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kaigou1. New power drill. LOTS of power. Mmmmm.
2. Right now I'm torn between being disgusted at how sometimes people just can't seem to get past their own experiences to even remotely grok what it's like to go through a major curveball in one's life, versus being bored-now over continued pettiness even when I try to rise above former disagreements and make a sort of truce. Well, maybe, fuck the first and fuck the second and whatever.
3. Must start next novel, or I'll have nothing to do all day.
4. Wrote agents with exclusive requesting followup.
5. I need to buy four or five more 2x4s.
6. It feels weird to have GTMD rewritten and posted in full. Only took me a month & a frickin' half to polish, rewrite a good chunk of the second half, polish and...now the dreaded query phase. Oh, yay.
7. Book reviews...
I finally purchased a copy of Holly Black's Valiant, and score, it's signed by the author. (Must've been from when she was in town back in November.) Will be reading that this week while at the gym.
Also picked up several more of Tanya Huff's Blood series, not because I'm really that crazy about vampires but because I find the range of sexualities a nice change from the incessant-het usually prevalent in vampire stories (unless, of course, the vamp is omnisexual, which can get just as boring in some ways). Read Last Light of the Sun, by Kay, and... well. I'll start there.
I'd been told Kay's an amazing writer, and I suppose to some extent he is in terms of spinning a large piece with a huge cast of characters, but it was damn hard to get into the story. It didn't help that at the end of Part II, there's this extended chapter of two men trying to help their dying/injured king (aged twenty-something) to safety so he can get better and come back to kick out the Erlings/Norsemen. He does, they do, peace prevails...and then the chapter skims forward, as if suddenly we're twenty years into the future, and the king has four kids and bam, part two. Meanwhile, I'm thinking: "has all of part one been a flashback?" I was rather annoyed. I'd paid attention to these characters, tried to figure out where they were and how they fit together (as best I could given that I only seemed to meet familiar characters once or twice and then onto new characters, damn it) -- and the whole bloody thing was a flashback? What a gyp!
Actually, it wasn't. To which I said: Uh. Wait. It threw me right out of the story. Kay does that a number of times, sometimes as a flashback, and sometimes as a flash-forward, telling me some two-bit character's life for the rest of her life until death eighty years after the story's events, and I'm thinking, that would be okay if you had some way to warn me that this does not mean the story is chronologically going on from here. I feel like I'm being jerked around.
What's even more aggravating was bits like this, from near the end (though it happens pretty consistently through the story, this was the first example I found when opening the book at random):
It is in the nature of things that when we judge actions to be memorably courageous, they are invariably those that have an impact that resonates: saving other lives at great risk, winning a battle, losing one's life in a valiant attempt to do one or the other. A death of that sort can lead to songs and memories at least as much--sometimes more--than a triumph. We celebrate our losses, knowing how they are woven into the gift of our being here.
The first time, I was like, uh, okay, editorializing. Whatever. The second and third times, I skimmed. By the twentieth time, I was growling at the book and thinking SHUT UP AND GET BACK TO THE DAMN STORY. I don't need your lectures, Kay, and I really don't care if you're trying to tweak the oral storytelling tradition that interrupts its own pacing to say, "and sometimes children, this is the way the world works, and you don't realize it now but..." and so on, but this is NOT a spoken story with asides and tangents, this is a written story, and lecturing me in the middle just breaks your tension.
I won't even go into how much parentheses actually annoy me in fiction--it feels too, ugh, too formal, too non-fiction-ey. If the idea belongs in the story, work it into the narrative or dialogue. If it doesn't belong, leave it out, or use dashes instead, or something. Parentheses, to me, belong in an email, in a letter, in a nonfiction piece (possibly) but fiction should be more graceful than that. And when you put the lecturing together with parentheses and throw in the excessive use of you--"you don't think about things like that" and "when it happened, you just grabbed your sword and went"--and I'm thinking, STOP TALKING TO ME. I didn't start with that impression, but by the end, I found it overwhelmingly pretentious and annoying.
Tonya Huff's stories are okay, a bit more readable, definitely less pretentious--I started with Smoke & Shadow, her first one in a series about a young man trying to make it as television production staff, who's friends with a vampire. I'm willing to grit my teeth and ignore the instances of "would of" and "should of" that somehow slipped past the copyeditor--and these were in narrative, you can't argue dialogue quirks to me for these--but bloody hell, the vampire was Henry VIII's bastard son, I got it already, shut up. And worse than that, Tony (the main character) constantly refers to past experiences, as in, "he'd been through a lot already, like that time he'd seen the Egyptian priest kill that couple's baby..." on page 50 something, and then again refers to it on page 100, and then again on page 140...you get the idea. By the end of the book, as soon as there was the slightest hint of Tony referring to current events and psyching himself up to deal with it because how bad could it be compared to other things like (insert me shouting along) THE DAMNED EGYPTIAN MAGICIAN I GOT IT ALREADY MOVE ALONG.
