Bad, Bad, Bad

Sorry...I've been bad and not updated in a bit. I don't want to make excuses, so I'll just post an update about what's been going on...

I've been looking for work. I started out a year ago optimistic that my shiny BA would get me an office job, I'm now submitting resumes to cafe and thinking of returning to the Barista life. Anything would be good.

That said, I've also shifted gears completely with my writing. I have switched and caved, researching the City (San Fransisco) to place a story there. Yes, Urban fantasy. If the character were not so loud, I'd have ignored the whole concept. Lara will be a suitable culmination of my interest in Chinese and Celtic (Irish) cultures/mythology, Northern California history and geography.

Erica, Lily and I are discussing (very preliminary stages) opening a bookstore. Like with Lara I am in the research phase of this endeavor. So there is a long way to go, but it has been a bit consuming.

I have followed iPad news, and I will discuss that tomorrow :D

Until then!

Drea

Popular Fiction and Quality Fiction

Fiction that writers and publishers shower praise on and those which soar up the bestseller lists are rarely the same. I do believe that there is value in both, but they are of completely different types. Taste and preference impact our attitudes and buying patterns. It is a mistake to think that there is a solid thing as "good writing." While some of us still love the classics (Austin, Shakespeare, Jules Verne, etc) we must admit that when we open such books we have to tell ourselves "well, this was written in a different era." We invent excuses "This is from a time when the attention span was longer," and seem to accept modern "limitations" as a difference of physical capability rather than preference.

Only, our brains look no different now than they did two hundred years ago. For that matter, since the appearance of the first homo sapien sapiens, there has been no change in capability.

Culture has changed: technology, communication, language and with them philosophy, behavior, and taste. It makes sense that in Old English it was proper to say 'aksed' and that a child in the modern American school system is chastised for the same pronunciation. "Proper language" shifts, just as all things do.

If that is the case, the definition of "good writing" is a recognition of the preferences of the era. They will evolve and shift in response to "groundbreaking" works respected in the writers' circles.

But best sellers aren't necessarily concerned with quality. Often it is the ability to master character which draws the populace to reading these books, but the reactions readers have to these characters further illustrate that it is all a matter of preference. For instance, I read a blog post discussing Twilight. The author of the post enjoyed the book and attacked those who dismissed it as bad writing. The one point of contention I have is with the the analysis of Bella. The blog author likes Bella's character because she believes it to be realistic. Obviously, plenty of readers agree. I personally, don't care if it is realistic. I don't read a book to get as pissed at the characters' whining as I did with my fellow teenagers in High School. When I was in high school, I read to be exposed to something more. Yes, a bit of escapism was essential then and it still is now. Which means that I want to identify with my characters, but I also want to like them. Who I like in real life and on the page amounts to my own personality and taste. When encountering characters we bring our own histories and baggage to play, our own perceptions of reality and our own preferences. So taste enters the picture.

Starting New

New ideas do strike me. I have had a hard time focusing on them, but now the time comes. I do want to be published. I don't know how long Silver Mask or Traitor Born will take to get there. I have been playing with a bunch of new (no-Don-Yin) ideas. But depression due to joblessness has attacked my self-confidence and I haven't finished a draft of either.

So here is my new effort: off Don-Yin Stories--

Lara Lam (Urban fantasy)
Kymana (Sword and Sorcery)

The goal will be stand alone -manuscripts that could use a sequel but don't need them.

Let's see how I do!

A Character Day

So I posted on SWS' Blog a day late today, and it was about characters derailing the storyline.

Now I want to discuss what I as a reader like in characters and how this might help in writing and revisions. I like struggle, internal to the character. A lot of writers like to approach this from a moralistic perspective and that can make for an exciting story. My favorites are battles against expectations (usually social) which force characters to confront and or develop a stronger sense of self. (Yes, I'm a sucker for self-discovery). This can also tread the moral ground when a character has to stick up for what he/she "knows" is right, but the society (of which they are a part) disagrees. Or, perhaps the achievement of the goal forces some moral flexibility or unavoidable actions which creates a crisis in the hero's self-image (they could not avoid some terrible immoral act). This creates the gray area, or the gray character.

But I don't always need or want this grayness. Sometimes I want the author's word choice to shape the characters just-so-much that I care. How do you do that, though?

In revisions of Novel One, I am stepping far closer to characters than I ever have. I am trying to to see the world through their eyes. I have everything so neatly drawn in my mind. I know so much. But what do the characters know? In an effort to bring the characters to the fore, the story lines change. I want the reader's interest in the characters to pull the story through, but I have never taken this tact before (exactly) because I was afraid that "nothing would happen." The path the characters might take me on might lead through an insane number of details that may or may not pull the reader into the story.

So is the answer as simple as keeping the characters morally ambiguous or otherwise in crisis, to keep them interesting?

On the Rules

I'm starting to plunge into the latest rewrite of Silver Mask. I feel like I'm doing two things: returning to my original vision, but altering the current pace. The alterations the draft has undergone, partially due to the number of eyes I had go over the whole thing. Rather than attempting to identify my audience right off, I let varied critique groups tug at my confidence and fill me with rules i hadn't considered. My second-guessing and eagerness to produce a publishable manuscript left me open to their "rules" which led away from what "knew" was true.

