too damn picky I guess

I was reading a back issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction recently, and thinking once again that it had an old-fashioned feel to it. Retro, maybe. One story I enjoyed for the most part, because it had a very Edward Pangborn vibe:  enigmatic old man with Biblical name arrives at early-settler-type village, befriends adolescent narrator, reveals knowledge of advanced tech and lost history of colonisers of alien planet, is feared and accused of witchcraft by less-enlightened, lights out for territories with adolescent narrator. You see what I mean.
The Pangborn echoes kept me reading on, though after a while I started to wonder why far-future colonists would revert to a 1600s American Colonial sort of social structure, and why they would fear witchcraft (why would they know about witchcraft?) without the sort of pressures and fears that were present in the 1600s? Since there was a hint that the colonists were multicultural, why not revert to clans or tribes or monasteries? But yeah, okay, pick one, and the author did pick one.
And when the village crops depend largely on a steam-powered tractor that's a piece of ancient tech, why is knowledge of ancient tech suspicious? I get that fear-of-tech is a common trope in post-catastrophe stories, but they didn't fear tech, they'd just forgotten how to maintain it.

Near the end of the story, a sentence just jumped out at me. A sympathetic character says that our adolescent narrator will reach adult status and "choose a bride".
Wait, what? Choose from where? Because other than the narrator's dead mother, there were no women in this village. The speaking characters were all male, the named secondary characters were all male, the un-named tertiary characters were male. (Come to that, the only non-adult character was the narrator.) The enigmatic old man scores points by teaching the locals how to make devilled eggs and to add "aromatic herbs" to the stewpot (yeah, might want to be a bit more specific about which ones, this being an alien planet and all). He tells this to the men because there are no women present in the narrative. I skimmed quickly back through the story, and didn't spot any women.
I think I figured out why your colony isn't doing too well, fellows. And it's not just because you forgot how to fix machinery and make devilled eggs. (Speaking of which, where did they get the pepper?)

The more I thought about this story, the more worldbuilding problems I began to see. The villagers live apparently at the brink of starvation, one bad harvest and they have to start eating each other. Again, I don't think devilled eggs are going to solve that problem, and if hunger means you routinely pop wrongdoers into the stewpot, making stewmeat tastier is not the big issue. They have 'bottles' in which they could preserve food (hey, where did they get bottles? who made them? Is there a glass foundry somewhere nearby?) but don't bother to do so until the enigmatic old man suggests it.
Okay, maybe the lack of nutrients in the native plants or starvation because of climate change is making everyone stupid, as in some theories about what happened to the medieval Greenland colony. 
By the time I reached the end of the story, I was so distracted by background questions I had to re-read the last paragraphs a couple of times, which only made the problem worse.

It wasn't badly written. And I was prepped to enjoy a Pangborn-style story. But there were so many loose threads that I couldn't resist pulling on one, then on another, until it all came apart. I don't know if there's a moral here, unless it's Don't have picky readers.

readers' rights AGAIN!

What with the Week of Writerly Whingeing just past, it seems time to repost this, so's y'all can hold me to it should I ever be widely published.

My Pledge of Readers' Rights
If my books are sold and published, and people I've never met read them, I hereby admit the following rights to any and all such readers:

1) The right to not like my book, and to think it is crap.
2) The right to stop reading and to judge my whole book on howeverlittle you read.
3) The right to completely miss my point.
4) The right to dislike any of my characters, even based on a partial or inaccurate reading.
5) The right to dislike my prose style and to quibble with my word choices.
6) The right to find fault with my plotting, worldbuilding, or other big-picture aspects.
7) The right to share these opinions in person, twitter, blog post or other social media as they appear.
8) Other rights that seem good and reasonable and occur to me later.

I do not grant to the reader the right to make me change something already published.

I have the responsibility to act like an adult.
That is, the responsibility to listen to criticism with attention, using my own critical faculties to find what's useful and what's not (just as I would with a workshop critique).
That is, the responsibility to not hold grudges or look for ways to do down someone who doesn't like my writing however they express it.
I was tempted to weasel here, to say something about tone, about even-handedness, but given that writers generically want nothing but praise, in bucketloads, even-handedness is way too difficult to quantify. As a reader, you have a perfect right to think that anything I've written is a load of crap and to say so, in those words or similar.

I retain the right to bitch in private to my friends about how you completely missed my point, dear god do these people have no reading skills at all?

The ABM is fired

I've been writing. That is, I have been in the depths of my own brain, with occasional excursions to the Bishops' Wars and to the Fenland Riots, and to the Witch Panic. This is not actually a comfortable or relaxing tour, but it is full of incident.
I can sort of see the end of this book, if I stand on my tiptoes and squint. I'm hoping to have all the holes filled in within a couple of weeks.

So every now and then I stick my head out to see what's up with teh intarwebz, which almost always results in my staying up too late reading FandomWank or something similar. Is it my imagination, or has there been a marked increase in Authors (and Publishers) Behaving Badly over the past few months?
I mean, just on OTF (Other than Fandom) Wank, there's been (the ironically named) Chivalry Bookshelf ripping off its authors; Decadent Publishing getting over-excited over some nasty sockpuppet reviews; First One Publishing wanting $150 to take all your rights; and most recently the J Howett meltdown over a mixed review.
More fun threads on Absolute Write, in the forums, but if I look for them I'll be up all night.

