Zoë Marriott's Blog, page 17
October 20, 2015
FRAIL HUMAN HEART DELETED SCENES - TOGETHER AT LAST!
Happy Tuesday, lovely muffins! Welcome back!
Today I bring you
In other news, if you, like me, are constantly on the look out for cool geek-chic clothing, you might want to know about a great site I recently discovered, called Society6. I've only ordered T-shirts from them so far, but I've been delighted with the quality, selection and shipping speed of my orders. Society6's prices (including the cost of shipping) are reasonable, working out - once converted from dollars to pounds - at a bit less than fourteen pounds a shirt, which is the same or less than a lot of the far less interesting T-shirts you normally see in UK shops.
What's more, they have great unisex v-neck tops (I'm so sick of wafer thin, skin-tight 'girls' t-shirts, or boys ones that have such a tiny neck I can barely fit my hair through it) which are made of thick, snuggly soft brushed cotton.
Here's a selection of what I've bought recently (don't judge my spending spree - they gave me free shipping and a money off coupon, OK?):
And every purchase you make pays directly to the artist who designed the shirt! The site aren't paying me for this endorsement, by the way - I'm just overjoyed to finally find an outlet that carries the type of T-shirt I can happily and comfortably lounge about in all day, writing, without feeling like a slob. Now I can throw away all the thin crappy ones that have pointless love hearts or diamante butterflies on (OK, fine, I'll donate them to charity, happy?).
I've just broken 10,000 words on my Mulan retelling and am starting to find my protagonist's distinctive and - I think - compelling voice. I'm moving slowly on this book, moving tentatively around the edges of my fictional world while I continue to research Tang Dynasty China feverishly. I'll know when I've done 'enough' research when I've absorbed so much detail that I feel comfortable letting go of all my reference books and just inventing things in my fictional, fantasy version of China without checking.
I'm also moving slowly because, honestly, I hate writing beginnings. I'm hoping that by setting myself a target of between 600 and 1000 words a day instead of expecting myself to produce huge chunks at the outset, I can progress the story in a worthwhile way but avoid my all too common problem of having to chuck out the first 3-9 chapters later on when I revise.
It's going so well at the moment that I'm thinking of doing a sort of... Faux-NaNoWriMo this year. Not real NaNo of course. I've already started the book, which disqualifies me. Also, as long-time blog readers know, every time (every. single. time) that I declare I'm going to do NaNo this year, something awful happens to me. Flu. Prolapsed disc. Food poisoning. Family drama. No more of that! My NaNo will be informal and less ambitious - I'll just up my word target to 1000 words or more a day, six days a week, and try to significantly bump my overall word count by the end of the month.
Anyone who wants to join in with Faux-NaNo is very welcome to post their progress in the comments on my checking in posts - which I'll probably put up once a week.
What's going on in your lives - writing or otherwise - cookies? Let me know in the comments!
Today I bring you
In other news, if you, like me, are constantly on the look out for cool geek-chic clothing, you might want to know about a great site I recently discovered, called Society6. I've only ordered T-shirts from them so far, but I've been delighted with the quality, selection and shipping speed of my orders. Society6's prices (including the cost of shipping) are reasonable, working out - once converted from dollars to pounds - at a bit less than fourteen pounds a shirt, which is the same or less than a lot of the far less interesting T-shirts you normally see in UK shops.
What's more, they have great unisex v-neck tops (I'm so sick of wafer thin, skin-tight 'girls' t-shirts, or boys ones that have such a tiny neck I can barely fit my hair through it) which are made of thick, snuggly soft brushed cotton.
Here's a selection of what I've bought recently (don't judge my spending spree - they gave me free shipping and a money off coupon, OK?):
And every purchase you make pays directly to the artist who designed the shirt! The site aren't paying me for this endorsement, by the way - I'm just overjoyed to finally find an outlet that carries the type of T-shirt I can happily and comfortably lounge about in all day, writing, without feeling like a slob. Now I can throw away all the thin crappy ones that have pointless love hearts or diamante butterflies on (OK, fine, I'll donate them to charity, happy?).
I've just broken 10,000 words on my Mulan retelling and am starting to find my protagonist's distinctive and - I think - compelling voice. I'm moving slowly on this book, moving tentatively around the edges of my fictional world while I continue to research Tang Dynasty China feverishly. I'll know when I've done 'enough' research when I've absorbed so much detail that I feel comfortable letting go of all my reference books and just inventing things in my fictional, fantasy version of China without checking.
I'm also moving slowly because, honestly, I hate writing beginnings. I'm hoping that by setting myself a target of between 600 and 1000 words a day instead of expecting myself to produce huge chunks at the outset, I can progress the story in a worthwhile way but avoid my all too common problem of having to chuck out the first 3-9 chapters later on when I revise.
It's going so well at the moment that I'm thinking of doing a sort of... Faux-NaNoWriMo this year. Not real NaNo of course. I've already started the book, which disqualifies me. Also, as long-time blog readers know, every time (every. single. time) that I declare I'm going to do NaNo this year, something awful happens to me. Flu. Prolapsed disc. Food poisoning. Family drama. No more of that! My NaNo will be informal and less ambitious - I'll just up my word target to 1000 words or more a day, six days a week, and try to significantly bump my overall word count by the end of the month.
Anyone who wants to join in with Faux-NaNo is very welcome to post their progress in the comments on my checking in posts - which I'll probably put up once a week.
What's going on in your lives - writing or otherwise - cookies? Let me know in the comments!
October 13, 2015
LIFE & DEATH BY STEPHENIE MEYER - MY REVIEW
Hello, Dear Readers! Happy Tuesday to you all. Before I move onto the main topic of today's post I just need to say a huge thank you to writer pals Emma Pass and Kerry Drewery, and to all the lovely writers (old friends and new) who were at the #UKYAX on Saturday. I think I can honestly say it was the most relaxed, happy book event I've ever been to. If any of you were there, Dear Readers, I hope you had as wonderful a time as I did. If not - try to make it next time! I certainly will :)
With thanks Kendra Leighton and Chelley Toy for the pics!
And now... My review of Life & Death by Stephenie Meyer (henceforth referred to as Smeyer in the grand old Zoë-Trope tradition) which is, in case you've been peacefully snoozing in a woodland grotto for the past week, a genderbent retelling of her internationally bestselling YA vampire novel Twilight. (Guys, you have no idea how hard I had to look to find a link that wasn't spoilery! I'm not going to spoil anyone with this review if I can help it, by the way - there will be spoilers, but they'll be hidden under a cut at the end so you can avoid).
Yes, that's right. Smeyer went ahead and did a genderbent AU of her own novel to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the book's publication. When I heard this I actually had to check the date because I thought it couldn't possibly be serious - it had to be April Fool's, right? But no. It was really true! And then I couldn't decide if I thought it was the worst train-wreck-you-can't-look-away-from idea ever or the best thing I'd heard since Taylor Swift released 'Wildest Dreams' on single. What? Just... I mean... WHAT?!?
Longtime blog readers know that in the past I have taken issue with Twilight (although that was before everyone else started making a career out of slamming it, by which point it seemed a little mean-spirited) and have on occasion chosen to use it to illustrate dos and don'ts of writing . So why would I be interested in buying my very own copy of a book in which the author had presumably simply pressed 'Find' and 'Replace' on the names and had the whole thing rebound for a quick anniversary cash-grab? Well, two reasons, muffins:
1) I genuinely enjoyed Smeyer's later novel The Host, and thought it showed a marked improvement in her ability as both a craftsperson and storyteller. I believed (rightly as it turned out) that she wouldn't be able to resist meddling in more than a superficial way with this new version of her story, and I wanted to see if she could substantially improve it.
2) I love fanfic! Some of my favourite fanfic is Twilight AUs where people change one significant detail about the story and make it awesome. If I'm willing to read it on A03, I should be willing to read the author's own take, right?
So here's the book's deal. Bella has become Beau (short for Beaufort, ikr) and Edward is now Edythe (ha ha ha. Ahem. No, apparently there was at least one real live person called Edythe during the period that Edward would have been alive, so... we just have to go with it. And thanks for that link, Sally!).
But Smeyer has done more than this. She has also changed the gender of almost every other character in the book, including all the vampires except one, a couple of minor non-speaking roles, and Bella - sorry, Beaufort's - parents, Renee and Charlie (and Phil). She states this is because she finds it tough to believe an unemployed father would have been given custody of a baby back in the 80s when Beau was born, and... eh, maybe she's right. What this change makes clear, though, is how dominated by male characters (major, minor and incidental) the story was previously. Life and Death feels stuffed full of women instead, which just shows how easily we forget that women are actually 52% of the planet's population.
Now, in Smeyer's interviews about this book, and in her author's note, she says that she decided to bend the genders (by the way, I'm using 'bend' rather than 'swap' to describe this because I think it better acknowledges that there are, in fact, more than two genders in the world) of her characters because she was sick of seeing people talk about Bella as a damsel in distress. She felt the character only got flak for being obsessed with love/sparkly vampires as a result of being a girl. I think she wanted to show that these choices in characterisation were nothing to do with Bella's gender and everything to do with being a human playing in a world of monsters and magic.
Did she succeed in this? Not really, to be honest. Not necessarily because she's wrong in her point about how we respond to male versus female characters, though. More on that anon. I think Smeyer's mistake is she fell into that trap herself - she even acknowledges it (albeit without apparently realising she's done so). She states straight out in her author's note that Beau's personality 'developed' differently than Bella's. Her opinion on this is that Beau is merely less angry than Bella, doesn't carry a chip on his shoulder like his female counterpart, and is 'more OCD'.
But Smeyer is wrong. Bella never came across as particularly angry or OCD (not loving the casual flinging about of this mental illness, btw, but we'll give benefit of the doubt and assume she really does mean her character has a very mild form of obsessive compulsive disorder, rather than that she's using the term to be cute). Bella never came across as having a chip on her shoulder. She never came across as much of ANYTHING, really.
