Books

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

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I started listening to steampunk audiobook Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, which I have heard from multiple sources is a great series, and the premise intrigued me as it is an alternate history of World War I. Also, later books in the series won awards and stuff.

Unfortunately, nobody told me that this was a young adult series, where the two protagonists are 16-ish. In fact, I would argue that this is not just young adult, but middle grade, because the kids act like middle grade kids and are usually accompanied by adult guides. They aren’t "rebeling" like most of the kids in young adult books.

That by itself wouldn’t bother me – although I probably would not have bought it if I’d known it beforehand, because I generally do not relate at all to the trials and tribulations of middle grade kids and young adults. No, I still might like this book if it weren’t for one thing: The plot seems like a thinly-veiled excuse to explore the worldbuilding.

A great deal of time is spent describing these mechanical contraptions called "walkers" and these genetically-created airbourne creatures that float like balloons. The protagonists just happen to be on a path that comes in contact with these neat worldbuilding things. Alek just happens to be learning to drive a walker, and ends up running from pursuers in a walker, and Dylan just happens to want to join the navy and fly, and just happens to get stuck on a flying leviathan by chance. Even that contrivance wouldn’t bother me if the characters pulled me into their stories. Unfortunately, I find that I don’t care the slightest bit about these two kids. Maybe I am biased against kid protagonists in general, but their problems just don’t interest me. Dylan is a girl dressing up as a boy so she can fly with the others – how many times has *that* plot been done – but so far, her part could have been played by a boy just as well. Alek is the son of the Archduke Ferdinand who was assassinated to start World War I – that could have been interesting, but Prince Alek does not seem to have any emotional depth, and he comes across as a petulent child.

<Time passes.>

I am now about 2/3rd through the audiobook, having listened mostly without paying a lot of attention, and the two main characters finally ran into each other. My internal wannabe editor tells me that this is where the book *should* have started, because the relationship between these two characters from radically different worlds makes the book funny and compelling. Far more compelling than their individual lives.

Books

Latest Audibooks I’ve Listened To

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I’ve been on an audiobook kick lately. I realize it’s “cheating” to listen to a book instead of read it, but it’s just so darn convenient. You can actually accomplish other things simultaneously while listening to a book (like driving, washing dishes, playing games, paying bills, etc.), whereas if you read a book, it’s pretty much all you can do.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, read by Wil Wheaton. Great nostalgia book, although I could have lived without the cliche “real world is better than the virtual world” moral.

Hunted by Kevin Hearne, read by Luke Daniels. The latest in the Iron Druid Chronicles (#6 I think). Another highly entertaining episode from the life and times of Atticus O’Sullivan, this time covering his run across Europe while being chased by Roman and Greek hunting goddesses Diana and Artemis. This is the only “series” that I religiously keep up with. I like the IDC because Luke Daniels is an incredibly good reader, Hearne is a good story-teller, and the stories go into a lot of interesting mythology without being too cheesy. Also, it’s one of the few Urban Fantasy series that doesn’t focus on vampires and werewolves.

Redshirts by John Scalzi, read by Wil Wheaton. This book is awesome. I listened to the entire ~8 hours on a Saturday. I loved it because it’s the kind of thing I might have written, except I would have considered it way too absurd and silly for anyone but me to find it amusing. I also would have been too obsessed with trying to come up with a logical reason for *why* fictional characters would become sentient – Scalzi made no such attempt – they just are (or else the explanation is so obscure that I missed it). It’s a book that starts out being unabashedly comedic, then gets pretty serious and thought-provoking by the time the three codas come around.

Inferno by Dan Brown, read by Paul Michael. It showed up on the front page on Audible, so I got it with one of my credits. Whatever, so sue me. This book is pretty much exactly the same as every previous Robert Langdon book: He meets a woman and together they run from secret organizations and the government while decrypting puzzles. This time, the lessons are about Dante’s Inferno and excessive global population. Paul Michael is a good reader; it’s a lot more entertaining to listen to Dan Brown than to read it.

