Chelsea Gaither's Blog, page 65

Starbleached 2 Status

I am re-reading this book. And with the pressure on to make it ABSOLTELY PERFECT I want to kick myself for not doing a better job on the first draft.

The thing about writing is, the first draft is not a thing. It is the moment when you are flinging shit at the wall and waiting to see what sticks. So far, not a lot is sticking. I hated writing it, I will probably hate editing it, until about Dec 15th when it's come together a little more and I start being amazed at how...not from me most of my writing is. The best moments are usually in the second or third draft when most of the bullshit has been cleared away and I find out a whole bunch of disconnected things kind of connected themselves when I wasn't looking, and if I just tweek a couple passages the rest of it will all link up and make me look really, really good. I know that moment will come. It came with every other book so far. I just don't like not having that feeling now, when I know there are at least two people actively waiting on this.

I will, I think, be keeping the flashback/flashforward thing from the earlier books. Partially because it will help my ultimate goal with this series along emencely. (If you do not simultaneously love the book and hate me at the end of it, I have not done my job right) partially because it says part of what I think Sci-fi should say. Fantasy is about who we are right now. Sci-fi is about where we're going. Weird thing is, we're also defined by our past in a really weird way. And I like being able to lay past and present side-by-side like this and say, this is what made these people the way they are.


The other thing that worries me is...this story will have a positive ending, but I can't comfortably say this is a Happily Ever After yet. Oh, that's coming. I LOVE HEA as much as the next girl. I just believe in making characters earn them. But I've got this story arc planned down to the minute, and if it were a real novel, this ending would technically be the midpoint. You're going to hate me. The next one is going to end at the "failure" point, which means (If you're still with me that late into the career) that you are REALLY going to hate me.

Which I am fine with, as long as you like the story. If I am not fucking with you, boys and girls, I am not doing my job as a writer.

Ah, well. Must sign off and go do real job now. Which sucks. I've got a migrane that is KILLING me. Have a nice weekend!

State of the CW...again

Yeah, I know. It's a little early to be doing YET. ANOTHER. ONE. OF THESE.

But I want to. First, I want to talk about numbers. I like numbers. I don't like adding numbers, but I like playing with them. When I'm playing video games and/or selling books I like watching the numbers go up. The one nice thing about KDP is, I get a little screen that I can refresh as often as I want to, so I can know with a couple hours delay exactly how many books I have sold. I have a stat addiction. Sometimes I feel like huddling under the sink with a box of cheetoes and my knitting row counter, counting how many times I can click the little red button.

If everything goes right/well/same as it's been for the last two months? I'll have sold 100 books by the end of the year.

Yes. I know this is not a ground breaking thing. I know that a *real* writer would have sold that the first month her book was published. That doesn't even mean real money. But still...it's a number. It's a pretty cool number. I would like to see that number happen. Buy things in December, you know, if you want to, and make that number happen. It would make me very happy. Think of it as my christmas present or something. :D

As ya'll know...well, you SHOULD know, given how much time I spend talking about them around here, I have three series going. Exiles, which nobody really cares much about, Gray Prince, which definately nobody cares about (Which is sad. I'm VERY proud of that book) and Starbleached. Oh, ho ho ho, Starbleached.

Ready for numbers, boys and girls?

As of today, this minute, I have sold a grand total of 84 books.

45 of them are copies of Starbleached. Yes. The sci-fi story that I basicially wrote over the course of three days in the desperate hopes that the story itself would go away and let me get back to writing books that nobody cares about. Now, since then I've understood the story better and I really like it. A lot. And I like where I want to take it, otherwise I'd be taking it somewhere else.

But for the first time? Guys?

I'm scared.

This self publishing thing is not my attempt to be successful as a writer. I gave up on that back in April. And that giving up? Was hard. But it was a combination of realizing just how unlikely my being really published was, and understanding just how truely fucked in the head the attempt had made me...and it was really more the latter issue than the former that drove me to throw in the towel and go with KDP. I figured that after six months or so of utter failure, I'd publish the goddamn novels Exiles are leading up to, and that would be that. You know that line from Toy Story? "We're not flying! We're falling. WITH STYLE!" That's kind of how I wanted this to go.

And then things started going well. Not the kind of great numbers that lead to publishing deals but the kind that give me a warm, fuzzy feeling at the end of a shitty day. My life outside of writing is suddenly something I like, which is not something I could say back when I was trying and failing at being a real writer. I could sit in the glow of nice, expectationless numbers and be kind of happy. I was--hell, as far as I know, I still am--falling with style.

But a couple nights ago it hit me: You guys like that story. I mean, really, really like that story. You don't give a flying flip about the other two series, far as I can tell, but that one? You like that one. And now I have to release the sequel in a month. Which I've been looking forward to, because I really, really like this story too. Only...ya'll hate the other two series, close as I can tell. So what if I fuck this one up? Don't do it right. What if it was like that one fluke, and now...yeah, kids. It's stage fright. The pressure is on.

