Laura's Books

Speculative Fiction

2012-03-11T09:28:00.002-07:00

“Speculative fiction” is a catchphrase that has been used a lot recently to describe the various subgenres and crossed-genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror. The term is a little silly when you think about it, because all fiction is speculative—otherwise it would be nonfiction. But it’s a useful term for the recent proliferation of fiction that doesn’t easily fit into one of the “typical” genres (e.g., urban fantasy, steampunk, paranormal romance, dark fantasy).

I’ve been reading a lot of speculative fiction series lately. First: The Parasol Protectorate series by Gail Carriger, which includes SOULLESS, CHANGELESS, BLAMELESS, HEARTLESS, and TIMELESS. The novels are set in an alternate version of Victorian England where vampires and werewolves are accepted into society. Vampirism and lycanthropy, along with ghostliness, are indicators of excess soul, but there are also preternaturals—people who are born with no soul. The protagonist, a twenty-something “spinster” named Alexia Tarabotti, is one such soulless. Her lack of soul allows her to negate the powers of the supernatural set with a touch.

Besides the alternate history and paranormal subgenres, the series also incorporates steampunk, mystery, humor and romance elements. Other characters are Lord Conall Maccon, temperamental werewolf and love interest; Lord Akeldama, flamboyantly gay vampire; and Ivy, Alexia’s best friend, a human girl with an unfortunate obsession with ugly hats. Gail Carriger’s writing is brilliant, like a cross between Jane Austen and Douglas Adams.

Another series is The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare, the first novel of which is CITY OF BONES. This series is set in a version of modern America that is populated by vampires, werewolves, warlocks, demons, angels and fae. Certain humans are born with the ability to see the supernaturals. These Shadowhunters dedicate their lives to killing demons and rogue supernaturals. The protagonist, a teen girl named Clary, was born a Shadowhunter but only recently learned of the supernatural world. Other characters are Simon, her best friend; Jace, a hot Shadowhunter who may or may not be her brother; Magnus Bane, an intriguing warlock; and a pack of werewolves.

Cassandra Clare has also started a second series, The Infernal Devices, which also features the Shadowhunters, but is set in an alternate-history, steampunkish Victorian London.

Currently I’m reading the Leviathan series, an alternate history/ steampunk/ science fiction/ speculative fiction series by Scott Westerfeld, which includes LEVIATHAN, BEHEMOTH and GOLIATH. Leviathan is set in 1914 Europe in the lead-up to World War I. In this alternate Europe, Germany and Austria (called the “Clankers”) have developed huge mechanical walking war machines, while Britain and France (called the “Darwinists”) have created biological constructs through altering the “life threads” (i.e., DNA and genetic engineering) of creatures. The Leviathan of the title is an enormous “airbeast” in the British fleet, a floating ecosystem that supports the hydrogen-producing activities of a whale-like creature. The protagonists are Alek, an Austrian prince who is on the run from his parents’ political murderers, and Deryn, a British girl who pretends to be a boy so she can join the Air Service. The novels are well-written and also feature fascinating illustrations by Keith Thompson.

"I Want My Hat Back"

2012-03-02T09:11:00.003-08:00

Review of I WANT MY HAT BACK, by Jon Klassen (2011)

I WANT MY HAT BACK is the funniest picture book I’ve read in a long time. It’s rather hard to write a review of a picture book that contains less than 200 words, but I’ll try!

I first heard of this book last December when I was doing Christmas book shopping for my kids and their cousins. The bookstore employee dragged me over and said, "You have to check out this new picture book!" I didn't buy it at that time, but checked it out from the library recently. My kids are so in love with the book that I'm going to have to buy a copy soon.

The story is told entirely through dialogue and follows a big, fat bear as he asks other animals if they’ve seen his hat. He asks a fox, a frog, a rabbit (who is wearing a pointy red hat, has a devious expression on his face, and answers the bear evasively), a turtle, a snake and an armadillo. The poor bear collapses in despair, saying, “My poor hat. I miss it so much.” An elk wanders by and asks the bear, “What’s the matter?” The bear starts to describe his missing hat (red and pointy) and realizes, “I HAVE SEEN MY HAT.” I won’t spoil the ending by telling you what happens to the thieving rabbit, but kids will roll with laughter.

My daughters, ages 5 and 7, ask for this book every night at story time. They laugh hysterically, especially at the end. Highly recommended for kids in the four-to-eight-year-old range. Younger kids probably won’t understand the twist ending but will enjoy the pictures.

The Newport Ladies Book Club

2012-02-11T17:10:00.000-08:00

OLIVIA, by Julie Wright, is the first of The Newport Ladies Book Club series, which consists of four books, written by four authors, following the stories of four women who are drawn together by their love of reading.

Olivia is a forty-something wife and mother of four. Her husband, Nick, also has two grown children from a previous marriage but from whom he is estranged. Nick has grown distant from Olivia and their children, and she feels like her life is falling apart. Julie Wright perfectly captures the feelings of a deteriorating marriage: the subtle verbal jabs, the silence, the smothering tension in the home, the discomfort of being close, and the pain of being apart. After Nick fails to show up for their anniversary dinner, Olivia sees a flyer for a new women’s book club. She hesitates; she wants to join but feels like she can’t take the time away from her troubled family. After arguing with herself, she joins the club and meets the other women, Daisy, Paige and Athena, whose stories will be featured in the following books.

All of the women are in crisis, facing loneliness, divorce, an unexpected pregnancy, a mother’s death, and a father’s dementia. All are struggling, trying—as many women do—to bravely solve their problems without inconveniencing anyone, but they all need help. They reach out to each other, hesitantly at first but later with a fierce loyalty. They learn to trust each other and develop deep friendships.

The other books in the series will be released throughout 2012:

DAISY, by Josi S. Kilpack
PAIGE, by Annette Lyon
ATHENA, by Heather Moore

I’m looking forward to reading the other books in the series to learn the other women’s stories from their points of view.

HealthyPet article

2012-01-27T20:13:00.001-08:00

Another nonfiction article published!

HealthyPet magazine is aimed toward pet owners, and has a combination of veterinary medical columns as well as general interest articles. Every issue features an animal-loving celebrity with his/her pets.

My article is titled “Is it normal for my dog to be so ‘amorous’?” and talks about dogs who hump inanimate objects. (That was a difficult article to write; how on earth do you talk about dogs humping teddy bears in a politically correct fashion?) It appears in the Winter 2011 issue and is accompanied by a cute illustration of a doggy and a red heart.

But the best part is:

I get to share the issue with William Shatner! Yes, I am a geek, and have been a Star Trek fan since the eighties.

All Creatures Great and Small

2012-01-26T11:05:00.000-08:00

I recently reread All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot (1972). James Herriot (real name: James Alfred Wight) was a veterinarian in rural Yorkshire in the 1930’s. He wrote a series of memoirs of veterinary life, published from the 1970’s through 90’s. I first read the series in high school, then reread it soon after graduating from vet school.

Herriot makes writing seem easy. Reading his stories is like sitting around a cozy fireplace listening to a kindly fellow telling stories. His phrasing seems effortless, but every word and sentence is precise, as in:

I pulled out the syringe box and selected a wide-bored needle. My fingers, numb with the special kind of cold you felt in the early morning with your circulation sluggish and your stomach empty, could hardly hold it.

Each chapter is only a few pages long, a vignette of a particular patient or client. Although he talks about medical issues, the stories are more about the people—their personalities, attitudes toward their animals, and relationships with family and neighbors. For example, one chapter is framed around an old dog in congestive heart failure, but the real spirit of the story centers on the dog’s owner, a little old lady whose love of her pets—and Herriot’s assurance that animals have souls—help her find the courage to face her looming mortality.

As a veterinarian, I love to read Herriot because I’ve encountered many of the same situations with my patients and clients. It doesn’t matter that he practiced large animal medicine in England in the 1930’s while I’m practicing small animal medicine in America in the 2010’s—people and animals are the same all over.

The opening line is: “They didn’t say anything about this in the books, I thought, as the snow blew in through the gaping doorway and settled on my naked back.” (He’s pulled off his shirt to reach deep into a cow to deliver a stuck calf.) Yup. I can think of hundreds of situations when I thought, They didn’t teach me this in vet school. Like, how do you repair a lacerated tongue on a cockatoo? How do you treat a seagull with head trauma? What do you do when a scared feral cat is running amok in your surgery suite?

Some of the stories will make a veterinarian laugh. There’s one hostile farmer who antagonizes practice owner Siegfried every time he sees him. Siegfried has tried repeatedly to fire the farmer as a client but he keeps calling them back for veterinary services, the quality and price of which he always complains about. But then Tristan, Siegfried’s goofy younger brother, inadvertently mixes up an ointment which was meant to go to the farmer with a fecal sample which was meant to go to the lab. The farmer receives a stinking pile of diarrhea on his breakfast table and they never have to deal with him again.

Some stories make you cry. James has been treating a kind farmer’s prized cow, but the cow’s health is deteriorating despite his efforts. The cow represents the foundation of the future herd, and the farmer saved for years to buy her. Herriot writes:

I shuffled my feet miserably. ‘I don’t know what to say, Dick. There’s nothing more I can do.’ I turned to go, bowed down by a sense of failure heavier than I had ever known. As I went out into the yard, Dick called after me.
‘Don’t worry, lad, these things happen. Thank ye for all you’ve done.’
The words were like a whip across my back. If he had cursed me thoroughly I’d have felt a lot better.

Siegfried, James’s boss, sums up a veterinarian’s life: “It’s a funny profession, ours, you know. It offers unparalleled opportunities for making a chump of yourself.”

Freelance Job

2012-01-07T11:18:00.000-08:00

I’ve gotten an exciting freelance job! Last month I received an invitation to bid on a job ghostwriting a book about veterinary practice management. I didn't get the writing job but they gave me the job of editing it. I think it should work out well. The writing job went to an author (who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons) who has published a ton of books, both under his own name and as a ghostwriter.

So my job will be both a copy editor and a content editor as a veterinarian. Copy editing isn’t a task I’ve ever done professionally, but for which I feel qualified because my brain has an annoying habit of catching every typo, homophone (like “core” vs. “corps”), and erroneous word choice in published works.

The editing job pays well, plus I’ll get my name in the book. The company that commissioned the book has previously published a book on dental practice management that I’ve been reading as background. It's, um, rather boring. I now know more than any non-dentist needs to know about dental practice valuations. If you ever want to buy a dental practice, let me know and I can set you up.

The Magician King

2011-12-23T09:26:00.000-08:00

Review of THE MAGICIAN KING, Lev Grossman, 2011:

Like (presumably) every other fantasy geek I’ve thought, Wouldn’t it be cool to do magic? To pop into Hogsmeade for a butterbeer with Professor Dumbledore? Or maybe use magical cures when my regular Western medicine fails?

But think about. Like really think about it. Would you want the surly teenager with his underpants showing because his pants are down below his hips to be chucking magic missiles at the substitute teacher? Or the creepy old guy who mows his lawn naked to be scrying in a pool of used motor oil? Or the entitled chick Facebooking on her smart phone to be whipping up a pox potion?

Well, er, not really. But that’s the world that Lev Grossman has created. If you’re smart enough and dedicated enough, and possibly do enough drugs, you too can do magic.

Like Grossman’s previous novel, THE MAGICIANS, this urban fantasy is not for kids. And it’s not a book to breeze through in an evening; you’ve got to be paying attention. His writing is intricate (“I was perfectly happy where I was, deliquescing, atom by atom, amid a riot of luxury”) and full of references to literature, math and physics (I’ve got a doctorate degree and still didn’t understand many of them). In one chapter, there are references across the board from Italian carabinieri to Candy Land to Brythonic languages to Arthurian legend to Google Street View to Beatrix Potter to “The Wind in the Willows” to Jim Morrison to Scarlett’s Tara to Christopher Robin. Confused yet?

The prose is by turns colloquial and elegant. One great passage:

But nuclear winter was coming, and magic wasn’t keeping her warm. It was getting cold, tainted snow was falling, and the earth was getting thirsty again, thirsty for balm. The black dog was hunting. Julia was feeling it again, the blackness.

Or really blackness would have been a relief, blackness would have been a field trip compared with where she was headed, which was despair. That stuff had no color. She wished it were made of blackness, velvety soft blackness, that she could curl up and fall asleep in, but it was so much worse than that. Think of it as the difference between zero and the empty set, the set that contains nothing, not even zero. These but the trappings and the suits of woe. All these seem to laugh,/Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Highly recommended.

Writing Goals

2011-12-11T15:00:00.000-08:00

At the last meeting of my writing group our cheerleader pushed us to make writing goals for the coming year. Umm, okay. I’ve never been big on New Year’s resolutions. (A couple years ago I decided to make resolutions I knew I could keep: watching NCIS and eating chocolate ice cream!) But, yeah, I know it’s important to set goals.

Last year my writing resolution was to “submit as many queries as possible.” In retrospect that was overambitious. I mean, I didn’t submit as many queries as was possible—I could have sent a dozen every day—but I did send a reasonable number, and got some gigs out of it. No fiction yet, alas, but in 2011 I published a print article in Veterinary Economics and eleven online articles—all paying! And I finally got a job in children’s writing: an article upcoming in AppleSeeds on the evolution of dogs from wolves. The issue is devoted entirely to dogs and I was also asked to be a Consulting Editor for the issue. Woot!

So my goal for 2012 is to keep plugging away. Keep writing. Get some more nonfiction published (because that helps pay the bills) while I keep writing and querying for fiction.

A couple of (real, live, published!) authors have recently blogged on this topic. Sydney Salter (a very nice Utah young adult author) wrote on the YA Outside the Lines blog:

An eye-opening debut author experience had me setting this goal in 2010: "Do NOT compare your career path to others. No, no, no!" Two years later I'm still reminding myself about that one as yet another year ends without a new manuscript sale.

I have to remind myself of this often. I know a lot of writers who diss Stephenie Meyer. She wrote a novel about an unhealthy, obsessive, faux-romantic teen relationship, and overnight went from an unknown to a zillionaire with a movie cameo. Or closer to home, yesterday a writing acquaintance of mine announced that she’s gotten an agent. My initial reaction was: Aack! I’m falling behind! I met her at an editing workshop over the summer at which we both submitted the first chapters of our novels. At that time we were both at about the same point on the writing racetrack but now she’s lapped me.

But I need to remind myself that I can’t compare my writing career to theirs. My life is different. Writing isn’t my “real” job, although I fantasize that someday it could be. I might be a slow bloomer when it comes to writing, but I’ve still got time.

And Lev Grossman, author of the amazing urban fantasy The Magicians, wrote on his blog:

I got a lot of rejections during those first, oh, dozen years or so. Enough that a more reasonable person would have given up. But for some reason my lizard hind-brain wasn't going to let me quit.

It’s encouraging to realize that not all bestselling authors just waltzed onto the New York Times list. If he could survive hundreds of rejections over a dozen years, I can too.

Christmas Kids' Books!

2011-12-10T08:44:00.000-08:00

So I’ve realized that I have a minor addiction to children’s picture books. It’s okay. I can stop anytime. Really.

Last week I spent an hour or so in the children’s department at my favorite local independent bookstore, The King’s English. I bought books for all nine children on my holiday shopping list, chatted with the employees, and browsed. I would have spent all afternoon there but regrettably had to go back to work.

In the spirit of the season, here are some of my favorite Christmas children’s books.

Dragon’s Merry Christmas, by Dav Pilkey (1991). This early reader is divided into four chapters following Dragon (a cheerful, blue, horned beast) as he makes preparations for the holiday. In “The Perfect Christmas Tree,” Dragon searches for the perfect tree, but once he finds it he can’t bear to cut it down, so decorates it where it stands. In “Merry Christmas, Dragon,” he buys himself some presents but gives them away to creatures in need: food for hungry raccoons, a coat for an elderly rhino, and a birdhouse for a pair of lovebirds. This sweet story teaches the importance of giving.

Olive, the Other Reindeer, by J. Otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh (1997). Olive is a cute little terrier who mishears the song lyrics, “All of the other reindeer” as “Olive, the other reindeer.” She figures she is meant to go to the North Pole to join Santa’s reindeer. Santa and Comet aren’t sure why the small dog is there but give her a chance, and she saves the day by using her super-sniffer to guide the sleigh through the fog.

Snowmen at Christmas, by Caralyn Beuhner and Mark Beuhner (2005). In this gorgeously illustrated picture book, while people are asleep on Christmas Eve night, snowmen gather in the town square for dancing and tree-trimming. The snowy scenes glow with light and color, and each illustration has bonus hidden shapes for kids to find.

The Night Before the Night Before Christmas, by Natasha Wing and Mike Lester (2002). In this very funny riff on the classic poem, the narrator, a clever young girl, comments on the ironic, hectic preparations for a modern American holiday celebration. One of my favorite passages:

Things will get better, I thought, as I crawled into bed.
Maybe visions of sugarplums will dance in my head.
Instead, I lay wondering, gazing up at the moon.
What on earth is a sugarplum? Is it a candy or prune?

Everything is a disaster, as Mom gets the flu, Dad nearly falls off the ladder hanging lights, bulbs burn out, the cat knocks over the tree, and little brother pees on the mall Santa’s lap. Mom despairs that the holiday is ruined but Dad reminds her of the true meaning of Christmas:

No, it’s not, sugarplum,
These things are just stuff.
Christmas is about love.
And we have quite enough.

And, of course, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, by Dr. Seuss (1957). I’ve loved this book since I was little; my mom used to read it to me, and now I’m reading it to my kids.

The story follows the Grinch, a nasty green creature with a heart “two sizes too small,” and his faithful dog, Max, in their adventures stealing Christmas décor and presents from the villagers of Who-ville. In the end, the Grinch realizes that Christmas “doesn’t come from a store” and that perhaps it “means a little bit more.” His heart grows three sizes, he brings back the gifts, carves the Whos’ Christmas roast beast, and they all live happily ever after. (Be honest—how many adults out there still refer to roast beef as “roast beast?” I’m raising my hand.)

It’s a marvelous story, an antidote to the commercialism of the holiday. Dr. Seuss’s writing is brilliant as always, as when the Grinch gets a “wonderful, awful idea.” Most writers would never consider stringing “wonderful” and “awful” together, but the result is perfect.

World War Z

2011-11-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

I saw Max Brooks, the author of WORLD WAR Z (2006), on a History Channel show called “Zombies: A Living History.” I was annoyed: he’s confident and affable, the published author of a bestselling novel, and I’m pretty sure he’s younger than me. I was jealous. But I looked up the novel, read some online reviews and bought it. Now I don’t begrudge Brooks his success, because the book is bloody brilliant.

In the aftermath of a global zombie apocalypse, the anonymous narrator travels the world, collecting stories from human survivors: soldiers and doctors, housewives and mercenaries, politicians and survivalists. Each chapter is the recollections of a different person, assembled into chronological order.

As I read the book the night before Halloween, my husband asked, “Is it scary?” I answered, “Not scary in the traditional sense of horror, but scary in the sense that you can totally see everything happening, the way governments respond—everything is completely plausible.”

Disregard for now the zombies. Just think of any virulent, lethal, previously unknown infectious disease. The virus spreads rapidly around the globe, transferred not only by international commerce and travel, but also by the rampant black-market trade in human organs. Some governments cover up outbreaks. Other governments mobilize their armies—targeting civilians as well as the infected. Society breaks down. A few intelligence officers figure out what’s happening and hand-deliver an “Eyes Only” report to the White House, which is ignored and relegated to a bottom desk drawer in a remote field office. A sensationalized, televised battle between humans and zombies fails spectacularly when the army shows up with fabulously expensive, high-tech weaponry that has no effect against the enemy. Millions die after evacuating their homes—not from the infection but from violence or starvation or exposure. Desperation. Panic. Religious fervor. Nukes.

So, yes, it’s scary.

Max Brooks has clearly done his homework, and the novel is well-written. The voice of each survivor comes through clearly and their terror is evident, both in what they say and in what is left unsaid, as in these passages:

From a soldier who was witness to one of the first outbreaks:

Beyond them, in the first chamber, we saw our first evidence of a one-sided firefight, one-sided because only one wall of the cavern was pockmarked by small arms. Opposite that wall were the shooters. They’d been torn apart. Their limbs, their bones, shredded and gnawed…some still clutching their weapons, one of those severed hands with an old Makarov still in the grip. The hand was missing a finger. I found it across the room, along with the body of another unarmed man who’d been hit over a hundred times. Several rounds had taken the top of his head off. The finger was still stuck between his teeth.

From a girl who evacuated with her family to the woods of northern Canada:

I was a pretty heavy kid. I never played sports, I lived on fast food and snacks. I was only a little bit thinner when we arrived in August. By November, I was like a skeleton. […] One time, around Thanksgiving…I couldn’t get out of my sleeping bag. My belly was swollen and I had these sores on my mouth and nose. There was this smell coming from the neighbor’s RV. They were cooking something, meat, it smelled really good. Mom and Dad were outside arguing. Mom said “it” was the only way. I didn’t know what “it” was. She said “it” wasn’t “that bad” because the neighbors, not us, had been the ones to actually “do it.”

Recommended for anyone who has wondered, “What if?"

Halloween Picture Books

2011-10-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

Halloween is my favorite holiday and I’ve been collecting Halloween children’s books for eight years. (This year, I broke out the stash on September 2 to allow a full two months’ of spooky entertainment!) All of the picture books below have fun stories and intriguing illustrations, and are entertaining even for the parent who has to read them aloud a few (dozen) times.

THE HALLO-WIENER, by Dav Pilkey (1995), is my all-time-favorite children’s book of any genre. I’ve bought this book for a number of friends with small children, and will soon need to replace my own bedraggled copy. Oscar is a wiener dog who is “half-a-dog tall and one-and-a-half dogs long.” All the other dogs tease him, and the teasing gets even worse when his mom makes him a hotdog costume for Halloween. He tags along behind his friends on Halloween night, embarrassed by his costume. The other dogs are spooked by a monster—but Oscar realizes that the monster is just a couple of cats and saves the day. The illustrations have hidden treasures for adults (at obedience school one dog is writing on the blackboard, I will not sniff my neighbor). This year I bought a hotdog costume for my short-legged corgi because of this book!

