This is one of my favorite sentences and has been since I was a child. When I was a child, I didn’t quite understand it (and some days I think I still don’t), but it resonated with me deeply until I was old enough to at least grasp the intellectual concept. (Some of the best things I’ve ever read/heard come from a subconscious wisdom that it took chemical enhancement to drag kicking and screaming into the light, but what the hell, right?)
I still draw on it for strength and encouragement fairly often, at least once a week. I don’t have it posted anywhere; I don’t need to.
Go ahead. Be brave. Pony up with your guiding maxims.
I have a bunch of beautiful books. They’re mostly in hardback because I don’t see paperbacks as objets d’art the way I do my hardback books. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I read hardbacks, certainly. If I have it, I read it. But there’s just something substantial about a hardback book. Specifically, I’m thinking of my faux leatherbound books, but no matter.
As I go around the ebook blogs like Teleread and The Book is Dead, a bunch of dissociated rememberies from my childhood plague me. They’re always the same ones, played in different order, but in a loop:
Remembery #1.
The mp3 player was only a Wish when I was a child (think 1970s) with my little panda transistor radio barely capable of tuning in the jazz station, but playing disco just fine and dandy. Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat, baby. Rock the boat, don’t tip the boat over.
I had my Wish in my mind like a jukebox, playing all the songs I loved and none of the songs I didn’t love, all in one place, in the palm of my hand. Even as I got older, I couldn’t afford to buy albums and then, once I got a “boom box,” couldn’t afford to buy cassettes, either. I taped random songs off the radio and tried my best to come up with as clean a version as a K-Tel compilation cassette as I could. It didn’t work and my wish became a longing so intense sometimes I couldn’t bear it. Then I got a Walkman, which was a step up, but my ADD/OCD could not be happy. Why, oh why, was there no way to buy a song at a time? What would that look like? How could it be done?
My Wish: a jukebox in my hand, with all the songs I loved and none of the songs I hated, with the ability to purchase one song at a time.
Remembery #2.
Dark house post family bedtime. Flashlight. Book. Covers. You all know this routine. For my mother, it was hiding in the back of a closet. With a flashlight. And a book. Why didn’t my book come with a light? You know, something handy, that I could clip onto it? That way I didn’t have to give my flashlight a blow job every time I had to turn the page.
Remembery #3.
Jean-Luc Picard sitting in his cabin reading a hardback book. To me, this was nothing until a crew member questioned him. Wesley, maybe? I can’t remember. Too young to know what a hardback book with paper pages was. To Picard, it was an antique. To Wesley, it was a novelty.
DISCLAIMER: I didn’t watch Star Trek much. Not the original, not the Next Generation, not Voyager, or many of the spinoffs (although I actually enjoyed Deep Space 9 because everybody on that show had serious faults and weren’t a bunch of Mary Sues and Gary Stus running around knowing how to deal with every situation). This is why my remembering an STNG episode is so…exceptional. And it had to do with a book and what must have happened to books to evoke the reaction Picard’s hardback paper book evoked.
eBookwise reader
Something that could store a library in one spot? Like my dream of a jukebox in my hand. Could it be? A library in my hand?
Don’t get me wrong. At that point, I was old enough to know it could be done, but I wasn’t getting my hopes up because the jukebox in my hand hadn’t materialized yet or if it had, I didn’t know about it.
You have to know something about me that makes my need for such things a compulsion (you know, besides my mental disorders): I am an anti-packrat. I hate Stuff. I have Stuff I don’t hate, really, but if it can be condensed, packed, and stored out of sight until I need it, so I can have SPACE, I am more kindly disposed toward Stuff. (Oh, Space Bags, how I would love thee if every blanket we own weren’t in use because it’s as cold as a witch’s tit outside.) I don’t like knickknacks, either. And as I get older, the Mies van der Rohe school of architecture (mid-century modern) gets more and more attractive to me.
The only things I collect and store without driving my OCD/ADD batty is data. And mp3s. And now, ebooks.