It makes me think that that's all professional success is. That there isn't one moment where you get to sit back and go "I did this, I am cool, I am awesome, go me" and that instead it's a mountain of work, followed by a mountain of work, followed by another mountain of work, with breif pauses for you to eat, sleep and get drunk in .That the anxiety I felt when I was trying to be published is the way I'm gonna feel this time next year when it's time to assess how this project's really going, because I'm always going to be scared of fucking it up. I'm not that good, boys and girls. If I were that good, I'd be a real writer with real books and stuff.

IDK. Maybe it is just stage fright.

Alright, signing off. Planet Bob ETA 32 days and counting. We're gonna do it. I can't swear that you'll like it--the story arch as I have planned isn't going to be the prettiest thing in the universe--but damn if I'm not going to try.

City of Bones Chapter 16

This may come as a surprise to those of you who read my books, but I like action.

Starbleached is the way it is (Flash back, flash forward, flash back, flash forward) because otherwise it would have been a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time before we got to the interesting parts. It was either juggle explaining why the plot was what it was with the actual interesting bits, or bore the utter living shit out of you trying to set everything up. I went with the first option, figuring that Memento: The book wouldn't be annoying as long as it stayed short.

My point with name dropping my own stuff in this review? I like character interactions, too, as long as they are interesting character interactions. There is no action in P&P for example, and yet I love every moment about it. Mostly because every moment is telling us something about these characters. And you know the Kiera Knightly movie? There's one scene that is the most telling moment in it. It's short and it's subtle. Darcy helps Elizabeth into her family's carrage after Bingley's party. She appears shocked, as he's actually touching her. He walks away. Camera cuts to his hand, which he is flexing rather quickly. Short, quick, over in a second, but you know that her presence has affected him, somehow. It allows the next big moment in their relationship (his proposal of marriage in the gondola) to happen with only a couple more interactions between Darcy and Elizabeth (...I think the next time they talk is at Lady De Bough's house, when Lizzie is attempting to play the piano.)

Cassandra Clare? Is not nearly that subtle. She wants to build romance between characters, and I think poor Applebloom will be puking quite a bit in the paragraphs to come.

They go back to the Institute (...infidels being protected by consecrated ground by a God they don't believe in. And Jace says God doesn't care.) and Hodge reads all three of them, Simon included, the riot act. Let's cover all the things Jace has done in the last few hours:

-Involve no less than three percieved mundanes in Clave business (He thought Random Hispanic Dude AKA Raphael the Vampire was a mundie at the time, so it counts for stupid)
-Put Simon's life in danger by taking him to Magnus's party
-Invade the home of vampires who were minding their own business (they thought Simon was their rat)
-Hurt the vampires who were formerly minding their own business, in ways that were possibly fatal
-Possibly break the Accords between Clave and Downworlders by doing the two above items.
-Possibly incite a war between vampires and werewolves, because the two aren't supposed to be ANYWHERE  NEAR each other.
-Steal a vampire's motor cycle and fly it over downtown New York

I'd ground the little bastard two. Preferably into bone meal, because I think he'd be better off as fertilizer.

Then they all troop off to the infirmary, though Clary takes time out for a shower. Jace and Clary exchange sexually laden innuendo and romantic tension. Simon gives her a kiss. And hey, I haven't pointed out descriptive fail in a while:

“Sure.” To her surprise he leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. It was a butterfly kiss, a quick brush of lips on skin, but as she pulled away, she knew she was blushing.

First of all...

Secondly...and I really hate myself for knowing this...that is not what a butterfly kiss is. I grew up in a borderline Christian fundamentalist household, meaning that Harry Potter was banned, but Terry Brooks and David Eddings were not (Figure that out, sports fans) and the only thing our radio played was Christian Music. Newsboys. Audio Adrenaline. Stephen Curtis Chapman. Mercy Me (who are still awesome). Kendall Payne (who is, no bullshit, the best lyracist I have heard in my entire LIFE. Seriously. Go find "Wonderland" on youtube and listen to it. If by some God granted miracle the Exile books ever turn into an actual tv/ movie thing, that song is the theme song)

Anyway, one of the less awesome acts in CCM was a dude named Bob Carislile. There is mellow, and then there is that shit. And the song that he was best known for was a song called "Butterfly Kisses". Todd in the Shadows, one of my favorite human beings of all time, ever, uses a term "overplay" to describe when a radio station pounds a song into the ground so hard the individual music notes wind up in China. Those of you who do not listen to CCM have no idea what this thing is. If you combined the overplay of "Hey Soul Sister", Kesha and Katy Perry, you'd be about halfway to the level of bone-chilling nausia I felt whenever "Butterfly Kisses" hit the airwaves back in 98-04, when I stopped listening to CCM exclusively. I promise you, it is still on the airwaves. I am embedding the music video for the song down below, but promise me. You don't want to hear it.



