. We were sitting around when my husband made a random joke about Peta. Honestly, it was not that great a joke, but that didn't matter to my niece. She started crying, overwhelmed with emotion about Peta and his tragic life as a boy shaped piece of flat bread. After crying for a few minutes, she called her best friend and repeated the joke, at which point her friend also started crying.
So! When Scarlett starts crying thinking about how her favorite show got canceled, Breslaw nails it.
She also nails internet fandom--the interactions, the people you meet there, the fics that show up. It was nice to see all the terms used correctly and used in the way someone familiar with them would use them, instead of like an anthropologist wading into a strange, backward culture. Scarlett makes groan-worthy rookie mistakes in her fic, that you know are going to come back to bite her even before she realizes she's done anything wrong. "Oh, you naive sunfish," I think, "find/replace those characters' names." "Oh, you sweet summer child," I think, "don't insert yourself into your story." That can never end well.
Scarlett's dad now lives in New York with his new brilliant, beautiful wife and their new brilliant, beautiful daughter. He gets a book deal for a novel that turns out to have characters that are unflattering portrayals of Scarlett and her mom. (The snip-its we get are painfully accurate snip-its of a man-book-with-manly-man-feels book.) This hurts Scarlett tremendously, yet Scarlett never seems to make the connection between what her dad did and what she did. It's a hugely obvious parallel, but it's never made explicit. Maybe it's so obvious that Breslaw doesn't feel it needs to be made explicit? Maybe Scarlett never put it together that directly, but it affected her response just the same? It's strange.
On the other hand, I didn't like how when these problems do inevitably rear their ugly head, Scarlett takes all the blame. Although her actions are hurtful, I don't like that her bully never sees that she was hurtful as well. All the guilt is heaped on Scarlett even though her bully spends the entire book being awful. Yes, Scarlett should (and does) learn from her mistakes, but this rings of victim blaming and it ruins the only productive outlet Scarlett had to vent her frustrations.
So it's strange that I feel so differently about the situation between Scarlett and her bully and Scarlett and her dad. Scarlett's dad says she's unpopular and I don't blame Scarlett for that. Scarlett says her bully is mean and fake and I do blame her bully for that. It's a difference between an adult saying mean things about their child and a kid saying mean things about a peer. It's a difference between being unpopular, which isn't a choice, and being cruel, which is.
So yeah, there's a lot of ground to cover there, but it just ends up being that Scarlett feels bad about everything and blames herself for writing her story AND being unpopular.
***
Next week: A Criminal Magic--mobsters and speakeasy magic shows! by Lee Kelly.
Scarlett Epstein writes fanfiction for the TV show Lycanthrope High and is devastated when it gets canceled. She's not very popular at school with her reduced price lunch and her C average, so most of her friends are online in the Lycanthrope fandom. Worried she's about to lose her friends, she starts a new story populated with characters from her high school: her best friend, the boy she has a crush on, and the girl that bullies her.
First, story time! My teenage niece came to visit one summer. At the time, she was super into The Hunger Games to the point where she and her best friend skipped school to dive to Dallas to go to that creepy, ironic mall tour that the movie cast did. We were sitting around when my husband made a random joke about Peta. Honestly, it was not that great a joke, but that didn't matter to my niece. She started crying, overwhelmed with emotion about Peta and his tragic life as a boy shaped piece of flat bread. After crying for a few minutes, she called her best friend and repeated the joke, at which point her friend also started crying.
So! When Scarlett starts crying thinking about how her favorite show got canceled, Breslaw nails it.
She also nails internet fandom--the interactions, the people you meet there, the fics that show up. It was nice to see all the terms used correctly and used in the way someone familiar with them would use them, instead of like an anthropologist wading into a strange, backward culture. Scarlett makes groan-worthy rookie mistakes in her fic, that you know are going to come back to bite her even before she realizes she's done anything wrong. "Oh, you naive sunfish," I think, "find/replace those characters' names." "Oh, you sweet summer child," I think, "don't insert yourself into your story." That can never end well.
Scarlett's dad now lives in New York with his new brilliant, beautiful wife and their new brilliant, beautiful daughter. He gets a book deal for a novel that turns out to have characters that are unflattering portrayals of Scarlett and her mom. (The snip-its we get are painfully accurate snip-its of a man-book-with-manly-man-feels book.) This hurts Scarlett tremendously, yet Scarlett never seems to make the connection between what her dad did and what she did. It's a hugely obvious parallel, but it's never made explicit. Maybe it's so obvious that Breslaw doesn't feel it needs to be made explicit? Maybe Scarlett never put it together that directly, but it affected her response just the same? It's strange.
On the other hand, I didn't like how when these problems do inevitably rear their ugly head, Scarlett takes all the blame. Although her actions are hurtful, I don't like that her bully never sees that she was hurtful as well. All the guilt is heaped on Scarlett even though her bully spends the entire book being awful. Yes, Scarlett should (and does) learn from her mistakes, but this rings of victim blaming and it ruins the only productive outlet Scarlett had to vent her frustrations.
So it's strange that I feel so differently about the situation between Scarlett and her bully and Scarlett and her dad. Scarlett's dad says she's unpopular and I don't blame Scarlett for that. Scarlett says her bully is mean and fake and I do blame her bully for that. It's a difference between an adult saying mean things about their child and a kid saying mean things about a peer. It's a difference between being unpopular, which isn't a choice, and being cruel, which is.