GOODNIGHT GOON, by Michael Rex (2008), is a spooky parody of the classic GOODNIGHT MOON. It begins:
In the cold gray tomb
There was a gravestone
And a black lagoon
And a picture of—
Martians taking over the moon
The little werewolf who lives in the tomb says goodnight to all his possessions and puts the Goon to bed. The illustrations are entertaining, showing various monsters interacting (Goon, vampire, witch, mummy, and the Martians which have escaped from their picture).

Each page of WHEN A MONSTER IS BORN, written by Sean Taylor and illustrated by Nick Sharratt (2006), features two possibilities that propel the story. When a chartreuse monster sets out to seek his fortune and hides behind a restaurant, “there are two possibilities—either a kitchen-girl comes out and tips a saucepan of porridge over the monster’s head, or… the kitchen girl notices the monster and stops in her tracks.” And so on with possibilities as the girl turns into a lavender monster, they fall in love, get married, and have a little orange baby monster.

T. REX TRICK-OR-TREATS, written by Lois G. Grambling and illustrated by Jack E. Davis (2005), is a cute story for dino-loving kids. (And what kid doesn’t love dinos?) T. Rex ponders what to wear for trick-or-treating. His friends, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus and Iguanodon, convince him to go as himself because his pointy teeth are much scarier than any costume. The text is fun for reading out loud because of repetitive phrases like Eeeek! and Scary!

In BIG PUMPKIN, written by Erica Silverman and illustrated by S.D. Schindler (1992), a witch plants a pumpkin. Come harvest time, the pumpkin has grown much too large. One after another, a ghost, a vampire, and a mummy—each bigger and stronger than the last—offer to help but none can budge it. Finally a bat, tiny but clever, solves the problem. The witch makes pumpkin pie for her new monster friends.

A Discovery of Witches

2011-10-11T08:15:00.001-07:00

Review of A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES, by Deborah Harkness (2011)

Dr. Diana Bishop is a visiting scholar at Oxford. As a historian of science, her research focuses on sixteenth-century alchemists. She spends her days in the university library, translating ancient illuminated manuscripts. She’s also a witch, descended from a powerful family burned in Salem, but avoids using any magic. One day she calls a rare manuscript from the stacks and recognizes its magic but quickly sends it back. The entire paranormal community starts hounding her, and she learns that the manuscript has been thought lost for over a century. Allegedly the manuscript reveals the origins of the four races on this planet: magical witches; cool, ageless, predatory vampires; artistic, mad daemons; and blissfully unaware humans.

One paranormal creature who is drawn to her is Dr. Matthew Clairmont: brilliant scientist, wine connoisseur, and gorgeous vampire. They fight over library space and bicker their way into falling in love. He does what he can to protect her, but fellow witches and vampires close in, intent on probing Diana’s magical abilities and her connection to the lost manuscript.

The story is exciting, with twists and turns, violence and romance. Deborah Harkness, a historian herself, successfully weaves together alchemy, witchcraft, evolution, mitochondrial DNA, wolf behavior, mythology, religion and history. The settings are beautifully described, from the libraries and boathouses of Oxford to the magical Bishop home in New England, and the descriptions of tea, wine, and English breakfasts (piled high with toast, eggs, sausage and fried tomatoes) are crave-inducing.

Most of the chapters are written in first person, from Diana’s point of view, but a few chapters are in third person, following other characters, primarily Matthew. Normally, when authors switch between first- and third-person it drives me nuts, but in this case I loved the story and characters so much that I am willing to overlook the point of view changes!

My only complaint is that the novel is the first of a trilogy so I must wait to find out what happens next.

Banned Books Week and Harry Potter

2011-09-24T20:24:00.000-07:00

It’s Banned Books Week!

For a list of the Top 100 Banned or Challenged Books for 2000-2009 see here.

The “Number One Undesirable” on the list for the last decade is my favorite series ever, the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. The reasons listed for challenging Harry Potter are “anti-family, occult/Satanism, religious viewpoint, violence.” I say that’s bull. Let’s take them one at a time.

Anti-family. Sure, Harry doesn’t like the Dursleys—but would you, if they made you sleep in the closet under the stairs? Harry’s entire personality is shaped by his love for his deceased parents and godfather. The reason Voldemort wasn’t able to kill Harry as an infant was because his mother sacrificed herself to try to save him: her love protected him. And then in his final battle with Voldemort, Harry survives because he is willing to sacrifice himself to save his friends whom he loves.

Occult/Satanism. There is nothing Satanic about Harry Potter. Period. There is magic, which is not the same as occult. In fact, it could be argued that Harry is a Christ figure, and in the end good defeats evil.

Religious viewpoint. Religion is never discussed in the HP series. However, I suppose if you are a member of a conservative religious group, you may perceive that everything outside the boundaries of your religion—like magic, werewolves, and whomping willow trees—is evil. In that case, we ought to ban pretty much the entire genre of fantasy, as well as large chunks of every other speculative fiction genre. And we ought to ban the Koran, the Bible, the Torah, texts of Greek and Norse mythology, creation stories from every culture worldwide, and every fairy tale ever written.

Violence. Yeah, sure, there’s violence. But if we banned every book with violence, the library would fit in a closet. Grab any middle-grade book from the children’s section and there will be violence. Violence is a part of human nature, and we can’t just turn that off by preventing kids from reading about it.

The Magicians

2011-09-22T08:45:00.000-07:00

I read a review of THE MAGICIANS (by Lev Grossman, 2009) that suggested it would appeal to Harry Potter fans after they’ve graduated high school. Well, I had already graduated college by the time I read—and fell in love with—Harry Potter, but that was enough of a recommendation for me.

Awesome story. Rather dark, with some bad words and naughty escapades, but a great read for a fantasy addict like me. If you like darker, edgier fantasy like George R.R. Martin you should read it. (In fact, George R.R. Martin wrote a cover blurb: “The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea.”) Plus, there are happily geeky references to D&D, Star Wars and Star Trek; J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis. (Huh. Never occurred to me that all those famous fantasy authors go by their initials; maybe I’d have better luck getting my fantasy novel published if I went by L.L.M. Madsen?)

Quentin Coldwater is a brilliant 17-year-old but he feels like “his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.” He escapes reality by reading and dreaming of Fillory, a Narnia-esque fantasy locale from a children’s book series. But then he is inexplicably recruited into Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, a weird, exclusive, magical university in upstate New York. The college is a huge mansion with hedge maze and manicured lawns, hidden by ancient spells from the prying eyes of regular people. The magical faculty is “largely dependent on Victorian-era technology. It wasn’t an affectation, or not entirely; electronics, Quentin was told, behaved unpredictably in the presence of sorcery.”

Grossman’s magic system is intriguing. “You don’t just wave a wand and yell some made-up Latin.” The spells require painstaking practice, precise hand movements, and knowledge of some obscure languages like Aramaic and Old High Dutch.

At Brakebills, Quentin’s friends are brilliant but cripplingly shy Alice; flamboyantly eccentric Eliot; loud, fashionable Janet; and chronically underestimated Josh. Another classmate is a tattooed, mohawked guy with the inexplicable name of Penny, whom Josh describes as “a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking time bomb.”

During his years at Brakebills, Quentin learns to do some amazing magic. Pretty much anything you can imagine is possible, provided you have the brains and balls and perseverance to try it. But after graduation, Quentin and his friends descend into aimless, self-loathing, drug- and alcohol-fueled debauchery.

One night, Penny shows up with a magic item he’s bought from a black-market dealer. It’s real, and it allows a person to transport to the Neitherlands (“Neither here nor there”), a realm from the Fillory novels which connects to every other realm and dimension—including Fillory.

Quentin and his friends take the plunge and jump into Fillory, where they find that things aren’t quite as clear-cut as they were in the novels. Good vs. evil comes down to a matter of perspective. Friends turn into enemies and enemies into friends.

Although Quentin is 17 when the novel starts, this is adult fiction, not YA. It’s not that it’s necessarily inappropriate for older teens, but I think the complexity puts it firmly into adult fiction. With references from Karate Kid to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, I think teens just wouldn’t find it very interesting. But if you’re an adult who never outgrew wanting to go to Narnia or Hogwarts—yet you can appreciate that maybe humans, with all their foibles and prejudices, shouldn’t really wield magic—this is for you. It’s both an homage to the fantasy genre and a commentary on our non-magical society.

Concussion

2011-09-07T09:27:00.000-07:00

I got a concussion on Labor Day. Here's my story:

I become aware.
I’m sitting under a tree. There’s a tan-colored house and granite boulders. The sun is too bright and the grass has yellowed under its brilliance. There are a bunch of people near the house; they look like they’re having a party.
I have no idea where I am.
My husband is sitting next to me. I know him, but I don’t know myself.
I think I was either at work or at home. Maybe I was sleeping in my bed at home. How did I end up here is this too-bright country? Did I have a stroke?
I turn to my husband and start crying and hyperventilating. “I don’t know where I am or what happened. I’m so scared.”
Blink.
Now I’m in the passenger seat of our van. We’re driving on the highway and the girls are in their booster seats in the back. We’re following a car; I recognize it as Sherry’s car but I don’t understand.
“What happened?” I ask my husband.
“You fell off the horse. We’re going to the hospital.”
“Was I wearing a helmet?”
“Yes.”
I don’t remember the horse but I’m glad I wore a helmet.
I see Katelyn’s pink plaid shorts on the floor of the van by my feet and wonder why they’re there.
Blink.
We’re sitting in the waiting area at the hospital. There’s a huge fish tank and the girls are talking to the fish. My husband calls his sister to come pick up the girls.
Blink.
I’m in an examining room.
One nurse checks my vitals as my husband explains what happened. “She’s complaining of short-term memory loss,” he says.
The nurse says to me, “I’m going to give you three words to remember, then I’ll ask you in a few minutes to say them back to me, okay?” I nod. “Red, ball, boy. Can you say those back?”
“Red, ball, boy.”
Red, ball, boy.
I grab on to the words like I’m drowning and they are a life preserver. If I can remember them then maybe my brain will be okay. I know I’m not remembering things, and I know that I can’t practice medicine if I’m only aware one minute out of five.
Red, ball, boy.
Red, ball, boy.
The first nurse leaves and I tell my husband again, “I’m so scared.”
Blink.
Another nurse enters and asks what happened. “I guess I fell off a horse.”
“Were you wearing a helmet?”
“I think so?” I turn to my husband and he says, “Yes, although I’m not sure if it fit well.”
I remember a bit. “The helmet was white, right? Yes, it fit fine.” I remember the white helmet but not the horse.
“Did you vomit?” she asks.
I don’t taste any vomit in my mouth. “I don’t think so?” Again I turn to my husband for confirmation and he shakes his head.
“Do you have pain anywhere?”
“I don’t know.” I stand up gingerly. “Uh, yeah, my right hip hurts. I guess I fell on it?”
The nurse asks me the year, the date, my full name, phone number, birth date and social security number. I remember all of that. I even remember my husband’s birth date. But I don’t remember what happened. Why was I on a horse? Why were we in the too-bright country?
The nurse leaves and I try to remember.
Red, ball, boy.
I remember that we were at a party. I remember that the kids all took a turn on the horse as Susan led him at a walk. I remember asking her if I could ride him to a trot. He’s a fox trotter and they have a different, smoother, trot than other horses.
I’m so scared because I can’t remember anything else.
The doctor comes in and examines me. She talks about doing a CT, but says the decision is up to me. She explains that the risk of intracranial bleeding is slim, and the radiation exposure is not insignificant. I start to cry again. “I can’t remember,” I sob. “I’m afraid. So yes, I want the CT.”
A few minutes later the radiology tech comes for me. I stumble into the wheelchair and she wheels me to the CT scanning room. I lie on the bed of the scanner, close my eyes, and try to remember.
Red, ball, boy.
The radiology tech wheels me back to my room. The girls have left with their aunt and my husband has found a football game to watch. The room is too bright. I turn over and bury my head in the pillow. Now it’s not just my hip that hurts. The whole right side of my body hurts.
Red, ball, boy.
The doctor returns and explains that the CT was normal. I’m so relieved. Maybe my brain will start working again. She gives me some pain meds and we leave, after paying the $100 ER co-pay, which I know will overdraw our account. I remember how much money is in our account, but not what happened with the horse.
We have an hour-long drive to pick up the girls and go home. I put the van seat back, take a handful of ibuprofen and close my eyes. As my husband drives, I try to remember.
Red, ball, boy.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

2011-09-05T07:56:00.000-07:00

I read THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN by Sherman Alexie for the Salt Lake County Library’s Banned Books Challenge. It has been challenged or banned multiple times. One incident, according to Think for Yourself and Let Others Do the Same: Books Challenged or Banned in 2009-2010, was: “Retained on the summer reading list at Antioch, Ill. High School (2009) despite objections from several parents who found its language vulgar and racist. In response to concerns, however, the district will form a committee each March to review future summer reading assignments. The committee, which will include parents, would decide whether parents should be warned if a book contains possibly objectionable material.”

Vulgar and racist? I don’t think those parents read the book. The world is vulgar and racist and you can’t make it better by banning a book.

The ALA site lists reasons given for other challenges to PART-TIME INDIAN as: “offensive language, racism, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence.” I will address each complaint below.

The “part-time” Indian is Junior, the first-person narrator, a 14-year-old boy with a neurologic disorder. He lives in poverty on the rez with his parents. His best friend is Rowdy, a temperamental kid who is frequently beaten by his alcoholic father. Junior knows he’s going to end up like everyone else on the rez—depressed and impoverished and drunk—if he doesn’t escape, so he transfers to a white high school. The Indians beat him for being a “traitor,” while the white kids beat him for being an Indian.

“Vulgarity/offensive language”
There is moderate cussing (bastard, shit, crap, boner, WTF), but trust me, even the most angelic 14-year-old has heard those words—and much worse—before.

“Sex education/sexually explicit”
Um, yeah, Junior talks about masturbation but as he says (author’s emphasis), “Well, tough, I’m going to talk about it because EVERYBODY does it. And EVERYBODY likes it. And if God hadn’t wanted us to masturbate, then God wouldn’t have given us thumbs.”

“Unsuited to age group”
This novel is YA (young adult), meant for kids in the roughly 13-18 range. High school students have a right to read books like this. You want an eighteen-year-old to ship off to Afghanistan but you don’t want him to read about an Indian kid getting beat up? You trust a sixteen-year-old to drive but don’t trust her to know the difference between fact and fiction? Sure, I wouldn’t want to see this book in the elementary school library, but I would have no problem with it in the high school or public libraries.

“Violence”
This is a commonly cited reason for books to be banned, but a weak one in my opinion. It’s not like we’re talking chainsaw massacres here, just a few fistfights and minor concussions. If every book with violence was to be banned you’d be banning pretty much the whole library. Pick up nearly any YA book and there will be violence: The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale: a girl’s escort is slaughtered and she is forced into hiding. Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan: a boy and his friends are nearly killed many times over by mortals, gods and monsters. Or even look at a middle-grade novel (meant for kids in the roughly 8-12 range): The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman: a little kid is orphaned after his family is murdered. Septimus Heap by Angie Sage: an infant is abducted and raised by an evil magician.

“Racism”
Junior has to deal with discrimination from his tribe and from the white kids. Yes, racism is alive and well in the twenty-first century. Denying kids’ access to reading about racism isn’t going to make the problem magically disappear. I think reading about racism will instead raise kids’ awareness of the issue and empathy for the oppressed. Take this passage: “My teeth got so crowded that I could barely close my mouth. I went to Indian Health Service to get some teeth pulled so I could eat normally, not like some slobbering vulture. But the Indian Health Service funded major dental work only once a year, so I had to have all ten extra teeth pulled in one day. And what’s more, our white dentist believed that Indians only felt half as much pain as white people did, so he only gave us half the Novocain.” Ouch! That is a clear and painful image of racism.

Native Americans have been persecuted and marginalized in this country for three hundred years. Hiding our heads in the sand won’t help our society move past this deplorable history. PART-TIME INDIAN is hopeful because in the end, the story is about perseverance; surviving discrimination, betrayal and loss; redemption; and love.

Banned Books Week

2011-08-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

Banned Books Week is coming up soon: September 24-October 1.

Last year to celebrate Banned Books Week I reread TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. It’s been challenged numerous times because of racism and the word “nigger.” One example (from this link):

Challenged at the Brentwood, TN Middle School (2006) because the book contains “profanity” and “contains adult themes such as sexual intercourse, rape, and incest.” The complainants also contend that the book’s use of racial slurs promotes “racial hatred, racial division, racial separation, and promotes white supremacy.”

To those people I say: Trying to cover up our country’s painful race problems, both past and present, puts you in the same class as the Holocaust deniers—those people who, despite ample evidence to the contrary, deny that six million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany. Those who cannot remember the past are bound to repeat it.

I want my daughters to read TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD—to feel the oppression and pain and cruelty of racism, to understand why the scars of slavery are still raw in this country. I would also point out that the book, if anything, promotes unity and racial understanding. Atticus Finch is a white attorney defending a wrongfully accused black man, Tom Robinson. (Sound like something that could happen in 2011?) He knows that the jury will find the accused guilty, and knows that taking the case may be a career-ending move, but he defends Tom anyway, because it is the right and just thing to do. When he suspects that a lynch mob may come for his client, he camps out in front of the jail, alone and unarmed. Atticus is a hero.

Consider this conversation, between Atticus, his son Jem, and his sister Alexandra, at home after the guilty verdict is handed down:

“It ain’t right, Atticus,” said Jem.
“No son, it’s not right.”
Aunt Alexandra was waiting up. […] “I didn’t think it wise in the first place to let them—”
“This is their home, sister,” said Atticus. “We’ve made it this was for them, they might as well learn to cope with it.”
“But they don’t have to go to the courthouse and wallow in it—”
“It’s just as much Maycomb County as missionary teas.” […]
“Atticus—” said Jem bleakly.
He turned in the doorway. “What, son?”
“How could they do it, how could they?”
“I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it—seems that only children weep.”

It’s like Harper Lee is addressing her critics in this passage. She reminds us that racism is part of the history of this country; that our children need to know about its terrible legacy; and that children understand the moral wrongness when adults might have grown complacent.

Writing assignment :)

2011-08-21T13:54:00.001-07:00

Yay! I got an assignment to write an article for APPLESEEDS, a non-fiction children’s magazine. Each issue has a theme, and one upcoming theme is “Dogs, Dogs, and More Dogs.” So I sent a few queries, and received an assignment to write about canine evolution from wolves and divergence into all the breeds we see today. The mom in me has to keep telling the scientist in me to keep the language simple, as it’s intended for 7- to 10-year-olds.

Random garden photos

2011-08-13T18:22:00.000-07:00

Brilliant Picture Books

2011-08-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

The Caldecott Medal is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children (a division of the American Library Association) for excellence in children’s book illustrating. David Wiesner has won the Caldecott Medal three times, for FLOTSAM, TUESDAY, and THE THREE PIGS. In addition, his SECTOR 7 and FREE FALL are Caldecott Honor books. The awards are well-deserved, as his illustrations are magnificent.

In FREE FALL (1988) we see a boy’s dreams as they morph from scene to scene, inspired by objects in his bedroom. The green plaid pattern of his blanket turns into a landscape of fields and then into a chess board. Trees shift into book pages and mountains turn into croissants. The most beautiful page has leaves changing into swans.

TUESDAY (1991) shows the mysterious events of a certain Tuesday evening. (The front cover bears this disclaimer: “The events recorded here are verified by an undisclosed source to have happened somewhere, U.S.A., on Tuesday. All those in doubt are reminded that there is always another Tuesday.”) A bunch of bullfrogs are delighted when their lily pads suddenly levitate at sundown. The battalion of frogs on lily pads flies over the countryside to town, where the happy frogs surprise the townsfolk, annoy the dogs, and appropriate a sleeping old lady’s television remote control.

SECTOR 7 (1999) follows a school class on a field trip to the Empire State Building. A curious cloud befriends one of the boys and takes him to see the Sector 7 Cloud Dispatch Center, where clouds receive assignments. The clouds are bored by their assigned puffy roundish shapes, so the boy draws new blueprints for them: lion fish, puffer fish, octopus and jellyfish. New Yorkers are delighted by the new fishy-shaped clouds.

THE THREE PIGS (2001) re-imagines the classic “Three Little Pigs” story. The clever pigs escape from the two-dimensional confines of their storybook and go exploring through the three-dimensional world. They pop into other stories, befriending the cat with his fiddle and a dragon guarding a golden rose. Eventually, they return with their new friends to the third pig’s brick house, where they all live happily ever after.

My favorite is FLOTSAM (2006), which is simply extraordinary. A boy hunting for treasures on the beach finds a washed-up underwater camera. He has the film developed and is astonished by the resultant photos: a clockwork fish schooling with its biological cousins; bemused seahorses being photographed by miniscule green aliens; verdant islands clinging to the backs of giant starfish; and an octopus family relaxing on sunken couches. There are also photos of other children—the previous finders of the wondrous camera. The boy reloads the camera and returns it to the sea. The reader sees the camera floating through more magical scenes and eventually washing up on a distant beach into the hands of another child.

David Wiesner’s illustrations are intricately detailed and whimsical, appealing to adults as well as children. Because the stories are largely wordless, even very young kids can “read” them.

Interview with Carol Lynch Williams

2011-07-19T07:39:00.001-07:00

I interviewed young adult author Carol Lynch Williams for Bookshop Talk. Her YA novels are well-written and thought-provoking. She tackles some tough subjects but her protagonists (all girls) are resilient and smart. In GLIMPSE, the heroine tries to uncover why her older sister has attempted suicide. In THE CHOSEN ONE, the heroine escapes from an arranged marriage to her polygamist uncle.

The Lightning Thief

2011-07-12T08:09:00.000-07:00

I was hesitant to read THE LIGHTNING THIEF; in my mind I had lumped it with other recent, wildly popular, boy-appeal, urban fantasy series which were, frankly, underwhelming. But I was pleasantly surprised by this fun, well-written story.

Percy Jackson is a likable hero. He has dyslexia and ADHD, but doesn’t use the diagnoses as excuses. He’s twelve years old and is about to be kicked out of the sixth school in as many years. The only people at school who like him are Mr. Brunner, the Latin and Greek teacher, and his best friend, Grover, a scrawny kid with a muscle disorder. Percy loves his mom, and believes her story that his father was lost at sea. We later learn that Percy’s father wasn’t so much lost at sea but returned to the sea.

