Books

Fixing a Fairy Tale

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’d recently read a Beauty and the Beast retelling. That book was The Beast’s Heart by Leife Shallcross, and it’s the Beauty and the Beast story from the Beast’s perspective. While there are a few elements from the Disney version that showed up (the curse is his punishment for being shallow, the library!), it mostly draws upon the fairy tale — the version with the down-on-his-luck formerly wealthy merchant with three daughters — and is a really nice fleshing out of the story.

One thing I loved was that this telling fixed the Stockholm Syndrome issue that can make this story uncomfortable. Isabeau, our “Beauty,” isn’t the Beast’s prisoner. He does initially demand that the merchant send his youngest daughter or he’ll kill him, but he never planned to follow through and is surprised when she actually shows up. He immediately feels terrible about it, apologizes to her, and explains that he was hoping to have someone who could remind him how to be human again (he’d gone feral for a while and had recently found his castle again and started living more like a human before her father showed up). He’s been all alone and is afraid that if he doesn’t interact with someone, he’ll lose whatever humanity he has left. He asks her to stay with him for a year, but she can leave at any time. She stays in part because she feels bad for him, but also because since her father lost his money, she’s been the one acting essentially as the servant for her father and sisters, and she could use the break. Let her sisters figure out how to cook and clean for a while. Meanwhile, he doesn’t learn until later how the curse can be broken, so he isn’t setting all this up to use her, either.

That idea that she’s on vacation and can leave any time she wants makes a difference in how the relationship feels. They’re much closer to being equals, and in novel form, we get to spend a lot more time on the development of their friendship instead of compressing it into a musical number. It’s also interesting getting his perspective, with the story told entirely from his viewpoint (in first person), so he has to guess at what she’s thinking, and he’s very much out of practice of reading other people.

One little detail I loved was that his grounds while the castle is enchanted contain gardens that stay in each of the seasons. So, say, if it’s a hot summer day, you can go to the winter garden and play in the snow. I’m not sure how the spring and autumn gardens would work, since those are transition seasons. Does the spring garden shrink back to the end of winter every so often, as soon as the trees are fully leafed out and the spring flowers have died back? Does the autumn garden re-grow the leaves after they fall? Or maybe the seasons rotate among the four gardens, so that it’s always one of the seasons in one of the gardens, but each garden goes through all the phases. They’re just out of sync with normal time so that there’s always a garden where it’s winter, fall, etc. I would pretty much live in the fall garden, I suspect, though I do also like spring.

The plot sticks fairly closely to the fairy tale, so there’s no real villain or external conflict. It’s mostly about the Beast getting his act together, and then there are some issues between the Beauty and her family. If you’re looking for a nice relaxing read that makes you feel good, this is an excellent choice. It’s going on my keeper shelf because I think it will make a good “comfort food” sort of book.

writing

Defending the Hero’s Journey

One other thing that came out of the panel on structure last weekend was a big hate for the Hero’s Journey format. I feel like I need to speak up to defend it because it’s made a huge difference in my writing. It was what taught me how to plot.

I’ve always been good at coming up with characters and situations that would lend themselves to stories. I sometimes even came up with the inciting incidents, the things that lurched the characters into the situations that would make for stories. I wrote a lot of first chapters of novels, but I couldn’t seem to get past that point. After I’d launched the story, I wasn’t sure what would happen next, what the story would actually be about.

Somehow, I managed to write and sell some books in spite of this. They were category romances, which have their own fairly rigid structure. I knew the beats I needed to hit, and I managed to write stories that hit them well enough to have them published, but I still didn’t know how to plot a book. I was trying to learn. I read a lot of how-to-write books about plotting. I tried making outlines. But it just didn’t click for me. It became more dire when the category line I was writing for folded and my editor suggested I expand the book I was working on into a single-title book, which would require me to double the length and actually have a plot.

