In a shocking turn of events, I appear as a guest on Marie’s podcast to compare our experiences in the world of higher education.
Year: 2013
Bloody Fairy Tales
Terri Windling was the best editor of the 90s; while she was in the business it seemed everything she touched turned to gold. I’m especially fond of the Adult Fairy Tales series she edited for Tor Books, which gave us novels like Charles de Lint’s Jack the Giant Killer and Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose. Her involvement seemed to bring out the best in writers. Snow White, Blood Red (1993) is the best multi-author anthology I’ve yet read; unsurprisingly, Terri Windling was involved. Together with Ellen Datlow, she assembled a group of stories that took direct inspiration from Angela Carter’s famous fairy tale retellings in The Bloody Chamber. Twenty-one adult fairy tales by twenty-one different authors. All of them are a delight to read.
Swordswomen
I shamelessly admit that I bought Ellen Kushner’s The Privilege of the Sword solely for the cover. Note to publishers: if you put a lady with a rapier on a novel, I will snatch it off the shelf. Thankfully, the novel delivered woman-with-rapier in spades and I enjoyed myself immensely. I’ve gone back to it three times as a comfort read since then.
Strangely, there aren’t that many novels out there in the fantasy field about women duelling with rapiers, which is probably why I keep going back to this one. I’ve got a craving for this kind of character.
Hugo Post-mortem
The Hugo awards have come and gone. I’ve found the Hugo a pretty erratic indicator of whether a book is worth reading; the award has gone to highly-regarded classics as well as ephemeral fluff ever since it began. The World Fantasy Award is probably the only award that actually steers me consistently towards good (or at least readable) books, but my opinion of other sf awards is essentially the same as my opinion of the Hugo: meh. The Hugo is best viewed as a barometer of what was trending the previous year; what the sf community bought regardless of quality. It’s held as something far more than that, so inevitably September is also a month of bloggers complaining about the Hugos. This year’s no exception.
Y’all Should Read Nalo Hopkinson
I finished reading Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) a few days ago and am currently working my way through her short story collection Skin Folk (2001), and I’m once again experiencing a Jane Yolen moment where I suddenly need to hunt down and devour anything I can get by Hopkinson because she’s such a fantastic writer. I’m also utterly baffled that I hadn’t read anything by her before; she’s a Canadian sf author and I’m always trying to keep up with my “scene”, but I obviously haven’t been doing a very good job. I mean, Brown Girl in the Ring was a selection for the 2008 CBC Canada Reads thing (it’s like a reality show but about books and on the radio…I’m not exactly the biggest fan) and has blurbs from Tim Powers, C.J. Cherryh and Octavia Butler; for a first novel, that’s damn impressive. Anyway, from what I’ve read so far, Hopkinson might well be the best writer I know of working in Canada, and I’m including Margaret Atwood, Guy Gavriel Kay and Charles de Lint in that group.
Twithulhu
In his house in R’lyeh, Great Cthulhu lies dreaming…of her.
So it’s happened. A few days ago, Serra Elinsen released Awoken upon the world, a paranormal romance wherein the love interest is none other than Great Cthulhu itself. It seems Cthulhu, in response to a prophecy that a teenage girl will prevent the coming of Azathoth, materializes in a high school as the mysterious and handsome Riley Bay, and captures the heart of our heroine, Andromeda Slate.
What.
And a Rough Draft Done
Over two years and 94,000 words since I started working on my novel, I finally have a complete first draft. That’s 325 pages, an extra hundred if set in Courier font like you’re supposed to. I typed “The End” yesterday, not so much with triumph but with resignation. The story had gone everywhere it could possibly go, the characters had reached a point of peace, satisfaction, and the adventure was over.
This was a long process, probably longer than it should have been. Had I known the ending when I started, I would’ve had an easier time reaching it instead of just releasing the characters and hoping they’d go somewhere. I’m not distant enough from the ending I just wrote to accurately judge if it fulfills the promise of the early chapters. I guess I’ll find out.
Behold!
A Remington typewriter obtained this Saturday! From the Carcross Dump!
Episode 9 – Beyond Hungerdome
Two podcasters enter. One podcaster leaves.
In this eleventh episode, we discuss Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, and ponder over the oddity of the Capitol’s urban planning.
Hanging on to Every Word
I have never considered myself a fast reader. My reading rate has increased since I finished my Master’s degree—probably because I was doing so much of it—but I still rarely polish off a book in an afternoon unless it’s as short as Stardust. I’m not a very fast writer either. My secret in grad school to finishing my essays early was that I started them very early. Once I deemed my research complete (that is, when all my secondary sources started referring to each other) I would draft an outline and start as soon as I could. Fiction has rarely come easy to me. A story is a long and twisty process entailing multiple drafts, rewrites, starts and stops. A good short story requires months of work, but not continuous; I think of the process as interrupted islands of devotion in-between the rest of life.
One Last Sketch 