[Imagine my less-than-thrilled reaction when reading the earlier books in the series and in the last set of the five Blood Series, yep, Tony thinks, "well, it's not like I've not dealt with baddies, like that Egyptian Magician who killed the baby..." and I'm going, NOT THE DAMN BABY SHUT UP GET SOME OTHER MEMORIES PLEASE.]
The one thing that actually sort of saved the book, for me, was that the bastard son of Henry VIII, now a vampire (in case you missed that memo the first seventeen times) has the whole traditional alpha-male vampire romance-novel crap going on. MINE! he yells, he emotes, whatever. Tony's response: No, I don't think so. Although Tony might long to let the vamp get away with it, he refuses. So that was at least nice to see that Tony didn't fall into the romance-heroine crap I often see (especially in M/M stories where the uke-half is just a girl with a frickin' dick, thank you).
I'm not entirely certain, though, that this made up for the fact that the conflict rested on "saving the world". Okay, it's book six or seven with some of these characters, but I really hate the whole "we must save the world!" crap because it's like a default. Of course you care about whether they succeed or fail, because, hey, the world! Just like children-in-peril stories: if you don't care, you're a callous bastard. (Unfortunately for many writers, I don't care, and I do tend to root for the world ending, especially if your characters or voice really annoy me. I really, really wanted the world to end for Kay's book. Like, three pages into it I was ready to entertain the notion...)
However, Huff can spin a decent yarn, and the characters were somewhat amusing, and I was bored, so I picked up more of the first series. Not sure I'll pick up any others, I'm tapped out. Last book in the Blood series, we have new vamp-girl. If I bloody well (ahem) had to read ONE MORE TIME that her eyes went silver, I was going to shred the book. You know how we laugh at amateur authors who Mary-Sue with crazy eye colors? Yes! Now we have proof published, established writers can do it, too! I mean, shut up already about the damned eye color and get over it. It got to the point that when the character's eyes were just plain gray, that was far more worth my time/attention. Rest of time, me: ooh, silver, whatever.
And the other thing? If you set up a character as being so good at what s/he does, that the only character who can help is this character who's so good, then do not, for the love of bait-and-switches everywhere, have a different character solve the mystery. I'm just sayin'.
Huff writes quasi-mystery or suspense, but she does a bait-and-switch in that, too. The first book I read, it wasn't quite so much (since the bad guy doesn't really show up until near the end); the three I've read in the Blood series, the pattern is basically the same. Mysterious events, strange murder, review of possible suspects, then ka-bam, we get POV for the actual murderer. Suddenly we've gone from standard murder-book opening, first four or five chapters or so, and now we're in suspense, where we're supposed to be three steps ahead of the character, terrified on her behalf that she'll go into the basement. Except...I start in a mindset of "can I figure this out, too?" and showing me the murderer right there just annoys me. The first time, I thought, ooh, red herring! and got even more irked to find that no, this is the murderer. I didn't even get the fun of being deliciously tricked. The second time, the pattern was the same: murderer revealed, and then I'm supposed to switch tracks to react like I'm reading suspense...but I never really found any of the suspense that damn suspenseful. Huff was doing much better if she'd kept to mystery, instead of trying to build tension.
Part of the lack of tension, though, is that she writes omniscient POV. I've talked before about how I really dislike this style if it's done badly, but Huff seems to stick to a single head for at least five or six paragraphs, goes to somewhat distant for at least a paragraph, and then moves into another head. She's more skillful at it than most, but I still found it frustrating--because it meant she could go into the bad guy's head: if she didn't, it was obvious; if she did, there, everything's revealed. For me, that meant no suspense, because suspense comes when I know something the character doesn't, and if I'm not deep in the character's head, how can I be reminded so painfully that I know something and the character doesn't? We've already moved onto someone else!
All in all, Kay gets a C+ for decent (if flat) storytelling if you don't mind skipping the superfluous paragraphs (and sometimes entire scenes that are about one-time-characters and seem to be completely tangential and existing only to show you that, uh, there are other people in this world, or something) -- but skipping all that, on the up side, means the story just went from about five hundred pages to maybe two-thirds that. Faster reading!
Huff gets a B for slicing at some classic alpha-male romance crap, and for having a variety of sexualities in her stories, and for some good quick moments. But she's bogged down in the Blood series with a repetitive pattern, she gets a piont in her head that she thinks we readers MUST remember (eye color, age of vampire, significant personal storyline events) and hammers it at us over, and over, and over. Could do without that, really.
