So many words.

It’s been a long week; heavy on the editing, light on the writing, with Thursday being a sick day.

I’ve started reading The Thousand Names, by Django Wexler. I’ve also started putting more of a dent in my magazine backlog, which is kind of huge. And it’s going to get bigger in the next five days, when September’s issues come in. And I have a copy of Fran Wilde’s Updraft on pre-order.

(…and I look at all this and I think oh, goodness.)

My morning glory has continued growing enthusiastically despite the fact that its stem has been broken clear through. It’s put out six flowers in the last week, and grown at least a foot of vines. I’m somewhat bewildered by this, but really, it can’t keep doing this for much longer, can it?

The flowers are getting smaller, at any rate. And paler. But the stem below the break is putting out new leaves, and I’m hoping that I’ll get some new climbing vines before it stops growing. It’s odd to think that it’s nearly September, and October’s just around the corner. I need to start looking up what to do to take care of the garden plants over the winter. (The foxgloves haven’t flowered this year, but I’m hopeful for 2016.)

I am thinking I might need to add a gardening tag, if I keep struggling with the plants.

“I have something to give you. I don’t want it anymore.”

Poster for the 1994 movie The Crow.Last week (I meant to ramble about this earlier, but it’s been a somewhat hectic Thursday-evening-through-weekend), I was talking to a friend about movies, and she mentioned that she’d not only see The Wrath of Khan, she’d snuck out of school to see it when it opened in the theatres. Twice.

I never did that[1], but I was thinking about a movie that I went to see six times in the first month or so after it opened in the theatres[2], and that is The Crow. Murder, revenance[3], rain, fire, revenge, poetry quoted and lines spoken; I loved that movie so very much, and even writing about it now has some of the dialogue chiming around my head and I am smiling.

But I could never remember the ending. I mean, I remembered Sarah being kidnapped, I remembered the fight in the church, I remembered the scene with Shelley at the end. But I never remembered what Eric did to beat Top Dollar. It just went right out of my mind, which I suppose is nice in that it made the fight much tenser, since I wasn’t sure how he was possibly going to survive that.

And it’s odd, to forget that. Because it’s a deeply satisfying moment, in its way.

Same with The Shining–not the movie, this time, but the book. I remember the ending; you will remember what your father forgot, the boiler, the capering figure before the flames. But for the first few years I read it–during which I’m guessing I read it at least three times–I never remembered the scene where Jack smashed his own face with the roque mallet, and what looked out was the Overlook Motel.

In its own way, that’s as pivotal a scene to The Shining as Eric inflicting Shelley’s pain is to The Crow; the one is an extremely visceral representation of the effects of the haunted house, the other’s an encapsulation of revenge that is inarguably earned and was explicitly justified by the target not seven seconds earlier. They could have been written out, but it’s hard to imagine them being replaced by anything that would be better suited to the story.

So I’m honestly puzzled as to why I couldn’t remember them. I first read The Shining when I was eleven or twelve, and I guess it’s possible that I just had trouble grasping the concretization of such an abstract concept, but that makes no sense in the context of The Crow. I was older, and the concept there is a lot less abstract.

And of course, now I’m wondering if there are other things that I’ve forgotten the same way, blanked out after multiple readings or viewings. I suppose I couldn’t tell, which is rather annoying. (I’m guessing I’m not the only person who has these blank spots, but I’m also guessing that other people with these blank spots don’t necessarily share mine. Which makes em even more curious about what causes them, I think.)

[1] Off the top of my head, I am an extremely boring person, and the only school-related movie incident I can recall is when I got so many demerits for staying up reading after lights-out at boarding school that I was grounded and could not go see Bram Stoker’s Dracula the one day it was playing.
[2] The sixth time, my dad went with me and said I wasn’t old enough to see it again. It seems like it would be kind of a moot point by then, but moving on.
[3] This is now a word.

Tiny silver skulls, and old griffins in the cold.

Beasts of TabatBeasts of Tabat by Cat Rambo

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(Full disclosure: I’ve taken writing classes from Cat. That said, I have liked her work since before I knew to even recognize her name–may I recommend the lovely Events at Fort Plentitude, which I first read in Weird Tales–and I think my review fairly reflects the fact that, dammit, she’s good.)

