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2010-04-03T08:42:00.001-04:00

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The Garmann Sequel

2010-04-02T18:42:00.002-04:00

The Excelsior File reviews Garmann's Street, the further adventures of the wild and wacky kid from Garmann's Summer.

Guess Who Just Had The Best Workday This Year?

2010-04-02T17:59:00.003-04:00

Last week I began revising the 365 Story Project (again), this time into a traditional novel using only one of the story lines from the original material. This week I set up a spreadsheet to keep track of various parts of the job. I used a spreadsheet while I was working on my last book, and while that still hasn't sold, I do think a spreadsheet gives me more control of the on-going work. And it allows me to keep track of word count, which is nice in terms of daily goal setting.

Today I reworked (sometimes generating new material) one thousand, two hundred and forty-seven words! Yes, I know there are writers who wouldn't fire up their word processors for that, but I am not one of them. In addition, I made a submission, which involved doing a little market research. And I continued with some research for another project I want to get started on soon. This means, I'm sort of working on two projects at once, which is a new experience for me. I'm rather liking it.

Now that I've got the spread sheet going and am working a big three days a week, I can go back to giving you training reports, which I had to give up last August. Excited, aren't you? My computer guy found the training reports mind-numbing, which I will remember the next time he gets going on the kind of mind-numbing thing only a computer guy can go on about.

What's the point of doing training reports here? It allows me to use the blog as a sort of writer work buddy. Some writers report to their writer buddies each day, which makes them work harder so they'll have something to report. Why training report instead of work report? I like the whole idea of training. Working, not so much.

If You Have A Lot Of Time...

2010-04-02T10:32:00.002-04:00

...you might want to decipher the ISBN on the book you're reading. Or you might want to work on a cure for cancer instead.

Sort of related--I was just reading today that evidence from mummy autopsies suggests that cancer was pretty much unknown among ancient Egyptians. Their secret may be that they didn't live long enough to develop it.

But I Did Like It

2010-04-01T18:12:00.012-04:00

I used the above title because I can recall years ago reading long, long reviews that went on for a column and a half before the reviewer began to say anything about the book. Ah, those were the good old days, when newsprint was cheap and a reviewer could drone on and on, showing the world how clever she was.

Anyway, Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld--To cut to the chase, it's set in an alternative, steampunk just barely pre-WWI world in which the German-type folks, or Clankers, are into machines like no machines the German-type folks of that real era ever knew,and the British-type folks, known as Darwinists, are into "fabricated animals" that do all kinds of things for them, including serving as dirigibles. (Fabricating animals to function as machines seems like a great deal of work to me, but then science was never my strong suit. I am, in fact, still waiting to find my strong suit.)

The New York Times, where I used to read a lot of those long-winded reviews I was talking about earlier, carried a review for Leviathan in which the reviewer said there was "something a little mechanical (or bioengineered?)" about the two main characters. I would go further and say there was something a little mechanical about the whole book. You've got one storyline about Aleck, the classic royal refugee on the run with loyal retainers. You've got Deryn the classic girl disguised as a boy so she can follow her bliss in a line of work not open to women in the Victorian era. Deryn's bliss is flying on those fabricated beasties the Darwinists use to get around on, much as Matt in Airborn (another steampunk novel) is into gadding about on dirigibles. You've got a character here, Dr. Barlow, who reminded me of Europe in Monster Blood Tattoo. In fact, you have illustrations in this book that reminded me of those in Monster Blood Tattoo.

The book seemed to be manufactured of parts that would be recognizable to someone who had done much reading. It's well done, nonetheless. And less experienced readers won't have read a lot of books about girls going undercover as boys and royalty having to run for their lives. Leviathan won't sound as familiar to them. And I did like it--until I got twenty or thirty pages from the end, when I realized that this story wasn't going to be wrapped up in this volume and that I was reading a hardcore serial. Then I began to feel a little testy.