Strange things start happening to Percy, beginning with his pre-algebra teacher’s scary transformation into a vicious Fury from Greek mythology. Other supposedly mythical monsters and heroes crop up, and Percy soon finds himself at a summer camp for demigods (the offspring of gods and mortals). Ares’s kids are big and ugly and warlike; Athena’s kids are grey-eyed and wise. The camp is run by Dionysus, who is perpetually grumpy because he’s been ordered by Zeus to abstain from wine and must settle for Diet Coke.

Percy learns that he is the prime suspect in the theft of Zeus’s master lightning bolt (“a two-foot-long cylinder of high-grade celestial bronze, capped on both ends with god-level explosives”) and sets off on a quest to retrieve it, accompanied by Grover (who turns out not to be a kid with a muscle disorder) and Annabeth, daughter of Athena.

Rick Riordan’s writing is spot-on, with snappy dialogue, as in this scene:

Mr. Brunner pointed to one of the pictures on the stele. “Perhaps you’ll tell us what this picture represents?”
I looked at the carving, and felt a flush of relief, because I actually recognized it. “That’s Kronos eating his kids, right?”
“Yes,” Mr. Brunner said, obviously not satisfied. “And he did this because…”
“Well…” I racked my brain to remember. “Kronos was the king god, and—”
“God?” Mr. Brunner asked.
“Titan,” I corrected myself. “And… he didn’t trust his kids, who were the gods. So, um, Kronos ate them, right? But his wife hid baby Zeus, and gave Kronos a rock to eat instead. And later, when Zeus grew up, he tricked his dad, Kronos, into barfing up his brothers and sisters—”
“Eeew!” said one of the girls behind me.
“—and so there was this big fight between the gods and the Titans,” I continued, “and the gods won.”

The characters are interesting, and there are bits of humor interspersed (the Naiads enjoy underwater basketweaving, and the Minotaur wears nothing but bright white Fruit of the Loom underpants). Overall, a very entertaining read, and may have a side-effect of encouraging kids to learn about Greek mythology.

Shakespeare for toddlers?

2011-07-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

There was an article on the Publishers Weekly website about a new line of board books (Baby Lit) for babies and toddlers that introduce classic literature. Okay, good in theory.

Little Miss Austen: Pride & Prejudice and Little Master Shakespeare: Romeo & Juliet are the introductory titles. My first thought was, “Is this a three-months-too-late April Fool’s joke?” My second thought was, “Seriously?” I read Romeo & Juliet in high school and don’t think the story is appropriate for teens, let alone toddlers. Think about it: they meet at a party, speak for two minutes, decide they’re madly in love (or, more likely, lust), elope to be married by an ignorant country priest (so they don’t have to feel guilty about having premarital sex), hatch a scheme to evade their families, and accidentally end up dead.

However, from the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon, it appears that the Baby Lit series are really just counting books very loosely inspired by the classics, as in “5 sisters, 6 horses” for Pride & Prejudice. I’m not sure how a simple counting book really introduces the literature, other than the title.

The reason Austen and Shakespeare are timeless is the beauty of the language. Consider the opening line of Pride & Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” I don’t think ten-year-olds will appreciate the subtle wit of that sentence; certainly two-year-olds won’t. If you dumb down the language to a preschool—or even elementary school—level, you’ll lose the thing that makes Austen brilliant.

If one wanted to retell a Shakespeare story for little kids, how about A Midsummer Night’s Dream? It’s got fairies, mistaken identities, weddings, a guy with a donkey head—and most importantly, a happy ending. You can’t have your protagonists dying in children’s literature. If they’re going to do Romeo & Juliet, they might as well do Hamlet:

Once upon a time, there was a boy named Hamlet. His mean uncle killed Hamlet’s daddy so he could marry Hamlet’s mommy. The ghost of Hamlet’s dead daddy haunted him and scared his friends. Hamlet’s uncle told Hamlet’s two best friends to kill him, but he found out and killed them first. Finally, Hamlet’s uncle put poison on a knife and had another boy stab Hamlet. He died, and they were all dead forever after. The End.

Deathly Hallows, a.k.a. HP7

2011-06-30T07:28:00.000-07:00

I’ve just finished reading HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS for the fifth or sixth time, in eager anticipation of the final movie installment coming out in two weeks.

I. LOVE. THIS. BOOK.

Before the novel was released in 2007 I preordered it from Amazon. After it arrived I read it day and night (including at work when I should have been caring for my patients!), finished it within a few days, reluctantly parted from it to let my hubby read it, then reread it the next week. I’ve reread books before, but never within a week of the first reading!

So as I was reading, I tried to figure out what exactly is so appealing about the novel. The biggest thing is the characters: after six books and three-thousand-something pages, the reader knows the characters and cares for them. They are as real as anyone. And we don’t just care for Harry, Ron and Hermione—we also care for Luna, Neville, Fred & George, Tonks, Lupin, Mad-Eye, even crazy Auntie Muriel. We cry when beloved characters fall and rejoice when they succeed.

J.K. Rowling does an amazing job with synthesis in the seventh book. Through the first six books we met so many characters and learned so many bits of information about genealogy and magic and creatures and politics, but she brings it all together. For example, in the chapter when members of the Order escort Harry from the Dursleys’ to the Burrow, there are references to Hagrid’s motorbike (Book 1), Polyjuice Potion (Book 2), Stan Shunpike (Book 3), Portkeys (Book 4), and thestrals (Book 5). We know and understand all of it because of JKR’s fantastic world-building.

The dialog is snappy and full of tension, as in this scene when Harry sees another vision of Voldemort:

“Dream,” he said, sitting up quickly and attempting to meet Hermione’s glower with a look of innocence. “Must’ve dozed off, sorry.”
“I know it was your scar! I can tell by the look on your face! You were looking into Vol—”
“Don’t say his name!” came Ron’s angry voice from the depths of the tent.
“Fine,” retorted Hermione. “You-Know-Who’s mind, then!”
“I didn’t mean it to happen!” Harry said. “It was a dream! Can you control what you dream about, Hermione?”
“If you had just learned to apply Occlumency—”

My favorite parts of the book, in no particular order (SPOILER ALERT):

Ron’s swearing: “In the name of Merlin’s saggy left—”

Hermione’s brilliant Undetectable Extension Charm which allows them to pack a houseful of supplies into an evening bag.

Dumbledore’s will, in which he bequeaths obscure objects to Harry, Hermione and Ron—items which at first glance seem sentimental at best, pointless at worst, but which eventually enable them to succeed.

The Room of Requirement, which really outdoes itself in providing the students a cozy refuge.

Ron and Hermione’s loyalty to Harry, and Harry’s loyalty to Dumbledore and his parents.

Snape’s redemption, as seen in his memories given to Harry.

Harry taking Mad-Eye’s magic eye from the Ministry, even though he knows it might get them caught, because it’s the right thing to do in honoring Mad-Eye’s memory.

Dobby rescuing everyone from the Malfoys’ dungeon.

Neville proving himself a true Gryffindor and a worthy heir to his parents. He is courageous, honorable, and dedicated in his fight against tyranny.

Professor McGonagall confronting Professor Slughorn: “If you wish to leave with your students, we shall not stop you. But if any of you attempt to sabotage our resistance or take up arms against us within this castle, then, Horace, we duel to kill… The time has come for Slytherin House to decide upon its loyalties.”

Ron complaining about having to rescue Draco Malfoy: “If we die for them, I’ll kill you, Harry!”

Hermione planting a kiss on Ron after he worries about the safety of the Hogwarts house elves.

And finally: kindly, unassuming Mrs. Weasley unleashing her inner badass on Bellatrix.

Revisions & The Goose Girl

2011-06-14T08:21:00.000-07:00

The current issue of Writer’s Digest is all about revision. It came at a very opportune time, as I am currently revising my young adult (YA) novel. One article by thriller author Steven James talked about status, which is particularly applicable to my novel.

Language, character movement, and even punctuation indicate (often subconsciously) the status of one character relative to another. As an example, he says that a person of high status (which the protagonist and primary antagonist ought to be) will shout, holler, call or yell, while a person of lower status will scream, screech, bawl or squeal. Another example he gave was his protagonist in: “I’d suggest you back away,” I said. “Now.” Reading that, you can picture the investigator, calm and collected, staring down his nemesis. The pause (the “I said”) adds a little punch that “I’d suggest you back away now” wouldn’t have.

I just read The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale (her Princess Academy is a Newbery Honor book) and tried to pay attention to details which (I suspect) were perfected in the revision process.

The protagonist of The Goose Girl is Ani. She was born the Crown Princess but always felt more comfortable around animals than people. After the King dies, the Queen ships her off to the neighboring country to an arranged marriage. The journey takes months of riding through a gloomy mountainous forest.

This paragraph caught my notice:

The party grew quiet as they neared the lip of the Forest. Ani took a last look behind her at the friendly lowlands, a deep breath before plunging underwater. She felt the cool shadow of the trees pass over her, and she shivered.

The last sentence could just as easily have read, “She felt the cool shadow of the trees pass over her and shivered,” but by adding the “comma and she” Ms. Hale slows the pace down, and hints at the danger that lurks in the forest.

Another passage:

It was dark before the others returned. Ani dried her hair by the fire and waited. Ishta stood on the other side of the fire. The light turned his face orange, the hollows of his cheeks still in shadow. She could hear him scrape the undersides of his fingernails with a knife. […]
He walked to her, dead pine needles breaking like glass under his boots, and crouched beside her. He leaned in. Her pulse snapped in her throat.
“Step back,” she whispered. He held his face there, and up close his expression was leering, inhuman, his face as sharp as a weapon, his breath the promise of ugly things. Ani gripped her brush in both hands and could not seem to let it go, not to push him away, not to push herself to her feet. Never had she felt this way, helpless, alone, no servant to call, no guard outside her door. No door. And a man who came too close.
“Step back, Ishta,” she said again, but her voice held no more of the authority of her mother [the Queen] than the chattering of a magpie. He sneered.

This passage is a great example of status. The protagonist, Ani, shows a lower status than the antagonist, Ishta. He is menacing while she is powerless. His stance is aggressive as he leans in and holds his face close to hers, while her stance is passive as she sits clutching her hairbrush.

The imagery is also fantastic: the shadowed cheeks, the knife, and the glass-like pine needles all evoke feelings of dread of what is to come.

Later in the book, as she reclaims what was lost, Ani’s status is elevated, as shown by her standing tall and speaking calmly.

Darkness in YA

2011-06-11T15:59:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Journal recently published an article (“Darkness Too Visible,” by Meghan Cox Gurdon) bemoaning the state of YA (young adult) literature. The author claims that contemporary YA is too dark, full of serious subjects like cutting, rape, abuse, and eating disorders. She writes, “Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail.” This is no new phenomenon; I recall a famous story written in 1595 featuring a dysfunctional pair of teenagers who elope a day after meeting and then commit suicide the next day.

I’ll be the first to agree that there is too much paranormal in YA. There are all together too damn many vampires (sparkly and otherwise), werewolves, zombies, fallen angels, risen demons, and now mermaids. I joked with my writing group that the next trends will be Sexy Yeti, undead minotaurs, and were-pigeons.

But darkness? YA is a relatively new genre. When I was a teenager in the eighties, there really weren’t many books written for teens. So I read adult fiction, including a lot of Stephen King (Pet Sematary [wholesome story for a future veterinarian, don’t you think?], Carrie, Christine). Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Stephen King qualifies as dark and disturbing, especially when read by a thirteen-year-old. I like to think I turned out okay despite that.

The article mentions The Hunger Games. Yeah, sure, it’s violent. But is it any more explicit than programs my seven-year-old can find on television this very minute? If we prevent teens from reading about suicide and abuse and drugs, and only let them then read about rainbows and flowers, their lives with be perfectly happy, right? Cuz high school is such a cheerful and civilized place.

There is a good response to the article by Linda Holmes on the NPR book website.

If you’re looking for well-written, non-dark, non-paranormal, non-dystopian YA, check out Shannon Hale, Jessica Day George, Janette Rallison, or Megan Whalen Turner.

Geek Fantasy Novel

2011-06-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

Review of GEEK: FANTASY NOVEL, by E. Archer (2011)

I confess: I am a geek by any common definition of the word.

Science major in college? Check
Played D&D? Check
Been to a Star Trek convention? Check
Own a color-coordinated set of 4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, 12- and 20-sided dice? Check
Able to quote entire scenes of Star Wars? Check
Have a home wi-fi network with five or more devices connected to it? Check

So when I saw the cover of GEEK: FANTASY NOVEL at the library, illustrated with a glasses-wearing geek in a battle helm, I picked up the book and flipped the pages. When I saw the list of possessions the protagonist packs for a trip (including 1 Petri Dish, 1 set of High Elf Figurines, 2 Laptops and 1 Novelization of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), I had to get the book.

Ralph is an American teenage geek who dreams of designing video games. His parents love him, but for his entire life they have adamantly prohibited him from making wishes, even a simple wish while blowing out a birthday candle. They explain to him that many people on his family tree have died from making wishes, for example one who “wished for money and wound up with a coin-shaped tunnel through her body after a gold piece was shot at her from a cannon.”

Ralph is invited by the eccentric British branch of his family to spend the summer installing a computer network in their castle. He has fun with his cousins, Beatrice, Cecil and Daphne, and comes to understand that his parents’ prohibition on wishes is because of his Aunt Chessie, the Duchess of Cheshire, and her magic wish-granting ability.

Soon he is launched into the fantasy land of Cecil’s wish, a creepy place reminiscent of Niel Gaiman’s Faerie in Stardust, where Chessie and her minions try to kill him in various flamboyant ways. Ralph is infected by Shambling Mound Distemper, attacked by fairies, afflicted by pyrotechnically hyperallergenic cold-fused nuclear ragweed, and nearly stabbed by a unicorn-horn stiletto—all in his first two hours. Things deteriorate after that.

The writing is very entertaining, and the narrator is intriguingly unreliable.

One laugh-out-loud passage:

She was lucky she didn’t enter through the front entrance. Not for the cutting winds, but for the bevy of Snow Dragons. The Snow Queen had stolen their hatchlings and lodged them in nets at the top of the chamber, which made the dragons cranky beyond their general orneriness. Behind the dragons were Ice Worms, any one of which could have swallowed Daphne in a mouthful. And Ice Worms, of course, never travel unless in the company of Sleet Mermaids, which aren’t particularly menacing on their own…only, they refuse to travel without their Cold Trident Housecats, which would have been dangerous but not overly so if it hadn’t been for their Deep Freeze Fleas. Oh, and the Snow Queen had ordered the floor ripped up and replaced with spikes of chilled aluminum.

The Quest of the Warrior Sheep

2011-06-03T07:48:00.000-07:00

Review of THE QUEST OF THE WARRIOR SHEEP, by Christine & Christopher Russell (2011)

Oxo, Links, Jaycey, Sal and Wills are rare-breed sheep living on an idyllic English farm. One day an object falls from the sky, hitting Sal’s head. Wills, an orphan lamb raised in the farmhouse kitchen, recognizes the object as a cell phone. Sal, however, has studied sheep prophecy and believes that the object is the mythical Baaton, tool of the great Lord Aries. The prophecy states:

For without the Baaton’s magic rays,
The Ram of Rams will die in days.
Only they can save his life,
And the world from pain and strife.
They must be warriors, brave and true!
Sheeply warriors through and through!

Sal insists that the five are the sheep of legend, destined to return the Baaton to Aries. Declaring, “We shall use all the resourcefulness and cunning for which we sheep are rightly famous,” the sheep set out on a quest, although they aren’t really sure where they’re going.

From a hilltop field, Tony the neighbor watches the sheep begin their journey. After a golden craft (a hot-air balloon) hovers over the sheep and they disappear (fallen down an embankment), he is convinced that aliens have abducted the sheep, and calls the local television station.

The flock’s owners, Tod and his grandma, are distraught to learn their sheep have been abducted by aliens, and are even more upset when they discover that Gran’s savings account, which she had intended to offer as a reward for the sheep’s safe return, has been emptied. Tod, Gran, Tony, Nisha the television reporter, and the sheep become entangled in a bank embezzlement scheme.

I’m a fan of quirky British humor (Monty Python, Red Dwarf, Douglas Adams, etc.) and I think this middle-grade novel is a great way to introduce kids to British humor. Kids who like the Shaun the Sheep television show will like this book.

The Map of Time

2011-05-31T19:42:00.000-07:00

Release date: June 28, 2011

THE MAP OF TIME is set in Victorian London and follows several interlacing story lines, all of which center on time travel, both real and imagined. Inspired by H.G. Wells’ novel, THE TIME MACHINE, the concept of time travel is the latest rage among fashionable members of British high society.

Cousins Andrew Harrington and Charles Winslow are aristocratic twenty-somethings living in indolent splendor. Andrew falls in love with a poor Whitechapel prostitute who is subsequently murdered by the infamous Jack the Ripper. On the anniversary of her death, Andrew is on the verge of committing suicide when Charles interrupts to propose a visit to the past, by way of Wells’ attic, to stop the Ripper before he can murder Andrew’s mistress.

Elsewhere in London, a firm alleges to have located a time portal to the year 2000, when humans battle steam-powered automatons in a steampunk version of Terminator, and offers guided expeditions to the future. Claire Haggerty hates the life set out for a Victorian young woman of social standing (“she loathed those corsets apparently designed by the devil himself, she longed to be able to use her brain the way any man could, and she was not the slightest bit interested in marrying any of the young men hovering around her”). She daydreams of defecting to the year 2000 to be with the human hero of the war against the robots.

And finally, Inspector Colin Garrett of Scotland Yard investigates a series of murders which can only have been perpetrated by a traveler from the future with advanced weapon technology. Authors H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker and Henry James are among the intended victims.

Sprinkled throughout the novel are interesting discussions about the nature of time (“the elasticity of time, its ability to expand or contract like an accordion regardless of clocks”), parallel universes (“if the grass in next door’s garden was always greener, how much more luxuriantly verdant must it be in the neighboring universe?”) and the paradoxes inherent in discussion of time travel.

The point of view is third-person omniscient with occasional direct comments from the narrator to the reader, as in this passage:

And so Andrew rode on, seized by a wild impulse, overwhelmed for the first time by a burning, pulsating sensation, which might reasonably be described as happiness. And, prey to the effects of such a violent infatuation, everything in the universe he rode past appeared to sparkle, as though each of its elements—the paths strewn with dead leaves, the rocks, the trees, even the squirrels leaping from branch to branch—were lit up by an inner glow. But have no fear, I shall not become bogged down in lengthy descriptions of acres of impassioned, practically luminous parkland because, not only do I have no taste for it, but it would be untrue, for despite Andrew’s altered vision, the landscape clearly did not undergo any real transformation, not even the squirrels, which are well known as creatures who pursue their own interests.

The novel was written in Spanish by Félix J. Palma and translated to English by Nick Caistor. The English is occasionally clunky; however I read an ARC (advance reading copy), and presumably the wrinkles will be ironed out for the official printing.

John Scalzi

2011-05-20T12:24:00.000-07:00

I went to a reading and book signing by sci-fi author John Scalzi this week at Sam Weller’s Bookstore. He’s on tour for his newly-released Fuzzy Nation.

Mr. Scalzi is funny and very down-to-earth. He read the prologue, not of Fuzzy Nation, but of a novel which will be released in the summer of 2012. He swore us all to secrecy so all I can say is that I giggled. A lot. Even casual science fiction fans should like it.

He also read the first three sentences of his hysterically funny April Fool’s fantasy spoof written for Tor.com. The piece is purported to be the prologue to a trilogy called The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, and is a really excellent example of intentionally-so-bad-it’s-good prose. Just a portion of the 155 words of the opening sentence reads, “… toward the deepest, blackest crevasses of Drindelthengen, the netherworld ruled by Drindel, in which the sinful were punished, the black of which was so legendarily black…”

In the Q&A period, someone asked about his cat Ghlaghghee, who is frequently mentioned on his blog, Whatever, and he admitted that the cat’s name is a brilliant sci-fi spelling of “Fluffy.”

I’ve read a couple of his books (The Android’s Dream and Old Man’s War) but they were borrowed copies. So I bought his first novel, Agent to the Stars, so I would have something for him to sign.

In Agent to the Stars, an alien race of stinky gelatinous beings hire a Hollywood agent to help them improve their image before they introduce themselves to humanity. As Mr. Scalzi signed my book, I mentioned that I had been reading it earlier in the day at a coffee shop and busted out, laughing out loud. He wrote, “Laura! Happy you made a scene in the coffee shop."

Practical Cats

2011-05-07T09:14:00.001-07:00

I picked up T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats to read to my girls. The edition I bought is illustrated by Axel Scheffler with neat paintings of colorful, unique, misbehaving cats.

One poem I like is “The Old Gumbie Cat,” which perfectly describes my cat, who sits and naps all day to save energy for troublemaking at night.

Part of the original:

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;
Her coat is of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard spots.
All day she sits upon the stair or on the steps or on the mat:
She sits and sits and sits and sits—and that’s what makes a Gumbie Cat!

My cat:

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, his name is ClydeWestNaughtyCat;
His coat is of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes, all sleek and flat.
All day he sits upon the chair or on the couch or on the mat:
He sits and sits and sits and sits—and that’s what makes a Gumbie Cat!

Click, Clack, Moo

2011-04-28T08:12:00.000-07:00

A review I wrote for Bookshop Talk about the fabulous children's books by Doreen Cronin:

Author Doreen Cronin and illustrator Betsy Lewin have created a wonderful series of picture books featuring Farmer Brown’s clever animals. All of the books are appealing to both children and adults. The illustrations capture the animals’ personalities, and the text is suitably silly. Kids will root for the animals as they confound Farmer Brown.

In CLICK, CLACK, MOO: COWS THAT TYPE (2000), a Caldecott Honor Book, the cows and hens send Farmer Brown typed notes demanding electric blankets in the barn. He refuses and they strike. Finally, Farmer Brown negotiates a settlement: he will give the animals electric blankets if they will surrender their typewriter. But the supposedly neutral negotiator, Duck, takes the typewriter for himself and demands a diving board for the duck pond.

In GIGGLE, GIGGLE, QUACK (2002), Duck is again up to no good. Farmer Brown goes on vacation, leaving his brother Bob is charge. Farmer Brown leaves written instructions for Bob regarding the animals’ care, but Duck uses a stolen pencil to alter the notes. Bob dutifully orders pizza for the farm animals (“the hens prefer anchovies”), gives the pigs bubble baths, and lets the cows watch movies in the farmhouse.

