Outlook for August

This week, my productivity tapered off to the point where I did not hit my original goal of editing for 50 hours.  I worked for 44 hours and some change though, and that's not too shabby. 

We're moving, which is a three-ring circus, and I've been packing, which because of the three-ring circus has to be done with painful specificity and care.  My writing time has suffered, and will continue to suffer for the next few weeks as we move and get settled.  My goal for this month, instead of time based, is goal based: I want to get through half of the global edits I've laid out for myself.  That leaves the second half of the edits for September, the ending for October, and then this draft will be done just in time for Nano, where I can give this a break and write a first draft of something else.

That's the plan anyway.  It's good to have plans.

The work I did do this week went well.  I'm restructuring the first chapter I've written, adding a new first chapter and breaking the old one up into chapters two and four.  It's a lot of new writing.  The last time I wrote instead of edited was November, and everything I slapped down then felt like the most awful thing anyone has ever bothered to save in a text file.  Writing this week was a world of difference.  My groove is back.  My enthusiasm is back.  I'm going to chalk it up to the way this book has found its direction in the second draft.

Winter Review

This week's novel is Winter, the final installment of the Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer.  I haven't talked about the rest of the series on here, so I'm going to talk about the series as a whole, but focus on Winter.

Each of the four books in this series is a retelling of a fairy tale, set in a sci-fi future.  Cinder is the story of a cyborg mechanic, who lives with her bigoted step family, and meets prince Kai when she fixed his Android.  Scarlet is the story of a pilot in a red hoodie, who goes to search for her missing grandmother and meets a genetically engineered soldier, who now has wolf DNA.  Cress is the story of a computer hacker, who is kept alone on a satellite, where she spies on the earth for Luna.  And Winter is the story of the Lunar princess who is so beautiful and the people so taken with her that the Lunar Queen sees her as a threat.

Through all of these individual stories about girls in the future is the added story of the Lunar Queen's invasion of earth, and her plans to marry Prince turned Emperor Kai and become Empress of the Eastern Commonwealth.  Furthermore, each novel is additive, with the new characters living out their fairy tale while joining up with the characters from the previous books, who are now off script.  This way, even though the beats of the main story are obvious, the rest is up for grabs.

At this point in the series, this is getting to be a lot of story to go around.  The book still gives time to Cinder, Kai, Scarlet, Wolf, Cress, Thorne, and the Lunar Queen, so Winter's story feels shuffled to the back instead of acting as the main driving force of the plot.  It feels like even Meyer acknowledges that we all know what's going to happen to Winter, so her story is just going through the motions.  "This is the part where Winter's guard is going to fake her death.  This is the part where she gets put in a stasis chamber."  It was well written, but I was much more invested in what everyone else was up to. 

Part of this is that I like Winter as a character less than I like Cinder and Scarlet.  I've had four books to get to know Cinder and three to get to know Scarlet, while Winter doesn't have time to grow on me.  Furthermore, Winter and Cress have more demure personalities, while Cinder and Scarlet are brash and assertive and I just find it more fun to read about them.

The thing Winter did have going for her as a character was that she had Lunar Sickness.  Lunars have a gift that allows them to make people see things and lets them control people, but if they don't use this gift, they start to hallucinate.  Winter has vowed to never manipulate anyone with her gift and that decision is rotting away her sanity.  Her dedication to treating people with respect makes the people of Luna like her, and her declining sanity makes the Lunar Queen underestimate her.  Some of her best moments were when she used the fact that everyone thinks she's crazy to act even more crazy than she actually is in order to aid the rebellion against the queen without anyone suspecting her.  There is also a great discussion about how she's not broken, this is just a part of her.

The Lunars are frightening in this.  They can control people, so they make several people chop off their own fingers or claw at their own faces.  They use guards as human shields, making them jump in front of bullets.  They can take control of half an invading army and make it attack the other half.  They can make you shoot someone you love or say things you don't mean.  They were scary, and I think the only thing not making them completely over powered was the fact that this is YA and it can't get too grizzly.

The romance in this series was good too.  The relationships grew organically, they made sense, they felt balanced and reciprocal, and they had believable arguments and setbacks.  The problem though was that by this book, everyone was paired off, and that's a lot of straight couples hanging out on a space ship.