Scott Westerfeld has redone his website with a Leviathan theme. I thought the Leviathan trailer looked as if it was made by the same folks who did the trailer for Monster Blood Tattoo. Leviathan's had a neat ending, though. "Do you oil your war machines or do you feed them?"

And since steampunk deals with technology, this seems like a good time to refer you to Science Fiction and the Frame of Technology by Paul Woodlin, which I found a while back through Cynsations.

Plot Project: I almost forgot about the plotting project, in which I'm supposed to determine whether or not a plot was generated by a character wanting something and the author creating obstacles to the character getting it. Well, one thing I'm learning from thinking about the plots of the books I read is that you can't read authors' minds. You can only guess how a plot came about. I'm also becoming less and less entranced with the "find out what your character wants and then keep her from getting it" plot plan. If you go to Holly Lisle's Create Your Professional Plot Outline (thank you Procrastinating Writers), you'll see that she says you can develop a plot starting from a number of points, including world building. My guess is that even if a book like Leviathan began with its two traditional characters who can take off from traditional jumping off points--prince escaping, girl disguising herself as boy in order to gain entry into a male world--because it is steampunk, the world building would be crucial to plot development. It seems as if a lot of world building would have to come before the writer could do much with the plot. But that's just speculation.

Don't Cross Me

2010-03-31T19:15:00.001-04:00

Cinema's Greatest Writer Villains.

Alpha female...writer villain. I'll settle for either one.

Grammar Monkeys And The Subjunctive Mood

2010-03-31T14:27:00.004-04:00

Grammar Monkeys is a blog that's brand-spanking new to me, and it's exactly what I was talking about when I posted about changing the blogs you follow in order to bring some spark into your own.

You're probably thinking, But, Gail, seriously, how can a grammar blog inspire a post for your own blog? Oh, easily, easily, dear ones.

Note this Grammar Monkey post on the subjunctive. Now, my grasp of the subjunctive is very weak. However, I feel warmly toward it because it always makes me think of my father-in-law. When I first met him, his son, my boyfriend, warned me that his father, a civil engineering professor and textbook author, was going to ask me about the subjunctive. "He knows you're an English major, and he's always asking people about the subjunctive, anyway. Be ready."

My response was, What the Hell? Be ready for what?

Well, sure enough, soon after meeting, my future father-in-law did bring up the subjunctive. "It is my favorite mood," he said.

I've never known anyone else with a favorite mood. Actually, except for an editor at Putnam, I doubt anyone else I've known knew what a mood was.

So, there you have it, a blog post inspired by a grammar blog. Go forth and look for those new blogs!

Thanks to Blog of a Bookslut for the link.

UPDATE: Oops. I've told the subjunctive story here before. About four and a half years ago. Well, this just proves my original point, that if you've blogged long enough, you'll have read it all and blogged about it all.

Keeping The Magic In Blogging

2010-03-31T10:31:00.007-04:00

Original Content's eighth anniversary was the beginning of this month, and instead of doing an anniversary post, I blogged about Sally. Social networking masters would point out that I missed a golden opportunity to generate some traffic at my blog with some book giveaways, maybe a blog tour, something. Anything.

My only excuse is that when anyone has experienced a great many anniversaries of any type, it's hard to get up a lot of energy for another one. Or sometimes even notice. (Though if Civil Guy sees this, be warned--we're getting out of town the weekend of July 23rd. At least, I am.)

I wouldn't have even noticed the eighth anniversary at all, but Greg Pincus did a post at The Happy Accident on what he described as The Blahgs--"the feeling you get when you lack the desire to keep on blogging." I've been hearing about this for a while now. It's not unusual to read of bloggers needing to take a break, needing to redefine why they're blogging in order to go on. I wanted to respond to Greg's post, the reponse involved figuring out how long I've been doing this, and there you go.