In DOOBY, DOOBY, MOO (2006), the farm animals conspire to enter a talent contest at the county fair. Farmer Brown is sure they are up to something, but he can’t catch them in the act. Duck wins the talent contest with his rendition of “Born to be Wild,” and the animals all enjoy the prize—a trampoline that they install in the barn.

In THUMP, QUACK, MOO (2008), Duck is causing trouble yet again. Farmer Brown is preparing a corn maze in his field and recruits the animals to help. Duck only reluctantly helps when Farmer Brown threatens to take away his “special-order organic duck feed.” Duck gets the last laugh as he covertly alters the corn maze from a picture of the Statue of Liberty to a portrait of himself.

The Paradise Prophecy

2011-04-25T16:38:00.001-07:00

Review of THE PARADISE PROPHECY, by Robert Browne

Release date: July 21, 2011

Angels and demons walk among humans, and the battle in Heaven continues.

We’ve seen a lot of Revelation-type badness recently—wars, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, nuclear accidents. Maybe the Apocalypse really is coming. Robert Browne draws from the Old Testament, Milton’s PARADISE LOST, and angel lore to tell a tale of angels and demons in their eternal war over humanity.

The main characters in THE PARADISE PROPHECY are Sebastian LaLaurie, a religious studies professor at a southern Baptist university, and Bernadette Callahan, a tough government agent who has been sent to Brazil to investigate the mysterious death of a Christian pop star.

The pop singer experienced a meteoric rise to superstar from meth addict in the slums (“The forgotten people, left to rot in their own waste, with little or no chance of ever moving beyond this hole they called home. They were born, grew up and died here—often violently—barely a blip on heaven’s radar screen”). When her inexplicably charred remains are found, Callahan suspects foul play, while LaLaurie recognizes supernatural forces.

The novel is plot-driven; we learn enough about the characters to understand their motivations, but what carries the story along is the mystery. Callahan and LaLaurie fly around the world, from Brazil to Turkey to Thailand, searching for answers. There are enough unexpected plot twists to keep you reading late into the night.

THE PARADISE PROPHECY will appeal to fans of Dan Brown’s ANGELS & DEMONS and THE DA VINCI CODE.

Septimus Heap: Magyk

2011-04-24T08:23:00.000-07:00

A review I wrote for Bookshop Talk:

Review of SEPTIMUS HEAP: BOOK ONE: MAGYK, by Angie Sage (2006)

MAGYK is the first book of a series of middle-grade fantasy, somewhat in the style of the HARRY POTTER series. Septimus Heap—the seventh son of a seventh son—was destined to become very powerful in magyk.

But he died as an infant.

Instead, the Heap family raises Jenna, the baby daughter of the assassinated queen, keeping her identity secret until her tenth birthday. Marcia, the ExtraOrdinary Wizard, who along with the wizarding Heap family remains loyal to the late queen, takes the princess to the Wizard Tower. Along the way, they save a pathetic ten-year-old orphan boy, called Boy 412 by the Young Army, who is nearly frozen to death at his guard post. Jenna’s adoptive dad, Silas Heap, her brother Nicko, and the family wolfhound Maxie follow them to the Tower.

An assassin bursts into Marcia’s chambers and the motley group escapes by hurling themselves down the Tower rubbish chute. Thus begins a series of adventures as the Heap family, along with Marcia and Boy 412 (who we learn is more than he appears), evade assassins, learn about magyk, fight against the evil wizard, etc.

Ms. Sage’s magyk system is well-developed and creative. Spells are written down on Charms for later reference, and Charms may be sold or passed from wizard to wizard. The Charm can be “written on bits of silk, wood, shells and even toast, although that one had not worked properly, as mice had nibbled the ending.” Magykal creatures include Message Rats, Shield Bugs, the otter-like Boggart, diabolical Brownies, and a golden Dragon Boat.

The point of view is omniscient: the POV sometimes shifts rapidly between characters and even dips into the third-person minds of animals or inanimate objects, reminiscent of the style in Douglas Adams’ HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. The POV might center on a ghost: “In a quiet corner of the Throne Room the ghost of Alther Mella eased himself up from the cold stone bench he had been sitting on. He sighed and stretched his old ghostly legs. The he gathered his faded purple robes around him, took a deep breath and walked out through the thick stone wall of the Throne Room. Outside he found himself hovering sixty feet above the ground in the cold dark morning air. Instead of walking off in a dignified manner as a ghost of his age and status really should, Alther stuck his arms out like the wings of a bird and swooped gracefully through the falling snow.”

Or a dog: “Maxie the wolfhound was having a good time. He liked this game. Maxie had been a little surprised when he had jumped into the chute and not found Silas ready with his ball… Then he had bumped his nose on the back of the scary woman’s neck and tried to lick a tasty morsel of something off her hair.”

Or even a bug: “The millipede lay in the Preserve Pot in a state of shock. It had been asleep under its favorite rock when Something Huge with a Red Head had picked up the rock and lifted it into Space… Every millipede knew that nowhere to hide meant the end of the world, and now the millipede know that was indeed true because sure enough, here it was, floating in a thick green goo and something terrible was happening to it.”

The chapter endings are often cliffhangers designed to keep one reading past one’s bedtime, such as the end of Chapter 15: “A slimy mud-brown hand with webbed fingers and broad black claws had reached out of the water and grabbed the end of her canoe.”

The Heaps are a lovable bunch. Like the wizarding Weasley family in HARRY POTTER, the Heaps don’t have much money, but their home is full of kids and books, love and loyalty. A description of their home: “If you were foolish enough to cast your eye around the Heaps’ room hoping to find a space in which to sit, the chances were a book would have found it first.”

I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series. Highly recommended for kids and teens, and should appeal to both boys and girls.

Banned Books

2011-04-12T06:57:00.000-07:00

The ALA released its annual list of the Top Ten Banned Books. For 2010, the list includes:

And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson Reasons: homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie Reasons: offensive language, racism, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley Reasons: insensitivity, offensive language, racism, and sexually explicit

Crank, by Ellen Hopkins Reasons: drugs, offensive language, and sexually explicit

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins Reasons: sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence

Lush, by Natasha Friend Reasons: drugs, offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group

What My Mother Doesn't Know, by Sonya Sones Reasons: sexism, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group

Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich Reasons: drugs, inaccurate, offensive language, political viewpoint, and religious viewpoint

Revolutionary Voices, edited by Amy Sonnie Reasons: homosexuality and sexually explicit

Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer Reasons: religious viewpoint and violence

Of the ten, I've only read Hunger Games and Twilight, although the others are going to my To-Be-Read list. As usual when I read lists of banned books, I wonder what planet these people are living on.

Hunger Games takes place in a future dystopia after the fall of the United States. The main characters are forced to participate in a glamorized, media-frenzied, live, televised fight to the death. Yeah, it's violent. There is no sex, though, and as far as being "unsuited to age group," I'm not sure what that means. It's a young adult (YA) novel, and teens have heard and seen far worse online or on TV.

Relic Master

2011-04-01T08:24:00.000-07:00

Review of RELIC MASTER: Book 1: THE DARK CITY, by Catherine Fisher.

Release date: May 17, 2011

I was excited to get an ARC (Advance Reading Copy) of this novel. While I’ll read nearly any genre, fantasy is my first love. THE DARK CITY is the first in a series of four books to be released this summer; it will be followed by THE LOST HEIRESS in June, THE HIDDEN CORONET in July, and THE MARGRAVE in August. Wow, impressive marketing campaign!

The novel is categorized as young adult fantasy, although I’m actually not sure why it was designated YA. It could just as easily be shelved with adult fantasy. The main character’s age is never stated, but from context could be anywhere from fifteen to twenty.

The novel provides an excellent example for aspiring novelists learning the lesson of How To Write A First Chapter. We learn within the first few pages that this is a fantasy set somewhere other than our world (“The seven moons were all in the sky at once”); that the main character has magical abilities (“He let his third eye open and made tiny purple filaments of light spray from the central moon…”); that the main character has a personal conflict with his mentor (“It was no use talking to Galen”); that the characters belong to the Order of keepers and are being pursued by the Watch; and that the Order is concerned with technological relics (“They found a relic, as they were plowing. A tube. When you touch it, it hums. Small green lights move inside it”).

Raffael (Raffi) Morel is a young man apprenticed to Galen Harn, a cynical old man with wounded leg and damaged mind. They are keepers, member of a magical order dedicated to protecting the relics of a previous civilization. The Makers left behind cities, buildings, and technological equipment. The Order of keepers has been outlawed, with many keepers murdered and much knowledge lost.

Raffi and Galen travel to Tasceron, the abandoned city of the Makers. They are joined by a girl, Carys Arrin. Carys tells Raffi and Galen that she is tracking her abducted father, but the reader knows she is a member of the Watch, the governmental agency which hunts the keepers. Carys joins the others on their journey, and comes to question the beliefs of the Watch.

Tasceron is like the evil twin of Oz City: creepy, decrepit, and lawless. The city is cloaked in smoke from fires that have been burning deep underneath for decades. In the gloom hide Watch patrols—and worse monsters.

Looking forward to reading the rest of the series!

Plotting

2011-03-26T06:55:00.000-07:00

I’m at a writing workshop this weekend. Going to conferences or workshops for fiction writers always leaves me conflicted. On the one hand, I learn new techniques and get motivated to write, but on the other hand, I feel discouraged. I talk to other unpublished writers and begin to think, if this person hasn’t gotten published after nine years, what makes me think I’ll have better luck?

Anyway, one lecture covered plotting. I have a tendency to not plot in advance, although I recognize that it would probably help me. I can’t do rigid outlines, but I’m going to try some general plotting systems. One system discussed was the seven-point system described by Dan Wells. (Not the same as a twelve-point system for addictions, although I could probably benefit from that as well for my zillion-calorie-mocha-frappucino problem.)

The seven points are:
Hook: the character’s initial situation; the opposite of the resolution
Plot turn 1: the inciting event
Pinch 1: introduce the conflict, put on the pressure
Midpoint: when the character starts to move from reaction to action
Pinch 2: the situation looks very bad for the characters
Plot turn 2: characters get the last piece of the puzzle
Resolution: the satisfying ending

To put it in Star Wars terms, because that’s how I think:
Hook: Luke is a farm boy living on a backwater planet
Plot turn 1: Luke encounters Obi-Wan and learns his father was a Jedi
Pinch 1: Storm Troopers are trying to kill Luke to get the droids
Midpoint: Luke learns about the Force
Pinch 2: Good guys are captured and Obi-Wan is killed
Plot turn 2: Rebels figure out the weakness of the Death Star
Resolution: Luke uses the Force to blow up the Death Star

There may be multiple seven-point arcs, including one for each character, separate ones for external action and internal emotion, or an overarching one for a series.

An overarching seven-point plan for the Harry Potter series would be:
Hook: Harry is a lonely kid who sleeps in the cupboard under the stairs
Plot turn 1: Harry receives an invitation to Hogwarts
Pinch 1: Voldemort tries repeatedly to eliminate Harry
Midpoint: Harry starts to investigate the Horcruxes with Dumbledore
Pinch 2: Bad guys take over Hogwarts and threaten everyone Harry loves
Plot turn 2: Good guys figure out how to destroy the Horcruxes
Resolution: Voldemort is destroyed and they live happily ever after

So I’m going to use this system to try to pound my YA novel into shape so I can start sending it out.

The Books of Elsewhere

2011-03-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

Review I wrote for Bookshop Talk of THE SHADOWS, Book 1 of The Books of Elsewhere, by Jacqueline West

THE SHADOWS (2010), a middle-grade paranormal novel, opens with a great line: “Ms. McMartin was definitely dead.” The decedent leaves behind a huge old pile of a mansion, and as her nearest relative has just died in Shanghai of “a severe allergic reaction to a bowl of turtle and arsenic soup,” the house is put on the market. Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody, a pair of university mathematicians, buy the house and move in with their eleven-year-old daughter, Olive. Olive’s parents are loving, but tend to consider her slow as she hasn’t inherited their mathematical genius.

Olive is largely left to her own devices and begins to explore the mansion. The house is full of spooky noises, dusty cobwebs, and creepy paintings. “Olive had never been anywhere—not even the doctor’s office, not even gym class—that made her feel so out of place, or so alone.” (The reference to feeling out of place in gym class resonates strongly with me!)

Paintings hang all through the house and Mrs. Dunwoody finds they are impossible to remove from the walls. Olive notices a flicker of movement in one painting, a sinister moonlit forest scene. Later, while playing in an upstairs bedroom for antique jewelry, lace and gloves, she finds a pair of old spectacles. She puts them on and all the paintings come alive: Grecian girls dancing, men mortaring a stone wall, a woman serving tea—and a scared child ducking for cover in the sinister forest.

Olive peers closer and closer at the canvas, and discovers that while wearing the enchanted spectacles she can push her way into the scene. After safety-testing with her teddy bear, she hops through the portal into the sinister moonlit forest. She locates the frightened child, a boy named Morton, who explains his fear of the Bad Man.

Olive continues to investigate the mysteries of the house: Who built it? Who is the Bad Man? Who created the living paintings? Where did Morton come from? What is buried in the creepy basement?

I won’t spoil the story by answering the questions, but suffice it to say that the story is enjoyable and should appeal to readers of middle-grade fantasies like HARRY POTTER, SEPTIMUS HEAP or LEVEN THUMPS. Ms. West writes with an authentic, entertaining voice.

Publication

2011-03-18T14:01:00.000-07:00

Here's a tip I published in the January issue of Veterinary Medicine for a feature called "Idea Exchange." Last summer I set up a basket on our reception desk at the veterinary hospital to sell catnip in exchange for donations to a fund for homeless cats. The response was incredible and we raised over seventy dollars. That's a lot of money for a plant that grows like a weed!

The Belgariad

2011-03-17T08:57:00.000-07:00

A review I wrote for Bookshop Talk:

Review of the series, THE BELGARIAD, by David Eddings.

I don’t remember where or when or why I first read this series, but I have reread THE BELGARIAD every few years over the last decade or two. The series is like an old friend; even though I know the plot and the outcome, it’s comforting to return to the story again and again.

The series is classified as fantasy, although if it were published nowadays I suppose it might instead be categorized as Young Adult because the protagonist is a teenage boy. I think the series would be enjoyable for adults, teens and tweens.

The story arc follows the general fantasy theme of “young man learns how to use magic and/or finds a magic item, is taught by a wise old man, goes on thrilling adventures, and saves the world,” but the characters make the story original.

The first book in the series is PAWN OF PROPHECY (1982), in which we meet the pawn: a farm boy named Garion. The first fourteen years of his life have been spent living with his Aunt Pol in pastoral simplicity. But the forces of evil draw near, and Aunt Pol rushes Garion away from the farm, accompanied by Durnik the blacksmith and Mister Wolf, a disreputable traveling storyteller. They meet up with Barak, a red-bearded Viking-esque berserker, and Silk, a specialist in thievery, disguise and espionage.

Garion gradually learns that Aunt Pol is the legendary sorceress Polgara, and Mister Wolf is Polgara’s father, the immortal sorcerer Belgarath. The Orb of Aldur has been stolen and they must recover it before it can be used to wake the evil god Torak. World events are swirling around Garion and he is prophesied to confront Torak.

In the second book, QUEEN OF SORCERY (1982), several more people join the group, including a fiery teenage princess named Ce’Nedra. She is running away from home and the prospect of an arranged marriage to the King of Riva. Garion and Ce’Nedra bicker and fight but eventually begin to fall in love. At the end of the second book Garion’s latent sorcery abilities begin to manifest. He gains the prefix to his name which is bestowed on sorcerers and becomes Belgarion.

Throughout the third book, MAGICIAN’S GAMBIT (1983), Belgarion learns more about his abilities. Meanwhile, the group continues to follow the Orb of Aldur as the thief carries it across nations. They run afoul of assassins, a grieving god, carnivorous horses and the menacing followers of Torak, and finally cross into the lands of their enemies to reclaim the Orb.

In the fourth book, CASTLE OF WIZARDRY (1984), we learn that although Belgarion and his friends have recovered the Orb of Aldur, war between the forces of good and evil is inevitable. The group takes the Orb back to its home in Riva, where Belgarion is shocked to learn that he is the last heir of the long-ago-murdered King of Riva. Ce’Nedra is also stunned, because she realizes that after he is crowned King she will be bound by treaty and prophecy to marry him. Belgarion leaves with Belgarath and Silk, heading with heavy heart to the prophesied meeting with Torak, while Ce’Nedra raises an army at home in Riva.

The series concludes with ENCHANTERS’ END GAME (1984). Belagarion, Belgarath and Silk travel deep into enemy lands to the city of darkness where Torak is waking from a millennium-long sleep. Ce’Nedra, Polgara and their allies gather a huge army and march onward, distracting the enemy forces. All of the major characters are swept by the winds of prophecy to the City of Night, where Belgarion uses the Orb to defeat Torak.

Eddings’ characters sometimes verge on caricatures, but they are always memorable. All of the supporting characters are fully fleshed-out with quirks and weaknesses and sub-plots. There is playful banter amongst the characters, which adds flavor to the story. For example, in this scene, Barak is explaining boar-hunting:

He gestured at a rack of stout, broad-headed boar spears. “When the boar sees you standing in his way, he charges you and tries to kill you with his tusks, but instead you kill him with your spear.”

“I see,” Durnik said somewhat doubtfully. “It doesn’t sound very complicated.”

“We wear mail shirts, Durnik,” Barak said. “Our hunters are hardly ever injured seriously.”

“’Hardly ever’ has an uncomfortable ring of frequency to it, Barak,” Silk said, fingering a mail shirt hanging on a peg by the door.

“No sport is very entertaining without a certain element of risk.” Barak shrugged, hefting a boar spear.

“Have you ever thought of throwing dice instead?” Silk asked.

“Not with your dice, my friend.”

Or this scene, after one character admits on her deathbed her love for another character, only to find out that she isn’t actually dying:

Adara closed her eyes. “How inconvenient,” she murmured, a faint blush coming to her cheeks. She opened her eyes again. “I apologize, Hettar. I wouldn’t have said any of this if I’d known that my meddling physicians were going to save my life.”

I also like the point of view. Although it is usually standard third-person, the POV occasionally pulls back to become more omniscient. The omniscient narrator is a character unto itself, wry and clever, as in this passage:

In the early autumn just before Garion’s fourteenth birthday, he came very close to ending his career. In response to some primal urge all children have—given a pond and a handy supply of logs—they had built a raft that summer. The raft was neither very large nor was it particularly well-built. It had a tendency to sink on one end if the weight aboard were improperly distributed and an alarming habit of coming apart at unexpected moments. Quite naturally it was Garion who was aboard the raft—showing off—on that fine autumn day when the raft quite suddenly decided once and for all to revert to its original state.

There is a second five-book series by Eddings, THE MALLOREON, which follows THE BELGARIAD, but the two series can largely stand separate.

What Makes a Good Book

2011-03-10T20:26:00.000-08:00

My writing group meetings often degenerate into gabbing—chatting about kids and spouses, ranting about best-selling authors who really aren’t very good writers, gossiping about crazy neighbors, arguing politics and religion, etc. But at our meeting this week we actually managed to stay on topic. We talked about best-selling books that we like, discussing what we think makes the books so popular.

I’m currently reading Flyte, the second book in the Septimus Heap middle-grade fantasy series by Angie Sage. The books are best-sellers, popular with both kids and adults. Several factors that I think account for their popularity are:

Likeable characters with broad appeal. The main characters are Septimus and Jenna, eleven-year-old brother and sister, but there are plenty of teen and adult characters of both sexes, so any reader can find someone with whom to identify.
Humor. I laughed out loud when Septimus is delayed by a Street Fouling Enforcement Officer after his dragon poops in the middle of the Wizard Way.
Entertaining writing style. For example, this passage: “…The stove let the coffee boil over for the second time that week. The stove was never at its best in the morning, and it always felt tense and anxious at breakfast. It was not helped by the fact that the coffeepot was upset at being shouted at and was not concentrating on the job at hand. To top it all off, there was a dragon chewing on one of its feet.”
Rapid change of emotions. In a five-page stretch, we are taken from wonder to nervousness to elation to dismay to hope to frustration to worry.

Scholastic Books

2011-03-08T08:43:00.000-08:00

I love Scholastic Books. The publisher that ran book fairs at school when I was little (we won’t say how many years ago that was) is taking full advantage of twenty-first century with a comprehensive website. My kids bring home paper fliers from school with selections for the age and season, and then I go online to order. The website has a function to search by price, so I start with the one- and two-dollar selections. I just bought The BFG [Big Friendly Giant] by Roald Dahl (of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fame) and Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko, a Newbery Honor book for 2005—each for only a buck! Oh yeah, and I got some books for the kids, too.

Korgi

2011-03-05T16:56:00.000-08:00

We picked up the graphic novel Korgi, by Christian Slade, at the library today. It's a charming story of a young girl named Ivy and her young corgi, Sprout. They battle assorted monsters and discover their magical powers. It's only 84 pages long, all pictures, but is a wonderful book. My six-year-old daughter "read" it to Pippin, our corgi.

Dr. Seuss Day

2011-03-02T16:20:00.000-08:00

Today is Dr. Seuss Day: the birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel in 1904. In honor of the happy day, here's a picture of my girls a few years ago, when they dressed as Thing One and Thing Two for Halloween:

My favorite Dr. Seuss book has got to be How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but for the other eleven months of the year, I think my favorite is One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. I especially like this part, which is illustrated with a couple kids carrying a very large flask of water, in which resides a goofy blue creature with tusks and a topknot:

Look what we found

in the park

in the dark.

We will take him home.

We will call him Clark.

He will live at our house.

He will grow and grow.

Will our mother like this?

We don't know.

I could totally see my kids bringing home random Seuss-ish creatures.

My nook

2011-02-28T19:54:00.000-08:00

I'm getting into trouble with my nook e-reader. Barnes & Noble has "Free Fridays" and offers one or two books free for the nook every week. Since I discovered this, I've downloaded every selection. Combined with 50 Classic Books, The Complete Works of Mark Twain and a few other books I've purchased, I'm up to 1.24 gigabytes in my library.

I just finished reading Septimus Heap: Book One: Magyk by Angie Sage, and am now reading The Apothecary's Daughter by Julie Klassen. Both are good reads which I probably wouldn't have discovered if not for Free Fridays.