Responding to a negative review is such a poor idea that it's called the Author's Big Mistake, or ABM. (Paul Fussell is credited with inventing the term) Back in the day when print was all, authors and reviewers would carry on feuds slowly, over weeks, through the book review sections and letter columns of newspapers. It was made even more fun by the likelihood that reviewers and authors were likely colleagues, published by the same presses and reviewing in the same newspapers and journals. So an angry author might have the chance for sweet revenge by reviewing his enemy's book (and being paid for the review, too).
Yeah, the fact that everyone knew it was a bad idea didn't stop highly-educated, literate and eloquent people from doing it. Some very classy invective was produced this way--but again, if I look for it I'll be up all night.
Wait, Jane Smith's brill blog How Publishing Really Works has a terrif rundown on the classics here.

The internet has made it possible not only to carry on such a feud without any timelag (and without, alas, most of the eloquence, as eloquence takes time) but for everyone and his dog-that-no-one-knows-you-are-on-the-internet to weigh in and mock and share.
I like snark (I sometime explain that we are an ESL family: the first language is sarcasm) and I'm willing to watch a trainwreck happen in realtime. But the scope of the possible wreckage is more than a little scary.
On the one hand, it's possible to have an ongoing intelligent and thoughtful conversation between writer and reviewer, online.
On the other hand, it's possible for things to explode before one party even realises the fuse has been lit.

I wonder what I'll do when/if I get my first negative review? Hopefully I'll have as much class as the author of Pregnesia does here. Or at least the good sense to bitch privately and offline.
Now, back to the fens!

books, book-talk, and race

Terri, I'm sorry, this will probably give you another book to read--but it's a very fast read!

So, I recently finished Half World, by Hiromi Goto, a sorta-local author (lives on the mainland), book trailer for which can be seen here. The back-cover copy reads:

MELANIE TAMAKI IS AN OUTSIDER
As the unpopular and impoverished only child of a loving but neglectful mother, she is just barely coping with school and life. But everything changes on the day she returns home to find her mother is missing, lured back to Half World by a vile creature calling himself Mr. Glueskin. Soon Melanie embarks on an epic and darkly fantastical journey to Half World to save her mother. What she does not yet realize is that the state of the universe itself is at stake....
Award winning author Hiromi Goto's novel is an adventurous, genre-bending fantasy of shape-shifting characters, tortured half-lives, and redemption.

Wow. This book moves at a dead run. There are two prologues, one distant past and one recent past. The first is a pared-down legend-backstory, but the second is grab-reader-by-throat.
Then the story proper begins, as Melanie's mother goes missing, and she gets a phone call (on a disconnected phone) from the deeply-creepy Mr. Glueskin telling her what she has to do if she ever wants to see her mother again. Because the reader has already encountered Mr. Glueskin in the second prologue, this is even creepier than Melanie knows.
Melanie makes a believable young heroine, sometimes frustrated and overwhelmed, sometimes hasty and resentful, but always picking herself up and 'doing what's nearest'. She has no special powers, only determination and a loving heart--a refreshing change from the YA heroines who are billed as kickass tough girls but are passive and helpless when the crunch comes. (And hoorah, she is a chubby kid and does not become magically thin-and-pretty by the end of the story.)
The horrors she faces in Half World aren't cheap blood-splatter special effects, but subtler and weirder. I thought there was an influence both of the Japanese ghost scrolls and of the Buddhist hells, and maybe also Stephen King's Overlook Hotel, which is to say, pretty damn creepy.
So yeah, if you haven't read this book already, you should go and read it.

You can guess, thus, that when I heard Hiromi Goto was delivering the keynote talk at a conference at the university where I work, I knew I'd have to be there. Even if not for myself, for the others on the book-chat forum who'd read her work.
The conference info is here. Curious, If True: The Fantastic in Literature.
I would have liked to attend the whole thing, but I was booked already to leave Friday for a medieval event in Bremerton where I'd be taking a new apprentice--not something one can reschedule easily. And Hiromi's talk was the highlight.

After some to-ing and fro-ing to find out about registration, which turned out to be on the other side of campus, but which I didn't really need to deal with anyways because I wasn't speaking, just listening, but let me be useful in walking one of the real attendees over to find the secret hidden building he needed, I was in place with coffee and snacks and a copy of Half World in good time. Here's my notes, filled in and cleaned up. Anything incoherent or wonky is due to my errors of transcription and memory.

The title of her talk was: "Escape Procedures May Not Have Been Designed To Your Specifications: Some Thoughts on Race and Representation in the Literature of the Fantastic"

Hiromi Goto is a small compact woman with fairly short grey hair and a face either smiling or seeming about to smile. She is very present, almost concentrated, in the space she occupies (I'm not sure if that's a clear explanation). She spoke from written notes, at first with her eyes on them, gradually more confidently and with less referring. She began by acknowledging that this was the territory of the Coast Salish peoples, and thanking them in Japanese for allowing her there.
The spark for her talk was the not-too-long-ago kerfuffle over the filming and whitewashing of the Earthsea books. Having read the books in her youth, Hiromi's first reaction to the fuss was 'wait, Ged's not white?' Then she was embarrassed: at a time when she was reading avidly and hungrily for characters like her, (enough that she was thrilled and touched by the Chinese character in A Cricket in Times Square, only later recognising him as stereotypical), how could she have missed that Ged was not another white character?
In part because she applied the author's race to the characters. In part because of the author's conscious decision to provide the physical clues gradually, to get the (possibly-resistant white) reader into Ged's skin before noticing that said skin was brown. And in part because the clues about the culture of the islands of Gont (bronze-smithing, goat-herding, witch-women, women's magic being 'rubbish and humbug', dragons) were not sufficient to mark it as a non-European culture for her.
A distinct race (like the Karg?) will be set against a 'normative' race. Readers within a culture that has a dominant race will assume that the unspecified is the dominant. The attempt to envision and write for a 'universal reader' erases difference and homogenizes, which ends up being exclusive rather than inclusive.

