Archive for the ‘reading’ Category

Heroes

Posted: May 15, 2013 in reading
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Ross's rendition of the Justice League

Also, Alex Ross’ art makes me want to work harder at painting. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I recently got back into superhero comics after a hiatus of almost fifteen years. Oh, I still bought graphic novels, mostly of the independent or mature* varieties, but after moving to a town without anywhere to buy comics halfway through high school, I fell out of reading the cape stuff.

I never realized how much I missed it until I started again.

Still, I get weird comments about it occasionally. I’m a thirty-year-old woman, so people assume that I should be, I don’t know, off having babies or breaking the glass ceiling or something. Not reading something that, at its heart, was designed for twelve-year-old boys.** They want to know why I’m wasting my time on something like that. They call it unrealistic and juvenile.

To which I say, well, yeah.

I get enough realism by fucking living. I don’t need more of it. That’s why I like fantasy, sci fi, horror, comics, surrealism, all that stuff that takes you away from the every day. If realism was the sole basis for choosing entertainment, we’d read nothing but encyclopedias. And considering Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives of Somewhere You Don’t Give a Shit About are ‘realistic’, I don’t think the word is the high praise these people think it is.

As for juvenile, I’m going to let C.S. Lewis handle this one:

When I became a man, I put away childish things. Including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Besides, people who focus on those aspects of comics are missing other points. As a medium, comics are a great combination of writing and art***. It’s a unique form of story telling. It allows techniques that work only within the confines of the panels. It makes me think about creating images with writing, focusing on those perfect moments that pull the story along.

And in the end they’re about heroes. Damaged people who are still trying to do their best for the world, day after day. Couldn’t we all use a little more of that attitude?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s new comic book day and I’ve got reading to do.

*Not porn. Just stuff that is very obviously not for children: Transmetropolitan, Preacher, Hellblazer, Maus, that sort of stuff.
**As a lot of the costuming shows. Any women out there who want to read about a strong female superhero who doesn’t wander around with her tits falling out and her cervix on display should try the new Captain Marvel, written by Kelly Sue Deconnick. Good story, good characters, lots of kicking ass.
***When they’re done well, of course, but isn’t that true of everything?

Spring Cleaning: Your Writing Routine

Posted: March 20, 2013 in internet, life, reading, writing
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Beach Head (G.I. Joe)

The other half of the battle is guns. (G.I. Joe) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you haven’t heard, Google Reader is going tits up sometime in July. Seems that the service is only used by a relatively small, if dedicated and somewhat insane, minority, and Google doesn’t feel it offers anything to the general public.

Guess who’s a member of that minority.

I am addicted to information. New stuff, old stuff, different stuff, the same stuff but turned upside down…you name it. And Google Reader was one of my primary information delivery systems.* It managed about fifty percent of my information streams, seriously cutting down on the time I needed to spend going out and finding shit. Learning to use it was the agriculture to my earlier hunter-gatherer style: it gave me more time to devote to other things, like culture, written language, and the development of city states run by the Spider God.**

But instead of rending my clothes and organizing a march on the Google offices, I decided to take this as an opportunity. My old system was going away? Fine. Time to experiment with some new ones.

The net result of this is that I spent about half the weekend looking through all my automated systems, information delivery and otherwise, and seeing if they could be better. No system is so perfect that it doesn’t benefit from experimentation. Even if you just go back to the old way, at least you know something that doesn’t work. And G.I. Joe taught us all that knowing is half the battle.

A routine can be great. It can provide structure to the otherwise structureless, which can be very helpful when doing something as fundamentally ephemeral as writing. But never make the mistake of thinking that the structure is anything other than a tool for ensuring something gets done. And, like all tools, there are other versions and upgrades, some of which might improve your experience.

And there can be other benefits. For example, I run most efficiently—that is to say, my fastest times—in the afternoon, so usually I run in the afternoon. But yesterday morning I got up and ran before breakfast, just for the hell of it. It was harder, and my time wasn’t as good, but I started the day feeling amazing from the endorphin rush. Plus, I didn’t have to make sure I left time for a workout later. Both times offer different, but still very good, results.

Experiment with your routine. You write in the evening? Try getting up early on a Saturday and writing in the morning, just to see what happens***. Edit a draft all at once? Try breaking it up into short chunks. Only write science fiction? Try a romance. Shake it up. Your routine will always be there if you want to go back to it. But it never hurts to stretch your legs a little.

