Jane Lindskold's Blog, page 107

FF: Not Before Bed

This week I read Well of Shiuan by C.J. Cherryh.  I found the story made me very tense, so I decided against reading it right before going to sleep.  Instead, I read short stories from Once Upon a Time by Shannon Hale instead.  Proved an interesting mix.  I’m always amazed how much variety there can be between the books I enjoy.

Read Me a Story!

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Well of Shiuan by C.J. Cherryh.

When in Rome by Ngaio Marsh.  Audiobook.  Re-read.

Once Upon a Time by Shannon Hale.  An Ever After High short story collection, fleshing out various characters.  Slight feel at times of being the author’s notes, but in an interesting, not bad, way.

In Progress:

The Murder Room by P.D. James.  Audiobook.  Surprisingly similar in some ways to the prior book (Death in Holy Orders) in the series in that the tension is built around conflict over whether or not to close an institution.

Palace of Stone by Shannon Hale.  Direct Sequel to Princess Academy.  Just started.

Also:

One of my own unsold manuscripts.  It’s been a fun trip.

TT: Instant Gratification

JANE:  Last time I mentioned how there seems to have been a culture shift towards instant gratification.  The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that this cultural shift goes beyond social activities such as eating out.

Hey! What ‘Cha Got?

Search engines such as Google permit instant gratification regarding acquiring information.  Books, music, and movies can be downloaded at a whim.  I-phones and suchlike devices mean you don’t even need to be at home to acquire the new book or movie or whatever.  All you need is connectivity.

Overnight shipping is becoming routine, so there’s no more waiting for that special order.  If you’re willing to pay, you can have it the next day.

I’m not saying this is wholly bad or good – but, to me, it’s a definite indication of a cultural shift where planning, persistence, and patience are less valued than immediate satisfaction.

ALAN: To an extent that’s true, at least for simple things. Certainly I’ve been able to find books and music that I’d probably never have been able to obtain in the pre-internet days, and that’s been absolutely wonderful. But once you start to dig a bit deeper and try to achieve more complex goals, things become trickier (and often slower).

For example, I recently needed find out how old the writer Janet Kagan was when she died (and when it happened). That was trivially easy and it only took a few seconds. However, when you and I were writing Tangents about all the kings of England called Henry, the subject proved to be so complex that I found myself making notes and sketching relationships and cross-referencing between articles – in other words I was doing traditional academic research to try and fully understand something that quickly turned into a rat’s nest of complicated interconnections.

Sometimes I used the internet, sometimes I used traditional reference books and it took quite some time before I really felt I had a handle on the Henries. We started the discussion here and I’m rather proud of  what we did.

JANE: That’s an excellent point.  Instant availability of information does not mean instant comprehension.  Why did you feel the need to use printed references rather than just the web?

ALAN: Mainly because I was doing a lot of reading and I don’t like reading huge slabs of prose on a computer screen. Also I’m very fond of my 1966 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica and it was wonderful to have an excuse to use it as it was intended to be used!

JANE: That makes perfect sense. I don’t like reading on a screen either.

So you opted away from instant gratification in favor of some other benefit.  That’s just one way that this cultural metamorphosis is complex and many-sided.

Being able to order what one needs, not settle for what is in the store, is wonderful.  This is especially a positive development for medical or other specialized needs.  Recently, I was able to find the precise type of sandal I needed on-line.  Ironically, I wanted to patronize a brick and mortar store, because I wanted the store to be there next time I needed to actually try on shoes.  However, I was also unwilling to settle for less than what I needed so, in the end, I went on-line.

However, what does cultivating instant gratification mean for the things that can’t be sped up?  Rock stars are the classic model of the “overnight success,” yet, based on the numerous bios I’ve read, many of these “overnight” prodigies put in a lot of practice time.  The gratification – even for those who “broke in” in their teens or early twenties – was far from instantaneous.

Some things can’t be sped up.  Period.  Do people who are used to getting what they want now or at the very least the next day still have this patience?  Is our future changing?

ALAN: Well, let’s try and answer that question science fictionally, since changing futures is a large part of what SF is all about. SF has always assumed (sometimes implicitly rather than explicitly) that as the future arrives things will get faster and easier.