Pause to describe the concept of umwelt (German, the surrounding world), the perception of the world related to oneself, through constructions of one's body, education, desires, past. The understanding of the world can be very different even by organisms that are quite similar. A meadow will be understood differently by a fieldmouse, a hawk, and a farmer, and different again by a second farmer. No one umwelt is correct or dominant, each is true for the one within it. Neither is that understanding fixed. One's self alters within different contexts, one isn't a neutral subject. She compared this shifting and altering to the altering of perceptions in optical illusions where foreground becomes background.
Goto's family came to Canada when she was three. She remembers English being incomprehensible babble to her ear, and remembers text moving from incomprehensible to meaningful as she learned to read. As she read, she didn't at first notice the absence of 'people like her', only as she encountered the few that existed in fiction did she become aware of the lack.

Representing diverse races and cultures requires complexities, and the necessities of narrative prune away complexity. Thought must be put into the complexities of race: what effect does it have? The markers of race include colour, hair, language, cultural practices and religion. Not all of these will have space in the narrative, but there is more to representing diversity than providing different skin colours.
LeGuin diversified sf/f, but race is more than skin colour. Goto considers Always Coming Home to be the more effective treatment of race. She uses the term Terra Racialliblendedis to refer to the setting where everyone is mixed or non-white but there are no differences in culture or custom, even in food, and cites The Hunger Games as an example. Given the near-future setting, it's implausible that racial and regional differences could have been subsumed so completely into class differences.
Race is inextricable from political discourse: multiculturalism, immigration, economics etc. Racial narratives can be deadly; she gives the example of the black man seen as criminal. Brown bodies in literature have been locked in the attic or the kitchen, or banished to jungles and forests for exotic background.
Sf/f provides room to imagine different worlds and futures, but setting the brown body in a supposedly post-racial world and flattening the differences inherent in race and culture presents its own problems. Fantastic literature can push at the boundaries of comfort, but is read by the reader within her own social context / umwelt. The reading of the fantastical other is the reading of one's imagined self.

We cannot escape our context, even reading for escape, but we can dismantle, small step by small step, and move toward a place where escape is no longer desired.

After her talk, there was some time for questions. A couple of questions asked on how to represent other cultures respectfully, and what would affect your decision on whether to use one culture rather than another. She suggested (to a question that came perilous close to whining about touchiness) that peoples need space / chance of their own representation, that it may be appropriative to make use of a culture that hasn't had experience of its own (representational) space yet.
The concept that struck with me was 'narrative prunes away complexity' and since I'd recently read a Quill & Quire review of Half World, where the reviewer regretted that the story spent so little time on Melanie's life before the crisis, and wanted more time spent on the world and how it worked, I asked whether much had been pruned from Half World.
Answer being yes - that an earlier draft had been probably 400 pages, and the last was less than 200 (not sure if that's mss or printed - the pbk is 233 p.). The present opening scene of ch.1 was originally ch. 15 or 16. Much was pruned out by the pressures not only of narrative but of market considerations and the intended audience.

Then I had to run away back to work, and was unable to stay for the readings and panel discussions. But I did get a copy of Half World signed, and found out where I can buy her other books (the university bookstore - have not found them at the local indies.).

readers' rights: my pledge

I've been stewing over this for about a week, trying not to get all ranty. Then I read Janni Lee Simner's call to action, and had (yay!) permission to rant.
(A good link roundup on YA Highway here , including a link to Zoe Marriott's fine post on the insecurity that makes writers vulnerable)

As I've said, repeatedly and recently, I was a reader before I was a writer. I'm still a reader. If some wicked fate forced me to choose, I'd weep and wail and hammer the walls... then choose reading.
Something you learn, hanging out with readers, whether in person or online, is that tastes differ. The book one person thrusts into your hands promising that it will Change Your Life is the book someone else gets three pages into and gives up on. The protagonist who is one reader's ideal lover is another's pretentious git who needs smacking hard.
The internet has made it a lot easier to have entertaining, spirited (yet usually civil) discussions about books with people whose perspectives are quite different from mine, and to read reviews of books I might never have known about, reviewed by people who are insightful, funny, and sometimes snarky.
Which means I am not thrilled by the chilling effect of recent tweets and posts suggesting that Negative Reviews Will Be Held Against You (Caps of Portentiousness, found in all the best fantasy novels). At present I find it doubtful that I'll be asked to blurb someone else's books, but I sincerely hope that any blurbing I do would be based on what I thought of the actual book, not whether the author reviewed mine.

