Olga Godim's Blog, page 3

Internet for introverts

It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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APRIL QUESTION: How long have you been blogging? (Or on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram?) What do you like about it and how has it changed?

MY ANSWER: I have never been a regular, or even a frequent visitor to Facebook or other social media sites, but I have been blogging regularly, if not often, for over 10 years. I started my website and blog on WP – this one – in November 2013. At about the same time, I started collecting my online friends: people whose blogs I like and subscribe to.

What I like about blogging in general is huge. I’m an extreme introvert. I don’t have many real-life friends and I don’t socialize often, not even by phone. I always feel iffy at a party of more than 3 participants.

But even introverts feel lonely sometimes. The internet and the blogosphere provide people like me, the extreme introverts, with a secure outlet for socializing without ever stepping outside our home. Whenever I feel lonely, whenever I need a dose of social interaction, I can log on to the internet and read one of my friends’ blogs. And comment. And follow links someplace else. I don’t have to go anywhere. I don’t have to talk to people face to face. I could do it on my own schedule, sitting in my own comfortable chair, and carrying on for as long as it suits me. Surfing the web alleviates my loneliness, gives me an illusion of being social … somewhat. Besides I learn a lot of interesting stuff while reading various blogs.

On the other side of this equation, I write my own posts, and someone else might visit and comment,  if they are interested. In life, I’m very quiet. If I’m with 2 other people, they tend to talk, and I usually stay silent. I’m uncomfortable if I have to talk publicly. But my blog is my place on the net. I can talk there and feel safe. I can say what I want, without censoring myself. I can express my feelings without chafing inside that my readers might get bored or angry at my words. After all, if they don’t like what they read, they can always close the window on their computer. Or I might delete their comments if I don’t like them. It is my blog after all. I’m in charge of all its aspects. Hence, blogging is not as much a dialog for me as it is a monologue, a sheltered venue for speaking my mind, for venting my emotions.

Besides, the blogging format tends to offer like-minded individuals safe places to congregate, to chat about what is important to them. Writers meet on certain websites, like https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/, to talk about grammar issues, book promotion, vocabulary quirks, etc. Ranting is allowed too, as so many of us need a good rant once in a while, when life throws us one curveball too many. Motorcycle riders, gardening enthusiasts, or alternative healing aficionados have their own internet forums to verbalize their opinions and gripe about their problems. It is so nice to meet sympathetic folks who understand you without ever leaving your safe and cozy nook, isn’t it?

What is Home?

It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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One of the books I read recently was a re-read of Becky Chambers’s novel The Galaxy, and the Ground Within. In it, several strangers are thrown together by circumstances and forced to spend a few days in each other’s company with no outside contact. As it is science fiction, the strangers are all aliens to one another. Each one of them has a problem with their home.

I won’t go into specifics about their appearances or names. I’ll call them by the alphabet letters.

Alien A doesn’t have a planet of her own. Her people are forced to roam the galaxy endlessly because their home planet was destroyed centuries ago by some ruthless invaders. She hankers for home, but she doesn’t really know what it means.

Alien B and his species have a home world, but he was exiled from it decades ago for ‘politically incorrect’ views. He’s nostalgic about his former home, even if he isn’t allowed to return. He has been living in another place, a good place by all accounts, the place that allowed him a happy and successful life, free of political censure. But he doesn’t think of it as home.

Alien C has a home and can return any time she wishes, but she loves a guy from a different species, and interspecies coupling is strongly discouraged in her culture. She meets her lover rarely and in secret. If she is ever discovered, she would probably be shunned by most of her friends and coworkers. So she is torn between her love and her people. She wants to love openly, but she doesn’t want to lose her home, her friends, her family, etc.

I don’t know how it works with aliens, but I do know that I’m an immigrant. I was born in Russia, and immigrated to Canada when I was 36. Unlike Alien B, I wasn’t forced to leave my former home. I just didn’t want to stay there any longer. Unlike Alien A, the place of my birth and childhood still exists. It is horrible, but it is still there, in the same geographic location. But do I miss it?

