Sarah Cypher's Blog, page 9
September 15, 2012
Impressions of “The Impressionist”: A Review of my first Hari Kunzru Novel
The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book was recommended to me by a well-traveled, foreign-policy-savvy author friend of mine, and I found it to be one of my favorite books this year. It’s a smart, wry, vivid, take on the hero’s journey, where the hero is a fair-skinned Indian who seeks to pass as an Englishman during the Raj era.
The way the narrator follows the nameless (or rather, many-named) protagonist reminded me of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, in that he’s somewhat of a tabula rasa, an observer of society who writes its customs on himself. Yet this narrator allows itself humorous detours into the secondary characters’ POVs, sampling opinions and needling egos, gradually constructing an emotional portrait of what colonialism feels like if you’re the colonized.
Kunzru loves irony, and without spoiling the ending, I’ll add that it is one of the “be careful what you wish for” variety. In a way, that’s how I felt about this book, too, and why I didn’t give it five stars–the story flowed into a tragically logical climax, and allowed us to see some vengeance on the characters we loved to hate. Yet when I closed the book, those satisfying choices–Kunzru’s characters, sensibility, and deft plotting–all added up to a slightly empty ending. It may have been the point, but part of me longed for the unapologetic beauty I found in the last pages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, another big book about colonialism.
I was excited to discover Hari Kunzru, and if I find myself staring at another of his novels in the bookstore, I’ll probably pick it up.
View all my reviews
June 15, 2012
Dissecting Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award: An Interview with Semifinalist Tony Russo
Author Tony Russo
Tomorrow, Amazon will name the winners of the Breakthrough Novel Award, its annual career-maker contest. This year over five thousand novelists submitted their manuscripts to a grueling elimination process that winnows entries down to a handful, to be chosen among by popular vote. The grand prize winner receives a $15,000 advance and a contract from Penguin; the others receive $3,000.
The contest is so valuable that writers start preparing a year in advance–and that is why I asked Tony Russo, one of this year’s semifinalists, to share his advice on what makes a strong submission. His YA manuscript was one of fifty to receive comments from Publisher’s Weekly, and some valuable advice for making his novel the most compelling story that it can be.
If you would like more information on how to enter next year’s contest, look no further than this link.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
SC: First, tell us about your book! What’s it about, how long have you been working on it, and how long have you been writing?
TR: ZAK CORBIN: MASTER OF MACHINES takes place in an alternative past, the 1950s, where certain advances in science and technology have already come about (or in some cases, didn’t exist at all) such as space flight, flying cars, megacities and, of course, robots. It’s a throwback to the earlier days of science fiction, like the old Tom Swift stories and The Adventures of Tin-Tin, with a little young romance thrown in.
The story’s about a young teen, Zak, who has a famous uncle who once pioneered and designed robots. His uncle has been sentenced to this island prison and Zak doesn’t understand why everyone says he’s a madman and a traitor. Just the mere mention of the Corbin name sends people screaming in panic—everyone thinks his uncle is some crazed mad scientist! So Zak tries to build a robot of his own, mostly to impress a girl, and promptly gets into trouble. When he finds the plans for one of his uncle’s amazing robots, Zak decides building the machine will prove his uncle is not a madman. But when Zak wishes he could set his uncle free, the robot takes his request a little too literally and breaks his uncle out of prison.
The story’s idea hit me in a single Saturday morning. I wake up too early for my spouse’s liking, so I putter around my office and get on the computer. I have a lot of art books and publications from the 1930s and 1940s: I love the New York World’s Fair and the iconography of that period. It may have been an image from an old Superman cartoon that got me thinking about robots and the mad scientist bent on destroying some city. Then I thought, what about his poor family? Can you imagine going to school with everyone knowing your uncle is that guy? As soon as I decided the main character was around fifteen years old and in high school, I knew the story was going to end up in the YA genre. It took me three months to write the first draft and then another month for revising. And yes, I’m considering another revision.