So yeah, there's a lot of ground to cover there, but it just ends up being that Scarlett feels bad about everything and blames herself for writing her story AND being unpopular.
***
Next week: A Criminal Magic--mobsters and speakeasy magic shows! by Lee Kelly.
August 27, 2016
Rahm's Little Readers
My son and I did the Chicago Public Library's summer reading program this summer. While I was looking into it online, I found a reference to a parent reflection on doing the summer reading program with your child that could win you some tech stuff. That sounded right up my alley, so for the last few months I've been working off and on on a short story reflection on the summer reading program.
It was getting late in the summer and I hadn't heard anything more about it. I wanted to know the rules before I got my story all polished. Was there a word limit? Did it have to be in a certain format? Did I e-mail it somewhere or print it out and hand it in? So I asked. And I was told to ask my librarian for "the form." The form?...Oh no.
The parent reflection is a single page form with two and a half lines to describe an activity I did with my child, two lines to say what we learned from that activity, and two lines to say what our favorite part was. It's also a raffle, not a contest.
I was disappointed, and felt stupid for jumping the gun so much, and also for what was now almost a complete misfire of summer reading activities (as you will see.)
At least I can post it here! Enjoy!
-----
It was getting late in the summer and I hadn't heard anything more about it. I wanted to know the rules before I got my story all polished. Was there a word limit? Did it have to be in a certain format? Did I e-mail it somewhere or print it out and hand it in? So I asked. And I was told to ask my librarian for "the form." The form?...Oh no.
The parent reflection is a single page form with two and a half lines to describe an activity I did with my child, two lines to say what we learned from that activity, and two lines to say what our favorite part was. It's also a raffle, not a contest.
I was disappointed, and felt stupid for jumping the gun so much, and also for what was now almost a complete misfire of summer reading activities (as you will see.)
At least I can post it here! Enjoy!
-----
August 23, 2016
Wink Poppy Midnight Review
This week's novel is Wink Poppy Midnight, a dark YA mystery by April Genevieve Tucholke.
When his mother and brother move away to France, Midnight's father moves them to a farmhouse outside of town. Midnight appreciates this because he's determined to get out of the clutches of Poppy, the horrible, beautiful girl who's been seducing and manipulating him and a bunch of other people. Across the street from the farmhouse is the Bell's farm, where Wink, her fortune telling mother, and her innumerable siblings live. Wink understands her life in terms of the fairy tales she reads to her siblings. When Midnight falls for Wink, Poppy gets extra vindictive. But Poppy disappears after an incident involving a haunted house and revenge gone wrong, and there's a question of if she ran away into the woods and is stalking everyone, or if she died and is haunting them.
The story is told with short, alternating chapters from each of the three characters' points of view. Each character has their own distinct voice, to the point where you can pick out the moments they influence each other. Occasionally, the characters cover an event that another character has already covered, and it becomes clear that at least one of them is an unreliable narrator and someone is full of lies.
The setting is beautiful and haunting, all forest and farmland and neglected buildings. The language is beautiful too, emotive and sad and vicious.
The twists made my eyes light as I read them. I had suspected them, but their unveiling was brilliantly executed. However, after the initial reveal, they stopped making sense. Suddenly, I don't understand the characters' motivations. Why on earth did they do any of this? Aside from that, the characters' reactions don't make sense to me. I would expect them to be angry or hurt, and instead they shrug it off and move on. This is especially irksome because everyone had clear motivations and reactions before the twist, and--like I said--I knew the twist was coming, but I was itching to learn why. That was going to be the surprise. But that didn't happen.
I'm disappointed, but it was a lovely book.
***
Next week: Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here, contemporary YA by Anna Breslaw.
When his mother and brother move away to France, Midnight's father moves them to a farmhouse outside of town. Midnight appreciates this because he's determined to get out of the clutches of Poppy, the horrible, beautiful girl who's been seducing and manipulating him and a bunch of other people. Across the street from the farmhouse is the Bell's farm, where Wink, her fortune telling mother, and her innumerable siblings live. Wink understands her life in terms of the fairy tales she reads to her siblings. When Midnight falls for Wink, Poppy gets extra vindictive. But Poppy disappears after an incident involving a haunted house and revenge gone wrong, and there's a question of if she ran away into the woods and is stalking everyone, or if she died and is haunting them.
The story is told with short, alternating chapters from each of the three characters' points of view. Each character has their own distinct voice, to the point where you can pick out the moments they influence each other. Occasionally, the characters cover an event that another character has already covered, and it becomes clear that at least one of them is an unreliable narrator and someone is full of lies.
The setting is beautiful and haunting, all forest and farmland and neglected buildings. The language is beautiful too, emotive and sad and vicious.
The twists made my eyes light as I read them. I had suspected them, but their unveiling was brilliantly executed. However, after the initial reveal, they stopped making sense. Suddenly, I don't understand the characters' motivations. Why on earth did they do any of this? Aside from that, the characters' reactions don't make sense to me. I would expect them to be angry or hurt, and instead they shrug it off and move on. This is especially irksome because everyone had clear motivations and reactions before the twist, and--like I said--I knew the twist was coming, but I was itching to learn why. That was going to be the surprise. But that didn't happen.
I'm disappointed, but it was a lovely book.
***
Next week: Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here, contemporary YA by Anna Breslaw.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)