Archive for April, 2021

Books

Recent Reading: Spooky Stuff

One more book in my recent reading was Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. If you were like me and devoured the Mary Stewart gothic/suspense novels as a teen, all those books about spunky young women visiting spooky houses and dealing with wealthy men who were potentially shady, but you wished there was something truly uncanny about them and not just atmosphere, this is the book for you.

A Mexico City debutante in 1950 gets an unsettling letter from her recently married cousin, and her father sends her to check on the cousin, who now lives with her husband’s family in the manor by their defunct silver mine in the mountains. Once she gets there, she finds that this family is deeply weird and something seems to be seriously wrong with her cousin, who tries to warn her of danger. The only person in the house who seems to be reasonably sane is one of the husband’s relatives, but she’s not sure she can trust him, either. She needs to figure out what’s really going on in order to save her cousin and get back to her life, but she’s not at all prepared for the truth of what this family’s secret really is.

I wouldn’t have thought this was my kind of book from the publisher description (they forgot to mention Mary Stewart) because I don’t like horror and scary things, but I ended up devouring it. It’s just so beautifully atmospheric. I could see the setting so vividly. One thing I absolutely loved was that the heroine was allowed to be smart. There was never a point when I found myself trying to give her advice or telling her not to go there or not to do that. She made all the right moves, based on the information she had available, but she was up against something bigger and weirder than she could have realized, so even while doing smart things she ended up having to struggle. I appreciate that so much because I get frustrated by plotting that relies on dumb characters who cause their own problems to create conflict. I also enjoyed the setting. I remember liking the globe trotting of those old Mary Stewart books that allowed me to visit interesting locations, and this one gives us a view of Mexico that’s very different from the usual American pop culture depictions (and my own experiences visiting border cities).

I don’t know if this book has been optioned for film, but it would make an amazing movie because it’s so visual. I’d love to see the heroine’s wardrobe on the screen, and then there’s that house that’s the sort of project production designers drool over.

I’m definitely looking up more of this author’s books. I think she just had a new one come out this week.

Books

Epic Fantasy, But Different

Back to more book discussion …

I’ve been on a fantasy kick for at least the last six months, really diving in to epic fantasy, and as much as I love it, I’ve got to admit that it gets kind of monotonous after a while. Those quasi-medieval European fantasy worlds start to blur together. And yet I can’t get enough of that kind of story, the quests, missions, prophecies, courtly political intrigue, magic, monsters, multiple storylines on a collision course, etc. If you feel the same way, I’ve got just the book for you.

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse is an epic fantasy that has all those things you love in epic fantasy, but instead of a setting based on quasi-medieval Europe, it’s a secondary world based on pre-Colombian America. That injects a shot of real originality into the story and makes those old fantasy tropes come to new life from a different perspective.

The complex story tracks a young man marked from childhood as a prophesied chosen one trained to carry out one life’s mission, the sea captain hired to get him where he needs to be faster than anyone has managed to make that voyage, the outsider priest trying against great opposition (and betrayal) to be more relevant to the people, and the warrior torn between what his clan expects and the underground movement he’s starting to believe in. They’re all coming together on the winter solstice, when an eclipse is happening.

I plowed through this book pretty quickly, even though it’s rather long, and I hope the sequel is coming soon because I immediately wanted more of the story (the ending does wrap up the main events but immediately sets up new ones). I found the setting and the cultures fascinating and really pulled for most of the main characters. It scratched that epic fantasy itch, but in a new and exciting way.

I’ve seen this book recommended for fans of Game of Thrones, and while I wouldn’t have thought to compare the two, I can see some similarities, and I do think that if you like that series you’ll like this. It has a few bloody moments, but I definitely wouldn’t call it “grimdark,” though. It’s less of a “people suck, life sucks, nothing is fair” world than Game of Thrones is.

Life

Oops!

Oops, I realized I skipped posting on Friday. I had an appointment for my second vaccination Friday morning, and I made it for an hour earlier than the last one, so I figured that I’d be home in plenty of time to take care of it.

Then it took twice as long, thanks to terrible traffic and a larger than normal crowd since they were expecting possible severe weather in the afternoon and moved the afternoon appointments to the morning. I finally got home and collapsed — not from the shot, but from the driving ordeal — and totally forgot about it.

I’m feeling back to normal after a blah weekend of wallowing and relaxing, so normal service should resume Wednesday.

And I really need to learn how to schedule posts so I can set something up ahead of time for days like that.

