Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 243

Fun with FenCon

I survived the convention weekend. Well, better than survived, but at the moment, "survive" is the word that keeps coming to mind. I wasn't at my most social and was in a state where noise and crowds were extremely overwhelming, so there were a lot of people I never got to see or interact with. I may as well rename FenCon "Ragweed Con" for me because it always seems to fall at the height of allergy season. This year, the worst held off until Sunday, so I wasn't either sniffling or in a drugged stupor for the whole weekend, and when I was in public mode I was able to be my usual self. It just took a lot of hiding and down time in between public mode times in order to sustain my usual public mode personality. I barely made it to any of the room parties Saturday night because I ran completely out of steam.

This was my first year to be on the convention staff in addition to being a program participant. Not that it changed all that much for me, since the staff are the people I hang out with the rest of the year and I've usually jumped in and done things as needed. It's just this year I had "staff" on my badge and my name in the convention credits. My main job mostly happens before the con, so at the event I do whatever's needed. That meant I spent most of Friday afternoon setting up and then working in the staff lounge, and then when the registration desk got slammed in the early evening I worked registration. I was in "program participant" mode on Saturday and most of Sunday and did my panels, reading, etc., then on Sunday evening I switched to jeans, a t-shirt and sneakers to be on the teardown crew. Apologies to those who were disappointed by not getting to watch me carry huge metal poles down the stairs while wearing a skirt and heels again this year. But I couldn't have crawled under the stage to get cables or climbed the ladder to cut down the networking cables from the ceiling if I'd stayed in my convention clothes, so I was more useful if less decorative.

I think my most fun panel was the Phineas & Ferb panel that included our convention's youngest ever panelist, a six-year-old (who was dressed in his Perry the Platypus costume). I figured that if we were talking about the multigenerational appeal of the show, we needed another generation represented. That was a bit of a test of my moderation skills to keep conversation flowing among both adults and a small child, but I think it worked. We had a very high-energy Doctor Who panel and I was on a couple of writing panels where I hope the audience got something out of them because I know I picked up a thing or two, including a potential story idea. The big giggle fit for the con happened on Sunday afternoon in a panel, but I think it had something to do with the Benadryl kicking in by that point, and I don't remember what it was about, just that I was shaking from trying not to laugh out loud over something that was only funny to me because of the vivid mental image it conjured up in my warped brain.

I was in charge of public relations this year, and I don't think I can take credit for our highest attendance ever, but at least I can't be considered a devastating failure at my job if we had our highest attendance ever. But now there are expectations for next year …

And in the meantime, even though I prefer to go into vegetable mode on the day after a convention, I have a deadline and work to do (with the allergies really in high gear), so I have to work today. At least I have absolute quiet and solitude and lots and lots of tea.

What Will Be, Will Be

It's convention weekend, and I'm so not ready, but I've reached the zen state of deciding that what will be, will be, and one of the things adding to the stress of the week was also one of those things that puts everything else in perspective and reminds me that in the grand scheme of things, so many of the things we stress over really aren't all that important, especially if we let them distract us from what is important.

Like cookies. Instead of working yesterday, I baked. I knew nothing would get done with squirrel brain and baking would help calm the squirrels, and then I can make other people happy with yummy cookies. I can always rewrite the rest of the book after the con, which will also be when the cable gets dealt with.

Fortunately, I'm commuting from home, so I don't have to make decisions for the weekend or pack ahead of time. I have clothes picked out and ironed, but I can change my mind if necessary, and I can get home easily if I need to. Plus, I'll have my own bed at night, which always helps.

Fun things I get to do:
Moderate the con's first Phineas & Ferb panel
Moderate the annual Doctor Who panel
Moderate our traditional Sunday-morning SyFy Smackdown -- this can be worth getting up for. We hash out what's wrong with the network that's supposed to be aimed at people like us. Last year, we created the concept for a new reality show: Ghost Hoarders. This year, I have a foam broadsword.
Plus, I get to spend the weekend hanging out with my friends and consider it "work."