The world building on earth isn't great.  There's some obvious missteps, like having Africa be one country and having Asia be one country with a Japanese Emperor.   Yikes!  The cultural influences are also shallow, where they're basically all culturally Western and wear kimonos to a ball (...I...oh dear).  But this book took place almost entirely on the moon, so its world building didn't stumble over real cultures or real history.

On the whole, a fun series even if I didn't care about the title character of this last book.

***

Next week: The Scorpion Rules, YA sci-fi by Erin Bow.

Building an Iceberg

This week was about knuckling down and getting my world building sorted.  You'd think this would be something that should have been worked out long ago, and you would be right.

I recently read some advice on world building by N.K. Jemisin.  (It's a powerpoint and well worth the read.)  She mentioned that world building is like an iceberg, and you only see the tip of it in the text of the story.   That feels like solid, resonating advice to me, and it nailed home that my shoddy world building here needs to pull itself together.

More specifically, I was having problems with how non-magic people view magic in the world I've created.  It was inconsistent throughout the story, ranging from unimpressed to confused, to anger and fear, to flat out disbelief and rejection.  This problem stems from how this is a million story ideas mooshed together, each with their own take on the situation, and I'd yet to commit to one over another.  Even though I've known this was a problem for a while and I've put off thinking about it because I couldn't come up with a quick answer.

But this edit is about cohesiveness.

So this week, I sat down and wrote "A brief history of magic in the United States" as written by the main character. 

It worked surprisingly well.  It fit together like a history should, with swings in opinion and rises and falls in popularity.  I thought I would have to go in and change the behavior of some characters, but I surprised myself and found justification for everyone's reactions.  Now I just need to change the framing around their reactions. I also got everything I needed under a shared history, tying things together.

Themes started to appear.  I solidified that there are several different groups of magicians, who are influenced by different events and influence each other.  These different groups are split along class lines, education levels, and North/South and East/West lines.  Second, I clarified that there's a history of both people lying about being magicians and of magicians lying about their capabilities.  They can fool people because no one really understands how magic works and people expect magicians to look and act a certain way.  But people have figured out that magicians lie, so now that's part of what they expect to see.  Finally, I saw that it's messy.  There's a lot of groups with a lot of agendas and values and opinions about each other.  The public doesn't understand that they're as different as they see themselves, so the public's opinion of one group affects their view of all magicians.  I kind of like that it's messy because it feels real.  I just need to embrace the mess in the text.

The other cool part was that now I have dozens of little side stories that amuse me and might go into the novel, but might not.

September Girls Review

This week's novel is September Girls by Bennett Madison.

When his mom leaves to go find herself, Sam's dad whisks him and his brother off to a beach town for the summer.  The beach town has the odd local feature of boatloads of eerie, beautiful blond girls, all of whom are weirdly interested in Sam.

This book makes me uncomfortable.  I can't tell if it's commentary on gender roles and sexism, if it was supposed to be commentary on gender roles and sexism that got lost under displays of the harms of gender roles and sexism, or if it's just kind of sexist.  Whatever way you slice it, it wasn't fun to read.

Sam meditates a great deal on masculinity.  His father talks about him "becoming a man."  Sam's brother, Jeff is a pig who sees women as objects with which to have sex and is determined to get Sam laid over the summer.  Sam's negative reaction to this would suggest that the book's condemning such behavior.  But then it tries to make Jeff sympathetic while Sam slut-shames and uses gendered slurs throughout the book, at which point it feels less like a condemnation and more like a gritty, honest description of how boys behave.

Apparently boys are gross.

Then there's the fact that the girls are all the same.  They're blond and tan and stare at Sam whenever he goes to the beach.  There's some weirdness where Sam can't tell them apart, even to the point of second guessing whether the one he's talking to is the one he's dating.  They are interchangeable sex objects.  Yikes.

It turns out that the girls can control how they look and they decide to look as appealing as they possibly can, so they make themselves blond with tight butts, and they flip their hair, and wear lip gloss and short-shorts.  So that sounds like commentary on how women are told by society that they need to look a certain way, especially if they want to be desirable.

But then it's weird that they all look the same if their goal is to catch attention.  Maybe that's a message too, that if women really did make themselves look a certain way to appeal to the male gaze, they'd all end up looking the same.  Then there's a moment in the book where one of the girls talks about how she saw a picture of Beyoncé and thought she was the most beautiful woman she'd ever seen.  Well, then why doesn't she look like Beyoncé?  Maybe this says something about the difference between what women find attractive in themselves and what they think men would find attractive in them, but it also has the odor of white supremacy.  And then I think these are all layers that I've added on to this by thinking about it too much.