Books

Ready Player One – Start!

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I’m finally listening to the audiobook of the much-talked-about Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, read by Internet super-celebrity Wil Wheaton.

Though I’m only a handful of chapters into it, this book is clearly an 80s geek subculture nerdgasm from start to finish. It’s fascinating, hilarious, and depressing – despressing because of how many of the obscure references I understand (like, roughly, all of them).

Now I’m going to take the fanboy hat off and put on the author hat. This book has a lot of exposition. I mean a lot of it. There are what I assume are pages and pages and pages of telling, not showing. I think there was one whole chapter telling Halliday’s life story. He’s basically John Carmack on steroids, which is neat if you know anything about computer gaming history, but it really didn’t do much to serve the story right then.

This book is yet another first-person-sarcastic-narrator book. I’m starting to think of all of these books as extended blog posts. This is not necessarily a good thing, in my opinion. I’m thinking that I will distinguish myself in my writing career by being one of the only authors never to write a first person book. Or perhaps to be the first author to write a first person book from the perspective of someone without a sense of humor. Or, I could write the same first-person book as everyone else and make some money. Probably I’ll do that last thing.

Ready Player One is yet another dystopian future book, this time with an energy crisis that destroys the near-future world. The green movement subtext is not very subtle. My jaw still hurts from being punched in the face with it. Personally, I have a hard time believing that fossil fuels are going to run out in our lifetimes.

Now if I can put on my programmer hat on for a second, there are a number of engineering problems with this Oasis system. I can buy the VR goggles (see Oculus Rift), but the haptic gloves stretch the limit of credibility. Even suspending disbelief enough to assume they work exactly as described and you can reach out and touch objects in the virtual world, how would you make your avatar *move* in Oasis? Wade runs quite a bit when he goes to the Tomb of Horrors. Would you have to dogpaddle your hands in the air? There’s nothing hooked up to your real-world legs. Maybe there are footpedals on the floor that aren’t described. Or maybe a virtual keyboard and mouse appears, or a virtual game controller perhaps, that you operate with your virtual hands and fingers. That’s not even talking about the two sentences of hand-waving magic that somehow allows Oasis to support millions of simultaneous, realistically-rendered users without any lag or processing delay. I don’t even think *that* is possible in our lifetimes.

Anyway, it’s a fun book. I’m not really sure if the story is any good yet, though. Mostly it’s a trip down memory lane.

Process

A Minor Variation

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With apologies to Billy Joel. I had a minor revelation for my Airworld story last night. It occurred to me that things would work out much better if the location of the Council of Life is known when we start out. For some reason I had set it in stone that Naobi was leaving Motiva to search for the Council of Life. Now she is leaving to visit the Council of Life. With that minor variation, some other things fall into place nicely. Mainly, it removes “finding the Council of Life” as a condition for ending the story. I was having major problems with the ending because it wasn’t symmetrical with the beginning.

Television

Game of Thrones Season 3

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Game-Of-Thrones-Season-3-Episode-3-Poster-JamieOkay I’m going to say it. Or write it. Whatever. Game of Thrones is getting a bit dull. In the books, it’s fine to have twenty different storylines, because it’s an epic fantasy after all and you get to stay with the characters for at least a chapter before moving on, and they are usually long chapters.

In the television series, you get to spend roughly thirty seconds on each story in each episode, so it’s nearly impossible to form any kind of attachment with what’s going on. We see so little of Daenerys that I really don’t care what she’s doing over there in the desert anymore. Every time we see her, all she’s doing is whining about slaves. I almost wish they would devote each episode to one specific character’s story instead of trying to weave them all together.

Anyway, it just seems like the show has turned into a series of barely-connected vignettes between characters. Some of them are awesome, like the ones between Varys and Littlefinger. Some of them are tiresome, like any of the scenes with Sansa (I don’t feel nearly as sorry for her in the show as I did in the books).