ZAK CORBIN is my first attempt at YA fiction. I read a few books in the YA category, first the Leviathan series by Scott Westerfield and then The Hunger Games trilogy, when I decided to try my own hand at it. I’ve been writing mostly science fiction for over fifteen years but it’s only been in the last year when I suddenly became more prolific. Besides short stories for a few magazines, I was a contributor for a company that held the license for Star Wars The Roleplaying Game (D&D meets Star Wars, just how geeky is that?) and I tried self-publishing a novel way before the e-book market surged. It feels as though I’m always either ahead or behind the trends.
SC: Your manuscript made it pretty far in Amazon’s yearly Breakthrough Novel contest—ahead of some crazy number of other entries … five thousand? What can you tell us about the process? Did you get advice or feedback as the manuscript advanced?
TR: The contest was mentioned in a major website, either Publishers Weekly or Writers Digest. Prior to that, I had submitted queries for ZAK CORBIN to a number of literary agents and the responses were either boilerplate no or polite “not what I’m looking for.” The contest appealed to me because it was like submitting the manuscript to an agent: You need to craft a 300-word pitch, submit the first 5,000-6,000 words of the manuscript, and then the whole thing. So I thought, well at least this is a chance for the story to be read by a wide swath of people in the industry: Amazon Vine reviewers, readers from Publishers Weekly and then a panel of judges.
Most of the information handed out during the contest came from the discussion boards. Amazon posted reviews of the pitches and then the excerpts. Those who made it to the semifinals got their manuscripts reviewed by Publishers Weekly and those reviews were posted to each entrant. As each contest milestone approached, those who had entries would compare their reviews and talk about the positive and negative reactions they got. Each step of the contest was judged based on each entrant’s work, except for the three finalists in each category (there are YA and General Fiction categories). The finalists’ excerpts are downloaded and voted on by the public. So the winner is by popular vote.
SC: When we first spoke about your manuscript last November, you had already done a lot of preparation. Most writers enter contests on a whim (the odds seem so unforgiving!). How did you go about preparing for Amazon’s contest, and what advice would you give other writers?
TR: The first thing I did was read the Amazon discussion boards for the contest. They have a “pitch review” discussion thread, which lets you send in your 300-word pitch and allow others to critique it. They were very positive about the whole process. I got some great feedback and changed my wording and sentence structure to make it concise, exciting and appealing.
The most important thing I wanted to send in was a really polished manuscript. My wife went through the entire story for a grammatical and spelling edit (she’s always first in line to read my work). She also made some story suggestions and comments. I then decided to turn to a professional editor to review what I would be submitting for the contest. I actually came across your Threepenny Editor website several months before because I’m a web designer by profession (writer by choice) and your site was featured on a list of excellent web designs. So I found your site again and made the inquiry.
SC: What have you learned about this year’s YA category?
TR: Had I done my research, it may have stopped me from submitting to the Amazon contest. I had no clear idea of what was currently popular in the YA category. I wrote my story because there were parts of it that greatly interested me. I don’t follow trends because I don’t want my work to end up in the same crowd, looking and sounding like everyone else’s. I follow my own path and write what I like. So yes, dark dystopian futures (a.k.a., The Hunger Games, Divergent, City of Bones) paranormal romance (the Trylle books), and slice-of-life, coming-of-age stories (The Fault Lies in the Stars) are current bestsellers.
The finalists for this year’s contest for YA fell into those categories: Two were coming-of-age stories and the third was a dark dystopian future. I’ve read plenty of articles that suggest following trends is pointless. This year it was The Hunger Games. Before that, it was Harry Potter. As writers, we only provide the words. It’s the readers who decide whether it’s worth their time.
SC: How would you like to see YA literature evolve or expand? (Or isn’t it up to writers?)
TR: I’ve read a number of the best sellers. I’ve also gone out of the YA category and picked up some other really popular books. I really love steampunk and historical science fiction and would love to write more in that genre.
