If you haven’t read a book, don’t trash it. Your credibility is shot.
Mormon-Vampire tale blows up intrawebs
This post is for the non-Mormon readers of this blog who come from (most likely) the genre romance corner of the net.
Backstory: LDS fiction (aka Mormon fiction) is analogous to, say, what Steeple Hill puts out or any other run-of-the-mill Christian/evangelical inspirational romance. No swearing, no sex, very clean. No taking the Lord’s name in vain, no smoking, no drinking, no allusions to any of these things. For all intents and purposes, the term “LDS fiction” has come to be defined informally in the same milieu as inspirational romance category fiction.
Common sense in publishing
I was a reader long before I was a writer, and I’m still a reader more than a writer (’cause, you know, reading is a faster process than writing). So when I read Dear Author this morning, wherein Jane proceeds to give publishers advice as to how to help readers buy books and she didn’t miss a trick, I shouted hallelujah!
Kansas City: your basic geography
So the people over in Kansas City, Kansas, got a little huffy over a Jeopardy! question somewhere in the early ’90s. “Kansas City, Kansas, is a suburb of what city?” That would be Kansas City, Missouri, dingdingding.
This post is not for those who live here because we know there’s a Kansas City in Kansas and one in Missouri, too. We’re just tired of having to conduct extemporaneous geography lessons to people who think they know what they’re talking about.
Movies post-apocalyptic
Last night’s fare: I Am Legend.
I don’t watch many movies because I’m usually obsessed with the ones playing in my head, begging to be laid on paper.
But I’ll roll over for post-apocalyptic tales (oh, 12 Monkeys and Waterworld come to mind and that reminds me, why [other than Kevin Costner’s acting] is Waterworld so reviled?). I Am Legend is the best I’ve seen yet.
Book Review: Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander
Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander
by Ann Herendeen
published by Harper Paperbacks
This book, whose tagline is “A man in love with his wife and his boyfriend,” wouldn’t normally catch my eye because m/m isn’t my kink. I bought it for an entirely different reason. So now that I bought it and read it and thoroughly enjoyed myself (oooh, have you noticed this trend about what I review?), I must speak my piece.
Here we are in Regency England (and those of us in Romancelandia are more or less completely and totally comfortable in Regency England, Heyer or no Heyer) and a sodomite wishes to marry to fulfill his duty to his family name while still continuing his unabashed lifestyle. He finds the right chick, marries her, figures out he so really doesn’t mind doing her, thinks she’s refreshing and falls in love with her blahblahblah (yeah, you know how it goes), then meets the male love of his life and we all end up happily ever after in the same bed with nary a menage a trois to be had. Of course, what would a Regency romance be without a little spying here and there?
The authorial beau monde
Third person narrative: Limited, Omniscient, Objective
Third person limited, with a little modification.
According to Wikipedia (that most unassailable source), third-person limited is:
Third person limited is when the narrator is an outsider who sees into the mind of one character … In third person limited the narrator is outside of the story and tells the story from only one character’s view.
However, some authors use an even narrower and more subjective perspective, as though the viewpoint character were narrating the story; this is dramatically very similar to the first person, allowing in-depth revelation of the protagonist’s personality, but uses third-person grammar.
In my time writing novels, being in critique groups, chomped on by the creative writing professors at UMKC, this has been pounded into me as being The Correct Way To Do Things. Well, either that or first person, which has a literary cachet that is only beginning to gain ground in genre fiction.
Then there’s third person objective, which I will admit I have been confusing with third person omniscient as recently two minutes ago:
… which tells a story without detailing any characters’ thoughts and instead gives an objective point of view. This point of view can be described as “a fly on the wall” and is preferred in newspaper articles.
Then there’s third person omniscient.
Historically, the “third person omniscient” perspective was more common. This is the tale told from the point of view of the storyteller who knows all the facts. An example of this would be “little did he know” when told by that third person, such as a narrator. The primary advantage is that it injected the narrator’s own perspective and reputation into the story, creating a greater sense of objectivity for the story. The disadvantage of this mode is that it creates more distance between the reader and the story.
And the salient point to the above paragraph is this: “Currently this style is out of favor.”
Oh, ya think?
We who have been pummeled call it “head hopping.” I hate it. I really do. But my problem is that I don’t know if I hate this style of storytelling natively or if I’ve been conditioned to spot it and, thus, hate it. Why am I agonizing over this now?
Because of Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander.
The short backstory is this: The book was self-published and picked up by a NY house when it started catching buzz around Blogland. I did not buy the self-published version; I bought the Harper version. I don’t know how heavily edited the second one was, but it appears it underwent some serious whipping-into-shape. Obviously I can’t make comparisons between the two (sorry, not getting the other one), but this is significant to today’s agonization.
This book is told in so many points of view I can’t count them all. The servants have a POV, for cryin’ out loud! And while I don’t mind that in some authors, it makes me mad in others (no, I’m not naming names). So beware, head-hopper haters, this book might drive you up a wucking fall.
I didn’t mind it at all in this book, which is what surprised me, but that was also because there was no “meanwhile back at the ranch” transitioning (and if there was, I didn’t notice it), which is what annoys my inner storyteller. Why and when did this style of storytelling fall out of favor? If I weren’t a writer who’d had the propensity beat out of her with the sharp end of a red pen, I would A) not notice and B) not care.
Obviously, whoever read this book (then blogged it and started the buzz) enjoyed it enough for a bunch of other people to pick it up. That snowballed into Harper picking it up. They edited it, but they apparently didn’t follow the current trend of limiting the number of one’s POV characters and, furthermore, not head hopping.