Recently Robin and I were watching an old episode of the TV series Lost in Space. The lady of the spaceship (Mrs Robinson – now there’s a name to conjure with) wandered on set with a basket of dirty clothes. She put them in the washing machine and pressed a button. Lights flashed for a few seconds. Then she opened the machine and took the clean clothes out. And not only were they clean, they had been pressed and folded and individually wrapped in cellophane!

Since I do the washing in our house, I want one of those washing machines. But even without one, I still spend considerably less time washing the clothes than my mother did. She did the washing by hand for years and even when she did finally get a washing machine it was quite primitive by modern standards and she still had a lot of manual labour to do.

So, in SF terms (and, by extension, in real life as well), the trend towards instant gratification is simply a function of future technology. Almost by definition, the one follows on from the other.

Until it doesn’t, as with my Janet Kagan/King Henry experience.

JANE: I wish I thought it was that simple.  There are good things, absolutely.  These days there’s no need to argue about some factual point.  You can Google it, then talk about substance without getting lost in a triviality like a date or time or some other purely factual element.

But does substance get discussed or have we merely become a community of trivia buffs?  I’m reminded of when pocket calculators became inexpensive enough that anyone could get one.  Before long, the argument was being made that students shouldn’t need to learn to add, subtract, multiply, or divide because the machine could do it for them.  Many people felt that allowing kids to use pocket calculators was a positive development, that now students could concentrate on higher mathematics rather than wasting time learning mere arithmetic.  Has this happened?

ALAN: When I was a schoolboy we were always encouraged to use slide rules (and log tables, though that’s much the same thing). Calculators are just a logical extension of that and they are much faster, of course. The time saved can be used to concentrate on more important mathematical principles rather than getting bogged down in arithmetical detail. I’m sure that happens.

However I have noticed that these days a lot of people can’t do simple arithmetic any more. If you want to bewilder a teenager, wait until you have a supermarket bill of $19.10. Give the cashier $20.10 and then sit back and enjoy the confusion that results…

JANE: Clearly I need to think about this further.  Perhaps we could continue this discussion next time.

Who Are You Writing For?

Here’s a question that I received from Mab Morris via my Facebook page.  Ms. Morris has done a great deal of writing, has edited for other people, and has even taken the step of self-publishing her novella, The Red Khemeresh (which I’ve read).

Would I Like This?

Ms. Morris’ question was complicated.  I’ll paraphrase: “How do I get beyond the frustrating praise of being told I’m a strong writer by agents, while still not knowing what it is about the piece that makes them pass on representing my work?”

Let’s start by taking a look at that important phrase “frustrating praise.”  Frustrating praise is something that writers (and I suspect musicians and other artists) encounter frequently.  The rejection says something like, “This is a well-written piece.  However, it isn’t quite right for me, so I’m going to pass on it.”

Honestly, this sort of rejection is worse than being told “Would you please learn how to write a grammatical sentence?” Or “Your book is obviously a mishmash of Firefly and Game of Thrones.  You need to do more than file off the serial numbers.  Changing Tyrion Lannister to Tyra Bannister doesn’t do it.”

At least these rejections, nasty as they are, give a writer something to work on, a path to follow towards improvement.  “You write well but this isn’t for me” is only frustrating.  So here are a few questions to ask yourself.

Did you submit your work to the right place?

This question applies both to agents and publishers.  A book that would be perfect for Baen Books (which has established a solid audience for military SF, space opera, and traditional SF/F) might not interest a press that specializes in works with a GLBTQ emphasis.  Bigger publishers or agencies deal with a wider range of books, but even there you need to target the right editor or agent.

Just because a story isn’t right for one publisher doesn’t mean it’s a bad story or a weak story.  It only means it doesn’t suit that particular market.  This applies to agents as well, since most agents specialize in a few areas.

Be familiar with your field.  I recently spoke at an event where I chatted with several people who told me they wrote “Science Fiction.”  However, after a very short discussion, it became clear that they all wrote Fantasy and, at that, very different sorts of Fantasy.  Had they submitted their works – no matter how well-written – to an SF market, they might indeed have received a rejection.