And I Thought Things Were Crazy Before

It looks like I may be going into this year's FenCon almost as sleep-deprived as the first one I went to. That year, I'd been at the Serenity premiere in LA the night before the con, and by the time I got to bed Friday evening, the first night of the con, I'd been awake for 43 hours. This year, I've had sleep and I've actually been to bed, but I'm not sleeping well. I think it's just that I'm feeling entirely overwhelmed with lots of stuff, all at the same time, and I can't shut off the brain.

The preschool choir last night didn't help. My co-teacher, who does a lot of the planning and teaching while I mostly herd cats and lead the actual singing, was out. I had a parent of one of last year's kids helping so we'd have the required two adults in the room, but we're also supposed to have two teen helpers. One isn't coming until October because of a schedule conflict, and one just didn't show last night. I don't know how many kids I had last night because I never got a good chance to get a head count, but I think I was only missing two and I had a new one. It really does take four people to manage that bunch because you need one person to teach, one to herd cats/do crowd control, one to deal with the clingy ones and one to help set up, pass things out, take roll, etc. We had some extremely clingy ones last night who were crying and had to be held, so that left me trying to teach, set things up and try to keep some control over the group. By the end of the evening, it was the teacher who wanted to cry for mommy.

For even more fun, the CD player was being weird. We don't have an accompanist, so we use CDs with the musical accompaniment. The CD that was most crucial, the one with the song we're doing in church in a few weeks, wouldn't play. The player wouldn't even acknowledge that there was a CD in there. So I decided that would be a good time for us to really work on the words, with me singing a phrase and getting them to repeat it. That worked until one of the kids commented on the way I sing. I wasn't doing full-on "opera lady" type singing (though I did find that hitting a really high note really loud and full works as well as a whistle for getting attention, since I can't whistle), but I was singing with proper technique. I have to go from the preschoolers to a real choir rehearsal, so I can't afford to strain my voice by not using good technique, but that results in what the kids call "fancy singing." And once one kid noticed and commented on it, they all had to. And then they all tried to sing that way. And things kind of went downhill from there.

In a final act of desperation, I handed out the rhythm sticks, and that went okay for a while, until they started pounding them on the floor. And that's when I gave up trying to control anything. I figured I might as well let them get it out of their system, so we pounded sticks on the floor (with me occasionally trying to guide them into particular patterns or trying to achieve something resembling unison) until it was the kids complaining that it was too loud.

And just to round out the evening, when I was thinking I'd survived because it was the end of the session and parents were arriving, one of the kids threw up during the closing prayer.

But on the up side, one little girl ran to hug me when she arrived, several of the girls actually fought over who got to sit next to me, and the special needs girl who at first wouldn't come in the room was now coming eagerly and was one of the kids wanting to sit with me and tell me everything about her week. And then at dinner afterward one of the kids who used to refuse to participate came over to show me her dessert. So I may be going insane, but they seem to be enjoying it. Even so, I got home from choir practice and had a glass of wine while watching CSI (I'd thought about trying to get some work done, but that wasn't happening), and I still didn't manage to unwind enough to get any sleep.

Now all that's left on my plate is revising the end of the book, ironing clothes, getting my cable service fixed (I can't access OnDemand, which is how I'm watching most TV these days), doing any final PR push for the con, preparing for my guest role at the con and something I'm sure I'm forgetting. Plus I got some sad news regarding a friend yesterday that's been a little distracting, so it looks like there will be a funeral to attend very soon. They haven't said anything to me about singing, and I'm not sure I could because thinking about the situation makes me cry.

I think I'm going to bake chocolate chip cookies. I need them, and I think handing them out to friends at the con will also make me happy.

How Not to Create a Character

I haven't received any writing questions, so I'm going to get into a series on character development, since that seems to be one of my strengths. I'll start with some of the methods that aren't so great. I won't say that these are bad ways to develop characters or that you should never do these. It's just that these are perhaps lazy ways that are risky if you don't do it well.

