Anna Frost's Blog, page 7

Birthdays and Insane Gifts

My birthday is this week, wee! I look forward to cake, cake, and more cake. In Hobbit-like fashion, I'm running another Goodreads giveaway for The Fox's Mask.

I also got an exercising machine for my birthday. Between working nightshift and writing, I haven't been doing any exercise at all. I couldn't even outrun a slow zombie right now.

The kind of machine I mean might surprise you. Behold:




This is a Dance Dance Revolution game arcade made in Japan. They've been around for over a decade but I never thought I might be able to own the real thing (instead of the cheap home version plastic mats). I found a used one on ebay and my boyfriend was willing to fetch it. We "only" had to drive about 15 hours to get it from New York (the state) to Quebec (the city) with a rental truck.

(BTW, the thing on the left is our homemade playpen for the chinchillas. It keeps them from eating the house.)

Amazon Wants to Monetize Fandom

I may have mentioned this before, but I used to write fanfiction (stories based on somebody else's work and posted online for other fans' enjoyment) and I still read tons of it. Therefore I'm particularly concerned to find out Amazon had come up with an idea to exploit fanfic writers. I understand that Amazon obtains the appropriate rights from the original right holders and from there can publish works based in those licensed universes.

 What worries me:
 -The potential for fanficcers to be exploited because they don't perfectly understand what they're signing. Amazon claims ALL rights to the works and can do whatever they wish with it. If it goes big (50 Shades, anyone?), the profits will be largely theirs.

 -The potential to split fandom between "approved" ficcers and "unapproved" ficcers. That could get ugly, especially if the M/F writers are approved of but not the M/M and F/F writers.

 -The potential for Amazon's lawyers to go after free fanfiction sites because they're suddenly considered competition.

 -The potential for Amazon to cripple the LGBT-friendly side of fandom. A great deal of fanfiction is M/M, F/F, or otherwise queered up. It is likely that these stories would not fall within the guidelines of what's acceptable for publication (they already said no AU). If Amazon does try to shut down free sites, such material would be forced to take refuge on servers in other countries.

 As an author I'm very much in favor of fanfiction (preferably published under a noncommercial Creative Commons license), but I feel that this endeavour goes against the spirit of fandom and may cause real harm.

 Links:
Official Press Release
Author John Scalzi's thoughts
Author Malinda Lo's thoughts
Author Jim C. Hines' thoughts
Author Chuck Wendig's thoughts

Pro-gay ad from Amazon? Gasp!

Since I don't watch any TV, I'm always last to find out about cool commercials. This one is great because you can't tell which of the two guys at the bar is the gay one and which is the straight one. Point well made!

Nadeshicon 2013: Post Mortem

I might have good news to announce soon, but I can't speak of it right now so how about I ramble about Nadeshicon?

Since I had a spot in the artist alley, I spent most of the weekend sitting there and chatting with my friend Ju, who was sharing the table with me. Here's Ju helpfully holding up a copy of my book at our table. The art pieces are hers. (The dvds contain ebook copies.)




We talked to people browsing the displays and played "identify the cosplay." I regret not taking a picture of that Loki cosplayer. She maintained the cold disdainful look so very well. I however have a picture of the Doctor who kept showing up at our table--sometimes with Tardis in tow. Behold! (I don't know where his red fez went, but he had one.)



I got away a few times to watch some shows happening as part of the convention. Notably there was a short but impressive performance by a Japanese acrobat and a one-hour show from a group that performs traditional Japanese music and dances, Matsu Také. They had a guy on a Japanese flute, a guy on drums, a woman on a koto (an horizontal string instrument) and a woman who both danced and played the shamisen (a three-string instrument).

Shamisen are really neat. Here, have a video of the Yoshida Brothers, who play shamisen like guitars. The contrast between the traditional elements and the modern ones is great.





I'd have liked to end with a picture of my own fabulous getup, but I didn't think of asking my friend to take one and none has yet showed up online from the people who stopped to ask for a picture of me.

Life of a Manuscript

Every writer works differently, and every project has a slightly different progression, but this is roughly how it works for me:

0 - Planning
Think about what I want to do and let the ideas build at the back of my mind. Write a couple notes on bits and pieces of paper. Try not to lose the bits and pieces of paper.

1- First Draft
This usually happens quickly, because I tend to use NaNoWriMo (the "write 50 000 words in one month" yearly challenge) to dash out a quick and dirty draft. I'm a pantser, so I don't have a lot of notes when I get started either. I just start running down the hill and hope I don't fall on my face.

I tend to leave my drafts alone for at least one month before picking them up again.

2 - Heavy Editing Round
This is when I take the draft and beat it bloody. Many writers overwrite, but I do the opposite. This means that a 50k draft will be a 65k draft by the time I'm done with this round. I regularly rewrite entire scenes just because I don't like how they flow. This takes 4-6 weeks, because I progress like a turtle, a few pages a day until I'm done. Editing when you're sick and tired of working leads to bad work.

Here, I annoy a beta reader or two to help me find problems I didn't notice.

3 - Light Editing Round
This is cleaning up. Fixing plot holes and contradictions, weeding out overused words, working on any issue pointed out by beta readers, cleaning grammar messes, etc. This is usually the work of a few weeks.