My question is this: Does it even matter to the reader, all this technical flim-flammery, if the story’s engaging? Apparently not.
On the other hand, are you going to be able to send your deliciously wonderful head-hopping novel to an agent and expect something other than a rejection letter? Erm, no. Remember the story I just told you about this novel’s path to publication.
Are we writers just so conditioned by now to spot and eliminate (or the gods of writing will come take our pen nibs away from us) all head hopping and unauthorized POV switches that we automatically think “bad writing” when we come across it? I mean, yes, it can get in the way of the story (and I ran across that even when I was a child glomming every book in the small library by my house), but is it necessarily to be eliminated at all costs?
I’m now intrigued by this and will probably end up reading everything through this filter for a while. I know myself well enough to know I won’t ever be comfortable writing this way and even if I were, a lot of someones would come along and say, “You can’t do that.”
Kansas City: le sigh…
After viewing my KC photo gallery [dead link for now], a friend of mine said, “Oh, what a romantic city!”
Now, I love this town and yes, I have always thought there was a certain romance to it, but I never thought I’d hear someone not a native say it. I mean, that’s like saying Toledo is romantic. Maybe it is, but “romantic” isn’t the first thing I think of when I hear “Toledo, Ohio.”
Book Review: Always Listen to the Ravings of a Mad Woman
Always Listen to the Ravings of a Mad Woman
(A Story of Sex, Porn, and Postum in the Land of Zion)
by JulieAnn Henneman
published by Draumr Publishing
This book was mentioned to me as something different (especially as regards Mormon characters), so I went a-seeking. And boy, did I get.
Corinne Young is having an affair with her dentist. Kinda. Sorta. She’s not sure why, but there’s gotta be a reason, right? Her husband, Brent, holes himself up in his office with his computer all night long, working on the software training company he built. And then, well, all hell breaks loose. It doesn’t take long to understand why Corinne’s diddling the dentist, even if it takes her longer than the reader to figure it out. (Because, well, what does “husband holed up in his office with his computer all night long” say to you? Okay, after much thought, it occurred to me he could have been gaming.)
Genre romance as trailblazer (as usual)
In my wanderings around the ’net, one thing has become perfectly clear to me: However harried and hassled, looked down upon, sneered at, spit toward, and generally disrespected as a valid art form, genre romance (just after science fiction and Cory Doctorow) seems to be at the leading edge of the ebook revolution.
<donning pimp hat>
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Nekkid in public
The owner of Sexy Little Outfits [dead link] has asked me to contribute snippets (some clothing-related, some not) from The Proviso for the “Sexy Stories” [dead link] part of her site. She’ll be putting up one a week for the next several weeks, so don’t miss out!
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I gotta get me one’a dese
Hide-a-Book [dead link]. For keeping your deliciously wicked covers under wrap wherever decidedly un-wicked people will be staring at you funny.
Just because they’re so dang purty.
Reading against type
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,
Bettie Sharpe’s “Ember”
In my opinion, this is not so much a twisted fairy tale as an example of how to write. I won’t get into all the gush-deconstruction with various adjectives and superlatives because it’s been done ad nauseam (by an agent, even!)
Bettie, if you see, this, please email me your Paypal account and I’ll PAY you for the privilege of having read it.
Thank you, Stephen King.
I stopped reading you when I was 17. There was a reason for this: I’d run through everything you’d ever written by that time and I was burnt out on you, so I went on to glomming my next author, whom I have also never read again. Lather, rinse, repeat throughout my life. Glom, abandon, glom, abandon. Yes, I am an evil reader.
“Eventually you will succeed.”
Does anybody actually believe this without a boatload of qualifiers?
Over at Romancing the Blog, there was a very nice article about a mystery writer’s convention comparing and contrasting how that genre’s culture stacks up against the romance genre’s culture (including ebooks, my pet topic, but I’ll pimp that later elsewhere). I found this tidbit interesting:
The motivating keynote and luncheon speeches sounded just like the ones we hear at RWA, discussing how important it is to write your story, to finish the book, to be persistent, hone your craft, and if you keep at it, eventually you will succeed.
Er, no.
I rode this train for so long … why?
I have a buncha novels on my hard drive that have been sitting around collecting dust since, oh, 1990 some time, I guess. In ’93 I wrote one that got me an agent another that year that got me a contract—before they were shut down (because, according to the rumor at the time [get this] it was making too much money and it had been created to take a loss for tax purposes) (remember Kismet? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?) [dead link]; one in ’95 that got me an early-Saturday-morning phone call from Harlequin to pleasepleaseplease overnight the manuscript; and a fourth novel in ’98 that got me a different agent.
Hatchet, ax, and saw
In the last week or so, it has become clear to me that the basic understanding quite a few people have of libertarianism is that of greed and selfishness. This surprises me because I thought most people had us figured for proponents of legalized marijuana and prostitution.
Book Review: Angel Falling Softly
Angel Falling Softly
by Eugene Woodbury
published by Zarahemla Books
Perhaps I should admit upfront that I consider myself an undemanding reader. I’ll happily go wherever the author wants to take me as long as it’s logical, consistent, and interesting. Let me add that I don’t even particularly care whether a story is plot-driven or character-driven; give me something to chaw on intellectually and I’m good to go. Make me laugh and I’ll forgive almost anything.
This is one reason why, when I read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, I was highly annoyed [private link]. I like vampires. I’ve studied vampire myths since I fell in love with Vlad the Impaler somewhere in the early ’90s, so her inconsistent worldbuilding, her habit of telling rather than showing, and her mostly flat characterizations grated.
By contrast, Eugene Woodbury’s take is haunting. Poignant, even.
Speaking of politics…
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.