So I'm reading more, which is good, but I've been a little lax about doing housework, which is bad. Or maybe that's good, too.

Chickens, Dinosaurs and Kids

2011-02-25T09:12:00.001-08:00

A review I wrote for Bookshop Talk:

Young kids are inordinately fascinated by bodily functions, as well as any associated anatomy, clothing or equipment. Here are two picture books that kids will find wickedly entertaining:

CHICKEN CHEEKS, written by Michael Ian Black and illustrated by Kevin Hawkes, features rear ends across the animal kingdom. On the cover, a hen bends over, peeking between her legs and showing off her cheeks—her feathery, orange, plump, rear end. In the story, a variety of animals climb on each other to make a tower, trying to reach a honey comb at the top of a tree. Each animal’s name is accompanied by a euphemism for its bottom (“Moose caboose,” “Polar bear derriere, “Guinea pig buns,” and so on), and the illustrated rumps make kids giggle.

In DINOSAURS LOVE UNDERPANTS, written by Claire Freedman and illustrated by Ben Cort, we learn the real reason for the dinosaurs’ extinction—they coveted the cavemen’s underpants. Vast battles ensue as dinosaurs fight over multicolored briefs and panties. The rhyming text is fun for reading aloud: “The pants from Wooly Mammoth coats made Stegosaurus itchy. Diplodocus was really mad. His briefs were way too pinchy!” I read this to my daughter’s kindergarten class and they laughed hysterically.

Just the Facts

2011-02-24T21:23:00.000-08:00

You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
--Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Publishers Weekly reported on a panel discussion about the publisher’s responsibility in ensuring facts in non-fiction works. There have been several cases recently of books being published (or almost published) as non-fiction, when in fact they were partly or wholly fabricated. The scientist in me feels very strongly about this. Facts are facts. Any other than fact is fiction.

I’ve been writing scientific articles for twenty years and tend to reference or cite sources out of habit, even when I’m not writing for a scientific audience. For an author to invent something out of whole cloth and then attempt to sell the book as a true story is astonishingly irresponsible and unethical. As a scientist, not only do you cite your sources, but you read the source material and check their references, and only cite reputable sources.

But what are facts? If you dig hard enough, you can find a few scientists who say that HIV does not cause AIDS; or global warming is not related to human activity; or there are no carcinogens in cigarette smoke. But the majority of scientists and majority of research papers will argue against these few outlying opinions. Scientific theories change with time as new evidence is discovered, and the consensus opinion is usually the most accurate.

A few years ago I published an article in Veterinary Technician titled “How Global Warming May Affect the Prevalence of Lyme Disease.” After it was published, we got a letter to the editor complaining that I had asserted that global warming was due to greenhouse gases. I admit, I did write the article with that assumption. I’m not saying that human activity is the only cause of global climate change, but yes, it plays a role. Simple physics. Human activity emits carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases >> greenhouse gases trap energy >> the average temperature planet-wide becomes warmer >> weather patterns become goofier. And regardless of whether climate change is caused by humans, the climate is changing, and as a result of warming climates, insect-borne diseases like Lyme disease are spreading. If you get yellow fever, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Literature on the Frontlines

2011-02-23T19:54:00.000-08:00

Fascinating article on the Art of Manliness blog (not being manly, I don’t follow this blog, but rather followed a link from the Shelf Awareness daily publishing newsletter) called Literature on the Frontlines, discussing Armed Services Edition books that were given to soldiers during WWII.

From the article: “To combat the morale-sapping effects of boredom during World War II, a unique collaboration between government and private industry launched an effort to distribute almost 1.3 million books to American GI’s. These books, the Armed Services Editions, were eagerly read by men in submarines, battleships, foxholes, and hospital beds, and not only served as a source of entertainment and solace during the war, but also turned many men into lifelong readers when they returned home.”

I had never heard of the Armed Services Editions, which included fiction and nonfiction, classics to contemporary. They were printed cheaply in paperback form, a perfect size for a soldier to easily carry. The motto of the organization that created the ASE’s was “Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas.” Very true.

There are quite a few ASE’s on eBay; I think I might need to bid on a few for my antique book collection. (My collection will be a future post topic!)

How Books Have Changed My Life

2011-02-17T08:25:00.000-08:00

A blog I wrote for Bookshop Talk:

How has literature affected your life? We’ve all been changed by the books we’ve read, but how has that impacted your life outside of books? Have you named children or pets after characters or authors? Married someone because of a book? Gotten a literary tattoo?

I’ve named several of my dogs after characters in literature. I had two Norwich terriers in vet school; they both passed away after long and happy lives. One was named Calum, after one of the veterinarians in James Herriot’s ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL series. The other was named Harry Hotspur. “Harry Hotspur” was the nickname of real-life Henry Percy, a fourteenth-century English noble, indicating his brash, reckless temperament. He is a minor character in William Shakespeare’s HENRY IV PART 1, and in the play has a very terrier-ish personality. My Harry lived up to his namesake, always getting into trouble.

My current dog is a Pembroke Welsh Corgi named Pippin, after one of the hobbits in J.R.R. Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy. In the trilogy, “Pippin” is the nickname of Peregrin Took, one of Frodo’s young cousins, who is careless and clumsy but always loyal to his friends. Like Tolkien’s Pippin, my Pippin is short-statured and devoted.

Books are also part of the reason I’m married to my husband. We both love fantasy, thriller and paranormal fiction. When we moved in together and combined our libraries, it was freakish how well our collections meshed. He had the early novels of Anne Rice’s VAMPIRE CHRONICLES series while I had the later novels. I had the first book of David Eddings’ ELENIUM trilogy while he had the second and third. And we both still had childhood copies of Deborah & James Howe’s BUNNICULA.

Six years ago we moved to a new home. I think our realtors were about to strangle us because we looked at over forty houses before finding one we both liked. The house we finally chose had several appealing features, but the one that particularly caught my eye was a certain space downstairs. It’s not quite a room, not quite a hallway, but we immediately saw that it was ideal for a library. Seven IKEA bookcases later, it’s perfect.

World Without End

2011-02-13T20:23:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading World Without End by Ken Follett. It is a sort-of-sequel to his blockbuster novel Pillars of the Earth, set two hundred years later. Like Pillars, it follows a dozen characters with intertwined stories, all circling around Kingsbridge, a fictional cathedral town in fourteenth-century England. One fascinating character is Caris. She’s an independent-minded woman who is found guilty of witchcraft and forced to enter a nunnery, where she works in the hospital as the plague epidemic strikes. The monk-physicians are still practicing techniques described by the Greeks—bleeding, dung poultices, etc. Caris learns modern medical practices from the surgeon-barber and the herb woman, and takes meticulous notes about symptoms, treatments, successes and failures. She insists on face masks, separating the sick from the well, and hand hygiene between patients, all of which are labeled heretical practices by the monk-physicians.

Of course this is a fictional novel, but it got me thinking. I take for granted that I can practice medicine as a woman and that I am free to choose the medical therapies which I believe to be most effective. Six hundred years ago, I probably would have been burned as a witch. Who were all the anonymous medical practitioners who challenged the old ways of thinking, blazing the trail for modern doctors? My posthumous thanks to them.

Cascade

2011-02-08T08:41:00.000-08:00

This form of poetry is called a cascade. Each line of first stanza becomes last line of subsequent stanzas:

Corvette cut me off
Rumbling loud engine
Scarlet with orange flames
Midlife crisis at the wheel

Driving recklessly
Swerving across lanes
No respect for fellows
Corvette cut me off

Muffler spewing fumes
Gagging gasoline
Like a wheezing dragon
Rumbling loud engine

Shiny chrome bumper
Black leather seats
Glittering new paint
Scarlet with orange flames

All he’s missing is a
Blonde in the passenger seat
His important life
Midlife crisis at the wheel

Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow

2011-01-30T11:50:00.000-08:00

I just read Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow by Jessica Day George (one of the hosts of the Bookshop Talk blog) and loved it! I picked it up at the library on Friday and finished reading it on Saturday.

Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow is a modern retelling of a Norwegian folk tale. It turns princess stories on their heads, because the resourceful girl rescues the prince in the end. The heroine is called simply “the lass,” because as the ninth child—an unwanted girl—she was never named. She encounters a magical white reindeer trapped in brambles; as a reward for setting him free, he gives her a name and the ability to speak with animals. Soon, an enormous isbjørn (“ice bear,” a polar bear) asks her to come live with him for a year in a palace. She accepts, and spends her time discussing literature with the bear, learning the language of Trolls, exploring the ice palace, and trying to solve the mystery of the enchanted isbjørn and the servants of the palace.

However, the lass makes a fatal mistake, and the evil Troll princess abducts the isbjørn. The lass learns—too late—that the isbjørn is a prince, cursed by the Troll princess to live as a bear by day and man by night. The lass travels to the Troll’s castle and outwits the Troll to rescue her prince.

The imagery is beautiful and the characters are captivating. Minor characters include salamanders (not the slimy amphibious kind, but the fire-dwelling kind), a selkie, a faun, and a gargoyle. The prince is suitably handsome and kind, and the lass is clever and intelligent. She’s the kind of girl I would like my daughters to be.

Blog on Censorship

2011-01-29T08:55:00.000-08:00

Here is a guest blog by me on Bookshop Talk about censorship, specifically the rewriting of Mark Twain to eliminate the "N" word.

My new love

2011-01-28T12:03:00.000-08:00

Don’t tell my husband, but I’m in love with another. My new love is only about seven inches tall, and needs to be plugged in to the outlet periodically, but he gives me everything I want.

Okay, silliness aside. I got a Barnes&Noble Nook e-reader. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t buy an e-reader until I had finished all the old-fashioned paper-and-ink books I already own, but a friend offered it to me half-price. She is upgrading to the color Nook and wanted to get rid of her black-and-white Nook. Fine by me! I prefer the black-and-white Nook to the color anyway; to me reading on the color screen tires my eyes as much as reading on a computer screen.

Always in the market for a deal, I downloaded The Complete Works of Mark Twain for $0.99 and 50 Classic Books (a collection of fourteen thousand pages, including authors from Austen to Machiavelli to Tolstoy) for $2.99. Those will keep me occupied for quite some time.

I read “Extracts from Adam’s Diary,” a short piece by Mark Twain. It is supposedly the translation from the hieroglyphs written by the Adam, of Garden of Eden fame. It’s hysterically funny; Adam is annoyed by Eve’s insistence on naming everything. When Cain comes along, Adam believes that Eve found the creature in the woods, and he tries to figure out how to taxonomically classify it: “It resembles us in some ways, and may be a relation. That is what she thinks, but this is an error, in my judgment. The difference in size warrants the conclusion that it is a different and new kind of animal—a fish, perhaps, though when I put it in the water to see, it sank, and she plunged in and snatched it out before there was opportunity for the experiment to determine the matter.” Like most toddlers, Cain drives his father crazy: “I am like to lose my mind over the capricious and harassing developments of this unclassifiable zoological freak.” But in the end, Adam learns to live with Eve and his children.

The Graveyard Book

2011-01-24T20:58:00.000-08:00

I’m reading The Graveyard Book (2008) by Neil Gaiman, winner of the 2009 American Library Association’s Newbery medal for children’s literature. It’s awesome, of course; it’s doubtful Mr. Gaiman ever wrote anything that wasn’t terrific.

The story follows a young boy, Nobody “Bod” Owens, who after being orphaned is taken in by a group of graveyard ghosts. He meets ghouls, Hounds of God (werewolves), night-gaunts, vampires, and other assorted denizens of the night as he makes friends and explores.

The writing is precise, evocative and entertaining. For example:

You might think that Mr. Owens should not have taken on so at seeing a ghost, given that Mr. and Mrs. Owens were themselves dead and had been for a few hundred years now, and given that the entirety of their social life, or very nearly, was spent with those who were also dead.

And:

The dead sun set, and two moons rose, one huge and pitted and white, which seemed, as it rose, to be taking up half the horizon, although it shrank as it ascended, and a smaller moon, the bluish-green color of the veins of mold in a cheese.

I heard at a writing conference that Mr. Gaiman carried the story of The Graveyard Book around in his head for twenty years before he felt like he was ready to write it. That makes me feel better; I have a few ideas for novels bouncing around in my brain, stewing and percolating. I don’t feel like I’m ready to write them yet—not accomplished enough—but maybe in ten or twenty years, after I hopefully get some fiction published, I’ll be ready.

Library Trip

2011-01-22T12:04:00.000-08:00

My girls will be turning five and seven this year, and I finally got up the courage to take them to the library. They were giddy with excitement as they ran into the children’s section and grabbed the first princess books they saw. I let them each pick out two books, and they chose fairies, princesses and Barbies. I’m not a huge fan of the spin-off characters, but it’s a start. In a few years hopefully I can get them reading the classics.

Sanitizing Mark Twain

2011-01-07T14:31:00.000-08:00

NewSouth publishing is rereleasing a sanitized version of Mark Twain’s immortal Huckleberry Finn. In the new version, the “N” word has been replaced with “slaves.” Are you kidding me? This is the most absurd publishing-related idiocy I’ve ever heard. As one of my writing group friends pointed out, next they’ll be rewriting Roots into the story of an African boy on a pleasure cruise to America.

While we’re at it, maybe we should also clean up Shakespeare’s works to remove the sexual innuendos, and the Declaration to replace “all men are created equal” with “all human persons are created equal.” Maybe we should sanitize the Bible, too—I’ve never liked the story of Job. Instead of losing everything and everyone he loves, maybe he could just lose a sheep or two.

Huckleberry Finn has been challenged many times by book-banning fanatics. (For more about banned books, see the American Library Association’s list of the Top 100 challenged books.) The objection, as with other classics like To Kill a Mockingbird, is the presence of the “N” word and its associated racial tension. Apparently these idiots have never heard George Santayana’s quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

If we cover up the pain of our country’s racial history, how will our children understand? I think the vast majority of modern Americans would agree that slavery is morally wrong, but how many of us came to that conclusion through reading books? Reading books like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple or Beloved—and feeling the overwhelming despair, misery and pain—will teach our children about our country’s history.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas

2010-12-31T20:15:00.000-08:00

The classic! Here's a review I wrote for Bookshop Talk:

I missed Christmas with this review but I figure it’s never a bad time to gush about How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I’ve loved this book since I was little; my mom used to read it to me, and now I’m reading it to my kids.

The story follows the Grinch, a nasty green creature with a heart “two sizes too small,” and his faithful dog, Max, in their adventures stealing Christmas décor and presents from the villagers of Who-ville. In the end, the Grinch realizes that Christmas “doesn’t come from a store” and that perhaps it “means a little bit more.” His heart grows three sizes, he brings back the gifts, carves the Whos’ Christmas roast beast, and they all live happily ever after. (Be honest—how many adults out there still refer to roast beef as “roast beast?” I’m raising my hand.)

It’s a marvelous story, an antidote to the commercialism of the holiday. Dr. Seuss’s writing is brilliant as always, as when the Grinch gets a “wonderful, awful idea.” Most writers would never consider stringing “wonderful” and “awful” together, but the result is perfect.

Starship Troopers

2010-12-14T20:04:00.000-08:00

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein is copyright 1959 but as relevant today as a half-century ago. It’s science fiction, although the sci-fi aspects take a back seat to the greater stories of humanity and morality.

The story is written in first-person past tense, as Juan Rico recounts his career with the Mobile Infantry of the Terran Federation Army during an interstellar war with the “Bugs” (ruthless exoskeletal hive-mind creatures). It takes place sometime in the future, after a violent period in the Earth’s history. If you’ve seen the movie adaptation, the novel has less gory Bug guts, fewer battles, and more intellectual speculation and political observation. Juan writes: Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one [Mobile Infantryman] it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution.

I’ve said before that Heinlein (1907-1988) was a genius. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress he portrays life in a lunar colony and so much of the science that he predicted has come true. In Starship Troopers we learn of a world war between the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance and the Chinese Hegemony. In 1959 who would have predicted that the Americans and Russians would become allies?

After the world war, North America disintegrates politically, driven by gang violence. I suppose there was some gang violence in the fifties a la "West Side Story," but nothing approaching the slaughter of today. One character, Mr. Dubois, offers a brilliant commentary on juvenile violence: “I told you that ‘juvenile delinquent’ is a contradiction in terms. ‘Delinquent’ means ‘failing in duty.’ But duty is an adult virtue—indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be, a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents—people of mature years, who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.” I’d bet a lot of prosecuting attorneys would agree with that argument.

Interesting, thought-provoking novel.

The Pillars of the Earth

2010-12-10T16:47:00.000-08:00

A review I wrote for Bookshop Talk:

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett is one of the most memorable novels I’ve read. Mr. Follett recently won the ThrillerMaster award from the International Thriller Writers association, prompting me to reread the novel. (Pillars is historical fiction, but Mr. Follett has written a number of thrillers.)

I first read Pillars seven years ago on a trip to England. At the time, I knew nothing of the plot and hadn’t heard of the author. I only picked it because it was the fattest book on the shelf (the paperback is nearly a thousand pages) and I thought it would last me through the two-week trip. Once I started reading I was entranced. As we toured the great cathedrals of Ely, Salisbury, York and Westminster, the novel came to life for me.

The first line is a great hook: “The small boys came early to the hanging.” (Not a novel for the faint of heart; it was a violent time in history, after all.)

The novel is a historical fiction spanning several decades in the twelfth century. The primary protagonist is Tom, a stonemason who dreams of building a cathedral. Accompanied by his family he walks across southern England in search of a job. They are impoverished and starving when his wife dies in childbirth; Tom abandons the baby knowing that he cannot feed it.

Other plot lines follow Philip, a monk who becomes prior of Kingsbridge monastery and begins to build a new cathedral; Jonathan, the baby whom Tom abandoned; Ellen, a beautiful outlaw woman who cursed the churchmen who wrongfully executed her lover; Ellen’s peculiar son, Jack; Waleran, an ambitious abbot; William, a vicious young noble; and Aliena, penniless daughter of a deposed earl. Their stories are set against a tumultuous background of the massive cathedral construction project; the mystery of the unjust hanging of Jack’s father years before; and the bloody civil war between King Stephen and Empress Maud for the throne of England.

The writing is evocative: “The gloomy interior smelled of old dirt and corruption.”

“A variety of unfamiliar smells pricked her nostrils, acrid and yeasty, sulfurous and smoky, woody and rotten.”

“A chill December morning dawned with rags and tatters of mist hanging on the trees like poor people’s washing.”

“The people wore no badges of mourning but the lines of their faces showed grief as starkly as bare trees show winter.”

You’ll be engrossed by the intertwining stories and learn a bit about medieval ecclesiastic architecture as well.

Unnecessary Quotation Marks

2010-12-09T19:33:00.000-08:00

I found a funny blog, The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, which posts photos of misused punctuation. One recent post was a school lunch menu featuring shepherds pie and stir fry “chicken.” One wonders what sort of faux chicken was used (road kill squirrel, perhaps?) and the bonus missing apostrophe implies the pie wasn’t made by a shepherd but contains shepherds.

Quotation marks are properly used in several situations in the English language, including:

A direct quote, as in: “There’s a zombie in the garden,” said Bill.
A nickname, as in: Bill ran to the garden wielding “Big Bertha,” his favorite chainsaw.
Something that isn’t what it seems, as in: After a full day of zombie slaying, Bill liked to go to Rita’s Diner for vegan tofu “cheesecake.”

However, proper usage does not include emphasis. A lot of people use quotation marks to draw attention, when one would typically use bold or italics. A sign that reads Deli “Hot Dogs” does not mean, this restaurant serves awesomely delicious hot dogs. It means, this restaurant serves something that looks like a hot dog but isn’t; we’re not quite sure what it’s made of or whether it’s even edible, and it would probably be safer to eat elsewhere.

A few unnecessary quotation marks I’ve seen recently are:

Quality Signs. Since “1945.” The quotes turn the meaning into, we’ve been in business a long time, it might have been 1945 or maybe that’s just what crazy Uncle Charlie wants us to believe. (It’s also odd, of course, that a sign business has a punctuation error on its own sign—not the smartest advertising move.)

“Large Houses, Small Prices” = Well, they’re actually rather small and expensive.

“Sorry, No Checks” = We’re not really sorry, and we may or may not accept checks.

Harry Potter

2010-11-25T09:07:00.000-08:00

I love Harry Potter.

Just saw the movie of Deathly Hallows Part I. Of course, movies are never as good as the novels on which they are based, but it’s pretty good. I think it captures the despair that Harry feels, and the tension between Harry, Ron and Hermione. I just wish they had made one five-hour-long movie instead of breaking it up into two. I can’t wait until June!

There’s been a lot of uproar about the so-called “nude scene” in the movie. When Ron is about to use the Sword of Gryffindor to break open the Horcrux locket, the part of Voldemort’s soul which infuses the locket tries to deter him. The locket tells Ron he is least-loved by his mother and that Hermione loves Harry, not Ron. It shows him a vision of Harry and Hermione kissing. In the movie, the vision Harry and Hermione are clearly naked, although swirling smoke conveniently obscures the naughty bits.

Granted, the nudity is unnecessary. In the novel there is no mention of clothing or lack thereof. The scene is described as:

“Who wouldn’t prefer him, what woman would take you, you are nothing, nothing to him,” crooned Riddle-Hermione, and she stretched like a snake and entwined herself around Riddle-Harry, wrapping him in a close embrace: Their lips met.

But really, why do people pick that part of the movie to object to? I won’t let my kids see the movie—but not for that reason. I’m more concerned with the Muggle Studies professor dangling upside-down and bleeding over the table, the giant snake bursting out of the old lady’s body, Bellatrix torturing Hermione, George’s bloody head wound, and Dobby dying of a dagger to the chest—not to mention Voldemort’s all-around creepiness.

Stardust

2010-11-22T08:27:00.000-08:00

The review I wrote for Stardust for Bookshop Talk:

Stardust, by Neil Gaiman (1999), is the inspiration for the movie of the same name, released in 2004. The movie is delightful, but as is generally the case with such things, the novel outshines the movie adaptation.

The novel opens with Dunstan Thorn, a young man living in the village of Wall. The town is named for the large stone wall that runs alongside, marking the boundary between mundane England and magical Faerie. Once every nine years the border is opened for a May Day festival. At the fair, Dunstan falls in love with a fairie slave girl and fathers a son, Tristran.