Way back in late 2012, Alan Robson and I made a methodical journey through every genre and sub-genre we could think of within Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.  You can find these posts starting here.  Or you might want to take advantage of a free download of most of the Thursday Tangents as an e-book here.

Who Are You Writing For?

When faced with a “nice but not for me” rejection, writers need to ask themselves just who are they writing for.  Mab Morris admits that what she writes does not fit into currently popular slots: “I have a lot of joy in what I write, but it’s not like I write about vampires or YA Post Apocalyptical stuff. I write these weird aggregated world culture/mythos mashes that are allegories.”

Lately, publishers have become very focused on how to market a book.  Books are talked about not for what they are, but what they are like – while at the same time being represented as presenting a completely unique twist.  A good example of this sort of marketing is Victor Milan’s Dinosaur Lords, which was marketed as Game of Thrones meets Jurassic Park.

Since many publishers are thinking in terms of marketing categories, then agents (who make their money by selling books to publishers) are also put in the position of thinking this way.

Therefore, at some point writers need to stop and say, “Who am I writing for?  Why am I writing?”

Many writers choose to write specifically for the market they want to break into.  The more structured the market, the more constraints this will put on the material that the writer can address.  The Romance market is a good example.  In a recent SFWA Bulletin, Jeffe Kennedy wrote an excellent article talking about why characters in love do not a Romance novel make.

I once asked a very popular Romance writer about the number of sex scenes in her most recent book, especially since they didn’t seem to fit the rest of the material.  Her reply was simple: “I know what my audience wants and expects, so I give it to them.”  She’s selling a lot of books, and following expectations doesn’t make her unhappy, so, for her, it’s a win-win situation.

Although the Romance market may have more constraints than many, still it’s important to remember that any work – even self-published – will need to be identified within one or more market areas.  That’s how readers have been trained to look for the sort of book they will like.  However, this means that if you’re going to write stories that don’t neatly fit, you’re going to need to find ways to show how your story has more, not less, appeal because of that.

Well-written Doesn’t Mean Perfect.

Consider that although you may “write well,” that doesn’t mean you write perfectly.  Writers are often unable to find their own blind spots.  Finding people who can help you find them can be difficult – especially if you’re relying on volunteers.

Don’t count on an editor to “fix” your story for you.  These days, editors find themselves having less time to edit manuscripts.  Most editors I’ve talked with do their actual “editing” during their commute or at home.  Office time is spent on meetings, e-mails, phone conferences, and such.

This has led to the rise of the “editorial agent.”  However, remember that an agent’s commission is based on selling the book.  Therefore, an editorial agent’s best interests may not be served by helping you evolve as a writer.  Instead, it may be served by making the book as saleable as possible.  If this is what you want, great.  However, if you have a vision for your work that does not involve revising to make it fit the formula of the moment, then an editorial agent’s input may not serve your interests.

I don’t have a simple answer as to how you can find out what your work may be missing.  All I can say is that you’re going to be a step closer to that goal if you figure out why you started writing in the first place.  At least then you’ll be able to say to your beta readers, “What I’m trying to do here is THIS.  Am I managing?”

I know a good many of you are creatively engaged in one or more arts.  Any productive comments to offer?  And any more questions for me?

FF: Variety is Spice

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

Ogapoge Reflects with a Good Book

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Death in Holy Orders by P.D. James.  Audiobook.  Good conclusion.  Will probably read more of her work.

Gate of Ivrel by C.J. Cherryh.  I enjoyed.

In Progress:

Well of Shiuan by C.J. Cherryh.  Great evocation of wet.  Seriously.  I live in a very dry climate and I found myself “feeling” this place.

When in Rome by Ngaio Marsh.  Audiobook.  Re-read.  Nice, quirky cast.

Also:

The Red Khemeresh by Mab Morris.  Novella.  Good evocation of a fictional shamanistic culture.  As often in novellas, character dimension takes a backseat to setting and plot.  Plot seems a prologue to a longer work, rather than a stand-alone piece.

TT: Food, Glorious Food!