Bella is a personality void in the story. A list of traits which the other characters respond to as if they were real, but which are never truly demonstrated to us, the readers, in a way that makes her feel alive.
And that is the main difference between Life and Death and Twilight. Because Beau? Actually has a personality.
Yes, the story makes it clear that he possesses the same rather generic list of traits which are all we really know about Bella - the clumsiness, the social awkwardness/shyness, the reserve, the apparent ingrained need to cook and clean, the liking for classic literature - but either because of a natural increase in Smeyer's skill or because she sympathises with male characters more (Edward was always her writer's pet, after all) Beau manages to seem like an actual person on the page.
Despite moaning about looking after his mother, whining about the move to Forks, failing to connect with Charlie, and mocking/snarking about his classmates in exactly the same way (sometimes in almost identical words) to Bella, Beau is immediately vastly more sympathetic as a character. At first I felt that this was my own internal misogyny (yes, we all have it) telling me that a boy in the position of caring for his mother since childhood, and forced out of his home by her all-consuming love for her new husband, was more interesting and worthy of respect than a girl in a similar position.
And perhaps that is partly true. But what is also true is that Smeyer's other changes, large and small, mean that Beau seems like a real, awkward teen, dealing awkwardly with being put in an awkward position. He seems to have some degree of inner life. He doesn't express himself with the same stilted formality that Bella does, doesn't seem to have his life on pause waiting for someone to come along and give it meaning. He demonstrates traits within the action of the story instead of relying on his narration to inform us of them. We can see that while he's shy and awkward, he's also an incredibly laid back type. He doesn't worry much about the future. He has a sense of humour that isn't limited to making deprecating cracks at his classmates. He's aware of his own faults but seems to have at least some sense of self and even self-esteem. Maybe this was how Smeyer always saw Bella. But at the time of writing Twilight she didn't have the skill to show us any of it. Now she does.
Something else Smeyer gets right in L&D is to immediately make explicit the fact that Charlie chose to leave Beau with Renee not because he believed it was best for Beau, but because he knew 'Renee needed him'. Charlie gets a lot of sympathy in Twilight because of Bella's apparent indifference to him. He's cast in many people's eyes as a perfect, loving father with an ungrateful, cold off-spring. Reading in this new version that Charlie prioritised the well-being of his scatty ex-wife over that of his small child, and that Beau consequently was balancing Renee's chequebook and doing her laundry as soon as he could add up and reach the buttons on the washing machine - and that Charlie knew this and approved! - makes Beau's lack of interest in his dad, and his abrupt, overwhelming attachment not only to Edythe (protective, caring Edythe) but to her helicopter family seem much more logical.
When Beau meets Edythe not only is his reaction to her much more immediately romantic - and less filled with terror and hurt - it is also intensely physical. Bella is obsessed with Edward mostly, it seems, because he was mean to her, and then saved her life and was mean to her again. When the realisation comes that she's in love with him it seems to come out of nowhere. But Beau is unequivocally obsessed with Edythe from the start because he finds her hot and sexy and gorgeous and just can't believe she might look sideways at a normal guy like him, and it's clear that he knows it's not sensible or healthy - but he still wants her any way he can get her.
Because of this vital, profound difference between Bella and Beau - not in their genders but in their characters - it's much more difficult to compare Twilight and Life & Death than it might first appear. Having a central character, a first person narrator, who is sympathetic to some extent (although his blithering on about Edith's perfection is as boring as ever) makes a massive difference in the overall quality of the book.
Onto the other vampires of the Cullen clan! Dr Carlisle Cullen becomes Dr Carine Cullen - a Grace Kelly/Marilyn Monroe look-alike, but even more beautiful (pfft). The maternal, beautiful Esme becomes gentle stay-at-home husband Earnest, whose looks aren't really mentioned. Rosalie becomes Royal, dubbed 'the golden quarterback and homecoming king' by Beau, and possessor of a surprising man-bun. Emmett is Eleanor, a terrifyingly aggressive foil for Royal. Jasper is Jessamine, feline and spooky. Alice is Archie, and somehow becomes far less extreme, far warmer, less shrill (I hate to use that word for any female character, but come on) and more interesting in the process.
It's really telling to me how, in attempting to preserve the pre-bend traits of the younger vampires in their new genders, Smeyer instantly makes them more interesting. When all the female vampires suddenly become animalistic, intimidating and not-to-be-messed with, and the male ones are mostly described in terms of their hair and beauty it makes you realise how strongly gender-essentialist the book was in the first place. But Smeyer does some rapid work on the backstories of some characters here too, because apparently it wouldn't do to give a male character a history of having survived sexual assault, or a female one a past as a (terrible amateur) vampire hunter. Would it? *Raises eyebrow*
As for Edythe - she initially seems the least interesting of the bunch, although Smeyer goes to a lot of effort to switch up the descriptions of her to make it clear that she's super feminine. Her hair is strikingly 'metallic', leading me to believe it's more bright coppery-red than that famously ambiguous 'bronze' ascribed to Edward. She's tiny, but as graceful as a dancer (a description previously reserved for Alice). Her hands are described as 'little' and her eyes are 'long', although she does have 'surprisingly muscular' forearms (natch). Beau towers over her. It almost seems fitting for such a fairy-like creature to sparkle in the sunlight.
As the book progresses onward, however, Edythe also emerges as a distinct character from Edward. Freed of the need to act the Bryonic, tortured hero, Edythe keeps her (audible to Beau, anyway) self-loathing and self-castigation to a minimum, exhibits some interest in Beau as a person rather than as the vessel for floral-scented tastyblood (with thanks to Cleolinda) and an impenetrable mind, appears to have a rudimentary sense of humour herself, and offers convincing emotional vulnerability that actually makes the sudden, desperate connection between the two feel somewhat realistic.
OK, she's the definition of a manic pixie dream girl, and OK, she indulges in the same sort of weirdo stalker behaviour as her male counterpart. But she actually seems sorry, which is more then Edward ever does. What's more, her inhumanity, her alienness, are so much better established that it feels much easier to accept that she cannot be expected to conform to human behavioural norms. Beau's easy and unquestioning acceptance feels more like a reinforcement of his irrational crush rather than a death-wish.
Less wholesomely, Beau's repeated and loving descriptions of the hollows under Edythe's cheeks, her 'sharp' shoulder-blades, 'thin' arms, the 'fragile' 'twigs' of her collarbone, her 'vulnerable' slenderness and the fact that he can count her ribs makes it clear that part of Edythe's beauty is severe emaciation (presumably from having been half dead of Spanish 'flu when Carine transformed her). Beau not only notices this thinness; he clearly desires it desperately. It's a facet of her appeal. Something deeply whiggy is coming out of the author's subconscious there and I think these parts should have been edited responsibly before the book was published.
Another interesting thing that swims to light in this new version is how truly odd and out of place it appears when everyone in Beau's life, including Charlie, seems fixated on getting him paired off with a girl and attending the dance. I honestly can't remember if this plot point was hammered home with such verve in the original book. Maybe it's not. Or maybe we're all just much more used to seeing girls pressured to fall in love and focus on romance and defining themselves by relationships (preferably with boys). All I know is that by the time Beau finally confesses his and Edythe's relationship to his father, I was starting to think that Charlie was caught up in some kind of mortal panic that his son might be gay. Leave the kid alone!
More messed-up stuff comes in the form of Charlie *not* bothering to sabotage Beau's truck when he thinks his son is going to sneak off, as he does with Bella's in the same situation. Apparently only girl children need their autonomy physically restricted, kids! I also remain baffled by how a vampire who has been eavesdropping on both humans and vampires thinking about and having sex for nearly a hundred years, apparently manages to know absolutely nothing about it - a fact of the story that sadly remains unchanged.
Cool stuff comes from the new Volturi, who have a different line-up and a totally awesome history that took me by surprise. If only Smeyer had used this version in the original books and allowed them to be multidimensional people instead of pantomime villains! Also, there's less pointed victim-blaming from Edythe for Beau. I wonder why...
And now: spoilers!
The ending of Twilight is about Edward. It's the Edward-is-the-perfect-boyfriend show. Demonstrating his (in Smeyer's eyes) heroic, pure love for Bella, and his astonishing self-control, he manages to suck the venom out of Bella's veins before she is transformed, without losing control and draining her dry. It's all a big metaphor for not having sex, and to me and many other readers, it can basically be summed up as Edward imposing his will on a helpless Bella (who is barely conscious for most of this and is informed of it later when she's in the hospital). He doesn't ask what she wants, and we all know that he could just as easily have killed her or left her with life-altering injuries - but he preferred that risk to seeing his perfect, human girlfriend, the representation of all the mortal goodness he believed he had lost, turned into a despicable vampire. Into his equal.
In Life and Death, the ending of the book belongs to Beau. Which is fitting, considering it's supposed to be his story. He remains conscious throughout, and is active mentally even though he's incapacitated physically.
When Edythe arrives and finds Beau bleeding to death, her first concern is to preserve his life. On discovering that he has been bitten she, too, attempts to suck the venom out - but Archie tells her without the venom in his veins Beau will die from his wounds. At which point, Edythe asks Beau what he wants. She gives him a choice - something that Edward never did in Twilight and continued to fail to do in any respect right through to the middle of Breaking Dawn when she finally became a vampire herself.
After she has Beau's precious consent to the transformation, Edythe wastes no time with self-indulgent self-loathing. She acts on Beau's wishes and bites him again, closer to his heart, to speed his transformation and spare him as much pain as possible.
In the new ending, instead of evil being soundly vanquished by the power of love, and life returning to its status quo with no long-term effects felt by anyone, there is a true cost to Beau's decision to risk his life to be with Edythe. In a very real sense, he loses his life. He pays the price in his deliberately cruel last words to his father and dismissive ones to his mother, neither of whom he can ever see again. Beau doesn't get to return to human life. He doesn't end up getting a bling-romantic wedding, and a miracle baby, and being allowed to stay in his family's life despite this requiring a re-write of the rules of the vampire world. The story doesn't close on a fairytale married young couple with a perfect family and perfect lives, heading straight into contented vampiric middle-age.