TV

New TV Perspectives

One interesting effect of the pandemic is that TV programmers are having to get creative while TV production has had to slow down. Last year, there were all those specials with performances by people in their homes or in limited sets outdoors. I enjoyed getting these little concerts without all the bells and whistles. Now PBS has filled a programming gap by getting shows from places other than England.

Right now, they’re showing the series Atlantic Crossing on Masterpiece, and it’s a Norwegian production about how the Crown Princess of Norway and her children (including the very small boy who is the current king of Norway) took refuge in the United States during World War II after the Nazis invaded Norway. Even Sweden, where the princess was originally from and where her uncle was king, wouldn’t let them stay there, for fear of enraging the Nazis and risking their neutrality. But Franklin Roosevelt, who’d met the prince and princess during an earlier tour, offered to let the family come to the US, and so, after a harrowing escape, they ended up staying at the White House. Meanwhile, her husband and father-in-law were in Buckingham Palace during the Blitz. She gets a lot of pressure to try to influence FDR to get the US into the war or to at least try to help free Norway.

The interesting thing about this production is that the characters speak the languages they would have been speaking in those situations, with subtitles. When they’re in Norway or when Norwegians are talking to each other, it’s in Norwegian. When they’re in Sweden, they’re speaking Swedish. When they talk to the German ambassador, it’s in German. Once they get to America and England, it’s in English (unless the Norwegians are talking among themselves). American actors play the American characters (Kyle MacLachlan plays FDR), and it looks like they have British actors playing the British characters. I’m more accustomed to American and British shows in which everyone speaks English, and you can tell they’re supposed to be foreign people because they speak English with a foreign accent.

I’ve been learning Norwegian, so this has been great practice in listening for me. I don’t think I’d understand it fully without subtitles, but I pick up on a lot of words, and I seem to do better with each episode, either because I’ve learned more in the meantime (last week’s lessons were particularly applicable to this story) or because my ear is getting better attuned to it (probably both). It’s also an interesting perspective on the war, looking at it from the point of view of people whose country was invaded, and they have to wrestle with the dilemma of whether to stay with their people or get away and try to do some good where they can while staying out of Nazi hands. Meanwhile, there’s also the human story of a family that’s been separated and finding a sense of home in a new place. Apparently, the current king of Norway still speaks English with an American accent because he spent a good chunk of his early childhood in the US, and FDR was like a godfather to him.

I wouldn’t mind PBS picking up some other foreign productions beyond the usual British fare. I don’t mind reading subtitles, and it’s interesting seeing the other perspectives.

Books

Book Report: Defensive Baking

This may turn into a book blog for the next few weeks because I realized I haven’t talked about what I’m reading for a couple of months and I need to catch up. I had to keep kind of quiet about what I was reading for a little while because I’m the Assistant Nebula Awards Commissioner, and one of the perks of my position is that I could see which books were likely to end up being finalists so that I was able to get a jump on reading the probable finalists. Then I knew who the actual finalists were a couple of weeks before they were announced. And since I was reading the nominees before that was public knowledge, I figured it was probably best that I didn’t say anything about what I was reading, lest some clever person put two and two together and figure it out. But it’s all public now, and I can talk about what I’ve been reading. I’m getting to these books in no particular order, and this isn’t covering everything I read or even liked. These are just the books I think my readers are most likely to be interested in.

One book that I’d already bought before it started showing up with a lot of nominations was A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher. How could I resist a book with a title like that? Since I had the e-book on my tablet, this was what I read during the dark nights of the power outage. In some respects, it was the perfect book to read by candlelight while huddled under blankets in a dark, freezing house because it was fun and light and kind of cozy. In some respects, it was a bad idea because it made me desperately want to bake, and I couldn’t because I had no power. It also made me hungry for scones. The first morning I was sure my power would stay on, I baked scones.

This story is about a world in which wizards have one power, in a very specialized way, and our young heroine’s power is baking. She can make bread rise properly, make scones come out perfectly, and make rolls bake to just the right degree of doneness. She can also make gingerbread men walk, and then there was that incident with the sourdough starter, who now lives in the basement and manages pest control for the bakery. This doesn’t seem like the sort of talent that would get anyone in trouble or make someone seem like a threat, but she finds a dead body in the bakery one morning, and then she learns that wizards all over town are being killed. There seems to be a conspiracy to destabilize the city while the army is off fighting a battle and there’s an enemy army approaching. Our heroine may be the last wizard left in the city, but how can she defend the city by baking?

