Mermaids

Last night I finished The Mermaid's Madness by Jim Hines. It was a great read--quick, dark, and sometimes funny--that kept me reading the way one is drawn further out into the breakers on a sunny day at the beach. This is the second book in his series of Princess novels giving the now entwined histories of how Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella survived the circumstances that became enshrined in their respective fairy tales and what came next when they came together as wiser, tougher women in the kingdom of Lorindar. Can't help but think these would have been the perfect companions for lazy days in the dorm.

As it is, I'm happy to have something fun to sneak in between the stalk of writing about writing that I seem to have waded into again. It must be that January needs to have some kind of instructional component, because I find myself wandering out of the literature aisle and creeping into the instructional titles almost without intention. Perhaps I can put off drafts with another several chapters regarding how I should be organizing my paragraphs. I think I'd rather be swashbuckling with the princesses.

The Great Workplace Romance

I've discovered that conversational, slightly odd accounts of working in cubeville (Dilbert, Then We Came to the End, microserfs) are my equivalent of the romance novel. I read them from cover to cover, empathizing and wishing that I had a well-paying, life-eating, interesting job instead of the crazy job I have or instead of spending all day avoiding doing the dishes.

In addition to being guilty pleasures, they show the way that workplace relationships function (for that one job, in that one company): how they create identity, how they offer opportunity for the demarcation of private and public information and personas, how they are as fleeting as collegial and high school status structures. These structures are as good as the costume personas of the romance novel. While I didn't believe in the myth of happily ever after vis-a-vis your average romance novel long enough to pick up the habit of reading them, I do believe in the idea of the perfect job, in which status, hours, salary, and responsibilities align to bless the employee with respect and satisfaction. Alas that the limits of my practicality don't extend into the workaday world.

Job novels are also about the artifacts of communication and technology that shift with the status of the company and the age or status of the corporate leaders. I recall the time that I left a temp job after arriving and being given a pencil and a pad of paper upon which to do some odd job--it was obvious that neither the company nor my position in it would provide the status I wanted at the time, especially being eager to prove that an English degree from a local university didn't make me unfit for the earning of a reasonable salary. As I hunched over the pad, miserable and drawing chains down the side of the page, I realized that this was another dead-end relationship. Now, in the middle of another job search, I'd like to combat the creeping Romance colonization of the rest of the bookstore with a new category: Workplace Pub Fiction, or those novels in which you could imagine hearing the majority of the book across a table from a disgruntled coworker, best friend, or former boss. There are good stories out there, from the very heart of our cubicled, consumerist, flourescent wastelands.

Happy New Year!

Surprise! A new post for the new year. I had a wonderful holiday with my family and I'm now full up on new books (with more coming soon--thanks, Mom & Dad!!) for the new year. So, here we are on an unusually cold day in January--32 degrees at noon here in south Texas--with leftover barbeque in fridge and more than a little irritated by the last book that crossed my path.

I'd been looking forward to it, already taken in by the cover art, the good word of mouth, and the dearth of new fantasy on my shelves as of late. Then it was here and I was half-way through and waiting for the story to begin. I was in denial that it had already started and that it was the kind of soap opera plot that was more like the Fairies of Peyton Place. Of course, female protagonist, it would have to be a journey of the heart, right?

Well, no. It didn't have to be about self-discovery through sex, nor did it have to treat the fantastic elements like the remnants of bad traditions that cause people to do stupid and murderous things. Thanks for that. Good to know that I only read fantasy because I'm a reactionary prig. And your next fantasy novel? Black-balled from the library, my dear. So sorry, tradition and all that. You understand.

I had much better luck with Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. It was engaging from the unexepectedly bloody beginning to the unexpectedly sad ending and kept me immobile on the couch from start to finish. Altogether the kind of reflective book that brings up the missing parts of the holidays, friends and relatives no longer here or unable to visit, the way the season changes as its meaning inevitably shifts to younger family members.

And here we are in the new year, waiting for the words that haven't been read yet and the days that haven't been thawed from the future or accreted to the past. Happy New Year!

The End and The Editing

La la la, oh, sorry. Caught me in the middle of the NaNo/Thanksgiving happy dance. Fifty thousand words and 131 pages (double-spaced) later, I'm finally catching up on my reading. I think writing wrings it out of me and, like a dehydrated runner, I'm gulping down the sentences and chapters of the books that have been waiting by the desk. This week it was Blue Diablo by Ann Aguirre and Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire. Both books centered on a female character for whom the particular mystery in each book was not their first rodeo. One could draw other similarities, but they would be endemic to the genre.

Blue Diablo had a unique urban setting and voice for it's protagonist, Corine Solomon. Despite a frenetic storyline, her voice was never less than assured with humor cracking beneath. She was vulnerable enough to elicit empathy and strong enough to drive the story forward with her choices. Since the story hewed closely to the Texas/Mexico border, the descriptions and concerns felt both new in terms of my reading and familiar in terms of the politics and concerns of living in Texas. Rosemary and Rue shared the same frenetic pacing, but it played more like a movie such as Crank or Speed, in that motion seemed to be the entire goal of the plot and at times I felt I was being shoved forward through yet another door with the story shredding around me as I tried to keep up. Not that the story wasn't interesting or that I didn't enjoy it--I enjoyed both books and will look for the second in each series.

However, I am wondering when the pendulum will swing back from the action every second plotting that marks so much contemporary fantasy and back into the slower but for me more enjoyable action, breathing space, action, breathing space pacing that marks some older works. I dislike finding myself at the end of a book relieved that I don't have to suffer through the character's insane life anymore. Each time I pick up a new book, I'm hopeful that it will represent an author that I'm going to want to follow over the course of several books, someone who is going to show me something different, not shake me through a series of creative trope-tweaks while he or she whips the characters into pulp, occasionally rewarding them with cheap sex or a resolution that gives them extra-narrative breathing (gasping, rather) room.

