I spent yesterday traveling, getting up at 6 to drag three heavy bags all the way across town and get on a bus to Manhattan (5hrs), where I dragged those three bags eight blocks to the train station and then spent another hour there, and then two more hours on the train. Luckily, I was prepared. My iPod was filled with books and podcasts and music, and I had my embroidery, and my laptop, and I was set.
Unfortunately, riding the bus in the mornings makes me ill, and the book I was listening to didn't help.
I won't blame the book, because I was already feeling poorly before turning it on. Let me just say there were werewolves and there was a lot of *intense feelings* of girl for wolf without any real interaction between them at all.
The problem with audiobooks is that you can't skip ahead to get to the plot, so I was stuck listening to this girl as she whined about her family, and whined about her friends, and whined about how no one understood her, except for her wolf, who, of course, never speaks to her. And it was all very well written, and the girl was very strongly characterized, and the town and side-characters were well-depicted. And I wanted to puke. (Again, moving bus, early morning, holiday party the day before. Probably not the book's fault.) So finally, I turned it off.
Once I was off the bus and could actually think again, I was wondering why I really didn't like the book. When I was eleven I had adored paranormals. I read all the Night World books, I even wrote fanfic for them. But then I considered further. I had adored LJ Smith. I thought her books were great. (And when I reread one during college, I realized, yeah, the writing is pretty workmanlike, but the plot is fast and funny, and the romance is charming. What's not to like?) But I had tried and tried to read other teen paranormal romances and had never been able to get past the first few pages.
Why not? What was so different about LJ Smith? And then I remembered:
In the Night World Series, soulmates are built into the world. They're a plot point. And they're hilarious. I will never forget the scene where Ash sees Mary Lynette for the first time, and he reacts, like a cat that's had a bucket of water dropped over him.
He doesn't want this. This is the worst thing ever. And even Mary Lynette - she wants boys that are thin, brown, and interesting, not men like big blond cats. (Clearly, I have read that book too many times. I believe those are direct quotes.) The insta-love isn't even love. It's just an intense, inextricable bond. It's an obstacle. It complicates the situation. It allows the attraction and real love room to grow.
A romance that starts with an obsessive love bond between two characters is a lot like an epic fantasy that begins with the world already having been saved. There's nowhere to go, no stakes, no excitement. Now I'm sure that there are plenty of people who like to bask (*cough*wallow*cough*) in the purity of magical love. But not me. And I've been spoiled, by LJ Smith, who writes a love story that manages to be a natural outgrowth of learning to like and to trust. (And has humor. Honestly, humor can make things so much better.)
When I decided to read grown-up romance novels, I couldn't make it past the first few pages of even the most highly recommended ones, until I found Shannon Donnelly. All of the characters, even the antagonists, were likable and interesting. And the romances evolved out of scenes where the characters connected and grew to understand each other. And they were also hilarious. (Hilarious Regency Romance, that's the way to go.)
In the end, I think this all comes down to 'show, don't tell.' I want to watch people fall in love. I want to see that process where you look at someone once and can't find anything worthwhile there, and then each time you see them thereafter there's something new that alters the way you perceive them. Don't tell me they're in love. Don't beat me over the head with their pure and inexplicable bond. Show me that they connect. That moment when one suddenly understands the other, and sees them, with all their flaws, as beautiful and real, now that's what I call swoonworthy.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Saturday, December 17, 2011
What kind of reader are you?
| What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane. | |
| Dedicated Reader | |
| Book Snob | |
| Literate Good Citizen | |
| Non-Reader | |
| Fad Reader | |
| What Kind of Reader Are You? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz | |
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Road Trip Wednesday #109
This Week's Topic:
What would be the ideal holiday present for your main character?
My poor dear MC, just wants to get home. Unfortunately, I, as the author, will be heading off anyone going in her direction with any sort of vehicle, teleportation device, seven-league boots, and definitely NO PRINCES OR HORSES ALLOWED, or the story will never happen.
But if you want to give her a gift she'd really appreciate...
