L. Jagi Lamplighter's Blog, page 63

Christmas is Coming…and advice is needed.

The wonderful Christmas largess from my father-in-law has arrived.  Juss finally will receive his well earned DS…which he's waited for for years.

So…I need to buy a DS and a laptop for my daughter…any suggestions as to where or what?

I was going to get Ping-Ping a used model…but she wants to pay for part of it and get a nice one.

Casual Vacancy — Take Two — Actually pretty good!

After my previous review, I read some reviews of J.K.Rowling's Casual Vacancy on Amazon. Some people said that the second half was better than the first, so I decided to keep reading.

And, it did get better!

All the secret reasons for the behaviors of the characters unfolded in the second half, so one's sympathy increased. Also, the tragic events of the end became much more sad and inevitable as the story progressd.

Originally, I thought it would be about how a man’s death led to troubled people coming together. It wasn’t. It was about how when you remove the lynchpin of the one man who had compassion and acted efficiently on it, everything else fell apart.

It was about the state of the poor and the failure of the middle class to help them.

Overall, in retrospect, I thought it was really quite good. 

Interview with Professor Crazy

Nice interview with Douglas Cobb, who has appeared here, over at Nick Wale's website. Just posting it to give a shout out for both of them (Douglas and Nick)

 

Excerpt:

"Douglas Cobb is a man on a mission. I noticed from the start of the interview that he was easy going and self assured. I knew that this would be a great interview and it would be fine to stray away from his books and into his life. A happy family man at heart, this interview with Doug was one of the most entertaining I have undertaken so far."

 

To read more: http://nickwale.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/144/

 

 

 

Magic Forever and Do Anything

The title phrase refers to my husband's youthful answer to the question: what would you wish for if you had three wishes. His answer: I would want to be magic forever and do anything, then I wouldn't need the second two wishes.

Assuming being magic forever and doing anything was NOT an option…what would you want magic to do?

 

I realize I asked this before, but still gathering info. In this particular case, the more specific the answers the better. Both "what would you want in daily life" and "what would you want in a battle fighting monsters or evil wizards" would be useful.

 

 

The Toothfairy vs. Zeus

Recently, I've been wondering: how many traditions and superstitions of the past were like Santa or the Toothfairy or the Easter Bunny. — all of these are carried on by people who do not believe in them, and yet who, year after year, do the correct things to keep up the mythos.

How many of the myths and folktales of the past were like that…people knew they weren't there but did the things anyway. Did anyone ever put out milk for brownies who thought brownies would come clean their houses? Or did everyone know it was like cookies for Santa?

 

(In the Roanoke roleplaying game, John's character the cowboy sorcerer kid immediately filled the brownie's milk bowl with whiskey. His room got painted puce and chartreuse.).)

 

 

Overheard at the Wright Household

The boys were doing something odd with the Master Mind game.

 

Mom: "What are you doing?"

Juss: "Nothing. Just watching an evil demon lose against Orville."

Orville: "No actually, it's an evil master mind from outer space."

Juss: "You think that if he were a master mind, he would be good at Master Mind."

Orville nods: "The world was saved by a game of Master Mind."

 

 

Playing Games With Parents

Juss loves board games. No one else in the family does. But recently, he's been learning the secret that if you pick games your parents like, they might play.

He already has an offer from Daddy that Daddy will play chess any time Juss asks, unless he's writing.

But now he discovered Mommy's weakness, too…Master Mind. I LOVE Master Mind. Unlike nearly every other game, which I really could do without, I find this one absolutely delightful.

Juss is onto me.

Overheard at the Wright Household

Juss comes home from school and says:
 
 
Two guys are sneaking along in a basement:
 
First guy: "Why am I hearing spy music?"
 
Second guy: "The fourth wall is still broken."

 

 

Best recent line from a roleplaying game

Iris Meadowsweet, talking to her father, the Archangel Gabriel: "If it were up to me, I'd be happy with something small. But I think the little hobbit life I expected is going to turn out to be Frodo's."