No. I never missed it, not even the first few years of my immigration, which were not easy. Immigration is never easy, not for anyone. But I like it in Canada, in Vancouver, in my home. I think the best thing I ever did in my life was leaving Russia and taking my children away from there. Building a home in Canada.

This month, March 29th, marks the 30th anniversary of our coming to Canada. Canada has definitely become my home in every sense of the word. I’m proud to be Canadian. Canada has been very good to me (the way Russia never was). Canada accepted me as I am and granted me the warm feeling of home (which Russia never did). I wonder: why do all those aliens in the book miss their homes that either don’t exist or don’t accept them the way they are?    

What do you think? What is home? Is it the place you were born? The place you live now? The place you built for your children? Is it a country? A house? The people you love? Would you miss a place that kicked you out? Would you miss a place that doesn’t exist, except in your imagination? And what about your fiction? Do you write about home? What is home for your characters?

Why I like a blog

It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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FEBRUARY QUESTION: What turns you off when visiting an author’s website/blog? Lack of information? A drone of negativity? Little mention of author’s books? Constant mention of books?

MY ANSWER: What turns me off are either long and boring posts or the posts where the authors push their books. Rabid promotion disgusts me. It is much more enjoyable for me to talk about what turns me on, who are the authors I subscribe to, which blogs interest me. Because if I’m not interested, I won’t subscribe to the blog and won’t read it.

There is actually only one point of attraction for me in the blogosphere: the author gives me something I want or need.

An opportunity to participate regularly in a blog hop (IWSG blog or WEP blog).Free fiction by the writers I enjoy (Ilona Andrews’s blog https://ilona-andrews.com/blog/).A book review blog by a reviewer I trust (there are several of those).A blog where my main point of interest, more often than not, lies in the comments, not the blog posts themselves. E. g. the blog https://arghink.com/ by one of my favorite romance writers Jennifer Cruise. Her posts are usually short and to a theme, like Working Wednesday or my favorite, Good Book Thursday. Each Thursday, the author tells us in a few pithy lines what she read in the past week and then passes the estafette to her readers. Every week, these posts might have a hundred or more comments. I usually participate in the Good Book Thursday posts: I post my own comments and read the comments of the others. The commenters discuss the books they read, liked, or disliked, and why. Some comments have 5 or more comments nested under it. The whole conversations are going on in those comments. Most of my reading these days comes from the comments on this site. I especially like these posts because the commenters are very respectful and supporting towards each other. The virtual atmosphere is simply lovely.

What about you. What blogs do you like/subscribe to and why?

WEP get together Feb 2024

I haven’t done anything interesting writing-wise in the past couple months, but I did play with imagery, to no one’s surprise. I was re-reading Michelle Diener’s sci-fi novels belonging to her Verdant String series. I enjoy Diener’s writing, but I don’t like her covers. So I decided I would make my own covers (strictly unofficially, for my own amusement) for the books I’ve finished this time around. There are 2 so far: Breakaway and Breakeven. Here are the existing covers, published by the author.

Here are the images I have created. I don’t want anyone to accuse me of anything, so I didn’t put the writer’s name on the covers, but I like my covers better all the same. :))

All original images come from Pixabay.com. The artists I used for my composite covers are:

ParallelVisionAlanFrijnsJcoope12DiversicatMythicSonBrinMacenMajabel

Spin-off series

It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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Lately, I read a book – that’s how most of my musings about writing come about. The book in question is Lois McMaster Bujold’s fantasy novel Paladin of Souls. In it, she writes, among other things, about magic, gods, and demons. The book was published in 2003. Twelve years later, in 2015, she published the novella Penric’s Demon, which became a start of a new series, one of my favorite series in all fantasy genre. In a way, this series – about a young sorcerer Penric and his demon Desdemona – has its roots in Bujold’s earlier fantasy books, including Paladin of Souls. Sort of a spin-off series. They all happened in the same world, although centuries apart, so no events or characters overlap.