I’ve become a little tired of the tropes that hallmark YA fiction: the mopey, unpopular girl with unruly hair who doesn’t think she’s pretty but has inner strength; the mysterious, handsome, but pouty boy who never answers direct questions; unreliable or dangerous adults; dressing up in black and wearing a lot of dark eye makeup makes a character “bad”; organizations that use murder, experimentation, and subterfuge to keep young people in line; references to makeup, styling, and appearance as notable character traits (really?); teens with superpowers; angst-ridden teens with superpowers; teens who are popular or are celebrities with the shallowest of talents; teens who romance, fight, or otherwise interact with demons, supernatural creatures, and godlike figures (hey, what’s the rest of the world doing while all of this is happening?) The list goes on. I’m always hoping for some genre-busting in YA. My next entry in the contest just might do that.
SC: What was your favorite book when you were fifteen?
TR: I had a score of really favorite books when I was that age. My English teachers latched on to my love of science fiction and encouraged me to read I, Robot, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, 1984, and Logan’s Run. My all-time favorite was Another Fine Myth (#1 of the Myth series) by Robert Aspirin. It combined my two favorite topics of the time: fantasy and terrible puns! I also read James Clavell’s Shogun, my first real big fat historical novel.
SC: Do you have any wisdom for dealing with encouraging rejections? As a fellow writer and friend of writers, I know we all sometimes get sick of the advice to accept constructive criticism and move on. Any variations on this theme will be welcome!
TR: It’s a truly wonderful profession that encourages people to put themselves out there, sharing their hard work and thoughts, only to receive a slap to the face and be told their words don’t fit broad categories of marketability, trendiness, or whatever factors put a book on a shelf these days. The gatekeepers (literary agents, editors, publishers, etc.) have specific goals or targets in mind: a certain number of literary titles, non-fiction, genre fiction, etc. If your work doesn’t fit their needs, they move on. It’s usually not personal. I don’t bother trying to “pierce the veil” of rejection notices. Unless the notice has something very specific to say, that rejection letter is sent to everyone who submits. You have to develop an appreciation that what you are doing is very personal and special to you. It’s to keep your mind and soul happy.
There are other ways to getting people’s attention. Learn to socialize (ah yes, even writers must master public communication), engage with other people who share your interests, distribute your work, make real friends instead of pushing the Like button on Facebook. (Even I’m guilty of this; I haven’t been to a convention, sci-fi or otherwise, in years. I would love to get back to real face-to-face chat time.)
And sometimes, yes, rejections can be very helpful. Some years back, I got a detailed, typewritten letter from a literary agent who explained why he loved my work, but the timing was all wrong. There was a movie that had come out which had the same retro-futuristic theme as my story, but it had flopped at the box office. He told me to wait for the dust to settle and try again later. I did that with ZAK CORBIN.
SC: Finally, what kind of writer are you: the kind who loves writing the first draft and dreads revision, or vice versa?
TR: I actually love both parts. I love composing a scene and getting very excited about how well it comes together – the images in my head, the dialogue and the description just merge together. Then I’ll come back around to revising and remember that scene, how it came together, and smooth out the rough patches. Sometimes I revise to the point that I end up writing new scenes or rewrite old ones just because I enjoy the story and the characters too much. Maybe that’s why writers end up creating trilogies. We just can’t stop!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Interested in submitting next year? Learn more by reading about Amazon’s award process here.
June 6, 2012
Kierkegaard, meet Mother Theresa, meet Chuck Palahniuk: A Review of Jane McCafferty’s “First You Try Everything”
First You Try Everything: A Novel by Jane McCafferty
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The novel’s two POV protagonists, Evvie and Ben, find themselves on the other side of true love: in their early forties, each puzzled by the person their spouse has become. When Ben leaves Evvie for a more emotionally stable woman, Evvie loses her last kite string to earth and begins to look for ways to bring Ben back to her. What results is a potentially violent ploy that is equal parts darkness and innocence.