JANE: The Good Humor Man led us to ice cream trucks, and from there we went to coffee vans.  Tell me, do you folks have food trucks there?

Food Truck!

ALAN: Yes, we do – there’s a particularly famous one known as the White Lady  which turns up in downtown Auckland in the small hours of every morning to save the lives of starving drunks. It’s been doing that since 1948.

JANE: And a noble cause that is indeed.

Food trucks seem to be undergoing an evolution here.  In one sense, they’ve always been around.  However, their appearance tended to be tied to specific events: fairs, sporting events, and the like.

One of the things I find interesting about the new incarnation is that, like the Good Humor Man of old, these trucks stalk their potential clients.  They don’t just show up near the ballpark, or buy a vendor’s slot at the fair, they’re alert to opportunities.

As soon as the kiddie soccer leagues begin practice on fields near the library, food vans offering a variety of snacks and treats start showing up.  No kids playing soccer (complete with bored siblings who need to be bribed to behave or parents dying for a hot drink), no trucks.

ALAN: That’s clever of them. I’m not quite sure what ours do (I don’t have much experience of them) but I do know that the White Lady is always in the same place at the same time. It’s never seen anywhere else.

JANE:  An ambitious food truck vendor recently realized that out where Jim’s office is now located, there is nowhere to buy food other than a golf course snack stand.  These people came visiting and did very well by the staff – many of whom don’t have transportation and are bored with brown bagging.

ALAN: Brown bagging? What does that mean?

JANE: Carrying your own lunch.  The term comes from the cheap brown bags that were the usual means used to carry lunch by almost anyone who had outgrown the colorful lunchbox used by children.  Do you folks have a term?

ALAN: No – we’re very boring by comparison. We just take our own lunch. It’s very common for children to take their own lunch to school. Sometimes they don’t approve of what their mother has lovingly packed for them and they just throw the contents away. Jake and I go for our morning walk close to a school and one day he came across a ham sandwich, an apple and a slice of cake. Best walk ever! He still sniffs that same spot hopefully every day, but we’ve never had that much luck again…

JANE: From what you’ve said about Jake, he’d probably have eaten the brown bag, too.

Even where there are restaurants available, such as downtown, the food trucks do good business with office workers who don’t have time for a sit-down lunch, but don’t want a fast food burger.

ALAN: I assume from what you say that these trucks don’t serve burgers and the like? Ours are really just mobile burger places with vast vats of bubbling grease for deep frying. They sell cholesterol on a stick to anyone in need of hard arteries.

JANE: I’m sure those are out there, too.  However, these days, food trucks offer cuisine that is a lot more varied and interesting.

ALAN: So what kinds of food do they serve?

JANE: I did some research and learned that Southwestern food is, unsurprisingly, popular, especially dishes like burritos and tacos, which are easy to eat without utensils.  You can also get pizza and a wide variety of barbecue and smoked meats.

More ambitious food truck vendors venture into specialties.  There’s “Cheesy Street” which specializes in cheese dishes – including a homemade tomato soup with cheese.  Europa Modern Kitchen promises a European dining experience.  I found a listing for a food truck that specializes in Argentinean cuisine as well as several offering a wide variety of Asian foods.

A friend of mine was telling me that in San Francisco, there’s a food truck that serves nothing but various types of crème brulee.

ALAN: Wow! We don’t have anything like that. However, we do have food halls in shopping malls and the like. A food hall has a large number of small counters, each specialising in a different type of food. So you’ll have a choice of sushi, or curry, or Chinese, or Thai, or pizza or… The quality of the food is amazingly good. It’s all delicious and they always do a roaring trade. Your food trucks sound like mobile versions of our food hall counters. Do you have food halls?

JANE: Oh, yes…  Here they’re called “food courts,” and have been around for decades.   Maybe you’re just catching up with us.

Back when you mentioned coffee vans, a thought occurred to me.  I don’t claim it’s deep philosophy, but I do think it says something about a shift in culture, a shift that may go all the way back to the Good Humor Man.

