Spellchecker Rant

Okay, so I'm reading though and it takes me about two sentences to identify that it is Spellchecked. I have ranted about spellcheckers before, but let me be 100% clear on this: Spellcheckers are the worst things to happen to amateur writers since Papermate Erasable Ink Pens(*).

(*) Papermate Erasable Ink Pens smelled horrible and, what's more, DID NOT ERASE, at least not completely. In grade school and junior high, we thought these were the best things ever. When our sadistic teachers would demand that we take our tests IN INK (for some odd reason that I find hard to process even now--something about how if we made mistakes we'd have to cross them out and they could see every mistake?), we would gleefully whip out our erasable pens and take the tests, secure in the knowledge that we could cover up our errors if need be. Of course, we never could, because the pen always left faint lines. Did I mention the smell? Still, it's interesting in that it was, I believe, my first experience of a technology vs. authority arms race. The teachers did eventually forbid the use of erasable pens in ink-only test taking, but at that point we were in high school and didn't care.

This manuscript that I was reading had every word spelled correctly. The problem was that the correctly-spelled word was, almost more often than not, the WRONG WORD. A spellchecker will not tell you that "where" is wrong in the sentence, "My parents where sad." It will not pick up the mistake in, "I came form a small town." It will not, further, tell you that the sentence, "I found my father in the shed we called it that, even though it was a garage that, we could have parked a car in if we had on, doing drugs" is an abomination.

What a spellchecker will do is give you the illusion that it is editing your manuscript for you. "Just run it through a spellchecker before you hand it in," the amateur writer's instinct, with all the wisdom of Candlewick, tells him. And so he does so, congratulates himself on catching all those misspellings, and turns in his manuscript.

There is no substitute for reading through and editing your own work. No spellchecker, no grammar checker, no proofreader can do this for you. Yes, it's not as much fun as the writing part. Yes, there are often two or three words at a time that don't need any more editing. But yes, it is an essential part of being a writer. And when you turn in a spellchecked manuscript, it is blindingly, glaringly obvious that you are missing an essential component of being a writer, and the manuscript reader will treat your manuscript accordingly(**).

(**) In my case, writing blog posts about it and complaining about it to my friends.

Review: The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
8.5/10, a touching and richly textured story of family and atonement

Stories of redemption and atonement pluck at our heart more strongly than any other theme. In our past, we've all made mistakes, but the opportunity to make up for them rarely greets us in as perfect a fashion as it does in fiction. So we live along with our fictional hero, cringe at his fall, and return with him to the state of grace.

Of course, our own mistakes are rarely as life-altering as the one made by Amir, the hero of "The Kite Runner," who doesn't quite abandon a boat full of people to fire, but it feels about the same to him. His best friend Hassan, the son of his family's servant, gets into some rather serious trouble, during which Amir stands by and does nothing. He isn't sure Hassan has seen him (at least, I'm not sure whether he knows or not), but that isn't really relevant: Amir feels the press of guilt immediately, and even though he's only twelve at the time, his life is forever altered.

Thrown into the mix is Hassan's race: he is a Hazara, while Amir and his family are Pashtun. Amir's peers mock him for his friendship with a Hazara boy, a taunt which Amir is not strong enough to confront. His strength is an issue for his father Baba, who wants him to become as strong and proud a man as he himself is. Baba seems, in Amir's eyes, to prefer Hassan to him, which further stokes his resentment and his guilt.

How does a young man become worthy of his father and his best friend? This is what Amir must ultimately discover, after leaving Afghanistan for California. Though he has a reasonably good life in California, he knows there is something missing.

Hosseini writes vividly, with wonderful detail. He shares my love of food, never hesitating to tell us what is being cooked. The smells of the city are an integral part of the landscape, and his portrait of post-war Kabul is one of the most heart-wrenching cityscapes I've read since war-time Shanghai. The characters are just as vividly drawn: Baba, the demanding father; Hassan, the devoted best friend; Amir, the conflicted young man struggling between what he feels and what society and his family tell him.