A vacuum.
Actually, I think my critique group would really appreciate it too, because then she'd finish the cleaning, and we could finally get on with good stuff!
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Road Trip Wednesday #108
This Week's Topic:
How far would you go to get published?
We writers can form quite an attachment to our characters and stories. But we also know publishing is a business, and sometimes to make it in said business--to really build a career from it--we have to bend a bit. How far would you go to break into the publishing world?
1st - Jumping on the trend train
2nd - Switch to a well selling genre
3rd - Minor revisions requested to sign with an agent
Home - Major revisions requested by an editor
So, being wonderfully and purely unpublished, I am free to muddle around as much as I like. And I'm muddling away. No one is going to ask me to jump on a trend or switch genres, and I'm not going to. I'm not planning to ever even try to write YA contemporaries, because honestly, high school was kind of boring, and when I was in high school, the last thing I wanted to do was read about high school. And yet, I've written things that could totally be classed as YA contemporaries, (if they hadn't been quite so explicit). I've written paranormals. I've written fiction about a noir-style mermaid world.
For 1st and 2nd base the important thing is to keep in mind the difference between being given a prompt and being told what to do. I love getting prompts. Sometimes they catch my imagination and I end up with a 30,000 word novella before I noticed that I started writing. But I hate being told what to do. So if an agent says, hey, I've got this contract for a cool fantasy-mystery about demon-fish and I think you're the girl to write it. I will say, hey, send me the info, I'll check it out. They say that constraints are the best way to work your imagination, and I agree. The smaller the focus the bigger my ideas get. (And of course, the bigger the field for maneuvering in the fewer ideas I have.) But if anyone tells me, "hey, if you aren't writing paranormals you'll never get published," I will bridle in annoyance and set out to prove them wrong.
(Notably, the only prompt that consistently leaves me cold is Vampires. I have nothing to say about Vampires.)
For 3rd and Home, really, they're par for the course. There will always be revision requests. If it will actually be better for the book, then I'm down with it. If it's something that rubs me the wrong way, like de-gaying or whitewashing a character, I might fight that. If it's just something that will be a lot of work? Well, writing is a lot of work. Better get on it.
Right now, I'm totally sure that my book is going to be awesome, and as soon as I finish making it so, everyone else will agree. :D
Monday, December 5, 2011
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Road Trip Wednesday #107 Best Book of the Month
You know, I've been doing Road Trip Wednesday for a few months now, and I have always had a very difficult time with the 'what's the best book you've read this month' question. I've skipped it, I've evaded it, because for me the meaning of 'best book,' doesn't mean the least bad of books, but the number one book of all the ones I enjoyed.
(I should probably write out the semantics for this, where if the denotation of [[thoroughly enjoyed book]] is empty, then [[best book]] must be empty. But I won't.)
But finally, November!
For book club we read Daughter of Smoke and Bone, which I found readable and okay, but not excellent or satisfying. And then I read Medicus by Ruth Downie.
This was an excellent book. It was hilarious, complex, intriguing. I loved all the characters: Ruso, Tilla, Chloe. The setting was awesome, visually and socially compelling. Roman Britain is a really cool place, and Downie brought it to life with the perfect details. But the plot, oh my, the plot is what keeps those pages turning and turning. (And for all the FYAers, I found this incredibly swoonworthy, an 8 at least.)
Basically, I can't recommend it enough. Check it out!
(I should probably write out the semantics for this, where if the denotation of [[thoroughly enjoyed book]] is empty, then [[best book]] must be empty. But I won't.)
But finally, November!
For book club we read Daughter of Smoke and Bone, which I found readable and okay, but not excellent or satisfying. And then I read Medicus by Ruth Downie.
This was an excellent book. It was hilarious, complex, intriguing. I loved all the characters: Ruso, Tilla, Chloe. The setting was awesome, visually and socially compelling. Roman Britain is a really cool place, and Downie brought it to life with the perfect details. But the plot, oh my, the plot is what keeps those pages turning and turning. (And for all the FYAers, I found this incredibly swoonworthy, an 8 at least.)