Instead, Beau goes through an agonising transformation, during which he begs for a death that it's too late to grant him, and then witnesses his own funeral, helpless to comfort his devastated parents or take back the decisions he hastily made.
Life and Death allows the reader to see Edythe and Beau as a couple of impulsive, not-too-bright kids, caught up in first love and stuck there forever because they're both dead and only the living can change. This bittersweet ending, which comes much closer to acknowledging the pitfalls of Beau and Edythe's relationship and everything entailed in giving up mortality, feels tangibly more emotional and genuine than anything Smeyer produced in her original saga.
Despite all the whiggy stuff in this new version of the story, I vastly prefer Life and Death to Twilight. But it doesn't do the job Smeyer wanted it to. In fact, it has the opposite effect. Instead of making us reassess and re-appreciate Twilight, see Bella in a new light and embrace the original as the true love story between equals that Smeyer's always maintained it was, it just makes us realise how lacking the first version was. Edward and Bella's relationship is an unhealthy dysfunctional mess. So is Edythe and Beau's - but at least in bending their genders Smeyer seems to have found the courage to allow them to admit this, and readers to be able to perceive it.
My verdict: Life and Death is not a great book. But it still makes Twilight feel like a lack-lustre first draft compared to a more polished, finished novel.
I wonder who they'll get for the film adaption...
With thanks Kendra Leighton and Chelley Toy for the pics!And now... My review of Life & Death by Stephenie Meyer (henceforth referred to as Smeyer in the grand old Zoë-Trope tradition) which is, in case you've been peacefully snoozing in a woodland grotto for the past week, a genderbent retelling of her internationally bestselling YA vampire novel Twilight. (Guys, you have no idea how hard I had to look to find a link that wasn't spoilery! I'm not going to spoil anyone with this review if I can help it, by the way - there will be spoilers, but they'll be hidden under a cut at the end so you can avoid).
Yes, that's right. Smeyer went ahead and did a genderbent AU of her own novel to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the book's publication. When I heard this I actually had to check the date because I thought it couldn't possibly be serious - it had to be April Fool's, right? But no. It was really true! And then I couldn't decide if I thought it was the worst train-wreck-you-can't-look-away-from idea ever or the best thing I'd heard since Taylor Swift released 'Wildest Dreams' on single. What? Just... I mean... WHAT?!?
Longtime blog readers know that in the past I have taken issue with Twilight (although that was before everyone else started making a career out of slamming it, by which point it seemed a little mean-spirited) and have on occasion chosen to use it to illustrate dos and don'ts of writing . So why would I be interested in buying my very own copy of a book in which the author had presumably simply pressed 'Find' and 'Replace' on the names and had the whole thing rebound for a quick anniversary cash-grab? Well, two reasons, muffins:
1) I genuinely enjoyed Smeyer's later novel The Host, and thought it showed a marked improvement in her ability as both a craftsperson and storyteller. I believed (rightly as it turned out) that she wouldn't be able to resist meddling in more than a superficial way with this new version of her story, and I wanted to see if she could substantially improve it.
2) I love fanfic! Some of my favourite fanfic is Twilight AUs where people change one significant detail about the story and make it awesome. If I'm willing to read it on A03, I should be willing to read the author's own take, right?
So here's the book's deal. Bella has become Beau (short for Beaufort, ikr) and Edward is now Edythe (ha ha ha. Ahem. No, apparently there was at least one real live person called Edythe during the period that Edward would have been alive, so... we just have to go with it. And thanks for that link, Sally!).
But Smeyer has done more than this. She has also changed the gender of almost every other character in the book, including all the vampires except one, a couple of minor non-speaking roles, and Bella - sorry, Beaufort's - parents, Renee and Charlie (and Phil). She states this is because she finds it tough to believe an unemployed father would have been given custody of a baby back in the 80s when Beau was born, and... eh, maybe she's right. What this change makes clear, though, is how dominated by male characters (major, minor and incidental) the story was previously. Life and Death feels stuffed full of women instead, which just shows how easily we forget that women are actually 52% of the planet's population.
Now, in Smeyer's interviews about this book, and in her author's note, she says that she decided to bend the genders (by the way, I'm using 'bend' rather than 'swap' to describe this because I think it better acknowledges that there are, in fact, more than two genders in the world) of her characters because she was sick of seeing people talk about Bella as a damsel in distress. She felt the character only got flak for being obsessed with love/sparkly vampires as a result of being a girl. I think she wanted to show that these choices in characterisation were nothing to do with Bella's gender and everything to do with being a human playing in a world of monsters and magic.
Did she succeed in this? Not really, to be honest. Not necessarily because she's wrong in her point about how we respond to male versus female characters, though. More on that anon. I think Smeyer's mistake is she fell into that trap herself - she even acknowledges it (albeit without apparently realising she's done so). She states straight out in her author's note that Beau's personality 'developed' differently than Bella's. Her opinion on this is that Beau is merely less angry than Bella, doesn't carry a chip on his shoulder like his female counterpart, and is 'more OCD'.
But Smeyer is wrong. Bella never came across as particularly angry or OCD (not loving the casual flinging about of this mental illness, btw, but we'll give benefit of the doubt and assume she really does mean her character has a very mild form of obsessive compulsive disorder, rather than that she's using the term to be cute). Bella never came across as having a chip on her shoulder. She never came across as much of ANYTHING, really.
Bella is a personality void in the story. A list of traits which the other characters respond to as if they were real, but which are never truly demonstrated to us, the readers, in a way that makes her feel alive.
And that is the main difference between Life and Death and Twilight. Because Beau? Actually has a personality.
Yes, the story makes it clear that he possesses the same rather generic list of traits which are all we really know about Bella - the clumsiness, the social awkwardness/shyness, the reserve, the apparent ingrained need to cook and clean, the liking for classic literature - but either because of a natural increase in Smeyer's skill or because she sympathises with male characters more (Edward was always her writer's pet, after all) Beau manages to seem like an actual person on the page.
Despite moaning about looking after his mother, whining about the move to Forks, failing to connect with Charlie, and mocking/snarking about his classmates in exactly the same way (sometimes in almost identical words) to Bella, Beau is immediately vastly more sympathetic as a character. At first I felt that this was my own internal misogyny (yes, we all have it) telling me that a boy in the position of caring for his mother since childhood, and forced out of his home by her all-consuming love for her new husband, was more interesting and worthy of respect than a girl in a similar position.
And perhaps that is partly true. But what is also true is that Smeyer's other changes, large and small, mean that Beau seems like a real, awkward teen, dealing awkwardly with being put in an awkward position. He seems to have some degree of inner life. He doesn't express himself with the same stilted formality that Bella does, doesn't seem to have his life on pause waiting for someone to come along and give it meaning. He demonstrates traits within the action of the story instead of relying on his narration to inform us of them. We can see that while he's shy and awkward, he's also an incredibly laid back type. He doesn't worry much about the future. He has a sense of humour that isn't limited to making deprecating cracks at his classmates. He's aware of his own faults but seems to have at least some sense of self and even self-esteem. Maybe this was how Smeyer always saw Bella. But at the time of writing Twilight she didn't have the skill to show us any of it. Now she does.
Something else Smeyer gets right in L&D is to immediately make explicit the fact that Charlie chose to leave Beau with Renee not because he believed it was best for Beau, but because he knew 'Renee needed him'. Charlie gets a lot of sympathy in Twilight because of Bella's apparent indifference to him. He's cast in many people's eyes as a perfect, loving father with an ungrateful, cold off-spring. Reading in this new version that Charlie prioritised the well-being of his scatty ex-wife over that of his small child, and that Beau consequently was balancing Renee's chequebook and doing her laundry as soon as he could add up and reach the buttons on the washing machine - and that Charlie knew this and approved! - makes Beau's lack of interest in his dad, and his abrupt, overwhelming attachment not only to Edythe (protective, caring Edythe) but to her helicopter family seem much more logical.
When Beau meets Edythe not only is his reaction to her much more immediately romantic - and less filled with terror and hurt - it is also intensely physical. Bella is obsessed with Edward mostly, it seems, because he was mean to her, and then saved her life and was mean to her again. When the realisation comes that she's in love with him it seems to come out of nowhere. But Beau is unequivocally obsessed with Edythe from the start because he finds her hot and sexy and gorgeous and just can't believe she might look sideways at a normal guy like him, and it's clear that he knows it's not sensible or healthy - but he still wants her any way he can get her.
Because of this vital, profound difference between Bella and Beau - not in their genders but in their characters - it's much more difficult to compare Twilight and Life & Death than it might first appear. Having a central character, a first person narrator, who is sympathetic to some extent (although his blithering on about Edith's perfection is as boring as ever) makes a massive difference in the overall quality of the book.
Onto the other vampires of the Cullen clan! Dr Carlisle Cullen becomes Dr Carine Cullen - a Grace Kelly/Marilyn Monroe look-alike, but even more beautiful (pfft). The maternal, beautiful Esme becomes gentle stay-at-home husband Earnest, whose looks aren't really mentioned. Rosalie becomes Royal, dubbed 'the golden quarterback and homecoming king' by Beau, and possessor of a surprising man-bun. Emmett is Eleanor, a terrifyingly aggressive foil for Royal. Jasper is Jessamine, feline and spooky. Alice is Archie, and somehow becomes far less extreme, far warmer, less shrill (I hate to use that word for any female character, but come on) and more interesting in the process.