After all that I can throw the manuscript out on submission. When it's accepted, it gets even more rounds of editing of course. But that's a different process.

(Right now, The Fox's God is sitting between step 2 and step 3. One of my friends is helping out, as well as my awesome long time beta. I'm waiting for their feedback anxiously.)

Anime Rec: Kuragehime (Princess Jellyfish)

I love this show. It's about a bunch of socially-awkward girl geeks who live together in a Tokyo apartment building. The main character has an obsession with jellyfish because one of the best memories she has of her (now deceased) mother is a visit at the aquarium. As the series starts she meets a fashionable girl who turns out to be a crossdressing boy. The plot is largely about a threat to the apartment building, which might be sold and demolished to make room for trendy shops, and about the main character learning a little confidence and some "feminine" skills from her crossdressing friend.

I LOVE how the crossdressing thing isn't portrayed as a problem. He does it because he likes fashion (and to convince his politician father to leave him out of politics). The guy isn't gay either; he has some feelings for the main girl.

This short, cute show can be watched on Funimation.

*insert cricket sounds here*

I've been rather quiet lately, eh? It's because I've been working diligently on The Fox's God, the third and final volume of my trilogy. I'm about 2/3 done turning my terrible draft into a presentable manuscript. Another two weeks and it'll be nice and pretty. After that a short break followed by a round of proofreading before I send it off to Musa. Then more edits! The other thing I've been doing is preparing for Nadeshicon, the local anime convention. I'll be sharing a table with a friend in the artists alley. I can't wait to wear my fancy Japanese fashion. There might be pictures, after. :)

Cute Attack: the Momonga

If you've looked at the news recently, you know what I mean when I say I need to find some happy things to think about this week. Fluffy critters are usually a good bet, so let me introduce you all to the momonga, a type of flying squirrel found in Japan:


Because I'm insanely imaginative, the momonga in my novel WIP is called Momo. :)

Book Rec: Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton (not ya)

Summary from Goodreads:

A century from now, thanks to a technology allowing instantaneous travel across light-years, humanity has solved its energy shortages, cleaned up the environment, and created far-flung colony worlds. The keys to this empire belong to the powerful North family—composed of successive generations of clones. Yet these clones are not identical. For one thing, genetic errors have crept in with each generation. For another, the original three clone “brothers” have gone their separate ways, and the branches of the family are now friendly rivals more than allies.

Or maybe not so friendly. At least that’s what the murder of a North clone in the English city of Newcastle suggests to Detective Sidney Hurst. Sid is a solid investigator who’d like nothing better than to hand off this hot potato of a case. The way he figures it, whether he solves the crime or not, he’ll make enough enemies to ruin his career.

Yet Sid’s case is about to take an unexpected turn: because the circumstances of the murder bear an uncanny resemblance to a killing that took place years ago on the planet St. Libra, where a North clone and his entire household were slaughtered in cold blood. The convicted slayer, Angela Tramelo, has always claimed her innocence. And now it seems she may have been right. Because only the St. Libra killer could have committed the Newcastle crime.

Problem is, Angela also claims that the murderer was an alien monster.

Now Sid must navigate through a Byzantine minefield of competing interests within the police department and the world’s political and economic elite . . . all the while hunting down a brutal killer poised to strike again. And on St. Libra, Angela, newly released from prison, joins a mission to hunt down the elusive alien, only to learn that the line between hunter and hunted is a thin one.



Review
I recently finished Peter F. Hamilton's newest brick, Great North Road. I say brick because it's like a thousand pages. It's pretty typical for a Hamilton book; tons of details, large casts of diverse characters, a complex unfolding story that sometimes feel slow but never boring.

The  awesome: I loved how the female main character's backstory was doled out a bit at a time, until finally everything she did made perfect sense. It's sometimes difficult to get attached to Hamilton's characters because there's so many of them, but this one stood out in all the right ways.

The good: I liked following the police investigation and finding out what fancy technologies they have at their disposition to solve crimes. It felt realistic because of the way they had moments of great excitement when something new came to light, followed by weeks of necessary-but-boring data correlation, followed by eureka! moments, back to boring ground work.

The less-good: I was not entirely happy with the ending and the police should have solved the murder mystery faster that they did. All the pieces were there, but they got sidetracked by something that seemed bigger and more urgent (of course everything turned out to be related).

Overall: This is for people who enjoy reading brick-sized novels with big plots and big worlds. You really have time to sink in and enjoy the universe. People with endless to-read lists should probably stay away, though!


Peter F. Hamilton is one of my top favourite sci-fi authors. He writes detailed and inventive futures. Some have spaceships, other have world-to-world gateways, but all of them are awesome. There's three series: the Greg Mandel trilogy (close-future sci-fi, where humanity is still mostly living on Earth), the Night's Dawn Trilogy (huge plot with spaceships, got a couple aliens who aren't central to the plot), and the Confederation universe (inter-planet travel via gateways and there's more aliens). I think the best 'verse is the last one. Start with Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained.

Bats, Bats, and More Bats

I have no idea why bats have a "scary critter" reputation. Many species are insanely adorable. I must have been a fruit bat in a previous life because I eat nearly as much fruit as they do. Here, have videos of adorable itty bitty baby bats.