Writing - Heather Sellers - Chapter after Chapter (2007)

I told you I have a lot of these. I even have a lot I haven't read. I will admit that I read about half of this one back when I bought it, but then it lost me. I read it all the way through this time.

Maybe the fact that this book is not for my situation has colored the way I feel about it. I don't really like it though. I'll get into why in a minute.

This book is the spiritual sequel to Sellers's first writing book, Page After Page, which is mostly about getting started writing as a practice and a habit. This book, however, is about writing your book. Sellers's way.

It may stem from my relationship with my parents (better, now, that I don't live with them), but I hate it when people tell me what to do and imply that it is their way or the highway. Sellers spends the last half of the book talking about how to keep on your book and how to then get it published. This includes not reading anything while actually writing the book (which can obviously take a year or more!), how to travel while in the midst of your book (make assignments for yourself every day and don't you dare enjoy your vacation), and how to not even think about any of the new ideas your musing brain may come up with while in a creative stance to write your story.

Normally, I would just remember that it's advice. This lady is not going to fly to Vegas from Michigan, beat down my door, and strangle me for not doing things her way. But she often bookends her advice about not doing things you like while writing with "if you want to be a real writer" or "if you ever want to finish" or even "if you ever want to publish".

If you're writing, you're a real writer. You can finish in your own way, at your own pace. Thousands of books get published every year. You're not going to miss out somehow just because you decide to spend your Florida vacation on the beach rather than in a darkened hotel room.

The first half of the book actually does address some of the anxieties writers have about their stories. Like how they might mess them up if they actually write them. Like wanting to write, but having to go to a child's birthday party, or celebratory dinner, or help your friends move, or whatever other obligations you may have. Like feeling like you should be writing, or doing something else, or working on one project or the other. But again, these are steeped in "this is what I do, so you should do it too, especially if you want to be a real writer". Like, do you volunteer and visit with your friends over lunch? Say goodbye to it. It's taking up too much of your time.

The part I think that I dislike the most is the part about the "Book 100". Sellers says that you should, before even starting on writing your story, read 100 books like it. List them all out, and read them all over the course of a year, taking copious notes on each one. And, if you can't easily list 100 books similar to yours, (by the way, you probably had to read them in the first place before to know this) then it's probably not a good idea.

Read that part again. If you cannot list a hundred books like yours, it's not a good idea. This is book writing on Sellers's terms.

I say, if you have a story in you right now, start it right now. Give it a shot. Don't wait until you've found and read a hundred books like it. And if you want to read while you write, have at. You may find new themes and concepts from the book you're reading that you want to incorporate into a book you're writing. Go to lunch with your friends. Have a life outside the writing room.

The reason I think that it may have gone over better with me is the fact that it is for a person in the middle of their story and floundering. I have a few started stories, but like I said in the last post, I haven't actually written in a long time. So the exercises in this quickly became irrelevant to me. I don't need something to help me finish something. I need something to get me back on the horse.

If that has colored my review somewhat, then so be it. All I know is that the last book had me excited about writing. This one made me feel cynical and like I shouldn't bother.

4.0/10

Writing - Jamie Cat Callan - The Writer's Toolbox (2007)

I think this is the first writing book I'm reviewing. You may not know this, but I have a ton of these things. Not boxes full of stuff. I only have two of those.

Except for this blog, regrettably I haven't written for a while. It was my job, and also the wedding, and also my depression and anxiety. But now I'm unemployed, married, and on Celexa, so I figured it was time to stop with the excuses.

And if you have writer's block, this is fucking amazing.

The book inside is a scant 60 pages long, but it's mostly an instruction manual for the goodies inside the box, which include Popsicle sticks, a deck of cards, a three-minute hourglass, and spinning palettes you would otherwise think are more suited to kids learning their addition or times tables.

But they aren't normal items. The Popsicle sticks have first lines on them, lines to start new scenes, and even something to spark the conflict in a story. The cards have ideas and senses on them, so you can dive into description or use one as a starting off point. The palettes have protagonists, their goals, what's standing in their way, and how they try to get around that. All in all, it's a pretty robust set of inspiration tools for any stuck writer hoping to fill a notebook with some ideas to mine through later.