Short summary: this is a secondary-world fantasy primarily set in the great strange port city of Tabat, which is about to have the Duke step down and hold elections. It revolves around two characters: Teo, a young country boy indentured into servitude at the temple of the Moons, and Bella Kanto, the gladiator whose unbroken string of triumphs in the annual Winter-vs-Spring battle have led to twenty years of long winters and late springs.

(This isn’t a children’s book, by the way. In case anyone was wondering. It’s not gratuitous, but my niephlets aren’t going to be getting this one for a few more years.)

I was expecting a straight-up secondary world fantasy–an adventure, or what you’d traditionally call a romance. There is some of that here; I think you see it most strongly in Teo. But there’s more life than there is just adventure, if that makes sense.

Second, a lot of the fantasy adventures I mentioned are about solving a problem. Beasts of Tabat is so much more than this. There are problems, yes, and some of them get resolved, but this is not a book where the Tour goes around collecting Plot Coupons and applying them to a Clearly Defined Problem. This is coming into a world in flux–on a personal level, a professional level, a social level, a magical level–and watching it turn into something new and wonderful.

(This is perhaps an excellent time to remind people of the origins of words such as “wonderful”, “fantastic”, and “terrific”. Terry Pratchett said it best.)

I think this works because of the attention paid to the characters and the small details. There’s Bella Kanto and Teo, but the characters moving around them and affected by them (I’m particularly engaged by Eloquence Seaborn and Leonoa, but you can take your pick) feel so distinct that those two feel pleasantly more like windows to the world than heroes in it. (I grant Bella Kanto is of heroic stature, but it’s not because of how she’s framed in the text.)

The growing unrest, the prejudice against the Beasts, the changes coming–this is the kind of thing that could get handwaved into a simple didactic dichotomy, and instead the depiction of what living in a world like this is like makes it interesting and involving. I am having opinions about this world, dammit, and I love it.

(There are several other stories set in Tabat, which are listed at the bottom of the page here; I’ve read half a dozen of them, and am going to go read more now that I’ve finished the novel. Just figured I should mention (1) you don’t need to have read them and (2) they’re worth checking out.)

I want to see where this goes. I need to see how it comes out. And it will be wonderful.

Getting sorted.

Not entirely comfortable with how quiet I’ve been this month; going to try and work on that.

Things I’ve been thinking about, and will probably attempt to ramble about in a more coherent fashion over the next month:

  • Superheroic powers as magical realism.
  • Uplifting TV shows. (This is mostly me trying to figure out what exactly it takes to make a show qualify as one. Being funny isn’t enough, and being constructive isn’t enough.)
  • Timing and scheduling, I guess? I’ve started work, and it seems to be going well, but I need to get back on top of my time schedule.
  • Cracked. It’s a police procedural that has a unit where police officers (one of whom is dealing with PTSD-related issues) are teamed with mental health professionals. It’s sort of ridiculously kind. (I was extremely suspicious of this as a conceit, and its execution has kinda smit me.)
  • Days. I actually haven’t talked at all about James Lovegrove’s Days ever here, I think. It is a lovely, strange, funny, and rather weird novel about a day in Days, the world’s first and (provisionally) foremost megastore.
  • Which might actually let me cycle back to “Evening Primrose”, and assorted other fiction with the conceit of “let’s all go live in the shopping mall”.

Counting ink.

It is late, and everyone is discussing 2014. With my habit of getting bogged down in quantifiable minutiae, I am therefore posting about my reading and writing this year.

In 2014, I aimed for 80 books and finished 95, covering a total of 24421 pages.

I was also trying to aim for gender parity in my reading, and I failed. Overall the split was 38:14:43 (the numbers representing female authors:authors of non-binary or unspecified gender, or multi-authored works with a gender mix, or anthologies:male authors, respectively).

