Isabel Cooper's Blog, page 19

Aieeee!

Lessons After Dark is out tomorrow! 

Meanwhile, I have a blog post over at Romancing the Darkside: http://romancingthedarkside.blogspot.com/2012/04/romancing-guest-post-isabel-cooper-on.html#more.

I talk about why I write paranormal romance, insofar as I know why I do anything ever. Also, hyperintelligent snapping turtles. 

RT Book Reviews

I've got a column up  over at RT Book Reviews, talking about things I learned from writing No Proper Lady.

Here!

News! Analysis! Oh my God it’s Thursday!

…and nice out! There were crocuses this morning when I walked to work! White, light purple, and the bright purple that I’ve loved since I was a kid and ZOMG BRIGHT PURPLE BEST FLOWER EVER. (I have never been much for subdued earth tones.) Also snowdrops, or I think they’re snowdrops–little white flowers. Very pretty.  

Eventful spring ahead of me:

Hickey of the Beast comes out in print on March 20th! Connie Perez, a smartass faculty brat–specifically, the head’s kid–at a Northeastern prep school which may or may not resemble the one I went to, or the ones where I was raised. (Though it bears little resemblance to Midland. Otherwise, there’d be less central heating and more mountain lions.) Connie’s just trying to deal with freshman year, as you do, when she starts having weird dreams–dreams about students who later fall mysteriously ill. (This is the part that didn’t happen to me, in case you were wondering. I mean, I “fell mysteriously ill” a fair amount, but by that I mean less occult hijinks and more cutting gym class.) She and her friends have to figure out what’s going on, stop it, and not die. 

Lessons After Dark releases April 3rd! Englefield, now setting up as the Victorian magical equivalent of Xavier’s School for the Gifted*, has brought in a bunch of freakish magically-gifted teenagers, a couple less-freakish teenagers who want to learn magic, and two more people to try and keep them all from going Tetsuo-does-London. Olivia Brightmore is a fake-medium-turned-real; Gareth St. John is the school doctor, an ex-Army surgeon with magical healing powers and a whole stack of Issues with Olivia, who he encountered in her wires-and-table-rapping days. Much belligerent sexual tension, also teenage demon-summoning antics! 

And then I’ve been reading Ursula Vernon’s Digger, for about the third time. Spoilers below.

This is a fantasy webcomic about a talking wombat. It’s also one of the best actual epic fantasy books that I can think of.

No, seriously.

I just thought of that lately, mostly because I’ve been thinking about how little Epic Fantasy I read these days, and how much of a shame that is. I loved LotR; still do; re-read it every few years; geek cred established; I like the fantasy tropes like dragons and elves and magic swords; but none of the really obvious hey-this-is-big-fantasy works do much for me. The characters irk, or the writing style bugs, or they take seventeen books to tell the story, or they let the world details overwhelm everything** or they’re George R.R. Martin and really good but I need a Xanax prescription just to get through one book, so…no. 

And I was thinking about that, and making my list of regrettably-rare exceptions, and reading Digger, which, for starters, absolutely rocks at characterization. I am an unforgiving curmudgeon with a cold black heart which may or may not be two sizes too small; there are few works of fiction that don’t make me long for five minutes with at least one character and a rolled-up newspaper.*** Digger…I can’t think of a character that I don’t actively *like*. (And a whole lot of them are female.)

Moreover, the story gives the sense of an actual world with actual cultures and legends and little bits of stuff around the edges that don’t quite get filled in, while still being a story and not a travel guide. And it’s a really, well, epic story.

Doesn’t start out that way. The first couple chapters are cheerful and funny, for the most part; there’s some stuff going on, and it definitely has the potential to get bad (when people are talking about writing on your skin a couple pages in, the world is not without threat), but mostly it’s Digger wandering around and alternately snarking at or having her mind blown by the Cerulean Foothills and their vampire squash.

Then there’s this scene where Ed–”weird exiled hyena guy in a cave” to this point–explains demons by telling one of his people’s myths. It’s not funny; it’s not supposed to be. It’s about pride and desperation and finding that there’s no way back from who you’ve become. (That particular myth also informs much of the plot later.) And then there’s a journey underground, and things that really, really should not be happening, and suddenly there’s a lot more going on here.

