Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 385

If Steinbeck had written Harry Potter…

A fun post from Sage Blackwood.

And I need a smile this morning, because a) burst water pipe; b) looking like the pipe broke right up at the ceiling; c) which is awfully hard to get to; d) my dad can cap the pipe, but it’ll be unfortunate if he has to take out a chunk of crown molding and a piece of the ceiling to get to the broken bit.

But! I truly shouldn’t complain, because my dad CAN cap the pipe, if he can get to it — he’s a handy guy; and anyway, if I MUST have water, my parents’ house is right over across the street.

I hear hundreds of pipes have broken over the last day. Why would they break as it starts to warm up, instead of while it was so cold? To plumbers, it seems to make sense. They’re prioritizing people who don’t have heat, which totally makes sense, but I sure hope Dad can cap this pipe because otherwise I’ll be crossing the street to shower for days.

UPDATE: We found the break! It is not up high. It is barely above halfway up the wall. That should be fixable, as long as Dad has extra bits of pipe around. If he doesn’t, of course, no way to drive to the hardware store today. The roads are still dreadful. But still! Happy to have found the break.

Anyway, click through and read Harry Potter and the Grapes of Wrath. And spare a moment to appreciate that you aren’t a homesteader! Sage Blackwood says she spent 8 years in Alaska, so she might have been closer to the homesteader thing than most of us ever get.

Also, scroll down and read about Sage’s experience with NaNoWriMo back in 2009.

You know, maybe I will make New Year’s Resolutions this year

Book-related New Year’s resolutions only. Because we all know how those declarations about losing weight and exercising more go, don’t we? I mean, as if, right? But these I think I can manage:

1. Read more new-to-me authors. Enough that I can pick a top-ten list of new-to-me authors at the end of the year. This should be easy! And fun! BUT! It will also mean that this year I cannot fall in love with one or two authors and read everything they ever wrote. Because from last year, it’s clear that there is NO WAY I can both read through a couple extensive backlists AND read a lot of different new-to-me authors. NO WAY.

2. Read enough debuts that I can pick a top-five-debuts at the end of the year. I am absolutely terrible about debuts. I think I hardly ever read a book the same year it is published. Though I REALLY don’t want to focus on the shiny new debuts at the expense of older books, I would like to do at least a little bit better at reading at least A FEW of the new, shiny titles.

3. Read at least enough older books that I can pick a top-five list of titles that are at least five years old — or older. Right now I am dipping into THE TALE OF GENJI, which is about as “older” as you can get. I don’t like it much, I admit. Genji is way too perfect and spoiled. But I want to read at least half of it.

4. Buy books even when I don’t plan to read them this year. Especially second and third books in series. As you might imagine, I am way more conscious now of the need to support authors than I was before I needed people to buy *my* books.

5. Post. Even when I lose internet access in May (oak leaves block the signal more effectively than you might think), I hereby resolve to post at least every other day, either from work or by taking my laptop with me when I go to town.

Outlining

Here’s a post about outlining — or about deciding to outline. Because apparently Stephanie Burgis has decided to take a stab at outlining her next book before she writes it:

I’m ready to try something different with the latest rewrite of my new novel – but I realized: honestly, I had no idea where to start. How do people come up with book outlines ahead of time?

Good question! I have no idea. Deciding to outline a new book just to see how it works strikes me as an interesting exercise, but . . . and with all due respect to all Stephanie’s commenters who offered suggestions and links . . . but I am still frankly baffled by the whole idea of actually outlining ahead of time.

An opening image. A scene somewhere in the middle (possibly). A notion of where you want to arrive (probably). That’s it. I could no more outline my way from one point to the next than I could . . . what is a good analogy here . . . okay, than I could bring myself to write grimdark.

The one is impossible in practical terms. The other is impossible emotionally. Both are impossible.

On the other hand, now that I am past the halfway point with my current WIP, I DO have an outline for the back half of the book. The outline changes every day, though, as I suddenly decide to add another chapter in the middle / figure out a scene that’s coming up / realize that obviously event Y needs to happen after event X.

One odd thing this time around is: I seem to be hitting the cascade of action scenes that lead up to the climax. And I’m only on pg. 230. It seems a little early to be at this point. It seems to me there are just two possibilities here: A) Things are going to stretch out as I realize I have left stuff out. B) This is going to be a short book.