(I like lots of art, though, so as soon as the Tax Deductions stop coloring on the walls, I’ll paint and put up my art. It’s difficult to deal with the child who writes her name on the wall and then blames her little brother, who doesn’t know how to read, much less write.)
I haven’t quite figured out how to go completely minimalist, given the life of a family and its needs for Stuff.
But the jukebox-and-library in hand is a good start.
I said something in my little rant the other day that’s stuck with me: The book is the art.
To me, Harry Potter’s fabulous because it’s a whole experience. The cover art and the story work together. It’s got color, movement, focus, texture. You’re sitting there in your reading chair on a cold day (possibly snowing), drinking hot chocolate, bundled up with this heavy hardback book in your hands.
Your head’s in the story. Your eyes are seeing the specialized fonts in the header and the brilliant colors of the edge of the binding. Every once in a while, your eyes get a treat in the form of a graphic buried in the text denoting handwritten notes that give you a sense of intimacy with the events that you don’t get with typesetting. Your arms feel the weight of good storytelling. Your fingertips brush the dust jacket and feel the texture of the thick mottled matte paper, they pinch heavy paper between them and turn the pages.
I have a leatherbound edition of Alice in Wonderland. It, too, is an experience, with a little bit of the feel of age. Deckle edges are the best.
I can tell you all the usual reasons I decided to publish independently, and give you another half dozen reasons why Dude enthusiastically encouraged me to do so (the biggest being that he has faith in my work). But after my little temper tantrum, it occurred to me that there was one other reason I really hadn’t thought about much:
The whole book is the art. I had a vision for my book, the series. Even when I was sending out queries galore, I had a vision and I’ll tell you, I was vaguely depressed to think that even if I got The Call, someone else was going to take my vision and put his own spin on it—and he may or may not give a fat rat’s ass what I want or what I see. That’s not to say a graphic artist wouldn’t have done better than I could have and surpassed my vision by light years. It’s simply that I would have no control over it, a little input that might or might not be taken into account, and perhaps no veto power, especially if he was up against a deadline. This is not a client-vendor relationship between the author and the artist.
Interior design is a relative static: You design so as to make the reader unaware of your design. You don’t give him a headache, you don’t wear his eyeballs out. In short, as Zoe put it, you don’t piss him off.
I can give no advice with regard to other indies and how they handle cover design. All I’m saying is that I’m a very visual person and for me, the story is not the art.
CD #2 was Tina Malia’s Lullaby Favorites. That lasted about 3 months.
She wanted the Nutcracker next (took her to the ballet last Christmas), but I couldn’t find my CD. (Must be in another case somewhere—I hate it when that happens.)
So we’ve been on CD #3 now for about a week and a half. It’s just one of those compilation samplers of baroque (you know, the musical equivalent of the bathroom book of quotations to make you seem really smart at cocktail parties).
She says to me, she says, “Mama, there’s a springtime song!”
Oh, really? I mean, I know which one she’s probably talking about, but where/how does she know it’s the “springtime song”? Did she learn that at school? (Cause, wow, great school!) Or does it just magically say “Hey, I’m a springtime song” to a kindergartner?
So she’s on me about this, right? Tonight I turn on her “lullabies” (she had a meltdown when I told her it was really called “baroque,” so we’re back to “lullabies”) and she says to me, she says, “Number 9 is the springtime song.” So I look and why, yes, it is, right there, #9. I asked her a bunch of questions about how she knew this (well, I guess interrogated would be a better word), but she didn’t cough anything up.
I decided to go on the theory that a 5-year-old, when listening to Vivaldi’s Concerto No. 1, automatically knows that that’s the springtime song.
Because to think otherwise would take away the magic.