2. Right now I'm torn between being disgusted at how sometimes people just can't seem to get past their own experiences to even remotely grok what it's like to go through a major curveball in one's life, versus being bored-now over continued pettiness even when I try to rise above former disagreements and make a sort of truce. Well, maybe, fuck the first and fuck the second and whatever.
3. Must start next novel, or I'll have nothing to do all day.
4. Wrote agents with exclusive requesting followup.
5. I need to buy four or five more 2x4s.
6. It feels weird to have GTMD rewritten and posted in full. Only took me a month & a frickin' half to polish, rewrite a good chunk of the second half, polish and...now the dreaded query phase. Oh, yay.
7. Book reviews...
I finally purchased a copy of Holly Black's Valiant, and score, it's signed by the author. (Must've been from when she was in town back in November.) Will be reading that this week while at the gym.
Also picked up several more of Tanya Huff's Blood series, not because I'm really that crazy about vampires but because I find the range of sexualities a nice change from the incessant-het usually prevalent in vampire stories (unless, of course, the vamp is omnisexual, which can get just as boring in some ways). Read Last Light of the Sun, by Kay, and... well. I'll start there.
I'd been told Kay's an amazing writer, and I suppose to some extent he is in terms of spinning a large piece with a huge cast of characters, but it was damn hard to get into the story. It didn't help that at the end of Part II, there's this extended chapter of two men trying to help their dying/injured king (aged twenty-something) to safety so he can get better and come back to kick out the Erlings/Norsemen. He does, they do, peace prevails...and then the chapter skims forward, as if suddenly we're twenty years into the future, and the king has four kids and bam, part two. Meanwhile, I'm thinking: "has all of part one been a flashback?" I was rather annoyed. I'd paid attention to these characters, tried to figure out where they were and how they fit together (as best I could given that I only seemed to meet familiar characters once or twice and then onto new characters, damn it) -- and the whole bloody thing was a flashback? What a gyp!
Actually, it wasn't. To which I said: Uh. Wait. It threw me right out of the story. Kay does that a number of times, sometimes as a flashback, and sometimes as a flash-forward, telling me some two-bit character's life for the rest of her life until death eighty years after the story's events, and I'm thinking, that would be okay if you had some way to warn me that this does not mean the story is chronologically going on from here. I feel like I'm being jerked around.
What's even more aggravating was bits like this, from near the end (though it happens pretty consistently through the story, this was the first example I found when opening the book at random):
It is in the nature of things that when we judge actions to be memorably courageous, they are invariably those that have an impact that resonates: saving other lives at great risk, winning a battle, losing one's life in a valiant attempt to do one or the other. A death of that sort can lead to songs and memories at least as much--sometimes more--than a triumph. We celebrate our losses, knowing how they are woven into the gift of our being here.
The first time, I was like, uh, okay, editorializing. Whatever. The second and third times, I skimmed. By the twentieth time, I was growling at the book and thinking SHUT UP AND GET BACK TO THE DAMN STORY. I don't need your lectures, Kay, and I really don't care if you're trying to tweak the oral storytelling tradition that interrupts its own pacing to say, "and sometimes children, this is the way the world works, and you don't realize it now but..." and so on, but this is NOT a spoken story with asides and tangents, this is a written story, and lecturing me in the middle just breaks your tension.
I won't even go into how much parentheses actually annoy me in fiction--it feels too, ugh, too formal, too non-fiction-ey. If the idea belongs in the story, work it into the narrative or dialogue. If it doesn't belong, leave it out, or use dashes instead, or something. Parentheses, to me, belong in an email, in a letter, in a nonfiction piece (possibly) but fiction should be more graceful than that. And when you put the lecturing together with parentheses and throw in the excessive use of you--"you don't think about things like that" and "when it happened, you just grabbed your sword and went"--and I'm thinking, STOP TALKING TO ME. I didn't start with that impression, but by the end, I found it overwhelmingly pretentious and annoying.
Tonya Huff's stories are okay, a bit more readable, definitely less pretentious--I started with Smoke & Shadow, her first one in a series about a young man trying to make it as television production staff, who's friends with a vampire. I'm willing to grit my teeth and ignore the instances of "would of" and "should of" that somehow slipped past the copyeditor--and these were in narrative, you can't argue dialogue quirks to me for these--but bloody hell, the vampire was Henry VIII's bastard son, I got it already, shut up. And worse than that, Tony (the main character) constantly refers to past experiences, as in, "he'd been through a lot already, like that time he'd seen the Egyptian priest kill that couple's baby..." on page 50 something, and then again refers to it on page 100, and then again on page 140...you get the idea. By the end of the book, as soon as there was the slightest hint of Tony referring to current events and psyching himself up to deal with it because how bad could it be compared to other things like (insert me shouting along) THE DAMNED EGYPTIAN MAGICIAN I GOT IT ALREADY MOVE ALONG.
