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?

sometimes I'm clever 2

Another lazy post, reposting something I was musing about on a message board a few years ago. I thought it might have some relevancy, given the re-examination of Mary Sue on the Zoe-Trope and other good blogs (a decent round-up of links on this post).

Some helpful background on Mary Sue is found on this Making Light post.

And then there's me, below.

I was reading a book by James N. Frey (the writer, not the fraud) - The Key: How to Write Damn Good Fiction Using the Power of Myth. It uses the Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey as a framework, and I found it entertaining even though I'm somewhat dubious about Campbell, the same as I am about Robert Graves.
Anyway, Frey provides a handy-dandy checklist of the possible characteristics of the Hero (he neatly end-runs the sexism thing by making his own exemplary Hero a woman):
The Hero is a protagonist, is an 'outlaw', has courage or finds it, is good at his/her trade, has one or more special talents, is motivated by idealism, has been 'wounded', is clever and resourceful, is sexually potent/attractive, is stoic, is loyal, is physically superior, may have a special birth and special destiny.

You'll note I've bolded a few of those. Now, I direct your attention to The Original Fiction Mary Sue Litmus Test, and to the following questions:
Is the character highly attractive? (3 points)
Are one or more other characters attracted to her/him? (1 point)
Is the character related to royalty or nobility? (4 points)
Is the character the last surviving member of a family/clan/race/species/etc.? (2 points)
Was the character ever forcibly banished from her/his family/tribe/country/etc.? (3 points)
Does the character have an angsty childhood, or an angsty past? (1 point)
Was the character abandoned by her/his caregivers? (2 points)
Is the character unusually accomplished for her/his age/species/etc.? (2 points)
Does the character ever easily learn a difficult skill (e.g. learn to play guitar in a matter of weeks)? (3 points)
Does the character have a special birthmark or other marking? (4 points)
Does the character have any particular skill at which she/he the best or among the best? (2 points)

Which made me wonder. Is Mary Sue a mythic hero? An attempt at a mythic hero? Is the Hero a Mary Sue? What's the difference? I'm hesitant to say skill, because the myths have been through so many hands and languages the skill of the telling is kind of hard to be sure of.

At the time, I didn't go with the answer that's becoming the clearest in recent discussion--that the great difference between a Mythic Hero and a Mary Sue is that the Mary Sue is a female character, especially one written by a female author.
How dare a mere gurl act like a mythic hero? What would Joseph Campbell say?

Tangentially, this is one of the reasons why I prefer fairy tales to myths--that the protagonist in the majority of fairy tales is interchangeably male or female. But that's probably another and longer post, for some later time.

wherein I am artsy

 Thought I'd be lazy and just post some of the photos I took in the summer, a couple of which aren't bad, or might be mildly interesting.

 This below is a view of the shower (women's) at Coopers Lake Campground, the site of the Pennsic war. The building is over 100 years old - if you zoom, you can see adze marks on the roof joist. For several years, these three stalls (and three on the other side for men) were it for showers, unless you rigged something at your campsite. Now that Pennsic gets over 10k attending, there are a couple of shower trucks and other buildings, plus most group encampments have shower tents. It's still a rare occurence to find the whole room empty, so I commemorated the moment. About 2 or 3 am, I think it was, and the greenish light gives it a nicely underwater eerie look.

 At Mark's urging, I took my camera on a couple of early morning walk-runs around the camps. I may have mentioned that many groups do elaborate painted fabric walls or trompe l'oeil gates. This group went for the macabre. If someone had been awake I would have asked if it was a portrait or a generic head.

 I took so many photos on the way back, of changing landscapes, rock formations, cool clouds and lotsa vistas. This one comes under cool clouds--I like the way the sky mirrors the perspective of the lane lines, though I probably should have trimmed off some of the top third to emphasise it.

 Rock formations, did I say? Nature--not that subtle, really.

 We pulled over into this tiny town below for the sake of photographing the, um, mesa, that overlooks it. Although we found a good vantage point and got shots of it alone, I prefer this view interlined with houses.

 I'm a bit of a sucker for neon. We came out of the last hotel early early-oh, and I saw this sign against the hill. Just in time--a couple of minutes later the lights went out for morning.

Happy Year-End!

Oof. Half a bottle of wine, a glass of cider, and a slice of rum-soaked Christmas pudding with rum butter, and I am not firmly anchored to the turning world, I must say.
So I will post some pics, which will not risk spelling or syntactical errors.

 An artistic shot of one of our saffron-producing croci, beside the front gate in November, taken by Mark.

 Me icing my birthday cake, with the icing left over from doing Christmas cookies. Also taken by Mark. He took about a dozen, but I kept moving at the crucial moment and coming out blurred.
The overall icing is butterscotch, melted butter, cream and brown sugar. The coloured icing is basic butter icing. The red behaved much better then than it had for adding holly berries and suchlike to the cookies, but I don't know why.

Baking tally, hmmm...
Two batches of cake gingerbread
1 batch of gingerbread men
4 pans of 'petticoat tail' shortbread
1 batch of rolled shortbread
2 pans of oatmeal shortbread
2 pans of chocolate shortbread
1 pan of domino cookies (choc shortbread with white choc chips)
1 batch of cardomon sugar cookies
1 batch of honey cookies
2 batches of rolled & cut Christmas cookies, iced
1 batch of caramel sandwich cookies
2 batches of cheese shortbread (1 spicy, 1 plain)
2 batches of butter pecan shortbread
3 pounds of sugared walnuts
3 pounds of candied grapefruit peel

Tomorrow I may do butter tarts.