It's not a great idea to base your main character directly on yourself. That gets into potential "Mary Sue" territory. That's a term that comes from fan fiction and refers to a character who is clearly the author's avatar who's inserted into an existing universe -- Ensign Mary Sue joins the crew of the Enterprise and saves the day. In original fiction, it's come to mean the character who is obviously the author's stand-in, in a way that detracts from the story. This happens when the author is so emotionally bonded with that character that she loses all objectivity where that character is concerned -- everyone's in love with that character and anyone who isn't is just jealous, the character has no real flaws, the character never really faces consequences for her actions because for the author it would be like those things were happening to her.

(As an aside, I do think the "Mary Sue" accusation is overused and usually misused, often meaning any female character who is remotely competent or who has any self-confidence, but that's another discussion, and here I'm strictly using it for the more obvious cases.)

On the other hand, you're the only person you know from the inside out, so just about every character you write is going to be based in some way on yourself. The trick is to do that in such a way that you don't see the character as a projection of yourself. You can take your traits, feelings and personal experiences and mix them up with other stuff, and then you'll have a character who feels like flesh and blood that you'll still be able to treat like a character and not like an extension of yourself.

It's also not a great idea to directly base a character on a real person you know. For one thing, there's the possibility of legal action if the real person can be identified and your portrayal is negative in a way that isn't true. For another, basing characters directly on real people (including yourself) shows a lack of creativity. If you're writing fiction, you're supposed to be making people up. With real people, you may also run into that lack of objectivity that creates the Mary Sue problem. If you base your villain on your ex-boyfriend, odds are that working out your personal issues with that character will result in a less-realistic character than if you'd created someone entirely fictional (with maybe a few of the ex's traits, just for fun). If your cast of characters is essentially you and your friends, it starts to read like the kind of role-playing games my friends and I played when I was a kid -- not anything formal like Dungeons and Dragons, but just the make-believe scenarios we played out while running around in the back yard: "I'll be the captain and you be my first officer and now you do this and I do that."

Just like with taking aspects of yourself and mixing them up to create a character, you can take traits, actions, quirks and bits of physical description from real people and mix them up with other elements to create characters. You can even use a real person as an inspiration -- someone who is like someone you know in some way, but then you build a character around that rather than just plunking this real person into your story.

I would say that the farther you get from the main characters, the safer it is to draw on real life. If you have a conversation between your hero and a bank teller that lasts for all of half a page, it's probably not going to be a problem if you base the bank teller on your high school English teacher. In that short an appearance you don't have to worry too much about lack of objectivity, and very little of the person you really know is going to have a chance to come through. If a character with that small a role is more vivid in your mind because you're seeing someone you know, then maybe that little cameo moment will be more vivid for readers.

Another really dangerous thing to do is base your character on another fictional character (aside from a story that overtly uses public domain characters in new situations, like Lizzie Bennet fighting zombies or solving mysteries). I don't know how often this happens, but I have run across books where I'm pretty sure that I recognize the characters, or at least the inspirations behind the characters. Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer shows up in a lot of paranormal vampire romances, for instance. I'll admit to having used some favorite characters as a jumping-off point because there's something in those characters I want to explore that I didn't think was explored in a satisfying way in the original work (I tend to like the secondary characters more than the heroes), but it's like using real people -- take those key elements you want to explore and create an entirely new character around them. Your closest friends who know your obsessions may recognize the source, but if you've done your job in filing off the serial numbers, readers who don't know you shouldn't be able to tell where your characters came from.

And there are also situations where breaking all the rules can work. There are authors who deliberately base their cast of characters on themselves and their friends, with that being the gimmick of the books (several mystery authors do this). There was an author who got a lot of publicity by openly admitting that she'd based her main characters on a pair of TV characters and had written a book to allow herself to explore that relationship and find a way to make it work. There have been hugely bestselling books that were acknowledged Mary Sue stories, with the author writing her own personal fantasy that ended up striking a chord with readers. But I do think it's something beginning writers should be wary of. It's usually a sign of an amateur manuscript when you can tell that the hero is basically the author in costume or when you can spot the characters from other sources.

Next I'll get into some other ways to build characters.

Did I Mention Crazy?