*Information delivery systems trump even caffeine delivery systems in my day.
**I may need to review my books from my anthropology minor.
***’Just to see what happens’ is pretty much the reason I do everything.

Why I Would Write Amazing Children’s Books

Posted: October 26, 2012 in inspiration, reading, writing
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Grumpy Bear in the Nelvana episode "Home ...

“You know what, Timmy? Fuck those guys.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(Note: we found ourselves at my parent’s place during our week long road trip. While The Husband took a shower, I found some books from when I was a kid on a shelf. And then proceeded to read.)

Me: (As he enters) This is bullshit.

Snowman: Showering?

Me: No. This book. (Shows him a Care Bears book from the 80’s.) This sends a horrible message to kids.

Snowman: Which I’m sure you’re going to tell me all about.

Me: This kid’s being picked on by bullies, and the Care Bears basically tell him it’s his own fault. “You’ll never make any friends with that look on your face.” And then, “Anyone would be your friend if you just cared enough.”

Snowman: All right, that’s a little weird.

Me: Damn right it is. Someone makes fun of you and then physically assaults you for being nerdy and liking science? Clearly, you’re not caring enough about them. Assholes.

Snowman: Do you have some unresolved Care Bear issues you’re not telling me about?

Me: And never mind that the kid is smart enough to fix a villain’s Freeze Ray, he—

Snowman: Fix what?

Me: A Freeze Ray. For freezing kids. (Turns book to show him.) See?

Snowman: Why?

Me: No idea. Maybe Bad Guy wanted a kid-igloo. Or some hilariously shaped curling rocks. Anyway, the kid’s smart, smarter than Bad Guy. But once the Care Bears unfreeze everyone, the kid gives up science and goes to play baseball with the same asshole who was abusing him earlier. Sounds like anti-intellectualism to me.

Snowman: I think you’re reading too much into this.

Me: Am I? Well, how about this: the supposed moral of the story is, “Don’t seek revenge”.

Snowman: Well, that is a decent point.

Me: Yeah, but shouldn’t the more practical message be, “Don’t follow strange men who’ve confessed to hating all children home”? I mean, him wanting you to help build a weapon of mass destruction is really the best case scenario in that situation.

Snowman: …Okay, I’m with you there.

Me: You know how this story should have gone? “Little Timmy was being picked on by bullies. But he didn’t need to seek revenge because he knew that their own inner misery and emotional emptiness would create an unhappy, meaningless shell of  life for them.”

Snowman: As far as I remember, kids aren’t big on long term consequences.

Me: Okay, then how about this: “Little Timmy was being picked on. But one day when the bully tried to trip him, the bully’s leg rotted and fell off. Because that’s what happens to jerks.”

Snowman: You should write kid’s books.

Me: Maybe I will.

That Holy Shit Moment

Posted: August 1, 2012 in reading, writing
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Surprise!

She did WHAT? (Photo credit: Greencolander)

I was reading Locke and Key (volumes 4 and 5, because I was a good girl and rewarded myself with books) the other day. Very good series, one of the best I’ve read. And in these two volumes, there were a couple of moments that were full blown Holy Shit Moments. Fucking serious, something just jumped off that page and gut-punched me moments. I genuinely could not put them down until I was done. And then, when I was, I had a second of intense frustration that I didn’t have another one right fucking now.

I had to tell someone about it, and the only other person I knew who’d read it was in Australia. But texting is a wonderful thing. Here’s part of the conversation:

Me: OMG, did you read L&K 4 and 5? O_O

Krys: YES I did.

Me: She [redacted]! With A FUCKING [redacted]!*

Me: And poor [redacted]. : (

Krys: I KNOW. Broke my fucking heart. : (

Not the wittiest I’ve ever been in a text conversation. But that was the point. I didn’t have it in me to be witty. I just wanted to share. Those moments of the story were so good that I had to text someone on another goddamn continent just to say, “Holy shit. That just happened.”

Moments like that are so fucking rare in fiction. I mentioned before that I’m having trouble finding a new great novel, and part of the reason all the ones I’ve tried so far have fallen short is that they lacked those Holy Shit Moments. There was never a second that the emotion I felt was so strong that I had to share it with someone else or burst. My heart, blackened and cynical organ that it is, was never in danger of breaking.

It’s a hard thing to write. And it’s so elusive. I can’t sit down here and just tell you what made those moments so strong.**  They just were.