I used some of the tools as I read through the manual. I ended up with a guy setting his family's home on fire while hallucinating that they are actually all going on a vacation together, three female roommates that secretly and not-so-secretly hate each other, and an older guy trying to reclaim his youth through sex with younger women. This, after not really writing for months.

The great thing about book itself is that it doesn't just explain the tools in the box and give crappy examples of how to use them. It describes how to use each tool to start a new story, start back into a half-finished one, and even how to combine them more than just "sticks go together, cards go together".

I mentioned earlier that I have a lot of these kinds of books. One thing that this one does, and I love, that none of the others do, is show some examples of using the tools by other authors. Short little vignettes followed by commentary by the author describing their thought process while writing. That was super cool. And the vignettes are enough to inspire you to pick up your pen and start on using the tools yourself.

Not bad for a box I picked up on a whim to use a coupon.

9.5/10

Children's Literature - Dorothy Haas - Trouble At Alcott School (1989)

Is there a reason they made these kids' books readable in twenty minutes? Did they think kids didn't have the stamina to read very much at a time? I can't believe how I took kids' books out of the library and justified it. I could have just sat there and read it!

This was another one of those books I got from some box of kids' books at a garage sale. I actually have three of this short-lived series, this, number four, being the first of those that I own.

The premise of this series is that there are two friends, Polly Butterman, called Peanut for some reason that I don't understand, and Jillian Matthews, called Jilly because it's actually a logical diminutive of her name. Apparently they weren't friends right away? This book seems to imply as such and, as I said, this is the earliest book I have of the series, so I have no way of knowing. Their personalities in this book don't have many differences, which is to say any differences at all. The only difference I can tell is that Peanut is more cynical and downtrodden then Jilly is.

There are several plots in this book, which seems to be a showcase of things that happen at their school, hence the title. The main plot is that their friend, Erin, wore her great aunt's locket to school and then lost it, and they have to find it, especially when notes start showing up implying someone stole it. There is also a scientist biography project subplot which culminates in the students fighting about whether or not inventors count as scientists, as well as a subplot involving a kid named Elvis and his homeless pet mice.

The only thing I have to say about a book that I finished in less time than a sitcom episode is that the least they could have done is made the culprit be someone less obvious. There is a character, Jennifer, who is established several times as a huge cunt. It was obvious from the second the first note showed up that it was her. It would have been so much more interesting if it was Erin's friend Emmy, who went with Erin to go look for it and was participating in trying to find out who stole it. That would have been amazing.

Not bad for what I assume is a very young reader's book.

6.5/10

Steampunk - Various Authors - Extraordinary Engines (2008)

This isn't like the last anthology I read for several reasons. One, this one features short stories only, not novellas. Two, it's steampunk, not retarded. Three, it's actually good.

You may or may not know me in real life, but know this: we had a steampunk wedding. If that doesn't tell you how much love I have for this genre, you can go get a lobotomy, because it's not going to change much. The time period of the industrial revolution encapsulating the Victorian era and the Civil War, plus the sci-fi elements of high technology based on basic invention, and especially the embrace of Tesla-style advancements over our more traditional Edison dependence is just delicious. Like decadent cake covered in addictive frosting. There is very little to go wrong.

This being an anthology of short stories, rather than an actual novel, I'm going to have to go through each story to talk about how well the book is pulled off, but remember, I actually like and wanted to like the whole thing.

"Steampunch" by James Lovegrove is the story that starts off the book, and quite easily the best one in here. Not to say that there aren't other stories I like also, but this one is great. It is my favorite and starts the anthology off very strongly. Come on. Boxing, steam-powered automatons, told in a storyteller's first-second POV? And that ending was super unexpected.

The next story dropped my enthusiasm for the book like a rock. "Static" by Marly Youmans tries to do way too much in a small space and ends up doing it all badly. It introduces an idea of a world irradiated by electricity. Okay. And how that effects daily life. Gotcha. But the police are bad, the main character is a prisoner of her great aunt, there is this guy called a Static investigating a death the main character has no sympathy for, and a climax that just takes maybe a single step down from the nonescalating buildup. Terrible. My least favorite in the whole thing.

"Speed, Speed the Cable" by Kage Baker is apparently a short story based in a universe he has already printed books for, but one that I haven't read. I don't think I have to say anything about it other than to quote the description before the tale.