I've reached the point in the week where I've had to start trimming things from my to-do list for my own sanity. I reviewed the short story I wrote to have something new to read at FenCon, and I don't think it works well for reading out loud. I also don't like the ending and I don't know how to end it. I thought for a mad moment about trying to come up with something else, but I don't really have the time or the mental energy to write something new this week. So I'll read something else. It will be a FenCon premiere, and I've only read it twice before, so while my obsessive fans who come to all my readings at every convention may have heard it, if you weren't at ConDFW or MileHiCon last year, it will be new to you. And maybe next year I'll have something new coming out to read from.

I didn't have much luck finding a good kids' book to read to the choir. I went through the whole section at the library, and I wasn't impressed with much of anything I found. That could be because about half that section is checked out at any given time, so only the dregs are left, and it didn't help that I was limiting myself to books with some kind of musical theme. But I found that a lot of the children's books were awfully didactic and preachy, teaching Valuable Life Lessons in a very non-subtle and boring way. Or else there was tons of narrative text that I know my bunch would lose interest in quickly. I found one book that had potential, about an animal marching band. It had adorable illustrations, and I had visions of getting the kids to act out playing the various instruments as they were introduced, but then it turned out that the text was deadly dull. They pretty much just copied and pasted the Wikipedia entries for each instrument without bothering to describe the instruments in any fun or clever way, like in rhyme or with any humor, just "this is a trombone, it's made of metal tubes and is played by moving a slide." So I think we'll just be singing a lot this week.

I may have figured out my wardrobe for the weekend, and it requires no shopping, which also removes things from the to-do list. I shopped my closet, instead, and I found a favorite skirt that I hadn't seen in years. I'd wondered what became of it and assumed it was in the bag of things I've been not getting around to taking to the dry cleaner, but it wasn't in there. I finally discovered where it had slipped off a hanger at the back of the closet. It needs ironing, but I have it back in my life, which really adds to my wardrobe.

So, now all I have to do this week is revise a novel, iron some clothes, come up with a lesson plan for preschool choir, do a major PR push and get ready for a convention. Piece of cake!

Crazy Week

This is going to be crazy scary busy week, with book revisions and a deadline looming over me and a convention this weekend (FenCon) where I'm not only a guest but on the staff, and most of my staff work takes place this week.

I'm not going to post my schedule because I figure if you're at the convention, you'll have a convention guide, and if you're not going to the convention, you probably don't care. I will say that I think I'll be debuting a new Enchanted, Inc. universe short story that's a bit of a prequel to the first book for my reading Saturday at noon -- that is, if I can figure out a way to fix the ending in the middle of everything else I'm doing this week. If I don't fix the ending, I may be reading preschool story books.

I had a busy weekend with choir stuff and con stuff, though a good side-effect of the con stuff was going out to dinner with friends, where the conversation ranged from food and cooking to books to music, with smart phones being passed around to provide samples of the music under discussion (living in the future is cool). Now I just have a few days to recharge before it really kicks off and I have to go into "author" mode. Ack, I haven't even decided what to wear. I was watching a Merchant-Ivory marathon on TCM last week and realized that I pretty much have the same length hair as Helena Bonham Carter does in those movies, which means I either need to get a haircut or I need to learn to do some Edwardian or Victorian updos. That could work as our theme this year involves steampunk, but since I don't have steampunk clothes it might look a little out of place. A Gibson Girl style doesn't quite go with jeans and a t-shirt.

Now I need to make a library run to find something to read to the kids and then I need to go quietly (or not so quietly) insane with all the stuff I need to get done this week.

Fall TV

My sense of time has gone all wonky, and I can't believe it's already mid-September. The summer seemed to drag on, and I thought we'd never see the end of it, and yet it's almost come as a shock to realize it's on its way out. For instance, the fall TV season has totally caught me off-guard.

Not that I'm too excited about it. My favorite shows, the ones I analyze and discuss and really care about, are summer shows, and some of them still have a few episodes left, so I'm more fired up about those season finales than I am about the new season that's starting. At level of highest intensity there's Doctor Who and Haven, and then Warehouse 13 is right behind them. I also like some of the USA summer series, but not really on the analyze/discuss level.

