August Reading
Is it September already?
Novels
Galatea 2.2 by Richard Power
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohen and David Levithan
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
That Summer by Sarah Dessen
Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison
Bullyville by Francine Prose
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
When Zachary Beaver Came to Town by Kimberly Willis Holt
Cures for Heartbreak by Margo Rabb
Short Stories
Glory Goes and Gets Some by Emily Carter
Nonfiction
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson
I had no idea I read that much this month. Obviously, the theme was YA lit. Some raves include: Cures for Heartbreak, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and Galatea 2.2. I also started, but can’t seem to finish The Savage Detectives. Oh well.
‘Fess Up Friday
Writing: . . . Aaaaaand we’re back. I finally put the real estate stuff aside and got back to writing this week. I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked, but I am back in the drafting stages of a novel. Cool.
Submissions: Got two back this week, including a rejection from a market that held on to my submission for 286 days. No personalization, no anything. Just a form letter that was 200 days overdue.
Etc.: The running continues to go well. The reading for the magazine has come to an end. The cats are both happy and healthy. In short, everything’s great.
Linkage: On Chick Lit
(As in the genre, not the username.)
I tend to get a little prickly when people dismiss books as being chick lit. For example, “Oh I’m not reading anything special, just some chick lit” or (from a guy) “I’m not going to read that, it’s chick lit.” It annoys me but I’ve never been able to articulate why it annoys me. When I’ve tried, it has turned into a thousand word rant on literary elitism and that damn MFA program. These sorts of outbursts are better left off the blog.
However, one of my favorite authors briefly tackled the subject on her blog and I think she summed it up very nicely:
. . . I did an interview the other day where I was asked what I thought of the label “chick lit” and how it’s applied to my books. It’s an interesting question. The truth is, I feel like the label “chick lit” is kind of lazy. It’s a way of grouping any book about a woman which has NOT been classified by the Powers That Be as Literary into one incredibly vast category. Personally, I love books about women, Literary and not, and I’ve read enough to them to know that one word cannot possibly define everything that is out there. Is Jennifer Weiner the same as Meg Cabot who is the same as Suzanne Finnamore who is the same as Jennifer Belle? No, no, no and no. It’s like saying that all YA books are the same because they are about teenagers. I think, personally, that it’s up to you as a reader to define what a book is to you. It’s different for everyone. Which is a great thing, and really what reading is all about, anyway.
Via Sarah Dessen.
‘Fess Up Friday
For today only (I hope!) a special edition of ‘Fess Up Friday called “What I have been doing instead of writing my novel.” It goes a little something like this:
Doing the real estate thing. We’re looking at houses and this an incredibly time consuming task. You’d think that it might be limited to a couple of hours on the weekend or something, but you would be wrong. There is the general house looking thing that can stretch into three or four hours (ugh), then there is the sorting through emails about properties, then there is the speculating about this neighborhood or that neighborhood, and then there’s all the thinking about houses and comparing houses and the list goes on and on and on.
In short, it has taken over my life.
And I am not terribly happy about it right now.
But enough about that. I have also been cleaning out our house just in case we find our dream home and need to sell this place. I made some mighty fine progress on the hall closet last week. It turns out that we actually have a floor in there. Unfortunately, that is only a small dent in our clutter-filled home, but since we have no dream home on the horizon, I’d say we’re doing okay.
I took the boy cat to the vet this week. I have to brag on him for just a moment. Anyone who knows me or has read this blog has been subjected to the saga that is Mr. B’s health problems. The short version is that he had IBD. The treatment for the IBD gave him diabetes, which we treated with diet and insulin. That eventually gave him hyperglycemia and indicated that he was diabetes-free. But he still had the IBD. For a while there, we were making vet trips pretty much every month.
On the last visit we settled on a food trial plan for Mr. B. The food was expensive, but worth it. Especially since Mr. B has been puke free for about a month now (knock wood). The vet says that this kind of progress may indicate that we can stop the food trial and just keep him on the special diet. I’m very excited about the prospect. I love my vet and the staff, but I’m perfectly happy to not see them monthly. Keep your fingers crossed for continued kitty health.