Seventeen years later, Tristan’s primary concern is gaining the hand of Victoria, the most beautiful girl in Wall. Victoria finds him dull and tries to get rid of him. She says she will only marry him if he brings her a star which has fallen on the other side of the wall. Tristran sets out across the boundary to recover the fallen star, but we learn that when a star falls in Fairie, it falls not as a lifeless lump of meteoric iron but as radiant young woman.

Tristran kidnaps the star, named Yvaine, and begins the return journey to England. The land of Fairie isn’t a rainbows-and-pixie-dust-and-pink-ponies sort of place. It is magical and mysterious, dark and dangerous, like the Fairie of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (in fact, she wrote a blurb for the cover of Stardust). In Fairie there are predatory trees, “choleric gnomes of poor disposition,” ghosts and hobgoblins.

Along the way, Tristran and Yvaine are pursued by witches (for the heart of a star is a valuable commodity in witchcraft) and become entangled in the battle for succession to the throne of Stormhold. And, of course, they fall in love.

Mr. Gaiman’s writing is creative, lyrical and descriptive. For example, a description of a Fairie cat:

“The farm cat had three kittens: two black-and-white ones like herself, and a tiny kitten with a dusty blue sheen to her coat, and eyes that changed color depending on her mood, from green and gold to salmon, scarlet and vermillion.”

This would be a great novel with which to curl up on a rainy day. Although the novel is adult, I think it would also appeal to teens.

Bookshop Talk

2010-11-16T19:44:00.000-08:00

Found a fun blog at Bookshop Talk, run by authors Jessica Day George and Amy Finnegan. The premise of the blog is writers (published or not) talking about their favorite books. It’s like walking into your favorite neighborhood bookstore and asking, “What mystery would you recommend?” All the reviews are positive; as Jessica and Amy say, it’s not that they’re literary pushovers who claim to love every book, it’s just that there’s no point in talking about the books you don’t like.

La Lune

2010-11-10T17:43:00.000-08:00

Many people are familiar with haiku, a three-lined poem that has five syllables in the first line, seven in the second and five in the third. I remember writing haiku as a class assignment in fifth grade. As examples, here are two haiku I wrote last Halloween. (Can you guess my favorite holiday?)

Dry linen wrappings
Rustle and crack as they tear
Mummy walks tonight

Bright white canine teeth
Pierce tender jugular vein
Yum says the vampire

I recently learned of a similar poetic form, the lune. The classical lune has five syllables in the first line, three in the second and five in the third. Here are my attempts at les lunes:

The bananas are
Squishy brown
Time to make some bread

Snow dusted on leaves
Ice crystals
Hang in the still air

An alternate lune form counts words instead of syllables, and has three in the first line, five in the second, and three in the third:

Admitted my addiction
Finally bought a coffee pot
Caffeine is essential

Clear sapphire sky
Warm sun yet the breeze
Carries winter’s chill

Irises are confused
Trying to bloom in November
Frost is coming

NaNoWriMo

2010-11-09T20:01:00.000-08:00

November is National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. NaNoWriMo. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel in the course of the month, which translates to 1,667 words per day. The emphasis is quantity over quality by necessity. I know a couple of writers who are participating. I’m not—with a full-time “real” job and a family and a need to perform basic bodily functions like eating and sleeping, I don’t have time.

But I have been trying to get my YA (teen) novel hammered into shape in honor of the month. I started the novel in the spring of 2008, put it on hold for a while, and then finished two years later. Now I’m in the process of revisions: clarifying the purpose of each chapter and character, increasing the conflict and tension, making sure each sub-plot has a resolution, and fixing basic writing errors. As I read through the manuscript, I can see how much I’ve learned about the craft of writing. The early chapters are dull and riddled with editorial mistakes. The challenge lies in whipping the beginning chapters into a state worthy of submission to agents (since agents typically ask for the first ten pages of the manuscript, not the thrilling-grand-finale-wouldn’t-that-be-awesome-on-screen-coolest ten pages).

How to Train Your Dragon

2010-11-05T08:42:00.000-07:00

I’m reading the How to Train Your Dragon series by Cressida Cowell. I didn’t know the movie was based on a book until I watched the DVD last week with my kids. The movie is entertaining, particularly in the way the dragons are animated. Their behaviors and facial expressions are very doglike and catlike.

So I bought the first three books in the series, How to Train Your Dragon, How to be a Pirate, and How to Speak Dragonese. The unlikely heroes of the series are Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, a scrawny Viking boy, and his diminutive dragon pal, Toothless. The plot of the movie, it turns out, is quite different than the books, but both are good stories.

In the first book, Hiccup and his friends trick two enormous dragons into killing each other rather than the Viking tribe. In the second book, Hiccup and his best friend, Fishlegs, evade Alvin the Treacherous to discover a treasure buried by Hiccup’s pirate great-grandfather, Grimbeard the Ghastly. In the third book, Hiccup, Toothless and Fishlegs are abducted by Romans and escape with the help of a fleet of nanodragons.

The writing wouldn’t satisfy a literature snob but is entertaining.

Some examples:

“Snotlout cheered up a bit because he could show of his superior skill at Burglary. He managed to steal Baggybum’s knickers right off him as he was standing in a Huddle discussing a Plan of Action. Baggybum didn’t notice, not even when he reached a hairy hand to down to absentmindedly scratch his great bottom—he was too busy talking about Bigger and Better Methods of Yelling.”

“Hiccup knew that Grimbeard had been the ULTIMATE in pirate-ness, the GREEDIEST, GRISLIEST, GORIEST Viking who had ever sailed and slew and farted his way across the Northern Seas.”

“Big-Boobied Bertha stomped on board, her beard bristling. Fists like sledgehammers, ears like cauliflowers, she had once stunned a stag with one blow of her mighty bosoms, and many a smaller animal had suffocated in their stern depths.”

Fun books, and I imagine that if I were a member of the target audience (boys in the eight-to-twelve range), I would coerce my parents into buying them all.

New article published

2010-10-31T19:46:00.000-07:00

Here's an article of mine (which originally began as a ranting blog post) that was recently published in Veterinary Economics, about a bad experience I had with a physician.

Censorship

2010-10-20T16:17:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators' Bulletin has a couple of articles addressing censorship. One article is about Ellen Hopkins, who was kicked out of a teen literature festival because some parents objected to her books. I haven’t read any of her novels, but they’re going on my Amazon wish list today. According to the article, Burned, Glass, Crank and Impulse “deal openly and honestly with difficult subjects faced by teens—from drug abuse to body image.” Oh, no! Let’s get the pitchforks and torches! We can’t possibly let our teenagers know about drugs or alcohol or sex or abusive relationships. Much better to cloister our kids until they graduate and go to college. Or maybe we should keep them in a bubble until they turn thirty? Maybe forty?

Another article summarizes other recent incidents of authors being dis-invited from school visits because of the subject matter of their books—parents dying of cancer, religion, monsters, students annoying their teachers, magic, and hominid fossils.

I just can’t fathom the viewpoints of these critics. How can kids deal with a difficult situation in real life—whether a family member’s death, or a sexual suggestion from a classmate, or an offer of drugs—if they haven’t learned? And how can they learn without reading? Shutting kids up in a Rapunzel tower won’t protect them; it will only cripple them when they have to face difficult situations.

Happy Halloween

2010-10-18T07:53:00.000-07:00

“What’ll you have?” asked Frankenstein.

“Whiskey, if you’ve got any,” said the Wolfman.

“Jameson?”

“Great,” he growled.

Frankenstein pulled a bottle of whiskey from the liquor cabinet and poured two generous glasses. He turned to the refrigerator to retrieve a pint of blood, freshly stolen the previous night from the Red Cross. “Vlad, I couldn’t remember which type was your favorite. I got A positive, is that okay?’

The count nodded. “I prefer B, but A is fine.”

Frankenstein cut the pint bag open, poured the blood into a latte mug, and popped it into the microwave for thirty seconds.

“Who else is coming this year?” Wolfman asked.

“I got an email from the Creature that he won’t make it,” said Frankenstein. “He said the Black Lagoon is under serious pressure from developers who want to build a shopping mall, so he’s been making a lot of calls to the zoning commission. But I think everyone else is coming.”

Wolfman turned to Dracula. “So what’s new with you?”

Dracula shook his head. “It’s getting so hard to feed these days.” He lifted the mug of blood. “I mean, this packaged stuff is all right, but drinking from an innocent young maiden is a million times better, you know? But these days there aren’t any innocents left. The teenagers I grab downtown are disgusting. Their blood flows with meth and alcohol, and they’re so busy texting and listening to their iPods that they don’t even notice me.”

“Yeah, I know how you feel,” said Frankenstein. “There are just too many people in the world now. We’re out-dated.”

The doorbell rang. “Excuse me,” said Frankenstein. Dracula and Wolfman heard the front door open to a chorus of “Trick or Treat!” Frankenstein came back to the kitchen a moment later. “A ninja, a cowboy and an alien.” He gestured to Wolfman. “You hungry?”

Wolfman chuckled. “When am I not hungry?”

Frankenstein pulled out a meat and cheese tray from the fridge, which Wolfman happily attacked.

The doorbell rang again. Wolfman and Dracula followed Frankenstein to the front door. “Trick or Treat!” yelled a couple of teenagers. They wore masks, but hadn’t put any effort into costumes. “Hey, awesome costumes, dudes,” one of the boys said.

Wolfman winked at Frankenstein, then let loose a huge snarl at the boys. They both jumped back, eyes wide, then glanced at each other. They covered their mutual embarrassment by laughing and smacking each other, then took off down the driveway, candy forgotten.

An Aston Martin glided to park at the curb and the Mummy emerged. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said with a bow. “I hope I’m not late. The traffic on the freeway was perfectly dreadful.”

“No, we’re just getting started,” said Frankenstein. “Come on in, have a seat in the living room. Can I get you something to drink?”

“Gin and tonic would be delightful.”

“How’s Egypt?” Wolfman asked as they settled into the living room.

Mummy sighed melodramatically. “How I long for the old days. Egypt was beautiful then. Now it’s bedraggled, like a flower withered in a vase, scarred by cell towers and fast food restaurants. I’ve actually been spending more time in England than in Egypt. At least there are a few remote areas in England which are still civilized.”

Frankenstein returned with the gin and tonic, and sat down to sip his whiskey. “It’s depressing. Vampires and werewolves are in vogue now, but they’ve been glamorized in pop culture. We real monsters don’t get any respect. Whoever heard of sparkly vegetarian vampires, anyway?”

Dracula snorted. “Those sparkly twerps wouldn’t last two hours in Transylvania. Can you believe, a few months ago I was feeding downtown and this girl came up to me. She was all dressed up in black, with a leather bodice and short skirt, with tattooed wings on her shoulders and piercings all over. She said, ‘Oh my god, are you a real vampire? Oh my god, this is so totally awesome.’ She kept hounding me, begging me to turn her into a vampire. I finally had to hypnotize her to escape from her!”

Wolfman had finished off the entire meat and cheese tray while the others talked. He looked up sheepishly. “Got any more, buddy?”

Frankenstein laughed and stood. “Of course I do.”

The doorbell rang again while Frankenstein was out of the room, so Dracula hopped up to answer the door. He swept the door open dramatically, swishing his cape around. Two young girls squealed, barely recovering to blurt out “Trick or Treat!” Dracula dropped candy bars into their bags and waved them away. He spotted a figure shambling across the street and called, “Zombie! Over here!” The figure nodded and shuffled up the driveway.

“Come on in, Zombie. How’ve you been?”

“Unggh. Ny nost parng oh mah dunggh.”

“You lost part of your tongue?” Mummy said. “That’s absolutely dreadful. I’m so sorry, old chap.”

Zombie shrugged and reached for a piece of cheese from the second appetizer tray. “Mmnn, dase nike brains.”

“Gouda, I remembered,” said Frankenstein.

Zombie turned to Wolfman. “Whanngh you been doinggh?”

“Same old, same old. I’ve been working at a game store part-time. Either they haven’t figured out that I call in sick every full moon, or they don’t care. Oh, that reminds me, I wanted to show you guys something I’ve been working on.” He pulled out a black leather folio and extracted a stack of eight-by-ten photos. The others passed the photos around one by one. They were landscapes—cities, deserts and mountains; midday, night and dusk—all featuring the moon. A quarter moon hung over Delicate Arch. A full moon shone over the Seattle Space Needle. A sliver of a crescent moon peeked over a sagebrush.

“Astounding,” said Mummy. “You’ll have to come visit me next time I’m in England. The moonrise over Stonehenge is spectacular.”

The garage door rumbled and Frankenstein hopped up, grinning. His wife came in the back door, looking radiant in a black dress that set off the white streaks in her hair. “Hey, baby,” he murmured, giving her a quick kiss.

“Hi, guys,” the Bride greeted everyone. “It’s good to see you all again. Mummy, have you been working out?”

“My dear, I’m delighted you noticed.” The Mummy held up his linen-wrapped arms and posed like a bodybuilder.

“And Vlad, how is Mina?”

“She’s doing well. She’s out of town now, went back home for a visit.”

Wolfman stood up, rubbing his hands with excitement. “Okay, we’re all here now. Ready to go?”

Everyone jumped up from their chairs, except the Zombie, who laboriously pushed himself up. Wolfman drained a fifth glass of whiskey and Dracula finished off his blood. Zombie grabbed a few more pieces of Gouda cheese, and the group piled into Frankenstein’s black Suburban.

“Where are we going this year?” asked Wolfman,

“I finagled us invitations to a huge party at a club called Haze,” said Frankenstein. “There should be at least a couple hundred people there.”

“Splendid,” said the Mummy. “Our one chance of the year to socialize and be seen, with no worries of being exposed.”

Wolfman stuck his head out the sunroof and howled.

Banned Books Week

2010-09-29T15:08:00.000-07:00

It’s the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week. Take a look at the most commonly challenged books and you could be reading a list of the best novels ever written.

The ALA website lists the top ten challenged books by year. In the past decade there have been challenges against some very popular YA series, including the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling and the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman. The reasoning (not that it has anything to do with reason) is that dark fantasy is apparently going to turn our kids into Satan worshippers or induce them to commit suicide. Just like playing Dungeons & Dragons is believed to do by some people. (My hubby has been playing D&D every week for years and hasn’t become a Satan worshipper yet.)

The Twilight series was opposed due to “religious viewpoint” and “sexually explicit.” Huh? What religious viewpoint? Edward’s disagreement with Carlisle about whether vampires have souls? And what sexual explicitness? Bella and Edward don’t have sex until they’re married, and all the action happens in the white space between chapters (she takes off her clothes and then—poof—it’s the next morning).

And the Harry Potter series was opposed due to “occult/Satanism,” “violence,” “anti-family” and “religious viewpoint.” Apparently the idiots who tried to ban it were so busy acting like Nazis that they never actually got around to reading the book. Harry longs for a family; his life’s mission is shaped by the deaths of his parents and godfather. Themes in the series include befriending the friendless; supporting one’s friends through good times and bad; self-sacrifice to the greater good; and fighting back against torture, oppression and complacency. Oh, yeah, those are pretty evil concepts there. Thousands of kids became readers because of Harry Potter. We should be thanking Ms. Rowling, not banning her.

I also found out from the ALA website that The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) was burned in 2001 for allegedly being Satanic. Okay, so I realize that burning books is constitutionally-protected free speech, but it’s sick and wrong. And who came up with the Satanic charge? Sauron is a pretty evil dude but he is defeated in the end—the LOTR series is a classic story of good overcoming evil.

To celebrate Banned Books Week, I’m reading To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It was published in 1960 (and won a Pulitzer in 1961) but people are still challenging its inclusion in school curricula and libraries. Really? Could we please move on to the twenty-first century? Yes, the book deals with racism, but racism is real. It’s not as blatant as it was a half-century ago but it’s still alive and well, still permeating the American culture, still affecting our children’s world views. And it’s something that our kids need to understand. Burying our heads in the sand won’t teach our kids to be better people.

Real Life

2010-09-21T15:59:00.000-07:00

This post has nothing to do with books, but it's my real life:

I stand on my front porch watching a wildfire in the foothills a mile or two from our home. I hug my arms around myself. It’s about nine o’clock and the kids are in bed. The youngest is asleep, but the oldest is worried. She keeps coming out of her room to ask, “When are we leaving?” and “What about the volcano? There’s hot lava.” It’s true, the flames licking the crest of the hill look a bit like molten lava spilling down the slopes of a volcano.

Over the course of the evening we have watched as the fire spread from the south side of the hill, crested the summit and started to creep down the north face towards our neighborhood. The wind whips out of the south, pushing the heavy smoke into my face. The leading edge of the wildfire burns dark red and angry, but when the wind gusts the flames leap higher and glow yellow. The fire jumps—a yellow spot flares, quickly grows to a ring and then rejoins the main as it marches inexorably down the hill.

In the distance I hear sirens and megaphones. We are only a few blocks away from the mandatory evacuation area. My husband and I debate whether to leave. We decide to stay, rather than dragging the kids and dogs and cat to Grandma’s, but we pack up, just in case. I pack a small suitcase with clothes and toiletries while my husband gets the fire-safe containing birth certificates, passports and insurance papers. The girls each pick out two favorite toys to take. I back up my computer onto a flash drive, grab my diamond earrings. What else to take? What’s most important when you may lose your home? Family heirlooms—but I can’t very well pack up my grandmother’s dining table and chairs, or the dresser handmade by my great-grandfather. Photos? Books? Souvenirs from European vacations? The new Halloween costumes I just spent fifty bucks on? In the end, just my purse and camera.

My husband and I sit nervously on the couch. The blinds are open so we can see the fire as we try to watch TV. He flips between the news, monitoring the evacuation zone, and a movie. We watch Dodgeball: juvenile, raunchy, mindless humor to distract us from the fire. I finally collapse with exhaustion after eleven, but he stays up for hours, watching and waiting.

Children's Books

2010-09-18T19:33:00.000-07:00

I love books. Obviously. My daughters love books too, even though the older one is only just barely learning to read. I counted over a hundred kids’ books on the shelf in the living room; that doesn’t count the dozen or so that each girl probably has in her room. It also doesn’t count the casualties of war—books that have been thrown away due to wear-and-tear beyond what I can fix with packing tape. (It pains me to throw away books, even when they’re terminally bedraggled. I once moved a heavy Russian-English dictionary across country because I couldn’t find it a home worthy of donation.)

Every time we go to Barnes & Noble (too often as far as the checking account is concerned) each girl gets to pick a book. I also buy books for them online, and my mom buys books for them as my parents travel (usually desert southwest or Native American themes).

The girls tend to pick out books featuring princesses, fairies and Barbie. Some of those are mind-numbing to read aloud a few times—not to mention a few hundred times. The books I like the best have clever writing, humor and interesting illustrations. I’ve learned that writing picture books is a lot harder than it looks.

My favorite children’s books—the ones I still enjoy reading after a thousand times:

The Hallo-Wiener, written and illustrated by Dav Pilkey. The star of this cute Halloween doggy story is dachshund Oscar, a dog who is “half-a-dog tall and one-and-a-half dogs long.” The illustrations and text have enough puns to entertain adults.
Don’t Wake up the Bear, written by Marjorie Dennis Murray and illustrated by Patricia Wittmann. The illustrations are gorgeous and the text is calmly repetitive as a hare, a fox, a badger, a squirrel and a mouse all take refuge in a bear’s cave on a winter night.
The Color Kittens, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Alice & Martin Provensen. Brush and Hush are two kittens who mix paint colors. The illustrations are fascinating and the text is lyrical (“Green as cats’ eyes, green as grass, by streams of water, green as glass”).
Dr. Seuss, of course. Especially The Grinch, Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now, Green Eggs and Ham, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish and Fox in Socks.
Board books by Sandra Boynton, including Moo, Baa, La La La, Hippos Go Berserk and Pajama Time.
The barnyard series written by Doreen Cronin and illustrated by Betsy Lewin. In Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type, the cows demand electric blankets from Farmer Brown. In Giggle, Giggle, Quack, Farmer Brown leaves his brother in charge of the farm and scheming Duck takes advantage. In Dooby Dooby Moo the animals perform in a talent show at the County Fair. The books are hilarious, with witty characters (especially Duck) and funny illustrations.
Dinosaur Roar by Paul & Henrietta Stickland. This board book teaches opposites, and has marvelous watercolor illustrations. “Dinosaur clean,” a squeaky-clean turquoise-and-peach-colored therapod, files his nails and looks on with dismay at “Dinosaur slimy,” a smiling fat green sauropod dripping with black slime and sitting in a mud puddle.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

2010-09-12T19:30:00.000-07:00

I’m reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I’ve read it before, but not in the last decade. I first watched the BBC miniseries in the early 80’s with my mom, and the story is probably a major contributing factor to my love of both science fiction novels and goofy British comedy shows.

Douglas Adams does a very clever version of the omniscient point of view. The point of view flips rapidly between the narrator and between various characters. For example:

“Will you open up the exit hatch, please, computer?” said Zaphod, trying not to get angry.
“Not until whoever said that owns up,” urged the computer, stamping a few synapses closed.
“Oh God,” muttered Ford, slumping against a bulkhead. He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this.

In three short paragraphs, the point of view switches amongst three characters (two humanoid and one machine). Normally, rapid POV switches drive me crazy, but for some reason it works when Adams does it. In other places, the narrator actually becomes another character in the story, offering quirky explanations to the reader…

“Here, have a look at this,” said Ford. He sat down on one of the mattresses and rummaged about in his satchel. Arthur prodded the mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had very little to be nervous about, because all mattresses grown in the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being put to service. Very few have ever come to life again.

…and even referring to itself in the third person:

Mark Knopfler has an extraordinary ability to make a Schecter Custom Stratocaster hoot and sing like angels on a Saturday night, exhausted from being good all week and needing a stiff drink—which is not strictly relevant at this point since the record [which Arthur put on at his girlfriend’s house] hadn’t got to that bit yet, but there will be too much else going on when it does, and furthermore the chronicler does not intend to sit here with a track list and a stopwatch, so it seems best to mention it now while things are still moving slowly.

I think the omniscient POV is difficult to write. If it’s done well, it gives the reader a broad understanding of the story and what’s happening inside the characters’ minds, but if it’s not done right, it reads badly.