Anyway, presently I have no influence, to raise or to crush. I hope I would never want to crush someone for being passionately engaged with books, or for bringing the snark. So here's the little that I can do against the chill:

My Pledge of Readers' Rights
If my books are sold and published, and people I've never met read them, I hereby admit the following rights to any and all such readers:

1) The right to not like my book, and to think it is crap.
2) The right to stop reading and to judge my whole book on howeverlittle you read.
3) The right to completely miss my point.
4) The right to dislike any of my characters, even based on a partial or inaccurate reading.
5) The right to dislike my prose style and to quibble with my word choices.
6) The right to find fault with my plotting, worldbuilding, or other big-picture aspects.
7) The right to share these opinions in person, twitter, blog post or other social media as they appear.
8) Other rights that seem good and reasonable and occur to me later.

I do not grant to the reader the right to make me change something already published.

I have the responsibility to act like an adult.
That is, the responsibility to listen to criticism with attention, using my own critical faculties to find what's useful and what's not (just as I would with a workshop critique).
That is, the responsibility to not hold grudges or look for ways to do down someone who doesn't like my writing however they express it.
I was tempted to weasel here, to say something about tone, about even-handedness, but given that writers generically want nothing but praise, in bucketloads, even-handedness is way too difficult to quantify. As a reader, you have a perfect right to think that anything I've written is a load of crap and to say so, in those words or similar.

I retain the right to bitch in private to my friends about how you completely missed my point, dear god do these people have no reading skills at all?

To which I set my hand and seal, this fourth day of March 2011, when I should be finishing my revisions and not blathering online.

snow has fallen

And Victoria grinds to a halt. That was the newspaper headline a day or two ago: Victoria grinds to a halt. I'm sitting in the kitchen sipping on my second cup of tea and watching the snow fall. It would be nice to get the woodstove going, but there's not really enough time before I leave for work. And yes, I'm being a wuss and getting a ride in and out, rather than biking. Which there really is no excuse for, because it's not icy at present, and it's ice that I refuse to bike on, not snow.

I'm working on a writing-related post--or reading-related post--on characters with Destinies and what I think of as 'unearned specialness', but since it's something that annoys me as a reader, I keep wandering off into sidetracks about specific books, and having to delete.
It's an odd thing to be a writer as well as a reader. Suddenly the opinions I have about books and stories become opinions about other people's work, and that dubious ground between creator and creation becomes even boggier. It's as if I've compromised myself.
And yet I've been a reader all my life (even before I could read for myself, my parents read to us and told us stories) and a writer only since, oh, 2004. And a critical reader, too, encouraged to analyse and to put my analysis into words.

Some writers give up reviewing or commenting on what they read, or review only books they loved, because of the discomfort of saying anything negative about the work of someone who is in a sense a colleague, or whom you might meet at a convention or workshop.
I wonder what I'll do?

weekend warrior

I'm all fidgety and flighty and for why? Because this weekend is the 3-Day Novel Contest, and I've just staggered free of rewriting my synopsis and a bio and a few paragraphs on Fairy Tales and Me, only to jump into making shopping lists and notes about characters and setting.
Yes, I will take a break from writing to challenge myself with ... more writing!

At present I have a setting of archipelagos of a drowned continent (cue legends of churchbells ringing underwater) after some ill-defined disaster (maybe Reality collapsed?) and two young characters. One is the daughter of scientists in an isolated research station, crippled by a birth defect that fused her legs together (and yes, the Little Mermaid--notDisneyfied--is invoked). The other lives with her grandmother, and is much closer to the Little Robber Girl in archetype.
There will be a scene where the second girl rows to another island full of statues of jet, of people staring into the sky, the former population of the island, and hacks chunks off the statues to take back for fuel. (Yes, this was in a dream of mine, and it was too weird not to use.)
That's all. It may turn out kind of dark, even though the sun shines a lot on the islands, beams sinking down through the clear water to show the drowned buildings of the valleys below.
And it may turn out totally incoherent. Because that is the chance one takes.

Next, because it's been a while since I caught up on this--

Recently read: Darkborn, by Alison Sinclair. First in a series (trilogy?) but works as a stand-alone.
Intriguing worldbuilding - due to a goddess's curse, the world is divided into two races (maybe 3) those who live by night and are scorched to death by the sun, and those who live by day and cannot abide shadow. The Darkborn race cannot see, but have a sonar sense called sonning.
There are a bunch of questions raised by this arrangement, in my mind, and some are answered in this book, others presumably in the next. A few I thought were handwaved, but maybe they'll be covered properly later. Overall the author does a good job of incluing rather than info-dumping.

The first book is set, as you can guess from the title, in the world of the Darkborn, who are wary of magic and prefer technology - they have steam trains and clockwork automatons, though Sinclair doesn't really push the steampunk aspect. The society feels early 19th c. Anglo-French - they even have the beginnings of psychotherapy, which I thought was a really fascinating touch.
Balthasar Hearne is a physician who also treats nervous disorders, married to a gentlewoman who is hiding her magical talents (she'd lose her place in society, already precarious by her marriage). When a former love comes to his door minutes before the deadly sunrise, he is forced to shelter her - only to discover that she is about to give birth to the child of a mysterious lover. He delivers her twins and realises that one of them at least can see.
After that, things move quickly. The mother tries to murder the children by exposing them to daylight (a method of execution among the Darkborn), then thugs come after them and kidnap one of Balthasar's young daughters. In the meantime, the Shadowhunter, Ishmael Strumheller, is set on a secret and possibly suicidal mission by his spymaster, the crippled Vladimer, which will see him aiding Balthasar's wife, Telmaine - and unwillingly falling in love with her.
Overall recommended, for original worldbuilding and attention to court intrigue and commoner politicking both. There are hints of the next book in the Hearne's Lightborn neighbour, Fiamma of the White Hand, a female mage and assassin, and in the risk of outright war between Darkborn and Lightborn, possibly encouraged by the mysterious Shadowborn (creatures of the wild Shadowlands).