Meandering along here, I think a big part of litblogging is responding to material on the Internet--other blogs, literary columns, etc. I follow--superfically--a great many blogs, and something I've been noticing happening is that I often have days when I've waded through as much as I can without feeling a lot of excitment about anything I've seen. I've been doing this for eight years (See? This is the point where I checked to see how long O.C. has been around and learned I'd missed an anniversary), and what I think has happened is that I'm beginning to feel as if I've read it all before. Certainly, I have read a lot of it before. I have responded to a lot of it before. Yes, I can never read too much about Shirley Jackson and will probably always have a response. But another book controversy...another so-called celebrity author...another vampire story...another barking award...another list of some kind...I think anyone can see that if bloggers have been around long enough, they may very well get to the point that they just don't have anything more to say on a wide variety of subjects.

Now, I actually do have a bit of an assist for this problem--start reading different blogs. Because I'm a writer and not a pure lit blogger, I have some different interests I can call upon. In addition to kidlit blogs, I follow some author blogs, some writing blogs, and right now I'm following some editor and agent blogs. So I do get exposed to a little more variety of thought than someone who follows only one kind of blog. I've also had to drop some blogs over the years, usually because I felt the material covered was covered in other blogs, sometimes in many other blogs. You can't keep taking on more and more blogs because of that thing about time--within an individual life, anyway--being finite. You have to cull the pack every now and then.

So I would like to suggest that change may be what it takes to keep a blog going.

Margo Lanagan. Short Stories. Margo Lanagan And Short Stories.

2010-03-29T19:29:00.003-04:00

Margo Lanagan did a guest post at Cynsations relating to writing short stories. And writing Tender Morsels. She did a blog tour last week, which I hope to read this week.

My Own Nominees For YA Books With Adult Appeal

2010-03-29T18:54:00.009-04:00

Earlier this month, The Spectacle did a post on YA books with special appeal to adult readers. When I say "earlier this month," I mean much earlier this month. Since I didn't see the post until yesterday, I felt I was way too late to add my two cents. So I decided to do it here.

YA books I think would be good reading choices for so-called grown-ups:

The Night Road

Tender Morsels

Corbenic

Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation

How the Hangman Lost His Heart

Ptolemy's Gate

What I Saw and How I Lied

Criss Cross

Other titles readers would like to nominate?

That Probably Wasn't Good

2010-03-28T19:35:00.004-04:00

Speaking of not doing everything I need to do, as I was, this at Mitali's Fire Escape nudged me into going over to Amazon to update my blog there. Whadayaknow? I hadn't updated in two and a half months or thereabouts.

I know I could link this blog to Amazon, but I want to keep Original Content totally independent. Also, I have this vague plan to make the Amazon blog about more nonprofessional interests.

I considered doing Goodreads or Indiebound, as Mitali suggested in her blog post, but who am I trying to kid? I'll never keep those things up to date.

What To Do? What To Do?

2010-03-28T18:20:00.002-04:00

My work life involves one main writing project, historical research for another, this blog, occasional posts for an Amazon blog, occasional business e-mail, short story and essay submissions, a writing meditation thing, and professional reading. Yet I can only work three days a week. Needless to say, many things are not getting done. In fact, I have two white boards in my office, one for a business To Do list and one for a personal To Do list. I haven't had time to update either one of them since February 21.

This afternoon I had a couple of hours I was going to use for cleaning my desk and doing three submissions. I have this long-term fantasy that if I were just tidier and more organized, I would be able to do anything. I have another long-term fantasy about getting manuscripts out of my office.

What to do? What to do?

I moved a stack of books and found a file I was looking for. I made one submission.

Hurray!

Alphas

2010-03-26T19:27:00.003-04:00

So I've just read two books in a row that have referred to characters as alpha and beta males. Soulless included a werewolf who was the alpha for his pack and had a beta buddy who made the top dog more tolerable to be around. So Punk Rock was written from the point of view of a character who considered himself a beta buddy to an alpha.

Now, the alpha in Soulless is a romantic figure, if you don't mind all the yelling and the occasional ripping people to shreds. The alpha in So Punk Rock is a shallow self-centered babe magnet.

It was interesting reading one book right after the other because while one alpha was more attractive than the other, we're only talking a matter of degree here. My own feeling has always been that alpha males are figures to avoid, and these two books didn't do a whole lot to convince me otherwise.