Resident in California, Kage Baker is the author of the very popular Company series of time-travel novels, in which the twenty-third century Zeus Corporation quickly ransacks the pasts of its treasures using an army of immortal once-human cyborgs.

"Elementals" by Ian R. MacLeod is the first one to introduce thematic ideas, but only seemed to make me think of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I felt that it was meh.

If "Steampunch" hadn't been so great, "Machine Maid" by Margo Lanagan would be a solid contender for my favorite. A newly married couple go to their gold-mining ranch, and the wife utterly hates all sexual contact with her husband. I wasn't sure right away that a passage was referring to forced blowjobs right away, but later content confirmed it. And she has a robotic maid that happens to have more than functions relating to housecleaning. The only thing I don't like about this story was the ambiguous ending.

"Lady Witherspoon's Solution" by James Morrow is awesome. Not because of male genital mutilation, but because it uses the journal form extremely well, and introduces an idea of devolution to the Women's Suffrage battle of the time.

"Hannah" by Keith Brooke is another great one. The only problem is that it could have easily been set in more modern times without much change. Though it does raise ethical questions to the medical procedures of yesteryear.

"Petrolpunk" by Adam Roberts is similar to "Static" in that it tries to do too much. Also, I just realized with derision, it's a self-insert story. Blech. Second least favorite for sure. It started strong, but then devolves into people explaining the story in dialogue sloppily.

"American Cheetah" by Robert Reed is not that awesome either. It tastes too much of a western for my tastes. Robot Abraham Lincoln is a Minnesotan sheriff against robot bank robbers. It was at this point that I decided that if there was anything wrong with the anthology, it was the dependence of automatons to drive the story.

"Fixing Hanover" by Jeff VanderMeer is another one about a robot, this time a robot that washes ashore of a castaway settlement. The main character is interesting, but his girlfriend and the other castaways are not. Nice touch, trying to make the girl seem interesting by giving her two different colored eyes. That kind of Mary Sue move only worked for Yuna.

"The Lollygang Save the World on Accident" by Jay Lake is very strange. I'm still not a hundred percent sure what kind of world it was. It seemed like people who lived on a ship for so long that they don't remember the outside, but then again, I might be off. Certainly a weird one that doesn't explain much of what's going on.

"The Dream of Reason" by Jeffrey Ford is the bookending great story. In another world, which is clearly different, but doesn't hesitate to steal from Earth's Victorian society, particularly in the use of Debtor's Prison, there is a scientist that is convinced that stars are diamonds and matter is just slow-moving light. In order to acquire diamond dust, he decides to slow starlight down completely, using the eternal pathways of a human's mind to exhaust its speed. This is a great one because of the psychological element.

So, there are a lot of good ones, a few meh ones, and a couple terrible ones. Not bad for a short story collection. You could probably do worse, and if you're unfamiliar with steampunk, it wouldn't hurt to give it a look-see.

8.5/10

Fiction - Eric Garcia - The Repossession Mambo (2009)

I told you the next review wouldn't be fantasy. But of course that meant I had to read it, and let me tell you up front, it wasn't fun. I actually read most of it yesterday, in one sitting. Not because it was really good, but because I didn't want to be sitting on it for a long time because I didn't like it.

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

I bought the book in my last shopping trip too; I don't know why I keep reading these books that haven't been in my house for very long, but there you go. If the title sounds familiar, it might be because the movie Repo Men was based on this book (which is a lie, but I'll get to that later). I never watched Repo Men, primarily because I didn't give a shit, and also because, after Sherlock Holmes, how can Jude Law be anything but an awesome Watson?

I mentioned that it was a lie to say that that movie was based on this book. The Wikipedia page can tell you some, but the author's note at the end describes the process in more detail: he wrote a short story, then a manuscript of a novel on the idea, and then the script and movie was started before it was published. Then, once the movie was pretty far into production, he decided to publish the book with very few of the edits made to the plot for the movie.

And dear God, it reads like it.

In the author's note, one of the things that Garcia mentions he kept was "the unruly structure". His words, not mine. But they are apt; it was a pain in the ass to keep track of which section was referring to which time in his life. He flips frequently between the past and the present, focusing a lot on his military experience, the parade of wives he traipsed through, and his being on the run. It doesn't even get to the parts we care about, why he got an artificial organ and why he didn't pay for it, until the second half of the book. And it flips randomly around between these subjects. It's not like he goes into the military stuff, then the wife stuff, then the present, or anything like that. Fuck, he doesn't even talk about these things chronologically! The whole thing reads more like a stream of consciousness diary than a novel.