Another in the Blackbird Sisters series - Cross Your Heart and Hope to Die, by Nancy Martin. This time, impoversished socialite Nora Blackbird is covering a fashion show for a revolutionary new bra developed by Brinker Holt, whom she remembers as a bullying, unpleasant adolescent. Murder (naturally) occurs soon afterwards, and the hotting-up of Nora's romance with Michael (son of a well-known crime family) is chilled by his becoming a suspect.

The soap-opera side of the series develops nicely (I don't mean this as derogatory, only to distinguish it from the mystery side) with Nora's sisters continuing their messy, complicated lives, Michael's mob connections being a real obstacle to their being together rather than just a fillip of bad-boy spice, and Nora's career developing rather than being in stasis. The mystery is pretty easily solved, but there's a fair bit of amusement about the fashion industry in between.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth, by Carrie Ryan, Random House 2010, book trailer here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou1s3t6q2Q4

It's tempting to summarise this book as "George A. Romero does The Village" (I suspect Carrie Ryan felt utterly sick when The Village came out) but that would be a disservice.
Mary is a passionate, questioning teenager living in a walled village ruled by the Sisterhood. The Sisterhood teaches that there is nothing outside but the Forest and the Unconsecrated. But they are hiding a girl named Gabrielle, who comes from somewhere else, somewhere outside ...

This is an intense, harsh book. Ryan doesn't mute the horrors of Mary's world, and she does a good job of balancing the deadly and constant threat of destruction by the Unconsecrated with the immediate adolescent misery of hopeless love. The fact that Mary must be married and having children so young, that she doesn't have the freedom to date and break up and make up again, that the choice she makes will be the one she must live with forever, does keep her agony from being trivial, even to an older reader who never experienced adolescent love.
She also, I think, does a good job of handling the worldbuilding by keeping a lot unknown and unknowable to our pov character. Much of what Mary does know turns out to be lies or mistaken, so the reader is in much the same uncertainty as she is.
Where I might fault the book is characterisation. The male characters, Travis and Harry, are lightly sketched, and I never really got a clear sense of why Mary loved one and was repelled by the other. I wondered whether characterisation was sacrificed to pacing (the book is fast-moving) or a reflection of the unreasoning nature of her affections. The brother, Jed, is more fully realised.

There's a sequel out - The Dead-Tossed Waves - which I will almost certainly buy.

On a lighter note, Magic Below Stairs, by Caroline Stevermer, Dial Books 2010

"Frederick Lincoln is the sort of boy who works hard, does what he's told, and uses his head. But when he's plucked from the orphanage to live 'below stairs' with the servants as a footboy for a wizard, that is easier said than done.
"Unbeknownst to him, he's accompanied by a mischievous brownie named Billy Bly. The wizard has forbidden all magical creatures from his manor. But Billy Bly isn't about to leave Frederick, and when they discover a hidden curse on the manor house, that might turn out to be a very good thing indeed."

This was a nice light read. I was pleased to find an orphan hero who doesn't have a Tremendous Destiny and isn't the True Heir to anything. Frederick has the old fairy tale virtues of hard work and kindness, and is duly rewarded. (I also did a bit of happy hopping to see the Belly Blind featured in a novel.) The characterisation is light, as one might expect from a middle-grade novel of 200 pages, but Frederick does have some convincing conflict, misery, and jealousy to get through, and some good friends to find.

The setting is after Sorcery and Cecelia, after the marriages and before the children.

With apologies to Terri for any inadvertant additions to her TBR pile.

griping is just one service we offer

Disappointing things: I found a cheap cookie press at the thriftshop, and at Christmas I made butter cookies (with butter) and squished them through the press. Conclusion: meh.
The press was annoying to use, fiddly, sometimes requiring the cookie to be pried off with a knife. Some of the shapes didn't work at all. Fell between drop cookies and roll cookies in speed of application.
The cookies? Meh. If I'm going to use that much butter in something, I want it to taste as rich as shortbread. These were dry and not very flavourful, even though I used the brown sugar recipe. I ended up giving most of them to a friend who loves butter cookies. She said they were great, but that may have been nostalgia.
On the favourable side, one of the cookies looks like Snowy from the Tintin comics.

Just for Terri, some books you don't need to add to your collection (in my opinion, anyways). I'm swiping my reviews from comments I made on the book forum, since I can't be bothered to write up whole new reviews for books I didn't enjoy.

The New Policeman, by Kate Thompson, Harper Teen 2007.

The opening is pretty rambly and unfocussed:

JJ hears something bad about his family history.
JJ changes his name.
JJ wishes he could give his mother more time.
JJ hears another version of the story.
JJ changes his name back.
JJ thinks about getting around to discussing the true story of his family history with his friend.
JJ gets around to looking into the time thing.
The new policeman wanders around.
This is not why he became a policeman.
Nope, not this neither.
Nor this.
People play music.
More music.
Homework.
Shopping.
Farm chores.