Indeed, if the story has a weakness, it's that the characters are too perfectly drawn, making this almost more of a parable than a story. It seems to shift between the two: the characters stray little from their archetypes, but the setting they move in is lovingly, richly detailed. This story has the feel of a fairy tale, but a fairy tale set in our unpleasant, gritty, modern world.

Certainly I recommend it, especially as our involvement in and attention to Afghanistan creeps back up. Apart from the wonderful characters, the book does provide a nostalgic look at what life was like once for the Afghanis, how they suffered from the Alliance and then the Taliban, and what exactly has been lost. I don't quite see a connection to Amir's own story--Afghanistan seems more the victim of a whole schoolyard full of bullies than a country trying to atone for some transgression--but then, there doesn't really have to be. The writing is simple but effective, and the story keeps moving briskly all the way through.

Be Yourself

Good advice in any profession. Joe Posnanski (yes, I read a lot of his columns) has a take on what this means to a major league manager. The same goes for being a writer. Don't write in a way that isn't you just to please an audience. Write what you love, be who you are, and then find your audience. It's much more worthwhile in the long run.

Review: Finn Family Moomintroll

Finn Family Moomintroll, by Tove Jansson
9/10, lovely sweet Finnish stories about a family in a magical world

I was somewhat apprehensive that the Moomin books would turn out to be pixibooks, but after picking up the lovely Drawn & Quarterly collections of Jansson's daily strips, I finally bit the bullet and dropped five bucks to get Finn Family Moomintroll, the first in the series.

I don't remember how many of these we had when I was growing up, but it was a lot of them. This one, though it is the first, seems to take place in the middle of the lives of the moomins. There's reference made to the comet which is a story in a later book, and we seem expected to know all the characters already. Fortunately, Jansson is so sure of her characters that we have no trouble picking them up right away and growing very fond of them. They are more or less at the center of the stories, so a quick dramatis moominae is probably better than a plot summary.

Moomintroll, the main character, is sort of a young teenager. He lives with his parents, Moominmamma and Moominpappa, and his friends Sniff and Snufkin. He has a little thing for the Snork Maiden, who lives with them along with her brother the Snork. If that weren't enough for a house, you have the Muskrat, whose favorite book is "On The Uselessness of Everything," and the Hemulen, who is quite despondent when it turns out that he has collected all the stamps and his collection is complete; he has nothing more to do. Snufkin is sort of a tramp of a character, who loves his friends but also craves solitude and the open road. Sniff also loves his friends but also loves himself (when they discover a boat and are arguing about what to name her, Sniff's contribution, yelled out loud, is "SNIFF!"). The Snork Maiden is a perfect teenage girl, young and romantic but also slightly insecure and prone to snubbing Moomintroll for slights against her that he hasn't realized he's made.

The gang have many magical adventures, many of which center around the Hobgoblin's Hat, a large top hat that mysteriously transforms anything that falls into it. This is a children's book, but doesn't shy away from some mature problems: how do you get your friends to like you, how do you get something back that someone's taken from you, what use is a lot of money? All of these problems, it turns out, have relatively simple solutions for the Moomins, but the wit and charm of this series lies in watching the characters go through the ridiculous predicaments and resolutions that Jansson's vivid imagination concocts for them. Her little asides (Moominmamma makes orange-peel teeth for her children to play with; a footnote says, "Ask your mother how to make them; she is sure to know.") are as delightful as the story itself.

If you like stories of children's adventures and magical fantasy worlds, it's hard to imagine that you would not enjoy Jansson's Moomin books. Thanks to Drawn and Quarterly, her comics are enjoying a renaissance; let's hope this spreads to the books as well.

Review: Swann's Way

Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust (translation by Lydia Davis)

9/10, a classic of literature in a new translation

 

Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" is one of the most lauded and least read classics of literature. A staggering seven thick volumes, it's a daunting read for even pretentious Ivy League graduates. But I decided I wanted to read it before I turn 50, which seems like an achievable goal, and a journey of a thousand books starts with a single page, so I picked up "Swann's Way." The new translation is getting rave reviews for capturing the spirit of Proust more elegantly than the older but classic Moncrieff translations.