The story never, or almost never, completely loses humor. It never completely loses anything, far as I can tell, which is a hell of a task. What it adds is what “epic fantasy” brings to mind for me: the sense of an unambiguous threat, one against which something important has to be done, and the sense that the characters’ decisions have a weight and a resonance that carry far beyond the present moment. There’s a scene with a shadow demon that blows me away every time; there’s a plot with Ed that I could write a damn paper on; there are takes on heroism and fate and acceptance that rank up there with anything else I’ve read. 

There is also, and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough, vampire squash. 

Seriously. I–due to the Internet–am very, very skeptical about anything with animal people, and I love this comic. It’s good stuff.

*This probably doesn’t mean one of the characters will lose her mind and consume an energy field bigger than her head and try to destroy the universe somewhere down the road. Probably.  

**Another concept I’ve been thinking of lately, and possibly one of the reasons I’m picky about original-world fantasy. I find that, in an effort to make worlds seem really original or alien, a lot of authors lose me in the details. For me, I think it’s best to change a few key elements but have the majority of the world vaguely correspond to a RL culture–”okay, you pick your kings by reading the markings on the shell of the Sacred Turtle, but you still have kings”–to stick with an outsider-POV character, or both. 

***The Dragonlance Chronicles, for example, which I thought of re: epic fantasy. They’ve got a lot going for them, and then DAMMIT, TANIS. Aaaaaamong other people. 

News! Analysis! Oh my God it's Thursday!

…and nice out! There were crocuses this morning when I walked to work! White, light purple, and the bright purple that I've loved since I was a kid and ZOMG BRIGHT PURPLE BEST FLOWER EVER. (I have never been much for subdued earth tones.) Also snowdrops, or I think they're snowdrops–little white flowers. Very pretty.  

Eventful spring ahead of me:

Hickey of the Beast comes out in print on March 20th! Connie Perez, a smartass faculty brat–specifically, the head's kid–at a Northeastern prep school which may or may not resemble the one I went to, or the ones where I was raised. (Though it bears little resemblance to Midland. Otherwise, there'd be less central heating and more mountain lions.) Connie's just trying to deal with freshman year, as you do, when she starts having weird dreams–dreams about students who later fall mysteriously ill. (This is the part that didn't happen to me, in case you were wondering. I mean, I "fell mysteriously ill" a fair amount, but by that I mean less occult hijinks and more cutting gym class.) She and her friends have to figure out what's going on, stop it, and not die. 

Lessons After Dark releases April 3rd! Englefield, now setting up as the Victorian magical equivalent of Xavier's School for the Gifted*, has brought in a bunch of freakish magically-gifted teenagers, a couple less-freakish teenagers who want to learn magic, and two more people to try and keep them all from going Tetsuo-does-London. Olivia Brightmore is a fake-medium-turned-real; Gareth St. John is the school doctor, an ex-Army surgeon with magical healing powers and a whole stack of Issues with Olivia, who he encountered in her wires-and-table-rapping days. Much belligerent sexual tension, also teenage demon-summoning antics! 

And then I've been reading Ursula Vernon's Digger, for about the third time. Spoilers below.

This is a fantasy webcomic about a talking wombat. It's also one of the best actual epic fantasy books that I can think of.

No, seriously.

I just thought of that lately, mostly because I've been thinking about how little Epic Fantasy I read these days, and how much of a shame that is. I loved LotR; still do; re-read it every few years; geek cred established; I like the fantasy tropes like dragons and elves and magic swords; but none of the really obvious hey-this-is-big-fantasy works do much for me. The characters irk, or the writing style bugs, or they take seventeen books to tell the story, or they let the world details overwhelm everything** or they're George R.R. Martin and really good but I need a Xanax prescription just to get through one book, so…no. 

And I was thinking about that, and making my list of regrettably-rare exceptions, and reading Digger, which, for starters, absolutely rocks at characterization. I am an unforgiving curmudgeon with a cold black heart which may or may not be two sizes too small; there are few works of fiction that don't make me long for five minutes with at least one character and a rolled-up newspaper.*** Digger…I can't think of a character that I don't actively *like*. (And a whole lot of them are female.)

Moreover, the story gives the sense of an actual world with actual cultures and legends and little bits of stuff around the edges that don't quite get filled in, while still being a story and not a travel guide. And it's a really, well, epic story.