Basically, I can't recommend it enough. Check it out!
Friday, November 25, 2011
What YA Fantasy Means to Me...
A particular famous author once said, after reading a short story of mine, that some people just have YA voices. After about a year of struggling to write a dark, gritty adult novel (which, in the end, was probably a thriller, only I had never read any thrillers, so I had no idea how they worked), and another year of being depressed about not wanting to write, I decided to write a book that I would like to read. To do this, I made a list of all my favorite books, which quickly started to trend toward fantasy books with children as the main characters. Why was I trying to write literary fiction (and failing) I wondered, when that wasn't what I enjoyed reading.
I had been a fantasy reader as a child: Edgar Eager, Patricia Wrede, Diana Wynne Jones. But when I had finished the Juveniles and wanted something new with a little more meat and depth than the latest Choose Your Own Adventure, I peered into the adult fantasy section and didn't find anything that matched up at all with the books I had read before. I read Xanth, because it was funny, and did occasionally have an interesting idea, and I adored the On a Pale Horse series, even though I was not entirely prepared for the rape and death and sticky adult situations that I found there. But I wasn't interested in epic tales about a farmboy with a destiny, or in stories where a culture's sexual mores is the obsessive focus of the author.
Then I found Terry Pratchett.
Terry Pratchett was everything I was looking for as a young adult reader. All of my favorite J-Fantasy authors had been smart and genre-savvy. They wrote stories about stories. They made jokes aimed at readers. They used fairytales and classic adventure stories as jumping off points to tell wonderful stories of their own. They were stories written by people who loved books for people who loved books. And Terry Pratchett was the same. He wrote books about ideas, with stories, and humor, and intertexts and worldbuilding that brought the ideas to life (sometimes as anthropomorphic personifications.)
Pratchett doesn't write adult fiction or young adult fiction. He writes fiction, though never without a core of truth. And honestly, though Edgar Eager and Patricia Wrede and Diana Wynne Jones may have 'young adult voices,' or even juvenile-type voices (probably not DWJ, who has an incredible range of writing styles that vary from J to Adult without ever losing their content), I think all of these authors are writing the same genre: smart fiction.
For me, YA fantasy is what I read when I was a young adult, what I still read and adore. It isn't distinguished by dragons and princesses or by wizards and elves. It is marked by the simple quality of being a story about an idea, and pulling it off like a kick-ass champ. A story without an idea, without a core quality of meaning, isn't YA fantasy for me. It's some sort of angel-romance, or necromancy-adventure-thriller hybrid.
Now, some of you might be thinking, seriously? Your definition of YA fantasy is absurd. It is neither YA, as its usually defined, nor does it fit any sort of definition of fantasy. (It's non-compositional! Sorry, linguist joke.) But I don't think that's true.
Okay, these days YA is defined as 'from the perspective of a person of the ages 15-18 ± 1 year, depending. But that's the publisher's perspective. For a librarian, the person in the trenches, interacting with the readers, a YA book is a book middle-school and high-school aged kids will want to read. Although everyone touts the self-absorption of young people, not everyone wants to read about themselves (or the prettier, whiter version of themselves). Some of them want to use reading to encounter something new and amazing. Isn't that a decent definition of YA, something a young-adult would want to read?
And of course, fantasy is caricatured as one of two things, either a Tolkein-derivative (which tend to give Tolkein a bad name, since he was doing something strange and astonishing and new with the oldest stories), or a paranormal (i.e. a murder mystery where people can be sexier than normal humans). Is this fair? Of course not. But when arguing for the purpose of fantasy, I've often heard it said, that it's a place where you can explore ideas without the arbitrary constraints of realism. So that's my definition of fantasy, an exploration of ideas that has relinquished arbitrary constraints such as no magic, no dragons, no gods. But it needs to ask the questions "What is magic? What are dragons? What are gods?" then it's fantasy.