Shuffle and re-deal.
I think I may have given up just as the plot was beginning - JJ hiding in a cart or something. But by then I didn't care what happened to him.

See, I can be quite happy with a story where not much is happening provided what is happening is interesting. William Mayne's books can be quite low-key, but there's these wonderful loopy allusive conversations and interactions.
Ho! Maybe that's it. The characters barely interacted. I mean, they don't seem to argue or get into fights or laugh or tease or ... Well, okay, they mope.

I just checked the Amazon reviews. One reviewer says the story gets moving after p.130.

Paper Mage, by Leah Cutter, Roc 2003
About a young woman in ancient China who practices origami magic and is hired out to protect a caravan. But her real aim is to do great deeds and earn a peach of immortality for the aunt who paid for her training. The story follows two timelines, alternating chapters between the caravan journey, where one of her fellow travellers is a goddess who charges her with a dangerous quest, and her childhood training, torn between her aunt's plans and her mother's plans to have her married off.

I wanted to like this, I really did. I love stories set in China, and Cutter seems to have done a lot of research (some of it not particularly well-digested, though). But Xiao-yen is so dreary, always fussing about being an outcast, about losing her luck or not deserving it when she has it, about whether she should do what her mother wants and get married, how much she misses her family (even though none of them are pleasant or trustworthy and she's been living apart from them since she was a small child), and on and on.
I think she's meant to be touchingly insecure, but there isn't enough joy in her to leaven the misery, and it became a chore to spend time with her - what happened to the spirited, mischievous little girl we met in the early chapters, before she began training?

Another thing that bothered me was the repetition (poor editing?): at least 5 characters, all male, are described as having eyes that greedily or hungrily suck everything in. Every dragon, whether real or represented, seems to have a hard belly (of pearl, or scale, or embroidery). The live dragons all breath fire, which I don't recall being a common feature of Chinese dragons, especially river dragons.

With the disclaimer that all my study of Chinese culture has been at the undergrad level or self-directed (with all the flaws that follow), I should add that Cutter's version of ancient China didn't work for me. Chinese culture was sexist, no denying, but the sexism in the book feels very 20th c. N. American, in the way everyone tells Xiao-yen that 'a girl can't be a mage'. Including the other paper-mage-students, and it bothered me that they were so unconcerned about questioning their master's judgement, since he had chosen Xiao-yen.
Similarly, Wang Tie-tie, the aunt, takes Xiao-yen from her mother and takes responsibility for her schooling--that's quite believable, since Tie-tie is the matriarch (and runs the finances) and that sort of adoption seems fairly common. But then Xiao-yen's mother keeps trying to marry her off, or set up meetings with a matchmaker for her. Why does she have the authority to do that (or the fee for the matchmaking) when Xiao-yen's fate has been decided by Wang Tie-tie?

Oh. Yeah. And there's no transliteration note, so it took me half the book to figure out that Cutter means Tie-tie to be Tai-tai, a title not a personal name. Because she uses the X for Hs in Xiao-yen, I thought she was using pinyin style, and kept mentally pronouncing it as Wang ch'ieh-ch'ieh. I wonder how many readers thought Xiao would be pronounced Zow instead of Hsiao?
If Cutter assumed they'd know how to pronounce the X, why pander by spelling Tai as Tie? Why not include a pronunciation chart, when you have space for a suggested reading list?

period pieces

A couple of recent reads, both children's books, both in historical settings. The covers make good use of old-style ornateness.

The Diamond of Drury Lane, by Julia Golding, Egmont 2008. Set in 1790 London, this is narrated by young Catherine (Cat) Royal, a foundling taken in by Sheridan and reared as the errand-girl of the Drury Lane Theatre. Her already eventful life becomes more exciting still with the addition to the company of Johnny, the mysterious new Prompt; Pedro, the young African violinist; and rumours of a diamond hidden somewhere in the theatre. Outside the theatre she is mixed up in (or mixes herself up in) boxing matches, street brawls, an ill-fated love, and risky political satire. Hair's-breadth escapes, sneering villains both high and low, balloon ascents, and more.



The Star of Kazan, by Eva Ibbotson, Macmillan 2005. In Vienna, in 1908, Annika, a foundling girl raised in a professorial household, is almost entirely happy helping her foster-mother (the servant who found her) cope with the eccentric professors, playing with her friends in the streets and gardens, listening to the stories of the old lady who was once the celebrated performer La Rondine, and admiring the breathtaking Lipizzaner horses. She only dreams a little of her birth-mother appearing and sweeping her away--until the day her mother does. Annika is swept away to her aristocratic, ancestral home. But why does her noble family live such an austere, scrimping life? Why is the gypsy boy Zed so angry at them? And why are they so interested in the costume jewelry that La Rondine left to her?

Both books are quite consciously period pieces, and make good use of the themes and tropes of older children's books and of melodrama: lost heirs, orphans, wicked aristocrats, noble-hearted poor folk, twists of fate and revelations. The wicked and the virtuous are pretty easy for the reader to spot and to either hiss or cheer. In short, both are thrilling yarns and good reads.