However, they also didn't discourage me from my new ambition to become an alpha female, myself. I may be up for third dan at the ol' dojang later this year, something I was not feeling a lot of enthusiasm for because of the testing involved. But if I consider third dan an objective toward my alpha female goal, it doesn't seem so grim.

Though if you're going to be an alpha, I suppose you should be able to do grim.

Hey, Man! Kosher!

2010-03-26T18:41:00.005-04:00

So Punk Rock by Micol Ostow with illustrations by David Ostow may be, when all is said and done, a bit of a generic, "Let's start a band!" book. Main character wants to be cool, pulls a group of kids together, finds a little success, has the big gig, realizes that the things he thought he wanted are not what he wanted at all. What makes the book different is that it is so...Jewish. And if you're not Jewish, it is such a pleasure to read about a contemporary real teen world you don't know a whole lot about.

If there are dozens of YA books out there about the teenage Jewish punk rock scene, please let me know. I'm sure not aware of them.

Our narrator, Ari Abramson, has a very laid back, dry wit. He is into irony. He's a junior at Leo R. Gittleman Jewish Day School where around sixty-four percent of the student body is "religious enough to find ourselves in a school where learning Hebrew, Torah, and Rabbinics is valued as much as learning English, history, and math--but not, you know, hard core about it." Since something similar can be said about the Christian church I sort of attend ("We're Christians, but let's not get ridiculous about it."), I definitely felt some common ground with this boy.

I don't see a lot of kids' or YA books that recognize the fact that many, many young people are involved in religious practice. I'm not even talking about what kids believe, just the fact that they attend services, receive religious instruction, etc. I found that here in a book with the words "Punk Rock" in the title.

While I enjoyed the graphic elements, I didn't pick up on their significance (a character was creating them), until the end. I may have stumbled with my reading (which has happened before) or they may not have been integrated into the story as well as they might have been.

Nonetheless, an enjoyable read.

Check out an interview with the author and illustrator at Cynsations.

"Teen Angel, Teen Angel, Teen Angel, Ooooooh"

2010-03-25T19:26:00.004-04:00

The author of Teenage Fiction's Death Wishes asks why teenagers are into reading about buying the farm. I don't think this is a particularly new interest. I can recall my high school creative writing teacher telling us that he was sure he was going to hear from parents regarding a morbid piece written by a student for the school literary magazine because he'd been in that situation before. And this may be tipping my hand regarding my seriously advanced age, but I can just barely remember when dying adolescents were a Top 40 staple.

I guess it's a sign of improved literacy if teenagers are reading books about dying instead of dancing to music about it.

Link from Cynsations.

Maybe More Than You Want To Know About Snow White

2010-03-24T19:52:00.002-04:00

Snow, Glass, Apples: The Story of Snow White by Terri Windling was a little overwhelming for someone like myself, whose knowledge of the tale is limited to a Little Golden Book rendering of the "Disney version." I've never seen the movie.

In reading Windling's article, I was struck by the older woman/younger woman relationship, unpleasant though it may be. I kept wondering if the Snow White figure's fate was to become a middle aged woman who will, in turn, hate a younger woman. And what are we to make of those princes who like their women dead?

The link came from Bookslut, of course.

Oh, My Gosh! Oh, My Gosh! I Am So Glad I Saw This!

2010-03-23T20:15:00.003-04:00

My Shirley Jackson obsession is well-documented here at O.C.. So imagine my delight when Blog of a Bookslut referred me to The Strange World of Stanley Edgar Hyman and Shirley Jackson in the Wall Street Journal. Be sure to read the comments.

Though I have been to Bennington, Vermont a number of times in years past, and one of my sisters lived there for a little while, I cannot lay any claim to knowledge of Bennington College. To Vermonters of my tribe and era, Bennington College was...another world. Out of state. Beyond our grasp and understanding. We could not imagine the wealth or fathom the intellect.

If Shirley Jackson had not been connected with it, I would barely have known Bennington College existed. Because she was, I've paid attention to anything I've read about the place. For her sake.