It's really telling to me how, in attempting to preserve the pre-bend traits of the younger vampires in their new genders, Smeyer instantly makes them more interesting. When all the female vampires suddenly become animalistic, intimidating and not-to-be-messed with, and the male ones are mostly described in terms of their hair and beauty it makes you realise how strongly gender-essentialist the book was in the first place. But Smeyer does some rapid work on the backstories of some characters here too, because apparently it wouldn't do to give a male character a history of having survived sexual assault, or a female one a past as a (terrible amateur) vampire hunter. Would it? *Raises eyebrow*
As for Edythe - she initially seems the least interesting of the bunch, although Smeyer goes to a lot of effort to switch up the descriptions of her to make it clear that she's super feminine. Her hair is strikingly 'metallic', leading me to believe it's more bright coppery-red than that famously ambiguous 'bronze' ascribed to Edward. She's tiny, but as graceful as a dancer (a description previously reserved for Alice). Her hands are described as 'little' and her eyes are 'long', although she does have 'surprisingly muscular' forearms (natch). Beau towers over her. It almost seems fitting for such a fairy-like creature to sparkle in the sunlight.
As the book progresses onward, however, Edythe also emerges as a distinct character from Edward. Freed of the need to act the Bryonic, tortured hero, Edythe keeps her (audible to Beau, anyway) self-loathing and self-castigation to a minimum, exhibits some interest in Beau as a person rather than as the vessel for floral-scented tastyblood (with thanks to Cleolinda) and an impenetrable mind, appears to have a rudimentary sense of humour herself, and offers convincing emotional vulnerability that actually makes the sudden, desperate connection between the two feel somewhat realistic.
OK, she's the definition of a manic pixie dream girl, and OK, she indulges in the same sort of weirdo stalker behaviour as her male counterpart. But she actually seems sorry, which is more then Edward ever does. What's more, her inhumanity, her alienness, are so much better established that it feels much easier to accept that she cannot be expected to conform to human behavioural norms. Beau's easy and unquestioning acceptance feels more like a reinforcement of his irrational crush rather than a death-wish.
Less wholesomely, Beau's repeated and loving descriptions of the hollows under Edythe's cheeks, her 'sharp' shoulder-blades, 'thin' arms, the 'fragile' 'twigs' of her collarbone, her 'vulnerable' slenderness and the fact that he can count her ribs makes it clear that part of Edythe's beauty is severe emaciation (presumably from having been half dead of Spanish 'flu when Carine transformed her). Beau not only notices this thinness; he clearly desires it desperately. It's a facet of her appeal. Something deeply whiggy is coming out of the author's subconscious there and I think these parts should have been edited responsibly before the book was published.
Another interesting thing that swims to light in this new version is how truly odd and out of place it appears when everyone in Beau's life, including Charlie, seems fixated on getting him paired off with a girl and attending the dance. I honestly can't remember if this plot point was hammered home with such verve in the original book. Maybe it's not. Or maybe we're all just much more used to seeing girls pressured to fall in love and focus on romance and defining themselves by relationships (preferably with boys). All I know is that by the time Beau finally confesses his and Edythe's relationship to his father, I was starting to think that Charlie was caught up in some kind of mortal panic that his son might be gay. Leave the kid alone!
More messed-up stuff comes in the form of Charlie *not* bothering to sabotage Beau's truck when he thinks his son is going to sneak off, as he does with Bella's in the same situation. Apparently only girl children need their autonomy physically restricted, kids! I also remain baffled by how a vampire who has been eavesdropping on both humans and vampires thinking about and having sex for nearly a hundred years, apparently manages to know absolutely nothing about it - a fact of the story that sadly remains unchanged.
Cool stuff comes from the new Volturi, who have a different line-up and a totally awesome history that took me by surprise. If only Smeyer had used this version in the original books and allowed them to be multidimensional people instead of pantomime villains! Also, there's less pointed victim-blaming from Edythe for Beau. I wonder why...
And now: spoilers!
The ending of Twilight is about Edward. It's the Edward-is-the-perfect-boyfriend show. Demonstrating his (in Smeyer's eyes) heroic, pure love for Bella, and his astonishing self-control, he manages to suck the venom out of Bella's veins before she is transformed, without losing control and draining her dry. It's all a big metaphor for not having sex, and to me and many other readers, it can basically be summed up as Edward imposing his will on a helpless Bella (who is barely conscious for most of this and is informed of it later when she's in the hospital). He doesn't ask what she wants, and we all know that he could just as easily have killed her or left her with life-altering injuries - but he preferred that risk to seeing his perfect, human girlfriend, the representation of all the mortal goodness he believed he had lost, turned into a despicable vampire. Into his equal.
In Life and Death, the ending of the book belongs to Beau. Which is fitting, considering it's supposed to be his story. He remains conscious throughout, and is active mentally even though he's incapacitated physically.
When Edythe arrives and finds Beau bleeding to death, her first concern is to preserve his life. On discovering that he has been bitten she, too, attempts to suck the venom out - but Archie tells her without the venom in his veins Beau will die from his wounds. At which point, Edythe asks Beau what he wants. She gives him a choice - something that Edward never did in Twilight and continued to fail to do in any respect right through to the middle of Breaking Dawn when she finally became a vampire herself.
After she has Beau's precious consent to the transformation, Edythe wastes no time with self-indulgent self-loathing. She acts on Beau's wishes and bites him again, closer to his heart, to speed his transformation and spare him as much pain as possible.
In the new ending, instead of evil being soundly vanquished by the power of love, and life returning to its status quo with no long-term effects felt by anyone, there is a true cost to Beau's decision to risk his life to be with Edythe. In a very real sense, he loses his life. He pays the price in his deliberately cruel last words to his father and dismissive ones to his mother, neither of whom he can ever see again. Beau doesn't get to return to human life. He doesn't end up getting a bling-romantic wedding, and a miracle baby, and being allowed to stay in his family's life despite this requiring a re-write of the rules of the vampire world. The story doesn't close on a fairytale married young couple with a perfect family and perfect lives, heading straight into contented vampiric middle-age.
Instead, Beau goes through an agonising transformation, during which he begs for a death that it's too late to grant him, and then witnesses his own funeral, helpless to comfort his devastated parents or take back the decisions he hastily made.
Life and Death allows the reader to see Edythe and Beau as a couple of impulsive, not-too-bright kids, caught up in first love and stuck there forever because they're both dead and only the living can change. This bittersweet ending, which comes much closer to acknowledging the pitfalls of Beau and Edythe's relationship and everything entailed in giving up mortality, feels tangibly more emotional and genuine than anything Smeyer produced in her original saga.
Despite all the whiggy stuff in this new version of the story, I vastly prefer Life and Death to Twilight. But it doesn't do the job Smeyer wanted it to. In fact, it has the opposite effect. Instead of making us reassess and re-appreciate Twilight, see Bella in a new light and embrace the original as the true love story between equals that Smeyer's always maintained it was, it just makes us realise how lacking the first version was. Edward and Bella's relationship is an unhealthy dysfunctional mess. So is Edythe and Beau's - but at least in bending their genders Smeyer seems to have found the courage to allow them to admit this, and readers to be able to perceive it.
My verdict: Life and Death is not a great book. But it still makes Twilight feel like a lack-lustre first draft compared to a more polished, finished novel.
I wonder who they'll get for the film adaption...
October 6, 2015
EVENTS, PINTEREST AND PLAYLISTS (oh my!)
Hello, hello, hello my magical muffins. A very happy Tuesday to you!
Last week I took part in a panel discussion on Diversity and Mental Illness in YA, at 7pm at Leeds Waterstones. The other authors were Martyn Bedford, Annabel Pitcher and Kim Slater. Each of us had written a book or books that had diverse characters and/or characters suffering with mental illness, and we had a great (somewhat rambling) discussion about our own personal reasons for writing about this, how we develop and research characters, and why diversity and the portrayal of mental illness or non-neurotypical people was important to us. Here's a reminder about my position on that from the archives, for interest's sake.
There was a great mix of people in the audience, and I was heartened that so many of them were young people (including some very focussed young writers). We were initially meant to each do a short reading of our books, and I had the first chapter of Barefoot on the Wind queued up on my laptop, but we ran out of time. I was equally relieved and disappointed! We did have time for questions from the audience, though, and I hope we gave out some helpful advice on how to get published.
As per usual, I forgot my camera (everytime! EVERY. TIME.) but thankfully the lovely Darren from Bart's Bookshelf was on the job, and he took these lovely shots:
That's the always wonderful Martyn Bedford on the far left, Annabel Pitcher to my immediate left, the delightful bookseller who arranged and ran the event on my right (I think her name was Tanya - I hope I'm right, comment and smack me if not) and Kim Slater on her right. And yes, I am making my usual selection of strange and awkward faces and gestures. It was a great time, and I'm very pleased to have been invited.
But wait, there's more!
This is a reminder that if you missed the panel at Leeds, there's still the UKYA Extravaganza, where no less than thirty other fab authors - including Martyn once again, and some of my other very favourite people! - will all be gathered on Saturday the 10th. Tickets are free, but you do need to call the store to get one (I'm told there are still some available).
Please do come to this if you can, Dear Readers. It's like no other big book event you've ever been to; authors wandering around chatting to bloggers, bloggers making friends with readers, readers nattering to authors. It's totally friendly and informal, everyone should get a chance to meet and talk to everyone, there are loads of panels, and we're all bringing cakes and other food from home. And it's in a bookshop! Honestly, what more could you want?
The line-up has changed slightly since the last time I posted this, so here's the poster again:
Get excited. Get on the phone to the bookshop. And get down to Nottingham on Saturday!
In other news, I finished and returned my Barefoot on the Wind edits last week, so right now I'm mid-dive back into research (library fines, my lovelies. So many library fines) on my Mulan re-telling, and hope to start work on the actual drafting next week. Wish me luck! This book is going to be a huge challenge on many levels, but I've had such lovely support from people who really want to see this story told and I'm super excited.
This'll evolve and change as the characters begin to really come to life in my head, but it's what I'm going with for now (for some reason in this embedded player the songs have organised themselves in kind of a weird way, so probably best to listen on random).