This book is so, so much fun. It’s sold as YA, but I think that also applies to the young at heart. It kind of reminds me of the Tiffany Aching books by Terry Pratchett, only instead of a sentient, bad-tempered cheese, there’s a sentient, bad-tempered sourdough starter. We’ve got a smart, practical heroine putting her specialized knowledge to use in an unorthodox way, with a lot of whimsy, heart, and humor. This is the perfect book to read if you’re having a bad day (like your power being out when it’s 10 degrees outside), but it might be a good idea to bake some scones or cookies first because you will get hungry while reading. If you’re a baker, you’ll want to bake, but you’ll never look at gingerbread men the same way again.

writing

The Hard Part

Last week I saw something reposted on Twitter about a writer admitting that she doesn’t really like the process of writing. She likes having written, but the process is difficult and frustrating.

There are days when I can totally relate, though while I do like having written, the part I really love is “going to write.” I love coming up with story ideas and characters, doing research and worldbuilding, even figuring out plots — all the stuff that falls under the category of “prewriting.”

The hard, and less fun, part comes when it’s time to put all that stuff into words. Sometimes it’s the words that are hard, finding a way to convey those things in your head. Sometimes it’s the nitty gritty of the plot, when you go beyond the big-picture arcs and need to come up with specific scenes that develop the plot.

That’s ironic when you consider how many times writers have people tell them that they have this great idea for a book, and if the writer will write it they can split the income 50/50. I think that happens at least once per booksigning (there seem to be people who go to every booksigning just to approach writers to tell them about their brilliant idea and present them with this proposition) and at just about every party where we meet new people who learn what we do.
New person: So, what do you do?
Writer: I’m a writer. I write books.
New person: Really? I have this amazing idea for a book. I should tell it to you, you can write it, and we can split the money it makes. I’m sure it’ll be a bestseller.
Writer: Oops, I need to go refill my drink. It was nice meeting you.

Ideas come all the time to writers. We don’t need to buy them from others. I’ll never get to all the ideas I want to write. Writing is the hard part, the part that takes time and real effort. That “brilliant” idea would probably take a ton of development and probably isn’t all that different from dozens of other things already on the market.

There are certainly days when the actual writing is fun, when I can see the scene playing out in my head like a movie, and all I have to do is describe it, and those words come so easily that I can forget I’m writing and feel like I’m just watching a movie. I usually love my characters, so I enjoy spending time with them. But a lot of the time, it really does feel like work, finding the right words, figuring out how to make things happen to get to the event I need. It’s at the end of one of those days when it’s been a real struggle but I still manage to get there that I love having written.

Sometimes I fantasize about being able to plug my brain into my computer so that the brilliant book in my head will just pour into the computer, but I suspect even if I could do that, the book would still require a lot of work. That brilliant book in the head is generally only a highlight reel or a trailer for the real book that has to be written. It’s the good parts, the scenes that come to life, without all the work of stitching those pieces together in a logical order that flows with good pacing. In other words, the hard part about writing.

Even if I could find someone to write my ideas for me, so that I just got to do the fun part without the hard part, I don’t think I would. I’m too proprietary with my ideas. I couldn’t hand them over to anyone else because no one else would be able to bring them to life the way I would. And so, the hard part is the price I pay to get to make up fun stuff and be able to share it with others. If I don’t write it, I can’t share it with others, which means I don’t make money, which means I’d have to get a different kind of job, and I have no idea what I’d do.

My Books

Timelines

I’ve joked that I’m some kind of weird Time Lord because I have a bit of an obsession with time, even though I don’t really feel its passing. I need to wear a watch or have a clock in view to have any idea what time it is, but I’m also obsessively punctual. I hate being late, and I like having at least a general schedule. I like to observe anniversaries of even small things, noting how long ago it was when things happened, but I think that’s mostly so I’ll be aware of the passage of time. If I don’t pay attention to that sort of thing, I can lose years in my head.

I tend to apply this to my writing, as well. I keep calendars so I’ll know what’s happening when within a book, but then timelines can get complicated because it takes a lot longer to write and publish a book than it usually takes for the events in the book to happen, and that means a series will end up taking place further and further into the past, even if it started in the present.