And that's not even going into the fact that the premise is suspect as well. People get artificial organs with usurious loans, and when the default, they die. Seems simple enough, I guess, until you start to think about the changes this would make to the world, and how unbelievable it gets the more you think of it.

For instance, the economic destruction that comes afterwards. These aren't just people getting artificial organs to replace the ones that fail. They are getting them with tons of unnecessary features, features that serve no real purpose other than convince people with healthy organs to get artificial ones as well. And then, when they can't pay the loan on them (and most of them go for as much as a house), repo men are sent out to reclaim the organ so that they can sell it again. They don't mention whether or not the organs cost that much to make, or if they are just overpriced. If they are overpriced, do you happen to remember the housing crisis of the past few years? The only thing saving this Credit Union from going belly-up is the fact that people are lined up around the block to try to get a loan to buy an organ.

On the same note, they mention that sometimes people just can't afford it, and fall delinquent on their loan in order to pay for food and rent. If the price of not paying is death (which it always is), why wouldn't you pay that first? The book tries to explain it away by saying that the bills run up to several thousand a month, and you pay mostly interest anyway. So the whole system is set up to fail. Awesome. How is that legal?

And why wouldn't the government get involved? It has things that each side of the aisle hates: death panels and preying on the poor. It sounds to me like there would be a lot of congressional hearings with whoever is in charge of the Credit Union, possibly every day based on what the book describes as gross negligence on the part of their repo department. Allow me to explain.

There is a described incident in which a repo man repossesses an organ from a guy while his wife is trying to convince him that they are all paid up. The repo man goes back to the office to find that oh, she was right. He just killed a guy for no reason. Where are the legal repercussions? The murder charges, the wrongful death lawsuit, the arguments on pundits' shows that these men have too much power? Nothing. Nada. They pay her some cash and that's it. Yeah, I don't think so.

There are also multiple incidents that someone's nonessential organ is repossessed, but because they do not receive any medical care whatsoever afterwards, they die, usually of blood loss. There is a character with a gall bladder. He could have lived! They even mention that there are some other organs that are repossessed with the same deadly results, such as eyes and tongues. You can live without both. Why do they die? Because nothing is done. This is why they should be paying through the nose in settlements and lawsuits.

For a book that I didn't like, it certainly gave me a lot to talk about. Mostly because the premise is okay, but horridly handled. There was a lot of opportunity for great world-building and even philosophical questions, such as if a person is mostly artificial parts, are they still human? But the author didn't even try.

There were two, and exactly two, saving graces to this novel, and that is why this book gets such a low score:

1. The opening sentence.

The first time I ever held a pancreas in my hands, I got an erection.

2.   The reason he quit his lucrative job as a repo man, even with an artificial heart.

1.5/10

Fantasy - C.S. Friedman - Feast of Souls (2007)

I wasn't lying when I said that I read a lot of fantasy. It is my preferred genre, after all, despite how much I hate high fantasy. I promise that the next review will not be another fantasy novel.

I got this book and The Adamantine Palace during my last book shopping trip. It isn't super often that I get around to reading the books I buy so soon after purchasing them, but what're you going to do? With my job being gone now, I won't be going out to buy books as often as I used to.

Man, I am getting off track easily this morning.

I went into this book expecting to like it. Not love it; if you go into a book expecting to love it, you may only be disappointed. And for the vast majority of the book, I did like it a lot. I've read C.S. Friedman before, in the form of  This Alien Shore, which still stands as one of my favorite science fiction novels. This one had an author I liked and a premise I adore: the cost of power in a land with magic. That's one of the themes I seriously love in fiction in general, the cost of power.

The cost of power here is that magic feeds off life energy, and where that energy comes from depends on what kind of magic user you are. For witches, who can be male or female, that life energy is your own. For Magisters, who can only be male, that life energy is that of another person, usually one you don't even know. The story opens up to present this idea in the form of a dying witch, but also quickly introduces the main character, Kamala, a girl who is determined to become a Magister, despite her uterus. I don't think it would be spoilery to tell you that she succeeds: if she didn't, she'd be dead before the first hundred pages are up, and that makes a shitty main character.