Read you later, cupcakes. And remember, requests for future blogposts on any topic, or questions you'd like answered in a Reader Questions post are always welcome in the comments :)
Last week I took part in a panel discussion on Diversity and Mental Illness in YA, at 7pm at Leeds Waterstones. The other authors were Martyn Bedford, Annabel Pitcher and Kim Slater. Each of us had written a book or books that had diverse characters and/or characters suffering with mental illness, and we had a great (somewhat rambling) discussion about our own personal reasons for writing about this, how we develop and research characters, and why diversity and the portrayal of mental illness or non-neurotypical people was important to us. Here's a reminder about my position on that from the archives, for interest's sake.
There was a great mix of people in the audience, and I was heartened that so many of them were young people (including some very focussed young writers). We were initially meant to each do a short reading of our books, and I had the first chapter of Barefoot on the Wind queued up on my laptop, but we ran out of time. I was equally relieved and disappointed! We did have time for questions from the audience, though, and I hope we gave out some helpful advice on how to get published.
As per usual, I forgot my camera (everytime! EVERY. TIME.) but thankfully the lovely Darren from Bart's Bookshelf was on the job, and he took these lovely shots:
That's the always wonderful Martyn Bedford on the far left, Annabel Pitcher to my immediate left, the delightful bookseller who arranged and ran the event on my right (I think her name was Tanya - I hope I'm right, comment and smack me if not) and Kim Slater on her right. And yes, I am making my usual selection of strange and awkward faces and gestures. It was a great time, and I'm very pleased to have been invited.
But wait, there's more!
This is a reminder that if you missed the panel at Leeds, there's still the UKYA Extravaganza, where no less than thirty other fab authors - including Martyn once again, and some of my other very favourite people! - will all be gathered on Saturday the 10th. Tickets are free, but you do need to call the store to get one (I'm told there are still some available).
Please do come to this if you can, Dear Readers. It's like no other big book event you've ever been to; authors wandering around chatting to bloggers, bloggers making friends with readers, readers nattering to authors. It's totally friendly and informal, everyone should get a chance to meet and talk to everyone, there are loads of panels, and we're all bringing cakes and other food from home. And it's in a bookshop! Honestly, what more could you want?
The line-up has changed slightly since the last time I posted this, so here's the poster again:
Get excited. Get on the phone to the bookshop. And get down to Nottingham on Saturday!
In other news, I finished and returned my Barefoot on the Wind edits last week, so right now I'm mid-dive back into research (library fines, my lovelies. So many library fines) on my Mulan re-telling, and hope to start work on the actual drafting next week. Wish me luck! This book is going to be a huge challenge on many levels, but I've had such lovely support from people who really want to see this story told and I'm super excited.
This'll evolve and change as the characters begin to really come to life in my head, but it's what I'm going with for now (for some reason in this embedded player the songs have organised themselves in kind of a weird way, so probably best to listen on random).
Read you later, cupcakes. And remember, requests for future blogposts on any topic, or questions you'd like answered in a Reader Questions post are always welcome in the comments :)
September 23, 2015
UKYAX GUEST POST & BABBOOK SNIPPET
Hello, and happy Thursday, dear muffins! It's nearly Friday, so hang in there - we can make it together.
Today I bring you a link to the lovely Writing From the Tub website where I did my guest post as part of the UKYAX Blog Tour . Here's the schedule in case you wanted to catch up with all the posts and follow them in the future:
My post on Carly's blog is chock-full of recommendations for amazing books written by UKYA authors, so check it out if your TBR pile is looking a little low or you're taking part in the UKYA Challenge this year. You won't regret it!
In other news, this week I'm reaching the end of my first edit (with my editor) on Barefoot on the Wind (otherwise known as #BaBBook) and am still just loving this book so, so much. I want to wrap it in snuggly hugs forever because it's the Beauty and the Beast retelling I always wanted. I'm just really hoping that everyone else likes it as much as I do! I have some news relating to this book that I'm not allowed to share yet, which is also pretty exciting (not that exciting - lower your expectations, no film deals are in the offing) but I'll tell you about it as soon as I can.
To tide you over, there's a snippet from the current version of the ms under the cut - subject to change as always!
Deeper into the woods and the shadows I went, with the trees closing in around me and their branches interlocking over my head until even my night vision almost failed, and I walked face-first into low boughs, and thin, whippy twigs that lashed my skin. The mountainside began to feel like a great, alien intelligence, unloving and unknowable, seeking to slow me or even turn me back. Yet through it all the soft whispering voices of my friends the trees called me on:
Turn now. Turn.
This way.
Walk. Walk...
My steps came slower and heavier, tiredness causing me to trip and falter. I had no idea where I was on the mountain anymore, or of the way back, if there was one. I knew I must have been walking a long time, hours and hours, though there was no burning candle nor sight of the circling stars to tell me how long. If I had entered the forest on a normal morning and simply walked straight, I was sure I would have encountered the wall of strange dark pines by now. A dreadful suspicion that the trees – whether well-meaning or malicious – were sending me deliberately in circles, caused my stomach to turn over.
“Is this the right way?” The words were panted more than spoken as I stopped to lean wearily against a young larch, wiping my forearm across my face. I licked my lips and found them dry and beginning to crack. I tasted my own sweat on them, and the metallic tang of blood too.
Look up, the trees replied.
Look ahead. Look behind.
Look.
I lifted my gaze from my feet, where it had fixed naturally after the second or third time my toe caught in a root and almost sent me sprawling, and glanced over my shoulder. Very little of whatever weak starlight gleamed above penetrated these shadows, and I had to squint, blinking rapidly, to make out my surroundings. The trees had called me upward, and I had been aware that I was climbing for a while without really thinking about it. Now I realised that I stood at the top of a ridge, and – with a shock that brought me fully awake, set blood to tingling and heart pattering – that I could see the distinct, foreboding line of closely growing evergreens at the bottom of that slope... several hundred yards behind me.
I had passed into the dark wood without even knowing it.
Slowly I turned to look at the forest ahead. Was it my imagination that the trees were wider, taller – that their twisted trunks and low-hanging boughs seemed more shadowy still than the ones I had left behind? I could not see what lay beyond them. I could barely see a thing.
A great, rolling rush of wind moved through the wood, and the trees – the trees of the dark wood! – spoke to me again: There is a monster in the forest.
What do you think, Dear Readers? Let me know in the comments!
Today I bring you a link to the lovely Writing From the Tub website where I did my guest post as part of the UKYAX Blog Tour . Here's the schedule in case you wanted to catch up with all the posts and follow them in the future:
My post on Carly's blog is chock-full of recommendations for amazing books written by UKYA authors, so check it out if your TBR pile is looking a little low or you're taking part in the UKYA Challenge this year. You won't regret it!
In other news, this week I'm reaching the end of my first edit (with my editor) on Barefoot on the Wind (otherwise known as #BaBBook) and am still just loving this book so, so much. I want to wrap it in snuggly hugs forever because it's the Beauty and the Beast retelling I always wanted. I'm just really hoping that everyone else likes it as much as I do! I have some news relating to this book that I'm not allowed to share yet, which is also pretty exciting (not that exciting - lower your expectations, no film deals are in the offing) but I'll tell you about it as soon as I can.
To tide you over, there's a snippet from the current version of the ms under the cut - subject to change as always!
Deeper into the woods and the shadows I went, with the trees closing in around me and their branches interlocking over my head until even my night vision almost failed, and I walked face-first into low boughs, and thin, whippy twigs that lashed my skin. The mountainside began to feel like a great, alien intelligence, unloving and unknowable, seeking to slow me or even turn me back. Yet through it all the soft whispering voices of my friends the trees called me on:
Turn now. Turn.
This way.
Walk. Walk...
My steps came slower and heavier, tiredness causing me to trip and falter. I had no idea where I was on the mountain anymore, or of the way back, if there was one. I knew I must have been walking a long time, hours and hours, though there was no burning candle nor sight of the circling stars to tell me how long. If I had entered the forest on a normal morning and simply walked straight, I was sure I would have encountered the wall of strange dark pines by now. A dreadful suspicion that the trees – whether well-meaning or malicious – were sending me deliberately in circles, caused my stomach to turn over.
“Is this the right way?” The words were panted more than spoken as I stopped to lean wearily against a young larch, wiping my forearm across my face. I licked my lips and found them dry and beginning to crack. I tasted my own sweat on them, and the metallic tang of blood too.
Look up, the trees replied.
Look ahead. Look behind.
Look.
I lifted my gaze from my feet, where it had fixed naturally after the second or third time my toe caught in a root and almost sent me sprawling, and glanced over my shoulder. Very little of whatever weak starlight gleamed above penetrated these shadows, and I had to squint, blinking rapidly, to make out my surroundings. The trees had called me upward, and I had been aware that I was climbing for a while without really thinking about it. Now I realised that I stood at the top of a ridge, and – with a shock that brought me fully awake, set blood to tingling and heart pattering – that I could see the distinct, foreboding line of closely growing evergreens at the bottom of that slope... several hundred yards behind me.
I had passed into the dark wood without even knowing it.
Slowly I turned to look at the forest ahead. Was it my imagination that the trees were wider, taller – that their twisted trunks and low-hanging boughs seemed more shadowy still than the ones I had left behind? I could not see what lay beyond them. I could barely see a thing.
A great, rolling rush of wind moved through the wood, and the trees – the trees of the dark wood! – spoke to me again: There is a monster in the forest.
What do you think, Dear Readers? Let me know in the comments!
September 14, 2015
SURPRISE!
Surprise Monday post! I'm sorry to have missed posting last week, Dear Readers. I wanted to wait to get confirmation that I could share some news, but then over the weekend I saw that the news was out anyway (as always seems to be the way for me). So I decided to do a bumper post with everything included today! Brace yourselves, muffins.
First up, just in case anyone's missed all the excitement about UKYAX - that is, the United Kingdom Young Adult Extravaganza - over on Twitter... yes, I am in the line-up this time! Hurray!