Fortunately, around that time, someone spoke to my writing group about the Hero’s Journey, using the book written about it for writers, The Writer’s Journey, and the lightbulb went off. Everything clicked into place. The heavens opened and the angels sang. I finally understood how to plot a book.

The thing is, this structure isn’t drastically different from any other in Western storytelling (non-European-based cultures have their own story structures). They’re all just different language for describing the same thing, and this was a language that spoke to me. It really boils down to a character in a comfort zone (but not living up to their full potential), getting called to leave their comfort zone, learning things along the way, being tested on this and not fully succeeding because there’s something they’re not ready to let go of, then regrouping and trying again, and passing the final test because they can finally let go and undergo a symbolic death and resurrection.

I think a lot of the criticism comes because Hollywood glommed onto this so hard following the success of Star Wars, since George Lucas cited the influence of Joseph Campbell and his Hero with a Thousand Faces. That made this a very rigid structure that film studios follow slavishly, which can result in cookie-cutter movies. One of my issues with all those Marvel movies was that with most of them, I could predict each major event based on the Hero’s Journey by watching the clock. But if you’re looser with following the structure and don’t take it so literally, I think it’s a more useful tool. Another criticism I’ve heard is that it’s male-oriented and about separating from society, and that is what Campbell’s analysis is about, but the first book I applied it to was a small-town romance about fitting in to a community, so it doesn’t have to be about solo journeys and separations. If you look at the Jungian work that Campbell based his analysis on (yes, I’m a nerd), all the journey stuff is metaphorical, anyway, and is a representation of an interior journey. You can use the Hero’s Journey for plotting a story about someone who never goes anywhere, whose journey is strictly internal.

These days, I think I’ve internalized enough about plotting that I may not consciously use this structure to plot, and it is only one of the tools I use. It’s a good way to test a story idea to find if you’ve got enough material for a story in that idea. I use it for the big-picture plotting before I dig deeper, and I layer it with other things. Once I had that plotting epiphany because of the Hero’s Journey, all the other plot stuff I’d read made a lot more sense to me.

So, use it or don’t use it. Just find what speaks to you, what makes sense for your brain, but don’t be rigid about following anything. Unless you’re working in Hollywood, where they have their own issues, you can do whatever works for your story. If people notice your structure, you’re probably doing it wrong. The structure should exist to provide a framework for the story, with the focus on the story.

writing

Fluff, Conflict, and Stakes

Last weekend was the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Awards Conference, and one of the panels really got me started thinking. It was about story structure and looking beyond the three-act structure that’s fairly standard in modern Western storytelling, whether it’s film or novels. As part of the discussion, one of the panelists mentioned reading a lot of fan fiction during the past year because regular fiction is just too stressful. In fan fiction, you can find stories that are pure fluff, just the characters doing things like hanging out in a coffee shop and talking, with no plot or conflict. Other panelists agreed with the need for fluff, and this was discussed further in an online chat that followed the panel. I’ve seen that sort of thing mentioned a lot lately, that “fluff” is really popular among fan fiction readers, and yet we keep hearing from editors and agents that stories need more conflict and tension. I certainly would enjoy just spending time with characters I like.

But then I started thinking about it some more, and I wonder how well fluff would work outside the fan fiction realm. Would you be interested in reading about a bunch of unknown superheroes hanging around in a coffee shop and talking about their lives, or is that only interesting if it’s the Avengers—characters you already know and care about? I’m sure you could write a fun story about random superheroes in a coffee shop, but it would probably be about their work lives, which would bring in the conflict and tension. You’d have to establish something about their superhero lives for their leisure hours to have any real meaning. On the other hand, you could have Steve and Natasha hanging out in a coffee shop, with him talking about his cute new neighbor and her trying to give him tips for dating in the 21st century, and if you’re a fan of the franchise you’d already know that he’s Captain America and she’s Black Widow, and this is a scene that might have taken place between the first Avenger’s movie and Captain America: Winter Soldier. You enjoy seeing them in their free time because you’ve seen them saving the world. The same sort of thing between someone like Super Soldier and Ninja Lady, but in their civilian personas, wouldn’t have the same interest since we don’t know what their superhero lives are about, so their story would have to be about them being superheroes, or why bother making them superheroes? I’m not sure you could do pure fluff outside an existing franchise with familiar characters.