ALAN: In what way? Tell me more…

JANE: It seems to me that all these coffee vans and food trucks reflect a shift toward not only a desire for instant gratification, but an almost childish refusal to plan to have that gratification met.  Farewell to the picnic basket or thermos bottle.  Food and drink shall appear wherever one goes, ready to cater to every whim.

When you think of it, the food court (or hall) is part of the same trend.  Taking the family shopping, maybe to a movie?  No more need to compromise as to where you’ll eat.  Little Jimmy wants sushi.  Fine.  He can have sushi.  Annie wants pizza?  She can have it.

What do you think?

ALAN: I think you are on to something there. A lot of people that I know tend to do things spontaneously rather than planning for them. So once you have decided to do something on that basis, you simply don’t have any time to create food or drink or indeed anything else. I hate that – I’m a careful planner and I’m decidedly uncomfortable with spontaneity, but clearly I’m in a minority on this one.

JANE: I have a whole bunch more thoughts on this, but I think I’ll save them for next time.

Extra Incarnations

The other day, I saw a shirt that read: “People who say you only live once have never read a book.”  Needless to say, this resonated with me.  It also made me think about a question that I get asked a lot, although perhaps never in more detail than a few years ago by my friend, Jane Noel.

Some of My Lives

Jane asked, “How do you relate to your characters?  Who are your favorites?  What do you have in common with them?  How long do they stay with you after you finish their story?  Are there some that you just don’t like?”

I never really answered Jane’s questions except in the most general sense.  The last of her questions is the easiest to answer.

Of course there are some characters I “just don’t like.”  As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I can get into my antagonists’ heads and develop their motivations.  They may know perfectly well that something they’re doing would be viewed by society as “evil” or “wrong.”  However, even understanding that when these characters do something self-serving or cruel, they don’t necessarily see themselves as “evil,” doesn’t mean I need to like them.

Honestly, outside of fairytales, few characters do see themselves as “evil.”  But I’ve discussed that elsewhere, and so will leave the topic behind for now.

Jane’s other questions were much harder for me to answer.  I think I put off answering them until today because I never saw the right way to explain how I feel about my characters.

Unlike some writers, I don’t write protagonists who are thinly veiled, sometimes idealized, versions of myself.  And I don’t write secondary characters who exist only to be foils to the protagonist or plot elements to move the story along.

I’d get bored out of my mind if I wrote only protagonists who were meant to be me (whether in a Fantasy setting or with a switch of gender or species or whatever).  I realize some people write to work out their personal problems or to provide themselves with the satisfaction of being the hero in fiction that they can’t be in reality.  However, until I saw the shirt mentioned above, I didn’t really realize that I write precisely not to be myself, but to explore a whole bunch of different incarnations.

In that light, Jane’s questions become much easier for me to answer.

How do I relate to my characters? I relate to my characters as if they are interesting people about whom I happen to know a whole lot more than you are ever privileged to know about the “real” people in your lives.  Because I know so much about them – often much more than ever makes it to the page – I feel a deep sense of empathy with them, even when they are doing something I don’t really like or think is wise.

“Who are your favorites?”  I don’t really have favorites.  Even though I’ve spent much more time with Firekeeper (six long novels beginning with Through Wolf’s Eyes) than I have with Mira from Child of a Rainless Year, each of them took me places and gave me experiences I could not have had without them.  So I care deeply for them all.

“What do you have in common with them?”  Well, as I said above, I have their entire lives in common with them.  Since this question could also mean, “What aspects of your life do you draw on for specific characters?” I’ll go on and say too many and too varied for me to even try to list.  Something non-writers often forget about characters – even main characters – is that writers don’t create them just by recycling parts of themselves and their own experiences.

“How long do they [your characters] stay with you after you finish their story?”  They stay with me forever.  However, I do develop a certain amnesia regarding the details of how the book or story itself was written.  That’s actually very cool.  When I have had to review older work – as when Tor re-released Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls or when I re-read a bunch of my shorter work to compile my short story collection, Curiosities – I found it was possible to read those older works almost as if a stranger wrote them.

It was very nice to realize that Jane Lindskold the Reader actually is a fan of the works of Jane Lindskold the Writer.

So, Jane Noel (and the rest of you) there’s an answer to the question of how I relate to my own fictional characters.  It’s been fun to have a lot of different incarnations.  I look forward to having many, many more.