Both have foundling heroines with generous and impulsive hearts, whose friends and neighbours rally to help them when things get dangerous. Both feature a young boy who might not have been included in the source fiction (at least, not as the heroine's equal): Pedro the former slave and Zed the Romany boy, one a talented violinist, the other a natural horse-trainer. Both manage to avoid turning their characters into modern North Americans with modern attitudes, while still keeping them sympathetic for a young reader. The period and settings are well-evoked, including smells and tastes, and based on strong research. Golding uses Cat to explain anything unfamiliar, and Ibbotson uses direct address, an old convention in children's literature. I didn't myself spot anything jarring, and I'm fairly picky.
The two heroines are different, though I'd agree with those reviewers who suggested that each was surprisingly slow to catch on to the big revelation. This is more believable in Annika's case, since she's presented as good-hearted and inclined to believe everyone else is as well, where Cat is (or believes herself to be) quite shrewd.
Politics... Diamond makes use of the political ferment of the 1790s, the pamphlets and political cartoons, the crime, poverty, and corruption. Star presents a tidier, cleaner world, though poverty and class barriers are real enough. And hanging over all the action of Star of Kazan, for an adult reader, is the awareness that dear old Franz Joseph will not die peacefully in his bed, Stefan's dream of training to be an engineer may be twisted, and soon the Spanish Riding School will be evacuated and broken up.

book reviews!

A mixed bag, strangely full of troubled adolescents.

Tamsin, by Peter Beagle, Firebird 1999. Jenny is a plain, resentful teen whose mother's remarriage uproots her from New York and dumps her, all bare roots and wilting leaves, in a crumbling Dorset farm. There she meets Tamsin, a ghost girl who died during the time of the Bloody Assizes, and finds that Tamsin herself is haunted, and that more dangerous spirits than a wistful ghost girl walks by night.
On the whole, I liked this (I'm sure Mr. Beagle is relieved to hear it). Jenny's misery and self-aware sulkiness are well-conveyed, with her devotion to Mr. Cat and her steadfast aid to Tamsin demonstrating that she is more than self-pity and snappishness. The Dorset countryside is brought to life, in more ways than one, and the secondary characters are distinctive. I'm still reading with my cutting goggles on, though, and I did wonder whether the story demanded both the pooka and the Wild Hunt? Sure, they Do Things In the Plot, but.

One for Sorrow, by Christopher Barzak, Bantam 2007. When Adam's classmate and almost-friend Jamie is murdered, his ghost comes to Adam for comfort and acknowledgement. Adam too needs comfort, as his family breaks apart and he slides from his high-school niche of nobody-much to outcast status. Even though Jamie's ghost-world is cold and dangerous, with skinless men lurking by the gates, it is a place where Adam seems to have purpose, and for a time living companionship with the girl who found Jamie's body and is also haunted by him.
One for Sorrow has several themes & tropes in common with Tamsin - the ghosts' memories are fragmentary and easily lost, and trying to recall traumatic memories breaks them apart; the living teens are faced with losing their ghost friends by helping them move on - but Tamsin is a fairly conventional mystery at its heart, and Barzak never attempts to solve Jamie's murder, which I liked. It did feel like a first novel (if that isn't a pretentious thing for me to say), with the story wandering about rather once Adam runs away from home, and the spunky black girl who befriends him being, um, kind of Magical Negro, and Adam's family getting their act together perhaps a little too much while he's hiding out. Still and all, this was a memorable and original story.

I Am Not a Serial Killer, by Dan Wells, Headline 2009. I bought this at World Fantasy because of his elevator pitch, and damn if it doesn't deliver more than what was promised. I'm not keen on using terms like 'compulsively readable', but I'm awfully tempted in this case. As I was getting near the end of the book, I was scared not only of what John might do but scared for him, and wondering how in heck Wells was going to pull a satisfactory conclusion together without being false to John. (spoiler: he does it.)
You can read about it over on Scalzi's Big Idea, which is probably more to the point than me blathering.

The Witch's Boy, by Michael Gruber, Harper 2005. I bought this for the astoundingly beautiful cover and for the opening: "Once upon a time, in a faraway country, there was a woman who lived by herself in the middle of a great forest. She had a little cottage and kept a garden and a large gray cat. In appearance, she was neither fair nor ugly, neither young nor old, and she dressed herself modestly in the colours of stones. None of the folk who lived nearby (not the oldest of them) could tell how long she had dwelt in that place."
Terri, if you haven't read this book, do so - you will love it. Gruber plays with any number of fairy tales, with incidents and characters wandering in and out of the plot, some central, others only winks or nudges to the well-read reader. He takes a risk by having Lump, the ugly goblin-like child that the witch absently adopts like a stray kitten, be as damaged, angry and selfish as he is, but when I fell out of sympathy with Lump, the other characters kept me involved, from the cat who becomes a man (a mercenary soldier, because 'he does so love killing') to the grown-up Hansel and Gretel, a cheerful and resilient pair through all their fortunes and misfortunes, to the daughter of Bluebeard and his last wife, who drove him to his death by her utter lack of interest in his locked and Bloody Chamber (yeah, I weep bitter tears there, that my conceit for Bluebeard Contented has been used).


I was thinking I should post about The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, by Diana Wynne Jones, in terms of how it influenced my plotting and worldbuilding - but that's probably another post altogether.

I promised book reviews

and my spam promises me a 'Massage from International Monetary Fund Unit London'. I guess the economic crisis is really calling for desperate measures.
Obligatory Monty Python reference: "And now, a massage from the Swedish Prime Minister."