  • one was non-fiction. This low number isn’t surprising; I tend to dip in and out of non-fiction works, rather than read them end to end, and I don’t count RPG books as non-fiction. 1:0:0
  • eighteen were short standalones (stories or novellas); most were ebooks, although I did get four in print, including copies of Bob Leman’s “Instructions” and Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light. 9:1:8
  • sixteen were anthologies! Unsurprising, as anthologies are generally my favourite kind of book to pick up. 2:13:1; the first two were Two of the Deadliest and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women, and the last one was The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack.
    (I ran across two other Mythos anthologies this year which only featured male authors, earning Mythos anthologies the distinction of being the only genre of anthology I’ve learned I need to check when I’m tracking gender in my reading, as I clearly can’t assume they’ll actually have a gender mix. A++ Nyarlathotep, carry on. You jackass.)
  • fourteen were collections of stories by a single author (including one of the graphic novels, since the Jonah Hex collection felt more episodic than any of the others). 6:0:8
  • three were RPG sourcebooks. 0:0:3
  • five were game-related fiction: two Wasteland standalones, two Deadlands Noir standalones, and one Pinebox, Texas (now… re-mastered, I guess? as East Texas University) anthology. 0:1:4
  • eight were graphic novels. 0:0:8
    Yes, really. And I thought Mythos anthologies were bad. If you count the writer and the artist as co-authors, that changes to 0:1:7, and my overall stats become 38:15:42
  • twenty-five were ebooks; I read more of these towards the end of the year, and suspect I will read more in 2015. Cheers for a tablet and a new ereader. 11:2:12
  • thirty-seven were novels. 20:0:17

Four of the books I read I five-starred on Goodreads, which is a rating a reserve for books that I think people should read even if they usually pass over that genre (The Last Unicorn, The Inheritance and Other Stories, Save Yourself, and Strong Female Protagonist). 2:0:2, or 2:1:1 if you count writer and artist as co-authors.

Four of them I two-starred, which means I did not hate them but pretty much stopped enjoying them and ground on to see if they would get better. If they had, I would have rated them higher.

And the oldest book I read this year was Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light, first published in 1952.

I also submitted stories 34 times, and got 31 rejections (although one of those rejections came in for a story I submitted in 2013, so you can say I only got 30 2014 rejections. This does not mean I got four acceptances, but it does mean I am expecting at least four rejections next year. 😉 ) I am slightly embarrassed by how little I wrote; my yearly wordcount hit five digits, but not six.

Happy New Year! See you on the other side.

The glass is half full. Of phosphors.

There's nothing creepy about butterflies, right?
There’s nothing creepy about butterflies, right?

I have had a long day in a few respects, so I am coping by accentuating the positive. Onwards!

After making plans, and waiting for several months (I mean, not many several months; the kind of several months that could also be a few months), I have gotten a tablet. It has a ten-inch-and-change screen, and I am really pleased with it. It occupies a niche closer to a smartphone than a laptop, for me; WiFi only, and not something I expect to do a lot of typing on.

That said, it is better for browsing on than a smartphone (due to the screen size), good for playing light games, and much better for reading on.

I’ve found that if I’m going to e-read (that is a verb, right?), I prefer relatively short pieces of fiction; magazines and anthologies work for me, as do standalone stories and individual issues of comics. Usually I’ve used my Kobo for this; it’s light and fairly durable, has great battery life, and it’s easy to read in direct sunlight. But the eInk screen has a regrettable tendency of freezing in -20C weather or lower (making waiting at bus stops extremely boring), the resolution is fairly low, it doesn’t handle images or zooming very well, and… well, not to be shallow, but it’s in greyscale.

There are certain aspects of the e-reading experience that are not well-served by 800 x 600 resolution in 16-level greyscale.

(By the way, I am kind of loving Cat Rambo’s stories, and her covers for same; I think my favourite so far is Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart, but since I am not sure how to pull that cover out of my Kindle app, I am tossing up the one for Jaco Tours.)

I need to be careful to stop using the tablet a while before I turn in (backlit screens before bed don’t improve my sleeping any), but it’s really made it a lot easier to get drawn into some of the stories I’ve been collecting. And since I have an upcoming trip (although not to Costa Rica, where Jaco Tours is set), I expect I will be getting a lot of reading in. I look forward to this.

Coming in fast, because music.

I mean, look at this cover.
I mean, look at this cover.

Because rock’n’roll.

It’s been a really stressful few weeks, and I haven’t been saying much. (I got bitten by a German Shepherd last month, did I mention? Stupid owner.) I’ve been low on time and low on energy, but I ran across something and thought I should mention:

I ran into The Truth of Rock and Roll. (Scroll down.)