So what is a Butterfly kiss? It's where you hold your eyes really close to someone's cheek...and blink. Fast. Like Bella in the "WTF is Human?" scene in BDpt2. So that the other person feels like a butterfly is tickling their cheeks with their eyelashes.

Hold on...

Okay, better now.

So yeah. It is not a "there and gone again" kiss, Clare. Look this shit up.

Clary, of course, misses the ENTIRE POINT and decides Simon's showing off for Isabelle.She wanders off. Alec follows her and then...*sigh*

The biggest problem I have with this book is one I can no longer ignore. Not that I've ignored it all that much, but here goes. Jace is Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter. Fandom Draco, where he's suave and dashing and not the constipated little shit from the real books and movies, but for all intents and purposes, The HP fandom took Draco, brushed his hair and taught him how to sit up straight, and then Cassandra Clare repackaged him for this book. Which would not be a huge problem IF Cass's hero worship of Draco wasn't oozing out of every page. This is her perfect human being and oh holy fuck does it ever show. Clary is a perfectly beautiful person NOT because the main character has to be perfect for her own self, but because only a perfectly beautiful person is worthy of Draco Malfoy. It's that pretty girl door prize that all boy are promised.

The problem? He's still a constipated little shit. He's just got better lines this time around.

Seriously. Jace is a terrible human being. He's a bigot. And by bigot I don't mean the "the black people are worth fifty points" game my racist relatives used to play. I mean he actively hates the visibly different so much he becomes homicidal around them. He says hideously insulting things to EVERYBODY around him. I have glossed over the number of terrible, terrible things Jace has said. He's a bully, he's so self-absorbed unrequited love directed at him only amuses him. He makes Ted Bundy look like a well adjusted human being with a few small anger issues. And this book worships him.

However, the last couple of chapters? Have been less than flattering for Mr. Weyland. First, he brought a mundane to a magical party and lost him to vampires. Then he broke his system's own rules going after the mundane he lost. Then he came very close to restarting a civil war. Then he got his ass rightfully chewed by his boss for doing the above stupid things. He also reveled that he's a religious bigot as well as a racist one. And as any author worth their salt will intuit, he needs some salvaging. Normally, this would be where the character is required to make some great sacrifice, preform some good deed, or otherwise do something to make up for being an utter asshole during his screen time. He would do something that would require significant character growth, promising that eventually, his asshole bigoted nature will go away.

Clare does not allow him to do this, because if he stopped being a racist, bigoted little shit he would stop being a direct clone of Draco Malfoy. So instead, she sends Alec after Clary to tell her, and by extension, the rest of us, what a fragile, precious little snowflake Jace really is.

“You don’t understand,” Alec said. “You don’t know him. I know him. He thinks he has to save the world; he’d be glad to kill himself trying. Sometimes I think he even wants to die, but that doesn’t mean you should encourage him to do it.”

You know who else thought they were saving the world? Hitler and the SS. No bullshit. Find a documentary on them, ANY documentary, and see for yourself. The power of thinking you're on the side of the angels is the kind that blinds you to your own terrible actions. The road to hell isn't paved with good intentions, kids. It's paved with self righteousness and bigotry. Combine the two, and everyone around you is fucked.

And I haven't gotten that vibe from Jace at all. I've gotten suave ladies' man. I've gotten murderer. I've gotten abused plaything. I haven't gotten superman.

Second, Alec's whole rant is way, way, way WAY off the mark. He says nobody asked her to get involved and she should just go home, and that's the biggest load of horse pucky this book has thrown at us so far. Clary is not here by her own choice. She's stayed here by her own choice, but she didn't even walk into the Institute for the first time under her own power. Clary got involved in Clave business because Jace hunted her down after the murder episode in the night club. If he hadn't gone to find her, if he had just ignored her being there, worst case senario is she would have faced the ravener demon and the demon cops outside her apartment on her own. Given that Dorothea was there with a magical doorway, there's a good chance that Clary could have survived with a little extra Downworlder help. Which, as this book will soon reveal, she definately would have gotten. Alternatively, she could have grown a spine and gone home in time for her and her mom to escape Valentine together. But Jace showed up, after everyone, Hodge included, had told Jace to drop it and leave Clary alone. So her being involved in the Clave? It's Jace's fault. Jace brought Clary to the institute the first time, Jace decided that Clary needed to go see the Silent Brothers, Jace decided that they then needed to go see Magnus Bane, Jace allowed Simon to tag along, and then left him alone with Isabelle and Alec, whose anti-mundane retoric should definately have disqualified them as babysitters. Jace decided to go after the vampires without backup. Clary hasn't even had a clue what the fuck is going on half the time. Jace has been in control the whole way. But what does Alec say?

“You mundanes are completely selfish, aren’t you? Have you no idea what he’s done for you, what kind of personal risks he’s taken? I’m not just talking about his safety. He could lose everything. He already lost his father and mother; do you want to make sure he loses the family he’s got left as well?”