 

A Casual Vacancy of Morals, Wit, and Charm

The first thing I heard about J. K. Rowling’s CASUAL VACANCY was that it would be a humorous book about a small town election. That sounded like it could be fun, but I wasn’t particularly interested. Then, I heard that it had one or two darker elements.

 

I decided I would wait to read it until I knew that someone I trusted liked it. Wish I had.

That caught my fancy. A light, airy book with a core of something more serious sounded very promising.

 

I saw the book in the bookstore and flipped through it, reading a few passages. They seemed promising. I remembered how much I liked her characters.

 

Then, Saturday, I woke up with a driving desire to read the book—out of nowhere. This was particularly odd as I have very little reading time, but happened to have some this weekend. I went to the library and put the book on hold. I was number 1064.

John took pity on me and bought me a copy at the bookstore for 40% off with a gift card my mother had given him.

 

I sat down with great delight and dived in. The writing was excellent. The insights into character really impressed me. Some even reminded me of my favorite writer of all, Tolstoy. I also really liked the slow, clever way that the plot unfolded—taking time to reveal what was really up, with unrelated comments in various scenes suddenly coming together to form a whole.

 

It was, therefore, with some startlement that I realized that I didn’t like any of the characters. (Well, not true. I liked two of them—a slutty, foul-mouthed teenager from the projects, and the guy who dies in the first scene. But, of course, he’s dead.)

 

Now, I’m going to repeat this. I didn’t really like any of the characters. I didn’t. I like everybody. Really. Not just saying that. I actually do. People all seem interesting to me. If you want me to dislike someone, you have to work REALLY hard.

 

And I didn’t particularly like…ALL OF THEM.

That had to be deliberate.

As a writer, I am a big believer in the theory that all writing is words on a page. No matter what effect a book has on you when you read it, it was particular words that created the image that evoked that effect. If you think, you should be able to figure out which words did it.

 

So, I spent the better part of a day fascinated with the question of: how is she doing it? How is she making it so that I didn’t care for them?

 

Eventually, I figured it out:

 

They lack sympathy. By which I mean—the characters lack sympathy for each other.

 

Almost every character is introduced from the point of view of someone who doesn’t like them—so you start with a basically negative take. Then, we see the character’s point of view and start to like them. Then, that character comes upon someone else, we kind of have started to like…and all their thoughts about that person are petty and unpleasant. Suddenly, we find ourselves disliking both of them more.

 

At first, I was okay with this. I thought: she’s clever. She’s setting us up to see the bad, then something—maybe the legacy of the dead guy, will turn things around, and it will all become good. It will be better in its goodness because of the depth of the bad.

That was before I read that it was a tragedy.

 

About halfway through, I jumped to the end and read the end. There was no happy solution. It was a tragedy…though a few characters improve their lot.  This was a huge blow.

 

Now, I am rethinking the book. I may go back and read a bit more. There are a few character’s whose story line I’d like to finish, but—for the most part—it was really hard to care.

 

Just a little bit of sympathy in the characters for each other—a hint of good among the unrelenting snideness and negativity—would have gone a LONG way to making the book really good.

 

I kept thinking of Filch the caretaker in Harry Potter. He’s pretty vile…but his love for his cat, Mrs. Norris brings out a human side that makes him a vivid character, and one for whom I have sympathy. Somehow, in this book, whenever she did something like that, she undercut it with some new unpleasant insight in the next chapter.

 

The story is supposed to be humorous…but the humor was entirely lost on me. Normally, I can see the humor in nearly anything. (I pride myself on being easily amused.) I usually see humor even in things that I don’t care for. There are scenes where I look at it and I imagine that perhaps Rowlings thought the scene was funny when she wrote it…and yet, somehow, the humor is not getting across to me. (I did read a review of someone who liked the book who listened to the audio version. Maybe the actor who read it brought out the humor more.)

 

Sigh.