There's a lot to love about Proust, and one big thing to dislike, or fear, or grow tired of, which is also one of the things to love: namely, his tendency to write sentences that stretch into paragraphs so long and dense that after hacking your way through the undergrowth of dependent clauses, some of which decide to tell their own story in the middle of the sentence, rather like one of those hard candies that abruptly shifts from one flavor to another on your tongue as you're holding it in your mouth, you will sometimes turn around, look back, and realize that although you've quite enjoyed the path, you have in fact lost sight of your subject. Sentences the size of paragraphs; paragraphs that go on for pages; it's like "The Lost World" for literature.

The good, though, is as monumental as the prose, and it's hard to read even a few pages without gaining a huge amount of respect for both Proust and translator Davis. The first twenty or so pages of the book describe what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night. Really. But Proust gets away with it, by examining every nuance of feeing and perception and exploring its relation to his own humanity and ours in general. If this sounds dry and academic, it's because I'm not doing it justice in the least. You end up reading passages and thinking, "I know exactly that feeling"--he describes them more thoroughly and accurately than anyone else I've ever read.

You don't even notice, at first, that there is no real story, that you've been reading for thirty pages and the narrator is still lying in his bed in the middle of the night. But Proust slides easily from the general to the specific, and in the middle of a discussion about his neurotic need for a good-night kiss from his mother, mentions the cases in which this became embarrassing, usually when company was over, and thus M. Swann enters the picture.

Swann dominates the first book: as a guest in the first part, the subject of the second part, and the father of the narrator's sweetheart in the third. By the time we're done, we know him backwards and forwards, as a young man pursuant of ideals and trapped in his own conceptions of what is worthwhile and proper; later as a father, mellower but still kind at heart. We know our narrator well, too: his insecurities and desperate need for female affection.

There are other terrific touches of character, like this, one of my favorites in the book:

[Mme. de Gallardon has drawn the attention of her cousin, the Princesse des Laumes, to M. Swann at the party they are attending, where the pianist has just begun to play a polonaise by Chopin.]

[Mme. des Laumes] belonged to that half of the human race in whom the curiosity the other half feels about the people it does not know is replaced by an interest in the people it does. As with many women of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the presence in a place where she happened to be of someone from her set, though she had nothing in particular to say to him, monopolized her attention at the expense of everything else. From that moment on, in the hopes that Swann would notice her, the Princesse, like a tame white mouse when a bit of sugar is offered to it and then taken away, kept turning her face, which was filled with a thousand signs of complicity unrelated to the feeling in Chopin's polonaise, in Swann's direction, and if he moved, she would shift in a corresponding direction her magnetic smile.

"Oriane, don't be angry," resumed Mme. de Gallardon, who could never stop herself from sacrificing her greatest social ambitions and highest hopes of someday dazzling the world to the immediate, obscure, and private pleasure of saying something disagreeable, "but people do claim that M. Swann is someone whom one can't have in one's house, is that true?"

"Why...you ought to know," answered the Princesse des Laumes, "since you've invited him fifty times and he hasn't come once."

If you love language, you owe it to yourself at least to pick up Swann's Way and read a couple pages in the bookstore. It's a daunting task, and I'm glad to have a friend reading it at the same time I am, or else I'd never get through it (that and a lot of plane flights helped). This translation is copiously footnoted, in case you are curious about questions like "what is Les Filles de Marbre?" or "who is Nicolas Maes?" Proust is sometimes a struggle to read, but the moments of delight, like the one listed above, are so unique that they are worth the effort.

And now, on to book 2...

Review: Darwin's Radio

Darwin's Radio, by Greg Bear

7/10, a well-written but ultimately scattered hard science fiction story with an interesting premise

 

I love Greg Bear's Songs of Earth and Power (originally The Infinity Concerto and The Serpent Mage). It's one of my favorite fantasy books of all time. And yet, I was strangely reluctant to pick up his science fiction, for some reason. Darwin's Radio had been on my radar for a while--Nebula award-winner and one of Bear's most popular books. So I was pretty excited to get the chance to start it recently.