But the writer seems to have forgotten how she described demons’ magic and its consequences in her earlier book, so it is different in Penric’s tales, and the inconsistencies, although small, are significant.

On the other hand, maybe she hadn’t forgotten, but the new series demanded a different approach, and she went with it for the sake of the new stories, disregarding her earlier descriptions and concepts.

Those inconsistencies didn’t affect my pleasure in reading any of her books, but they made me think. If I ever mention the same concept in my stories written a dozen or more years apart, would I overturn my earlier interpretations for the sake of the later stories? Would you? Have you encountered such a phenomenon in other writers’ books. Doesn’t it feel, at least a little bit, like altering history for the sake of storytelling? Tell me in the comments.

 

WEP Dec 2023 – Over to You

In this post, my entry for the Dec 2023 WEP challenge, I’ll concentrate on an old movie (and the eponymous book it’s based on) from my childhood. Both the book and the movie are called Scarlet Sails. It is not my favorite of all movies – there are other films vying for that honor – but the book has always been and still is one of my favorite pieces of fiction. Alexander Grin’s original novella Scarlet Sails was definitely my favorite book of all Russian literature. It was first published in Russia in 1923, a hundred years ago. To celebrate its centennial anniversary, I’d like to tell you about this book and its author.

Alexander Grin (1880 – 1932) was a Russian writer. Before he started writing, he was a vagabond and a laborer, a revolutionary and a jailbird. He never had a high education, never went to college. His romantic novels and short stories came straight from his heart.

Grin’s romantic visions enjoyed a significant readership in Russia in the 1920s. Later on, the communist regime tightened its stranglehold on the art and artists in the country. Everything had to be communist propaganda, but Grin’s stories wouldn’t comply. Most of them were set in an imaginary land, which Grin’s fans lovingly referred to as Grinlandia.

Grinlandia had nothing to do with the communist Russia. Instead, it vaguely resembled Europe sometime in the 19th century. Not one specific country but an amalgam of the European glamour and mystery, as seen through the eyes of the Russian writer who had never traveled to Europe.

The ambiance of Grin’s sparkling tales was far removed from the dreary, colorless reality of the post-revolutionary Russia. Grin’s heroes also didn’t mesh well with the rabid communists. They were adventurers and sailors, intrepid captains and enigmatic girls. They valued love and honor above any communist slogans.

As a result, the government-sponsored publishers in Moscow and St. Petersburg refused to publish Grin’s books. He and his wife lived in extreme poverty. His name was almost forgotten until the late 1950s, long after his passing, when his literary oeuvre suddenly experienced a revival. The print runs of his books skyrocketed from zero into millions. The movie Scarlet Sails (1961) enjoyed huge popularity. I loved it as a young girl.

There was also a ballet Scarlet Sails, an anime, and a song. Every kid in the Soviet Union knew the name of Alexander Grin and read at least one of his books, Scarlet Sails. In Feodosia, a town in Crimea, they transformed the house where Grin had lived and died into his museum.  

Furthermore, in the 21st century, the authorities of St. Petersburg, Russia, started an annual Scarlet Sails festival as a prom celebration for the city’s high school graduates. Every year during the festival, a ship sails up the river Neva at night, and fireworks coruscate over the ship’s scarlet sails to the delight of thousands of teenagers. Ironically, the ship with the scarlet sails is not Russian. At least until 2021 (I don’t have any later information) it had been the Swedish brig Tre Kronor, hired for the occasion.     

Despite Alexander Grin’s current acclaim in Russia, his name is almost unknown in the West. Even his most famous book, Scarlet Sails, is hard to find in the English translation, and the movie has never been translated at all.

The genre of this short book, only seven chapters, is hard to define. There is no overt magic there, so it’s not a typical fantasy. Nor it is a reality, as the action takes place in Grinlandia.