Take the Enchanted, Inc. books. I wrote the first one in the fall of 2003, with the idea that if it sold it was likely to be published in 2005 (and I was right), so I plotted it with that in mind. I wrote book 2 in 2004, and its events immediately followed those of the first book, so it was still set in 2005, but it came out in 2006, so we were starting to fall behind, and it got worse from there. For the most part, it doesn’t make a huge difference when the books were set, since I don’t put in any obvious timestamps, until I got to where I was about 10 years ahead of the books and people started asking why Katie didn’t have a cell phone and why people didn’t just look things up on their iPhones. In 2005, it wouldn’t have been so odd for someone not to have a cell phone. At that time, I just had a tiny flip phone, and I seldom used it. It was mostly for travel, in case I had car trouble. With Katie’s life, I might not have bothered with one. They didn’t introduce iPhones until 2007. You could get some Internet on phones before then, but it wasn’t nearly as common. Cameras on phones were available, but they weren’t very good and most of them didn’t do video. The shift toward readily available digital cameras and video cameras you could put in your pocket did end up becoming part of the plot for the last book, and by that time we were well over a decade past the events of the book.

The only real way to avoid the books getting so far behind reality is to skip the events ahead to when the book is getting published, but that means missing a year or so in the life of the characters, unless you publish a lot of books a year. And then there’s the fact that people don’t necessarily read them when they’re being published. There are still people just discovering the Enchanted, Inc. books, so they’re reading about 2005 in 2021, but since I don’t put any date stamps in the books, it’s not clear that it’s meant to be 2005. The copyright date might be a hint, but that only works for the first book. You’d have to be obsessive enough to try to work out a timeline based on the copyright of the first book and hints given about when events are taking place to know when the books are set.

I started writing the Lucky Lexie books in the fall of 2019, with the idea of them being set in 2020. Then 2020 happened, and setting the books then would have totally changed everything. Since I didn’t want to deal with the pandemic, I decided to keep them in a vague, eternal quasi-present. I’m still treating them like they’re happening around now when it comes to technology levels and gauging what would have been going on for the characters in their backstories. It makes me feel kind of old to realize that most of the main characters in those books would have been in high school with the early Enchanted, Inc. books were first being published. Everything would have been online for them already and cell phones were pretty common, but they probably wouldn’t have had smart phones while they were in high school and would have been in high school in the age of blogs, before social media got big.

Because of the time lag, if I were to look at when the Enchanted, Inc. characters were in high school or college, it would be in the early 90s. Rod is about four years older than Owen, but Owen skipped some grades in school, so they were in college together for a couple of years. The way I’ve calculated it, Rod is in the college class of 1994, and that means he’s not much younger than I am, so his and Owen’s college experience wouldn’t have been too different from mine. Cell phones wouldn’t have been common, and the Internet was still in its infancy. They might have been able to get e-mail on the school network and would have subscribed to mailing lists, maybe been on Usenet, but the Web as we know it wouldn’t have been there. They might have had desktop computers in their dorm rooms, but laptops were still rare and were pretty clunky. Katie’s a few years younger than Owen, so things would have been a bit different for her by the time she got to college.

There was a huge shift around 1995 so that the world before was very different from the world after, and there was another big shift around 2007-2008. As a writer, if you’re writing contemporary (ish) fiction set in the “real” world, you need to keep in mind when your characters came of age and how their lives fit around these shifts, especially if the backstory is part of the plot or if you’re doing a backstory story. A story about Rod and Owen in college wouldn’t take cell phones into consideration. It would be a lot easier to have someone be totally out of touch. I couldn’t do that for a story about Lexie’s friends in high school or college (or for events in those characters’ pasts that affect the current storylines).

That’s what makes secondary world fantasy so much fun to write. There’s less worry about how the passage of time between books affects the story. Readers aren’t going to wonder why your characters don’t have smart phones in a book you wrote in 2003 that they’re reading in 2021.

Maybe I should put a timeline for the Enchanted, Inc. books on my website. Some authors revise books to update them when they get the rights back, but I don’t have the rights to those early books since they’re still selling, and I don’t think I want to rewrite them, anyway, since the technological shifts end up tying into the plots. If I give everyone in the early books iPhones, the “everyone has cameras now and can record magic” issue can’t just come up in the last book.

writing

Reworking Priorities

I reworked my project priority plan last week. I’d let myself play with that fantasy project because I thought it would be quick and easy. After all, I’d already plotted it and the characters had been in my head for thirty years. I could just dash that book off.

Ha! I ended up totally replotting it, and that made it harder to write because I had to detach myself from what was already there and find the new direction. But then as I diverged more from the original book, the characters started shifting, so they were no longer the people I started with. The writing was a lot slower than I go on any other projects. That “quick and easy” book was taking me twice as long as the other things I could be working on.

So I decided to backburner it. I had something come up that I need to work on pretty quickly (a short piece), and I need to get to work on the fourth mystery book. I’ll let the fantasy book rest a bit while I get other things out of the way. That might help me solidify the new version in my head so it’s easier to write.