Coincidently, today I had lunch with my mother-in-law who was a faculty wife during the same period (and beyond) as Jackson, though at much techier colleges. How did those women maintain their sanity?

Cannibalizing

2010-03-23T18:23:00.003-04:00

Does Gail do any real work, you may wonder? She certainly doesn't say anything about doing anything that could pass for real work.

Well, since the end of January, beginning of February, I've been revising the first four months of 365 Story Project entries I did last year before everything went to Hell at Chez Gauthier. The revision was going well until a couple of weeks ago. I was getting (and still am) overwhelmed with the various storylines for the various arcs. I had colored notecards. I had lists. I was spending enormous amounts of time trying to manage information. I was reaching that point that comes in all writing projects at which the writer goes, What was I thinking? I'm ashamed to even have had this idea, forget about working on it all this time.

I was driving in the car one day, when I thought that perhaps the whole thing should shift to a traditional book format, that perhaps I had many book possibilities in the material I'd generated.

Nah, I told myself. That can't be right. And I continued struggling on.

Then yesterday I started reformatting from the beginning into a narrative for just one storyline, keeping only those things that will support that one storyline. Two chapters fell right into place.

I am cannibalizing the earlier work. I must say, cannibalizing feels good.

Everyone's Been In Monet's Garden

2010-03-21T19:36:00.004-04:00

I stumbled upon The Magical Garden of Claude Monet by Laurence Anholt, a story based on a real incident.

The book made me think of Linnea in Monet's Garden by Christina Bjork. Then I learned that Philippe has been there, too.

Everyone has been in Monet's garden. My sister has been in Monet's garden. That would make a great picture book. Constance in Monet's Garden and Why Gail is Bitter.

Something More Specific Regarding Archetype And Stereotype

2010-03-19T19:36:00.007-04:00

Today, folks, we will be discussing Soulless by Gail Carriger, for two reasons.

1. It is one of the 2010 Alex Award winners. That means it is a book written for adults that has special appeal to young adults, twelve through eighteen years of age. Once again, I just don't get this. This is a paranormal romance, mainly, about a twenty-six-year-old spinster living in a steampunk Victorian London who is warm for the form of a much, much older Scottish werewolf. What we have here is essentially a Georgette Heyer novel with vampires and werewolves and lots and lots of hot, steamy almost sex. Sure, plenty of teenagers will like it, just as I liked Georgette Heyer novels when I was a teenager. But I don't see how there's anything here that is of particular interest to teen readers. (Except for the almost sex.) No adolescent characters. No adolescent themes.

The people I think will really like this book are the adult women who've been reading the Twilight books for the sexual frustration. The sexual frustration in Twilight is really lame compared to what they'll find in Soulless.

2. Leila at bookshelves of doom brought up the familiarity of the characters. I, too, thought of the Amelia Peabody books in the opening chapters of Soulless. Both Amelia and Alexia, the main character in Soulless, are powerful Victorian outsiders partnered with powerful, highly cranky, if not close to violent, men with insatiable sex drives, and both women even carry umbrellas they use as weapons. But Leila's bringing up the characters in Soulless as "types" reminded me of my archetype vs. stereotype musings earlier this month. Is Gail Corriger merely tossing off some stereotypes in Soulless or is she messing with archetype? While Alexia- and Lord Maccon-type characters appear in plenty of Heyer and Heyer-type novels, is placing them in a steampunk werewolf story playing with the archetype or just plodding along with the stereotype? And while Lord Akeldama is a very stereotypical gay character, isn't he also the aristocratic fop from any number of Regency romances cranked up a great deal?

As J.L. Bell said in a comment, "Readers have different experiences, tastes, temperaments." Meaning that whether a character is viewed as a archetype or stereotype is subjective on the part of the reader. Or, as I said, "tomato/tomahto."

