dotsandlines

At Half Price Books, I bought a book about 1603 and one about the history of military medicine. In other words, I'm spending money on research for a book I don't intend to publish. Useless hobbies are fun. Woo. (My story isn't set in 1603, but that's about the latest era it could be analogous to right now.)

Also joined Goodreads, because I like rambling about books, and I like recommendations.

Edit: Oh, and I also bought another used copy of Erasure's best-of, since I loaned out my previous copy and never got it back (and pretty much all of my older Erasure CDs have worn out). So now I once again own a copy of "A Little Respect". Awesome. It's one of my favorite songs to sing, but I suck at it. I just can't handle the notes on "soul" and "calling" in the chorus. Oh, I can reach them, but by the time we've slid to the end of the word, I'm in some entirely incorrect key.

I might be the only dork who was squeeful over the copy of "A Little Respect" at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

This has been today's 1 a.m. geek-out. Tomorrow a new episode of Welcome to Night Vale comes out, so that'll be tomorrow's 1 a.m. geekout.

Close enough to the end of the month. (Ulterior motive: Wrote a bit last night, so if this keeps up, it will boost next month's count. Heh.)

( Stats )

I'm reading an ebook right now - not gonna name it, don't want to be a jerk - and I don't like it too much. I feel like the author is one of those "Women are unknowable alien creatures" types, and yet one of his narrators is a woman. So he has no idea what to do with her. Her scenes are flat and weird, and suffer greatly from omniscient breasts syndrome - even though the narrator is just doing stuff and not admiring herself rapturously in a mirror, the narration goes to ridiculous lengths panting over her assets. From her POV. When she, the character, is not paying attention to her looks at all. It's fourth-wall-breaking and bizarre.

Anyway, this ebook is bugging the hell out of me, but I am giving it a chance to see how it plays out. Also, to identify what exactly annoys me about it, and learn from that.

a) Omniscient breasts syndrome
b) Uses "unphased" instead of "unfazed", so editor is incompetent


That linked essay, BTW, also brings up an intriguing anecdote about a reader being offended because the author was "trying to make him gay" - she wrote from a straight female character's POV, including the character being attracted to men. The reader was offended/uncomfortable because he had never encountered the concept of a narrator who was not exactly like him, a straight (probably white) man. So he had no concept of reading except as a self-insert, and didn't know how to see a story from a fundamentally different person's POV. Fascinating. I tend to take that sort of thing for granted.

Just a fun quote that seems apropos for my journal. I bought this book when it popped up in the daily Kindle sales. It was adorably batty. Scene: A father haphazardly trying to calm his inconsolable (young?) son.

---

But Ranulph’s sobs redoubled. “I want to get away! to get away!” he moaned.

“Away? Away from where?” and there was a touch of impatience in Master Nathaniel’s voice.

“From … from things happening,” sobbed Ranulph.

Master Nathaniel’s heart suddenly contracted; but he tried not to understand. “Things happening?” he said in a voice that he endeavored to make jocular. “I don’t think anything very much happens in Lud, does it?”

“All the things,” moaned Ranulph, “summer and winter, and days and nights. All the things!”

- from Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

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The book overall is a fantasy story about a town on the edge of Faerie which is Very Unimpressed By Such Outlandish Nonsense, and the interactions between the townspeople and the fantastic world right around the bend. It's quasi-Victorian? It was published in 1926, which I thought was kayfabe* at first because it seems strangely parodic and simultaneously un-stagey, in a weirdly modern way. But no, according to Wikipedia and Amazon, it actually was published in 1926. I still feel wary of being tricked.

Anyway, it's a keeper. Lately I have been checking the daily sales... well, daily, buying dang near anything that is under $2.99 and piques my interest. I have a sizeable backlog for the first time in a while.


Writing is going well. Cut about 10K retconned words, then wrote 6K more. By my estimates, there's about 29K more that needs to be either cut or heavily edited - most of the last quarter of the thing, as it stands now. But I believe in my edits! They are drastic, but the end result will be better. There are two more weeks till stats time, so I won't belabor that point too much.


* something which is fictional, but which you're supposed to pretend is real in real life in order to play along with fandom properly. Like pro wrestling, or those fans who insist(ed) that Sherlock Holmes is factual. To me it seemed like a book which was written more recently but pretended to be vintage.

I need to make up some more icons. Ah, well.