It kicks off with an almost literal bang, an exploration of a glacier in the Alps that ends in an avalanche and an exhumed mass grave in eastern Europe. It turns out that there has been an increasing incidence of miscarriages in the United States, which is also linked to the discovery of prehistoric corpses in the glacier and the recent corpses in Europe. It transpires that the fetuses being miscarried are deformed, and it's up to Kaye Lang, chromosome expert, and Mitch Rafelson, explorer and biologist, to work from opposite ends to figure out the connection between these different incidences.

The scientific mystery is engaging, but by the middle of the book it's pretty much resolved. Bear focuses on the United States' political response to the crisis, as the number of miscarriages mounts and the public grows restless. Combining this story with the biological story is a bit overwhelming for the book, and about two-thirds of the way through it collapses under its own weight. The political story becomes rather fragmented, and taking the place of the biological mystery is a personal story about a mother going through the pregnancy and experiencing the political changes (most of which consist of the government insisting that she register with them).

I'm sorry to say that I have a hard time seeing why this book won a Nebula. The science is interesting but ultimately left me with questions--for example, why, if the biology is correct, were there sporadic outbreaks everywhere except the United States until the mass outbreaks started? Does that mean there were mass graves somewhere in the U.S. that we don't know about? There are some other, more specific questions that were left hanging, both about the biology and the politics, but by the end of the novel we do have a sense of how the whole thing is going to play out.

It just seems to happen a little too abruptly and easily. Things change, and Kaye comes up with a theory to explain the change, and it's correct. There are entire periods of the political process that are just skimmed over. Most of the personal section of the book focuses on Mitch and Kaye struggling against the politics that have been set in place, with some introspection about what this whole change means for them and for humanity.

It's engaging stuff, and Bear's touch for characters is terrific. Kaye, Mitch, and several of the supporting characters are three-dimensional and engaging. His imagination and science research are beyond reproach as well. The theories about what might happen as a result of the DNA wound in our chromosomes that we don't really understand are fascinating and believable. It's just that the book needed to choose the political path or the biological path, and it tries to encompass both, ultimately fulfilling neither.

Review: Smilla's Sense of Snow

Smilla's Sense of Snow, by Peter Hoeg

8/10, a mystery with beautiful evocative writing, a carefully constructed plot, and a rambling third act

I have no idea how they made this book into a movie. It's dense, from a writer who is clearly from the "beautiful sentence" school rather than the "plot" school, which makes it somewhat of an odd duck because those kinds of writers don't usually tackle murder mysteries. But Hoeg acquits himself well, setting up a strange and intriguing cast of characters and an engaging mystery.

Smilla, a Greenlander living in Denmark, comes home to find a friend of hers lying dead in the snow, having apparently jumped from the roof. That's what the police believe, but Smilla knows better: he was afraid of heights, so if he wanted to kill himself, why would he jump from the roof? She thinks he was chased up there and off, and her unraveling of the mystery surrounding her friend's death is a confusing but compelling journey through Copenhagen's upperworld and underworld, and through the tangled trauma of Greenland's assimilation into Danish culture.

Sounds like a great movie, huh?

Anyway. Smilla is a terrific character, and her "sense of snow" is a peculiar ability she has to know where things are and which direction to go, which has not helped her do the same in life. She's scornful and afraid of love, inconvenient considering she begins to fall for the mechanic who's helping her unravel the case.

Hoeg does a terrific job at doling out information piece by piece, occasionally keeping too much back but generally giving you some great surprises. One of my favorite structures in a mystery is the scene that the protagonist plays along with you, and then at the end pulls out that one detail you might have missed that is the key to moving forward, which changes the whole cast of the scene before and the story to date. That's hard to do, but Hoeg pulls it off a couple times here.

He's also great at building tension throughout the book, though by the end there's so much tension that you feel it's impossible to get a real payoff from it, and in some sense you'd be right. The end is rather anticlimactic and deliberately obscure--a disappointment to someone who considers endings the second most important part of a book. But there's enough other good stuff here, albeit densely packed in, to make the book definitely worth a read.

I Want This Conversation To Be Over

David Foster Wallace hanged himself Friday.

I was a great fan of his essays. I never read his fiction. Infinite Jest sounded like a wonderful, dense, monumental read, but I'm already trying to read Proust, and, y'know, one literary mountain at a time.