Doesn't start out that way. The first couple chapters are cheerful and funny, for the most part; there's some stuff going on, and it definitely has the potential to get bad (when people are talking about writing on your skin a couple pages in, the world is not without threat), but mostly it's Digger wandering around and alternately snarking at or having her mind blown by the Cerulean Foothills and their vampire squash.

Then there's this scene where Ed–"weird exiled hyena guy in a cave" to this point–explains demons by telling one of his people's myths. It's not funny; it's not supposed to be. It's about pride and desperation and finding that there's no way back from who you've become. (That particular myth also informs much of the plot later.) And then there's a journey underground, and things that really, really should not be happening, and suddenly there's a lot more going on here.

The story never, or almost never, completely loses humor. It never completely loses anything, far as I can tell, which is a hell of a task. What it adds is what "epic fantasy" brings to mind for me: the sense of an unambiguous threat, one against which something important has to be done, and the sense that the characters' decisions have a weight and a resonance that carry far beyond the present moment. There's a scene with a shadow demon that blows me away every time; there's a plot with Ed that I could write a damn paper on; there are takes on heroism and fate and acceptance that rank up there with anything else I've read. 

There is also, and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough, vampire squash. 

Seriously. I–due to the Internet–am very, very skeptical about anything with animal people, and I love this comic. It's good stuff.

*This probably doesn't mean one of the characters will lose her mind and consume an energy field bigger than her head and try to destroy the universe somewhere down the road. Probably.  

**Another concept I've been thinking of lately, and possibly one of the reasons I'm picky about original-world fantasy. I find that, in an effort to make worlds seem really original or alien, a lot of authors lose me in the details. For me, I think it's best to change a few key elements but have the majority of the world vaguely correspond to a RL culture–"okay, you pick your kings by reading the markings on the shell of the Sacred Turtle, but you still have kings"–to stick with an outsider-POV character, or both. 

***The Dragonlance Chronicles, for example, which I thought of re: epic fantasy. They've got a lot going for them, and then DAMMIT, TANIS. Aaaaaamong other people. 

Also, I have an…

Also, I have an official homepage:  isabelcooper.org. Yay!

Also, I have an…

Also, I have an official homepage: isabelcooper.org. Yay!

The Future: Magenta! Pegasi!

This article is relevant to my interests.

http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/blog/women-of-the-future2

More bloggery soon. 

Say…what, exactly…with flowers?

One of the best parts of writing novels, especially weird fantasy novels, is that it justifies just about any weird nonfiction reading I want. (It also leads to weird nonfiction reading, which means me sitting on the T with a book about UFOs and a veeeery defensive expression, but hey.)  For example, yesterday: I have vague thoughts about writing a novel set largely in a flower shop–hey, write what you know–and therefore I found myself checking out the Wikipedia entry on the language of flowers, a quintessentially Victorian "we don't talk about that" custom where you send roses or daisies or whatever to express what you can't say.

Some of the entries were what I expected. There's a lot of variations on love and admiration (including the inevitable red roses–although *black* roses can mean both "hatred" or "rebirth", interestingly) which have pretty much lasted into the modern day. There are also flowers for rejection–like striped carnations, and I have no idea what the logic is there–which makes some kind of sense, even if we don't really have the Rejection Bouquet tradition these days. And there are flowers for the more platonic stuff–sympathy,  friendship, etc.  We've got that; it's reasonable; okay.

Then, however, we get stuff that's…well, it's either purely theoretical or it's in the world championship bracket of passive-aggression. Sending someone lettuce means you think they're cold-hearted (and if you're the kind of person who sends people salad, I'm guessing a lot of people are cold-hearted where you're concerned). Mint is suspicion. Yellow roses can mean betrayal, jealousy, or infidelity–which makes the number of them I sold around Mother's Day just a little weird–and lobelia is "malevolence." So you can, indeed, send someone a basket of flowers that means "I think you suck, and I'm going to get you," like the plant-kingdom version of a horse's head.

Weirder still: aconite is "misanthropy". I can see the logic there, since if you're messing around with deadly nightshade a lot and you're not a doctor, you probably don't like people much. But as a statement? "Here's a bunch of flowers. This one says that I hate everyone in the world. Just…so you know."

The best, however, is probably delphinium, which Wikipedia says means "The ability to transcend the bounds of space and time."