I was gutted to miss it last time, especially as I was right there with the two fabulous organisers, writer-pals Kerry Drewery and Emma Pass, when the idea first crystallised. Stupid railways. Anyway, it would have taken a charging Rhino that looked like Katie Hopkins to keep me away this time (and even then I'd have put up a fight) so I will be there, at Nottingham Waterstones, with an absolute plethora of amazing fellow UK YA writers, on the 10th of October. Here's the event's Facebook Page, where updates and further exciting news shall be posted.
But wait, there's more! This will not be my only event in October!
On the 1st of the month I'm going to be at Leeds Waterstones at 7pm, taking part in a really exciting panel event on Mental Illness and Diversity in YA with another great line-up of YA writers. We'll have a panel discussion, a Q&A, and a signing session afterward. I'm really looking forward to this one - anyone who's read my books knows that mental illness is a topic very close to my heart, and I think everyone must have heard me banging on about the importance of diversity by now.
The other authors present will be Annabel Pitcher (author of My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece), Kim Slater (author of Smart), Hayley Long (author of Sophie Someone) and Martyn Bedford, who is a Walker author like me! He's the author of Flip and Never Ending. The two of us have met before (at the Leeds Book Award) and I know he's a very lovely man, which makes me slightly less nervous about being on a panel with a line-up of such serious, literary writers.
I really, really, really, REALLY hope that some Dear Readers will be able to make it to at least one (if not both!) of these events. They're in locations that are a bit more accessible to large swathes of the country than London, and they're at different times that hopefully can fit in with more people's schedules. UKYAX is on a Saturday in the early afternoon from 13:00, for those of you who have work or school during the week. But if anyone's busy on Saturdays then the Leeds panel is in the evening - 19:00 - on a Thursday night, after work and school are finished. PLEASE COME AND SEE MEEEEE.
Remember the rules if you do! No coming along and being too shy to approach me and then being bummed about it afterwards. I adore and treasure each and every one of you and it will quite literally make my day to see you. You are the reason I am there. But note that I am a compulsive hugger, so if you do not like hugs? Let me know. I will not be offended! Non-consensual hugging is not my scene.
In other news. edits on Barefoot on the Wind are now under way, bringing the usual landslide of open tabs in my web browser, scribbled notes, frantic notebook-page-flipping and highlighting, groaning, and COFFEE SO MUCH COFFEE.
Sunday morning... no rest for the wicked!It occurred to me yesterday that whenever I am editing I always feel a very strong urge to do my nails blood red. I'm not sure if this is because I'm metaphorically ripping the guts out of my book and want to look the part, or if wielding a red pen just reminds me how fond I am of the colour scarlet, but either way, here's proof of my Freudian slip. My nails also match my precious extra-large coffee mug. Coincidence? I think not.
Well, that's all for today, my darlings. If anyone has any questions about reading, writing, or books (or anything, really, although I'm not an expert on tax or how to do a fantastic shadow-crease smokey eye look) that they would like answering here on the blog, let me know in the comments. Similarly, if you have ideas for blogposts you'd like me to write, drop me a line; I'm always happy to take your interests into account.
First up, just in case anyone's missed all the excitement about UKYAX - that is, the United Kingdom Young Adult Extravaganza - over on Twitter... yes, I am in the line-up this time! Hurray!
I was gutted to miss it last time, especially as I was right there with the two fabulous organisers, writer-pals Kerry Drewery and Emma Pass, when the idea first crystallised. Stupid railways. Anyway, it would have taken a charging Rhino that looked like Katie Hopkins to keep me away this time (and even then I'd have put up a fight) so I will be there, at Nottingham Waterstones, with an absolute plethora of amazing fellow UK YA writers, on the 10th of October. Here's the event's Facebook Page, where updates and further exciting news shall be posted. But wait, there's more! This will not be my only event in October!
On the 1st of the month I'm going to be at Leeds Waterstones at 7pm, taking part in a really exciting panel event on Mental Illness and Diversity in YA with another great line-up of YA writers. We'll have a panel discussion, a Q&A, and a signing session afterward. I'm really looking forward to this one - anyone who's read my books knows that mental illness is a topic very close to my heart, and I think everyone must have heard me banging on about the importance of diversity by now.
The other authors present will be Annabel Pitcher (author of My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece), Kim Slater (author of Smart), Hayley Long (author of Sophie Someone) and Martyn Bedford, who is a Walker author like me! He's the author of Flip and Never Ending. The two of us have met before (at the Leeds Book Award) and I know he's a very lovely man, which makes me slightly less nervous about being on a panel with a line-up of such serious, literary writers.
I really, really, really, REALLY hope that some Dear Readers will be able to make it to at least one (if not both!) of these events. They're in locations that are a bit more accessible to large swathes of the country than London, and they're at different times that hopefully can fit in with more people's schedules. UKYAX is on a Saturday in the early afternoon from 13:00, for those of you who have work or school during the week. But if anyone's busy on Saturdays then the Leeds panel is in the evening - 19:00 - on a Thursday night, after work and school are finished. PLEASE COME AND SEE MEEEEE.
Remember the rules if you do! No coming along and being too shy to approach me and then being bummed about it afterwards. I adore and treasure each and every one of you and it will quite literally make my day to see you. You are the reason I am there. But note that I am a compulsive hugger, so if you do not like hugs? Let me know. I will not be offended! Non-consensual hugging is not my scene.
In other news. edits on Barefoot on the Wind are now under way, bringing the usual landslide of open tabs in my web browser, scribbled notes, frantic notebook-page-flipping and highlighting, groaning, and COFFEE SO MUCH COFFEE.
Sunday morning... no rest for the wicked!It occurred to me yesterday that whenever I am editing I always feel a very strong urge to do my nails blood red. I'm not sure if this is because I'm metaphorically ripping the guts out of my book and want to look the part, or if wielding a red pen just reminds me how fond I am of the colour scarlet, but either way, here's proof of my Freudian slip. My nails also match my precious extra-large coffee mug. Coincidence? I think not.
Well, that's all for today, my darlings. If anyone has any questions about reading, writing, or books (or anything, really, although I'm not an expert on tax or how to do a fantastic shadow-crease smokey eye look) that they would like answering here on the blog, let me know in the comments. Similarly, if you have ideas for blogposts you'd like me to write, drop me a line; I'm always happy to take your interests into account.
September 2, 2015
CANDLEWICK PRESS EMOTIONS
Hello, hello, hello, Dear Readers - and Happy Wednesday!
Today I bring you many emotions courtesy of my lovely US publisher, Candlewick Press, who sent me two things last week that made my bottom lip wobble (just a tiny, tasteful amount).
First up, the copyedit/pass pages for the US edition of
You might be little confused as to why this would make me feel ALL THE EMOTIONS or why I felt the need to snap a picture. But consider. Copyedits/pass pages are literally the last stage that a book goes through before it's sent off to the copyeditor and actually becomes a book. This is the final book of the trilogy. What that means is that this is the last time I will ever do work on or make changes to the trilogy. Ever. When I sealed up that big envelope to send it off to Candlewick Press (or rather, to my editor at Walker so that she could send it to Candlewick Press) I was saying goodbye to The Name of the Blade for the final, final time.
Goodbye, my darling!
*Blubs* *Waves hanky*
And just when America had reduced me to an attack of the feels once, another parcel arrived from the lovely Miriam (my US editor), and this one held shiny goodness of the
Yes, it's the US dust jacket - brilliant blood red with red and silver stamped foil and the Name of the Blade logo (which, I just will never ever get over having a logo, hee hee!).
I decided to see what it will look like as a finished book by wrapping it around the US hardback of The Night Itself/The Name of the Blade:
So pretty, right? And it has the most lovely quotes on the back from reviews of The Night Itself/Darkness Hidden on the back! And look at it next to it's big sister!
*Lip wobbles again*
So yes, all the feels from Candlewick. Thank you, Miriam! *Hugs*
Just a note: the UK paperback edition of
Read you lately, my lovelies!
Today I bring you many emotions courtesy of my lovely US publisher, Candlewick Press, who sent me two things last week that made my bottom lip wobble (just a tiny, tasteful amount).
First up, the copyedit/pass pages for the US edition of
You might be little confused as to why this would make me feel ALL THE EMOTIONS or why I felt the need to snap a picture. But consider. Copyedits/pass pages are literally the last stage that a book goes through before it's sent off to the copyeditor and actually becomes a book. This is the final book of the trilogy. What that means is that this is the last time I will ever do work on or make changes to the trilogy. Ever. When I sealed up that big envelope to send it off to Candlewick Press (or rather, to my editor at Walker so that she could send it to Candlewick Press) I was saying goodbye to The Name of the Blade for the final, final time.
Goodbye, my darling!
*Blubs* *Waves hanky*
And just when America had reduced me to an attack of the feels once, another parcel arrived from the lovely Miriam (my US editor), and this one held shiny goodness of the
Yes, it's the US dust jacket - brilliant blood red with red and silver stamped foil and the Name of the Blade logo (which, I just will never ever get over having a logo, hee hee!).
I decided to see what it will look like as a finished book by wrapping it around the US hardback of The Night Itself/The Name of the Blade:
So pretty, right? And it has the most lovely quotes on the back from reviews of The Night Itself/Darkness Hidden on the back! And look at it next to it's big sister!
*Lip wobbles again*
So yes, all the feels from Candlewick. Thank you, Miriam! *Hugs*
Just a note: the UK paperback edition of
Read you lately, my lovelies!
August 28, 2015
CLICHE KILLER: THE BIG ONE
Hello, Lovely Readers! Congratulations on making it to Friday once more. Last week I was a naughty, terrible writer-person and completely forgot about the post I'd promised to do on Friday for Author Allsorts (a revised version of my first Cliche Killer workshop) so this week I'm cramming both of the revised Cliche Killer workshops into one super ridiculously long essay and posting them together. Behold!
THE BIG ONE
.
Have a lovely weekend, my duckies!
Have a lovely weekend, my duckies!