[Imagine my less-than-thrilled reaction when reading the earlier books in the series and in the last set of the five Blood Series, yep, Tony thinks, "well, it's not like I've not dealt with baddies, like that Egyptian Magician who killed the baby..." and I'm going, NOT THE DAMN BABY SHUT UP GET SOME OTHER MEMORIES PLEASE.]
The one thing that actually sort of saved the book, for me, was that the bastard son of Henry VIII, now a vampire (in case you missed that memo the first seventeen times) has the whole traditional alpha-male vampire romance-novel crap going on. MINE! he yells, he emotes, whatever. Tony's response: No, I don't think so. Although Tony might long to let the vamp get away with it, he refuses. So that was at least nice to see that Tony didn't fall into the romance-heroine crap I often see (especially in M/M stories where the uke-half is just a girl with a frickin' dick, thank you).
I'm not entirely certain, though, that this made up for the fact that the conflict rested on "saving the world". Okay, it's book six or seven with some of these characters, but I really hate the whole "we must save the world!" crap because it's like a default. Of course you care about whether they succeed or fail, because, hey, the world! Just like children-in-peril stories: if you don't care, you're a callous bastard. (Unfortunately for many writers, I don't care, and I do tend to root for the world ending, especially if your characters or voice really annoy me. I really, really wanted the world to end for Kay's book. Like, three pages into it I was ready to entertain the notion...)
However, Huff can spin a decent yarn, and the characters were somewhat amusing, and I was bored, so I picked up more of the first series. Not sure I'll pick up any others, I'm tapped out. Last book in the Blood series, we have new vamp-girl. If I bloody well (ahem) had to read ONE MORE TIME that her eyes went silver, I was going to shred the book. You know how we laugh at amateur authors who Mary-Sue with crazy eye colors? Yes! Now we have proof published, established writers can do it, too! I mean, shut up already about the damned eye color and get over it. It got to the point that when the character's eyes were just plain gray, that was far more worth my time/attention. Rest of time, me: ooh, silver, whatever.
And the other thing? If you set up a character as being so good at what s/he does, that the only character who can help is this character who's so good, then do not, for the love of bait-and-switches everywhere, have a different character solve the mystery. I'm just sayin'.
Huff writes quasi-mystery or suspense, but she does a bait-and-switch in that, too. The first book I read, it wasn't quite so much (since the bad guy doesn't really show up until near the end); the three I've read in the Blood series, the pattern is basically the same. Mysterious events, strange murder, review of possible suspects, then ka-bam, we get POV for the actual murderer. Suddenly we've gone from standard murder-book opening, first four or five chapters or so, and now we're in suspense, where we're supposed to be three steps ahead of the character, terrified on her behalf that she'll go into the basement. Except...I start in a mindset of "can I figure this out, too?" and showing me the murderer right there just annoys me. The first time, I thought, ooh, red herring! and got even more irked to find that no, this is the murderer. I didn't even get the fun of being deliciously tricked. The second time, the pattern was the same: murderer revealed, and then I'm supposed to switch tracks to react like I'm reading suspense...but I never really found any of the suspense that damn suspenseful. Huff was doing much better if she'd kept to mystery, instead of trying to build tension.
Part of the lack of tension, though, is that she writes omniscient POV. I've talked before about how I really dislike this style if it's done badly, but Huff seems to stick to a single head for at least five or six paragraphs, goes to somewhat distant for at least a paragraph, and then moves into another head. She's more skillful at it than most, but I still found it frustrating--because it meant she could go into the bad guy's head: if she didn't, it was obvious; if she did, there, everything's revealed. For me, that meant no suspense, because suspense comes when I know something the character doesn't, and if I'm not deep in the character's head, how can I be reminded so painfully that I know something and the character doesn't? We've already moved onto someone else!
All in all, Kay gets a C+ for decent (if flat) storytelling if you don't mind skipping the superfluous paragraphs (and sometimes entire scenes that are about one-time-characters and seem to be completely tangential and existing only to show you that, uh, there are other people in this world, or something) -- but skipping all that, on the up side, means the story just went from about five hundred pages to maybe two-thirds that. Faster reading!
Huff gets a B for slicing at some classic alpha-male romance crap, and for having a variety of sexualities in her stories, and for some good quick moments. But she's bogged down in the Blood series with a repetitive pattern, she gets a piont in her head that she thinks we readers MUST remember (eye color, age of vampire, significant personal storyline events) and hammers it at us over, and over, and over. Could do without that, really.
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Date: 16 Mar 2006 04:19 am (UTC)