Monthly Archives: November 2007

What I Read This November

This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel J. Levitin
Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik
Undertow by Elizabeth Bear
Magic & Malice by Patricia C Wrede (reread)
Reserved for the Cat by Mercedes Lackey
Mistral’s Kiss by Laurell K Hamilton
Broken Music by Sting
Children of England by Alison Weir
Have His Carcase by Dorothy Sayers
Mistress Anne by Carrolly Erickson
The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Wolff (reread)

Brief notes:

Reserved for the Cat: Better than The Wizard of London, that’s for sure. I almost swore off buying these in hardcover because I was so disappointed in that last one, but the subject matter of this one was more interesting to me. Glad I bought it; it provided me an afternoon and evening of comfortable reading. Actually, I don’t know why I buy Lackey in hardcover at all any more, other than for the instant gratification of this fairy tale-based historical fantasy series. It’s the only thing of her’s I’m following.

Mistral’s Kiss: Why do I buy these? They’re too short now, and they only cover a very brief period of time. I think they’d read better if I read a lot of them at once to get a better idea of how Merry was changing Faerie. Except I’d have to wade through a million sex scenes to do it, as the whole union of life force thing is what’s doing the changing.

Broken Music: A look at Sting’s childhood and very early music years, outlining a lot of the compromises he made musically. Pretty much ends with the launch of the Police’s first full album, unfortunately.

Undertow: A very enjoyable planetary romance (in the traditional sense of the word) that calls into question the native-colonist ethic. Really interesting native species, technology, and one of the best observations about humanity I’ve come across lately: human are climbers, not schoolers.

This Is Your Brain On Music: A well-written and accessible layman’s book that examines how our brains encompass, interpret, and respond to music, written by a musician/producer who reinvented his career and became a cognitive psychologist instead. One of those books I wish I could buy for lots of people because lending it out will take too long.

Whoppitas, Whirrs, and Ums

Marissa says something interesting about work-in-progress reviews by writers and non-writers, and I’m going to paste it here for immediate reference too.

I think it’s extremely valuable to have non-writers read and critique books. This is not in lieu of having skilled writers doing critiques but in addition to it. Ideally, the finished books will be read by non-writers, and just as only having people of one sex or only having people of one age critique a book can skew the type of critique one will get, only having people of one approach to the written word read it might skew the response.

I think some non-writers are a little shy about this because they don’t necessarily know what a good critique looks like. Trust me, writers sometimes have all the jargon down and brilliant ideas for exactly how, technically, to fix a scene — and other times we will look at each other and go, “I dunno, it’s just that this part kinda goes whoppita whoppita whoppita when it should go whirrrrrr, y’know?” Or else, “I think it needs to be more, kinda, um, um…manic…does that make sense?” If you socialize with writers you should know that we are not necessarily more coherent than other people until we’ve had several drafts to hammer out the whoppitas and the ums. And we probably ask each other, “Does that make sense?” more often than the international average, not less. And sometimes the whoppitas and the ums are the bits that make for a good and useful critique and the detailed, technical jargon ideas about how to fix something turn out not to be very useful.

“Does that make sense?” has to be one of my top five frequently-uttered sayings.

She’s right. Even though I’m a writer, I find it hard to put how a story works (or doesn’t work) for me into words. And so I often resort to the technical review instead. It’s a cop-out, but I feel inadequate giving someone a crit that essentially says, “That scene didn’t work for me but I don’t know why; it just felt like it fizzled”. I keep looking for a way to suggest a fix for it, instead of just saying “This needs something else here”. A non-writer wouldn’t necessarily be looking for the fix; I think they’d be more comfortable saying “This led me to expect X and I didn’t get the payoff, and what I got instead wasn’t enough”.

This is one of the reasons why I drag my feet about doing reviews of works in progress for friends. I get stuck over-analysing why I feel a certain way about a scene or a chapter or a turn of events, and I have no way to express it clearly. This is completely my problem and has nothing to do with the MS I’m critiquing. I hate handing something back with vague “this made me feel” kind of feedback; I feel as if I should be saying more, giving them more value, so to speak, because there’s nothing worse than getting a work back with no concrete crits whatsoever. (Hello, the A minus that has haunted me for decades! What made it an A- paper? What could I have done better to make it an A?) I always feel that I’m not necessarily the best person to give another writer with whom I’m personally acquainted feedback. I can do it for strangers, because I don’t know them and the way they write, think, and work: they are completely separate from their MS. Understanding how and why a writer does something because one knows them in person is in some ways a handicap. The general public does not know an author personally (and reading their on-line journals or web sites does not constitute ‘knowing them personally’), and reads a book or short story as a discrete entity, free of any authorial association.