Now, I am figuring out what to ignore, as well as establishing where I want to go with my work. Here is a sampling of my ideas:

What I was told--

1) Be wary of similes in Fantasy, your readers might take them literally.
2) Authors need to keep the passages focused on actions to keep readers' interest.
3) Readers' attention spans are short, so be careful of poetry, longer sentences, etc--they won't get subtlety.

What I now think of these things--

1) Similes represent symbolic thought. We don't think literally, and if well-crafted, the simile will not confuse the reader.

2) I subscribed to action for the longest time before realizing that it was my lack of description (which I was already aware of my issues with) that were holding the story back. I had liked the idea of having integrated action and description all the way through a book , start to end. I felt that this would hold the reader's attention better. I was wrong. I now believe that through description with interspersed action (still placing emphasis on setting the scene rather than on what exactly the character is doing)I will create a more solid visual base upon which the reader will extrapolate and attach meaning in following passages.

3) Shorter attention spans is an oversimplified manner of looking at a cultural shift. Yes, we listen to soundbites. Yes Twitter is insanely popular; and yes, action packed books sell well--but we are also an increasingly visual society. Did it ever occur to anyone that action-packed stories require a sort of picture-building that makes the visceral reality of a book take solid shape in the reader's mind? I do think this is part of the equation. An overlooked part. So for Epic fantasy, more descriptive works are preferred because the description allows the world and thus the characters in it, to attain the sort of life the reader is looking for.

Now I'm working on carefully building each scene and the process is teaching me where the real holes in the manuscript are. Yay for the learning experience.

Writerly Things

So all of my research (read: blog reading) and my writing is meeting in the middle. I am starting short stories, which I will be seeking to publish after they go through the critique-group ringer. I lover my group, honest, they make me a better writer. But the aim of these short stories is going to be completely different than any I've attempted before. And yet--they could work really well for world building.

Idea: Trace my pseudo-SF world's history which begins with the death of Earth. In short story form, because I'm really a Fantasy writer, and I can only dwell on these depressing science based worlds for so long. But the future world is a bit of a parody of our own, and lets me play with pseudo-academic discourse. The whole thing is fashioned after an idea that the histories of my fantasy world are being translated (and there's an attempt at explaining them, too) by people from a scientific world. Ethnocentrism exudes from the Chontaulleans in their attempt to understand the Yinnians (my fantasy peoples). And at the heart of the debate is the fact that reality is as we see it. But that's big-picture. Small-picture is that as I piece it together and build up the Chontaullean society, there will be many situations for interesting dialogue.

And for the writer, it'll be fun to set up the ultra-rational and hierarchical Chontaull as a satire for the Western World. Take the "we know all" attitude and shove so many holes in it....

Not in a scientific sense, but in the relationships of the many societies I create to play with. I get my kicks watching the products of said societies interact. Yes. Dialogue. Plot. Cultural difference as a tension building device, where both people are right, and are only wrong because they try to force their reality on others and are ignorant of the fact that that is what they are doing. We are trapped in our own perspectives, and good and evil are constructs of these. No one is one or the other, but both. Good intentions lead down dangerous paths sometimes...and everything is about values, beliefs, experiences, etc.

That is why I write, I want to walk these edges and find the answer to human nature in fiction. Ambitious, I know, and improbable. But then, perhaps all I need is to uncover my own perspective to succeed.

A Bit of Market Analysis for E-Readers

I'm not an iPad lover. I'm still looking for the ideal e-reader, but one requirement of my e-reader will be versatility. I, as a consumer in the 18-34 age range want an all in one device, or something close to it. I want an e-reader/laptop replacement. The iPad is not that.

So I got confused when a few blogs I've been following featured links to articles that praised the iPad. Was I completely wrong? Was the cafe hangout and discussion session I had with my friends poor selection of the consumer market? At a loss, I went to quantcast.com to see exactly who was reading these articles. What I discerned was that the greatest segment of the audiences of latimes.com and huffingtonpost.com are 35 to over 50 years of age. Generation X and Babyboomer readers, that's who their selling the iPad too.

Fair. Wiki Millenial or Gen Y and you can see that the 18-34 year olds are facing the greatest level of global unemployment in decades. So are we buying? Or are Gen X and Babyboomers expected to buy for us?

If so, they better make a stop by Gizmodo,where a greater number of our generation follow the gadget-news. There, the iPad is a joke. It doesn't meet the expectations of the up-and-coming generation. Sorry, Apple. We went for the iPhone and iPad, but you can't use the same tech over and over and keep our loyalty thus.

So the gamble the iPad (Apple) and the Publishers investing in it are making is based on the buying power of the Babyboomers. I love my parents, but such a marketing strategy is shortsighted.

I really would like to know how short-sighted marketing and production is going to help our economy. But -- I'm just speaking from a Millenial-consumer perspective here.