Seducing the Muse

2010-09-09T19:58:00.000-07:00

Writers talk about tempting the muse, opening up, letting the words flow. Maybe the words are channeled from a muse, or from some heavenly library, or maybe just our subconscious minds. My middle-grade fantasy, for example, started as the writing equivalent of doodling as I sat with my laptop, trying to avoid doing any real work while my daughters watched a Tinkerbell movie.

I read an interview with Alice Walker (The Color Purple and many others). Talking about the inspiration for her varied genres and topics, she says:

“I feel that I need to write what comes to me… and if I just do nothing but basically stay open, that the genre actually will form itself to suit whatever the subject is that arrives. If I’m patient, and if I don’t try to force it—and I don’t. I have no interest in forcing anything. In fact, if it doesn’t want to come, fine, I will do something else, and it can go somewhere else. So it’s very easy, actually, to wait in an attitude of patience and acceptance and trust that this is something that clearly has come to me to be expressed and if it has gotten this far, probably it will want to come up with the form."

Ms. Walker’s comments seemed a little strange to me, but then I realized that I’ve experienced the same thing. A few years ago I published an article in Veterinary Technician titled “Pregnancy in the Workplace.” The topic came to me one day, urging me to write about hazards to a pregnant employee working in a veterinary clinic, and it told me the form and genre as well—an informative article for lay staff.

Another article, which I haven’t yet been able to sell, is about poisonous plants commonly used in residential landscaping. The plants came to me, hovered around threateningly, and told me to write an article for serious gardeners and landscapers. (Unfortunately, they forgot to tell me which magazine would want to publish it.)

Save the Cat

2010-08-11T12:49:00.000-07:00

I’m reading Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting you’ll Ever Need (2005) and Save the Cat Goes to the Movies (2007) by Blake Snyder. Although the books are intended for screenwriters, they are fantastic guides to plot structure for any sort of writer.

What do Jaws, Fatal Attraction and Tremors have in common? Hmm… vicious shark, psycho mistress, ginormous earthworm. They are all examples of “Monster in the House,” one of ten genres that Snyder defines. Basically every story ever told fits one of the genres, and the reason these stories hit us so hard emotionally is that we’re responding to some deep-seated subconscious plot structure preferences. Snyder says, “The elements that vibrate in us like a tuning fork—the stories that truly resonate—are based on patterns deep in our DNA.”

In “Monster in the House” there is—obviously—a monster, the badder the better (not like the lame aliens in Signs that wither wicked-witch-like when exposed to water), and a “house,” which is any confined space. A “sin” precipitates or exacerbate the monster attacks (in Jaws, the town council refuses to let Chief Brody close the beaches after the first shark bite). There may also be a “Half Man” who has previously encountered the monster and guides the hero (until the point when he gets eaten), like Quint in Jaws.

I learned that my middle-grade fantasy is a “Golden Fleece” story: a road trip in which the hero sets off to find something but what he really finds is himself. The Golden Fleece genre is further subdivided; my story is a “Buddy Fleece” because the hero needs his team of buddies to help him along the road.

Snyder also has an awesome “Beat Sheet.” Based on a 110-page script, he has marked out when the important plot points should happen. And do happen in many blockbuster hits. I watched Bolt, an example of “Buddy Fleece” for kids, and compared plot points to the Beat Sheet.

Opening Image: Bolt as a puppy, asleep in the animal shelter, apart from the other puppies.
Set-Up: We see Bolt and Penny in their superdog TV show; meet the producer, agent, and Penny’s mom; learn that Bolt thinks all the superhero stuff is real.
Theme Stated: Penny asks to take Bolt home for the weekend, saying, “But he never gets to be a real dog.”
Catalyst: Bolt thinks that Penny has been abducted by the evil Dr. Calico from the TV show.
Debate: Can Bolt rescue Penny? He is frantic to save Penny, escapes from his trailer at the production studio, inadvertently gets packed in a box to New York City, and escapes again to run around the streets of NYC.
Break into Act Two: Act Two is the “upside-down” of Act One. For Bolt, that means the real world instead of the imaginary TV superhero world. Bolt meets pigeons in NYC and they take him to Mittens the cat (a tough stray who extorts pigeons).
B Story: The A story is Bolt getting back to Hollywood to Penny; the B story is him learning to be a dog and developing friendships with Mittens the cat and Rhino the hamster (“one-sixteenth wolf”).
Fun and Games: Bolt and Mittens start on a journey from New York to Hollywood and meet Rhino the hamster in Ohio. Mittens starts to teach Bolt how to be a dog. Bolt and Mittens are caught by an Animal Control officer; Rhino rescues Bolt from the Animal Control truck. Bolt realizes he’s not a superdog, but knows Mittens needs help; Bolt and Rhino break Mittens out of the animal shelter.
Midpoint: Bolt, Mittens and Rhino hop a ride on a mobile home; Bolt has fun learning how to be a real dog (sticking his nose out the window of a moving vehicle).
Bad Guys Close In: Mittens doesn’t want to keep going and tries to convince Bolt to stay.
All is Lost: Bolt and Mittens argue in Las Vegas, and Mittens tells Bolt that Penny never loved him but she was acting; the team breaks up and Bolt leaves. Snyder says there is often a “whiff of death” at the All is Lost Point (like Obi-Wan’s death); this scene takes place in a stark junkyard surrounded by dead grass.
Dark Night of the Soul: Bolt finally reaches the Hollywood studio and sees Penny rehearsing with the new Bolt replacement dog; he thinks she has forgotten all about him.
Break into Act Three: The A story and B stories merge when Mittens catches up with Bolt, tells him she saw how sad Penny was about losing Bolt, and tells him to go to Penny.
Finale: Fire breaks out in the production studio and Penny is trapped; Bolt gets into the studio with the help of Mittens and Rhino, and is reunited with Penny; Bolt stays with Penny when she is overcome by smoke and uses his superbark to alert the firefighters; they are rescued alive.
Final Image: Penny, Bolt, Penny’s mom, Mittens and Rhino are a happy family far from Hollywood.

A Place of Her Own

2010-08-02T07:37:00.000-07:00

I’ve heard several speakers at writers’ conferences suggesting that an aspiring writer needs a place of her own. Preferably an office, preferably with a door, but at any rate a place to write without being disturbed.

I actually tend to do my writing with my laptop, sitting in a comfy chair in the living room. But I have carved out a little space of my own to be my writing “office.” (I have a “real” office at work for all my veterinary references and stuff, but it’s gloomy, cinder-block-walled, and cold twelve months of the year.)

My writing space is a corner of our master bedroom, tucked between a dog bed and the closet. The table is a family heirloom, affectionately called the “Cornelia Otis Skinner Memorial Table.” Cornelia Otis Skinner was an actress and author, and wrote this quote: "One learns in life to keep silent and draw one's own confusions." When my dad was in high school circa 1950, Ms. Skinner performed a one-woman show for which she required a small table prop. My grandmother volunteered the use of the table; after its fifteen minutes of fame it returned to being an ordinary piece of furniture.

On the table sits my laptop, which is routinely stored in the open position on account of a broken hinge. It can still close, sort of, but I’m hoping to prolong the inevitable catastrophic failure of the hinge. The trophy is my writing group’s travelling award for the most recent, most noteworthy, or most undeserved rejection. On the right side of the table are my writing references and a hundred-count box of manila envelopes for submissions. Below is a file of notes from conferences and scraps of paper with ideas for projects, a purple plastic hatbox of old manuscripts, and two laptop bags (one more protective, the other more fashionable).

Maybe someday I’ll have a real writing office with a functional laptop, a window, tastefully color-coordinated office supplies, and framed prints of the cover art from my best-selling novels. We can all dream, right?

Tell Me Where It Hurts

2010-07-11T19:55:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Tell Me Where It Hurts by Dr. Nick Trout, veterinary surgical specialist at Boston’s famous Angell Animal Medical Center. In the tradition of veterinarian James Herriot (All Creatures Great and Small), Trout weaves together stories of life and death, successes and failures, pets rambunctious or stoic, and clients obstreperous or grateful. Although modern veterinary medicine and technology are light years ahead of Herriot’s 1930’s Yorkshire practice, our patients and our clients haven’t changed.

A few days ago I spoke with a good client about her Jack Russell’s laboratory testing, which suggested hypothyroidism. She laughed, and said, “I have a thyroid condition, too. Sometimes I think Sadie came out of my womb, and she certainly acts like she thinks she came out of my womb, so I guess it’s natural that she would have a thyroid condition also.” It doesn’t matter that as a human and a canine they are clearly not genetically related; emotionally they are mother and daughter, and that’s what matters.

Yesterday, one of my rabbit clients brought in his two bunnies for their regularly scheduled tooth trims. By unfortunate coincidence, both of his rabbits have a relatively unusual problem with their molar teeth. Rabbit teeth grow continuously through life, and in unlucky bunnies the teeth don’t wear down properly, necessitating professional intervention. General anesthesia is required for bunny dentistry. So every four or five months, this client drives an hour to town with his bunnies in tow, and plunks down several hundred dollars for anesthesia and tooth trims. “For rabbits?” some people would say incredulously. “He could go to the farm store and buy a hundred rabbits for that money.” Yes, he could. But he doesn’t want a hundred rabbits. He wants these two, adored, long-eared, furry children.

To some people, animals will never be more than a commodity—a cow to milk, a pig to eat, or a dog to guard the flock. But to other people, animals are family, and it is to these people and their beloved pets that we veterinarians dedicate our lives.

Manipulation

2010-07-01T07:33:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Cemetery Dance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. It’s the latest in a series of thrillers featuring Special Agent Pendergast, a ridiculously intelligent, outrageously clever, absurdly wealthy FBI agent. A warning if you haven’t read any of the novels—they’re addictive. Preston & Child throw you into murder, mayhem and mystery, and you can’t stop reading.

Preston & Child write in a sharp, descriptive manner that increases the tension, keeping the reader actively engaged in the characters’ plight and reading far too late into the night. For example, in this scene, Nora is in the hospital after being viciously attacked:

She heard a noise, and a fleeting sense of déjà vu told her this same noise was what had woken her up. Her eyes flew open. It was the sound of a grunt, and it had come from the next bed in the double room. The sudden stab of panic subsided; someone must have been put into the bed while she was sleeping.

She turned her head toward it, trying to make out the person on the other side of the curtains. There was a faint sound of breathing now, ragged, stertorous. The curtains swayed and she realized it wasn’t from the movement of air in the room after all, but rather from the shifting of the person in the bed. A sigh, a rustle of starched sheets. The semi-translucent curtains were backlit by the window, and she could just make out a dark silhouette. As she stared, it slowly rose up with another sigh and a wheezing grunt of effort.

A hand reached out and touched the curtains lightly from within.

Boo! You know there’s a zombie on the other side of the curtain, and you know Preston & Child are intentionally writing to keep you turning the pages. You know you’re being manipulated, but you don’t care.

Sticklers Unite!

2010-06-30T07:33:00.000-07:00

That’s the battle cry of Lynne Truss in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, the best-selling British guide to punctuation. Punctuation, you say? Yep. Very funny book, very educational. It should be required reading for every American. Maybe Brits, Canadians and Aussies, too, but I’m not sure if they massacre the language as badly as we do.

The title refers to a punctuation error in a wildlife book.
“Eats shoots and leaves” would be a benign comment about the panda’s herbivorous habits, while…
“Eats, shoots and leaves” turns the meal into a dine-and-dash of violent proportions.

Another example is the difference of meaning between, “Let’s eat, Grandma,” and “Let’s eat Grandma.” Punctuation saves lives!

I am the daughter and granddaughter of university professors, and my parents drilled proper language into my head. So, yes, I am a stickler. I’m not sure if my writing group colleagues appreciate me pointing out their punctuation and spelling errors, or if I just drive them crazy.

Ms. Truss writes: While [sticklers] look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation.

I see dead punctuation. What really irks me is extra apostrophes, as in, “Sam went to the store to buy egg’s, carrot’s and potatoe’s.” When my staff at the veterinary clinic put random apostrophes in medical records, I scribble them out.

My other pet peeve is people who don’t know the difference between it’s and its. It’s simple. See that? That “it’s” is a contraction of “it is,” so it gets an apostrophe. Ms. Truss writes: If you still persist in writing, “Good food at it’s best,” you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave. Amen, sister.

2010-06-25T12:42:00.000-07:00

Making myself write

2010-06-10T19:38:00.000-07:00

No one in my writing group has accomplished much recently. Whether busy with work or family, or suffering from what one member calls The Lurgy, we haven’t made the effort to write. In an attempt to motivate each other, we’ve started an email accountability thread. Every day we post how many words we’ve written, or how many hours we’ve spent in revisions. One member of the group suggested this inspirational phrase: “Each day you don’t write, God kills a kitten.”

Well, it’s bad PR for a veterinarian to be accused of Kitten Murder by Authorial Negligence, so I’m writing. I wrote about 1200 words last night, although not for any serious project. I’ve mentioned before that my writing group has occasional theme assignments. We wrote horror stories for Halloween and “Love Gone Wrong” stories for Valentine’s. The current theme is superhero stories. My superhero is Wombatman, and he uses high fructose corn syrup to save the world from aliens. Not exactly literary, but fun. I’ll post it when I finish it.

Opening Lines

2010-05-20T19:10:00.000-07:00

My writing group discussed opening lines this week. What inspires a person to pick a particular novel out of thousands at the book store? First, you look at the cover and the title, both of which are ultimately the responsibility of the publisher. Then you flip to the back cover and read the blurb, which might have been written by the author, editor or a marketing guru. Then you open to Chapter 1 and read the first line or paragraph. This is the author’s real chance to hook you, to compel you to fork over your hard-earned money.

The opening lines that I picked from my personal library to share are:

“The day I died started out bad and got worse in a hurry,” from Mary Janice Davidson’s vampire romance, Undead and Unwed. Great line. Funny, sets the tone, and tells you that something paranormal is going to happen.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of someone or other of their daughters,” from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. The lines hint at her subtle wit and set up the main plot.

“Prince Raoden of Arelon awoke early that morning, completely unaware that he had been damned for all eternity,” from Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. You know it’s fantasy, and you want to know why he’s damned.

“Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened. First, picture the forest,” from Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. This establishes the literary, descriptive character of her writing, and immediately gets the reader imagining the exotic, mysterious, dangerous rain forest where the story unfolds.

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” from Neuromancer by William Gibson. Totally cool imagery.

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense,” from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling. By reading those lines, you know that something strange and mysterious is definitely going to happen, and the Dursleys aren’t going to like it one bit.

After the discussion, we did a writing exercise. We picked an opening line from Toni Morrison: “They shot the white girl first.” For fifteen minutes we each wrote a story or scene extending from that line. Here’s what I wrote:

They shot the white girl first. She had been screaming the loudest and I guess they wanted to shut her up. The Latina girl was smart and kept her mouth shut. The black girl tried some ninja tricks and knocked out one of the aliens before they shot her, too.

Aliens. Death ray or something. Laser power.

“You guys suck,” said the one guy in the group as he swung a right hook at the lead alien. Or, at least, the one I figured was the boss. They were all about seven feet tall and blue. The lead one was distinguished from the others by purple chevrons on his uniform.

I ducked behind a crumbled wall of concrete. I’m not brave and have no interest in going head-to-head with an alien.

But—I felt guilty leaving the others behind so I rummaged for a length of rebar and circled around, approaching the alien who held the Latina girl. I swung with all my strength, trying to remember the lessons of my junior high softball coach. I had been aiming for what I assumed was his head—the top bulbous structure of the gelatinous body. The rebar sunk into blue flesh the consistency of a Jell-O mold. The alien didn’t seem to notice and kept strangling the Latina girl.

Strangling? Why bother to strangle someone when you’ve got a laser death ray gun? Oh—he was eating her. There was a mouth-like orifice in the vicinity of where his belly button ought to be, and it was exuding acrid saliva—to predigest her, I presume.

I hauled the rebar out of the top part of the alien and repositioned it. Using it like a sword, I plunged the rebar into the cavernous maw and got lucky. Whatever sort of nervous system the blue Jell-O mold possessed must have been located behind the mouth. The alien stiffened up, fell over, and went into death tremors.

It was interesting to see how each of us approached the same opening line and diverged from it. The resulting scenes varied from funny to grim, featuring plots from aliens to racists to urban fantasy to third-world slave labor.

Mother's Day

2010-05-09T18:13:00.000-07:00

At Bridget’s preschool, the teachers helped the kids fill out a questionnaire about their moms for Mother’s Day. Very funny:

My mom looks prettiest when she smiles. Aww, how sweet.
My mom’s favorite food is tacos. True, any sort of Americanized Mexican food.
My mom’s eyes are brown. True.
My mom likes to clean on the floor. Uggh. Hate housework!
She is happy about me. For the most part.
My mom is 90 years old. Hah! Only 38, but some days it does feel like 90.
If my mom could go anywhere she would go to McDonald’s. Umm, not so much. I would prefer Scotland, Ireland, Alaska, Maui, Greece, Petra, or Egypt.
Her best friend is Bridget and Katelyn. Yes, except when I want to strangle them!
Her job is her meeting. I think by “my meeting,” she meant my writers group, which has been meeting at our house recently. Sure would be nice if that was my job, but writing is definitely not paying the bills right now.
I love my mom because she gives me and my sister cards. Motherhood is great.

I'm exhausted

2010-05-02T20:24:00.000-07:00

I haven’t done much reading or writing lately; as a consequence I haven’t had much to blog about. In “real life” I’m a full-time veterinarian, and we’ve been busy at the hospital. One of my two colleagues is out on maternity leave and I’ve been covering extra shifts.

I’ve only managed to read two books in the last month: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (sequel to The Hunger Games) and The Dark Divine, debut novel by fellow Salt Lake City resident Bree Despain. Both are YA novels with compelling stories and interesting characters.

And even though I haven’t had energy to write, I have entered a few fiction contests:
Utah Original Writing Contest http://arts.utah.gov/funding/competitions/writing.html
League of Utah Writers http://www.luwriters.org/index.html
We’ll see if anything comes of the contests...

Princesses

2010-03-30T20:06:00.001-07:00

I’ve been thinking about princesses, since my daughters and I just watched The Princess and the Frog. Great movie, by the way: fun story, good jazz and zydeco music, and set in one of my favorite cities, New Orleans.

Compare the older Disney princesses of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella with the newer Disney princesses of Ariel (the Little Mermaid), Belle (of Beauty and the Beast) and Tiana (of froggy fame). Snow White: her main redeeming qualities are apparently her beauty and her domestic capabilities. Sleeping Beauty: sleeps through all the action while the prince fights the dragon. Cinderella: like Snow White, another good housekeeper, and only gets her prince because of her fairy godmother. (Where’s my fairy godmother? That slacker. She ought to be helping me get my book published.)

In contrast, Ariel is spunky girl who makes an (admittedly unwise) deal with the sea witch to get her prince. Belle surrenders herself to the beast as his prisoner in exchange for her father’s life. Tiana works double shifts to save up money to open her own restaurant and hates the prince when they first meet. I think the new princesses are better role models for modern girls. I want my daughters to make their own ways in life, not sit around waiting for princes to take care of them. And housework really isn’t that important.

Maybe I should write a story about a princess with a can-do attitude who goes to college and doesn’t accept “no” from anyone, least of all the prince.

The Hunger Games

2010-03-26T19:40:00.000-07:00

I just read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008). It’s a YA (young adult) novel set in a future when teenage “tributes” are sent to compete in a weeks-long fight to the death. The Games are like a post-apocalyptic pageant—Miss America meets Mad Max. Definitely fits in the “edgy” description, a recent YA publishing trend. The story grabs you from the start and won’t let you go.

The story is a perfect example of the narrative arc. The arc has been described as starting with a day that is different from any other day. In the case of Kantiss, the heroine, the day is different because it’s “Reaping Day”—with a name like that the reader is hooked. The narrative arc then features a “doorway” through which the character passes, irrevocably changing him or her and the situation. Kantiss volunteers in place of her little sister and is shipped off to the Games. And then the character passes through increasingly challenging doorways, each one propelling him or her toward the final conflict. Every decision she makes, from allying with a competitor to starting a fire, affects her perilous situation.

Bunnicula

2010-03-23T16:39:00.001-07:00

Did you read Bunnicula as a child? It’s a fantastic children’s chapter book by Deborah and James Howe, copyright 1979 and still in print. I’m particularly sentimental about Bunnicula because it’s the only book that I saved from my childhood. My husband saved his, too, so we have two copies. (When we married and merged our book collections, it was spooky—I had some titles by certain authors, in particular Anne Rice and David Eddings, while my husband had other titles. Our assorted individual books meshed perfectly to create complete series.)

My daughters will be turning four and six this year, so last week I grabbed Bunnicula off the shelf. I had hoped they would be old enough to listen to the story. They weren’t; they both wandered off after I had read only a few pages. But I kept reading. It’s an entertaining story, “written” by a dog named Harold. When his human family adopts a rabbit, strange things begin to happen. Harold and his friend, Chester the cat, solve the mystery of the vampire bunny who sucks the fluids from vegetables. Very fun.

Submission party

2010-03-17T14:16:00.000-07:00

My writing group held a submission party this week. Basically, we’re all talented writers but are pessimistic about ever getting published; as a result, we tend not to submit to editors or agents. We all know the only way to get published is to screw up our courage and submit, submit, submit, but we’re all scared. So our intention with the submission party was to support each other—to be query letter cheerleaders.

We all brought our laptops and connected via Wi-Fi to email submissions. Several people also prepared hard copy manuscripts to mail, and we drove to the post office to applaud as they dropped their manila envelopes into the post box.

The party also marked the debut of our rejection trophy. An artistic member of our group refurbished a thrift-store trophy to be a travelling reward for rejection letters. Whoever among us has received the most recent rejection letter is the temporary keeper of the trophy, to pass it along when someone else receives a rejection. And the most recent rejection belongs to… (drum roll)… me! So I am currently the proud custodian of a sparkly winged trophy, the placard on which reads, “Rejected but not Dejected.”

Flash Fiction

2010-03-15T19:41:00.000-07:00

I’ve recently discovered flash fiction. Flash is basically super-short short stories, between 500 to 1000 words. It’s amazing how much plot, characterization and back story a good author can actually get into a mere thousand words. Check out Flash Fiction Online, a free monthly zine dedicated to the art. http://www.flashfictiononline.com/

Here’s a flash I wrote a few months ago (922 words):

It was a little before eight when Jamie parked her old truck in a dimly lit lot a half-block south of the bar. She breathed deeply a few times, trying to calm her thumping heart.