I don't know if I'll be reading any of the Soulless sequels because I don't know how long I will enjoy the male-lover-dripping-testosterone scenario. It seems like something that will get old really fast to me. (The same goes with the Amelia Peabody books.) However, I know one hairdresser who will be getting Soulless for Christmas this year.

Plot Project: Oh, definitely, this is a plot all about woman wanting werewolf. All the evil goings on are the obstacles to her getting him.

Oh, Please. What Century Is This?

2010-03-19T15:39:00.004-04:00

Why Are Bloggers Male? asked columnist Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail. Well, they aren't. Not all of them, anyway. And Wente heard about that in an on-line debate.

In the debate Wente says, "This was a lighter piece about opinions and sex differences in expressing them." Personally, I could tell she was trying to be light-hearted. Here's the thing, though--that oh-isn't-it-amusing-the-way-men-and-women are-different essay is so old. It is so 1970's. It has been done to death. So even if you're right and you actually have hit upon some way that men and women are actually different (say, because most women have noticeable breasts and most men don't), you're not going to get a lot of laughs with it because the structure of the humor is so old and predictable. We've been done laughing about that for a long time now.

And if you're blatantly wrong, well, yikes.

Check out Salon's response to the news that blogging belongs to guys.

As A General Rule, I Hate Writing Tips.

2010-03-19T14:21:00.004-04:00

Practicing Writing directed me to 21Tips to Get Out of the Slush Pile. As a general rule, I find writing tips superficial and manipulating the material to make the sale. But these had a lot more depth and really seemed to address writing issues.

Embody The Abstractions

2010-03-18T19:21:00.001-04:00

Isn't that a lovely phrase? M.T. Anderson used it in an interview at Cynsations. Pay attention when he talks about how writing nonfiction helped his fiction.

Good Interview

2010-03-17T11:44:00.004-04:00

Nancy Sondel with the Pacific Coast Children's Writers Workshop did an interesting interview with agent Edward Necarsulmer. The best information is on page 2 under "Novel Genres and Trends."

Eternity Stinks

2010-03-16T19:09:00.007-04:00

I picked up Night Road at the library for one reason--A.M. Jenkins wrote it. Jenkins is the author of Repossessed, a book I liked a great deal.

Night Road is terrific, too. It involves a hemovore named Cole. Hemovores are humans--and Cole does consider himself a human--who live on blood. Though Cole looks like a teenager and always will, he is worn down by life experience. Lots of it. He's been walking the Earth for over a hundred years. He's pretty much a broken man, burdened by the knowledge of what he failed to do for his brother over a century ago and what he did to the woman he loved a few decades back.

Think some kind of lone noir hero, adhering to a code that keeps him alive but not really living.

Cole is contacted by the leader of the hemovore community because a new heme was "accidentally" created by the funny, kind Sandor. Sandor and Cole take the newby, a real teenager, out on a road trip to help him acclimate to his new existence. If the kid can't make the transition, Cole is charged with seeing to it that he meets a fate that Cole believes will be worse than death since he believes people like them can't be killed.

The journey provides Cole for a chance at redemption, a redemption he wasn't looking for.

This is a great book, but, as often happens with me, I don't see why it's YA. Cole may look like a teenager, but he sure isn't one. This guy is world weary. He isn't trying to separate himself from family. He isn't trying to determine his path in life. This poor guy isn't trying to do anything when we first meet him. In my post on Repossessed, I said that while that book was definitely YA (imho), it could just as easily have been an adult book if the devil had been placed in an adult body. With Night Road if Cole had become a heme at twenty-five or thirty or thirty-five or...you get my drift...the book could have worked just as well without changing anything.

The Plot Project: Is this a book that's plot was generated by a character wanting something and meeting obstacles to getting it? I don't think so, because Cole doesn't seem to want anything at the beginning of the book. Yes, he seems to have moved on to a better situation by the end, but it wasn't one he was seeking. This book might have begun with a situation--the classic road trip on which older characters guide a younger one. As with any situation, the author would then have to decide which character her book would be about. It sure isn't the real teenager who truly does have something he wants--to go back to his old life.

A marvelous book, whatever it is.