This may be Wiki being Wiki. I kind of hope it's not.  I like the idea that, somewhere, there's a solution for the being who has the ability to break the rules of physical reality as we know it–and who wants to be, you know, *subtle* about announcing it.

Because they don't have Hallmark cards for that.

Thanksgiving and Wacky Analysis Times

First of all: Happy Thanksgiving! I'm thankful for many things this year, including my publisher, Sourcebooks, the great people who work there, and all of my readers. Thank you for giving me an audience for bizarre notions.

I've been on vacation from the day job, and cleaning, and therefore listening to the soundtrack to Once On This Island–which is The Little Mermaid, but in the Antilles and with class divides instead of actual mermaids. And is by far my favorite version of the story.*

OMGSPOILERALERT: it does not have a happy ending. (Well…bittersweet.)

And while I usually tend to avoid stories without happy endings, and don't particularly complain if those endings get changed so I don't come out of the show needing half a bottle of vodka and a small puppy, I'm okay with the sadness in OoTI. In fact, I think that particular fairy tale, both in the original and in the newer versions, is one that really doesn't go happy, by nature.

Why? (Other than "The original is by Hans Christen Andersen, and dude needed some serious SSRIs", I mean.) Because neither the hero nor the heroine is in love with a real person.

In every single version of the story, the heroine doesn't really know the hero at all when she chooses to make some sort of horrible sacrifice for him: she just thinks his world is The Best Ever. (Ti Moune in OotI has the most legitimate desire there, which is another reason I like the musical–while the chick doesn't exactly formulate a sophisticated theory of income inequality, I have a lot more sympathy for "Hey, my life is full of poverty and suck, theirs seems pretty cool, WTF?" than I do for Poor Little Undersea Rich Girl.)  She meets a guy who's from that world, he's cute,  he's in trouble, and…she's sixteen. Not the best age for getting it.

This comes across semi-strongly in all versions I've seen. What's less obvious, or what was less obvious to me, is that the same thing goes for the hero. Daniel in Island is most blatant about it: there's this bit in the deliberately-OMG-sketchtacular "Some Girls", where he's singing about how Ti Moune is "not small talk or shiny cars", and I remembered that she was singing about…wanting a shiny car…not five musical numbers ago, and was all "…oh, honey, no" at both of them.

Because in every single iteration of the story, it comes down to He/She Is So Very Different, on both ends. He represents this exciting new world! She's exotic and mysterious and not bound by my social constraints! It must be love!

And oh, hey, it's time for a TV Tropes link that will destroy your life: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LovingAShadow . We're talking Aragorn and Eowyn here, and Scarlett and Ashley, and…nothing that actually works in the end. It doesn't work even if the other person's projecting onto you as hard as you are onto them, because nobody lives up to the fantasy. People are people; they may work as symbols in some contexts, but that doesn't last. If you don't know them and like them as a person already when they break archetype…that's not going to be pretty.

There's this bit in Island–see, I was totally coming back here–where Ti Moune's mom is trying to convince her not to follow Daniel. You'll find some other boy to save, she says, and then a little later: Your heart is young. New dreams are everywhere.

And the thing is? She's right.

Which actually tangents into one of the other reasons I like the play: it's a lot broader than the basic love story, tragic or not. It starts with the island itself, the two "worlds" of peasants/Grand Hommes, and the gods; it ends not with Ti Moune's death, but with her legacy to the wider world; and the secondary characters are only barely "secondary" at all. That song I quoted above? I am not a parent, nor do I anticipate becoming one, but damned if that didn't hit me the hardest of anything in the play, that final recognition that someone you love is going to destroy themselves, probably, for no good reason, and there's nothing you can do except love them and let go. It's a gutpunch, in a good way.

Well, in an artistically excellent way.

More minorly, there's Andrea, the girl who at first seems to be the Evil Fiancee, and who *is* pretty damn catty at first. Except then she realizes that Ti Moune is naive enough to think Daniel's going to marry her, and Daniel, the git, hasn't said Word One to disillusion her, and she switches to harsh-but-sympathetic: dude, she doesn't know, you *have* to tell her, what are you doing? It's a more complex take on the trope, and I like it.

