Reading Recommendation: The Noble Dead Series, by Barb and J.C. Hendee
To be honest, I’m getting tired of recommending vampire books. I had this series for a while, meaning to read it, because I’d heard it spoken highly of and I know people who are friends of Barb and J.C.’s. Then I met them at the Rainforest Writer’s Retreat, run by our mutual friend, Patrick Swenson. I like them. So I picked up the first book, DAMPHIR. I proceeded to read the first four in series (six books, I think), and the only reason I’ve stopped is because I have to read something else I have a deadline for relating to my writer’s reading group that’s studying bestsellers. At least I get to go off and read something I like (George R.R. Martin). But I already have the next book in the series, and it is burning a hole in my shelf.
Given that my love for these books isn’t the vampire bit (I really am tired of vampires), I had to sit back and think about the attraction in the books, which are page-turners, and series-turners. I burned right through from book to book - put one down, pick up the next. So, it’s not the vampires. It’s not the line by line writing, which is good, but largely an invisible style, so I wouldn’t be reading the book for the sentences (like a Neil Stephenson). The main characters, Leesil, Magiere, Chap, and Wynn, are all larger than life and they all have depth and back-story. There villainy is multi-layered. The information feed is good. The world is detailed. And that combination makes the books a real escape - I go there in the way I fell into books and stories as a kid.
A Sense of Place
I’m finishing up THE DOWNBELOW GIRLS this weekend so I can finally get it in the mail. A last step was getting a sense of place into the book. I set it in Seattle, which I live a five minute bridge ride away from in off-peak traffic. It’s seventeen years away (set in 2025), but that’s not far enough in the future that the city will be completely different. The final scene (and an important mid-book scene) both take place at Volunteer Park, where I’d been five or six times. When I was drafting the book, I pulled up the satellite imagery from Google to get a bird’s eye view. Two weekends ago I went to Volunteer Park and took pictures and added more depth of place to the middle scene.
Today, I went back to the park and sat right where I have my protagonists and their dogs playing in the story, took out my laptop, and fixed things like bad blocking and adding tiny but correct details. That’s not to say I added tons and tons of words - it’s the climactic scene, and wouldn’t benefit from long description dumps. But now it feels better. Maybe I needed a sense of the place!
Watching Recommendation: Orwell Rolls in his Grave
I watched Orwell Rolls in his Grave, a documentary made in 2004 about the media. What curious science fiction writer could ignore that title, right? The pointer I got to it was from Mark Anderson, of Strategic News Service, who is one of the brighter thoughtful futurists I know. It turns out that’s is a movie that everyone should see. A divided argumentative independent media is a critical arm of democracy. And we’re losing it. Media is VERY consolidated, and that consolidation in increasingly global. Diversity in ownership is almost zero. AOL/Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch own much of both the ways we get our messages and the content of those messages. If the big telecoms win in the Network Neutrality fight (and we lose the wildness and neutrality of the Internet, which just let me watch a bunch of homemade ads for Obama and earlier let me watch homemade video on Youtube) we will have almost no unapproved messages left.
How awful.
I want to hear messages people don’t want me to hear. That’s whay I read science fiction.
Watch the movie. Orwell Rolls in His Grave. By the way, the movie is a little scary, at least as much as information can be scary. But the creepiest part of watching it for me is that when I talk about things like this movie, I feel like maybe Big Brother is watching somewhere.
Writer’s Read Posted What I’m Reading!
Pretty cool. You can see the entry here.
I’m listening to Cabaret over and over, now on the Joel Grey and Liza Minelli version. Boy, when I get obsessed, I get obsessed. Jeez. I’ve even been listening to it on my walks and runs. In this case its the story - Cabaret has so much in such a small set of scenes and songs - it’s compact and powerful and nearly perfect.
Also I’ve broken 50,000 words on Wings of Creation, and I finally got a breakthrough scene last night on one of my characters…where she had a personal breakthrough AND it helped me see the shape of at least the next few scenes. So Chelo got a breakthrough, and I got a “me too” breakthrough!
Place and Time in Story
I saw Cabaret at the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle last week. Although I have seen the movie, this was the first time I’d seen the play staged. It was fabulous. I also gave some thought as to why it has been such an enduring story. Many works about the same time period have stayed with us. The Sound of Music, Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List, The Diary of Anne Frank, Casablanca, Evita, and more. I read a huge nonfiction book as a child – The Third Reich, maybe the only history book I picked up all by myself around fifth or sixth grade.
We’re told to set our books in interesting places at interesting times, and I suspect World War II is one of the most interesting historical periods. Here is why I think it has so fascinated us:
· It included the Holocaust and the Bomb, two unthinkable moments
· That war close enough to us in time that we can still feel it (compared to say, the battle for Troy)
· At least now, it feels more black and white than recent wars, as if there was a good side and a bad side (and there probably was).
Reading Recommendation: Maximum Ride, The Final Warning by James Patterson
There are reasons Patterson is such a phenomenally successful writer. Among them is an ability to tap into our collective needs/angst as well as just managing pacing and hooks better than just about anyone else.
Anyway, he hooked me through the latest edition of his Maximum Ride books. If you haven’t met Max yet, well, she’s a beautiful brilliant sassy fourteen-year-old girl who regularly takes out legions of plastic bad guys, deals with more complex and real issues with her “parents” and protects her family to the death. Oh, and she’s got wings. I bought the book the moment I saw it on the front table at B and N, and even though I have a solemn promise to a friend to read her mss (now started, and it’s good), I had to read this first. After all, you can’t carry around a sheaf of papers on a bus, right? Well, justification aside, I finished it in less than a day. I just really like this series. Mostly because I like Max. I’m forty-seven and I want to be Max. How many teenagers must want to be Max?
