Rachel Hartman's Blog, page 45

Epic fail

* My friend Rich brought this article to my attention yesterday: The perils and pleasures of long-running fantasy series. It's about what (if anything) writers of vast, volume-and-decade spanning epics owe their readers, and whether it's inevitable that books of such unbridled magnitude will break your heart.

* As someone who's left people hanging on the cliff, I sympathize. I can only imagine how much George R. R. Martin has changed as a person since beginning A Song of Ice and Fire, or how m...

Only you, Mary Sue

I was looking at Ellen Kushner's blog, as I sometimes do, and I followed a link to another interesting blog post (by Holly Black) about Mary Sues. Not about identifying Mary Sues in literature – which has become quite the sport lately – but about the sport of identification itself. About the fact that "Mary Sue" is coming to mean "that female character I dislike".

Dilution of a useful term? Maybe. I'm not that convinced it was a useful term, with any meaning beyond the world of fanfiction and ...

Impromptu

Over the weekend I watched movie Impromptu, about George Sand and Chopin at the beginning of their celebrated 10-year relationship. A friend had been shoving me toward it for years, but I hadn't felt particularly compelled to try it: I've never read any Sand, and I'm not that enamoured of Chopin's music (piano music often leaves me cold, and I'm not sure why). However, recent discussions my friend and I have had – about being scary, being judged, genre and the idea of branding oneself – led m...

Seraphina: Origins III

In about 2006, I read several books on Sensory Processing Disorder. It turned out to be irrelevant to the real-life challenges I was facing at the time, but I still found the literature fascinating. I had already started thinking about brains, if you will recall (note: language warning); this gave me another angle for consideration.

Sensory Processing Disorder is, in essence, a difference in brain function, but it's more complicated than I'm going to make it sound. I'm giving you the parts...

No cover

I had hoped there would be cover art to show you this week, but alas the cover is undergoing another round of possible revision. This is actually good news: it means the book is already garnering enough positive attention that Random House wants to get the cover exactly right.

That doesn't mean I'm not feeling impatient. Fortunately, I have plenty to keep me occupied.

You, on the other hand, look bored. Have some Hanggai. It's on the house.

There!  Isn't that better? Don't you reckon you could r...

Generic

At a book site I visit, someone posed a question to the site members at large. How does one prepare oneself to write in an unfamiliar genre? Lots of answers had already been given by the time I got there, and yet they were all exactly the same answer: research! Read a hundred books in that genre! Learn the genre inside and out!

Because I am contrarian by nature, my first thought was Why on earth would anyone research a genre?

My knee-jerk incredulity aside, of course there are reasons to...

Cold War flashbacks

Hello darlings! I am back from my Tropical Ontario Vacation. I think it can pretty much be summed up in two words: The Diefenbunker. It's a little bit sobering to see objects you remember from your childhood – rotary phones, overhead projectors, hydrogen bombs, IBM mainframes the size of a small car with less memory than an iPod – in a museum. But more shocking, I think, to realize you'd forgotten what it was like to use them.

You're wondering whether I ever actually used a hydrogen bomb. I'm ...

Going Postal

I just finished re-reading Terry Pratchett's Going Postal. That's a rare treat for me, anymore. I used to be a great re-reader; I've read War and Peace 2.5 times (the .5 is because the first time through, I skipped all the war parts). I don't even remember how many times I've read Pride and Prejudice; I only know that three of those times were out loud to other people. That's the kind of hard core re-reader I was. Not just meekly re-reading to myself, no, I had to stick it in other people's e...

A few of my favourite things

Hello darlings! I am traveling, but shall return to amuse you next week. In the meantime, here are a few things to tide you over.

I don't usually consider myself prone to envy, but I can't read Hark, A Vagrant! without turning green and wishing I'd thought of it. There's a guest post on the front page at the moment, but dig back through the archives and you'll find all kinds of fiendishly demented cartoons about Jane Austen and fat ponies and the discovery of Canada and Crazy Nancy Drew. OK...

This afternoon's symposium

Ah, welcome! I trust you avoided the homework like a champion. That video was sillier than I remembered, and not in a Monty Python sense, either, alas. You have to feel for the philosopher-host, though: when the guy you're talking about has only a handful of epigrams left to his name, it's hard to fill half an hour. Can you blame him for talking about shopping?

Yeah, okay, I suppose I can.

In any case, this looks like the perfect time for a little symposium! And I mean that in the original...