The movie follows the book so closely that my summary would fit both of them. Both are lyrical and romantic. Both proclaim the power of love and dreams, which seems, at first glance, too naïve and too idealistic for our jaded world. Both introduce the most beloved of all Grin’s characters: Assol and Gray. 

Assol is a dreamer. A poor working girl in the fishing village of Kaperna, she doesn’t fit among her dull, hardworking neighbors, and they wouldn’t forgive her for being different. They mock and scorn her. Her dreams are her only refuge, and she dreams about a prince, coming for her on a magnificent ship under scarlet sails.

Gray is an heir to a fortune. He lives with his parents in a castle, with a score of tutors and servants, but he dreams too – of becoming a captain and roaming the seas. His parents don’t understand him, so as a teenager, he runs away from home and makes his dream come true.

Gray’s collision with Assol and her world seems almost inevitable, delivered in the writer’s expressive, emotional voice. Grin’s narrative is so evocative it touched your soul. You could almost see every scene, breathe in the salty air, hear the gulls scream. Every detail is like a tiny butterfly infused with radiance.

I wanted to share this book with my English-speaking friends, so I translated it into English and posted it on wattpad, for everyone to read. I hope my translation conveys to you, at least a little, my wonder and admiration of this enchanting little jewel of a story. You can read my translation for free here.

If you dare to dream, despite the bleak reality of our lives in the 21st century, you might like this story too.  

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Note: I made the cover myself, based on an image by the artist 1Tamara2 from Pixabay.com.

Book reviews

It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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DECEMBER QUESTION: Book reviews are for the readers. When you leave a book review, do you review for the Reader or the Author? Is it about what you liked and enjoyed about your reading experience, or do you critique the author?

MY ANSWER: The short answer would be all of the above. The long answer is more complicated. In general, I write reviews for myself, to keep track of what I read and didn’t read and what I liked and disliked. I also have a file on my laptop named DidNotFinish, where I list all the books I didn’t finish because I disliked them. In alphabetical order, starting with the author’s first name, so it is easy for me to find whether I read a particular book or not.

I keep all my reviews on my computer and copy them to GoodReads. I don’t review on Amazon. Sometimes, I mark the books I didn’t finish on GoodReads as well, but most of those unfortunate titles are only in the above-mentioned file on my laptop.

I have to point out that my reviews are not literary critique. They convey my subjective opinion. Sometimes a book is a bestseller, beloved by many readers, but it doesn’t work for me. Then it goes into that file and on GoodReads. My DNF wouldn’t damage a bestselling author’s reputation, so I feel free to express myself. My reading is for my pleasure, and if I can’t derive pleasure from a book, I usually don’t bother finishing it.

On the other hand, sometimes the author is a newbie. In that case, if I dislike his/her book, I usually enter it only in my file and don’t touch its GoodRead page. I don’t want to spoil the chances of a new writer by damning their first or second book with my DNF. My opinion is subjective after all.

What about you? Do you read everything to the end? What if you don’t like what you read? Do you ever abandon books in the middle? Do you write reviews for such books? Tell me in the comments.  

Familiar vs. exotic

It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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I was reading a book recently, a romance set in ancient China, by a Chinese American author. The author is well known, and the book was written very well, with sympathetic characters and a fast-moving plot. The narrative flowed, and the exotic locale added spice to the tale. The novel had all the ingredients of being a satisfying read. It should’ve been, but … I couldn’t finish it.

I know many readers who enjoy this author’s books. She has a large following, and deservedly so. I wanted to enjoy her book too, but it just didn’t work for me. While several readers mentioned the Chinese setting of her books as a huge plus, for me it was that same setting that put me off. It felt too alien, too outlandish. I became lost and confused, while I tried to navigate the foreign background and the peculiar (for me) mentality of the heroes. I found myself gravitating instead towards a familiar European-like setting in the books I read. I want the cities and towns I understand and the mental concepts and values I can relate to.  

Full disclosure: I’m a white 60+ woman with European roots and education. I emigrated to Canada from my home country 30 years ago. Maybe I’m too old and set in my ways to explore other lands through my reading?