Throughout his work, Wallace's genius was to get to the heart of what people are and why they do what they do. He found it perverse and often baffling (*), but never let his perspective slide too far into condescension without reminding himself that he was no better. His comments on the t-shirt booth at the Illinois State Fair remain my favorite in this vein; I don't have the text at hand, but it boils down to "who on Earth would wear these idiotic t-shirts...and who the hell am I for judging them?"

And there was the twist: his investigations never seemed to make him happy. At times (the titular essay of "A Supposedly Fun Thing..." is one example), he spiraled into a whirlpool of self-examination that was so critical it might have been called self-loathing if it hadn't been so funny. In "Consider The Lobster," in an essay on the English language, he laments his occasional social paralysis and inability to choose among the myriad different ways of expressing, for example, that he's tired of talking to someone and would like for them to leave so that he can go to bed. He ends up, he says, by blurting out, "I want this conversation to be over and for you to be out of my apartment." That he can see the humor in it and make us laugh doesn't make it any less awkward.

I feel like he finally figured out the way to say it. I wish he'd found another way. While I'm glad he left behind his humor, his insights, and his immense talent in writing, I'm angry because it's all tinged with sadness now. But in the end, we all have to choose our own path in this world, and sometimes out of it, and as Wallace himself might say, who the hell am I to judge?

Thanks for all the words. So long, DFW.

Y'load Sixteen Letters and Whaddya Get?

On the subject of making your words work, some interesting stuff from Elizabeth Bear (recent Hugo winner).

I have a book review to write and things to say about writing, mostly related to the fact that I'm in one of those states where I know I have to be writing what I'm writing but I want to be writing something else but I don't know what that is or I'd just do it ... anyway, the thing is that if you just keep writing what you have to be writing, eventually the "have to be" kind of fades out and you start enjoying it. At least, I do.

I'll worry about how much work my words are doing later. I'm reading "Smilla's Sense of Snow," which is at the same time a mystery and a really dense, literate book full of images and metaphors and characters and it's great and it's daunting because my story contains none of that.

Yet.

Review: Amulet

Amulet volume 1: The Stonekeeper, by Kazu Kibuishi
8/10, a gorgeous graphic novel of a fantasy adventure

Kazu Kibuishi first came to our attention through his webcomic "Copper," which led us to the anthology book "Flight." Last year, we picked up Kazu's book "Daisy Cutter: The Last Train" (which I believe is his first published graphic novel) and loved it, so we bought "Amulet" pretty much automatically.

The story, in a nutshell: after the loss of their father in a tragic accident, Emily and her brother Navin move with their mother to an ancient family home that once belonged to her grandfather. The grandfather, as often happens in stories like these, was exploring some other world connected through the house, and left an amulet behind , which Emily finds and puts on. Almost as soon as they venture into the other world, their mother is kidnapped, leaving the children to fend for themselves, with the help of the mysterious amulet and another voice. They are, of course, stalked by a shadowy presence whose motives are hidden, and chased by monsters whose motives are all too plain.

The story itself is compelling enough, if rather plain. Emily and Navin both want to be grown up, but they also seem to be aware of the carefree life they're leaving behind as they take on the responsibility of finding their mother. The characters of the children and the people (and non-people) they meet are nicely developed, and the story is beautifully paced and engaging.

But the real treasure in Amulet is the art. Kibuishi is a master at shading and depth, and under his talented pen (digital or not), the world and its inhabitants come alive. He imagines Victorian fantasy constructions: houses, castles, dungeons, laboratories, creepy monsters, ancient relatives, all with the delicate, confident touch of a master of his art.

Kazu posts updates to his blog about "Amulet," including tips about how it's produced. If you like fantasy adventures, Amulet is a gorgeous find, and one that deserves all the attention it's getting.

Did You Get It?

A couple people have commented that "Common and Precious" is "not subtle." I guess that's true (and honestly, if that's the biggest complaint people have about it, I'm thrilled), though it's not something I'd really thought about when writing the book(*).

*Clearly.