And then there's the heart of the girls' story: they are cursed to wash up on the beach and they can't go back to their ocean home unless they sleep with particular dudes.  If they don't do this by the time they're twenty-one, they turn into sea foam.  Now, this aligns with the fairy tale of The Little Mermaid, but it still reeks of needing a man.  And is that really a fairy tale to which you want to stay true?  And then it's not even just that they get their curse broken.  After the sex they also learn who they are and experience individuality for the first time. 

And then this happens:

"It was so weird.  Who am I? I mean, really?"
"You're DeeDee," I said.  And then she finally turned and looked at me for the first time since I'd sat down.  Her cheeks were streaked with mascara.  Her eyes were sharp and probing and she regarded me with a concerned squint that seemed nearly wounded.  I wondered if I had said something wrong.
"No," she said.  At first she sounded sad, and then she turned angry.  "Of course I'm not.  DeeDee.  God.  That's not even my real name."
"Sure it is," I said.  "It's what everyone calls you, so it's your name."
"That's not my name," she said, more firmly now.  "It's just something I called myself.  Before.  It doesn't seem right anymore.  And it's not my name.  It never was."
...
"I just wish I knew my real name," she said.  "That seems like it would make everything easier somehow."
I didn't reply.  I didn't care what she said.  Her real name was DeeDee.

So, she's experiencing individuality and coming into her own after her awful curse is broken, but Sam refuses to accept that.  He doesn't care what she has to say or how she feels.  He's going to call her DeeDee because he knows best.

Ick.

So it's either social commentary or gross, and either way I am uncomfortable.

***

Next week: Winter and an overview of The Lunar Chronicles, sci-fi retellings of fairy tales by Marissa Meyer.

Nitpicky Jerkface

This week's edits were pretty easy and mostly along the lines of adjusting concepts that I didn't like.  Most of them reoccurred again and again throughout the book, so it took some time, but once I had the concepts solidified in my head, the changes weren't hard.  They felt more like corrections.  Like if I decided to change a parade route.  Which streets would need to close would change, along with what businesses the parade passed and who came out to see it and when and where it ended.  Maybe since it ends in a new place, there would be room for a little fair with BBQ and face painting and music and a bounce house. 

I spent the first day doing even easier edits.  I did Find/Replace edits, where I changed names and standardized all the various spellings of those names.  What am I going to call this spell that gets used repeatedly?  What about this other spell, because in the first draft everything had names like "Magic Missile."  Turns out even though this is a Find/Replace edit, and therefore the easiest thing ever, I got snagged on what I was going to change these things to.

One of the big things I got snagged on is a street name where most of the story takes place.  The story is set in alternate-universe Austin on Pecan Street.  Now, there is not a Pecan Street in Austin, as is common knowledge to most Austinites because there used to be a Pecan Street that is now 6th Street, and 6th St is not only a popular street, but also likes to boast about how back in the day it was called Pecan Street. 

So.  If the story is set on Pecan Street, that might throw someone out of the story when they shout, "That street doesn't exist!" and slap my book on the table.  If the story is set on a street that does exist, like Congress Ave, that might throw someone out of the story when they shout, "That store's not on Congress!" and light my book on fire.

I've been grappling with this very minor detail for days, trying to convince myself that it I'm the only person who would ever be upset about this, or trying to come up with a third option that makes the problem disappear.  I've been struggling with it because I'm the kind of reader who gets hung up on things like this, especially when they're set in cities I love.  Like how I will never let go of the fact that in Divergent, the Erudite's evil headquarters is really a Panera Bread.  Because I am an asshole.

Then I heard this interesting interview with Chris Claremont (who wrote the X-Men for years and years and years), where he talked about setting fantastical stories in the real world and how the familiar elements are not just little treats, but make the characters more real and relatable.  It makes it so you can see yourself in them, and it makes them so they aren't unreachable superheroes, but actual people.

That's the coolness of watching a show that's filmed on location.  "Elementary," for example, last year had a wonderful scene where Holmes and Watson and the police captain are walking down the street, and I'm looking at a Manhattan street that I know, and I remember that snowstorm because I'd been out in it three weeks earlier...That's the ideal thing.  It's that real touchstones make the fiction, the fantasy, that much more embraceable.  And for those who live in the neighborhood that much more enjoyable.