Blog

A Writing Uniform?

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FedoraThe most recent episode of Writing Excuses introduced me to the concept of a “writer’s uniform.” I think they were referring to the clothing an author wears while conducting writer business, but I am thinking about it in terms of clothing to wear while writing.

In general, I don’t particularly like dressing up. But I have to admit that the act of putting on business casual attire does make me “feel” more like a professional in the ol’ day job. So I’m wondering if there is an outfit I could wear that would make me “feel” more like writing.

I say this because I’m still struggling to write. I’m improving, though: I actually want to write this story again, but now I’m struggling with “finding the time.” (Although if I’m going to be truthful with myself, it’s not so much a matter of “finding the time” as it is “giving up distractions.”)

So I’m wondering if changing my clothes would help. After all, if I take the time to dress up, I surely wouldn’t want to waste that effort by goofing off. But what kind of clothes would I wear? Not jeans, because I don’t like sitting in jeans for long periods of time, but not Dockers either. Some kind of button-down shirt but nothing fancy. According to Writing Excuses, Hawaiian shirts are popular with authors now, but I am not a fan of those. Maybe a hat. Yeah, maybe that’s the ticket. A writing hat.

Blog

Update on the Lack of Writing

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Since it’s now March I should probably write an update. I am still struggling with writing, and failing miserably. This is the result of many factors which are incredibly easy to identify, but not very easy to resolve.

The first is NaNoWriMo. I’m wondering if I should skip it in the future, because the blitz of writing during that one month has always been followed by a period of severe burn-out which is hard to recover from. As it is now three months later, that’s probably the least of my problems.

The second is that I’ve been moving a lot of stuff from one house to another over the past month, which has eaten into my time and energy. This is a pretty flimsy excuse, because really, even with only a half-hour a day, you can write something.

The third is a more weirder thing and the most hardest to deal with, and it’s a direct result of the marathon of Wheel of Time audiobooks I listened to. See, I live alone now, so the house is usually dead quiet. But while I was listening to those audiobooks for weeks on end, I got used to hearing voices all the time, and when I finished, I discovered (or re-discovered, because this has happened before) that the quiet of the house is extremely unsettling, especially after dark. So now, to stave off the willies, almost as soon as I get home I turn on something with voices, be it an audiobook, podcast, Netflix, or YouTube. I’m not sure if it’s fear of silence or fear of being alone or some combination thereof.

Unfortunately it impacts my writing because it’s basically impossible for me to concentrate whenever I can hear people speaking, particularly if they are narrating or acting in a story. My brain seems to zero in on the voices and process them automatically no matter what else I’m trying to do at the same time. It’s the same with singing. I can’t write while listening to any kind of songs with vocals, or podcasts. I always have to put on instrumental music or nothing.

So… there’s that. Periodically I try to turn everything off and return to writing, but so far I haven’t gotten more than a hundred words down before giving up in disgust. And somehow it feels worse to only write a few words than it does to write nothing.

Blog/Process

Dissecting What Went Wrong

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In the continuing saga of what to do with Airworld, I believe I have figured out why I don’t particularly want to continue it.

Somewhere along the way, the story stopped being fun to write.

It seems pretty obvious in retrospect. If it was fun to write, obviously I’d still be writing it. But what happened? This exact thing was something that Rachel Aaron addressed in her NaNoWriMo question-and-answer thread again and again. She advised not to continue writing something that wasn’t fun. She also advised that you should figure out why it isn’t fun to write, because it probably indicates a problem that needs to be fixed.

So after some thought, I think I know exactly when it stopped being fun: It was November 16, at the precise moment when Falclef rescued Naobi from the trial in Leavon.