The writing and premise got me reading for a while without pause, even though Kamala reads like a Mary Sue, with her hair and eye coloring reiterated often, along with her tomboyishness and desire to dress like a boy. All that plus the fact that she is the first female Magister makes one groan whenever the points in her favor are pointed out again and again. But I guess it's a good price to pay for some of the other characters, who are richly developed peoples. Colivar, Gwynofar, and Siderea stand out in particular. Especially the last: her set up where she has sex with Magisters so they will do her magical dirty work is an interesting concept that I wish could be explored longer.

About a third of the way into the book, the plot turns sharply away from Kamala trying to find her way as a Magister and her consort trying to find her to what is essentially a manhunt, because she accidentally kills a Magister, which is like the only rule Magisters have. I actually stopped reading for a few days because of this. It was not what I wanted to read.

But it just as quickly swung away from that plot line to that which included monstrous Souleaters, which look like dragons with dragonfly wings. They do exactly what they say, feed off life energy, but in hoards, like locusts. They quickly become the major concern for the rest of the book and probably the rest of the series. I don't know exactly how I feel about it. I didn't really like how the plot took on an inconsistent color that maybe a little more lingering on the transitions would have helped.

It also required a more careful editor. There were some obvious typos and formatting issues that the editor could have caught. It all kind of smelt like there was a looming deadline and it was published at the wire.

That isn't to say that the book isn't worth a look. For the magic system alone, I would recommend it. And I certainly will be getting the next book in the series.

8.0/10

Fantasy - Stephen Deas - The Adamantine Palace (2009)

Did anybody else catch Game of Thrones on HBO last night? I had been looking forward to that for like a year, and it totally did not disappoint. Mostly for hardcore Song of Ice and Fire fans, though. Not a lot of names for characters for the uninitiated. But Bryan liked it, primarily because of the sheer quantity of breasts. Whatever floats his boat.

Is that even here or there? Probably not. Anyway, The Adamantine Palace.

It took me a while to get into this. Which sucked because it was the kind of fantasy that I normally prefer: society and politics, plus how the fantastic changes the world. In this case, the fantastic takes the form of dragons, but if you can't figure that out from the cover, you must be reading the Braille version.

With as many ravings all over the covers about how awesome the dragons are, I was very disappointed at the outset because they were essentially fancy horses. There are hunting types and warring types, and they get stabled and traded and have zero personality. At first I thought it would just be like in Dragonriders of Pern, where the dragon-riders perform a service or something that allows for the dragon-kings and -queens to enjoy a heightened status. No. They're just dragons. Domesticated ones. What? You want something more? Fuck you, says Deas.

Until about a third of the way through with Snow and Kailin. It turns out that the domesticated state of dragons is a balance of drugs to dragon, and if the dragon tips the scales (see what I did there?) in his favor, shit hits the fucking fan. Snow "wakes up" and is hungry to kill. Mostly indiscriminately, I mean, she's really pissed, but later she focuses almost entirely on the alchemists that create the dragon soma that make them all the fancy horses they are at the beginning. She is also focused on waking up the other dragons she encounters.

Meanwhile, there are political machinations aplenty. An asshole marries a brutal queen's daughter, and they has sex with another immature queen. There is also the fact that the Speaker, kind of like a one-man UN for the nations, is retiring and has to choose his successor from among the kings and queens that are really just a hair away from warring. That's more like it. It even makes up for the sellswords that I hate, Sollos and Kemir.

Sollos and Kemir are lame. I'm not just saying that because they swear a lot, but they sound very modern. If their dialogue was placed in, say, contemporary New York, you would think they were just a little odd. Here, it stands out like a sore thumb. It's not good.

While the reviewers of this book loved how the dragons turned into vicious slaughter machines about halfway through, I was still disappointed by it. I may be a traditionalist in this way, but I like my dragons to be treasure hoarders, have distinct personalities beyond "I'm real mad!", and just a step below gods. I never really liked Dragonriders of Pern because why should dragons be ridden by people? People should be cowering before dragons. I especially like the dragons of Elizabeth Haydon's Symphony of the Ages series, because they have that majesty and terrifying aspect, but they can also take on a human form that still betrays the draconic nature beneath the skin. Dragons should want jewels and precious things, not whole scale genocide because they were enslaved by drugs.

8.0/10