Writers, take note: those are the moments we should be striving for. We want to be able to drag people along for the ride. We want to break hearts. We want readers to care so much that we can break them.

I’m putting those moments from Locke and Key into my brain’s Hall of Records, where I keep all the Holy Shit Moments. *** Whenever I’m struggling to put words together and trying to remember what I should be doing, I can take those out and look. Not because I want to copy those things; I couldn’t, anyway. But because I want to remember that gut-punch, that moment of breathlessness. And I want to try to create moments like that of my own.

*You didn’t really think I’d spoil it for you, did you?
**Well, I could tell you some, but, again, spoilers.
***The Hall of Records also has a WTF? Gallery and a This Is Fucking Bullshit Display.

Rewriting Classics, or Why I Will Be Murdered By Herman Melville’s Ghost

Posted: July 23, 2012 in life, lists, reading
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English: Illustration from an early edition of...

I’ve got your white whale right here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So, my friend Kat, who blog over here, was reading Fifty Shades of Grey* and texting me some of the more hilarious lines.** And she mentioned that a friend of hers had jokingly told her to write Fifty Shades of Dorian Grey as her next writing project.

…You probably see where this is going.

So, purely as a creative exercise, we began coming up with titles for erotic versions of classic novels. And now I’ve come up with plots for some of them. Again, purely creative.

Stop judging me.

So here’s the highlights (and maybe your new summer reading list):

Moby’s Dick: Captain Ahab realizes his obsession with the ‘white whale’ is just a Freudian misdirect to avoid dealing with his dual attraction to the wandering sailor Ishmael and the handsome harpooner Queequag.*** When the boat is far out to sea, he begins his ‘hunt’…

The Caning of the Shrew: When his attempt at courtship fails, Petruchio must find a new way to woo the bad-tempered dominatrix Katerina. An introduction to the world of BDSM gives him a new plan: become her latest sub.

The Gropes of Wrath: On the road to California, Tom Joad encounters a frisky parole officer bent on returning him to Oklahoma. His only way to remain with his family is to give the officer something else to chase.

She Poops to Conquer: A comedy of manners, as a young woman posing as a house maid discovers her lover’s scatological fetish while cleaning the bathrooms.

The Hos of Kilimanjaro: This collection of short stories details the adventures of a group of loose women, from the bored socialite on safari with ‘interesting’ people to the young woman who was a man’s first lover and “did first what no one ever did better”.

Think you can do better? Tell me in the comments. Or, better yet, write it. And then submit**** it to the same publishers that did Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Clearly there’s a market here. We just need to tap it.

*Don’t judge her. She’s a librarian, so technically she was reading it for work. Or so she tells me.
**Seriously, there’s a shitload. Don’t mistake me: I like erotica. Hell, I did my master’s thesis on it. But I like well-written erotica, and this ain’t it.
***Man the harpoons. If you know what I mean.
****I just cannot get my mind out of the gutter now.

Four Types of Books On Everyone’s Summer Reading List

Posted: June 29, 2012 in lists, reading
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"Study drawing shows the allegorical figu...

“God, I can’t believe I have 49 more shades of grey to get through. Maybe reading in the nude will make this seem like less of a piece of shit.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

When temperatures rise and the television becomes a hopeless vortex of reruns and boredom, people start turning to books again. Most people have a stack that they want to get done between the end of June and the beginning of September. Well, to help you get organized, here’s a list of the four most common specimens:

1. That Book You’ve Been Meaning To Read: Everyone’s got one. It can usually be identified by its presence on a bookshelf, covered in dust, but with a curiously pristine spine. No dog-eared pages, no coffee stains, no notes in the margins. Usually weighs more than the cat, or possibly two cats if you picked up this particular book in a lit class in university. You know it’ll be good for you to read it. Hell, it’s a fucking classic! People are probably judging you right now because you haven’t read it. You’ve just got to get around to it. And maybe stop using it to prop up your couch. Chances of completing: 1/6, unless Armageddon happens and there’s nothing else to do. Then 1.25/6.

2. That Book You Pretend You’re Not Reading: You’re so fucking embarrassed to be reading this one. Often sketchy, incredibly popular but also hated, this is the book you badmouth on the internet. But you heard so much about it that eventually your curiosity got the better of you and you started reading. You’d just die if anyone caught you reading this, which is why you either do it on an e-reader, so no one can see the cover, or in the privacy of your own home. In bed. Under the covers. With a flashlight. Chances of completing: 5/6, but you’ll develop a nervous twitch.