Anyway, yes, I have been reading. Stacking up the recently-read, I saw that I had still managed to knock off a few books through the revision blitz, in part because I can't revise on my lunch hour or while waiting in lines. Add to that more intensive reading last week, and it makes a stack I'm at least not ashamed of.

The Cup of the World, by John Dickinson, Random House 2007. Phaedra, only child of the Warden of Trant, refuses all suitors, both for fear of dying in childbirth and for love of a man she has met only in dreams. When the king's son courts her, her dream-lover comes to take her away, and proves to be the mysterious and ill-famed lord of the province across the inland sea. Her elopement is the trigger for war, and she hardly knows who to trust, who will betray her, or who she must betray next.
Not an ordinary fantasy. The world setup is nothing unusual - a continent with an inland sea, ringed with provinces & city-states, unstable politics and a king holding on by the fingernails. But the rulers came in ships, and there were aboriginal people, so there's a conflict rarely examined. The hillmen (shades of Kipling perhaps?) have a mythology involving a Great Mother, quite different from the near-Christianity of Phaedra's people. Phaedra is not an entirely sympathetic character, somewhat cold and self-centred (also only 15 in the first chapter) but with an inner core of toughness and endurance. What really stands out is how much of the story is what happens at home while the battles and raids and treaties are happening elsewhere, and how much of the intrigue and discovery is Phaedra's story and coming of age.

Thirteen Orphans, by Jane Lindskold, Tor 2008. I really like the premise of this - that when the first emperor of China 'burned the books and buried the scholars', he unknowingly created another world, the Lands of Smoke and Sacrifice, an alt-China. I admit to some disappointment that the story takes place in our world, where the characters' ancestors (the Thirteen Orphans) fled after dynastic overthrow in the Lands. Within a couple-three generations of assimilation, the descendants mostly believe the the history of how the Twelve protected the Thirteenth (true heir of the overthrown dynasty) and how they were exiled to be delusions or bedtime stories. But the Lands are once again in turmoil, and about to spill over into our world again.
Perhaps it is my increasing age, but I was more interested in the older characters, Pearl and Des (whose full name is the wonderful Desperate Lee, because of a birth certificate misunderstanding) than in the younger Brenda, discovering some unexpected powers as she takes on the role of the zodiac Rat. I was also made a bit uncomfortable by Brenda's nemesis from the Lands, a slinky sexpot who seems like a Dragon Lady in training - I really hope she's humanised in the sequels.

I tell you, it's hard to read big thick books when coming off a revision high. My cutting goggles are still on, and I keep asking 'does this scene need to be here?'

Which brings me to The Apocalypse Door, by James D. Macdonald, Tor 2009. In which there may not even be a superfluous syllable, let alone scene. This moves at a dead run, with black humour gasped out here and there. Not what you'd read for lyrical description or introspective character development--the main character does have a crisis of faith, but he has to keep running while he has it. It's great fun, but I wouldn't describe it as a romp, because there's an edge of seriousness throughout, not so much because of the threatened apocalypse (which is almost a staple of urban fantasy: Buffy stalled it at least once a month) as the questions of faith and purpose that move the characters.
I also read The Confessions of Peter Crossman, ordered from Lulu.com, three stories of the Knight Templar special agent and his rival and occasional sidekick, Sister Mary Magdalene, leather-clad assassin and Bride of Christ. A nice warm-up for the Apocalypse Door.

Oh, and I wrangled around with pdf and jpgs and put together my three alt-Europe 3-day novellas to make a single volume on Lulu. Not public, but so I can have a convenient hard copy. After I've seen my first copy and discovered whether the cover or anything needs fixing, I can share the url for private ordering, which is $8 US for pbk, or free download.
I titled it Threefold, in case anyone wondered.

more puppet pics

Because puppets are cool. Also I thought I should show you what the booth design is based on, though the puppets obviously are from the other bas-de-page illustration.
My puppets have heads of linden, hands of pine, cloth bodies, and are dressed in linen and wool. They are painted with ochres and whiting in size tempera, with a little ceruse for the eyes and vermilion for the lips tempered with yolk.
The booth is made of pine and oak, glued with cheese & quicklime glue, nailed, and painted with ochres in size. I handsawed the whole damn thing, because our tablesaw is under the beltsander and thus inaccessible.










The play was Le Cuvier, a French farce of about 1400, trimmed down and with one character removed. I used the French text, rather than my rough translation, so as not to lose the rhymes and bounciness.

In writing news, I've had my first real review, over on the Internet Review of Science Fiction, in its last issue, alas, alas. The review is for "On the Transmontane Run with the Aerial Mail Express", in the December issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and is brief enough that I think I can quote it here:
Rookie Willow, with her chimpanzee crew, has to prove herself as a blimp pilot on her first solo run. Adventures await her, pirates and treachery. Inventive stuff in this adventure story with a plucky heroine who is also pretty clever. But then, we expected that.

In reading news, I'm going to spend a week depleting my TBR piles before I jump back into The Cost of Silver. I have a fear of becoming one of those writers who says 'oh, I can't tell you which writers I enjoy, I just don't have time to read in my field anymore'.
I was a reader before I was a writer. I'm a writer because I'm a reader. The idea of having to sacrifice reading for writing makes me shudder. I'll try to post some reviews and thoughts of what I've been reading, and what I get on to reading in the next little while.