Right. Because it's selfish to want to understand where your mother went. Because it's selfish to ask for protection from the people who probably inadvertantly exposed Joycelyn to her enemies (again. Clary's mom has been on the run for sixteen years, and she is kidnapped within twenty four hours of Clary meeting Jace. In fact, given what I know about the other characters involved? Mom getting abducted is Jace's fault too, because he mentioned this Shadowhunter-seeing mundane girl to the wrong person.) It's selfish to expect the boneheaded moron who got your best friend turned into a rat and then kidnaped by vampires due to his not giving a shit to go out of his way to fix things.

And then? The book loses me. Because this is not characterization, kids. this is Clare slamming our heads into the wall, screaming "JACE IS A SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE! JACE IS A SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE!" Clary decides that Alec is "partly right".

This is victim blaming.

That Fundie household I grew up in? Sometimes, and not all the time, but sometimes, it could be emotionally abusive. I did wind up blaming myself for things that were not my fault. I remember once clearly believing that my asking for toys had caused my parents' bank account to become overdrawn. The victim's most natural self-protective reaction when faced with emotional abuse is to blame themselves for the abuse. It allows them to modify their behavior into something that will get them out of the situation alive.

This is not what Clare is going for. Instead, Clare gets angry because Alec is right, and her life is so unfair and everyone else is so mean to her, and she says ugly things back at Alec. And not just ugly things. Weaknesses and secrets that Jace shared with her in confidence, trusting that she would not use them against one of his own oldest friends. And then her own observation that he's in love with Jace. I have had this done to me, and sadly, I have done this. It is the ugliest, most underhanded thing a person can do short of doing physical harm.

So Alec ups the ante by hitting her and telling her never to bring it up to Jace, or he'll kill her. Well, boys and girls, if Clary were a decent human being? She wouldn't have brought it up with Alec.

So she goes to bed, scribbles a little, has a big cry about how her whole life has been a lie (Newsflash: Your mother had to keep secrets from you. You were a kid and she was in hiding, and if she hadn't kept things hidden you would have blown it. Her mistake was in keeping those secrets too long, not in having them in the first place.) and then Simon shows up to comfort her. They say sweet things and it is all friend-romantic.

Unfortunately Simon falls asleep in her bed, so she has to go off and find somewhere else to sleep, and who should show up but Jace!

Yeah. Literally. She pingpongs from one boy to another. Because we haven't hinted at this enough, it's time to develop it into a full-fledged nightmarish thing.

Of course, where Simon is an adorable teddy bear, Jace is perfect. Except for one tooth, which is "endearingly chipped".

...I can't use the Applebloom picture again, can I?

She asks him why he's here, and he spouts off some metaphysical bullshit to show us how uncomfortable he is with his feeeeeeeelings. Then he produces a basket, tells Clary he just found out from Hodge that it's her birthday--how would he know this?--and takes her up to the roof for a romantic rooftop picnic under the stars, to celebrate her birthday.

.........yeah.






Next chapter: I need more cutesy romance-induced puking macros, because it's entirely possible Applebloom might die before chapter 17 is over.

Publishers and grocery stores pt deux OR... WHAT THE ACTUAL F**K?

Okay, boys and girls. Some of you might remember a couple weeks back I went on this long, weird, rambling post about the Penguin/Random House merger, which I then named Penguin House because "Penguin Random House" sounds like the world's perfect password and not, you know, an actual thing.

Anyway, the tl:DR version of it is, Penguin House wants to compete with Amazon and will probably shoot the rest of the industry in the process. I thought it was 90% bullshit at the time, but I know what happened when HEB did the same thing with Wal-Mart down here and, well, I felt like rambling. That's the name of the blog, right?

Well...and this is really weird...I kind of found the connection that makes it all make more sense. And then the connection that makes me go why the fuck is this even a thing?

Let me introduce you to Author Solutions, sports fans. And by "introduce" I mean "talk about" because I'm not linking to them. They are not PubliSHAMerica but they are close to it the way that Miller/Bud/Michelobe lite beers are to water. It kind of sort of looks like the real thing, but you know it's not. Here is a litany of how awful they are. 

In case you don't click on that link, however, you'll miss the really weird part. Apparently Author Solutions is the DeBeers of the publishing industry.They are everything, apparently, that isn't Createspace or Lightening Source or Lulu. Including iUniverse, which I could have sworn was its own thing, but apparently not. And they're talking real publishers into creating their own self publishing arm.

I think this is the way most of 'em are going to wind up going, given the massive amounts of money Amazon is making off the self pubbed authors they've published via KDP. But the weird thing is, the publishers who do decide to do this? Aren't doing it on their own. They shove it off on Author Solutions, which is a little like asking the hot dog guy to do your surgeries for you when you're an IRL brain surgeon and you could probably find a way to do it cheaper and better if you thought about it hard enough. I get not wanting to deal with us self-pubbers, I really do. We're whiny, self-entitled idiots who think we understand the universe better than the people who have done it their entire adult lives. But again: hot dog guy.