So I have been thinking about it a bit recently, trying to toe the line between the perfectionism that demands that I correct every flaw perceived by every reader and the self-contained arrogance that sits in its cushy armchair and smugly says that the writing is what it is and that any flaws in the book are flaws in the reader reflected in the mirror-perfect surface of my work(**). I think what I've arrived at is the conclusion that there are some subtleties to the book--while Meli is never shy about shouting her preconceptions of lower class, her father's views are a bit more nuanced, his motives in chasing his daughter not as crystal-clear as they might be. But the book itself, no, is not subtle, and there's a good reason for that: I'm writing for an audience that does not easily pick up subtleties.

(**) The "Anne Rice" side of a writer.

Now, by that I don't mean to cast any aspersions on the perceptiveness of my readers, who are all wonderful people and obviously have excellent taste. No, I mean to cast aspersions on myself.

I grew up reading (a) science fiction, and (b) quickly. Neither of these things really lends itself to ponderous examination of a work for subtle nuances. So when I come to write the kind of book that I want to read, I don't put lots of layers in it. That would take time and effort. I want to make sure everything's more or less explained on the surface, because I hate going through books and coming to the end while still wondering why on earth the main character was so dead-set on catching that darn roadrunner, having to look up on some internet blog that oh, if you notice, his father was killed right around the time of some famous battle mentioned in another chapter in which the roadrunners had routed the coyotes, and didn't I notice that every time the main character's father is mentioned he starts getting hungry for poultry? Also, it should be noted, I am not Kazuo Ishiguro, who has the magical ability to plant an idea in your mind in chapter one and then poke you in chapter five to turn around and see that it's apparently been there all the time.

That said, it is something I'm working on. I think I can add layers without detracting from the surface plot, things like imagery and theme (and there is imagery and theme in C&P, albeit handled with all the grace and skill of an elephant on ice skates), things like word choice in certain situations. The thing is, what I don't know is whether someone complaining about a lack of subtlety is complaining about:

* Everything being laid out too much on the surface so there is nothing to figure out, or

* Nothing being underneath what's on the surface.

Because it is possible to write a book in which the story and plot and character motivations are all quite clear on the surface, but which also has layers underneath for those who care to look for them. I think that's what I will shoot for, because I don't really want to write a puzzle book and, as has been noted before, I am not all that skilled, really(***). I have also had readers fail to pick up things that I thought were obvious, and in the long run, I would rather have a couple readers complaining about lack of subtlety than a couple complaining about lack of understanding.

(***) This is only a little bit of false modesty. I am aware that I write like I read: too quickly and impatiently. I'm trying to teach myself patience and skill, and to get better at the minutiae that more demanding readers look for.

How Do You Start A Novel?

Kelly McCullough has some good thoughts on the matter...

I particularly like the comparison to an essay: get to your thesis statement, prove your thesis statement, recap your thesis statement. In essence, as our screenwriting teacher would say, your story is a thesis about the best way to live. The main character is missing something, or is doing something wrong, and in order to change his life, he needs to learn a lesson, gain an understanding, something like that. So it helps to think about that when you're structuring your character arc: show the reader what he needs; show the reader how he gets it and why he needs it; show the reader how much better life is when he has it (or how miserable he continues to be without it).

Review: Nurk

Nurk: The Strange, Surprising Adventures of a (Somewhat) Brave Shrew, by Ursula Vernon
8/10, a cute and engaging children's adventure story

Disclaimer: I work for Sofawolf Press, publisher of Ursula's comic "Digger," Artistic Visions sketchbook, and novel "Black Dogs."

Nurk is Ursula's first foray into the world of children's literature. To her established fans, the story will be a delight. Her whimsical, sarcastic humor and lovely illustrations are up to her usual standards, and the characters are fun, adorable, and engaging. It's a cute story, complete with mistaken identity, kidnapped princes, grounded boats, and a star-nosed mole.

I enjoyed Nurk thoroughly, not least because of the humor Ursula scatters through it. A lot of it (specifically, his grandmother's diary) is aimed at adults, and will no doubt go over the heads of kids (for example: "The best plan for any sensible adventurer is to sweep in, take the throne, live like a king for a few weeks, and then sneak out in the middle of the night before people start asking unpleasant questions about road maintenance and tax relief."). But the story is enough to keep kids engaged, a good adventure tale along the line of "The Hobbit," with Nurk the reluctant hero swept into a quest that is--at first--beyond his capabilities, learning about himself as he rises to the challenge.