So that's helping to sooth my internal battle.

The Curse Workers Review

This week I'm covering all of The Curse Worker Series (White Cat, Red Glove, and Black Heart) by Holly Black.  I really liked these, y'all.  It was a good thing they were all available for immediate download form the library, because I devoured them in a couple of days.

Cassel Sharpe is the only non-worker (a person with magical abilities who with just a touch of their bare hand can affect emotion, luck, memory, or dreams) in his family of con-artists and gangsters, and he's kept out of the business due to his lack of magic or due to the fact that three years ago he killed his best friend, the mob boss' daughter.  When he sleep walks onto the roof of his dorm, starts being stalked by a white cat, and realizes that chunks of his memory are missing, he gets dragged into a mess of family secrets and layers of betrayal, and has to survive with a series of cons.

The world building in this is so cool.  The magic is scary in that all the curses are intrinsically manipulative and most affect personality.  But there are consequences for cursing people in the form of pushback: when an emotion worker alters someone's emotions, their emotions also get messed up, eventually making them big, manic messes.  Memory workers become amnesiacs.  Death workers rot away fingers.  This makes not only the curses cast on people creepy in their manipulation and lack of consent, but it's also creepy to see interactions with the workers as they become more and more derailed. 

The world building here is pervasive, influencing every aspect of the story.  It's intricately tied to the plot in that the way the magic functions lends to stacks upon stacks of lies, driving the story along.  It's also tied to everyone's characterization, in that each worker's brand of magic affects their personality.  It influences the dynamics between characters either as workers/non-workers or as worker/person whose been worked.  It affects every aspect of the environment and social structure from the fact that everyone constantly wears gloves (and takes them off in burlesque shows), to the history of the worker camps where the crime families got their start, to the background political climate of New Jersey pushing for mandatory testing.

Cassel is an entertaining character.  He's clever in the way of clever con-men and heist movies.  He's sympathetic and struggling to "be good," but he's also done awful things that aren't easily forgiven.  The books are told from his first person perspective and what I was struck with most about that was that he way he described himself and the way he explained that he presented himself matched with his actions.  He didn't describe himself as clever and then do groan-worthy, boneheaded things.  He described himself as untrustworthy and then proceed to lie to even the people he was trying to be honest with.  You can see his struggle to be a good friend to his normal school friends in both his actions and his internal monologue.

It was also masterfully told in that this was from the first person and we watched Cassel to preparations for his cons, and yet as the cons went down they were still surprising.  I never felt that information was being withheld from me to make the story more suspenseful, and this fact only occurred to me after I'd finished the series.


That said, I did guess the twists in the first book before Cassel did, but he wasn't all that far behind me and it became clear that most of his slowness was denial, so I can cut him some slack.


Really fun reads.  Highly recommend.

***

Aside: There's an edition of White Cat with a cover that has Cassel as a white dude.  This is absurd.

***

Next week: September Girls, paranormal coming of age at the beach, by Bennett Madison 

Camp Nano Week One

Daily results were mixed this week, from finding twenty minutes to write at a downtown Starbucks before a doctor's appointment, to finding two and a half hours while the baby napped when the dishes were under control.  I'm still chugging along, still feeling good about my edits, I'm not so far behind my goal that I couldn't reasonably catch up, and I managed to keep my house from burning down and my son from climbing out a window on a week when my husband was desperately ill and I had a boatload of doctor's appointments for self-care things I've been neglecting, like the eye doctor and the dentist.  I call that a win.

Even more of a win is that I finished Phase Two of my edits on the Firebird story.  In this round of edits, there are four phases.  The first was line edits and fixing typos.  The second was massaging the language, smoothing out awkwardness and fixing instances where the word I used was not quite right.  This was where I worked on cadence and scanning.  This was where I had whole paragraphs blocked off in orange highlighter with the word "gross" written in the margin.  This is the one that cleaned up most of the sludge that resulted from blazing through the first draft during National Novel Month while I had a napping baby strapped to my chest.  It was a time consuming edit, but the story is so much better.  I can read it now without wanting to gorge out my own eyes.

The next two phases in this edit are the edits marked in lime green (the sections that need research and the sections that need specificity) and the edits marked in pink (global edits).  I'm going to tackle these simultaneously, since some of the research requires waiting for books to come in at the library and the fact that I don't want to hold myself to just doing research for however long that takes.  Doing these two phases at the same time will also help because the global edits are going to be head scratchers and it'll be nice to build a break from that (or some thinking time) into my schedule.  Global edits include, but are not limited to: smoothing the passage of time, handling flashbacks, focusing more on certain characters, upping the romance, and solidifying the themes that have risen up after the first draft.