August 19, 2015
DASTARDLY TROPES AND WHAT TO DO WITH THEM
Hi guys, and happy Wednesday! I'm back from a week off blogging (following ten days of blogging every single day for the
In the blogpost I also refer to a couple of other posts from the All About Writing page on how to isolate and kill off cliches. Due to popular demand, I'm going to be doing a sort of Retro-Friday thing - remember that? - over on Authors Allsorts after where I'll post a slightly updated version of those posts on this Friday (21st of August) and the Friday after (28th August), so I'll again post links here in case anyone wants to check that out.
And just a quick note to remind everyone that when
Now without further ado:
DASTARDLY TROPES & WHAT TO DO WITH THEM
Tropes! Huh! Wha-aat are they good for? Absolutely nuthin’ – say it again!
This probably sums up most people’s attitudes when they hear the word ‘trope’. It’s become one of those buzz terms that is flung around in our discussion of books like a handful of annoying and unnecessary glitter, getting into the carpet and your hair and still gleaming at you from the crannies of your desk six months later even after you used the hoover in an attempt to get shot of it. People talk about tropes all the time, and their comments usually run along these lines:
Tropes! Tropes everywhere! This book would’ve been good if not for all the tropes! These tropes are so over-used! This book is the tropey-est of the tropey! TOO MANY TROPES!’
What is a trope? Let’s consult Google for the formal definition:
However, if you’re a fan of the TV Tropes website, you’ll know that these days pretty much anything any writer can ever do has been identified, codified, and is now considered ‘a trope’. Stuff the majority of people have literally never even heard of (‘You I shall never forgive!’) has already become a tired and over-used trope to other people. The most moving, beautiful, shocking or gritty plot elements, the most fully realised and nuanced characters, the most heartfelt, raw pieces of dialogue. It’s all been done before. Everything is now a ‘trope’. Sorry!
*Blows the loudest raspberry in the world*
See, the problem with all this is that it seems the words ‘trope’ and ‘cliche’ have become interchangeable. And actually, they’re not the same. Most people currently use the word ‘trope’ as if they universally regarded all tropes as a bad thing. Even in talking about the most original, unique and quirky stories, people will point out what they believe to be tropes, either somewhat gleefully, as if they’d caught the author out somehow, or wearily and with annoyance, as a ‘shame’, as though the mere presence of a trope had spoiled something that would otherwise have been good.
But if everything is a trope, what is a writer to do? Create a book in which nothing is predictable, none of the characters are recognisable, and everything is utterly original? This does seem to be the gist of the ‘anti-trope’ discussions you see, and it’s a nice idea – if it were possible. But it’s not. In order to achieve this you’d need to literally publish a book of random words strung together randomly. ‘Nugget. Bumblebee. Scaffold. Fussbudget schaudenfreud; scrumpy marple Wimpole!’ Not a trope in sight! But not entertaining. Not actually a story at all.
Why? Because HUMANS LOVE PATTERNS. Humans instinctively and automatically strive to make sense of the random and chaotic by sorting it into recognisable patterns, which is why we look at clouds and see dancing monkeys, turn the cracks in the ceiling to rivers, discover a face hidden in the wood knots on the back of the bathroom door, and mentally draw out the constellation of Orion in our friend’s freckles.
You can’t stop humans from being humans. You cannot alter the way the human brain works or how people perceive and conceptualize the world. People will find patterns. If they can find a pattern in the raindrops on their windowpane they can certainly do it for any narrative constructed by a fellow human being. Which means if you give them a story, they will find tropes. From the very earliest myth of Gods and monsters and creation that humans made up to explain the world to the latest bestseller on the NYT bestseller lists, the same patterns can be found, if you look hard enough.
Cliches can certainly be a bad thing (and for advice on how to kill them you can check out my posts here and here). They can stifle your story and characters and drain the life from them. They can be lazy, boring and even harmful.
But not all tropes are cliches, just as not all the vacuum-cleaners you might drag into your office to get rid of glitter are hoovers, even if the words are used interchangeably. In fact, tropes can strengthen a writer’s work. How? In order to answer that, let’s look at another word which I think has been forgotten in the shuffle:
An archetype is, in fact, a powerful device within the storyteller’s toolkit, something which harks back to mythology, to our most primitive and instinctive understanding of stories, narrative, and how the world works. Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, true love’s kiss… these are all in fact *archetypes*, patterns which crop up again and again because they have immense narrative force, because they appeal to something basic within almost all people. The aged mentor who passes on his knowledge to a young protegee before falling in an attempt to protect him is an archetype – it’s powerful because we’ve seen it before, because we know we’ll see it again, because it can be twisted and subverted and turned on its head and our instinct will still identify and understand it.
Now – let’s be clear – just as all tropes are not cliches, so not all tropes are archetypes, either. There are certainly a raft of tropes that I would like to take gently by the hand, lead outside, and shoot point blank in the head with a sawn-off shotgun.
But they’re probably not the same tropes that everyone else is always talking about.
You see, I honestly believe that many of the most hated tropes, seemingly cliched and well-worn, can be transformed into archetypes – primal and moving devices for plot and characterisation – if used *well*. Love at first sight can still thrill our hearts. The aged mentor’s death can still move us to tears. The final showdown between former friends can still make our blood race. The monster in the cave can still send a chill down our spines, and true love’s kiss can still be the most satisfying finish.
Of course there are people who will always loathe some or all of these, no matter how well a writer uses them, but that’s individual taste: not the quality of work.
No, the tropes I’d like to lovingly feed into a blender are ones like… ‘I’m telling a fantasy story, so I’d better set it in a vaguely imagined pseudo-European Kingdom in which people of colour and gay people don’t and never have existed, and in which women are universally horribly oppressed and constantly assaulted and exist only to be rewards for or obstacles to the male characters, and all my heroes are strong manly straight white men’.
Amazingly, not many people talk about this sort of thing as either a cliche or a trope. In fact, plenty of people – the same ones moaning about ‘yet another teenaged heroine in a Dystopian world!’ – will defend this sort of lazy, cliched male power-fantasy trope. They will call it ‘historical accuracy’ even when wizards and dragons come into play, and despite the fact that it’s actually not even faintly historically accurate. Why? Because it’s a cliche that people feel comfortable with.
And this, in the end, is my main problem with our current discussion on tropes, cliches and archetypes. Too many people are all too ready to call out the cliche/tropes that are their own personal pet peeves – teenaged heroines, love at first sight, Cinderella stories – while failing to examine or even *acknowledge* the harmful and downright stupid cliche/tropes that they take for granted.
Violence against female characters (and only female characters) is seen as ‘realistic’ instead of as a lazy cliche. The lone black character (if we even get one) dying first is shrugged off as not important when it happens for the six thousandth time in a row. The cliche of the single QUILTBAG character (if we even get one) being a flamboyant gay male whose only purpose is to act as a faithful sidekick to a female character isn’t even noticed. The Asian person (if we even get one) is, of course, a geeky IT whizz. The lack of non-binary or disabled characters doesn’t register at all.
And in the end, the white, conventionally attractive, skinny heroine will always fall in love with the white, conventionally attractive, muscular main male lead once he’s heroically overcome his story’s trials and tribulations, even though he’s treated her like a piece of furniture throughout, because otherwise what was the point of her being in the story at all?
THESE are the cliches and tropes that ultimately ruin movies, books and TV series. They stifle truth in our storytelling, kill off the evolution of our characters before they’ve even begun to grow, and place painful, artificial limitations on the kind of stories we can tell and experience. If we want to see rich, beautiful, moving, original stories then we all ought to spend a lot less time making fun of teenaged girls for liking love triangles (a classic archetype) and a bit more making fun of middle aged white men who introduce female characters with a loving description of their breasts (nothing but a sexist cliche).
Down with Dastardly Tropes, say I!
In the blogpost I also refer to a couple of other posts from the All About Writing page on how to isolate and kill off cliches. Due to popular demand, I'm going to be doing a sort of Retro-Friday thing - remember that? - over on Authors Allsorts after where I'll post a slightly updated version of those posts on this Friday (21st of August) and the Friday after (28th August), so I'll again post links here in case anyone wants to check that out.
And just a quick note to remind everyone that when
Now without further ado:
DASTARDLY TROPES & WHAT TO DO WITH THEM
Tropes! Huh! Wha-aat are they good for? Absolutely nuthin’ – say it again!
This probably sums up most people’s attitudes when they hear the word ‘trope’. It’s become one of those buzz terms that is flung around in our discussion of books like a handful of annoying and unnecessary glitter, getting into the carpet and your hair and still gleaming at you from the crannies of your desk six months later even after you used the hoover in an attempt to get shot of it. People talk about tropes all the time, and their comments usually run along these lines:
Tropes! Tropes everywhere! This book would’ve been good if not for all the tropes! These tropes are so over-used! This book is the tropey-est of the tropey! TOO MANY TROPES!’
What is a trope? Let’s consult Google for the formal definition:
Trope/trəʊp/
nounnoun: trope; plural noun: tropes1. A figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression.“both clothes and illness became tropes for new attitudes toward the self”2. A significant or recurrent theme; a motif.“she uses the Eucharist as a pictorial trope”That second one is the one most people are most familiar with. A trope is a recurring motif. A pattern within a story which we recognise as having a familiar form – such as the Beauty and the Beast story, or the Cinderella/rags-to-riches story, or the true love’s kiss ending. More examples would be: the mother who sacrifices herself for her child, or the mild-mannered mother who turns out to be the murderer because the victim hurt her child, the climactic final showdown between former best friends turned enemies, the monster in the cave, cheerleaders and football players ruling the school, and love at first sight.
However, if you’re a fan of the TV Tropes website, you’ll know that these days pretty much anything any writer can ever do has been identified, codified, and is now considered ‘a trope’. Stuff the majority of people have literally never even heard of (‘You I shall never forgive!’) has already become a tired and over-used trope to other people. The most moving, beautiful, shocking or gritty plot elements, the most fully realised and nuanced characters, the most heartfelt, raw pieces of dialogue. It’s all been done before. Everything is now a ‘trope’. Sorry!
