Monthly Roundup: September 2015

So I spent the majority of the summer imitating a toddler going, "I DON'T WAAANNNAA". It was hot, the house was falling apart, everything sucked, and dammit I just didn't waaaannnaaa.

Now that it's cooled off and my garden has died back, I feel like an adult once more. I also started a new job in August that switched me back to day shift, consequently knocking me on my ass as far as my sleep schedule, so there's been a lot of residual crankiness in that department too. Suffice to say, I'm feeling a bit kinder towards the authors I'm reading at this time.

Here's some quick thoughts on books I read these last few months:

Writing Fiction - Janet Burroway
Nonfiction
I had this book recommended to me as part of the Writers in Paradise conference as a great reference text on crafting fiction. On the one hand, I do see how this kind of thing is helpful and contains a lot of good information. On the other? It's a slog, and while the info seems really good and helpful when you read it, for me it's not so easy to retain that information and apply it to my own works. It's one thing to think in the abstract and say, "A character needs contradictions to be three dimensional!" and another to apply that to creating your own characters. My own process often feels so nebulous and meandering, and things just kind of seem to happen or they don't. These are things that are, maybe, better applied during an editing phase than a first draft. I still firmly believe that the most important thing about a first draft is to just word vomit it all out and clean it up later, and that's worked ok for me so far. Now that I'm on, say, a third draft of a big project and it's morphed into a completely different beast from what it started as, these are things I want to keep in the back of my mind but not allow to take over. Good reference, I'll probably keep it around, but I'm conflicted on exactly how much it'll help.

Assholes: A Theory - Aaron James
Nonfiction
Another nonfiction book. I thought this would be a semi-humorous look at why assholes are assholes and strategies to manage their assholeness, but it falls far short of it's promised premise. This seems like an idea that started off really interesting, but would have benefited from handing the first draft to an actual writer. James is circular and monotonous, even when tongue-in-cheek, so that the whole thing just reads like a college freshman's philosophy text. It lacks general accessibility and  readability, which I think would have benefited from someone who could make it more palatable to an average reader.

Voices in the Night - Steven Millhauser
Magical realism
 A collection of short stories that was recommended to me by a writerly friend. It started off very interesting, but quickly fell into a rote pattern--Story is set in Small Town, where Something Weird is happening, but it's totally Normal, even as it is Weird. Relies heavily on American nostalgia and a sense of oddity, which I do like, but not as a pattern. The first half of the book just all felt vaguely similar, and then we got to a retelling of Rapunzel where we dive into the main characters' heads in a rotating turn, which just didn't grab me, and the same goes for a hyperbolic Paul Bunyan short that went on much, much too long. Short stories are difficult, I imagine, to not fall into these traps. Still, I enjoy the sense of magical realism and oddity in each setting, something I want to pull into my own work.

Glamour in Glass - Mary Robinette Kowal
Alternate history, fantasy
 The second in Kowal's Glamourist Histories series, Glamour in Glass follows the now-married couple Jane and Mr. Vincent in Brussels. They develop some neat new glamour techniques, and then get caught up in the Napoleonic wars. At one point, Jane has to use all her wits and techniques at her disposal to rescue her husband. Again I like the worldbuilding and the magic system, which Kowal establishes very well. The relationship between the two isn't particularly compelling, with lots of misunderstandings and such that makes it seem like they don't really understand each other much at all, and doesn't make them seem like a particularly close couple. Just didn't work for me as well as it could have, but as a whole it works well enough that I'll continue to follow the series.

One Good Earl Deserves a Lover - Sarah MacLean
Romance
I've never given romance novels much stock, honestly, especially historical ones. I love historical novels, but historical romances seem to love to throw accuracy to the side in favor of bodice-ripping, and it irritates me to no end. I thought I'd give the genre another chance when MacLean was recommended to me, and this is the second in her Rule of Scoundrels series. They're not bad, if you set your expectations for accuracy low, though I have to say her tendency to make dramatically short sentences/paragraphs is rather grating. It's a style affectation, but I don't care for it. It sticks out like a sore thumb when reading, and I feel like writing styles should be subtler than that. If it trips up a reader, it's too much, girl. But overall, some fun and funny characters, even if the constant harping on their stock personality traits (We get it, Penny is a scientist. She doesn't understand love. She needs to study it and conduct experiments and gets herself into hilarious(!) situations because of it. Enough.) gets overwhelming. At least it's a fast read.

The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison
Fantasy
It's hard for me to really make up my mind about this book. On the one hand, it plays in such stock fantasy tropes: beautiful elves! A half-breed prince suddenly thrust into a ruling position! Evil stepmothers! Pseudo-medieval speech patterns! Even the names are a bit over-syllabic. And the main character, despite being raised far from civilization and barely educated, manages to do nearly everything right without any realistic missteps. Yet for all that, it still wormed its way into my heart. It's a decent read, if not spectacular. I'm just rather burnt out on elves and royalty.

Texts from Jane Eyre - Mallory Ortberg
Humor
Simply brilliant. Enough said. Re-imagining classic stories through the medium of text (and a dark sense of humor), with references only book nerds will truly understand. Poe can't leave the house because a bird is looking at him, Emily Dickinson is concerned about the man who is definitely snakes, and Hamlet needs his mom to bring him a tuna fish sandwich WITHOUT THE LITTLE CRUNCHY THINGS. Read it and rejoice. Or weep. Whatever.