And they're charging money for this. Oodles and oodles of it. They are charging shitloads of money, in a branch of the industry that has a TON of free options that are as good, if not better. KDP. B&N's PubIT. Smashwords. All of these I can work with right now, for free (and Amazon is still my best option. Phooey) As for print books, I can go to Createspace or Lulu and, again, have it all done for free. Which I'm not doing yet because a real book will cost you twelve fucking dollars and I'd only get maybe a dollar out of that? And negative dollars for overseas sales? I was kind of drunk when I did it, and I just remember being massively disgusted with how much paper books would cost. My vanity, boys and girls, does not reach that far.

And if I'm not having books printed when they'd cost me nothing, I sure as shitfire am not going to have my books printed by a service that'll charge me ten thousand fucking dollars for the privelage. Not even to have Simon and Schuster's new affiliate attached to it.

Oh, yes. They're the latest to jump on the band wagon. They're gonna have "their" self publishing service, just like iUniverse and Harlequin's self pub service, and just like Xlibrius and a few dozen other ones, because it's all being run by Author Solutions.

Who suck hard enough to take the black out of space.

How does this tie in with Penguin House? Well...They bought Author Solutions back in July.

Speechless Castle is Speechless

So Simon and Schuster have basically licenced their name to Author Solutions, so Author Solutions can put it on a sticker on the spine of some of the books they print and then send a large portion of their profits to Penguin House. Simon and Schuster have licenced their brand to their biggest competitor.

And Penguin House? Now has its own self publishing arm that it doesn't have to fuck around with because, hey, it already is everything. iUniverse? PENGUIN HOUSE! Xlibris? PENGUIN HOUSE! The Harlequin offshoot that got Harlequin taken off the Romance novelists guild...thing...list of qualifying publishers? Penguin House again! As of right now, if you lined up all the self pub companies that are actually worth the card stock it took to write their name on and threw darts at this hypothetical board, you'd have a better chance of hitting an Author Solutions/Penguin House company than you would anything else. Including Amazon, who has a grand total of two services as compared with Author Solution's apparent nine billion. And, sadly, Amazon is still the only platform that offers a chance at actual sales. Which means? These books? That Penguin House will be printing via Author Solutions via whatever cardboard cut out they're using to sell these services? will probably be sold via Amazon.

This is wheels within wheels. This is the Russian Nesting Dolls of WHAT THE FUCKING HELL. There are weird systems, there are systems that don't make logical sense, and then there is the fucked up WAY past broken system we've chosen to call the publishing industry. I'm not even resentful anymore. I'm just kind of sitting here going



And...why. WHY? S&SCHUSTER, WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS? WHY WOULD YOU INVEST ANY MONEY IN YOUR BIGGEST COMPETITOR? ESPECIALLY when the company you just hired to do the work for you has a TERRIBLE record as far as publishing actually goes. WAS THE PITCHMAN HAROLD HILL? Wait. He was, wasn't he? He sang "Seventy six expresso book machines lead the big parade, while a hundred and ten copy machines followed behind" and the internet wayback machine had already stolen the pages that said the Gary Conservatory wasn't even open until aught six, so now you're stuck with the industry's version of marching band instruments and the think system.

Guys, I'm not as confident that I'm full of shit as I was a couple weeks ago. I'm not confident that we're about to see Penguin House Vs Amazon, but all this looks weirdly familiar to this Texas girl. HEB fought Wal-Mart, and everybody else in the grocery world "died" as a result. The problem with this comparison is...HEB actually takes damn good care of both its employees and its customers. It does things like donate day-olds to local food banks and truck in water if the local supply is bad and then give that water away to anyone with a bucket. When I worked for them, I did shitty, nasty, awful labor, but I was goddamn proud of the company I worked for. Yes, it's a cold heartless corporation that only thinks about its bottom line, but it's a cold heartless corporation that understands giving a shit about people is best for its bottom line. They're gonna charge as much as they can get away with for that box of noodles, but they'll turn around and spend a good portion of that profit making sure your community has drinking water and canned goods if a disaster hits your hometown. They'll do it, because they know when you're back on your feet? You're never shopping anywhere else, ever again.

A publishing company trying to set itself up as the HEB to face down Amazon's Wal-Mart? Would not buy Author Solutions. They're trying to compete with Amazon by being bigger and worse at the same damn time. Would you like to live in a world where the only options were Wal-Mart and the company worse than Wal-Mart?

Yeah. Me neither.

A hint at where TALES OF THE GRAY PRINCE is headed as a series

Starbleached book release blog tour January 2013!

So Planet Bob comes out January 1st. I want to promote the crap out of the entire series, since apparently it's y'all's favorite. (...this is Texas. That's a word here.)