That realization sparked two big thoughts. One is that maybe it’s not fluff I’m looking for, but rather things with less dire stakes. I don’t particularly want to read about characters I don’t already care about hanging around in a coffee shop and talking, with nothing else happening. I just want to read about adventures where the fate of the world isn’t at stake. There’s got to be a happy medium between the invincible villain whose plan is to destroy half the beings in the entire universe and the coffee shop. I think the vast majority of fantasy novels I’ve read involve some ultra-powerful villain who’s going to bring about the end of the world as the heroes know it, so all will be lost if the heroes don’t stop him, and they have to fight off swarms of evil minions along the way.

One of my favorite fantasy stories, in both book and movie version, is Stardust, where the stakes are pretty much just about whether the hero is going to figure out who his true love is before he makes a big mistake that will limit his life. There is the problem of the witch who wants the star’s heart, but they only really have one encounter with her before the final confrontation (in the movie; in the book they don’t even have that final confrontation), but they’re not focusing much attention on having to fight her. Then there’s the issue of the prince trying to get the gem that will make him king, which the star has, but our hero doesn’t even know or care about this and isn’t actively in opposition. Things will probably not be super for the kingdom if this guy gets the throne, but he doesn’t seem like he’ll be any worse than any of the previous kings. The stakes are pretty much that the hero is going to ruin his life if he doesn’t figure things out, and yet I find the story utterly captivating.

I recently read a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast story (that may be its own post later), and the only thing at stake there is that the beast will be stuck as a beast unless he can break the curse. The kingdom isn’t going to be sunk into an abyss, from which demons will come pouring out, if he fails. He’ll just be stuck as a beast. No one else will know, care, or be affected. The Beauty doesn’t know that he can be saved, so even she will merely have the status quo continue. But I still found it engaging. In fact, I may care more about whether the Beast will be redeemed or whether Tristan will get his act together than I care that an imaginary world will be taken over by orcs. It’s like the saying that one death is a tragedy while many deaths are a statistic, I guess. When it’s too big to comprehend, I just shut down and don’t get emotionally involved.

I think that’s the kind of thing I’d like more of, stories where the stakes are more personal than epic, where it’s not going to be great for the characters if they fail, but the fate of the entire world isn’t at stake. It does take really strong characters and solid writing to pull that off. Making readers care and turn pages is easy when the fate of the world is at stake. Making them worry just as much that a character will have an unfulfilling life if he fails is trickier to execute.

The other thing that occurred to me from this discussion was that there’s room for authors to write these fluff stories within their own franchises. The main books may have all the big conflict, but it might be possible to write those “coffee shop” scenes for fans of the franchises. I understand that some authors do this kind of thing on Patreon. I did the one story for the Enchanted, Inc. universe that you can get if you subscribe to my newsletter, but otherwise my shorter pieces have been very plotty—not “end of the world if we fail” plotty, but still with action and conflict. Now I’m pondering if I could write the sort of fluff pieces that are popular in fan fiction for my own work and have any kind of market for them, whether selling them as individual works or doing some kind of subscription thing. It might be fun to write missing scenes for my own books, the things editors make me cut out to improve pacing but that readers might enjoy.

musicals

Catching up with Hamilton

Now that I’ve finished the movie portion of my Marvel catch-up project, I’ve turned to other things I need to catch up on, and last weekend I finally caught up with the rest of the world and watched Hamilton.