Just about all of those come above most of the regular season shows for me. I'll be happy to have Parks and Recreation back again, but since I spent the summer getting caught up on the earlier seasons on DVD, it doesn't feel like it's been gone. I'm curious as to how The Office will go with James Spader in the cast. I'm also curious about what the cliffhanger in NCIS will mean going forward and it will be interesting to see how all the changes made in the season finale of Chuck will affect the show.

I may watch the season premieres of House and Supernatural just to see where they're going with things, but their season finales turned me off in ways I'm not sure they can overcome. Just about everything else falls into the "watch it OnDemand when I get a chance" category.

Of the new shows for the fall, the only ones I think I'm going to bother trying are the two fairy tale shows, Grimm and Once Upon a Time, mostly just to see what they do with the premise. They were doing some sneak peeks of Once Upon a Time at movie theaters in those pre-show ads during the summer, and it looked like it could be a really fun fantasy series, but then I also remember The Charmings. This one could go either way.

What I'm mostly excited about is the Masterpiece Theatre lineup for next year, with a new season of Downton Abbey and Sherlock. I believe Downton Abbey actually starts in England this week, but I think I'll resist the temptation to find it by alternative means and wait to watch the US broadcast -- mostly because I'm really busy right now and need to rewatch the first season, so by the time I'd have time to catch up, we'd almost be at the US broadcast anyway.

I haven't seen anything about anything new coming up for the fall/winter season on the channel formerly known as SciFi. I'd heard there would be another Battlestar Galactica prequel, but now I'm hearing that they're going to do that as a web-only series. Their site doesn't really mention anything new for the fall other than the Neverland miniseries. I never got into Sanctuary, but I may have to try, just for the lack of anything else to watch. I wonder if not having seen the previous seasons will be a problem in following it.

All this means I should have a lot more reading and writing time, I guess. And fall is my favorite outdoor time, so I'll be able to spend my days outside if I can write in the evenings.

Surviving Preschool

I survived the preschoolers! I think it went pretty well, but there were a few times when things got a little out of control. Fortunately, I had a parent helping because it was difficult to keep the class moving forward and keep the activities going while also reining in the kids who were having attention span issues. Some of the kids can go all day on a particular activity they like, and they don't want to move on to the next thing, but others are bored with everything after about thirty seconds, even if they like it. That means that no matter what, there will be whining. If we don't move on to something else, the bored ones will whine and get disruptive, but when we do move on, the ones who weren't ready to move on complain loudly and disrupt the next activity by trying to keep doing the previous one. My big triumph was that the special needs girl who couldn't be persuaded to even go in the room before not only came in this time, but actively participated and really seemed to attach to me, when before she wouldn't talk to anyone. I may have to brush up on my Star Wars prequels, though. One of the boys has just discovered Star Wars, but he's been watching the movies in series chronological order and hasn't yet seen the real Star Wars movies. He was describing in great detail some character from the prequels that I only remember vaguely. I can't believe I had to resort to the smile and nod and "Oh, really? Wow!" (the standard way to respond to anything a four-year-old tells me) for a conversation about Star Wars. His mom said they'll be getting to episode iV (the real Star Wars for us old-timers), and there I'll be in my element because that's where I have the obsessive attention to every little detail.

Surprisingly, story time (the way to settle them down and get them to focus after a more active activity) was probably my biggest success. I had a book my co-teacher lent me, but I think now I need to find another good read-aloud book with some kind of musical theme to it. I'll have to go to the library. I was in high school drama club with the children's librarian in my neighborhood and she does the library story times, so maybe she'll have some suggestions. The kids liked it when I did funny voices for the characters and made up tunes for the songs the characters were singing. (Hee, I should bring these books to FenCon for my reading instead of reading from my own work.)