Anyhoo, here's what I want to do. If you have a blog--counting your facebook page--and you'd like to participate in the tour, let me know. You'll get a copy of Starbleached for review purposes, gratis, because otherwise I'd be a horrible person, and you can do a review, or interview me, or just mention the book and post a bunch of cat macros under, if that's all you want to do. (...or chart out the basic plot with cat macros, which would be utterly awesome on every level)

In return? I'll review your blog, or a couple chapters of your book, or whatever, here. It's a blog tour quid pro quo. There's a page dedicated to it over here, so just pick a free day (They're all free at this point) and tell me what you'd like to do and what you'd like me to do.

Whatcha think?

State of the CW

New countdown is up! Starbleached 2 comes out January 1st. And it is going to be a good one. I hope. I hope I hope I hope...

It's not too late to pick up a copy of This Found Thing for free. You might want to go do that now, as a matter of fact. Go! GO! the giveaway ends tonight! The higher we can make it go, the better.


The problem I have with writing these days is...I get it. There is a rhythm that good writing has. Once you get a good feel for that rhythm you can start to go "Gee, I need action to happen now" and know where to put it. Plotting has also gotten...somewhat easier. Sometimes I have a goal in mind. Sometimes I'm just writing until I figure I've gotten the end. It's not about the material, kids. Well, okay, sometimes it's about the material (coughMichealBaycough) but usually it's just about pacing, details and character development and making sure you haven't accidentally recreated Jar Jar Binks.

But there are times when I just don't want to do it. I'm writing a scene right now. Not for Starbleached the Second, but for the next Gray Prince book. And this scene is begging for a fight. In fact, it'll be "BAD CW NO COOKIE" if this scene does not end with the two characters having to run from the ravening horde. But I don't want to write this fight scene. I want to get these two characters back to the other place so that we can move on with the rest of the story. (BTW do you have any idea how hard it is to figure out how to do gunpowder in a late mideval setting? I am cheating horendeously, and if anybody has a good reason why a sodium/water reaction wouldn't work for projectile weapons, you need to speak up now. None of my research has uncovered much either way. Which actually stuns me, given how freaking spectacular that reaction is)

That said, I'm having a lot of fun with this one boys and girls. I'm playing with currency and economics--not trying to answer any questions, just...establishing a thing and then working out how people will deal with it--and now chemistry. Also a little biology. I have, for example, decided that Leythorne and his folks will be using a reindeer-analogue instead of horses as the beast of burden. Because why not? It's my book.

And I'm knitting again. I know. Riveting. I'm adapting a pattern from The Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting into a circular Pi shawl. Someday I will do things like sweaters and straight-forward squares, but Pi shawls are so freaking easy to chart. My only problem is deciding how many increases I want to do, and what the final border is going to look like. That's the other awesome thing with pi shawls. You don't have to work out the whole design before you start knitting. I am a VERY lazy designer, boys and girls.

Okay, there's your updates. Now I need to go have the bad guys chase the good ones for a couple of pages. 

And the vertigo is GONE. Not quite 100% but definately 90-95.

We interrupt this bitching to bring you...

...seven minutes of TOTAL AWESOME.



He picked up that picture and I went



How'd you react?

City of Bones: Chapter 15

At the risk of starting my THIRD religious rant in as many posts, the Random Hispanic Vampire is named Raphael. Raphael is, for lack of a better term, my favorite archangel. Should I be annoyed that this is the nearest he gets to real coverage, or actively relieved?

Anyway, last time on Suddenly Werewolf, the vampire party got crashed by a band of Random Wolves, and sadly, Jace and Clary are both still alive. The sociopathic wonder and the cardboard cut-out exposit about how vampires and werewolves are mortal enemies, and I have to ask: WHERE THE FUCK DID THIS COME FROM? Seriously. Fifteen years ago Laurel K. Hamilton didn't suck, and she was writing books were the weres and the vamps were, at worst, reluctant allies if not outright in bed together (...literally. This IS LKH after all). I was never *that* into Buffy, but I really liked Angel and the wolfies weren't hated there. But the last few years it's been vamps and wolves/lycans/therianthropes are mortal enemies. It even reared its ugly head at the eleventh hour in Breaking Dawn of all places. WHY. WHY IS THIS A THING?

Wait. Cassandra Clare book. Right.

Okay, so back to "Random Collection of Shiny Object Plot Things", Jace explains that this is bad, something must have HAPPENED to make the wolves arrive at this moment in time, and that they are about to be in a war.

...something might happen in this book? Seriously?!?

So then a wolf shape-shifts and says that they came for Clary.

OF COURSE THEY DID. This whole book REVOLVES around Clary. Nothing would happen in this book that DOESN'T have something directly to do with her. You remember my rules about a Mary Sue? She can solve the plot, but she doesn't start it. The problems should not revolve around her little tiny life.

Of course the vamps do not say "Sure, take her with our compliments, and make sure you eat the rat too" like any sane creature would, having been stuck in the same room as Clary Frey. Rather, they decide to keep her, and a fight breaks out.