Oh…  This is a good time for me to remind you that I welcome reader questions.  I have a lot more fun writing the Wednesday Wanderings when I know that at least one person will be interested in what I have to say.

FF: Fair Trade Reading

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

Kwahe’e Sprawls

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Attack on Titan by Hashima Isayama.  Manga.  Volumes 11-17.  A rare story in that the more I read, the more I like it.  This has developed far beyond the gross-out horror war story it seemed at the start.

A Box of Pandoras by Steve Brewer.  Light, comic mystery set in New Mexico.  Good use of setting.  New Mexico really IS this weird.

In Progress:

Death in Holy Orders by P.D. James.  Audiobook.  Into part three and the body count is rising.  Not sure how I feel about that…  Especially in a mystery in an isolated setting, this seems a very stupid thing for a killer to do.

Gate of Ivrel by C.J. Cherryh.  The article by Betsy Wollheim celebrating C.J. Cherryh being named this year’s SFWA Grand Master made me realize I’d always meant to read this novel.  Just started.

Also:

I had a great visit with my mom last weekend, so I didn’t read as much as I usually would.  A fair trade indeed.

TT: Brew Me Up, Scotty!

JANE: Last time, I promised you a story about instant coffee.  My mom went to England to visit my sister, who was studying abroad for a year.  They went out and enjoyed various tourist options, then stopped for lunch.

You Figure It Out!

When the waitress asked for her drink order, my mom said, “Do you have coffee?”

“Yes, ma’am, we do.”

 “Brewed coffee, not instant?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then I’d like some, please.  Black.”  Coffee arrived.  Mom took a sip, set the cup down.  “This is instant.”

Waitress, eyes wide and startled. “Ma’am, you’re the first person ever to notice!”

ALAN: Lightly roast a single coffee bean so that the wonderful smell goes everywhere. Then serve instant coffee. It fools the punters every time…

Actually I quite like instant coffee.  (I drink Moccona.) However, I regard it as a completely different drink from real coffee. Given the choice, of course, I’d always go for properly prepared real coffee. How do you make yours? I keep it very simple.  In my opinion, coffee does not require elaborate mechanisms to brew it. I make filter coffee – the coffee sits in a filter paper and water drips through it into a pot.

JANE: I do the same thing.  I’ve even been known to horrify purists by re-heating coffee in the microwave.  I have had “cold pressed” coffee and find it wussy.

My friend Hilary works in a coffee bar.  She was telling me about Siphon coffee, which is made in a weird-looking hourglass contraption (sometimes called a vacuum pot).  Water is heated in the bottom, until the pressure buildup causes the water to flow up into the top through a filter. Once the water has reached to the proper temperature, you gently stir coffee into the water, let sit, then stir again and pull off of the heat source.  The coffee will then go down through the filter and you’ll end up with a clean cup of coffee in the bottom half.

One of these days, I need to meet her over at Michael Thomas Coffee and try this, just so I can say I have.

Of course, when I was a kid, the standard way of making coffee was in an electric percolator.  The white with blue design pot was a standard feature in most kitchens.   Occasionally, I see an old one at an “antique” store and consider trying it out.

ALAN: I had a percolator. After I left university and went out into the wide world, pretty much all I owned was a few clothes, a coffee percolator and a big floor cushion. I still have the cushion – these days it does duty as a dog bed. In retrospect, I think percolators concentrate the drink a bit too much and the taste tends towards the bitter end of the spectrum.

JANE: Interesting.  You almost make me want to try it again, just to compare.  I wonder if the concentration offered by a percolator is one reason that those weaker blends we mentioned last week – Maxwell House, Folgers, etc. – used to taste better.

Back when I was in grad school, I was too poor to afford a proper coffee pot.  Somehow I acquired a stove-top percolator (it may have been left in the apartment by the previous tenants) and started using that.  When the little glass knob that fit in the lid broke, I was too poor (yes, I really was) to afford a replacement.  However, a friend had been over and brought a coffee drink in a small bottle.  The threads on this matched those on the percolator lid, so I used that as a replacement.