Good luck to everyone else doing Camp NaNo!  Keep at it.

Huntress Review

This week's novel is Huntress, a YA high fantasy by Malinda Lo.

Summer doesn't come, the sun doesn't come out, the crops fail, people are starving, monsters start appearing, and the country hangs on the edge of civil war.  When the Fairy Queen sends the first invitation to her country that anyone can remember, everyone assumes it must be related to these unnatural problems.  Through visions and magic stones, the sages decide to send two students along with the crown prince.  Taisin is talented, soft spoken, and ready to become a sage after her graduation.  Kaede meanwhile has no talent to speak of and prefers to spend her time weeding in the garden or throwing knives.  When she graduates, her chancellor father has plans to marry her off.  Together they travel to see the Fairy Queen, return the world to its natural order, and fall in love along the way.

Stories that involve long stretches of traveling on horseback for weeks and weeks are not my favorite.  Horses are terrifying.  And slow movement through a slowly changing landscape naturally tends toward slow pacing.  Here it makes the pacing and action weirdly lopsided.  The journey to the capital of the fairy kingdom takes three quarters of the book, leaving the explanation for what's happening with the weather and multiple big action scenes for the last quarter.  These moments of climax and catharsis aren't given time to breathe, or given time for their impact to settle.  Furthermore, the traveling undercuts the Asian influence, which was one of the advertised hooks of the book.  They leave their Asian inspired setting to travel in the same way that happens in every Medieval European inspired fantasy.

The other hook that fell short is the romance.  Yay, lesbian representation!  But they don't grow to love one another.  It's like a switch that's turned off and then turned on.  Most of their basis for why they like each other is that Taisin had a vision that she would love Kaede in the future and Kaede thinks Taisin smells good.  At no point is it mentioned that she probably smells like terrifying horses and stale biscuits and camping, but maybe Kaede's into that.  The sad part is that I really liked all the characters, I just wish they had gotten time to develop, to grow with each other and change with each other.  I wish some of the themes introduced during their episodic stops along their journey had lead to character growth.  There's themes of feeling like a murderer even if self defense was justified, and themes of being tempted by power, and themes of betrayal at being sent out without all the answers.  Really fertile ground.  But mostly these incidents bum the characters out, then they move along.

So this book had a bunch of great seeds of ideas that never sprouted the way I wanted.

***
Next week we get a little caught up with the reading challenge. The Curse Worker series: White Cat, Red Glove, and Black Heart. Fantasy, con-men, and organized crime by Holly Black.

Outlook for July

Camp Nano strikes again.  I didn't do so hot last go around, but I have confidence that this month will go well.  For one thing, I've opted out of a cabin.  My cabin last time was painfully inactive, and seeing how many people had a word count of zero fooled me into complacency when I hadn't hit my goals.  I'm also so close to getting this section of my edits done, and it's embarrassing how long I've already let it laze around.

Once again I'm going to spend Nano editing, and I've set my rebel challenge for working for 50 hours.  I'll pretend 1 hour=1,000 words and keep track on the website like that.  I'm aiming to work an hour and forty minutes every day: an hour editing the Firebird story, a half hour on the blog, and ten minutes writing on a couple short things I have in mind.  Why not just do the full hour and forty minutes on the Firebird story?  Because the blog and the writing projects ought to get done too, and I just know if I don't make space for them, I'm going to do them first and then not do my edits, or I'll do my edits and be too tired for the other things.  Kind of against the point of Nano, but I honestly don't care at this point in my life. 

(This week I had to start telling my baby "no," as he's figured out how to climb onto the chair, the onto the table, and from there turn up the volume on the stereo to deafening levels.  Rock!  Also this week, he figured out that he doesn't like not being able to do exactly what he wants whenever he wants it, and started shrieking whenever I told him "no."  Too bad, because that's a lesson he's going to learn early.)

Why am I spending a half hour every day on the blog?  Geez, does it really take that long to write these posts?  No.  I have a backlog of books I've read but have yet to review, so I have quite a few posts to write.

As for the short things I'm working on, you'll have to stay tuned.

Anyone else doing Camp Nano?  What's your goal?  What's your favorite camp activity?