Sure, I like speculative fiction, which by definition deviates from reality, but even in speculative fiction, I prefer stories set in quasi-European environs, and when I write my own stories, they are invariably happening in such places. Traditional Middle Earth ambience usually works for me, both as a reader and as a writer. A spaceship with a European vibe does too, while a book based on African or Asian mythology rarely does. No offense to all the wonderful writers whose stories don’t spring exclusively from Europe. It is just a personal preference. Sometimes, I could appreciate the brilliance of their writing, from a cerebral viewpoint (e.g., Aliette de Bodard), but those stories almost never touch my heart.

What about you? Do you prefer familiar or exotic? And how do you define exotic? For a writer from India or Japan, for instance, European cultural milieu might seem pretty exotic. Tell me in the comments.

WEP Oct 2023 – The Phantom of the Opera

October WEP stories are often the hardest for me to write. In the North American parlance, October, the month of Halloween, is often associated with horror, and I neither read nor write in that genre. But the musical The Phantom of the Opera and the movie of the same name are an exception because of the superb music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It is not really a horror story, either. Love, hypnotism, obsession, and music seem to be the prevalent threads of the tale. Plus, the tragedy of the protagonist, the deformed ‘phantom’. In my sci-fi flash below – my entry for the Oct WEB challenge – the members of the anivid and dessert club on Mars watch the animated remake of this show and then discuss its complex ideas while applying their own unique interpretation. They are Martians, living in the 24th century. Of course, they would have a unique perspective on this classic tale from Earth.

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“Am I too late? No, I’m not too late. Marvelous!” Serena swept into the room. “I’m sorry, girls. I got held up in the recording studio.”

“What did you record today?” Yrvina asked. Serena was a musician, and in the last several years, her songs had become pretty popular in their dome.

“A new song.” Serena’s grin illuminated the whole room. “I have a new contract, girls. I didn’t say anything before, but we have been negotiating. I just signed it. I’m going to perform live in two other domes. My first out-dome tour.”

“Congratulations!” the club members chorused and applauded. Serena’s exuberance was catchy.

“When?” Yrvina asked.

“Next year.” Serena plopped down on her place on a sofa. Her eyes glowed. “What are we watching tonight? What movie from Earth had your animators fixed for us, Martians, this time?”

“Something you might find extremely interesting,” Yrvina said.

“Oh? Tell more,” Serena demanded.

“It’s a musical. The story is sort-of wacky, but the music and songs are amazing, very dramatic and emotional. We found another recording of the same story in the archives, a live show on stage, with much better musical performances – the voices and the orchestra – and used the soundtracks of that show in our anivid. It was a challenge for us, animators, I can tell you, to match all our characters’ lip movements with the songs already recorded. Our music director is ecstatic.”

“Do I know it?” Serena mused aloud. “I know most famous musical shows from Earth and Mars, starting as early as the earthen 18th century.”

“Not sure.” Yrvina shook her head. “It is called The Phantom of the Opera. Let’s watch it.”     

“No, I haven’t heard it before, at least, I don’t remember. Yes, let’s watch it,” Serena echoed.

“Silly story, but the music was astounding,” Verise said after the show closed.

“Incredible music,” Kaley agreed. “But why did this poor musician wear a mask. Couldn’t they have fixed his deformity when he was a baby? The cosmetic surgery wouldn’t be that complicated.”

Yrvina snorted. “They didn’t do cosmetic surgery at that time on Earth. Not for poor people anyway, and there were no health benefits for every citizen either. Besides, if it had been done, his psyche wouldn’t have been so twisted, so there would be no story.”

“True,” Kaley said. “I keep forgetting that it all happened so long ago. It is such a tragic story.” Her violet eyes shined with compassion. “I loved the costumes though. And the dance of colors in tune with the music. That was your doing, Yrvina? Very pretty.”

“Yes. Thank you.” Yrvina nodded, warmed by the compliment.