For adults, the story won't be quite as engaging as "The Hobbit." Though all the trappings are there, the stakes for Nurk are never so high as to make the adventure compelling. At every step, he is driven mostly by a vague discontentment with his own life and the memory of his grandmother Surka, who was, according to her own diary, an accomplished adventurer. The perils in Nurk's quest come quick and fast, and toward the end, they seem rather random.

But it's a fun story, for all that, and definitely worth a read. Your kids may have questions like "what's tax relief?" after reading it with them, but, you know, best they start asking it now.

The Harsh Glare of Fame

So there's this online magazine Anthro that has an interview with me and the other co-founder of our little small press, Jeff. If that sort of thing interests you, then you should go read it, and if it doesn't, then, well, you shouldn't. We mostly say fairly professional (bland) things about our goals and stuff and why am I even still talking about it?

Mistakes You Can Avoid

Over on PubRants, an agent has a couple posts up about mistakes beginning writers make. Not your standard stuff, pretty informative to read. A lot of it boils down to "show, don't tell," but in ways you might not initially pick up on. (I particularly like the second one: having characters in the story tell the reader about something that happened... because it feels like showing, but it's really not.)

What is your writing about?

Two posts in one day! This one's just a link to lot of things I've said about making your writing crisp and compelling, but said better and gathered into one place.

What is your story about?

A conversation between me and Ned, in e-mail. Yes, we are geeks who talk about this kind of stuff all the time. Ned's comments quoted.

---

I guess the thing is that Horror is usually a form of Mystery. Just the solution is a terrible one. Just never realized the link.
Is all genre fiction with a plot mystery? (he said provocatively!)

I actually said a while ago that any fiction with a plot (and some non-fiction with a plot) is a mystery in some sense of the word. The author is proposing a problem or conflict which the character must resolve, and our mystery is how the main character's going to do it. "Mystery" is actually a weird genre in that regard because in the really good ones, the question is not so much how (excepting locked-room mysteries) but "why." In standard fiction you know the "why" up front.

There is a funny bit in the Thursday Next books where all the members of the Literary police are talking about what every book really is about, what are the basic plots and what do they boil down to etc. etc etc and one guy, sort of grumbles. "Self discovery. It's all really the journey of self discovery." And maybe it is.

In our screenwriting class, the teacher discussed how in many movies, someone actually asks the main character the basic question he's trying to solve over the course of the movie, and 80% of the time it boils down to "Who do you think you are?" We watched "The Verdict" twice, and there's a great bit in the beginning when Paul Newman as the at-the-bottom-of-the-barrel lawyer goes to a funeral and gives his card to the grieving widow. Her brother throws him out and yells, "Who do you think you are?" It's a wonderful scene, and it fits so smoothly into the action that you don't really notice until you've watched it a couple times that that is the central question of the movie, for him: who IS he?

So yes, I would agree that most good stories are about self-discovery, and that in the process of the main character discovering him or herself, they teach us something about ourselves too.

Review: Thousand Leaves

Thousand Leaves, by Kevin Frane
8/10, a thrilling story with great characters in a completely realized furry world

Disclaimer: Kevin is a friend of mine and I edited "Thousand Leaves" for Sofawolf, so I am admittedly somewhat biased. :) I read it a while ago, but because it's just been released, I can post this.

Furry fiction lends itself to one of two main types of story: one in which the characters cannot stop obsessing over their "furriness" (whether good or bad), and one in which the furriness barely plays a role. It's rare to find a world that is so internally consistent that the ramifications of a society composed of so many different species are apparent to the reader, but completely ordinary to the characters. It's even rarer to find a good story set in such a world.