And as soon as I made that decision, I really made progress on the other things I need to work on. I got a shorter piece outlined and have written a thousand words on it, and I finally came up with the story for the fourth mystery. I need to flesh out some things, but I have the crime, the victim, the killer, the motive, and the red herrings. I’d felt like I was dragging for so long, and now I’ve made a good burst of progress.

I need to go back and do some new character development and worldbuilding on the fantasy to flesh it out for the new direction, but I can play with that in my off hours after I get my other work done. I’m aiming to have the fourth Lexie book out around July 4, so I need to get moving on that. Mostly, I have an idea for Halloween that I can’t wait to play with, but I don’t want to skip ahead so much in the characters’ lives, so I’m going to fit in a July 4 book and a late summer/early fall (start of the school year) book. If I can get them written. I have the main plots for both of them sort of planned, though I need to dig into specifics.

fantasy

The Taste of Memories

Some fantasy novels are notorious for an emphasis on food. We get loving descriptions of feasts and know exactly what the characters eat on their journeys. Reading the Shire portions of either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings will make you hungry, since hobbits love their food.

Food can be an important facet of worldbuilding. I have a writer friend who creates cuisines for each of the cultures in his fantasy world, figuring out what ingredients and spices they’d have and how that would come together to make the kinds of foods that culture would eat and where food fits into each culture.

I don’t seem to be that kind of writer. I’m lucky if I remember that my characters need to eat. The copyeditor on my Enchanted, Inc. books used to joke that she was the designated Jewish mother of my characters because she’d make notes asking how long it’s been since the characters had eaten and suggesting I put in a mention of them getting food if they’d gone too long without a meal. Figuring out what they’d be eating so I could describe it wouldn’t even occur to me.

Which is odd, when I think about it, because I love to cook. I like trying new recipes, and I put a lot of thought into menu planning. I base my meal plans not only on what ingredients are available and what I’m hungry for, but also on the weather, the mood I’m in, and whether it’s any kind of special occasion.

I also seem to link food to memories and emotions. The food I’m eating when something that makes me feel really emotional happens will forever be linked in my mind with that event or emotion. There’s a recipe I’ve never been able to make myself eat, even though it was something I like, because the first time I made it, I got some upsetting news while I was cooking, and now in my mind, that food is what “upsetting” tastes like. There are also positive associations, foods that make me happy when I eat them because I associate them with something good.

This week, I’m reclaiming a couple of foods. One is one of my favorite bread recipes. I just about live on this bread from fall through winter and even into spring. It’s hearty and travels well, so I bake a loaf and cut slices to take with me to conventions so I can have tea and bread in my room before I have to face people. Until this year, my main emotional connection to this bread is conventions. The taste makes me think of quiet mornings in a hotel room. But this year, I’d just baked a loaf before the big deep freeze and power outage. It was good that I had it because it was something I could eat without needing power to cook it, but because of that, the taste started making me think of freezing mornings spent huddled in a blanket by my fireplace, worrying about whether I’d get power back, whether my pipes would freeze. After I got power back, I didn’t want to touch that bread. I was too busy cooking other things for breakfast. The last part of the loaf got moldy, which had never happened before. I’ve never made that bread last long enough to go bad.

I didn’t want to ruin this bread for myself, so since it got cool again this week, I made another loaf. I’m remembering how much I like it, and I’m trying to move away from the bad memories. I guess it helps that now that the cold week is well into the past and I know it came out okay for me, I can look back on it somewhat fondly as a kind of adventure (in the same way, I get nostalgic about things like having the flu because I don’t remember the misery, only the coziness of snuggling up in blankets and letting myself watch movies all day).

I also made chili for dinner last night because I’d started associating chili with that week. It was the first thing I made when I got power back. I’d run out of things I could quickly heat up, so I had to cook something when I got the chance, and this was the sort of thing that could be done fairly quickly or could simmer for a long time. That turned out to be the day I got power back for good, and that linked the chili to my power outage. Now I’ve associated it with something different.

Oddly enough, I don’t seem to have the same issue with the beef stew I lived on during the outage and reheated when I got power. Maybe because it doesn’t have such a distinctive flavor or because it’s something I have frequently while the chili is a relatively new recipe and I don’t yet have other memories built around it.

Anyway, maybe I should add more food to my books since it does link so strongly to emotions. I wonder what things my characters might avoid eating because the last time they ate it something bad happened, and now that flavor is what that negative emotion tastes like.