A short book! Maybe even under 100,000 words! Before I even start cutting!

That would certainly be different. Interestingly, the outline I now have? It doesn’t make it any easier to guess whether this book is actually going to run short. Sure, it kind of looks like I am closing in on the end. But, my basic rule for writing is: Everything takes longer. Everything.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to know whether Stephanie Burgis can in fact decide to outline a story and then actually go ahead and outline it.

Stephanie, of course, is one new-to-me author whose book I have on my Kindle right now. Surely I will get to it in 2014. If you, like me, haven’t read anything by her yet, then just by the way, I notice that she has a free Kat Incorrigible story up for Kindle right now.

I’m not quite as introverted as this, but it’s still funny

A post from BuzzFeed: 27 Problems Only Introverts Will Understand

#5 speaks to me. I probably *would* turn into a hermit, except for the dogs. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a hermit!

#12 doesn’t work for me, though. I have no problem saying No, not really. And #15 is a little over the top. I mean, when I seriously don’t want to chat? I turn the ringers off on my phones. Poof, no problem.

For me, Most True would be #19. I can’t count the number of times I’ve experienced this exact moment: Yes I want to go somewhere, but once there (wherever “there” might be), I’m ready to come home again long before other people.

Actually, I really do wonder what proportion of all writers are introverts? I remember when doing this presentation at a high school a year or two ago, talking about my writing schedule when I’m actually working on finishing a book. This girl asked me something about, But when do I hang out with my friends? And I had to say, Well, in a month or two, when I’m done, that’s when I hang out with people. Hah, truly a moment when everyone really notices how different life can be for people at very different places along the introvert-extrovert spectrum.

Anyway, lots of illustrative gifs at the link! Enjoy.

Asimov as Nostradamus

Hey, did you know that, fifty years ago, Isaac Asimov made a bunch of predictions about 2014?

I sure didn’t.

The link is here.

I don’t know that I would agree that the predictions are “eerily accurate,” as the title of the article asserts. But some were certainly dead on. I think it was pretty easy to predict that there would be a lot of labor-saving gadgets around by now, but I wonder how easy it really was, fifty years ago, to declare that “electroluminescent panels” would be widely used and important?

Maybe that was a bit easier to predict for a chemist?

The author of the article pegs this one as wrong:

We will live in a “society of enforced leisure,” and “the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!”

But I’m not so sure Asimov was actually wrong about that. What is involuntary unemployment, after all, but “enforced leisure”? What about all the people who have just graduated and can’t find jobs, or who have lost their jobs and are now unable to find a new one? Wouldn’t you agree that they would generally consider “work” to be a glorious word?

Book Revels: SCARLET … plus a new year’s resolution

This caught my eye because AC Gaughan’s SCARLET is a book I really want to get to in 2014. I really love the Robin Hood story, always have, and yes, I know, Robin Hood is hard to do well and retellings usually have problems, particularly with the ending.

Assuming you all read Robin McKinley’s version back when it came out, what did you think of that one? Because I really enjoyed it. It’s my favorite retelling so far. But I didn’t like the way it ended — BUT I do think it is VERY HARD to do the ending of a Robin Hood retelling. I didn’t like the way the original story ended, either, at least not the version I read as a kid. I’m pretty sure I have never liked the ending of any Robin Hood story, ever.

So, anyway, SCARLET by AC Gaughan.

I don’t think there’s any need to worry about this book’s ending, since I get the impression we don’t get to the ending in this book anyway. Though that just pushes off the problem, of course. Still.

In SCARLET, We’ve got a girl dressed as a boy — you probably know that. That’s a plot element I often enjoy. No doubt you recall that McKinley did that, too, though not with Will Scarlet, and I enjoyed it in her book as well.

Ellie’s review isn’t the first rave I’ve seen. I’ve got this one on my Kindle, I’m pretty sure — unless that is SCARLET by Marissa Meyer, which would be fine, since I want to read that, too. (I could go check, but I’m too lazy to get up and go in the other room and get my Kindle.) I think I would prefer a Robin Hood retelling to a Red Riding Hood retelling — though of course it really depends on the actual story, so I don’t know.

If you retroactively define my reading goal for 2013 as “read through a lot of the extensive backlist of a handful of great writers”, I did that. But it didn’t leave much room for other (hopefully also great) authors. So I think my reading goal for 2014 is to read a lot more new-to-me authors. I’m still surprised I could come up with only eight new-to-me authors for 2013. Eight! Not very impressive.