First You Try Everything is not misty-edged, upmarket women’s fiction. It’s raw, unpredictable, stripped of the white-collar padding that often collects around marriage-related novels by college professors. Disclosure: Jane McCaffery is a former teacher and friend of mine, and I know her well enough to say that if Kierkegaard, Mother Theresa, and Chuck Palahniuk collaborated on an MFA, you’d get writing a bit like hers.
Evvie and Ben sort their way through nothing less than existence itself, always walking in that wobbly place between self-transcendence and identity. To me, the novel seems to open up the adage, “You know me better than I know myself,” and looks at the messy place inside: the absurdity of knowing oneself, the risks of being in love, how scary and beautiful life becomes when you start to pay attention to it.
On Admiration and Almosts: A Review of Abraham Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone”
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
After reading such an impressive debut novel, I’ve decided that my star rating and a book’s technical quality live in separate universes. Technically, Verghese’s knowledge blows me away–to be able to weave his fine historical research about Italians in Ethiopia, culture, nationalism, and medicine into an emotionally compelling story is a five-star accomplishment. So is carrying a story across two continents and forty years.
The writing is sometimes almost intentionally bland, perhaps because to turn too many lyrical somersaults in a line would muddy up the clear waters of erudition. Verghese’s skill with artistic language resides in his metaphors, instead; he writes like a good professor teaches–by illustration, giving us new eyes for his subject. For example: “If the beating heart is pure theater, a playful, moody, extroverted organ cavorting the chest, then the liver, sitting under the diaphragm, is a figurative painting, stolid and silent.” And he must educate the reader: because to understand the protagonist, Marion, you must understand what he loves, from medicine to Addis Ababa.
Yet for so much spectacular jinking through the library aisles, Cutting for Stone is a remarkably quiet story about a son’s reconciliation with the surgeon father who abandoned him. I wound up with a three-star reaction because in the heart of this most important story, Marion, the son and first-person narrator, feels obscure to the reader. As he meets his father for the first time near the novel’s climax, the writing acquires a clubfooted gait, pounding it into our heads that Marion is angry. The curiosity that infuses his voice as a narrator withers, and commits something very close to a violation of the cardinal rule of fiction, and tells rather than shows. In a tome of a novel, it was disappointing to find a dead spot at the heart of a character’s identity-giving emotional conflict.
Maybe because of it, I was glad to finally be done with the book. It deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon it, including its share from me. Yet it is not one of the novels that have affected me the most, and my reaction to it is equal parts admiration for a fine-grained story world; and the fond memory of picking it up for a fiver on a table of used books in the French Quarter, and then finding a home for it on my bookshelf, from which it is unlikely to be disturbed again.
March 27, 2012
“The Edge of the World” hits close to home: Review of Gail Vida Hamburg’s political novel in stories
The Edge of the World by Gail, Vida Hamburg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I finished this slender book last weekend after having met the author at the San Miguel Writers Conference. Through a series of brilliantly political, interconnected short stories, the novel is a tragic epitaph for a fictional Southeast Asian island nation that Westernized during Kennedy’s presidency, and through a strangling forty-year relationship with the US, found itself on the wrong end of the military-industrial complex.
The novel’s final moments represent the very worst of cynical American foreign policy, perhaps to a degree that betrays the writer’s political bias. My own sympathy for some of these views aside, the fictive dream wavers in a critical moment. It’s the only heavyhanded portion of the book, committing what Virginia Woolf once criticized in Emily Bronte’s writing–the error of putting one’s own convictions on the page so strongly that the story must step aside for a moment.
Yet the book is lyrical, beautiful, and sharply researched and imagined. Vida Hamburg has a journalism background, and her exactitude and broad knowledge combine with a cast of well-drawn characters. The characters are secondary to the social and political life of Chomumbhar during its relationship with the US, yet even the reader who shies from politics will enjoy the novel’s foreign flavor.