The world of "Thousand Leaves" is a multi-species community, at a level of technology roughly contemporary to ours. The city itself is a marvel of architecture and class distinction, with three levels separated from each other physically as well as by class. Reeve, one of the heroes of the book, has just come off a relationship that propelled him into the higher class briefly. He misses both the higher class and the relationship, but more importantly, he's starting to feel that something is wrong with him. His ex, who has taken up with a new boyfriend, misinterprets Reeve's attempts to warn him, even when some of their other upper-class friends start to get sick. Reeve has to turn to their mutual friend Monique and, in a strange turn of events, his ex's new boyfriend, to get to the bottom of the disease.

To tell more about the plot would be to ruin the excitement of what is a tautly constructed thriller. The early part of the book starts slowly, introducing you to the ensemble cast and the spiderweb of relationships that connect them, while laying the groundwork for the medical thriller to come. Think of it as the clack-clack-clack of the roller coaster mounting the hill. Once you crest the hill--and you'll know just where that is--the book doesn't let you go.

Kevin has a terrific touch with character, which allows him to pull off the very tricky feat of having an ensemble cast with character arcs of their own. Each of the personalities in the book is distinct and well-realized, with marvelous dialogue between them. The real joy of "Thousand Leaves" is getting to know the characters, and that's what gives an extra dimension to the medical thriller: you've come to truly care about the characters whose lives are at stake. That's not to short-change his ability to describe the city or the pathos he plunges his cast into, nor the complex plot he has his characters navigate, nor the textured feeling of the world they live in. But the characters are the heart of this book, and a vibrant, engaging heart it is.

I don't usually review Sofawolf books because I'm so intimately involved in the selection, edition, and production. And of course I'm going to say good things about our titles. But I'm particularly proud of having been a part of the release of "Thousand Leaves," not only because it's good for Kevin and good for Sofawolf, but because it's such a great story and exemplar of what we look for in a furry novel. So take my review with a grain of salt, but give "Thousand Leaves" the benefit of the doubt. We wouldn't be printing it if it weren't a great book.

Review: Ghost Map

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson
9/10, Fascinating examination of the causes, revelations, and impact of the 1854 Broad Street cholera epidemic in London

I secretly love the science of epidemiology: tracing the cause of a disease by looking at the patterns of how it spreads. The modern father of the science is John Snow, a British physician, and his seminal case was a cholera epidemic that struck the London slum of Soho in 1854. In order to prove his theory that the disease was transmitted by water, he created a map of the area showing cases of cholera in relation to the pumps that dispensed fresh water to the neighborhood. The prevailing theory of the time was that disease was spread by foul air, or a "miasma," and the Board of Health authorities were so fixated on this theory that even Snow's map did little to convince them.

"Ghost Map" traces the life of Snow and his partner in the investigation, Reverend Henry Whitehead, as well as the life of the small community that was devastated by cholera. Johnson views cities as life forms, their residents the "cells" that contribute to the overall health of the whole. One of the most fascinating parts of the book is the opening section, in which he discusses the organically developed solution to the problem of recycling waste (human and otherwise) in London.

The book chronicles not only the spread of an epidemic, the birth of a science, and the lives of two remarkable men; it also traces our migration from an agrarian life to an urban life, with all the benefits and challenges that accompany that change. Johnson sees the response to the Broad Street epidemic as a turning point, where cities began providing solutions to their own problems. His overview of those problems and benefits is just another wonderful piece of this work.

For the writer in me, this book is a reference I will keep around. If I have questions about cities in Renaissance or Victorian-era times, or thoughts about what problems future cities might solve more effectively than we have today, I have only to pull out "Ghost Map" for a refresher. It's hard to find intimate details of life in those early cities without reading through a Dickens novel, but here again "Ghost Map" proves valuable. And finally, the portrait of the two investigators, as well as the forces arrayed against them, is a wonderful character study.

Anyone interested in epidemiology, disease, Victorian-era society, city life, or simply a good story will love this book. Just don't discuss the finer details of cholera transmission over dinner.

Uninspired

Sometimes none of the projects you're working on really excite you. If you're tired (as I am today despite having had reasonable sleep this week), it's a lot harder to make yourself work on things. I know I'm excited at some level about all of these things I'm writing. It's just that I haven't been thinking about them recently, so they're not front of my not-particularly-active mind.

But that just means it's a good time to do some reading. I'll have a review up for you pretty soon.