Anyway, as part of an ongoing saga of waking up worrying about silly things in the middle of the night, it dawned on me that Max is the Superman of the decade. The books are paced like comic books (they must be out in Manga - anybody know? They’re perfect for it, anyway). They’re written for ten to ninety year olds,which Patterson says right out loud. That’s so the sweet spot I’m aiming for with the Fremont’s Children series. And you gotta read to write, right? There - another justification. Sigh.
Anyway - I recommend these - whether you’re ten and ninety.
Oh — and if you read the book, you’ll see why I tagged this global warming.
Writing on the Lake, with the Lake, and Many Others
There are many different kinds of writing workshops. I’ve been tasked to write all night - given a 10,000 word story assignment and told to finish it in 24 hours (yes, its possible). I’ve been on Kelley’s Island in Ohio with some fabulous east-coast and mid-country writers. critiquing novels. It’s good for my soul to fall into a world of other writers and just do and talk and breathe writing for three days. At the moment, I’m in Lake Quinault at the Rainforest Writers Workshop which is organized by my good friend Patrick Swenson, who publishes the magazine Talebones and runs Fairwood Press. The group includes about twenty people, including Jay Lake, Louise Marley, Barb and JC Hendee, James Van Pelt, Susan Mathews, and others.
Lake Quinault is in the temperate rain forest on the Olympic Penninsula in Washington State. At the moment, it is not raining, although clouds are dancing and fogging and the colors outside the window are all greens and greys and the white bones of trees in the last stand of winter.
I’m falling back into Wings of Creation, and some uninterrupted time is great. Perhaps, for me, that’s the best part of the process around workshops. Most of my life is a struggle for an hour a day to write, and someplace like this, I can have ten or twelve or more. There was a time I picked workshops for the teaching. Sometimes I still do, but now it’s as much for the focused time.
Molly Gloss’s reading
Earlier, I recommended Hearts of Horses, by Molly Gloss. We are, in fact, reading it in the writer’s book group which studies best-selling author’s work. Since I noticed she is touring our area, I went to her reading at the Bellevue Regional Library yesterday. Molly is one of those writers who evokes a really strong sense of setting and place in her work, which is pretty much a requirement for science fiction. Even though Hearts of Horses is a historical western, there are things for all of us to learn in her work. She read quite a bit - two very long scenes. With some writers, I kind of wish them along the reading part in hopes that the questions will get started. Not Molly - her reading is delightful to listen to. Anyway, I was glad I went.
Of note for the science fiction readers who may be here - Molly has a science fiction book still in print - The Dazzle of Day, by Tor. It’s also very good.
It was also strange to be in the audience - I seldom go to readings outside of conventions, where we kind of all expect and hope that we’ll show up to hear each other’s work. Jay Lake and David Levine and I will all be listening to Ken Scholes, or all to David, or we’ll all be drug into a chorus line (with many others) for Jay’s readings…there will be other audience, usually, but science fiction readings at conventions are kind of among-friends events. Here, I didn’t want to mention I was writer myself, but just to kind of sit back and enjoy. I hope that I can be as gracious as Molly!
Lazy Indulgences and the Writing Process
Every once in a while, it’s important to take down time. I’m in the school of writer’s who believes a high word count every day matters. I’m using 1,000 words a day for my current book (the third one in the series that starts with The Silver Ship and the Sea). I suppose I should name the series - maybe Fremont’s Children? That was the working title for the first book. Can you name a series after you’ve published a book or two in it? Good question, I guess. But back to the topic: Laziness.
For The Downbelow Girls, I wrote at 750 words a day, mostly since I was just too busy for words - no pun intended. And it was a YA, and could be finished in four months at that pace. The current book will take 6 months even at 1,000 words a day.
But I do believe in a little time off. The sun came out this weekend (it always comes out for one weekend in February in the Pacific Northwest). If the weather is true to pattern in spite of climate change, we may not see the great golden globe directly again until July 5th. So I worked in the garden and walked the golden retriever and soaked up Vitamin D. We all took a great big family nap this afternoon…a laziness.
I’m also switching gears into three short stories I owe, and that I want to get done in the next two weeks, and I needed to get Chelo and Joseph and company out of my head….and the weekend off let the back of my brain move from one world into another.
Just saying. Even if you’re so driven you have to write every day, a day or two off can be a good thing. Especially if the sun’s out.
Three Gifts from Far Away
Writing is a strange profession. There are long dry spells when everything is in the mail and nothing is resolved or finished. And then there are gift days. Today, I got three gifts from afar….
A copy of Mallorn, the Journal of the Tolkien Society, with a story of mine in it. Now how cool is that? I love Tolkien, and the journal is great. I mean, if there’s a Heinlein society, and there is, why wouldn’t there be a Tolkien Society? Still, very cool. It’s also a fun and very short bit, as much a scene as a story, set in the universe of Mayan December (I stacked all my research books from that yesterday and I must have read a million words to prepare for that book and that world, which makes me think I need to set something else there, too).
Now, Mallorn came from England, and the stamp even says Royal Mail. Sometimes, it’s the little things, you know. I also got my copy of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume 2. This also has a story of mine - a science fiction story about a real girl and her virtual twin sister. Not to mention stories by some of my favorite sf authors - so I’m really looking forward to reading the silly thing. That came from England, too, and the books had to go through customs. The cover is grand, and the table of contents includes writers like Michael Moorock and Karl Schroeder and Neal Asher and Kay Kenyon. So that’s two things I’m tickled to have been included in.
And then, from closer to home, but still all the way across the country in New York, New York, I got a second set of advanced reading copies for my book, READING THE WIND, with actually pretty covers - or at least prettier than the plain yellow on the previous ones. Which tells me the Tor marketing folk are working on my behalf, which is always cool to know.
A pretty good day.