3. The Wild Card: It lured you in with its flashy cover and catchy title, and you added it to the stack. Now it’s time for it to prove what it’s made of or get the fuck out of Dodge. Chances of completing: Roll a dice. Take off two points if the protagonist has an endearingly obscure hobby (luthier, competitive origami, artisanal sex-swing constructor) or if the words ‘nuclear reactor’ are involved anywhere in the back cover copy. Add one if there’s lots of sex/violence/witty dialogue.

4. The Old Favourite: You’re read this book so many times it’s falling apart. Rounded corners, broken spine, herds of old book marks lost in the pages…but you love it anyway. Maybe the summer you first read it, you were having a good one. Or maybe it’s just a damn good book. Either way, when the mercury rises, you find yourself searching your shelf for it once again, thinking that maybe this is the year you finally update to a new copy, one that isn’t held together with a rubber band and a prayer. But you never do, until it finally gives up the ghost and drops into a watery grave in the kiddie pool. Farewell, old friend. Chances of reading: 6/6, and then you’re going to have to buy a new copy and give the old one a proper burial.

Things I’m Judging You For Right Now

Posted: June 15, 2012 in reading, writing
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HoneyBee

The Attack Bees of Violent Judgement are immune to your feeble pleas for mercy. But they do like rum. Fucking drunk bee minions. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(Related to fiction writing, that is. That other stuff is between you and God/The Universe/The police/the neighbour with the restraining order.)

1. Passive voice: I had to put up with enough of this shit in academia. Any attempt to inflict it on my current life will result in the offender being dragged outside and beaten with a thigh-high stocking filled with kitchen utensils.* Knock that shit off. (Edit: some people would like clarification, so here you are. Don’t write, “Jimmy was hit by the car.” Write “the car hit Jimmy.” The first example adds useless words and slows the pace. End side-bar.)

2. Sock Puppets: I’m on to you. Don’t pretend that side character with an inexplicably long monologue only vaguely related to the plot is there for the story. It’s just a way for you to make a point, and a clumsy way at that. You want to make a point, go start a blog like every other maladjusted twat with an axe to grind. I can even give you some tips on how to get started.** But don’t drop that crap on me in the middle of a story. I haven’t been to Sunday School in eighteen years, and I’m not interested in going while I’m trying to read.

3. Tokens: If I see one more shallow, thinly-veiled attempt at inclusion in a work of fiction, I will set the Attack Bees of Violent Judgement on the offender. Gay characters, transgendered characters, polyamourous characters, characters of varied ethnicity, background, or sexuality—they should be characters first. Not shills, not a way to show how cool and accepting you are. If they exist only to fill the mandated ‘not a straight monogamous white dude’ quota, get the fuck out. It’s insulting and annoying.

4. Paper Tigers: If someone’s going to be a bad guy, then for the love of Crom, make them a goddamned bad guy. Don’t pull their teeth. Don’t force them to make choices that help the heroes just because you want the story to go a certain way. If your heroes can’t handle the villain, then they’re not the people for the job. They should go home and hide under the bed while they wait for the real heroes to turn up and kick some ass. Or die horribly. I’m not picky.

5. Born This Way: Related to number four, don’t show me villains without cause. The secret to creating good villains: they should believe they’re doing the right thing. No one sees themselves as the bad guy. Give them a reason why they want to turn the population into viscous gene-spliced soup, and use that. “Because they’re the bad guy” does not cut it. When I come across this crap in a story, I feel like the author believes I’m too stupid to question a character. And then I stop reading.

6. Sad Panda Assassins: Okay, this is kind of specific, but I’ve seen it a few times, especially in fantasy fiction. A serious thought on the sanctity of life and the wrongness of their actions is fine once or twice, but every fucking time? Dude either needs to shut up or find a new profession. Possibly as a flagellant.

Right. That’s my little list of vitriol and bile for the day. So, what’s annoying you about fiction lately?

*Any volunteers willing to check the internet and find out if this is already a thing? I’d do it myself, but I’m all out of mind-bleach.
**Step One: Embracing Your Maladjusted Twat-ness. It’s clear I already have.

Angry Beard Power, or Why I Need Book Recommendations

Posted: June 11, 2012 in reading
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George RR Martin at the Comicon

Behold the Beard of Power. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve hit a slump.

Not with writing; that continues at the usual pace.* But I haven’t found a good book in what seems like ages.