For a while, when I’d make coffee, it would go up from the pot, into the bottle, swirl down, and up again.  Very Cthuluesque.

ALAN: Wow! A coffee percolator and a lava lamp all in one. How wonderfully surreal!

JANE: Oh!  You just made me laugh.  I never thought of it that way, but that was precisely the effect.

I didn’t keep doing this forever.  A friend’s mother came by – for Thanksgiving, I think – and was horrified by my jury rigged lifestyle.  Next time my friend came, he had a new knob for the coffee pot and a set of nutcrackers.

ALAN: Nut crackers?

JANE: Yeah.  I’d been making do with a hammer.

ALAN: Have you ever tried to crack a macadamia nut?

JANE: No, I don’t think so…  Here, I’ve only seen them sold already shelled.

ALAN: They have the toughest shells in the world. Hit a macadamia nut with a hammer and there’s a good chance that the hammer will shatter. Perhaps that’s why the shelled nuts are so expensive in the shops. The cost of the dynamite they need to actually get the nuts out of the shells must be quite exorbitant…

JANE: That’s amazing.  I had wondered why macadamia nuts were so pricy and I bet you’ve – wait for it – hit the macadamia nut squarely on the shell.

Y’know, one advantage with collaborating with someone on the other side of the globe is that I don’t need to worry you’ll throw something at me for making a really bad joke.

ALAN: Oh I’ve thrown something at you. But Jake caught it in midair, shook it until it was dead and then ate it. So you got lucky.

JANE: Thank you, Jake!

But getting back to coffee…  You were talking about “coffee culture.”  Certainly it has developed here in the U.S.  There’s an entire show held each year at our convention center built around nothing but coffee and chocolate.  I haven’t been yet, but someday I will…  I’ll just plan not to sleep the next day.

ALAN: That sounds like something I’d enjoy, as long as it doesn’t get too complicated. I don’t know about you, but I find the range of coffee drinks on the average coffee bar menu to be quite bewildering. I’m clearly not alone in this feeling. There’s a New Zealand singing group called When The Cat’s Been Spayed (don’t ask, I don’t know) who sing a song called The Coffee Bar Blues which goes (in part):

Cappuccino, cafe negre, cafe latte, and more

With chocolate, and cinnamon, and froth to the floor

Long black, short black, two flat whites

I got the low-light coffee-bar blues

Do you have that huge range of choice at your end of the world?

JANE: We do indeed.  Since my mom comes from an Italian-American background, I was already familiar with some of them – including various espresso drinks and putting cinnamon in coffee or lemon peel in espresso –   before Starbucks made them trendy.  But a lot of the names remain a mystery to me.

When Jim bought a new vehicle a few years ago, the salesman gave us tickets for free drinks at a local coffee and dessert place called Flying Star.  We went in and then had to ask the barista to explain to us what the heck some of the choices actually tasted like.

That said, I quite enjoyed mine, although I found myself thinking of it more as a coffee-flavored dessert, rather than a cup of coffee.

ALAN: I don’t have much of a sweet tooth so I tend to avoid those kinds of things. Robin rather likes them though.

JANE: All this talk about ice cream vans and coffee vans has made me philosophical.  Let me mull until next time.

Cookie Cutter Stories

This weekend, as I was cutting out and baking sugar cookies for a Sunday afternoon cookie decorating party, the phrase “cookie cutter plot and characters” flashed into my head.  As you probably know, when the phrase “cookie cutter” is applied to anything (except for the tools used for making cut-out cookies, of course), it denotes something that is mass produced, standardized, or formulaic.

Variations on a Theme

As I rolled out sugar cookie dough and chose from my eclectic assortment of cookie cutters (among those not featured in the picture were a stegosaurus, frog, rabbit, cottage, cowboy boot, pick-up truck, and squirrel), I found myself thinking how inappropriate it would be to assume that, by the end of that day’s decorating party, we would have a lot of nearly identical cookies.  One reason I really like having friends over to decorate cookies is seeing the wide variety of interpretations of a single form that occur.

With that in mind, I decided to make duplicates of some of the cookies, just to see what happened under the influence of different decorators’ sense of style.