For Christmas dinner I made a spinach and feta pie for the boy, who has gone vegetarian, the pastry done with a veg shortening called Fluffo (which makes me laugh). Mark very very kindly dealt with the stalks and washing and stir-frying of the spinach, to spare me from the cooking side of things. I get somewhat nervous when I have to jigger a recipe the first time  I use it, so his prodding was more than a little helpful. 

The duck was dinner for the carnivores. Mmm. And made into curry, it fed another ten diners (two to four at a time).
I got to try out my Christmas present of an ergonomic potato masher, and very effective it was too.
Other cool presents - a long-handled pruning hook, with saw, so that I can Deal With that tree that's overshadowing the roses in the front.
And a Kobo e-reader. Which I am still learning my way around, after helpful lessons and work-arounds from Chris.

 A definitive sign of Christmas being over, I reckon. A flat Santa. (photo by Mark)
By the way, while I understand several of the Christmas totems (nutcracker soldier, reindeer, Santa in a prop airplane), I am stumped by the cartoon owl with Santa hat. Is it from some animated Christmas special I've missed? From the back it looks like a monstrous baked potato with a Santa hat, which is less Christmassy than one might think.
I prefer plywood to inflatables, but that's probably just my failure to move with the times.

A cute cat picture to see you to year's end. At present, Priss is squished between my breastbone and the back of the Capisco chair, relaxed and purring. Here she is at the kitchen table, preventing me from doing anything useful.
Though in cat terms I'm probably doing the most useful thing of all, providing aid and comfort to the cat. 



all photos by Mark, it seems!

Merry Christmas!

And other winter festivals as appropriate to your particular circumstances. Also my birthday. Yay!
The beating of Cost of Silver into another shape has been set aside for a while in favour of Christmassy things like writing and mailing cards, visiting friends, wrapping presents, decorating, and baking cookies (in a leisurely way, since I only just finished icing the rolled cookies).

 A little early this year (that is, before Christmas Eve) we brought in the greenery.
The tree was decorated with the assistance of Tess and Rowan, so there's rather more ornaments on the lower 2/3ds than on the top, and some of them are a bit crowded.
It still looks good with the lights on - and none of them blinking, after Tess's careful examination of every bulb to make sure.
If you're wondering, yes, we are standing on the big table, which Mark's mother used to polish by walking a floor polisher up and down it.

(The box of stuff in the front is my collection of antiquities, waiting on the new position of the display case, which is waiting on us figuring out where it will go.)

And here's my cubicle at work, where Christmas gets serious. It takes a couple of days to get everything out and on the shelves, once I've cleared off the books and orders that usually occupy that space.

Each year the Times-Colonist paper (yes, Victoria's newspaper really is called the Colonist) prints a map with routes to see the best light displays, and I always resolve to go and see them, but there isn't always time.
This year Mark got me out of the house, abandoning baking and wrapping for an evening, so here are some pics to share the Christmas wattage.

Here is but one small corner of the house that really goes all out. You need to get out and walk around the yard for the full experience.
I managed to enjoy it in an entirely non-ironic fashion, and without wondering about their electric bill until later.

 I admit it, this pic is for the sake of the madly excited pine tree in the front.
Whe I was a young child, our family would drive into Vancouver for Christmas shopping, and to visit my godmother. Near her house was a family who each year put up plywood figures of a snowman family. This was a high point of Christmas shopping, to drive by the snowman family.

On the other hand, the big department stores, like Hudson's Bay and Eatons, would fill their display windows not with fashion mannequins and goods for sale, but with Christmas scenes of trains, skating rinks, Dickens-era carollers, inhabited by animatronic children and elves. I don't know if anyone still does that, devote retail display space to a non-retail purpose. Perhaps no one can afford to anymore. So it's fallen to individuals to make up the balance of animatronic skating rinks?

I have to mash potatoes in a minute, so I'll leave you with the more spiritual side of Christmas, as expressed (like the snowman family) in plywood.
Merry Christmas!

metaphorical cat

Here, the cat takes on the role of symbolising Christmas tasks such as addressing and mailing cards, wrapping presents, and decorating the house, as she rises over my head.

Picture taken with Mark's IPad.

long tail?

Two weeks knee-deep in the 1600s, and last week hip-deep in other people's books.

I was helping with the United Way booksale at the university Student Union Building, and a right object lesson in humility for fiction writers it was.
See, it turns out that the hardest category to sell, even for $2 a pop is ...

Hardcover fiction.

Doesn't matter which genre. We had stacks of mysteries, thrillers, romance, Canlit, bildungsroman, small-town angst, wry slackers, picaresque, in shiny clean dustjackets and shabby library brodarts, sitting there yearningly like unattractive Babylonian women in that Herodotus story.
In the meantime, nonfiction, maps, and mass-market paperbacks were trundling steadily out the door.
Sarah the amazing co-op student and I made up gift baskets of thrillers, mysteries and romances with props like martini glasses, teacups, teabags and candles, in hopes of moving a few more, but even this did little to thin the ranks.

I took pity and took a few home at sale's end. For Christmas presents, of course.
Really. I'm not adding more books to my library when I should be weeding. Of course I'm not.