Anyway, that’s some of what I’ve been doing instead of writing. At least, that’s the more interesting portion of it. Running continues to go well. And I’m slowly but steadily working up to a 9500 Singstar score for “Torn.” Achieving that may be my biggest accomplishment this summer.
Happy weekend!
Apologies
Apologies for not coming to the blog very much this month. There is a whilwind of craziness around our house right now that is, in effect, blowing up a lot of dust, but not producing much change. Here’s the quick rundown:
1) We might be trying to buy a house. The key word is might. We found one, we like it, but whether or not we pursue it depends on a bunch of factors coming together. If they do, great. If not, we’ll look again in a bit. But in the meantime we’re talking with our realtor and discovering how much work goes into preparing a house for going on the market. (By the way, if anyone in Austin needs an awesome Realtor, leave me a comment. Ours is fabulous.)
2) I am completely changing paths on the novel. After reviving my love affair with YA this summer, I’ve decided that I want to write about teenagers. And so, the other novel (which took a three page cut after we last spoke) is on hold. I hope this is the right thing to do.
3) We got cable. Or, not-cable, actually. Hubs signed us up for AT&T’s U-verse, which gives us more channels than we can possibly be interested in and a DVR to record them all. I didn’t have cable all last year and it didn’t help my productivity at all, so I’m not terribly worried that I’ll end up watching Date My Ex instead of writing. Now, watching Date My Ex instead of cooking dinner is a whole other story . . .
‘Fess Up Friday: The Late Edition
But better late than never, right?
Writing: Much better than last week. I managed to get some writing in every day and increase my word count in small bursts. However, I’m reaching a point where I feel the novel spinning out of control. It’s suddenly not about what it is supposed to be about. The characters are changing, and I’m having trouble deciding whether to go with the changes or backtrack, erase, and restart. I know there are a lot of people who glamorize the whole “let your characters do what they want” approach to writing. I think if that works, go for it. I’m not so sure it works for me, though. I may need to rethink my main character and maybe do a little character sketch to find out what she’s really about.
I’m also fighting the urge to move to something else. It’s a pretty familiar feeling for me. As soon as I begin to get mired down in one project, I look for more attractive ones. Stories that are fresher. Newer. Never mind that 9,000 words in, I’ll probably be just as mired and exasperated.
Revisions: Not applicable.
Submissions: The mail void continues. I sent off another story for kicks, so I can expect to not hear from that market as well.
Other things: I’ve been regularly doing my Couch to 5K workouts and I’m seeing a noticeable improvement in my endurance. After upping my running time again today, I came home from the gym and browsed local 5Ks for the fall. I feel very good about this.
I’m currently swooning over Emily Carter’s Glory Goes And Gets Some. It’s scary good. I decided that I had to put it away for a little while because her writing just sparkles and mine does not. It’s intimidating as Hell. But it’s good. Go read it.
That’s it for this ‘fess up. Have a good weekend!
What Went Wrong with Breaking Dawn?
Warning: This post may contain spoilers for Twilight/Breaking Dawn, Harry Potter, and The Dark Materials. Read at your own risk.
Forgive me, friends, because I am a terrible person. I have a morbid fascination with the fallout over Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final book in the Twilight series. I’ve been watching the Amazon ratings and reading the fan discussions on the interwebs. My, there are a lot of angry fans out there.
Here’s the lowdown for those who haven’t been obsessively tracking the Twilight phenomenon. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series consists of four books dealing with (best I can tell) a love triangle between a teenage girl, the sparkley vamp she loves, and a werewolf. The much awaited finale had a midnight release this weekend to the tune of 1.3 million in book sales. Early Saturday morning Amazon reviews suggested some dissatisfaction with the book. (Two and a half star rating? Oh my!) Shortly after, threads suggesting readers return their copies or even burn them began appearing. Currently, the fandom appears divided between “Breaking Dawn is the BEST BOOK EVER” and “OMG did I just waste my Saturday morning reading that?”