Don’t get me wrong—I’ve found lots of okay books. Some of them I’ve even gotten halfway the way through before losing patience and interest. Others meet the fate described here. And a few I finish, but they leave me unsatisfied. It feels like eating a low-fat, low-calorie, no-sugar ‘dessert’ when what you really want, down in the depths of your grubby little soul, is cheesecake. Yeah, it’s sweet(ish) but it doesn’t satisfy the craving.

I’m not sure what’s going on, but I can pinpoint when it started. I began reading The Song of Ice and Fire series about eight months ago. Got all the way through A Game of Thrones and halfway through A Clash of Kings before the ennui set in. Not that they’re bad books; I can definitely see why so many people enjoy them so much. But I wasn’t feeling it.

And that’s when it started. I don’t know if George R. R. Martin is using his fearsome Beard of Power to reach out through the  internet and punish me for not finishing his epic series**, but I’ve hit the worst reading slump ever since putting that book down. It seems like I lose interest in every novel halfway through. Short story collections, too. Non-fiction still seems to be going well, but I need some fiction in my diet, man. I feel bereft without it.

So I’ve been hitting the bookstores, virtual and physical, looking for something. I’ve tried different genres: epic fantasy, urban fantasy, horror, mystery, science fiction, dystopian, literary. I even had a go at reading some sample chapters of Fifty Shades of Grey before bursting into uncontrollable laughter. I’ll admit to being a little stumped as to what to do next.

But I do know exactly what I need: I need a good book. A new one. Going back to an old favourite, no matter how much I love it, isn’t going to fix this. I need something new, something fresh, something I’ve never read before that hits me between the eyes like a squirrel on PCP that has learned to fly.

Tall order, maybe. But it’s been done before. Last time I hit a slump like this, Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind pulled me out. And somewhere out there is a book waiting for me to read it. I just have to find it.

So: what are you reading?

*Varying between rocket ship and sea ooze, with nothing in between.
**Of course, he hasn’t finished it, either. So there.

How To Make Me Hate Your Story

Posted: April 30, 2012 in reading, writing
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Working in the lab

Yup. Positive test for bullshit. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was reading a new novel the other day when my Writer Sense started tingling, and I realized that there was something wrong with the book.

This is pretty standard for a writer. We judge the crap out of others because we’re so used to judging ourselves. We can’t help it. It’s an automatic reaction, like cringing when people write affect when they mean effect.* And usually I can figure out what’s bothering me quickly. Unlikeable protagonist? Seen it. Wooden dialogue? Done that. Just plain boring? Read it so many times I’m bored of that.

But this one was tricky. I rounded up the usual suspects, but none checked out. It had a decent plot. There were varied characters. There was a nice mix of action and drama and sex and bloody violence. I couldn’t figure it why I wasn’t enjoying the book. So I kept reading, running diagnostics on that fucker like it was an ICU patient circling the drain.

I was halfway through when it finally clicked: there was no agency.** None of the characters made a real choice, good or bad. Everything was presented as inevitable. Man sleeping with a married woman? Can’t help himself. Woman cheating on the husband she loves? Not sure why, but has to do it. Attracted to a girl you’ve only seen once? Irresistible force*** drawing him in. Even the guy who murders two people doesn’t choose to do it. It just kind of…happens. In fact, there was only one real choice made in the whole story, and it happened off-screen. That was what set the events of the story in motion. After that, it was all done.

Which is boring as shit.

What’s the point of having an entire cast of characters who don’t choose? They don’t have to make the right choice, but, goddammit, they have to do something. They can’t just be puppets. But that’s what these characters were. Someone else (the author) was pulling their strings, and all they could do was helplessly dance.

So what did I do? I put that book down, and in all likelihood, I’ll never pick it back up. Because the second I figured out what was wrong, I wasn’t interested in what happened to those characters. I left some of them in terrible situations, too. Kidnapped by monsters. Chased by cops. Losing their minds.

And I don’t care. If they’re not going to try, then I don’t give a shit what happens to them. Choose right, choose wrong, but don’t sit on the sidelines. They have to act, even if it’s to do something stupid. Or I’m going to get bored and walk away.

Because I can only read so many books in a lifetime, and I’m not going to waste one of those slots on a bunch of lazy victims.

*Christ, it’s like God’s fingernails on the chalkboard of the universe. If you do this, I’m coming for you.
** No, not the CIA. Agency in this sense means the characters’ ability to act upon and influence their world.
***Not boobs. That I could at least understand.