It’s a little odd that I haven’t seen it yet or even heard the cast album, given that I’m a big musical theater fan. I used to have season tickets to the touring production series, and I usually try to see a show on every trip to New York. I grew up listening to cast albums of shows I hadn’t seen. But I haven’t had the budget for live theater for the past few years, so I haven’t had those season tickets in ages, and I haven’t been to New York in a long time (not that I’d have been able to get tickets to that show). I think I was also wary of the hype, and I had a mistaken impression of what the show was. I tend to like the semi-operatic shows (Les Miserables is my favorite), and I thought this was more of a very modern hip-hop/rap thing.

But the show’s on Disney+, and I figured I needed to see it to have any musical theater nerd credibility — and I learned that I’ve been totally wrong about the show. It actually reminds me more of Les Mis than just about any other show. There are rap and hip-hop elements, but they mostly seem to function in the same way the recitative bits in Les Mis (or other semi-operatic, sung-through shows) do, as a replacement for dialogue. The staging reminds me a lot of Les Mis, with the fairly bare stage with some architecture that serves a variety of functions, then there’s the turntable, comic relief numbers mixed in with the serious dramatic monologue type songs, a basis in history, and an ending that’s tragic but with a hopeful spin.

I absolutely loved this show. I’m going to have to watch it again with subtitles to catch all the clever wordplay. The words come fast and furious at times, packing so much information in and doing it somehow with rhyme and meter. The cast album is on Prime Music, so I listened to it the next day. Supposedly, it would be my background music for housework, but I ended up just standing there and listening.

Oddly enough, of all the big, dramatic songs that I loved, the one that’s stuck in my head on a loop is King George’s song. I’m walking around the house singing that one to myself.

Anyway, I love that they have a staged version of the original cast on film like this. I wish we could have had this sort of thing for the original cast of Les Mis. Some of these shows work better in the more abstract world of the stage than they do in a more “realistic” framework as most movies are done.

So, I’m late to the game, but I did eventually make it, and it reminds me of how much I love musical theater. It may be a while before I can go to live shows (they are expensive), and it’s nice to be able to get the experience at home.

Books

Revisiting Some Old-School Fantasy

Apologies for the delayed post. My web server was having issues yesterday and wouldn’t let me post anything. All seems to be fixed today!

Earlier this year when I was looking for examples of that journey/quest that starts with bickering but turns romantic trope, I dug up some old fantasy novels I read during my college days that I thought might have been how that trope got into my brain. The first one did involve a quest and it turned romantic, so I figured I’d re-read it. It turned out not to fit, but it started a pleasant journey down memory lane of what I think of as Old School Fantasy.

The first book in this trilogy is called The Ring of Allaire, by Susan Dexter, and it has all those fantasy elements that make this book a “comfort food” sort of book. We have the somewhat inept wizard’s apprentice, the lost heir, the offstage powerful villain, the rescued damsel, and the spunky servant girl, plus a twist or two. I suppose now it might be considered a bit trite, but the first book was published in the early 80s, so all those elements weren’t quite as familiar then, and I think they’re executed well enough that I enjoyed the re-read even now, with all the books I’ve read and written. It’s fun to re-read a book when it’s been so long since you last read it that you don’t remember much about it. I did remember more of the plot elements of the first one, including the big twists, but with the second and third books in the series, I remembered just enough to be sure I’d read them before, but otherwise it was like reading a new book. In some cases, I still remembered my mental imagery of scenes from when I originally read them, but I got different mental images this time around, and I was holding both in my head at the same time. I discovered the first book in the series at the library, on one of those paperback spinner racks, during the summer between my junior and senior years of college. The library didn’t have the rest of the trilogy, so I tracked them down and bought them, along with the first one.

The story is your basic fantasy plot about the offstage super-powerful magical being whose influence is spreading throughout the land, bringing earlier and harsher winters. The wizard who might have the knowledge to fight him gets killed, leaving his not very adept young apprentice to follow his instructions and finish his mission. He has to find a lost magical stallion and the heir to a long-empty throne to go on a quest to the villain’s stronghold to retrieve the imprisoned princess whose magical rings hold the power to fight the villain.