*Blows the loudest raspberry in the world*
See, the problem with all this is that it seems the words ‘trope’ and ‘cliche’ have become interchangeable. And actually, they’re not the same. Most people currently use the word ‘trope’ as if they universally regarded all tropes as a bad thing. Even in talking about the most original, unique and quirky stories, people will point out what they believe to be tropes, either somewhat gleefully, as if they’d caught the author out somehow, or wearily and with annoyance, as a ‘shame’, as though the mere presence of a trope had spoiled something that would otherwise have been good.
But if everything is a trope, what is a writer to do? Create a book in which nothing is predictable, none of the characters are recognisable, and everything is utterly original? This does seem to be the gist of the ‘anti-trope’ discussions you see, and it’s a nice idea – if it were possible. But it’s not. In order to achieve this you’d need to literally publish a book of random words strung together randomly. ‘Nugget. Bumblebee. Scaffold. Fussbudget schaudenfreud; scrumpy marple Wimpole!’ Not a trope in sight! But not entertaining. Not actually a story at all.
Why? Because HUMANS LOVE PATTERNS. Humans instinctively and automatically strive to make sense of the random and chaotic by sorting it into recognisable patterns, which is why we look at clouds and see dancing monkeys, turn the cracks in the ceiling to rivers, discover a face hidden in the wood knots on the back of the bathroom door, and mentally draw out the constellation of Orion in our friend’s freckles.
You can’t stop humans from being humans. You cannot alter the way the human brain works or how people perceive and conceptualize the world. People will find patterns. If they can find a pattern in the raindrops on their windowpane they can certainly do it for any narrative constructed by a fellow human being. Which means if you give them a story, they will find tropes. From the very earliest myth of Gods and monsters and creation that humans made up to explain the world to the latest bestseller on the NYT bestseller lists, the same patterns can be found, if you look hard enough.
Cliches can certainly be a bad thing (and for advice on how to kill them you can check out my posts here and here). They can stifle your story and characters and drain the life from them. They can be lazy, boring and even harmful.
But not all tropes are cliches, just as not all the vacuum-cleaners you might drag into your office to get rid of glitter are hoovers, even if the words are used interchangeably. In fact, tropes can strengthen a writer’s work. How? In order to answer that, let’s look at another word which I think has been forgotten in the shuffle:
archetype/ˈɑːkɪtʌɪp/
nounnoun: archetype; plural noun: archetypes1. a very typical example of a certain person or thing. “he was the archetype of the old-style football club chairman”Well, would you look at that! Kind of a significant overlap, wouldn’t you say?
2. an original which has been imitated; a prototype. “an instrument which was the archetype of the early flute”
3. Psychoanalysis; (in Jungian theory) a primitive mental image inherited from the earliest human ancestors, and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious.
4. a recurrent symbol or motif in literature, art, or mythology. “mythological archetypes of good and evil”
An archetype is, in fact, a powerful device within the storyteller’s toolkit, something which harks back to mythology, to our most primitive and instinctive understanding of stories, narrative, and how the world works. Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, true love’s kiss… these are all in fact *archetypes*, patterns which crop up again and again because they have immense narrative force, because they appeal to something basic within almost all people. The aged mentor who passes on his knowledge to a young protegee before falling in an attempt to protect him is an archetype – it’s powerful because we’ve seen it before, because we know we’ll see it again, because it can be twisted and subverted and turned on its head and our instinct will still identify and understand it.
Now – let’s be clear – just as all tropes are not cliches, so not all tropes are archetypes, either. There are certainly a raft of tropes that I would like to take gently by the hand, lead outside, and shoot point blank in the head with a sawn-off shotgun.
But they’re probably not the same tropes that everyone else is always talking about.
You see, I honestly believe that many of the most hated tropes, seemingly cliched and well-worn, can be transformed into archetypes – primal and moving devices for plot and characterisation – if used *well*. Love at first sight can still thrill our hearts. The aged mentor’s death can still move us to tears. The final showdown between former friends can still make our blood race. The monster in the cave can still send a chill down our spines, and true love’s kiss can still be the most satisfying finish.
Of course there are people who will always loathe some or all of these, no matter how well a writer uses them, but that’s individual taste: not the quality of work.
No, the tropes I’d like to lovingly feed into a blender are ones like… ‘I’m telling a fantasy story, so I’d better set it in a vaguely imagined pseudo-European Kingdom in which people of colour and gay people don’t and never have existed, and in which women are universally horribly oppressed and constantly assaulted and exist only to be rewards for or obstacles to the male characters, and all my heroes are strong manly straight white men’.
Amazingly, not many people talk about this sort of thing as either a cliche or a trope. In fact, plenty of people – the same ones moaning about ‘yet another teenaged heroine in a Dystopian world!’ – will defend this sort of lazy, cliched male power-fantasy trope. They will call it ‘historical accuracy’ even when wizards and dragons come into play, and despite the fact that it’s actually not even faintly historically accurate. Why? Because it’s a cliche that people feel comfortable with.
And this, in the end, is my main problem with our current discussion on tropes, cliches and archetypes. Too many people are all too ready to call out the cliche/tropes that are their own personal pet peeves – teenaged heroines, love at first sight, Cinderella stories – while failing to examine or even *acknowledge* the harmful and downright stupid cliche/tropes that they take for granted.
Violence against female characters (and only female characters) is seen as ‘realistic’ instead of as a lazy cliche. The lone black character (if we even get one) dying first is shrugged off as not important when it happens for the six thousandth time in a row. The cliche of the single QUILTBAG character (if we even get one) being a flamboyant gay male whose only purpose is to act as a faithful sidekick to a female character isn’t even noticed. The Asian person (if we even get one) is, of course, a geeky IT whizz. The lack of non-binary or disabled characters doesn’t register at all.
And in the end, the white, conventionally attractive, skinny heroine will always fall in love with the white, conventionally attractive, muscular main male lead once he’s heroically overcome his story’s trials and tribulations, even though he’s treated her like a piece of furniture throughout, because otherwise what was the point of her being in the story at all?
THESE are the cliches and tropes that ultimately ruin movies, books and TV series. They stifle truth in our storytelling, kill off the evolution of our characters before they’ve even begun to grow, and place painful, artificial limitations on the kind of stories we can tell and experience. If we want to see rich, beautiful, moving, original stories then we all ought to spend a lot less time making fun of teenaged girls for liking love triangles (a classic archetype) and a bit more making fun of middle aged white men who introduce female characters with a loving description of their breasts (nothing but a sexist cliche).
Down with Dastardly Tropes, say I!
August 5, 2015
DASTARDLY TROPES & WHAT TO DO WITH THEM
Hello, lovely Readers! A flying visit to the blog today to offer you
the link to my ranty post over on the Author Allsorts blog about tropes, cliches, and archetypes
, and which ones should be taken outside and shot. Let me know what you think in the comments here or there!
Read you next week!
Read you next week!
August 4, 2015
FRAIL HUMAN HEART BLOGTOUR: DAY #9
Happy Tuesday, Dear Readers! Today is the ninth and final day of the
Nine whole days of blogging in a row! I'm not sure I've ever done that before - but it's been fun, hasn't it? Below is the round up of all the stops in the tour:
Day #1, Pewterwolf - Snippet from the book
Day #3, Feeling Fictional - Snippet from the book
Day #4, Teens on Moon Lane - Snippet from the book
Day #5, The Reader's Corner, Jack & Hikaru Deleted Scene - major spoilers!
Day #6, Luna's Little Library, Hikaru Deleted Scene - not really spoilery
Day #7, SisterSpooky, Mio & Shinobu Deleleted Scene - pretty spoilery!
Day #8, Serendipity Reviews, Detailed interview with Viv
Day #9, Winged Reviews, In Depth Inspiration Post
The number of reviews on the
Also a quick reminder that not this weekend but the weekend before I totally overhauled and remade my website. The new one can be found at the exact same website address (handy, right?) of www.zoe.marriott.com, and I'd love to hear from you about it using the new email form or here in the comments. Do you like it? Miss anything from the old site? Is there anything new you'd like me to add? Let me know!
Finally, to ease the pain of the ending of this most magnificent blogtour, I'm going to be doing a guest post on the Author's Allsorts tomorrow called DASTARDLY TROPES in which I weigh in, at some length, about what is and is not a trope and how we should use or discard them in order to make our writing stronger. So if that's the kind of thing you like, pop in here again tomorrow for the link or else head straight to the Author's Allsorts.
Nine whole days of blogging in a row! I'm not sure I've ever done that before - but it's been fun, hasn't it? Below is the round up of all the stops in the tour:
Day #1, Pewterwolf - Snippet from the book
Day #3, Feeling Fictional - Snippet from the book
Day #4, Teens on Moon Lane - Snippet from the book
Day #5, The Reader's Corner, Jack & Hikaru Deleted Scene - major spoilers!
Day #6, Luna's Little Library, Hikaru Deleted Scene - not really spoilery
Day #7, SisterSpooky, Mio & Shinobu Deleleted Scene - pretty spoilery!
Day #8, Serendipity Reviews, Detailed interview with Viv
Day #9, Winged Reviews, In Depth Inspiration Post
The number of reviews on the
Also a quick reminder that not this weekend but the weekend before I totally overhauled and remade my website. The new one can be found at the exact same website address (handy, right?) of www.zoe.marriott.com, and I'd love to hear from you about it using the new email form or here in the comments. Do you like it? Miss anything from the old site? Is there anything new you'd like me to add? Let me know!
Finally, to ease the pain of the ending of this most magnificent blogtour, I'm going to be doing a guest post on the Author's Allsorts tomorrow called DASTARDLY TROPES in which I weigh in, at some length, about what is and is not a trope and how we should use or discard them in order to make our writing stronger. So if that's the kind of thing you like, pop in here again tomorrow for the link or else head straight to the Author's Allsorts.