I have an addictive personality and for years, I lived by the motto: If a little’s good, a lot’s gotta be better. It’s taken me years to get that pounded out of me. There are only 3 things where, as Madonna put it, “any number is fine with me/as long as it’s more”:
sex
money
books
And there are 2 things I have learned, to my everlasting detriment, where less is best:
salt (way to ruin a perfectly grilled slab of cow)
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
See, Christmas for me usually starts in late September/early October, when the autumn rains start and the leaves begin to mat on the ground. Well, this year, the autumn rains are coming early (though the leaves haven’t even begun to whisper that they’re going to turn). The first sign I’m getting itchy? I crack out the Christmas carols. Okay, so I’m a bit ahead of schedule right now, but then I decided to do a bit of Mom Stuff (that would be mending) and went digging for the Rudolph DVD.
The Tax Deductions don’t appreciate Rudolph for the wonder and magic that he is and I have to admit, in September, there’s not much magic there for me, either.
The magic of Rudolph, I’ve discovered, is in knowing that it will be shown on X date, probably early December, on CBS at X time and if you miss it, you’re just shit out of luck and you have to wait until next year.
I read a lot of Neal Stephenson’s stuff and the only thing he’s written that I cautiously suspect might possibly could be classified steampunk is Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, but I still don’t know if that makes it steampunk because it’s set in the future with Victorian aesthetics instead of in Victoriana with modern technology. (Great book, BTW, but I really really liked The Big U.)
I’ve been meaning to get into it (really!), especially after looking at sites such as Steampunk Workshop and Kit Stolen’s site (and oh, isn’t he a beautiful man; you know I had to make a character out of him).
But this limits me because to me, steampunk is eye candy, as in goods: Pretty clothes and pretty things and gorgeous textures–all DIY. I mean, really. Look at this stuff. It begs caressment.
And oh, various steampunk keyboards are for sale at Datamancer, FYI.
Anyway, I’ve been reading a short story by Eva Gale, which is post-apocalyptic for one and steampunk for two (steam engines? of course it is). The story is from Phaze anthology Fantasy IV and is called “Scorpion’s Orchid.” And now my appetite for steampunk fiction is whet and I want more, but SF/F is a foreign land to me. Obviously, I’m going to take suggestions off of Steampunk Workshop’s site, but help me out here, folks. Good steampunk (with or without utopian/dystopian elements) suggestions being solicited.
Well, so I’ve been through the whole “LDS fiction” genre discussion here and here and here.
But not here. I’m not late to the party, as I’ve been stewing about this for a while, but the LA Times article gave me something else to throw in the stew pot. Read more →
Awhile back, there was a discussion going on over at Six LDS Writers and a Frog about architecture. Why that is going on on a writer’s blog by a permablogger there who makes no connection to literature that I can see (I kid because I love), I do not know.
My first full-on real-life romance novel was Shanna by Kathleen Woodiwiss. Naturally, it’s on my keeper shelf right next to The Wolf and the Dove. I have the ones with the original covers, though they are far from mint. The namby pamby covers on the ones with the links are meh. Unlike most of my contemporaries whose first (or close to it) romance experience was Woodiwiss, mine wasn’t with The Flame and the Flower or Ashes in the Wind, neither of which I cared for.
But she’s not my guilty pleasure.
It’s Carole Mortimer of Harlequin Presents circa 1979 through, oh, I guess around 1986.
This morning I’m listening to Simply Red (flashbacks from freshman year at BYU) and the song “Money’s Too Tight to Mention” is a good song. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t have it in my library.
It also trashes things I believe in. Does it bother me? On some visceral level, yes, but that doesn’t make it difficult for me to listen to it and it certainly doesn’t keep me from listening. I’d miss a whole lot of good music (and that voice!) if I took umbrage at other people’s opinions and the way they state them (usually the way they state them is more off-putting than what they say).
So it started me thinking about how I read fiction,
My husband and I went to see Rush last night. We had AWESOME seats.
There were two age demographics: late 30s and up and … their kids. The youngest I saw was sevenish, but if there was anybody there between the ages of mom-and-dad-forced-me-to-come and 30, I didn’t see them.
It was the most sedate audience of a hard-rockin’ concert I’ve ever been to, but then, most all of us were old and fat. No matter. By halfway through the second half I was ready to get laid.
that he didn’t already have.