While this plot may be standard-issue by now, the characters are utterly endearing. Our young apprentice is competent enough in a lot of areas that his sometime ineptitude when it comes to magic isn’t that annoying. He’s an adept fencer, and while he fumbles some spells, he’s also capable of magical improvisation. He’s also kind, brave, and resourceful. Then there’s his “familiar,” a cat whose thoughts he can hear in his head, and his sidekick, a little canary whose bravery is much bigger than his body. We’ve also got a blustery knight who might be the lost heir and a “damsel in distress” who’s got more gumption than you’d expect.

It’s a fun read that’s got enough familiarity to be comforting while still feeling fresh enough to be entertaining. The sequels get a little more serious and intense as they have to solidify the victory of the first book and then take the fight to the villain. I can’t say too much more about them without spoiling the first book.

I think my readers might enjoy these. They’re character-centered fantasy without the grimdark nastiness. It looks like the author has got the rights back and has reissued her own editions, so you can still find them online. I’d love to find more books like these.

writing life

Productivity

I’ve been ridiculously productive this week. I’ve passed the halfway point on Lucky Lexie 4 and have done a ton of work developing another project. I’ve done a lot of things that have probably helped with productivity. Now I’ll need to figure out which ones of them have been the cause — or possibly all of them.

I’m still working in my office, and I do think it helps because I’m in “work” mode when I’m in here and seem to waste less time. I do still take the laptop downstairs in the evenings and do some work, but it’s more “fun” work, not actual writing.

I also made up a new rule. We’ve been having a rainy spell, with it raining at least a little bit every day, so I declared that when it’s raining, I get to have a change of pace, stop working on the current manuscript, and spend time developing another project. That feels like play, and it means my “break” time is still productive work time. I did a lot of work on the main characters this week. Next I’m going to work on figuring out my villains. I may have to figure out a different trigger for these breaks once the rainy spell ends. It needs to be something that can happen at any time during the day and that won’t likely last much longer than an hour or so. I’ve thought about designating certain composers for breaks since I keep the classical radio station on all day. Depending on the work, that can go from five minutes to half an hour. They publish a playlist that lets me know ahead of time when a work is coming up, so doesn’t have that “oh, hey, it’s raining, break!” moment of surprise, but it’s still something I don’t control, so it might work. Or I could attempt to be an adult with self-control and allow myself to take breaks to work on something else for a little while instead of scrolling Twitter, but not abuse it and take breaks when I feel stuck instead of working through the problem.

The other thing I did was make an alteration in my routine. It sometimes takes me forever to actually get to my desk and start working in the morning. I dawdle over my morning tea as I read the newspaper, do some journal writing, and then get sidetracked. I wasn’t sure if I was avoiding work or just lingering over my tea. My normal routine is to finish my tea, then go brush my teeth, get dressed for the day, and then go to work. This week, I got dressed when I got up, then after breakfast if I was still drinking my tea, I took the tea to my desk and worked until I finished my tea, and then went and brushed my teeth and tidied the bedroom and bathroom before going back to work. I ended up getting to my desk about half an hour earlier than usual and got a head start on my work. It seems I wasn’t putting off getting to work. I just was reluctant to stop sipping my tea. This may not apply on the days when it’s nice enough to have my tea on the patio and get some outdoor time, but I can do some planning and outlining out there.

Since I’m making good progress on the book, I don’t think I’m going to take the Memorial Day holiday. I need to keep moving forward. First, though, I’m going to have to figure out how the book is actually going to end. I had something in mind, but now that I’m halfway through the book, I’m less keen on it and may need to rethink it, and I need to come up with the specifics. I sort of know what’s going to happen, but I’m not exactly sure how it will happen.

movies

Wrapping up the Avengers

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been watching all (well, most of) the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, and I’ve found myself oddly captivated. They’re really eating into my brain. I watched Avengers: Endgame Monday night, so I’m pretty much done with that arc. While I’ve enjoyed these films, I have to say that I think I’m more intrigued by the possibilities for these stories than I am by the actual movies.