I think part of me will never enjoy the pulp fiction elements in any genre. It's a worry of mine, because it seems like something that other people enjoy and that I as a writer (and human being) should master. What I miss, though, is wonder. Even dark tales can contain their elements of amazement and discovery, but when you're moving at 80 miles an hour down your plot track, it's easy to miss those moments or just flat out mow them down. Why can't adult fiction aspire to the gasp and awe of children's literature?

It's Still November

So we're dealing with NaNo guilt. Because it's not just your friends and family who are eager to over-obligate you . . .your imagination is would like to do so as well. Am I actually reading anything else in November? Not really.

Instead, I'm trying to work out what is becoming a four-part novel that bears little resemblance to anything that I've written and is instead covered with snake and dragon and fire imagery. It's like some other book bled copiously into my narrative. I've quit several times, only to have this feeling of guilt creep up on me. Who else is going to tell this story (who will care?!?)--it's almost like the main character is tugging at me to keep telling its story. This confirms my theory that guilt has a gravitational aspect, since the main character is a sentient planet who is learning to be an individual through first contact with a gaggle of spacefaring humans. Since this is a fantasy masquerading as science fiction, everything feels just a little off.

I start other stories but am drawn back to this one. Who will tell the story of this little corner of the universe and the struggle of a planet to transform itself from an insular paradise into a connected part of the universe without becoming deranged? In at least 50,000 words before the end of November? Anyone?

And Then There Was Silence...And Crickets

It's November, so I'm NaNoing in another universe and unable to pick up the blog right now. Actually, my novel and I are having a completely dysfunctional relationship and cordially resenting each other. I quit for a day, deleted my word count and my summary from the NaNoWriMo site and growled at everyone who came near. I'm picking that up from Varda, who is quite a talker when you get her going. She's also been sneaking my stress putty to use as gum, so there is a decreasing amount on my desk just when I need it most.

Since it's just a NaNo novel (I have several sitting around gathering dust), it probably shouldn't matter that I'm having such a hard time with it, or that I have several weeks of novel classes shouting in my head while I'm trying to write it, or that I'm hating exactly the things I would have otherwise liked in it. Disillusionment with "how to write" shibboleths is setting in. Aren't we all glad that I've found another medium within which to bitch? Why don't I just go read a good book?

Fortunately, there are lots of good ones lying around and I'm looking forward to working through them during my increasingly extended NaNo breaks. Stashed in various locations are The Mermaid's Madness (by Jim Hines), Ice (by Sarah Durst), and The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars (by Steven Brust). Yea!! Stuff to read!! On a side note, it's time to put romance novels back on the shelf with other romance novels. Yes, putting in the Fantasy section will sometimes fool me. Yes, I will sometimes buy one. No, I will not be happy. More than likely, I won't finish something that's about little more than how devastating it is to be away from the pretty wolf-boy demon elf thief while actually having to--gasp--live your life! Stuff it, cupcake, and get on with the story.

ooooooooo. No more posts while on NaNo. Cue the crickets! Here cricket, cricket, cricket. . .

Beaches

I'm still not quite ready for the synthesis of Surfside and fairy tales. I approach it, draft it, and leave the carcass on the beach. While casting it aside, I continue to march grimly through Cultural Amnesia. I can't stop reading this book. It feels like sitting in a library in an Ivy League college when you're not really there for the education, but you like the idea of the way it smells and looks for the few moments you're there. Worlds pass in the comings and goings of the books.

As you might imagine from the paragraph above, worlds that barely touch anything other than my imagination. It is unlikely that I will even do myself the favor of picking out some of the recommended German texts and try to recover my college German in words that are a beginner's way into the tongue. The idea startles me with the effort involved--learning a language for no reason other than the beauty of the thoughts contained therein. I couldn't learn one when I thought my grades and future employment depended on it. But then, so much of that education was posited as a financial investment that so far hasn't paid off in more than the momentary double-take of a temporary agency staffer in that degree being listed on the otherwise clerical resume.

I won't be picking up German again because I never had a good understanding of more than a few words in the first place. Even my mother retained enough of her French to be able to read in it decades after her last exam. She loved the language to the extent that she could sing in it and read it to us when we were little. While this is probably due to her own proclivities, one wonders if it was also that she learned enough of it to be able to do as the author of these essays that I'm reading suggests--she knew it well enough to pick up a book written in the language and puzzle her way through it.

Another question that occurs to me as I go through this book is why I was never introduced to the essay in school. We wrote them for grades for years, yet we never studied the ones that were written in the journals of our time or any previous ones. Why didn't we study a form that we were supposed to write? Why didn't we study criticism in addition to literature? Journalism in addition to fiction? Why was my English education limited to a poor selection of classical fiction? It gave me the idea that there was room for an extra book; that I might be able to contribute to a thin stream of literature that skipped from great book to great book like a frog traversing a pond?

Please don't take these remarks to be directed at teachers, who are looking for competence in state-directed areas (less so when I was in school, thank goodness). They are more directed at the areas chosen by the faceless nameless who decided that I should learn to write an essay without the benefit of ever learning to what uses they could be put. It's also directed at myself for never asking the questions until now.

And, of course, the forecast is for didactic reading to continue through the next several weeks. Per a chance comment encountered earlier, I'm also thinking about seeing if I can finish War and Peace in a week. Anyone out there a fan who'd like to offer encouragement? Favorite scenes? Favorite character?