Raising the Stones - Sheri S. Tepper
Science fiction
This book has long been on my top list for science fiction. There's just something about it that really stuck to me, and, as a pretty avowed atheist, I find it's story of religion-gone-wrong and it's Hobbs Land Gods to be really compelling. A God that works, huh? A God that actually helps people get along, be happier, weeds out the bad seeds, helps them produce more (important on a farming planet!), and helps them communicate. And protects them from threats. This book is the second in a series, of which I have never read the first, but I'm told they aren't really related in story so much as taking place in the same universe, so it's an easy book to drop into the series with. This re-read proves no exception: Tepper is a thumbs-up.

The Magic Wars - Jo Clayton
Fantasy
I've previously talked about the book that got me into fantasy as a child, and how little it held up through the years. This is, finally, the third book in the series, that I found by accident at Half Price Books. I slogged through the others, but I gave up halfway through this book- once the magus falls through the dimensions and lands in Alice's Wonderland tea party, my disbelief is a little far stretched. The writing's not great anyway, and the formatting is annoying. Over it.

So that brings me up to the present time. I'll be trying to get back into the habit of posting about each book as I finish it to continue my dive into understanding what works and what doesn't.

What's coming up for October? Biggest of all: NerdCon Stories, of course. Helpfully based here in Minneapolis, many of my all-time favorite authors are coming to the Minneapolis Convention Center to tell some stories and talk about stories and sell some stories and sign some stories. People like the whole Nightvale podcast crew, John Green, John Scalzi, Maggie Stiefvater, Mara Wilson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Matt de la Pena, Nalo Hopkinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Patrick Rothfuss and more. I'm going to get so many books signed, you have no idea.

Wildfire - Jo Clayton

So this is a really interesting post for me to write. Wildfire, published in 1992, is possibly the first real fantasy book I remember reading. It hooked me into the genre completely. Previous to that I had read mostly children's lit, including things like Indian in the Cupboard and Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, that often had fantasy leanings, but this book was something completely different. I found it in my stepsister's castoffs, so it must have been when I was around 10 or so, so let's say around 1995. The pretty, ornate cover caught my eye, and I've fallen down the rabbit hole ever since.

As you can see, this copy has been well-loved. The binding was retaped somewhere around ten years ago.

I had never experienced anything like this book before. The heroine was beautiful, fascinating, with amazing powers, but flawed in that she didn't know how to use them and often made her situation worse by them. She was at the mercy of a vast pantheon of gods and powers, as she tried to navigate her way through a lush world that was completely alien to me. I didn't always understand what was going on, with the world's own language sprinkled in throughout the text, but it felt immersive to me, that I was getting a sense and flavor of the world without having it spelled out, so that you could perceive the meanings of these nonsense words through their context.

I kept this book ever since, re-reading here and there. I found the first book in the series, and now I discovered the third a few months ago. But in the last year I've been reading works with a more critical eye, looking at their structure, rather than just their story, so I picked this one up again.

Honestly, it's shit.

No, really. I experienced this with the Redwall series and also the Dragonriders of Pern series, too. All things that made huge impacts on me as a kid, and as an adult, suddenly lack the luster and sparkle that I remember. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, apparently. The 80's and 90's fantasy boom produced some really hilariously bad novels (especially covers) doing pretty much everything that is a publishing no-no today.

First, the plot is barely coherent. There's really very little tying events together in a logical way, but it's difficult for me to give a very specific example. The magus Navarre brings news of Varney's kidnapping by the Mezhmerrai to Varney's father, who promptly drugs, tortures, and sells Navarre to a wizard. But Navarre's sojourn as a drugged and broken slave is really just a few chapters long, before his friend Kitya shows up and kills the wizard, oh but a mini-god shows up, and Navarre gets his with his curse, and they all get scattered. We move through these elements SO fast that it feels like we're just barely touching on them without really exploring what's happening. It starts to feel more like an outline than the kind of story I really want to see.

Plus, the ending is a literal deus ex machina. The area's god Meggzatevoc comes down and sorts everyone out neatly, punishing the wrong doers and ejecting our main characters from his land.

I think this is one of the issues I have with writing God characters. There's really no established rules for what the gods and powers in this book at capable of. Why didn't Meggzatevoc just do this earlier, if they were making so much trouble for him? There's a subplot in the book of the city electing an Augstadievon (what that is, we never know) with a group of plotters trying to kill off candidates. The Diviners of the city can't figure out who it is because they're cloaking their meetings in smoke. Can't Megg just put a stop to that? God characters just make this whole thing too easy to solve, especially when they're only used for narrative convenience.

The language is a mixed blessing. I still do appreciate the immersive quality that Clayton imparts to her worldbuilding, however, it really could do with some explaining. So much ends up as literal nonsense because we have no idea what these made-up words mean. If you're going over the head of your reader, it's just not going to work.

Lastly, what the fuck is this formatting.

At several points throughout the novel Clayton splits chapters with numbers. We stick with one character for a scene, then abruptly shift to another, then another, or back. She uses this weird poetry-like formatting at parts where, it seems, powers are battling, there's confusion, the wrystrike curse is hitting them.. and honestly, this is not good. This is bad. Don't do this. Format normal. Your publisher will thank you for it. Use your skill at writing to convey confusion, if that's what you're going for: not cheap tricks.

So there I go, destroying another aspect of my childhood. It was fun while it lasted, but now I'm going to take what I've learned from this book, and move forward. I still have book #3 to read just for completion's sake.. I'm sure you'll hear all about that when it happens.

Overall: 2 stars

Amazon: Wildfire

More reviews: Wildfire on Librarything (Average 3.19 stars)

Wildfire on Goodreads (Average 3.63 stars)

Still pretty because somewhere deep down I'm still ten years old.