I think I'm in another weird reading mood, or maybe it's just a too-busy-to-read phase. The book I'm reading just isn't luring me in, and I don't think it's the book's fault. I think I'd really get into it at another time when I have the luxury of just delving into it for hours. There's a lot of set-up with short chapters that take place months or even years apart, and that doesn't work so well when you're reading a chapter before going to sleep at night. So I think I may let it go back to the library and get it back later when I'm in the mood for that sort of thing, but that then leaves me without a book I'm currently reading and nothing really in the queue for the next thing to read. With convention prep and book revisions, I don't have a lot of reading time right now, but I get twitchy without there being a book in progress. I pulled something at random off the to-be-read pile (one I didn't even realize I had and don't remember precisely how I got it), so we'll see if that works.

Now after a quick post office trip (ugh, quarterly taxes), I have to delve into revisions and spend some time as PR guru.

Meet Me in the Middle

Taking the new computer downstairs helped a lot in the productivity department, but when I needed to do some serious rewriting on a scene, I ended up copying that scene into a new file and transferring it to the old computer to really work on it. I guess I haven't conditioned myself to see the new computer as a place to work, or maybe I just needed to separate myself from the marked-up document in order to think.

Today I'll have to really focus, as not only do I need to get more work done on these revisions, but I have some other projects that need attention today, and then I'm in charge of the preschool choir tonight, so I have to come up with a lesson plan of activities that will keep 4-year-olds occupied for 45 minutes, with each activity lasting long enough for them to learn something but not so long that they lose interest, and with a mix of quiet and "active" activities. The nice thing is that kids that age like repetition, so I can repeat a lot of the things we did last week, just mixing it up a little.

I finally found that article I mentioned yesterday about fairies maybe being the next big thing in publishing. It turned out to be in the Facebook feed of a publisher blog, and I'd only read the headline. When I read the actual article, it was just some random person's opinion or idea, not anyone with any particular publishing knowledge, which makes me wonder why it was worth passing on. At any rate, it's not so much the subject matter for me, but rather the tone. I'm afraid I've become very tired of the Standard-Issue Urban Fantasy Heroine -- you know, tough and jaded, a little bitter, drinks and curses a lot, maybe even smokes, lives in a fleabag apartment and functions within the underbelly of society. I guess it's that noir influence. At the same time, I'm also not crazy about the other extreme that shows up in some of the paranormal romance that has a lot of chick lit influence, where the heroine is obsessed with designer labels and her idea of a crisis is ruining a pair of Manolos. There really ought to be some room in the middle, where most people live -- a middle-class apartment and buying clothes at Ann Taylor Loft, not moving in the high end of society but not associating entirely with street people. But the entertainment industry (including publishing) seems to think that the middle ground is boring. It has to be one extreme or another.

That makes finding books tricky for me because the extremes don't appeal to me. The same thing happens with the depiction of romantic relationships. These days, it seems like a romance novel is either super-hot, where the characters have a bad case of chronic hornypants and never think of anything but getting each other into bed, or it's inspirational romance, where the characters pray together and never have an impure thought. I don't mind a chaste relationship, particularly if there are other things going on that would preclude sex (like being in immediate danger), but I don't necessarily want religious content (and I am a religious person). There aren't too many romance novels that aren't overly sexual without being religious.

I was thinking of this yesterday when I was using a Twilight Zone marathon as my background noise/distraction for exercising. There was an episode I hadn't seen before, "The Fear," in which a state trooper stops by a remote mountain cabin to check on the new resident, a single woman who's moved there from New York. There's lots of loaded banter as she makes disparaging remarks about the sophistication of the locals and he takes offense, but then when there's a loud noise and a strange light in the sky, they surprise each other -- him by quoting Shakespeare and her by being just as candid about being afraid as she was about her impressions of the local yokels. When his police radio and her phone go dead and there's a definite but unspecific threat outside, they end up trapped in this remote cabin together for the night and have some interesting conversations about the nature of fear and courage. I was absolutely riveted. It was some of the best pre-romantic dialogue I've seen in ages, and I never would have thought of Rod Serling as a romantic writer. Not that it was overtly romantic, but it had a charge to it, and by the end of the episode I was desperately hoping this couple would get together. Of course, the episode ended in the usual abrupt Twilight Zone way, so we didn't get any kind of epilogue showing that going through this experience together had brought them together as people so their relationship would endure beyond this night. Still, I was sighing wistfully at the end, and then I laughed at myself for looking to The Twilight Zone as a source for romantic entertainment (I am such a geek).