I’ve been tired enough that it’s been easy to drop onto TV Tropes and let it eat my attention and my time for fifteen, twenty minutes at a stretch (which is really longer than I’d like right now), and I wandered onto the page for The Truth of Rock and Roll, and…

At first I thought it sounded twee. But the tropes page mentioned a shout-out to that much-loved-by-me Walter-Hill-scored-by-Jim-Steinman this-is-where-the-80s-gets-kidnapped-by-the-70s-and-saved-by-the-50s heartsong of a movie Streets of Fire, and mentioned it was serialized on the author’s blog. And I figured, well, I’d take a quick look. Blogs are easier for me to read than ebooks, and if it’s serialized it’ll have natural breaking points, won’t take up too much time.

(It starts here, by the way. Five parts.)

Take a look.

Depressurizing

Over the last few years, I’ve been making an effort to log more of my reading on GoodReads. (Lately I’ve also been looking at BookLikes, but that is a bit of an aside.) A fair bit of the stuff I read isn’t already on GoodReads, or has incomplete records there–authors are missing from anthologies, cover photos aren’t provided for books, standalone stories or small epubbed collections aren’t in the system. Usually I grumble about this a little and correct it.

(Someday I’m going to put all the old Hell on Earth stuff into a proper series list, oh yes. Organized by publication number and everything.)

Since I’ve been commuting a lot lately, I’ve been reading a lot more epubs–picking up some old stuff, picking up some new. And one of the things read earlier this week was a collection of draft stories and partials that you could get being a sponsor during the Clarion West Write-a-thon last year.

It’s not for distribution, which is fine; it is something which does not belong in GoodReads at all.

And it feels so weirdly good to read something that I don’t have to track.

(I mean, I don’t have to track what I read in GoodReads, of course. But it’s become an ingrained habit now, and the yearly challenges have a gamified appeal.)

I suspect this is exacerbated because I’m a bit stressed at the moment, and have a lot of things going on. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind, and perhaps I will clear myself a block of time when I can just read and give myself permission to not document it. I am already behind on reviews of books that really deserve it (can I just mention This Strange Way of Dying, which really needs more love), and I don’t imagine it would help with that. But at the same time writing reviews is actually pretty hard for me, and I think the breathing room–official self-given breathing room, rather than falling-behind-and-not-doing it–might feel lovely.

Disposal and decluttering

I have a fair number of books. (I’ve met people with more, so I don’t say I have a lot of books–I think it’s still under two thousand.) Occasionally, I go through my books and either garage-sale or give away ones I’ve decided I don’t care to keep. It took a fairly long time to come to terms with being someone who would get rid of books (a digression for another time), but it feels good to have the clutter gone, and to know that the books are not being kept in a place where they are not being read.

I can’t do this with ebooks. Rather, I have not yet figured out how to do this with ebooks.

Overwhelmingly, the way I get ebooks is through a service–Kobo, Smashwords, Weightless Books, emagazine subscription, DriveThruRPG, what-have-you–which requires me to create an account. The ebooks I own are associated with that account; if my computer explodes or if my ereader is run over by a stampeding moose, I can log in to my account from another computer and get fresh copies of said ebooks.

This makes it fairly hard to get rid of them.

I don’t want to give them away when I still own copies. I sometimes don’t have the option of not owning copies; it’s actually fairly frustrating to try and figure out how or if I can move something into a “yes I own this, stop reminding me” category and then duplicate that in Calibre, when I need to juggle scripting permissions to even log in (Kobo, I am looking at you), although a lot of the services are getting better about that.

I appreciate that ebooks don’t take up physical space. I do. But they’re still potential clutter, and if I am looking at a pile of badly sorted, unclearly organized, occasionally unwanted books, then my situation is not actually substantially better because the pile exists on a screen.

 

I didn’t read Heinlein.

Not the edition I would have picked up in the bookshop.
Not the edition I would have picked up in that bookshop.

Okay, that’s a lie. I read a Heinlein novel during a university course on science fiction. It was Starship Troopers, and it was contrasted with Haldeman’s Forever War. And I may have read part of The Puppet Masters, but since I only remember a bit about how some clothing (hats? coats? tops?) was being outlawed, it is more probable that I just picked it up at the neighbourhood secondhand bookstore and read a few pages. I liked to hang around the SF section and do that sometimes, and it’s left me with an eclectic collection of snippets–that bit, something about a Doctor Who novelization in which a villain had attached a canister of horrible mutagen to Peri[1], and a rich tourist who went to the Savage Theme Park of New York and was stuck there after it was closed for the season.