"The Edge of the World" hits close to home: Review of Gail Vida Hamburg's political novel in stories
The Edge of the World by Gail, Vida Hamburg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I finished this slender book last weekend after having met the author at the San Miguel Writers Conference. Through a series of brilliantly political, interconnected short stories, the novel is a tragic epitaph for a fictional Southeast Asian island nation that Westernized during Kennedy's presidency, and through a strangling forty-year relationship with the US, found itself on the wrong end of the military-industrial complex.
The novel's final moments represent the very worst of cynical American foreign policy, perhaps to a degree that betrays the writer's political bias. My own sympathy for some of these views aside, the fictive dream wavers in a critical moment. It's the only heavyhanded portion of the book, committing what Virginia Woolf once criticized in Emily Bronte's writing–the error of putting one's own convictions on the page so strongly that the story must step aside for a moment.
Yet the book is lyrical, beautiful, and sharply researched and imagined. Vida Hamburg has a journalism background, and her exactitude and broad knowledge combine with a cast of well-drawn characters. The characters are secondary to the social and political life of Chomumbhar during its relationship with the US, yet even the reader who shies from politics will enjoy the novel's foreign flavor.
Somebody Kills a Kitten: Review of part of “One Hundred and One Nights”
One Hundred and One Nights by Benjamin Buchholz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Constructed around a mysterious narrator’s appearance in Southern Iraqi town during the Iraq War, the novel uses an almost military pattern of repetition to peel back the layers on the narrator’s role in the town’s politics. We learn he is an aristocratic-born, Western-educated doctor in hiding, and only a few of the townspeople share his secret–but the faerie-like Leila, a young female visitor, threatens to upset his plan.
I wanted to love this book, and may return to it later this year. I set it aside in early January after encountering a disturbing scene of animal cruelty (sorry, often one of my dealbreakers for a book’s sensibility), and though the scene served its part in the book, I had a hard time picking it back up again and continuing. Once you lose momentum, it’s tough to get it back–even when there is a good mystery in the making.
Buchholz is otherwise a deft writer with a surprisingly lyrical style. He writes from his experience as a US soldier in the world and maintains an interesting blog of Middle Eastern contradictions, Not Quite Right.
Somebody Kills a Kitten: Review of part of "One Hundred and One Nights"
One Hundred and One Nights by Benjamin Buchholz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Constructed around a mysterious narrator's appearance in Southern Iraqi town during the Iraq War, the novel uses an almost military pattern of repetition to peel back the layers on the narrator's role in the town's politics. We learn he is an aristocratic-born, Western-educated doctor in hiding, and only a few of the townspeople share his secret–but the faerie-like Leila, a young female visitor, threatens to upset his plan.
I wanted to love this book, and may return to it later this year. I set it aside in early January after encountering a disturbing scene of animal cruelty (sorry, often one of my dealbreakers for a book's sensibility), and though the scene served its part in the book, I had a hard time picking it back up again and continuing. Once you lose momentum, it's tough to get it back–even when there is a good mystery in the making.
Buchholz is otherwise a deft writer with a surprisingly lyrical style. He writes from his experience as a US soldier in the world and maintains an interesting blog of Middle Eastern contradictions, Not Quite Right.
March 9, 2012
When an editor hires an editor.
At February's San Miguel de Allende writer's conference, agent Kathleen Anderson had some great advice for writers. One of the unexpected good fortunes to shake loose from the publishing industry's layoffs is the sudden abundance of freelance editors for hire.
Let me clarify exactly how good this is. There have always been lots of freelance editors. I am one. In my ten years of full-time freelancing, I have had to work very hard to distinguish my website from the sites of unscrupulous people who say they know how to edit, but don't know the difference between an em-dash and an M&M.
The editors that Kathleen Anderson is talking about, on the other hand, are hard to find on the web. They have little websites that are as plain as vanilla pudding. But buried on those HTML-coded dinosaurs is a list of successful authors that scrolls, and scrolls, and (remember, these aren't high-tech websites) keeps on scrolling.
You'll find some of them on Facebook here and here.