Also, the music just makes me happy. I don't have musical training of any sort–barring two semesters in ninth grade and some drunken Rock Band–but the songs are catchy, the lyrics are good, and it seems to me that many of them fit with the transformation theme of the original fairy tale. There are a *lot* of Dark Reprises, there are a lot of bridges in one song that come from another, and there are two songs in particular–"Forever Yours" and "Some Girls" that start out as sweet, sentimental love songs and become something very different by the end.  Being as fond as I am of different iterations and playing with archetypes, I couldn't help but like that.

Plus, Papa Ge is just made of awesome. I have a distinct soft spot for morally ambiguous death gods.

*Admittedly, this isn't hard. The Disney version inspires a lot of "shut up, Ariel",  because I have little patience for Nobody Understaaaaands Meeeee teenage angst, and also some speculation about whether she's like the Timothy Treadwell of the undersea kingdom, all infatuated with things that want to eat her friends…ooh, or like those club kids in S2 of Buffy.

Which, on at least one blog, turned to a debate about whether merpeople and the other Triton's-Kingdom folk…Tritonians…eat fish, with Defense Exhibit A being the way Crazed French Chef and Ursula eating the…polyp things?…and the shark are played for horror, and Prosecution Exhibit A being, well, dude, what *else* do they eat? And it never got settled either way, but this is why I love my other blogs.

ETA: Also, Wiki says the music's by Stephen Flaherty, who also wrote "Ragtime", which…"Back to Before" is one of my go-to wistful angst songs, so that makes sense.

The Oral Storytelling Traditions of My People

…by which I mean Valley Girls, yes.

And by "oral storytelling traditions" I do not mean the stories that begin with "sing in me muse" or even "once upon a time", but rather those that begin "oh my God*, dude," or sometimes "no shit, there I was". Sometimes people storm out of restaurants. Sometimes people start fistfights in order to defend the superiority of Pearl Jam. Sometimes, in the words of Cordelia Chase, you need to call everyone you know right now , and when you do that, there's a particular idiom for relating the cause of that phone call.

See, I just finished John McWhorter's What Language Is –excellent book, by the way–and the section in there on "she's all" made me think of Sarah Bunting's excellent point about "like":

My mother never grasped the distinction here, but "say" is for what people say. "Like" is for what people meant, for their faces, for their attitudes, for everything you can't see for yourself when you hear about something secondhand. I have often said, "Okay, great," but been like, "God, whatever."

Pretty much. Except that I also use "I'm like" and "she's all" for another, related purpose: when I don't remember verbatim what was said, but still want to convey the general gist of it. "…and I'm like 'well, fine, then, can I go home now'?"

And it occurred to me, when thinking about this, that you–or at least I–pretty much never use the standard written conventions when telling these stories. "He said 'blah'" does not come up a lot.** Rather, there are four basic forms. The three others:

1) Summary. "…and she said that she went there a lot." Nobody cares about the details. They may care about the information–"and he said he's moving to Kansas tomorrow"–or the information may just be necessary context for subsequent drama, but the manner or attitude really doesn't matter.

2) Begging for (over)analysis. "So she said 'I can't date a guy who's really into the Grateful Dead', and I'm wondering if she means she can't date a guy who likes the Dead at all, or just that she can't date a guy who, like, follows the tour in a modified VW bus."

This is the closest to standard dialogue tag stuff, but it nearly always has elaboration afterwards. "And I'm wondering," or "…so…do you think…" or whatever.

3) Verbatim. Sometimes you *do* care exactly what So-and-So said to What's-her-Face. Usually this is because So-and-So's wording was dramatic/obnoxious/otherwise noteworthy in and of itself. Therefore, sentences like this take a parenthetical. "He said, I swear to God…" or "He said, and I am completely serious here…"

When telling a friend about the Worst Date Ever, you may use all four, as follows:

"So he mentioned Depeche Mode and I said that yeah, they had some good songs.

To which he said, and I'm not even kidding, 'They really speak to the darkness in my soul. My last girlfriend couldn't understand that.'

And I'm all 'Oh, that's nice, great to meet you, I just remembered I have to go and…wash my…fish.'

The thing is, earlier in the evening, he said, 'I think a girl like you could really understand where I'm coming from,' so do you think I'm sending off that kind of vibes? Should I wear less eyeliner?"

And now you know!

*At some point, I may write another post on the different inflections and meanings of "oh my God". Yes, this was totally worth the student loans. Really.