To be fair to myself, I do need things to be as technically tight as possible before I can focus on reading and evaluating the story; that’s just one of my quirks. Floppy prose or distracting grammatical errors mean it’s hard to find the story in order to respond to it. So doing a tech critique before/while I respond to the story is just the way I have to do things. It means taking longer to do the crit, though, which is another reason I drag my feet.

That was all rather stream-of-consciousness, wasn’t it. And I have no pithy wrap-up for it, either.

*wanders off*

Friends

This morning we pulled up outside the caregiver’s house, and another familiar car pulled in right behind us before I’d even taken the key out of the ignition.

A: Hey, look who just arrived — Grace and Fergus.

BOY: OPEN THE DOOR! OPEN THE DOOR!

It’s good to look forward to playing with friends.

Absolution

The boy is finally asleep. It’s been a good morning. For the first time ever, I even got some research reading and longhand writing done while he played.

My years of absorbing and singing revival-era Disney heroine songs from the 90s were all validated today. While I made bread late this morning and Liam was lying on the floor of the kitchen playing with his trains, he began singing “under sea… under sea… under sea” over and over. Then he stopped and said, “Mama sing Ariel?”

This was a significant request, because I don’t get to sing any more. If I start singing something, I am told ‘no, Mama, no singing’. I would be a lot more upset if my goddaughter hadn’t gone through a similar brief phase when she was around the age Liam is now, because I love to sing, and I tend to do it a lot around the house whether there’s music on or not.

“You want me to sing Ariel’s song? The one where she’s in her room of treasures?” (I had to make sure. If I was wrong or had misunderstood somehow, I could damage my chances of singing ever again.)

“Yes.” (Firmly.)

And he lay there for the full three minutes it takes to sing the entire song, sneaking me quick looks from under his lashes every so often while I sang. I remembered the whole thing word for word, where to take breaths and phrasing and everything I used to have down perfectly. He was absolutely silent until I was done. Then he calmly went back to playing with his trains.

There was something very satisfying about being able to not only fulfil a child’s request for a song, but keep him spellbound through it (even if he was trying to act cool). Today, I win.

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 8,800
New words today: 1,250

Five hundred words before a two-hour nap (the nap bit was intentional, the two hour part was not), the rest in the hour post-nap before I went to get the boy. The five hundred took longer. I’m remembering that my most productive work hours are between four and six. The problem now is that I have to leave at 4:45ish to collect Sparky.

What I’m currently struggling with on this hearthcraft project is the balance between spiritual and practical information. Ideally, one would explore the spiritual associations of each practical bit of information, but that’s just not possible. I’m at the throwing information down on the page stage of the process, and I keep thinking in the back of my active brain that it all should be much more meaningful. There is plenty of time to go into the spiritual aspect of all these practical things once that practical things are down. Baby steps, brain. One thing at a time.

Today’s amusing tyop: ‘crate the ambiance’. Because you can’t let it be catching, goodness no.

Cautious Improvement

Today things are much better, thank you. I left the boy at the caregiver’s giving giggly hugs to all the other children and the flock of them jumping around like kangaroos. I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to pass out or not, now that I’ve handled my correspondence and filing. There will likely be a nap later, and my hair needs a wash. I’ll see if I can pull off a thousand words first. It may take a while, as I can’t think straight; my head feels like it’s stuffed with treacle-soaked cotton. I give myself permission to give up at some point.

Sunny out, but very cold. The car doors on the passenger side were frozen shut this morning.

I received my first Christmas present in the mail yesterday: a renewal to last year’s gift subscription of Fine Cooking! Thanks, Mum and Dad!

Just Great

The day began at 5:15, when Liam woke up. Exactly three days after HRH came home with a cold, the boy has it. I discovered when I woke up at this ungodly hour in response to the boy’s pitiful wail that so do I. That makes three colds for both of us in the space of four weeks.

I do not operate well on five to six hours of sleep. I’m an eight to nine hour kind of person. There have been very few full nights of sleep for me over the past month, be it due to insomnia, illness, or something unidentifiable that kept waking me up.

Blend all of the above, and you have two cranky people in the house today. Joy.

If you want me, I’ll be in the corner muttering darkly about the injustice of it all.

ETA: Also? The Sympatico web mail log-in thing never works for me. Ever. I hate it. I should be able to access my main e-mail no matter what.

ETA #2: Oh, after an hour of searching in frustration, I discovered that it’s because web access is *not* actually bundled with my regular internet service, like it says all over the place on the web site. I have to subscribe to and pay for an extra service in order to access my mail. I hate corps and badly designed/explained services. ARGH!