The sound of the fight is described like this:

The noise was like nothing Clary had ever heard. If Bosch’s paintings of hell had come with a soundtrack, they would have sounded like this.

We need to have Intellectual Pretense Bingo Cards. This item would go in the corner. Also in a corner are Clary and Jace, who are not participating in this fight at all, and who also are not running. If werewolves had tried to steal me from werewolves, I'd be running.

Simon, being brighter than the main cast all rolled up together, spots a door behind the drapes and runs for it. Clary and Jace follow the rat, because that's what our heroes do. A wolf follows them and Clary, who has never thrown a knife in her life, manages to nail the wolf with one of Jace's knives on her very first try. I guess somebody pointed out that Clary has done fuck all for over half of this book, but it's way too late to salvage her as a character by now.

So while the incredibly badass end to Breaking Dawn  2 (the whole movie is kind of worth the last twenty minutes, I'm not kidding) happens behind a closed door, Clary and Jace get to sneak down a shaky staircase. It's rickety. It's rotten. It shakes a little when they step on it. Then the door gets broken down by one side or the other, and they flee quickly, with as little  as one hundred feet between them and the bad guys. But they need it, because Jace is going to steal one of the screams-of-the-damned motorcycles. She sees the vampires as they leave, though, surrounded by werewolves. So there is that.

Meanwhile, Clary and Jace flirt on the motor cycle.

There was a battle between werewolves and vampires BEHIND us, and we have flirting instead. RIVETING, boys and girls. RIVETING!

Also, Clary has never flown on an airplane.

Yo, Clare? You can have your heroine be innocent and sweet, but look...she's mainstreamed in the modern world, and she's never been in a real fight, she's never thrown a weapon--and nice move there Mom--she's never flown in an airplane, and she's never been in a church. Why not just tattoo "I AM A VIRGIN" on her forehead and get it OVER with.

(Oh god it just occured to me...this is probably one of the scenes C&Ped from the Draco Trilogy, isn't it? I bet it is...)

Of course, when the sun rises the bike conks out, and we have Obligatory Falling Scene. Simon is magically returned to humanity and he and Clary share a loving embrace...that Jace witnesses. The last sentence in the chapter is Jace turning sharply away "As if the sun hurt his eyes."

aww. You made Appleblossum puke.Buckle up boys and girls. The romance is about to get hardcore.

City of Bones: A rant on religion

You know, sometimes I am AMAZED by what pisses me off. I am still freaking steaming over the stupid I read yesterday, and I keep thinking of things I wish I'd brought up during that rant. So now, kids, you're gonna get it full force. A full on, no holds barred, profanity laden rant on how FUCKING STUPID Cassandra Clare's treatment of religion is. And it's gonna be brutal. How brutal?

Loki made popcorn. So to refresh your memory, Clary and Jace are raiding a church for weaponry to fight vampires with, because every religion has demons in it, so every religion keeps weapons around. Never mind that of the three religions mentioned in this chapter (Christianity, Judiasm and Shinto) Two of them are founded on the same material, and one grew out of the other one. What about Islam, Clare? Do they keep holy water and throwing stars in mosques, too? What about the pagan revivals going on right now? Do the hard core Gardnerian Wiccans have rose scented holy water? Does it make a difference if the weapons are blessed to the Lord or to the Lady?

And then it comes out that Jace doesn't even believe in this shit, because "If there is a God, he just doesn't care." First off, that's the fucked up creed of anybody with a bad Daddy. Or, to quote the (possibly) late, lamented Tyler Durden:

Our fathers are our models for God. If our fathers abandon us, what does that say about God?

Yeah. He said it better than Jace ever could. Before you start doing heart-felt soul seeking, work out your daddy issues so they don't get in the way. Second, the reason God might not be very nice to you, Jace, might be because you're a self centered cold hearted bigoted murdering sociopath, and kindness won't be your wake up call. Just a suggestion.

But there is a deeper issue here, my friends. Yesterday I wrote that Clare might feel the need to write her novels to be as all-inclusive as possible, avoiding any possible stepping on any possible toes, so that every audience can enjoy her Harry Potter rip-off without shame. But with that one chapter she managed to crush everybody's ten little piggies in one fell swoop, except maybe a special brand of privileaged morons who don't know any better.

Oh yes, blog fans. I thought I could avoid and ignore that oh, so commonly dragged out word, "privelage", most commonly applied to the ass end of "white", because we white  folk get everything easy. And I'm not saying that sarcastically. As a white person and a Christian, I've got a healthy privelage going for me. And if I hadn't added a couple fun wrinkles to my personal theology (long story) I probably wouldn't understand a goddamn thing about how bigoted religion can be.