I was sprinting toward 130,000 because of a small part in an elaborate personal scheme. I calculate my entertainment budget based partly on time ($x per month) and partly on productivity ($x per finished project). My arbitrary signpost for writing is "every 10,000 words." I started this entertainment-budget scheme back around 117,000, in late October, and rounded that up to 120K. So this marks the first time I've passed one of my notches. 10K doesn't sound like that much in light of NaNoWriMo, but I don't write at that speed these days, let's be honest.

( Either way, it's been fun )

On a completely different note, I got Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold for Christmas, and LOVE IT. See, I only hesitantly call myself a science fiction fan, because I know that many of the absolute classics just don't grab me. Foundation, for instance. I can't call myself a SF fan if I was bored to tears by Foundation. It's a freaking classic. And yet...

Thus far, this series is full of political machinations, and it has another dimension that a lot of other SF lacks: characterization. Like, at all. Because of this, the political-machinations part comes off as not an Author Tract (cough) but a story that is happening to the characters. Because I believe that these are, in fact, characters, and not paper cutouts with "THIS IS THE BAD GUY" / "THIS IS THE AUTHOR AVATAR SLASH GOOD GUY" written on them and pasted to popsicle sticks.

...I have tried hard all my life to like Asimov's fiction, people, you just don't understand.

Anyway. Even though I turned in my science fiction fan badge long ago, there are some that I like, and this is one of them. I am delighted to possibly find a series that I enjoy, because it's been a while since I found a new one.

Time to tap out that entertainment budget... sigh. :)

I finally hit the "Oh PLEASE, you have GOT to be kidding me" point, at about 75%.

( Spoilers, though not really, if you've read any of it at all...you'll see it coming )

...so it still made me want to edit something. Argh...

Apparently there's a project in which a group of AMV fans all watch the same video and write commentary, leave reviews etc. My latest video's number came up, probably because of an Utena fan in the group. There were a couple of comments, some bemused, many helpful/educational... and that was all.

Wow. Faith in the AMV community +5. Good show. I promise to stop slagging them now. It's long past pathetic to do that, anyway.

Also just realized that it was the video equivalent of the Draw This Again meme. Darn, that could have made for a fun ending title or something... doesn't fit the tone of the video, though.

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Bought The Humble eBook Bundle, because it crossed my radar, because it included a few authors that I'd been meaning to read, and because I'm on track to finish my last ebook tomorrow (the third in two weeks! Although there were Circumstances).

Otherwise, I've recently read:
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Won't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold (her books are collectively #1 on Stuff I Should Have Read Long Ago Because I'd Obviously Like Them)
Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire (I am not much of a fan of faerie stories, never having been one of the Special People, but it's good anyway. Glad I tried it. Probably going back to her InCryptid series after this, though.)

I haven't fully digested Quiet yet, and should probably read parts of it again. I haven't done much reading on the subject, preferring to keep it in the realm of shame and denial, so many of these concepts are new to me. Ex. several other personality traits are thought to be linked to introverted personality traits, like being over-sensitive to noise and easily absorbed by fiction. (If you cry at movies, ever, apparently... you may be an introvert.)

It's interesting. I've never really thought that being methodical and deliberate could be considered GOOD traits by anyone else. A necessary evil, at best. I picked a self-mocking screenname for a reason, after all. But I've never really heard anything like the concept that these traits, which I've been raised to believe make me a broken and worthless human being, can be bent to an advantage. Not just "you should be ashamed, but here's how you hide it," and not all the way over to the other side like "you are the True Heroes of the Universe," because I also hate that zero-sum nonsense - but "Here's how it is for some people, and here's how some of them have compensated when they choose to do so."

Again, I need to ponder all of this. Which, apparently, is typical for an introvert. As is oversharing on the internet.

I am just over halfway through The Hunger Games trilogy (ebook form, all in one - smart move, Amazon). I vacillate between being on the edge of my seat with the shenanigans and facepalming over the characterization.

The heroes are all right, after a while - they are only vaguely sketched, but they at least act as though they have complex motives. The narrator just doesn't necessarily know what those motives are. But the antagonists, sheesh. We get it, OK? They're evil. They're all named pseudo-Roman names, they are earlobes deep in decadence, you keep telling us how snakelike they are (those who are not snakelike are ridiculously shallow), and they do all sorts of awful things right after you finish telling us about the last awful thing they did. After, of course, killing children on national TV just to entertain themselves and oppress the good and noble villagers.

Evil. We get it. Enough.

Other than that, seat, edge, shenanigans. I only started reading it on Saturday evening, and even though it is a YA novel, that speaks to a certain level of addictiveness.