Having read only the first 200 pages of Twilight, I am not at liberty to review the last book. I’m probably not qualified to even write this blog post. Still… In reading the reviews and discussions, one of the things that upsets me most are the people that answer any criticisms of the book with some variant of “it’s just fiction, don’t think too hard about it.” (For the record, there are a number of plot criticisms in which this comes up, but the primary discussion to which I’m referring to deals with vampire sperm. You see why this is fascinating to me.)
The Breaking Dawn problem seems to stem from the fact that Meyer broke the rules of a world that she created. Anytime you write fiction, you get to establish a new world. It can be a world just like ours, or it can be a completely other world. Rowling created a underground magic school and an entire society of wizarding folk. Pullman assigned people daemons that were tethered to them. Both of these world were completely plausible, despite the fact that they were completely unlike the world we live in.
But, just like our world operates on rules (the laws of physics, as just one example) so do fictional worlds. In Pullman’s world bad things happen when daemons are severed from their humans. It’s a rule. It would take a hell of a lot of skill to break it.
So Meyer built three books that established the world of Twilight and among the established rules is one that says vampires can’t have babies. Sorry, vamps, just the way it goes. And then in the last book, the rule is utterly, spectacularly broken, and revamped (sorry, I really couldn’t help myself) with some vamps can’t have babies, but others can. Hmm… remember that part about it taking a lot of skill to break an established rule? I’m gathering from the Breaking Dawn fallout that this book didn’t pull it off. People are pointing out that the whole vampire siring a child thing is completely implausible in the Twilight world. And it’s a valid criticism, one that has the other half of the fandom answering it with “it’s just fiction.”
To answer that criticism, or any criticism with that remark suggests that fiction doesn’t have to honor the world it creates when, in fact, it very much does. The best stories are the ones that I get completely lost in and I never question their plausibility, but that’s because they establish their rules and they don’t break them without some serious skill. Just because “it’s just fiction” does not give the work a bye when it isn’t plausible or breaks the rules that it has created.
Sorry if this post seems extremely harsh toward the book or toward Ms. Meyer. I actually feel a lot of sympathy for the Twilight fans that are feeling ripped off by the latest book. It really sucks to get very much invested in a book or a series only to want to end up burning it when it’s over. I hope your next reading adventure is much more enjoyable.
‘Fess Up Friday
Um . . . Yeah.
I did nothing this week. Seriously, there’s not even a point to breaking it down into categories because I didn’t accomplish anything. On any of them.
Today, I’m not even going to try to write. I didn’t sleep until 4 this morning and the house is something close to a disaster. So I’m going to straighten the house, do some reading, and hope to God to take a nap this afternoon. I am planning to shut myself in my office sometime this weekend with only the novel to work on, so maybe I’ll make some progress this weekend.
Happy weekend all.
July Reading
Novels
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
On a Night Like This by Ellen Sussman
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
Freshman Lies by Linda A. Cooney
Freshman Guys by Linda A. Cooney
Someone Like You by Sarah Dessen
Alternatives to Sex by Stephen McCauley
Short Stories
Notable Nonfiction
Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride by Michael Wallis
The Writer’s Desk by Jill Krementz
“The Lion and the Mouse” by Jill Lepore
Hibernating
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
I have a couple of great novels to recommend this month. I really enjoyed On a Night Like This and Someone Like You. The latter is a YA book that made me wish that someone was writing YA like this when I was a teen. I think I would have read more.
On the other side of that coin, I tried Twilight and I simply could not finish it. It didn’t help that I kept playing Buffy DVDs as I was reading it. I really wanted to like it because I’ve been getting more into YA lately (more on that later) and I’m usually up for a good vampire tale, but this book lacked the character development that I need to really pull me into a story. And so, permanently hibernating it is.