(Those bits are rather vague, since I would have been between seven and eleven at the time–more than two decades ago.)

But when I was growing up, I didn’t read Heinlein.

I have been thinking, lately, about a line from Toni Weisskopf’s blog post, “The Problem of Engagement,” which runs:

Well, Heinlein is one of the few points of reference those fans who read have. Of course we all read Heinlein and have an opinion about his work. How can you be a fan and not?

I am a fan who reads; horror by first choice, yes, but I always read SF and fantasy when there wasn’t enough horror around. I have loved Worlds-That-Are-Not (or Worlds-That-Are-Not-Quite) for many many years, and I found them through books. I have been, I would have said, one of those “fans who read” for a very long time.

But I didn’t read Heinlein.

See, the first time I picked up Heinlein with a recognition of who the author was supposed to be (this name I’d heard about, seen on book spines, was told was incomparable), in the hope that I would enjoy it? I would have been about twelve; my family was in Algeria at the time, and the English fiction library we had access to was in a repurposed basement. The entirety of the genre section was a single bookshelf, and I made a heartfelt effort to go through all of it.

phantoms
This, on the other hand, is the exact edition of Phantoms I read in that library.

I’m going to digress for a moment, and talk about Dean Koontz.

I discovered Dean Koontz and Stephen King on that same bookshelf (while I’d seen a secondhand hardcover of Cujo a few years earlier, I hadn’t been allowed to read it). Dean Koontz was easier to get a hold of, and often more snappily paced, and I would guess I read a good twenty or so of his books in the next few years. I probably overdid it, and I’d occasionally joke about how I could summarize the commonalities of plot of his novels in a single sentence. I got bored with him, and quit reading. (I’m drifting back, now, but that’s another story.)

But.

When I was twelve, when I was bored and had basically no-one to talk to, when I was starving for something to read and I went through that bookcase, here is what I found in the first handful of pages:

  • The first Heinlein novel I picked up, I read about a guy watching his daughter strip her top off and being proud that she was checking with her husband instead of with him to be sure it was okay.
  • The first Koontz novel I picked up, I read about a doctor who was taking care of her little sister and who’d bluffed an evil biker gang leader[2] into believing that she was too damn scary to mess with.

Goddamn right I wasn’t interested in more Heinlein. And my take on his work is and remains “I don’t know it,” and I don’t think that’s informed or detailed enough to count as an opinion.

And when I was back in Canada… well, I met other people I could talk to about this genre thing, and we swapped recommendations, and I know some of them liked Heinlein but none of them ever made anything he’d written sound cool enough for me to bump him onto my must-read list. And then there were things like university and work and now, sad as it makes me, I don’t have the time to read that I used to. For a little while in eighth grade I was getting through five books a week. These days I’m lucky to clear eighty books a year.

It doesn’t make me happy, but I can live with that.

So when it comes to the question of

Of course we all read Heinlein and have an opinion about his work. How can you be a fan and not?

It’s not that hard. You just find other things that suit you better, and listen for things that people describe in such a way that they sound actually enjoyable, and you don’t have unlimited time.

And to that, Weisskopf wrote:

So the question arises—why bother to engage these people at all? They are not of us. They do not share our values, they do not share our culture.

I can live with that, too. And my reaction to that is much the same as my reaction when I put down Number of the Beast. I don’t have time for this, I have not seen enough to suggest I will enjoy this, and so I will leave this behind and go find something that will brighten or deepen or enrich my day.

And if that decision means I am not of your culture, that I do not share your values, I am sure we will both be much happier for it.

[1] Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work. If I recall correctly, the mutagen canister was removed from where it was attached to Peri’s belt, and was ?thrown? at the villain, where it interacted with a wooden stake he was standing near. The mutagen then worked on the wooden stake, causing it to explode outwards into a spiky lattice of stake-y wood and skewer the villain to death.
[2] I am not saying Phantoms was particularly nuanced. (Jeter, the man in question, is further developed later in the novel. I would say the development was done to add horror, not subtlety or multi-faceted characterization.)