And after reading Ellie’s review, I’m tempted to start with retellings of folktales and fairy tales that happen to be titled “SCARLET”.

Buy, Read, Talk: How to Help a Writer’s Career

A post from Sarah Monette / Katherine Addison.

Sarah Monette is one of the authors who writes the Shadow Unit series, as you may know. She also wrote, among other things, MELUSINE, which was an extremely well-written book that I didn’t actually like. (Too grim in ways that I found hard to tolerate.) MELUSINE was the first book in a four-book series, and although it did fine, the series as a whole killed Sarah’s career (at least temporarily).

This post came out of that experience. Here, Sarah explains some of the pitfalls inherent in writing a series. This, btw, is why I frequently wait to read a series until the whole series is complete, but nevertheless buy the books as they come out. If you love a particular author or expect to love a particular series, this is a strategy I thoroughly recommend, as the (not unusual) fall-off in sales through a series is often deadly to an author.

Anyway, now Sarah has a new book coming out under the name Katherine Addison: THE GOBLIN EMPEROR, about which I am already hearing good things. Here’s hoping it does well for her.

On knowing whether a book will take off:

“Nobody actually understands why readers choose to buy the books they do. Nobody understands why J. K. Rowling took the world by storm and Diana Wynne Jones never did. … Publishers are trying their damnedest to find the books that will replicate this phenomenon, but they do it by guess and gamble, and when they succeed, they don’t know why, either. Nobody knows why people buy books.

The thing we do know is that word-of-mouth is the best and most persuasive way for a potential reader to find out about a book.”

We don’t know why one title takes off for the stratosphere while most linger barely above ground. No one knows. But in today’s publishing world, of small print runs and low promotion, a hundred copies sold more or less can make a real difference to an author. I just thought I would mention that.

Oh, hey, a new vampire novel by Barbara Hambly!

I just happened across this review by Liz Bourke over at tor.com.

You all know how I feel about the James Asher series. Or, as I think of it, the Simon Ysidro series, since to me Ysidro is the defining presence. ANYWAY, you know the one I mean. Two thumbs up for Severn House, which is keeping both this series and the Benjamin January mysteries moving along!

This installment is called Kindred of Darkness. Sounds like less travel but (if possible) more tension.

Liz says:

When it comes to Barbara Hambly’s novels, the first word that springs to mind is usually atmospheric. There is a dark, brooding, flickering-gaslight quality to The Kindred of Darkness; and an undertone of lurking horror that will be familiar to readers of the previous James Asher novels. Hambly’s vampires are monsters, murderers, capable of seductive manipulation of the humans on which they prey but even the best of them are never less than terrible.

Compellingly so, for Hambly is an excellent writer, at the top of her game. Her prose has always been precise, richly descriptive; her characters powerfully believable people. That is no less true here than it has been for her career to date. Indeed, it may even be a little more so. Her attention to historical detail is consistently delightful—as is only to be expected from the author of the Benjamin January mystery series.

Yes to all this. You can click through and read the whole thing if you want an idea of the main plot structure. There aren’t actual spoilers, so no need to worry about that. I gather that Lydia is front and center in this one, which is great, since much as I love James as a protagonist, I love Lydia more.

Anyway, I’m sure many of you will join me in looking forward to this one. Amazon says it’ll be released March 1st.

Looking forward to starting the New Year –

Today I have a cold. So, not writing. Instead, tea with honey (and I don’t even like tea) and a comfort read — books two and three of THE SHARING KNIFE series by Lois McMaster Bujold. If I still feel stuffed full of cotton tomorrow, maybe I’ll back up to the first two books. But by tomorrow, I am hoping to feel more like this:

I got this from Rae Carson, btw. I should probably get a poster-sized version and frame it.

DWJ fan fiction short story –

There’s a link to a DWJ Chrestomanci short story over at Marie Brennen’s Swan Tower site, just FYI.

Also scroll down just a tad and you will see a link to Book View Café, which is having a pretty nice sale now through Jan 6th. I do NOT need a larger TBR pile, but on the other hand, half off everything? I guess I will have to go browse.

Also, I see Marie Brennen is now working on the third book of the NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS series, which is great, because the first book was plainly really meant as a lead-in to a series.