I recall thinking at the time that there was something “off” about that rescue. I now realize what the problem was. Up until that point, Naobi was driving the story. She made the decisions that moved the plot along, be they good, bad, or indifferent. But when Falclef came along, she was helplessly carried away into a whole new setting and a whole new situation, getting tangled up with a rebel Order faction fighting a bigger war.

In my attempts to outline the rest of the story, I came up with a plot that took Naobi and Cheton away from Koerl and Falclef and that whole faction of rebel Order folk. I was overjoyed to get them back on their own, and now I realize that it’s because the rebel Order war with Dark Horizon is a whole different story.

Whew. Glad I figured that out.

Now I just need to figure out how to fix it.

Blog

Finished A Memory of Light

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The Third Age is finally over. I powered through books 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 all in a row, which has left me exhausted, yet exalted.

Say what you want about it, but you can’t deny that The Wheel of Time is EPIC. I quipped on Facebook that they should retire the category of “epic fantasy” after this because nobody else could possibly write anything as epic. I’m trying to think of anything I’ve read that had a similar scope. Lord of the Rings, obviously, but that was only three tiny, tiny books. The only other books I can think of (that I’ve read) that came close in terms of sheer immersion were Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and possibly The Sword of Shannara, which I remember as incredibly epic in scope, even though it was only one book, and I read it when I was a teenager.

Wheel of Time completely dwarfed those two in terms of sheer complexity. The Last Battle. Wow. It was pure shock and awe in terms of how all of the plots and factions and characters wove together. As an aspiring author, I now feel like a toddler playing with plastic blocks.

It was bittersweet to read the Epilogue. Knowing it was the late Robert Jordan’s words. The end of the series. The last time I’d be seeing these characters. Knowing there would be no more, even though you could sense that the aftermath could fill many more books. And there are many things to be discussed. But alas, no more questions, no more answers. I picked up this series late in life. I can’t imagine what the people who have literally been with these characters all their lives must feel.

Blog/Process

What Would a Professional Do

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So yeah, I’m still stuck on Airworld. The main obstacle I think is my complete lack of confidence in the outline I have sketched out for the rest of the book. It sounds like it will be terrible. Nothing makes sense, nobody is anywhere for a reason, entire plotlines are pointless and stupid. And what’s worse, according to my 3-books-a-year schedule, I should be starting a new book in February. That’s less than a month away, if you’re somehow unable to look at a calendar.

Let’s look at this like a professional writer. Let’s imagine that I’m under contract to deliver the first draft of a book by February 1. What would I do?

Well, I’d finish the book, that’s what. Because if I didn’t, I would develop a reputation as one of those temperamental writers who is hard to work with, and that’s probably not good, particularly for a new author. Seems pretty simple and straightforward.

Does it matter if I deliver a book with a sucky ending? My internal editor screams, “Of course it matters! Your entire life and reputation is riding on this!!” That’s probably not exactly true. But still, as someone who is supposed to be a pro, it’s not ideal. My theoretical publisher is probably expecting something they can sell. But then it’s still a first draft, the worst version of any book. I certainly wouldn’t be the first author to write a lame ending. Perhaps a theoretical editor could provide some tips to make it better. It’s also remotely possible that it’s not as bad as I think. Unlikely, but possible.

Okay, well that was easy. A pro would write the ending, deliver it, and move on.

But now let’s look at it from the view of an aspiring author who’s never published anything. Which is very realistic because that’s what I am.

My business goal right now is enticing an agent to represent me. That means I need to send out query letters. That does NOT mean I need to send out full manuscripts. If an agent is intrigued by a query letter, they will probably want to see only the first few chapters as a sample, NOT the full manuscript. They might also want a summary of the entire book. But if an agent is intrigued they will eventually want the full manuscript, so I should have it finished and ready to deliver, even if it still needs work.

So I still need to write an ending. However, re-writing the first few chapters is far more important at this point. Which means I should hurry up and finish the ending, then spend a little time revising the beginning. Then write queries. Then move on to the next project.