But let's step away from religion for a second and talk about race. Why? Well, I'm reading this book right now. It is a disgustingly awful, terrible, and yet wonderfully bad thing called Save the Pearls. The subtitle is, Revealing Eden, and it's supposed to be a trilogy, but if the author publishes the second one she's got bigger balls than a tom-cat. See, in the book, the white people? are the downtrodden and oppressed. The black people? Rule the world. And the white people are called "Pearls" while the black people are called "Coals". Yes, boys and girls. The book is literally titled "Save the white folk." And the point of the book is that we all need to be colorblind. We all need to realize that everyone is the same, and if we can come to a universe of homogeneity and oneness, then everybody will be at peace and harmony.

Basically, we're waiting for Jasmine from Angel to show up.

The problem is, once you dig a little deeper the message is not "We must all be one" but rather "Just shut the fuck up and lose the differences that make me uncomfortable." It's "Don't be different, don't think about differences, and while you're at it, forget about everything bad that ever happened to you, every triumph you gained and defeat you suffered, because I'm tired of thinking about how shitty I was to you. Get over it."
 
It is entirely possible to take something, divorce it from its history (an angel, the Nephilum, consecrated ground) and use it as a sock puppet to parrot your own POV to the universe. It's possible to do that, but it's wrong. Because first, by ignoring the history of the shiny object you've just picked up, you're making yourself look like a moron. Second, it pisses people off.

It's not like I don't like books that refuse to treat my religion with kid gloves. There are books that I love that acknowledge Christianity has issues (Mercedes Lackley's Bedlam's Bard series, for example) There are books that do scary things to theology (To Rein in Hell by Steve Brust) and there are stories that are just beautiful things. Neil Gaiman told a wonderful story involving pagan gods (American Gods. If you have not read it yet I will disown you until you do) and even he took time to acknowledge Christianity's source material. It was one paragraph involving Jesus having to hitchhike through the middle east, I think, but it was an "Okay, this is here, we acknowledge his place in the framework of our universe, let's get back to the story now"  moment that added to the realism of what he was doing. And I remember it because, like everything else in that story, it was profoundly beautiful.

This is not that. This is "Hey, we're in a Christian church borrowing Christian artifacts consecrated to the Christian God, our home base is in a Christian church consecrated to the Christian God, but we won't mention His name or his Son's name even once."



  "And hey, let's make it better. Let's ask for entry into His church in the name of our organization and cause, rather than his own, and let's shit all over the very concept of his existence and benevolence while we're getting the weapons we're going to depend on during the next battle. This is absolutely smart and badass for us to do."



" And hey, in the spirit of Political Correctness, let's add that All Religions Are One before we go off to kill the vampires. That way NOBODY will be offended!"




 And on the name front: For Fuck's sake, Clare, you could at least have used the Tetragrammaton. In fact, given the "vastness" of the occult practices you're drawing on here (and that's kind of sarcastic, here) I'm surprised that you didn't, given that many, many MANY magical systems at least ACKNOWLEDGE the power of the name of God. YHVH, Clare. Look it up. 

"All Religions Are One" is the same kind of bullshit as "Colorblind". No. All religions are not one. All religions may be equally valid--even if you can't believe that due to your religion's rules, you can at least acknowledge the possibility that you might be wrong and respect the other religions as if they ARE equal, because you are a decent human being who respects the rights and beliefs of others, even when yours says they're wrong. Odds are, theirs says you are wrong too. But you do NOT go out there and say that all religions are the same damn thing. You don't say that Jesus is Buddha is Krishna is Odin because one, that makes no fucking sense and two, it denies the fullness of each individual. It denies the mythology, the cultural baggage, the beauty of the liturgy, the stillness of meditation. It denies that there might be a reason why someone would choose Odin over Jesus or Buddha, or Jesus over the other two. Many terrible things have been done in the name of Christ. I'll be the first to admit it. So have many beautiful things. Other religions have also done terrible and beautiful things. One of my favorite stories about Islam is how a Muslem neighborhood stood guard over a Christian church on Christmas day, just so the extremists in the neighborhood wouldn't hurt them. That's not "All religions are one". That's "You're different and I am different, but we are both human beings and we both deserve to stand before our Gods in our own way without fear or shame because that's the right thing to do." In other words:

FYI I have been waiting three months for an excuse to use this macro.

The way to fix the world isn't to erase religion. The way to fix the world isn't to erase race. The way to fix the world is to fix the people, so that it doesn't matter if you are a hindu or a buddhist or a Hutu or a Tutsi, you are a human being and you deserve respect, and that respect had better damn well include respect for the differences between you and me that make you who you are. 

And just because you happen to come from a dominant group does not give you the right to say "we must all become the same to be equal." No. You make me your equal, I make you my equal. So take one sentence in your stupid book to at least acknowledge that my religion exists. Hey, Loki, you got anything you want to say to Cass while we're at it?
Thank you.

Have a good night.

Oh, and TFT is free today and tomorrow. We're at #52 on the fantasy-epic Kindle list. Whoot. Go get a copy.