“Did they really have an underground lake beneath that music building?” Nima wondered. “How come the building itself didn’t collapse?”

“It was all fantasy, from beginning to end,” Verise said dismissively. “None of that was even remotely possible. But the music … It was superb.” Her usually severe expression softened.

“Yeah,” Yrvina agreed. She loaded the slices of crostata Verise had brought for dessert into plates and sent the plates around the room. Everyone got busy chewing.

Everyone but Serena. Serena looked lost, as if she was wandering in a universe far away, her lips moving, and not because she was eating. The crostata sat forgotten in her lap, while her hands waved faintly, as if conducting an invisible orchestra. She was listening to the music again, Yrvina realized as she watched her friend. Reliving the experience. And singing the songs in her head without producing a single note.

“Serena?” Yrvina crossed the room and took the plate with the crostata off Serena’s lap, before the jam ended up on the floor. She had never seen Serena so fully absorbed in her creative groove. That was why she was such a good musician. She gave herself fully to the music.  

“Sublime,” Serena breathed. A tremor went through her body, as if she needed a physical shock to wake up from the music that had enspelled her. Her gaze traveled around the room and sharpened. She was here and now again, on the sofa with her friends.

She frowned. “Where is my crostata?”

Everybody laughed.

“Here it is,” Yrvina gave her back the plate. “I was afraid you would knock it down.”

Serena dived in, but after two mouthfuls, she lifted her head. “I want the score of that show. Who do I contact, Yrvina? I want to put it on. I want to sing Christina’s part.”     

“Talk to our music director. I’ll send his net address to your comm.”

“Thank you,” Serena said. “But I don’t like Erik. He doesn’t make sense. I think I’ll replace him with a twisted AI. A damaged robot maybe.”

“Yes, that would make more sense,” Kaley said. “A defective AI could do all that if it was inside a cyborg. Maybe the cyborg had lost some of its parts.”

“Exactly,” Serena exclaimed. “Or maybe a clone? Could there be a glitch in cloning to produce the same effect, Kaley?”

“Mm, maybe,” Kaley said doubtfully. She was a clone herself, so considered a specialist on all things cloning. “But the factory technicians would’ve terminated such a defective clone before it came out of the vat. No, a cyborg is a better idea.”     

“Maybe the vat was lost after a space station hostile takeover?” Serena muttered.

The two of them launched into a heated discussion on the comparative merits of a cyborg versus a clone versus an AI residing in a building’s maintenance comm unit for the part of Erik. Erik the human wasn’t even in the running.

Yrvina listened in fascination. “I hope you invite me to that show, Serena,” she said finally.

“Of course,” Serena responded. “The entire club is invited. I want all you, girls, there.”

Tagline: Music on Mars sounds just as beautiful as it did on Earth.

AI art vs. human art

It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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OCTOBER QUESTION: The topic of AI writing has been heavily debated across the world. According to various sources, generative AI will assist writers, not replace them. What are your thoughts?

MY ANSWER: I don’t know about AI writing, never having read it, but I can extrapolate from what I do know – AI-created art. Lately, several artists on my favorite free image website, Pixabay.com, have been using various AI programs to generate images. Those images are colorful and include abstracts, landscapes, portraits, and still life. They could be fantastic or realistic or lean towards science fiction. The variety is amazing, and each image is beautiful. I enjoy looking at them. They resonate with my aesthetic sense.

But I have to admit that after a while, I can see a certain ‘sameness’ to them all, no matter who the artist is. AI can’t really create anything new or original. It is software. It can only duplicate what already exists – millions of images already floating in cyberspace – and alter them using a multitude of filters, conditions, styles, etc. AI-generated art is fine for book covers or marketing imagery, but as high art, it doesn’t pass muster. There is no soul there, no inspiration, no personality, just clever, embellished copies. Da Vinci and Picasso don’t have any cause to worry. AI would never be a competition for them. I suppose the same is true for AI writing.   

What about you? Have you seen AI-generated art? Do you like it?