But that got me in the mood for something good and romantic. Unfortunately, for the reasons stated above I probably won't find something that gives me what I want in the romance genre. It might happen in fantasy, science fiction or mystery, but you never can tell if that's what you're going to get in those genres, and if that's what I'm looking for and don't get it, I'll be disappointed -- and yet, it takes away some of the impact if I know they'll get together because part of the fun is in the desperately hoping without it being guaranteed. It's really hard to tell if it's going to be that kind of book ahead of time, and that makes it difficult to find the right thing when you've got a craving for a particular kind of story.

Maybe I'll just re-read Stardust. That's exactly the kind of thing I seem to be in the mood for.

In other news, it's raining! I'd almost forgotten what that was like. We broke the record for the most 100-degree days in a year yesterday, and it's also been the driest summer ever. Now that the record's been broken, it looks like the weather is relenting a little.

Book Report: A Fairy Tale About Fairies

As a reminder, I'm still open to questions about writing (craft, writing life or the business) or about the Enchanted, Inc. series. Ask away!

I was much less productive than I needed to be yesterday. I forgot that whining is an essential part of the revision process, and I let the whining rattle me. I'll read a revision note or suggestion, rant and whine a bit about how silly and unreasonable it is and how no one who'd actually read the book and paid attention could possibly think that would be a good idea. Then when I get that out of my system, I admit that if one person got that impression, then others might, so I re-read that section. And then I may admit that it does need to be changed, and I'll find my own way to change it. The difficulty this time around is that I've been doing revisions on the new computer, since it has a wider screen that allows me to put the marked-up document alongside the document I'm working on. But this computer is the one attached to the Internet, and that makes it far too easy to just hop online while I'm in the whining "I don't want to do this and you can't make me" phase. Instead of five minutes of whining with each major note, I end up with 45 minutes of checking e-mail, checking Facebook, reading blogs, reading message boards, etc.

So, today the new computer gets disconnected from the Internet and taken downstairs, especially since it's hot again (boo) and my bedroom is the coolest spot in the house.

I've realized that in my talking about the Locke Lamora books, I've forgotten to mention something else I've read recently, The Uncertain Places by Lisa Goldstein. This book is a blend of two of my favorite fantasy plot types. It's a "lost in the fairy realm" book (which is kind of a subset of the "sucked through a portal" book) and it plays with the structure and elements of fairy tales. A college student gets dragged by his roommate to visit the roommate's new girlfriend (and be set up with her sister) and finds himself caught up in this strange family who are descendants of characters in a lost Grimm tale. Due to a bargain made by an ancestor, they're blessed, but there's also a curse that goes with it. He may have to find a way to break the spell to save the woman he loves, but doing that will also have greater repercussions to her whole family -- and to his family, years later.

Since I'm into both fairy tales and fairy folklore, I found this mix really interesting. Usually, "fairy tales" is a misnomer, as most fairy tales actually have little to do with fairies. Then there are the stories actually about the fairies and their land, which are usually about humans from our world ending up there, either through accident or abduction. This book wove the two types of fairy stories together. The result was the sort of "urban fantasy" I've been looking for since I first heard the term, before it turned out that the industry was going to take it to mean sexy vampires. There is some darkness and grit, but not oppressively so, and it doesn't delve into the dark underbelly of society. I'd like to find more books in this vein. I thought I read something yesterday about fairies maybe being the next big thing, replacing vampires, and I wouldn't mind that, if it were done well, with actual basis in the folklore instead of them just being sexy, sparkly things. Of course, now I can't find what I thought I saw on any of the usual genre or publishing blogs I read. I suspect it may have been something in a Twitter feed or blog roll sidebar, and 18 or so hours is a lifetime in Twitter time, so I doubt I'll be able to find it again.