As this has become a saga, and although I could go on about how this is the type of book I want to write, but it's a lot harder than I thought it would be, etc, etc. instead I'm going to bring up The Book Cellar's YA/MG Fantasy Reading Challenge. The goal is to read 10 fantasies released in 2012, and review them. Note well, that I will be reading and reviewing with the goal of finding books that fit my definition of YA Fantasy, and that should, therefore, be awesome. I'm excited and ready to get started!
I had been a fantasy reader as a child: Edgar Eager, Patricia Wrede, Diana Wynne Jones. But when I had finished the Juveniles and wanted something new with a little more meat and depth than the latest Choose Your Own Adventure, I peered into the adult fantasy section and didn't find anything that matched up at all with the books I had read before. I read Xanth, because it was funny, and did occasionally have an interesting idea, and I adored the On a Pale Horse series, even though I was not entirely prepared for the rape and death and sticky adult situations that I found there. But I wasn't interested in epic tales about a farmboy with a destiny, or in stories where a culture's sexual mores is the obsessive focus of the author.
Then I found Terry Pratchett.
Terry Pratchett was everything I was looking for as a young adult reader. All of my favorite J-Fantasy authors had been smart and genre-savvy. They wrote stories about stories. They made jokes aimed at readers. They used fairytales and classic adventure stories as jumping off points to tell wonderful stories of their own. They were stories written by people who loved books for people who loved books. And Terry Pratchett was the same. He wrote books about ideas, with stories, and humor, and intertexts and worldbuilding that brought the ideas to life (sometimes as anthropomorphic personifications.)
Pratchett doesn't write adult fiction or young adult fiction. He writes fiction, though never without a core of truth. And honestly, though Edgar Eager and Patricia Wrede and Diana Wynne Jones may have 'young adult voices,' or even juvenile-type voices (probably not DWJ, who has an incredible range of writing styles that vary from J to Adult without ever losing their content), I think all of these authors are writing the same genre: smart fiction.
For me, YA fantasy is what I read when I was a young adult, what I still read and adore. It isn't distinguished by dragons and princesses or by wizards and elves. It is marked by the simple quality of being a story about an idea, and pulling it off like a kick-ass champ. A story without an idea, without a core quality of meaning, isn't YA fantasy for me. It's some sort of angel-romance, or necromancy-adventure-thriller hybrid.
Now, some of you might be thinking, seriously? Your definition of YA fantasy is absurd. It is neither YA, as its usually defined, nor does it fit any sort of definition of fantasy. (It's non-compositional! Sorry, linguist joke.) But I don't think that's true.
Okay, these days YA is defined as 'from the perspective of a person of the ages 15-18 ± 1 year, depending. But that's the publisher's perspective. For a librarian, the person in the trenches, interacting with the readers, a YA book is a book middle-school and high-school aged kids will want to read. Although everyone touts the self-absorption of young people, not everyone wants to read about themselves (or the prettier, whiter version of themselves). Some of them want to use reading to encounter something new and amazing. Isn't that a decent definition of YA, something a young-adult would want to read?
And of course, fantasy is caricatured as one of two things, either a Tolkein-derivative (which tend to give Tolkein a bad name, since he was doing something strange and astonishing and new with the oldest stories), or a paranormal (i.e. a murder mystery where people can be sexier than normal humans). Is this fair? Of course not. But when arguing for the purpose of fantasy, I've often heard it said, that it's a place where you can explore ideas without the arbitrary constraints of realism. So that's my definition of fantasy, an exploration of ideas that has relinquished arbitrary constraints such as no magic, no dragons, no gods. But it needs to ask the questions "What is magic? What are dragons? What are gods?" then it's fantasy.
As this has become a saga, and although I could go on about how this is the type of book I want to write, but it's a lot harder than I thought it would be, etc, etc. instead I'm going to bring up The Book Cellar's YA/MG Fantasy Reading Challenge. The goal is to read 10 fantasies released in 2012, and review them. Note well, that I will be reading and reviewing with the goal of finding books that fit my definition of YA Fantasy, and that should, therefore, be awesome. I'm excited and ready to get started!
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