You'll pay a lot for these editors' services. You'll get unvarnished honesty, and a frank opinion of how salable your manuscript is. The advice is worth it. I have sat through hundreds of workshops in my writing career, and edited hundreds of manuscripts since I left the Carnegie Mellon University Press to start my own business. I don't trust editors easily. I may not have hired one had my mentor, Jane McCafferty (First You Try Everything, One Heart), not personally recommended her now-freelance editor, Marjorie Braman, to me.
And let me say, Kathleen Anderson's tip is right on. Marjorie is now probably the only person in the world who can tell me to change everything, and I'll listen. I am sixty pages into a revision of a novel I never thought I would rewrite, and I love what the advice is doing for the story.
Being an editor gives me some advantages as a writer, but I still need outside help. If I didn't love my characters enough to overlook a few of their shortcomings, I wouldn't have felt compelled to tell their stories in the first place. As my wife's academic advisor once told her about medicine, "You don't have to know everything. You just can't be stupid."
And it would be foolish indeed to ignore the wealth of editorial talent out there right now.
When they talk about silence, this is what they mean.
Yesterday was International Women's Day. I told my mentee, a 14-year-old girl at Twain Middle School, that it celebrates women's equality in work, education, and healthcare–but I don't really believe that.
Honestly, I'm not sure how many people read this blog often or at all. But amid the flurry of reporting on sexual violence in the military (here and here, for instance), I too notice a bizarre dual reality in the military's treatment of women. As the wife of a female officer candidate at Fort Sam Houston and as a thinking human being, I've made a few observations.
1. I am not talkative. I talk about politics even less. But if I make even a passing mention of the fact that the military's unequal treatment of same-sex partners is unfair, I get shushed. The implication is that we've won the right to not get fired, now shut up about it.
2. Despite complaints, soldiers with a history of harassing women or abusing a position of power are slow to face consequences. Almost any servicemember has a story about this.
3. As one friend pointed out, women who report an incident are moved elsewhere–not the offender. This makes little practical sense because the survivor must reestablish social connections in a new location at a time when existing connections are the most important.
4. A few months ago, the base conducted a mandatory training on sexual violence. Most of the soldiers cracked jokes or studied throughout the talk, but to the few who listened, the presenter confidently announced, "In a few years we will have eradicated sexual violence in the military." No wonder no one took him seriously.
As a survivor of sexual assault and harassment, I understand context. Specifically, that there is never a convenient or safe time to tell the truth. Also that a pervasive blame-the-victim attitude makes it frightening to come forward, because almost inevitably, more scrutiny falls on the woman's behavior than the man's. The perverse result is that the survivor feels more ashamed of the truth than her rapist.
That's why the military needs to be serious about its protection of whistleblowers; for instance, setting aside the automatic punishment of officer-enlistee fraternization, guaranteeing a serious review of every case, and putting the decision in the hands of people sensitive to the nuances of sexual violence. Some of these measures are already in process, but if the naive, we-can-eradicate-it! attitude prevails while women are still regularly being assaulted, those measures aren't worth a dime.
Culturally, the military resists change because it sees itself as different from civil society–tougher, manlier, more stoic, cabalistic, whatever. I don't buy it. A warrior myth will help you on the battlefield, but the rest of the time, we're Americans–our soldiers aren't Spartans, Romans, or Janissaries, but men and women from down the street who make a living doing almost everything civilians do; from cooking food, to treating patients, to fixing boat engines, to payroll. The people who fill these jobs are contiguous with the society they protect, and they don't deserve to be treated like the spoils of war behind their own lines.
As an employer of probably the widest cross-section of American society, the military needs to listen. It's simple: If you serve to protect life, liberty, and happiness, tolerating rape and discrimination is indefensible. Values and issues outside the military have a place inside it, too. A better process for taking care of servicemembers is essential, and just as important is an unwillingness to tolerate violence and bigotry among peers–and perhaps the argument can be made that the latter is even better, because intervention by peers happens more often and more effectively than a chain-of-command response. Either way, until women who choose to wear the uniform are entitled to the same civil justice as everyone else, no, we won't shut up about it. Why should we?