These are great characters, and they’re perfectly cast, with the actors truly embodying the characters. I haven’t read the comic books, so I don’t know how well they compare to that. But they just seem right to me, with what we see on the screen mostly matching what the movies tell us about them. But my frustration is that the really good stuff (at least, the stuff I was interested in) seemed to mostly happen offscreen. In that last movie, we finally got a lot of good, emotional character moments, with the characters on their own and dealing with things or interacting with each other when it wasn’t a life-or-death manner. That was the sort of thing we needed more of along the way because we needed to establish those relationships for the stuff that happened in the last two movies to really have impact.

One thing I feel like they skipped was Steve Rogers (Captain America) adapting to modern times. We went straight from him realizing he was in the 21st century, having skipped straight from World War II at the end of his first movie, to having been around for a bit at the beginning of the first Avengers movie. There were a couple of lines referring to him being more old-fashioned or straitlaced, then a joke about him actually getting a pop culture reference, and then they practically forgot he was from the 1940s.

I also felt like they skipped over the team building process for the Avengers. We had some contrived conflict when they first came together, then they had to work together to save the day, and the next time we see them, they’re a well-oiled machine. Characters who’d barely interacted were acting like best friends and working seamlessly together. That’s the part that would have been fun to see. How did Thor and Captain America become good friends and an effective fighting team? If we’d seen a little more about how that relationship developed, one of the big moments in Endgame would have had a lot more impact.

In some cases, I wasn’t sure what the relationship was supposed to be. I saw some commentaries on Civil War about how terrible it was that Tony and Steve were at odds because it destroyed their wonderful friendship. I hadn’t realized they were supposed to have been friends. It would have helped if we’d seen some development of their relationship and where their points of conflict were because there was a lot of potential material there. As it was, I was on Team Steve and felt like the others had all forgotten what they knew about him, but I didn’t feel any great loss for whatever relationship there was between Tony and Steve.

I really feel robbed that we didn’t get the story of what came after Civil War, when Steve, Natasha, Sam, and Wanda were apparently rogue and on the run. That would have made an amazing movie. I guess they were impatient to get to Infinity War and had a packed schedule, but I wish they’d managed to squeeze that one in—just a good adventure movie about trying to deal with the things the other heroes weren’t able to deal with while avoiding getting caught.

Unfortunately, when my brain feels like something is incomplete, it wants to complete it, so even though I don’t know enough about this universe to really write something, my brain is trying to mentally write the stuff we didn’t get to see while also rewriting what we did see. I can’t afford to use up that much mental energy on something like this! Maybe it’ll find a way to pull out the elements I like and rework it into my own story, but I’m not sure I could pull off rewriting the Avengers but filing off the serial numbers and putting it into my own universe to make my own story that covers the stuff I wanted to see.

Now that I’m more or less caught up (there’s still a Spider-Man movie, but it’s not urgent), I can start on the new Disney Plus series. I watched the first WandaVision last night, and the sitcom format may be too much for me. While other kids hid behind the sofa for things like Daleks, it was things like I Love Lucy and Gilligan’s Island that sent me behind the sofa, unable to bear the cringeworthy embarrassment of the sitcom misunderstandings and other idiot plotting. I know there’s more going on, so I’ll stick with it, but it may be more tense for me than all those invincible villains.

writing

Fitting in Niches

Because I really need to sell more books, I’ve been reading a lot about the business of publishing. And it seems that I’ve been doing one thing wrong if I want to make money. I’m apparently writing the wrong books.

My general way of deciding what books to write has started with the ideas I have, and that usually comes from me thinking of a kind of book I really want to read, trying to find it, not being able to find it, and then writing it myself. From a creative standpoint, that’s not a bad method. It means you love what you write, and it may mean you’re filling an unserved niche. I see people giving the advice to write the book you want to read but can’t find all the time.

From a sales and marketing standpoint, it doesn’t work so well. If you’re going the traditional publishing route, you run up against the problem of “comps” or comparable titles. When a publisher is trying to decide whether or not they want to publish a book, they want to get an idea of how well it might sell, and to do that, they look at other books that are similar. If there are no similar books, they can’t get the numbers to put in their spreadsheet. That’s when you get the “I love this but wouldn’t know how to market it” rejections. They have to really, really feel strongly about a book and have some other reason to think it might be successful to go for a book they can’t find comps for.

In independent publishing, all the advice is to look at the categories and make sure your book fits well within a category that sells well but that isn’t so crowded that your book will be lost. You try to find as narrow a category as possible, then hit all the expected tropes for that category and make sure that your cover makes it really obvious that it belongs in that category. There’s software to help you analyze the categories that tells you about how many books you need to sell a day to make the top ten of your category.

When you’re writing the book you want to read and can’t find, that gets difficult because your book doesn’t fit well in any one category, it doesn’t have the popular tropes readers are looking for, and the expected style of cover in that category doesn’t fit your book.

With that fantasy book I’ve been working on, the one with the journey that leads to romance, you’d think that would fit obviously into a category, but it doesn’t. The “fantasy—romantic” category isn’t really that thing at all. If I were to describe what’s there, I’d lure a lot of spambots (let’s just say there are a lot of covers with bare, sculpted male torsos). I kind of wish there were a separate category for books that aren’t quite as focused on the romance and that aren’t so steamy. I wouldn’t really consider it epic fantasy. It’s not based on fairy tales. It doesn’t have magical creatures (maybe I should throw in a dragon so I can go with that category). It’s got sorcery but no swords, so isn’t sword and sorcery. I’m not sure how they define “historical” fantasy. It’s secondary world and not based on any particular culture, period, or place in our world, though it does deal with the history of that world.

The problem for me is that I don’t seem to have story ideas in the obvious, strong categories. My ideas almost always come from the place of “I want to read this and I can’t find it.” I know there are a lot of other readers like me out there who want those books, too. The trick is finding them and making sure they can find my books. That’s where I have to rely on my readers telling other readers about them. That’s the best way for like-minded people to be able to find the books they want.

I do think that the Kindle Unlimited program skews the perception of the trends and tropes, though. Those are readers who are paying a set price per month for all the books they want to read, and I think when you’re not paying for each book individually but can read all you want of the sort of thing you like, you choose books differently. If you remove the KU books from the bestseller list, the remaining books look very different. The problem is that the KU books tend to fill the Amazon bestseller lists, so everything else gets buried. Maybe it looks different on other retailers, but their interfaces aren’t quite as easy to scroll through. This is part of why I keep my books on wide release instead of in KU. I don’t think I fit the niches that do well in KU, and I’d lose the readers who don’t buy books through Amazon.

Books

More Recent Reading: Witches and Portals

I really have been lax in discussing my reading. I’m finding books even farther back in my records that I haven’t mentioned. Today, I’ve got a book that I think might appeal to adult (and maybe older teen) readers who enjoyed Rebel Mechanics: The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow.

This is an alternate history fantasy in a world where there really had been witches, before they were hunted down and burned. Their knowledge has survived in nursery rhymes and charms, seemingly harmless bits of magic, but there may be more out there. A trio of sisters who’ve been separated all find each other again when they move to a city where women are organizing to try to get the vote, and they realize that there’s other power they could reclaim, while they’re at it. But women with magic and the vote are very threatening to those who already have the power.

This book has a very dreamlike quality. I don’t so much remember reading it as I remember seeing the events play out, like the words in the book are merely a portal you travel through to enter the world of the story, and then you find yourself wondering if you really went there or if it was just a dream. That may be why I didn’t remember to discuss it. On the one hand, the story seems very grounded in actual history, reflecting the kind of cities that existed in the late 1800s, but on the other hand it’s a fantastical world where magic exists and there are shadowy threats. Our heroines are three very different sisters who fit the “strong female character” description without being what that cliché usually brings to mind. There are no Rambos in drag here, just intelligent, determined women who stand up against the things that are with the hope that they could be different.

Like Rebel Mechanics, this is an alternate history set in a different version of Victorian-era America with magic and a kind of revolution taking place, with an underground movement against the powers that be. It’s written for adults, so it’s a bit grittier than Rebel Mechanics with what might be called “mature themes,” but I do think a lot of my readers might like it. In some respects, it also reminds me of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, though in a different setting and time period—it’s got that element of magic being something forgotten and revived and a magical figure from the past playing a role. Plus that dreamlike quality that makes you wonder if you really read it or if all those events were just a dream.

I also recommend The Ten Thousand Doors of January by the same author. It’s sort of a portal fantasy, about a girl adopted by a mysterious man whose mansion is full of strange things. She finds a notebook that tells about intersections with other worlds. It’s also got that dreamlike quality that makes it hard for me to describe what the book’s actually about even as my mental images from reading it remain intensely vivid.

movies

Watching Superheroes

Over the past few months, I’ve been catching up on the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. I hadn’t seen any of them other than the first Guardians of the Galaxy at the theater. I was familiar with some of the characters from previous TV series and movies but am not a comics reader. It’s not a snob thing, it’s just that the comics style of storytelling doesn’t work well for me. I’m getting close to the end (so far, and then there are the follow-up TV series). This week’s movie is Black Panther. Then there are a couple more Avengers films.

I skipped the second and third Iron Man movies because I just don’t like that character. I can tolerate him somewhat in small doses in movies with other characters, but I don’t enjoy him as the focus. I’m more of a Captain America gal, and as of Civil War, that makes me even more firmly anti-Iron Man.

But that conflict between the characters is actually something that bugs me. Just about all of the movies in which there’s more than one superhero involve a fight between the heroes. It reminds me of the inevitable “who would win in a fight?” discussions that tend to come up in forums. What if Iron Man and Thor fought? How about Captain America and Thor? What about Iron Man vs. the Hulk? Hulk vs. Thor? Iron Man vs. Captain America? Maybe that’s something that comes up in the comic books, but all I can think is that they’re all supposed to be heroes and working together, so they’re wasting their time and energy fighting each other. The one time I’ll kind of accept it is Thor vs. Hulk in Thor: Ragnarok, since in that case Hulk wasn’t in his right mind and had been forced to fight. As soon as he came back to his senses, he worked with Thor. Otherwise, it just seems like self-indulgent “who could beat up whom?” fanboyism that wastes valuable screen time. There may also be some lazy writing in there, like they don’t know what to do about a midpoint action sequence that doesn’t defeat either the villains or the heroes, so they make it a hero vs. hero fight.

I think my favorite of the movies so far has been Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It played out more like a spy thriller, and there wasn’t really any hero vs. hero action, aside from the fact that Cap’s own organization seemed to be after him. But he wasn’t against any of the other Avengers. I also rather liked Doctor Strange, but that’s probably because it was more of a fantasy film than a “superhero” film. Ant Man was a lot of fun. I still tend to get bored during the big, climactic action sequences. I think they go a bit too over the top because they get so ridiculous that I don’t really care anymore. Maybe more focus on the people without all the crazy CGI would help.

Still, this has been a fun project, a good way to spend Friday nights. I make popcorn, curl up on the sofa, and pretend I’m at a movie theater, except I’m in my pajamas. I don’t know what I’ll do when I finish, but with the two follow-up series, I’ll have material to keep me going for ages. Maybe a rewatch of all the old Disney stuff.