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.

writing life

Back to the Office

For the past week or so, I’ve been doing something unusual for me: I’ve been working in my office. I have a rather nice office space in my house. It’s the upstairs bedroom, which is kind of like a writer’s garret. It’s right under the sloping roof, so it has a high, sloping ceiling and a skylight. The window in the room is a sliding glass door that leads to a balcony. There’s plenty of natural light and I seldom have to turn on a lamp during daylight hours. When I first moved in to this house, this room was my bedroom and the office was in the downstairs bedroom. The idea was that I could come home from work and run in and out of my office to cook dinner, do laundry, etc., and get some writing done, and then at the end of the day I could go up to my bedroom and be away from it all.

Then I started working from home and that arrangement no longer made sense. The upstairs room gets pretty bright and stays light, thanks to that skylight, while the downstairs room has one small window in a corner. It’s not really a room you want to work in all day. So, I switched the rooms. I could go upstairs to work, then my living space would be all downstairs.

That worked for a few years, and then I started migrating around the house. My internet connection was at my desk, and I’d disconnect and sit elsewhere to write. Then I got wi-fi, and I started migrating for everything. I even got a little laptop desk to put in front of the sofa so I could use the computer more easily there. I wrote my last four or five books sitting mostly on my bed (yes, in the room that I found too unpleasant to work in when it was the office). Meanwhile, because the office was upstairs and out of the way, it became more of a storage space. If I needed to quickly clean the downstairs, I’d just toss things in the office and shut the door.

I started working to reclaim the office last year, and the area around my desk is getting close to the way I want it to be, so I gave working there a shot last week. This room can get warm in hot weather and the ceiling fan hasn’t been working, so I’d bought a small fan. Much to my surprise, when I turned on the ceiling fan last week, it worked. I also had to replace the pillow I use to adapt my desk chair to me. It seems to be designed for a much larger person, and the pillow I’d been using disintegrated. Now the place is more or less comfortable.

I still have work to do in the office to make it ideal, but I’m liking working in here. I feel more like I’m going to work in the morning when I go to a dedicated room than when I sit on my bed or the sofa, and I feel like I’m ending work at the end of the day. I do take the laptop to the living room because there are some things I like to read while I’m watching the news in the evening, and that’s where I do my Norwegian lessons, but that feels different from having worked there all day.

I may eventually need different office furniture, since what I have was bought for when I was telecommuting and had both a desktop computer and my work laptop. The desk may be more than I need now and takes up a lot of space, and I need a chair that fits me better. Redecorating isn’t a huge priority yet, though. I need to work in the office for more than a week to get a better sense of it, and I need to finish purging, organizing, and cleaning. I’m adding some plants and maybe some other decor to make it more “me,” but anything major will have to wait.

In the meantime, we’ll see if it makes me more productive to have an actual “work” space.

Books

Magical Regency

I have yet another recommended read. This one is for the Jane Austen (or Georgette Heyer, or Regency or Georgian romance in general) fans. If you love all those stories about the social season/marriage market and young women who desperately need to marry well in order to save their family fortunes, but you wish they had more magic in them, check out The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk.

In this world, once women are married, they’re stopped from being able to use magic. One young woman is determined not to have that happen to her. She wants to be a sorceress, but her family needs her to marry well. Things get complicated when she meets another young woman from a very wealthy family who also would rather pursue magic than marriage, but then there’s her handsome brother, who really likes our heroine. As handsome and kind as he is, is he worth losing magic for? Both young women are running out of time to make a decision and take action because their families are trying to arrange marriages for them.

I’m definitely in the “I love Jane Austen, but those books could use more magic” camp, so this book was right up my alley. It’s a secondary-world fantasy, so it’s an imaginary world, not Georgian England, but it still has all those things we like about stories set in that world, while also having a lot of other cultures, social rules, and magic. It’s a much richer world than in your typical Regency romance, and while some of the ways women are constrained seem harsh, they’re probably not any worse than the way women really were treated in our world. The characters are endearing and spirited, and speaking of spirits, there’s the luck spirit who gets summoned and enjoys the opportunity to live vicariously through her hostess. Seeing the spirit’s joy at so many simple pleasures made me think about taking opportunities to savor moments, to eat strawberries and run on the beach (or woods; I’m not really a beach person and there isn’t one handy).

While there’s a lot of romance in this book and the most obvious comparisons are to Regency romances, it’s not actually a romance. It’s mostly about the struggle to obtain all the magic they can get before they can be forced to marry and the way they’re trying to navigate in this challenging world that’s set up to go against them. Having everything they want will require them to change their world.

Books

Creeping in to New York

I obviously like New York stories, given how many of my books take place there. I suppose in a way New York was my fantasy world when I was growing up. I knew that was the place where Broadway was, which was where I wanted to be. Later, I thought of it as where the news networks were headquartered and as the setting for most of the romantic comedies, so it was where my fantasy adult life took place. That shows in my books, I think, because I write New York as a fantasy world that’s accurate in some respects (you could probably map the city based on my descriptions, and it takes the right amount of time to walk places) but is probably wildly inaccurate for the actual experience of living in the city.

If you want a probably more truthful view of the city but still with fantasy elements, check out The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin. It’s kind of an updated Lovecraftian horror (without the racism) about the thing from the realm beyond that’s trying to make its way into our world, taking advantage of the moment when New York becomes a living city. Tapped to fight the battle for the city are people who become avatars of the boroughs, and they have to find the avatar of the city as a whole before the thing gets to him. Meanwhile, they have to find a way to deal with the inroads the thing is making, as it manifests in very real horrors, like alt.right trolls, gentrifying foundations that are backed by corporations, and “Karens” who call the police like they’re trying to speak to the manager.

This is a powerful, thought-provoking book that I could barely put down. It gave me a very different perspective on New York than my usual tourist point of view and made me think about the many different kinds of people who make up the city. The sense of place was so strong that it made me homesick for New York. It’s been far too long since my last visit. I was a little leery of the horror elements, but it’s not that scary. I think the more “realistic” horrors were more frightening. They may not be powered by eldritch horrors from another realm (or are they?) but “Karens” do exist. I’m less worried about giant tentacles from beyond. The characters really grew on me, getting under my skin so that I couldn’t help but emphasize with them, even though they were all very different from me.

I’d recommend this for those who like the Enchanted, Inc. books but are up for something grittier and scarier and who want to broaden their horizons about what New York is.

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.