While there’s a lot to be said for originality, one of the things that makes genre fiction “genre” is that there are shared elements.  This leaves any form of genre fiction (even “literary fiction” which I have heard persuasively described as just another genre) open to accusations of cookie-cutterdom.

Romance is probably the genre that comes in for this criticism most often.  I recently read an article in the SFWA Bulletin explaining all the different elements that make for a successful romance novel, rather than a novel in which romance is an element.  I found myself thinking that, while this could be helpful for writers who wanted to break into the ever-growing paranormal romance market, it would almost certainly guarantee a bunch of really bad stories written by authors who over-optimistically believed that all there was to writing successful romance novels was picking out an assortment of these elements and mechanically constructing a story around them.

The fact is, any writer who wants to work within a genre faces the dual challenges of using the elements that characterize the genre while, at the same time, giving these elements a fresh twist or interpretation.

Fairy tales and legends can be seen as among the older forms of Fantasy fiction.   Therefore, it would be fair to think that, after hundreds of years, there is nothing new to be done with them.  Judging by recently published novels and short stories – both for children and adults – the reverse is true.  A relevant retelling using these stories – whether very directly as in Shannon Hales’ “Ever After High” novels or more indirectly, such as the recent Nebula award winning novel Uprooted by Naomi Novik – can do very well indeed.

Equally, despite the numerous people who sneer at them, there are still good stories to be told about quests, dragons, space exploration, and even unicorns and princesses.  Murder mysteries still abound, despite the fact that readers know that 1) there will be a body (or more than one body); 2) a detective (amateur or professional or both), and 3) a solution.

If “originality” is the only thing that makes a story good, then historical fiction shouldn’t exist at all.  After all, how much more “cookie cutter” can you get than retelling an event that any reader can learn about by reading a short encyclopedia or Wikipedia article?  Yet historical fiction – up to and including historical mysteries and alternate history fiction – remain vastly popular.

The big difference between dull cookie cutter genre fiction and the sort of fresh, exciting writing that has readers making a beeline toward their favorite section of the bookstore is the passion that the writer brings to his or her story.  And, to be brutally honest, the worst thing would-be professional writers can do is copy what they see as the “hot thing” of the moment, since what will make them stand out from the pack is not their ability to imitate, but their ability to do something that makes them stand out.

Yet, ironically, imitation of what a writer loves when that writer is a reader is one of the best training exercises for becoming a future writer of original fiction.  I’ve talked to many writers who admit that their earliest exercises in writing fiction involved melding elements from their favorite novels, television shows, and/or movies.

Confusing, isn’t it?

I think lazy writing is one reason why the longer a genre is around, the more frequently parodies surface.  “The butler did it” was a big surprise when it first occurred in a murder mystery because, before that point, trusted servants had been considered background elements, as more or less living, breathing pieces of furniture.  Expanding the story to include servants or other trusted retainers as three-dimensional people with motives and emotions began as an interesting expansion of the murder mystery but quickly stagnated to a cliché.

So, let’s be fair both to cookie cutters and to genre fiction.  It isn’t the form that’s at fault.  It’s what the creator does with it.  Or so I see it…  What are your thoughts?

FF: Mystery, History, and Horror

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

Kel Reads on Red

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Black as He’s Painted by Ngaio Marsh.  Audiobook.  Some powerful descriptive language.  A resolution that still leaves me wondering about a key point.

Attack on Titan by Hashima Isayama.  Manga.  Volumes 5-10.  Very dark, but with some interesting revelations.

A Point of Law by John Maddox Roberts.  SPQR X.  Decius is back in Rome.  Pirates are easier to deal with than his fellow Romans.  I enjoyed the intrigue.

In Progress:

A Box of Pandoras by Steve Brewer.  Light, comic mystery set in New Mexico.  My favorite line to this point: “In New Mexico, everywhere is a three-hour drive.  You get used to it.”  For those of you who live in the East, this is because of distance, not traffic congestion.

Death in Holy Orders by P.D. James.  Audiobook.  A new author for me.  Just started.

Also:

Finally catching up on Archeology and Smithsonian magazines.