One of her co-workers, Dave, played bass in a local metal band, and tonight was the band’s big debut. Everyone from work was going to the concert.

But Jamie didn’t really care for metal, and wasn’t going because of Dave. She was going because of another co-worker, Will.

She had a crush on him. Big time.

Okay, here goes. She grabbed her purse, locked the truck, and hurried down the street.

From the street, the bar looked pretty grungy, and the interior wasn’t much better. The stage stood to the right, just a short platform of two-by-fours. The dark wooden bar stood to the left, and in the center was the staircase to the upper floor.

Jamie quickly scanned the room, and didn’t recognize anyone. Crap. Maybe everyone else had bailed. Or maybe she was too early. She hated being early, but she also hated being late.

She casually walked to the stairs, feeling as if everyone was watching her. The staircase was narrow and smoky. She emerged into a small room with two billiards tables, a scattering of bar stools, and a haze of smoke.

She smiled gratefully when she saw her friend Debbie. And there, leaning casually against a tall pub table, was Will. He was wearing a navy T-shirt and jeans, and his unruly brown hair was tousled.

They had been co-workers for a few years, and she had always appreciated his kindness and sense of humor, but recently she had also begun to appreciate his broad shoulders, hazel eyes, and quirky grin.

“Hey,” he said in greeting. He smiled, and gestured to a pitcher. “Want a beer?”

“Sure,” she said, her voice too high-pitched.

Debbie hurried around the pool table. “I’m so glad you came,” she said, holding her arms wide for a tipsy hug.

“Yeah, should be fun,” said Jamie. “Where’s everyone else?”

“Oh, they’re probably just late. Will and I were about to play a game of pool.”

Jamie nodded as she accepted a pint from Will. “I’ll just watch, you guys go ahead.”

She sat on a stool in the corner and sipped her beer as Debbie and Will played. Will won the first few games, but then Debbie caught up. “I always play better when I’m drunk,” she said between giggles.

After a few games, Debbie straightened up and fanned at her face. “Whew! I need to take a break.” She grabbed the empty pitcher and staggered to the staircase.

Will winked at Jamie. “You want to play?”

“Sure, but I’m not very good.”

“It’s okay.” He pulled a handful of quarters from his pocket and fed the table. Jamie took a gulp of beer to fortify herself as she watched him rack the balls. “You want to break?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No, you do it.” Will broke, sending two of the solids into pockets. He shot again, landing two more balls before missing.

Jamie took a deep breath and another swallow of beer. She lined up on a striped ball, trying not to admire the way Will had his thumbs tucked into his belt as he waited. She held her breath and shot. The cue slipped; the ball rolled lethargically toward the corner pocket.

Debbie reappeared, carrying two fresh pitchers. Jamie allowed her glass to be refilled, and drank more than she had been planning. Will won the game in just a few turns, but Jamie didn’t care that she’d lost.

“It’s time!” someone called up the stairs, and the group dutifully filed downstairs to watch the band perform. It wasn’t really music that one could dance to or sing along with, but Jamie figured they were pretty good for a local band. The band played several sets, finishing after midnight. Jamie and the others migrated back upstairs and Debbie, who was quite drunk by that point, beat everyone at pool.

A little after one o’clock, Jamie decided she ought to be getting home. She screwed up her courage. “Will, would you walk me to my car?”

“Yeah, sure.” He turned to Dave. “Hey, man, I’ll be right back.”

They started down the stairs, Jamie following Will, but were interrupted by another co-worker, Drew, calling out, “Will! Did you ever get that expansion pack?”

Will turned back to answer, putting his hand on the railing.

Jamie didn’t pay attention to the video game talk. Five beers coursing through her blood stream gave her the courage to put her hand on top of his on the railing, just for a moment. She wasn’t sure if he even noticed.

After a minute, he turned back and said, “Okay, let’s go.”

They left the bar, passing from the overcrowded, smoky, warm air to the clear chill of the downtown night. They made small talk as they walked to her truck.

“We’re here,” he said awkwardly, standing five feet away from the driver’s side door.

She unlocked her door. “Thanks for walking me to my car.” She looked up at him, met his eyes, took a hesitant step toward him. Talk to me. Sit on the hood and ask me anything. Let’s go somewhere for a bite to eat. Take my hand. Kiss me.

“Um, so,” he said, “have a good night.”

“Yeah, see you Monday.” She got into the truck, and watched him walk back to the bar.

More on sci-fi

2010-03-09T19:14:00.000-08:00

Most people think of science fiction as being like Star Trek—a variety of suspiciously humanoid aliens flitting around the galaxy and blasting each other with lasers. True, sci-fi includes those stories, but also a lot of other sub-genres. Near-future or far-future, humans or aliens, alternate histories, artificial intelligence, technology gone wrong. Some call it “speculative fiction,” which might be a more appropriate term. I’m (still) working my way through The Year’s Best Science Fiction and have found some really interesting stories. One gem is “N-Words” by Ted Kosmatka. It’s set in the near future and has neither aliens nor phasers. The “N-word” refers to Neanderthals, cloned by stem cell scientists. The Neanderthal children who are born of surrogate mothers are fair skinned, athletic and intelligent—and terrorized by racist H. sapiens.

Another great story is “Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal. It’s told from the point of view of an engineered intelligent chimp. My only complaint is that it’s too short—only two pages!

“The Sky the Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and into the Black” by Jay Lake gives us some beautiful prose: Blue to blue. Life had crawled from the ocean’s blue water to eventually climb past the wide blue sky. With luck, we’d carry forward to the dying blue at the end of time.

In “Crystal Nights,” Greg Egan has this great line: Daniel respected Gupta’s business acumen, but in the unlikely event that [Gupta’s search engine] software ever became conscious, the sheer cruelty of having forced it to wade through the endless tides of blogorrhoea would surely see it turn on its creator and exact a revenge that made The Terminator look like a picnic. (I hope this blog is better than blogorrhoea!)

I was inspired to try my hand at writing a sci-fi short story. Did you know that in 2004 a couple paid fifty thousand dollars for a clone of their dead pet cat? Honest. So I envisioned a future when custom pet cloning gets out of control. No aliens or laser beams; I’m a biologist so I wrote what I know.

Punctuation Saves Lives

2010-03-02T19:13:00.000-08:00

I saw this ad today:

“I Sizzler with Steak and Veggies. Protein Baby!”

The ad annoyed me so much that the text spent the afternoon buzzing like a horsefly, bouncing around in my brain, irritating my cerebral cortex. What is the English language coming to? The English would probably argue that we Americans already ruined the language decades ago, but the decline seems to be accelerating.

First of all, I can’t understand what the first sentence even means. I sizzle? Or maybe the I is a Roman numeral, as in Emperor Sizzler the First?

Secondly, nouns aren’t capitalized unless you’re German.

Thirdly, and what really bugs me, is the “Protein Baby!” I’m sure the ad person meant, “Protein, Baby!” Granted, a comma is a small thing, but without it the exclamation that you can follow your low-carb diet turns into a promotion for cannibalism.

It's Chilly in the Slush Pile

2010-02-28T20:45:00.000-08:00

The “slush pile” is the rather depressing term for an agent’s in-box full of submissions. I imagine it as a teetering pile of envelopes and manuscripts, threatening to collapse under its own weight. Or, for those agents who accept electronic submissions, a bulging email folder with electrons bursting through its virtual seams.

I’ve submitted my middle grades fantasy to a few agents, and received my first rejection letter. (Yay! One of my writing group friends suggests celebrating rejection letters and rewarding yourself; this is supposed to be an incentive to submit your manuscript to as many agents as possible. What can I reward myself with that is cheap and non-fattening?) Anyway, as far as rejections go it was actually a pretty nice rejection. The tone was, “keep submitting,” rather than, “you suck.”

One “slush pile” success story I’ve read about is Wizard’s First Rule, by Terry Goodkind, the first of a great fantasy series. I like the series because it’s well-written and has interesting plots and sub-plots, but most of all because of the characters. In the majority of fantasy novels, the protagonist is a teenage boy, and, well, it’s been a long time since I was a teenager. Mr. Goodkind’s protagonists are Richard and his wife Kahlan, well-rounded characters who act and think like adults. Prior to publication, Mr. Goodkind hadn’t published any other books. His agent took a chance on him and we all benefit.

Time to send my manuscript off to some more agents… I need to thaw my way out of the slush pile!

Olympics

2010-02-26T08:06:00.000-08:00

I haven’t spent much time reading or writing the last couple weeks, because I’ve been watching the Olympics. I love the Olympics, especially the Winter Games. After the 1980 Winter Games my mom signed up my sister and me for ice skating lessons. I loved skating, and was pretty intense for the next few years. During the summer of 1982, I skated four hours a day, five days a week. That was back in the bad old days, when figure skating actually involved doing figures—half of our practice time was devoted to tracing out circles and eights and loops on the ice. Much more exciting was the other half, when we did our programs with jumps and spins. (Competitive figure skating eliminated the figures ten years or so ago; the cranky old lady inside me says, “Back in my day, we worked and slaved for hours trying to do a perfect figure eight.”)

Of course, like every other kid on the ice, I dreamed of making it big and competing on the national or world level. The best I managed was a silver medal in my level at the annual competition of my local skating club. By that time, my spinning knee was shredded so I stopped skating. Twenty-seven years and one surgery later, that knee still bugs me, especially when a storm is coming.

But I still love the Olympics. The 2002 Winter Olympics was a major reason I moved to Salt Lake City. In 1999, I was working in Milwaukee and looking to move west. I sent resumes to hospitals all over the Rocky Mountains, but the one I liked the best (and where I’m still working) is in SLC. I didn’t know anyone here, but I knew SLC would be hosting the 2002 Games, and figured I could attend some events… so here I am.

I actually volunteered at the 2002 Games, which was a fantastic experience. I was a “Transportation Attendant,” which was a euphemism for slave-labor-hauling-luggage-at-the-airport. I was part of a team of twenty or so, stationed at the baggage carousels at the airport. We greeted the teams and made sure all their equipment made it onto the correct truck to transport to the Olympic Village. Jumping skis are heavy! Even though it was manual labor, which I generally try to avoid, it was fun to meet the athletes and officials, exchanging small gifts and pins. I was given a folded paper doll by a Japanese journalist, and a fleece ski hat by a Swiss official.

Nearly all the volunteers were on-shift the day of the Opening Ceremonies. The airspace was closed during the ceremony (it was only a few months after 9-11), so we had no official duties to perform at the airport. The organizers set up a projection screen in one of the terminals and we all watched the broadcast on TV. There were probably fifty to seventy of us, all wearing our Olympic uniforms. When the five Olympic rings lit up on the foothills above town, we gathered around the windows to see. Tears flowed and everyone hugged.

Since I had to work at my real job every day I wasn’t volunteering, I didn’t make it to any events, but my husband and I did spend one afternoon downtown, wandering around and enjoying the atmosphere. We stood in line an hour to get official Roots Team USA berets, snapped photos of athletes, and bought pins. My Olympic pin collection includes a few that celebrate Utah and its peculiar culture: green Jell-O (yes, my Mormon mother-in-law really does make Jell-O for every family occasion), “funeral potatoes” (potato casserole to feed a large group at church), and fry sauce (usually a combination of ketchup and mayo, in which to dip your French fries).

This is the first Winter Olympics that my kids have been old enough to watch, and they’re fascinated. They like ski jumping, luge, and, of course, figure skating.

Vampire fiction

2010-02-11T19:53:00.000-08:00

I need to join VA—Vampires Anonymous.

I’ve read a lot of vampire books, including the Bram Stoker original when I was in high school, and seen a lot of vampire movies. Best vampire movie: Dracula (1979) with Frank Langella as the darkly mysterious count. Funniest vampire movie: Love at First Bite (also 1979) with George Hamilton as an over-the-top disco Dracula. Creepiest vampire movie: hands down, no competition, it’s Nosferatu (1922). The vampire in Nosferatu is a true undead—withered and evil with bits of dried flesh flaking off his body. It’s quite a stretch to go from him to the sexy, sparkly vampires of Twilight.

I hadn’t read the Twilight series (Stephenie Meyer) until a few years ago, when my friends Kristalynn and Brandy introduced them to me. Since then, my vampire enablers have also hooked me on the Sookie Stackhouse series (Charlaine Harris; the books on which the True Blood television series is based) and the House of Night series (P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast). I’ve also read the New Orleans vampire series (Anne Rice), the Queen Betsy series (MaryJanice Davidson) and Stephanie Rowe’s paranormal romance series (not technically vampires, but lots of hot immortals.)

When an author writes a series, there tends to be an ever-widening galaxy of supporting characters and sub-plots. When the series is written in the first-person, there comes a point when things need to happen outside of the main character’s experience. In Twilight, when Bella is unconscious, Jacob steps in and writes his own sections in first-person. In the House of Night series, various supporting characters have their own third-person sections interspersed among Zoey’s first-person chapters. I’ve determined that I’m more sensitive than most to changes of tense: flipping between first- and third-person, or between present and past tense, drives me nuts. So, mental note to myself, if I plan to write a series, I’ll write it in third-person.

Bulwer-Lytton Contest

2010-02-09T19:42:00.000-08:00

“It was a dark and stormy night” is the inspiration for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest—a contest for bad writing ( http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/index.htm ). Anyone can enter for free. The goal is to write a single sentence to be the opening line of the worst novel ever. It’s fun to write badly; when I’m stuck for ideas for my “real” fiction, I write a few Bulwer entries to limber up my mental muscles.

Bad writing comes in every genre, and I’ve submitted around a dozen entries. Here are my favorites:

Thriller:

Lieutenant Muller held a hand up to shield his eyes against the blinding, blazing, scorching, roaring, blistering glare of the sunlight that ricocheted off the ruthless, harsh, barren, cruel, desolate, bleak desert surface; he was so absorbed searching for adjectives that he failed to notice the assassin until the knife slipped between his ribs.

Romance:

The raven-haired Gypsy beauty kicked her bare heels into the horse’s sweaty flanks, urging the powerful chestnut stallion to a gallop along the sunset beach; her ebony locks and the horse’s russet mane entwined as she pressed the horse to bear her ever faster toward the waiting arms of her handsome Viking lover.

His eyes, which were a dark, smoky brown, met mine, which are sort of hazel, across the room, which was an eighteenth century ballroom elaborately furnished with gilt King Louis armchairs, which had been imported from France, and the room was also quite crowded due to the large number of dancing couples, who were doing some sort of Scottish reel to the baleful sound of a baritone bagpipe, and I knew immediately that he was my soul mate.

Historical Fiction:

The samurai giggled as an errant breeze fluttered the highlander’s kilt.

The big Viking squinted his ice blue eyes, brushed a stray lock of wavy golden hair from his face, flexed his tanned biceps and hefted the cruel axe high above his head to bring it crashing down on his opponent, cleaving the zombie’s head from its shoulders and spilling greenish-black blood across the tundra.

Science Fiction

2010-02-06T08:42:00.000-08:00

I’m currently reading The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. It’s seven hundred pages worth of massive undertaking, an anthology of sci-fi short stories from 2008. I used to read a lot of sci-fi in high school, but haven’t read much in the last few years. I also tend not to read (or write) short stories. I like to really get involved in the characters and story, and I think you need a few hundred pages to accomplish that. Nevertheless, this is a great book. Mr. Dozois has edited in the science fiction field for two decades. His comments that precede each piece are insightful, and the anthology illustrates various sub-genres within sci-fi. My favorite story so far is “Boojum” (Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette), about a crew of pirates cruising the solar system in their sentient ship—a boojum, a species of lion-fish-esque space-travelling creatures born in the roiling clouds of the gas giants.

Six-Word Memoirs

2010-02-03T19:53:00.000-08:00

I heard this story on NPR today:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123289019&sc=fb&cc=fp

The concept behind the "Six-Word Memoir" is to distill your entire life story into six words. Kind of an interesting exercise in writing. I cheated a bit and wrote three memoirs:

Wisconsin to Utah, still miss cows.
Animals, books, friends, kids, Diet Coke.
Veterinarian, wife, mom—stressful but fun.

"Love Gone Wrong"

2010-02-02T19:21:00.000-08:00

I’ve been in a writing group for about a year. We meet every other week, and usually spend as much time talking about work, families, religion and politics as we do about writing. It’s a good group of people: evenly divided between men and women; of various ages, backgrounds and professions; and writing in assorted genres (sci-fi, chick lit, non-fiction, thriller, and kids). What we have in common is a compulsion to write.

Every few months, we have a writing “challenge,” wherein we each write a short piece on an assigned topic to appease the Muse and keep the creative juices flowing. For Halloween we wrote spooky/creepy stories. In honor of Valentine’s Day, the theme for the challenge is “Love Gone Wrong.” (I hate Valentine’s Day, so there’s no way I’ll write a romantic story.) Here’s my story about love gone wrong:

Cupid’s a dead man. Or baby. Or creepy, interfering, perpetually juvenile, naked-butt twerp. Whatever. The point is, he’s going down.

When you hear the name “Cupid,” you probably think of the cutesy pictures on Hallmark cards at Valentine’s Day—the charming little guy with his bow and arrows, spreading love, with sparkly pink and red hearts falling from the sky. In reality, he’s a slimy little jerk. Sure, he still looks like that cute baby, but the eyes reveal a crudeness born of a thousand whiskey bottles.

Like you, I though Cupid was just a myth, or an urban legend—like the Tooth Fairy or alligators in the sewers. But it turns out, he’s real. And a real pain in the butt.

I first encountered Cupid in the flesh a few years ago, my freshman year in college. I had briefly dated a geeky guy in high school. After a couple weeks, I told him it wasn’t working for me and he flipped. Totally started stalking me. He posted nasty things on my MySpace page and my blog, called my parents’ home at all hours of the night, and even mailed me a dead squirrel. Totally disgusting—the mailman left the box on the front porch, and by the time I got home from school there was a puddle of brownish goo leaking all over the concrete.

Eventually my parents helped me get a restraining order against him, but that only pissed him off more. And that’s when Cupid entered the picture.

I believe that once upon a time, Cupid actually was a romantic, setting up sweet girls with handsome boys to marry and live happily ever after with. I think Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were a product of Cupid’s kinder, gentler past—theirs was an arranged political marriage but by all accounts they were madly, truly, deeply in love for the rest of their lives.

But all that aforementioned whiskey turned Cupid sour on the whole romance thing.

Do you ever see a couple walking hand-in-hand at the mall and wonder, What the heck is she thinking going out with him? Or, What does he see in her? The answer is, they’re not thinking. It’s Cupid, playing jokes on humanity by setting the most incompatible people in love. The magic spell wears off after a few years, by which time plenty of lives have been ruined.

Anyway, the guy who was stalking me got into contact with Cupid somehow. And Cupid, seeing what a horrible couple we made, agreed to his request.

The first time Cupid shot me, my ex was standing nearby. I didn’t see Cupid at first—that’s part of his modus operandi, he camouflages into his surroundings—but I saw my ex. Seeing as how the restraining order prevented him from coming within fifty yards of me, I turned to confront him. That quick movement saved me as the pink-fletched arrow whistled harmlessly past me to lodge in a tree.

There were other times after that, but I had an advantage. Having seen Cupid once, I knew what to look for, and successfully dodged more sparkly pink and red arrows.

But it’s getting tiring. I have a new boyfriend now, and it would be really inconvenient to fall out of love with him and into love with that irritating geek. Not to mention that the constant vigilance required in evading Cupid is wearing me out.

So, I decided if he could track him down, so could I. The Internet is great—you can find anyone or anything, from black-market medicine to antique glassware to mythical entities. Turns out that Cupid’s got a website and Facebook page, and also offers his services for auction on eBay. I figured since he knew my name, an eBay auction would be the safest way to make contact. I set up a fake eBay account and bid, winning the auction at five hundred sixty-three dollars and twenty-eight cents. As much as a month’s rent but totally worth it.

Now it’s time for action. We emailed a few times to set up a meeting place and time, settling on the Walmart parking lot at midnight. There’ll be a few people around, but not enough to get in the way.

I arrive early at Walmart and do some shopping: men’s coat, black leather, size XXL; ball cap, Minnesota Vikings logo; sportsmen’s glasses, chrome frames, yellow lenses; landing net, aluminum handle, synthetic netting; two lemons; duct tape; bolt cutters; knife, serrated, five inches long, made in Pakistan; and a Dr. Pepper.

I’m not really a violent person, so I pass over the guns and pepper spray.

Back outside, I put on the coat and glasses, tucking my long hair up under the cap. Hopefully I look enough like a guy to be “Matt Anderson,” the winner of the eBay auction. I halve the lemons, and stash them, along with the net, knife and bolt cutters, in the bed of a pick-up truck.

I check my watch—three minutes to go—and take a swig of Dr. Pepper. I lean against the truck, trying to look casual while surveying the airspace around me.

There he is, the little twerp. I take another gulp of Dr. Pepper as he flutters closer. Deep breath. Trying a manly voice, I say, “Dude! Glad you could make it.”

Closer, closer…

I swing the landing net around, over his head and down to the pavement in a fluid motion.

“What the…” he starts to say but I squirt him in the eyes with the lemons and poke the tip of the knife blade into the fat rolls around his chubby neck.

“Don’t move,” I growl.

Fortunately, since he’s the size of a fat little toddler, I’m able to overpower him. Keeping a tight grip on him, I work the netting up to grab his wings. I use the duct tape to immobilize his wings, taping them to each other behind his back. It won’t cause any permanent damage but will probably sting when the tape pulls his feathers out. Then I retrieve the bolt cutters and snap the shaft of every sparkly arrow, as well as the body of the accursed bow.

Finally, I take off the glasses and hat.

Cupid gasps. “You!”

“Yep, it’s me,” I say. “Leave me alone.”

He doesn’t say anything, but struggles against the duct tape.

I squirt some more lemon juice in his eyes. “I said, leave me alone. Stop trying to shoot me. You leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone. Okay?”

“Fine,” he mutters, so I let him go. I leave the duct tape on. He picks up his busted bow and arrows and waddles off into the darkness.

I think he’ll leave me alone. Of course, I won’t ever be able to use his services, but that’s okay. I’d rather find love by myself, without any supernatural help.

Photography

2010-01-29T20:25:00.000-08:00

Besides writing and reading, I also love photography. Here are a few of my favorite shots from 2009: