Reading
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Writing Report, April 2019
Writing As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.
April didn’t go quite as intended.
On the one hand, I did cross another milestone: I wrote “The End” at the end(?) of my novel(?). Use use the (?)s because . . . well . . . it was the logical “end” of the story, although it does leave things in a rather prickly situation. Which is great if you know there’s going to be a book 2. Not so much if it’s supposed to be stand-alone. But I’ve never envisioned this as a stand-alone. And only once I get it rearranged and retooled will it be a novel. But as it stands as I write this between projects at work on April 30th, it is not a novel. “Novel” implies a sort of structure. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Character arcs. Coherent . . . ness. As it stands, it is 110,000+ words of . . . loosely related anecdotes involving the same characters and in the same universe.
So, yeah, it is not a novel. There are threads left dangling, characters mentioned once and never brought up again, a suddenly appearing thirteen-year-old son of a secondary character who was convenient to use as a hostage in the final confrontation scene . . . Kid doesn’t even have a name. I called him [HAL’S SON].
I discovery-wrote my way into some cool stuff, including finding the perfect location in which to set much of my action (and causing a huge difference in the different parts of the story as I have three locations. The final one is a place that is very Atlanta, which is what I want. If my story could take place anywhere, then what’s the point of setting it in Atlanta other than convenience? Most Atlantans will recognize the location I’ve chosen if they have ever driven through Spaghetti Junction, and those who aren’t in Atlanta can google the location and see the structure I’m describing. So it works out.
Last month, I said, naïvely, that I wanted to finish the thing in April, “so that I can start on the rewrite.”
Yeah.
About that . . .
No. :)
What had happened was . . . I kept coming up with things to change the plot, not augment it. New ideas about how my magic system works. Who can do what and why. (More of) What my adversary’s reasons are for doing what he’s doing. Etc. So I work through those by free-writing them, and then I also have other ideas for stories, and I’ve written those down with enough notes to help me remember everything without inflicting another Skullcosm on myself.
Because that was all infinitely more interesting than continuing to attempt to revise and submit some of my finished stories. I mean, I did spruce up one called “C Is for Clowns that Creep Through the Yard” (alt title: “Coulromisia”) and submitted that as my work to be critiqued for Write Here, Write Now, which starts day after tomorrow (as I type this). It’s one of the darker things I’ve written. We’ll see what the critters have to say. :) But that is the only story I did anything with in April. I didn’t even submit the rejected story from March to another market because, frankly, I forgot. <sigh>
Here’s my report.
April 2019 Writing Report Goal Progress
Finish This Damned Novel– Yay!Rewrite This Damned Novel – . . .
Three More Novel Outlines– Did that as one of my free-writing. So I have enough on all three to participate on a plot break on any or all of them. I think. We shall see which one I pick. :) The problems I have with all three is that they’re too similar to things that already exist, and I need more. Or maybe abandon the ideas if I can’t make them into anything coherent.Write Here, Write Now – I leave tomorrow (as I type this; May 1, 2019)
Read Forty Books – Meh. Maybe if they’re really short books, I can catch up? I have read a lot of short stories and reference stuff. But those don’t count on Goodreads. Well, except the reference books. I have one on autopsies, one on blood spatter, and one on crime scene investigation. You know, a little light reading. :)
Submit Things To Places – May. May is a good month to send Things out. To Places.
- The word I was fishing around for was ‘cohesion.’
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Writing Report, February 2019
Writing As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.
February was productive, but it wasn’t as productive as previous months. I wrote, but not a lot. But I did write every single day, rain or shine, in the mood or not, tired or perky, and made progress on short stories and my novel. I even <gasp> liked some of what I wrote! I KNOW! It’s so not me. I even submitted one of my older stories to another market in the hopes that it’ll find a home. Yes, I should submit more stories and more often. Working on that. Maybe an addition to my spreadsheet . . .
In addition to writing, I gave myself the goal of reading every day, as well. I added another spreadsheet (because who doesn’t love spreadsheets?) and started tracking minutes of reading, using a level system similar to the one I use for the writing, and also rewarding myself for reading more than one type of thing. My categories are “Audiobook,” “Short Story,” “Novel,” and “Non-Fiction.” Any reading I have to do for work or if I read a long article on a website, that goes in “non-fiction.” Anything shorter than a “novel” falls in the “short story” category, even if it’s ~40,000 words. I may add another section for ‘gaming’ because I find myself now playing Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition online with friends biweekly, and there’s a lot of reading involved. But it’s not really a novel or a short story or audiobook, and it’s certainly not non-fiction.
I have daily issues of Daily Science Fiction going back many years. I’ve made an actual dent in that since I read quite a few of them per day, now. I also have issues of Clarkesworld that have been collecting, as well as Crossed Genres and I just became a patron of Flash Fiction Online, so my short-stories itch is being scratched! My friend Jenn Lyons also just had her book The Ruin of Kings come out, and it’s next on my list! I was going to read the e-book version, but the footnotes plays havoc with the e-format, so I’m just gonna have to go old-style and read the dead-tree version. :) As a note, I attended Jenn’s book launch party at Eagle Eye Book Shop here in the Atlanta area, and she had the most amazing cake. Red velvet with raspberry filling. To. Die. For. And it was a 3-D rendering of her book cover.
For February, 2019, my stats are
- Words: 22,608
- Daily average words: 807
- Time: 1,250 minutes (20 hours, 50 minutes)
- Daily average time: 45 min
- Average words/hour: 1,085
- Chain: 151 days
- Level: 6 as of 22 February
- Quota: 450 words per day until 21 February, then 500 words/day
For February, 2019, my Reading stats are
- Minutes: 1,495 (24 hours, 55 minutes)
- Daily average minutes: 53
- Days on which I read:
- Audiobook: 0
- Short Story: 23
- Novel: 5
- Non-Fiction: 3
- Chain: 40 days
- Level: 2 as of 22 February
- Quota: 20 minutes per day through 21 February, 25 minutes per day thereafter
Goal Progress
Finish This Damned Novel – I’m writing the first pass at the first really huge scene where the protagonist and antagonist meet and there are fireworks. Now I have to figure out what happens after that, and what he tells his companions. Not everything is something he’s proud of or wants to admit.
Three More Novel Outlines – I wrote down a bunch of thoughts on one of them the other day, in preparation for the next item on my list. I’d like to do a plot break on it, and for that to happen, I have to have . . . you know, some kind of vague idea of what happens in the story.
Write Here, Write Now – I’m getting excited about seeing a bunch of friends I haven’t seen in a while and be in a room for several days with other writers talking writing and playing a lot — a lot — of Cards Against Humanity. And Werewolves. And maybe other stuff. But also writing.
Read Forty Books – I’m behind, but at least I already have read several books. Better than last year. :)
Submit Things To Places – I sent one out! So. Many. More. To go.
- Words: 22,608
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Writing Report, January 2019 + Goals
Writing As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.
This month I had incentive to write beyond just wanting to write. I belong to an online writers discussion forum called Codex Writers. Each year beginning the first full Friday-Sunday weekend in January, we have something called Weekend Warrior. I’ve talked about it before, but rather than giving you a link and making you go elsewhere, I’ll just explain it here, again. On Friday night, we’re given six prompts. By Sunday night, we write a 750-word (or less) flash story using one or more of the prompts and upload it anonymously to the site. Once the deadline has passed, participants download all the stories in our divisions (no one can read all the stories, so we’re divided into smaller subgroups randomly, to make the task easier and more enjoyable), read them for critique, rate them (again, anonymously), make a short comment explaining our rating, and upload those ratings by Friday evening . . . at which point the next week’s prompts go up and we start all over again. It’s like a slush pile, only better because you get comments. :)
The prize at the end? Five new stories, assuming you participate each week. And the knowledge that you can write a story to spec in just over two days. And the completely anonymous feedback from a plethora of readers — who are also writers — some of whom loved your story and some of whom . . . didn’t. But now you know why they did or didn’t.
So far, we’re in week four, which means I’ve written four flash stories in January. Two of those have already been turned into longer stories and one of those (now 4700 words) has been taken to my Tuesday night critique group for a more thorough examination. It needs some editing based on what my group said, and then I’ll put it through one more round of critiques before obsessively editing it for a couple more weeks and then, finally, sending it out into the world even though I hate it, now, every syllable. Such is writing. :)
The way I do Weekend Warrior, now, is to get the prompts and just do a free-association on each one, seeing what sticks and what doesn’t, until something gets past the part of my brain that filters out bad ideas and starts to tickle the creamy center. Then I elaborate on that one (or those ones) until I can’t think of anything else. That’s all on Friday night. By Saturday, I probably have an idea what I’m writing, but sometimes I don’t write it at all, but continue to freely associate. I like to let it marinate and dry-age in my brain until Sunday, at which point I start writing the actual story . . . and find out that the story I have in my head is not what comes out of my fingers onto the screen at. all. but is usually better in some ways. I then submit it sometime after 10 pm and spend the next couple of hours obsessively proofreading and tweaking it to get it Perfect™. So for a single 750-word story, I can generate a couple thousand words over a three-day period before it gets submitted. Which is awesome from a word-count and consistency point of view. :)
In between writing for Weekend Warrior, I’ve continued to work on my novel. It’s a giant, swirling, incoherent mess that I hope to clean up into a coherent, slightly less swirling . . . neater-thing that . . . is readable. <gestures vaguely>
I also noticed something that started to really bug me. I use Goodreads to put in all my books. In past years, I’ve read a lot of books in a given year. But in the last couple of years, I’ve read less and less as I listen to more and more audio and watch more YouTube. This is bad. I love reading, but I’ve let it slip away. So I made another sheet in my spreadsheet for time spent reading, come up with my own formulae for levels and points and such, and am now tracking that. It’s helping me to incentivize reading something every day, whether that is a single short story, part of a novel, or something non-fiction. I also count audiobooks, because regardless what anyone says, I count that as reading. Is it exactly the same thing? No. But I still absorb the story. My comprehension is still high. I remember where I left off just like I do with dead-tree or dead-electron books. So it counts as reading, for me. Your mileage may vary.
I also thought it might be informative if I made another spreadsheet with all of the stories I have in various stages of completion, regardless of length, subject, or whatever.
there are over ninety
Twenty-six of those are the Alphabet series I wrote. Another 30+ are from Weekend Warrior.
Also? I love making spreadsheets. So there’s that. :)
For January, 2019, my stats are
- Words: 31,362
- Daily average words: 1,012
- Time: 1,645 minutes (27 hours, 25 minutes)
- Daily average time: 53 min
- Average words/hour: 1,143
- Chain: 123 days
- Level: 5 as of 21 January
- Quota: 400 words per day until 20 December, then 450 words/day
For January, 2019, my Reading stats are
- Minutes: 2,148 (35 hours, 48 minutes)
- Daily average minutes: 77
- Days on which I read:
- Audiobook: 7
- Short Story: 12
- Novel: 9
- Non-Fiction: 7
- Chain: 13 days (I missed 3 days; 13 was the longest chain, of which there were 3)
- Level: 1
- Quota: 20 minutes per day
Goals
Yeah. I’m not big on ‘goals’ because they sound too much like ‘resolutions,’ but here’s some vagueness.
- I want to finish this damned novel and finally have something for my novel-writing group to read. I’m the only one who hasn’t had at least one novel put through the group, and some are working on a third. So I’m behind. By April 1, I want the rough draft done. The one no one will ever see. The one that gets turned into the alpha and beta versions.
- I have ideas for three more novels unrelated to the urban fantasy series for which the current WIP is book 1. It’d be nice to at least start outlining those.
- I’m attending one writing-related fun-thing this year, in May in Baltimore. Since I pay myself minimum wage for writing and I’m now writing every day, I have enough put aside to indulge one trip.
- I want to read at least forty books/audiobooks this year.
- I know this is a vague, non-SMART goal, but here it is anyway: submit, dammit. Stop self-rejecting.
- For each contest on Codex — and there are quite a few — ‘anonymous’ is achieved by selecting what we call a nom de guerre, which is used instead of our real names, so you may be reading a story by “George, Absolute Prefect of Saturn” and find out later that it was <insert famous author’s name here> and you never knew. Or you may find out that you absolutely love the writing of “Lulu, Queen of the Zorgs” and find out it’s someone whose name you’re unfamiliar with, but now you know to look for it in all the publications.
- Words: 31,362
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On World Building
Occasionally, while reading or listening to a story, I’m struck by a sentence or a paragraph that is just . . . so perfect, it makes me want to throw out everything I have ever written. Or, alternatively, to fix everything I’ve ever written so that it comes closer to what I have just read/heard.
Today, on my way to work, I was listening to the Glittership podcast, episode 6: “And Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness” by Lisa Nohealani Morton (@lnmorton).
The first two paragraphs of the story are as follows.
After the Collapse and the Great Reboot, Lila moved into the city and opened a barbershop.Great things were happening in the city: spaceports and condominiums and public works projects outlined their soon-to-be-erected monuments to great men and women and superior city living in holographic glows. Angels patrolled the sky, resplendent with metal wings that sparkled in the sun when they banked for a turn. Everyone seemed to be full of exciting plans for the future, but Lila came from a long line of barbers and her humble shop only seemed fitting. She called the shop The Lion’s Mane, because there were lions, once.
It was at this point that I completely lost the story. Not because it was boring or because something had kicked me out, but because of the stunning simplicity and beauty of the world building behind the phrase “because there were lions, once.” My mind wandered, imagining this story’s world. Something called the Collapse and something else called the Great Reboot are hinted at, but the single phrase “because there were lions, once” conveys important things about the character and the world and her relation to it.
It’s wistful and sad (to me, at least), and stated so matter-of-factly that there is no question in the reader/listener’s mind that the character feels this loss deeply. So deeply, in fact, that she has named her barber shop The Lion’s Mane in honor of the once-proud beasts. It tells us that lions are going to matter in this story.
The lion has long been a symbol of strength and wildness. If lions — the apex predator of an entire continent — no longer exist, what kind of world do these characters live in? I personally experienced a sense of loss upon hearing that phrase, as though lions really had been announced to be extinct. (I love big cats probably above all other animals.)
I missed the next half-minute of the story and had to rewind to that point, and nearly zoned out again, but pushed through, and listened to almost all of the rest on my remaining commute. I’m almost done with the story, and the promise of that phrase “because there were lions, once” is being fulfilled. I knew that from the get-go, of course, but this is how a skilled writer does it.
If you’re not already listening to Glittership, consider subscribing. Keffy R. M. Kehrli is the host of and editor behind the podcast. I’ve been enjoying it as I catch up.
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Review: The Accidental Salvation of Gracie Lee
The Accidental Salvation of Gracie Lee by Talya Tate Boerner
My rating: 5 of 5 starsHow can one be accidentally saved? That’s the question that pops into your head when you see the title.
*** MILD spoilers follow ***
Gracie Lee Eudora Abbott is ten years old. The summer is almost over, and school is looming ominously on the all-too-close horizon. So every single day is important! But her mother, Anne, makes her and her sister go to church every Sunday. They can’t even play all morning because they’ll get dirty, so it’s basically an entire day gone out of their busy schedules of being kids in the Mississippi Delta of eastern Arkansas in the early 70s.
Gracie’s father never goes to church with the girls and their mother. And that is totally not fair. If she has to go, why doesn’t he? Sure, he gets drunk (and mean) most nights after working all day on the farms. But that’s hardly an excuse.
So it’s only natural that Gracie would ask the preacher about it. Everything just . . . kind of got out of hand after that.
Boerner’s debut novel is full of wonderful prose, humor, and drop-dead serious situations that this plucky, curious, precocious ten-year-old girl has to navigate: school bullies, death, baptism, church camp, and the mysterious fate of the man in the gray house just down the street from hers. Did he really shoot himself? Is he all right?
*** END mild spoilers ***
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, and look forward to Boerner’s future novels.
The writing reminded me a lot of A Painted House by John Grisham. It has a similar feel, and it’s also from the first-person POV of a child trying to make sense of adult situations. Highly recommended.
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A Review of “Letters to Zell” by Camille Griep
Letters to Zell by Camille Griep
My rating: 5 of 5 starsI unabashedly loved this book. It is full of humor and a lot of allusional gems to fairy tales and other works of beloved literature ranging from Oz to Narnia. And yet . . . it is not a frivolous story. These women (whom we would think of as Snow White (Bianca), Cinderella (CeCi), and Sleeping Beauty (Rory)) reveal real lives with real problems in their letters to their friend Zell (Rapunzel), who has recently upset their social structure by moving away with her husband and children to pursue her dream of raising unicorns. Her Pages (story) were done, so she was free to go “off-script,” as it were. In doing so, she allowed CeCi, Bianca, and Rory to dream of a different life after their Pages are completed.
But not every fairy tale ends with Happily Ever After. The friends have to find a new equilibrium as their relationships change, and yet fulfill their own Pages lest the very fabric of their reality (the Realm of fairy tales) is destroyed.
A wonderful read. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
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A Review of “The Shambling Guide to New York City” by Mur Lafferty
The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty
My rating: 5 of 5 starsI think this is probably the best thing I’ve read from Mur Lafferty, and I’m a fan of her work, anyway. Who knew that a book about a book editor putting together a travel guide for New York City could be interesting?
Well, I mean . . . it’s a travel guide for, you know, monsters. Except they don’t like that term. It’s kind of insulting. They prefer ‘coterie.’ And they are anything from dragons to fae to vampires to demons, and everything in between.
Where do dragons sleep when they visit New York City? Where should zombies eat? And what about visiting incubi and succubi? All these are answered in the book.
But, of course, the book wasn’t just ‘Zoë sits at her desk compiling a book about New York City,’ because that actually would be pretty boring. She works with a couple of vampires, an incubus, a succubus, a death goddess, a water sprite, three zombies, a dragon, and a construct (think Frankenstein’s monster). And there are no sexual harassment laws or health insurance. Still, it’s a good enough job.
But then there’s a zombie uprising because someone is poisoning their food supply, and the Public Works Department (the coterie police force) are suddenly having to battle all kinds of problems. Something big is about to go down in New York City. And to top it off, it looks like someone (other than / in addition to several of her coworkers) is out to get Zoë.
Being a book editor is dangerous business when you’re food to a good number of your coworkers.
Highly recommended. As much as I hate to use this phrase, “It’s a fast-paced tour-de-force that will have you on the edge of your seat.” :)
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Lost in Translation, Part 2
I encountered another one of those things that made me take a moment to step back and say, “Wait a second. That doesn’t make any sense.”
If you don’t recall, I talked about one such thing in an earlier post.
This one is much shorter, and came from both an old pulp story I was listening to on a podcast and some old movies I’ve seen. This is one of those, “Did people ever really talk like this?” things.
The scene: Two people are talking. One of them (BOB) is a crook or dishonest in some way. The audience either knows or suspects this. The other (ALICE) is an “investigator” or another crook. Alice is trying to convince Bob to go along with something, whether it’s telling the truth (if Alice is an investigator) or another con (if Alice is a crook).
Alice makes her case.
Bob (reluctantly) agrees to go along with whatever scheme Alice has presented, starts to walk away, then turns and says, his voice dripping with suspicion, “Say . . . this isn’t some kind of trick, is it?” (Sometimes, it’s “trap” instead of “trick.”)
Alice responds, “Of course not,” and possibly follows up with, “Would I do that to you?”
Of course, whether Alice is an investigator or a crook, there is a better than even chance that it is some sort of trick. And the audience is fully aware of it because the audience is very smart.
Unlike Bob.
I mean, seriously, what would make Bob ask Alice that? It’s a nonsense question with no chance of any answer other than “no.” Whether that “no” is a lie or true depends entirely on Alice’s character.
So why ask it?
I finally thought of a reason for film. In print, the reader is able to get into the mind of the character, but the POV character is almost certainly not going to be Bob, but Alice.
I think maybe having Bob ask that question is a lazy attempt by the writers to give the readers / viewers a peek into Bob’s internal monologue that we couldn’t otherwise see. To let us know that Bob isn’t a total stooge. He knows there’s a chance he’s getting himself into more trouble, but the only way for the lazy writer to let us know this is to have him just come out and ask. For him to willingly go along with whatever scheme it is without question would be to show he’s kind of stupid.
That’s all I can think of, anyway. The other alternative — that he’s asking it because he’s an astute observer of people and can tell when they’re lying and is asking it to force Alice’s inevitable reaction to let him know with certainty what her intentions are — isn’t something I think the pulp writers or screenwriters did, unless Bob was the POV character, in which case he’s asking it for devious reasons.
What do you think?
- Can you imagine the story if Alice stopped, blinked, and then slumped and said, “Yeah, Bob, it was. But you caught me.”
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Ten or More Pieces of Fiction that Changed My Life
There’s this meme going around where people are encouraged to list the ten books that changed their life.
Well, a friend of mine (Terra LeMay) decided to change it to “ten pieces of fiction” because short stories, novelettes, novellas, flash, drabbles, etc. can also be transformative.
My problem is, I simply can’t limit it to ten. On my list of novels, alone, it comes to thirteen. With five more short stories.
So I decided to just toss out the rules and do it my own way. So here is the quasi-meme, “Ten or More Pieces of Fiction That Changed My Life.” With the life-changingness interpreted rather liberally. And in no certain order.
- It by Stephen King (1987)
This was the first book I literally stayed up all night to read (18 straight hours) because I literally could not put the thing down. Literally. It was super-glued to my hand. (OK, not literally.)
I had never seen the story-telling technique he used in this book where each alternate chapter was set in either the present or twenty-seven years in the past, when all the characters were children. And the chapters were from alternating POVs as well. I learned a lot about that type of story-telling from this book.
- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis (1950)
I don’t list all seven of The Chronicles of Narnia or count all of them as a unit because it was reading that first one that made me want to live in a fictional world and have the story never, ever end. It was one of three books that lit the spark of writing in me.
As an aside, I still want to live in Narnia.
- 1984 by George Orwell (1950)
I was well into my adult years when I first read this, even though I was already very into dystopias. I was blown away by it. My mother got to gleefully say her “I told you so”s because she kept trying to get me to read it as a teenager, but it was Old™ and therefore Not Worth My Time™
Irony Alert: take a look at the publication dates on most of these books. I’m just sayin’. :)
Winston is a very good unreliable narrator, too, which adds a nice touch.
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
Pretty much the same thing. I read it way later in life than I should have, but it’s one of those books I re-read periodically because it’s just so wonderful.
It makes the list because of how well it holds up for something written so long ago.
- The Shining by Stephen King (1977)
This was the very first “adult” book I read. I was in the sixth grade (age 12) and the book had just come out earlier that year. A friend in my class had read it and made it sound deliciously frightening. Up until this time, all the “horror” books I had read purported to be True™ or Based on Actual Events™. (I was heavily into ghost stories and aliens and Bigfoot and the like.)
I got it from the Eutaw Library because I was pretty sure there was no way my mother would let me buy it if she knew what it was about. Shhh! Don’t tell her. :)
I still get chills when I think about the scene where the topiary animals are chasing Danny Torrence.
- The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (1937)
What can I say about this book that hasn’t already been said? It got me interested in epic fantasy, fat books with a lot of pages, and conlangs (constructed languages and alphabets). (I guess those things have been said, but I repeated them anyway. Because I’m a rebel!)
- The Trouble with Jenny’s Ear by Oliver Butterworth (1960)
This one requires a bit of explanation. I read it in either fifth or sixth grade as part of my teacher’s Individualized Reading program. We would read books from her carefully selected classroom library and then take an oral test on it to prove we’d actually read it. We’d get points based on our knowledge and the reading level of the book. We had to read a certain number of points for each six-week period of the school year.
While I was reading this book, I was relentlessly harassed by the other boys in the class for reading a girl’s book. But it was good, and I didn’t care, and I finished it and enjoyed it, and got my points. I guess it taught me that just because a book is aimed at a target audience doesn’t mean others won’t or can’t enjoy it, too.
- Storm Front by Jim Butcher (2000)
I read a selection of a story I had just started writing in my newly joined critique group. Someone told me that my story and the style I wrote in reminded them of The Dresden Files‘ author Jim Butcher. I’d never heard of him or the series, so I picked up the first book and started reading. It introduced me to the entire genre which I’m now hopelessly in love with: urban fantasy.
And also, I want to be him when I grow up. That there’s already a him and that he’s younger than me are irrelevant.
- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (1973)
Another book written “for” girls but which I enjoyed immensely. Introduced me to tesseracts and was one of three books that lit the spark of writing in me.
- The Old Powder Line by Richard Parker (1974)
Also read as part of my teacher’s Individualized Reading program, I think it was the first book I had read where time travel was a major component of the story, and it dealt with sticky issues like what happens if you go back in time to before you were born.
- Dixie North by Herbert Burton (1976)
This one also requires a bit of background. My mother used to be the director of several things (over time) in the Hale County, Alabama education system. Sometimes, this led to her getting book samples. Sometimes, she brought these home to me. Sometimes, I actually read them. This may have been the first piece of fiction I read entirely voluntarily for pleasure. Plus, it was written by an author from Alabama. Who knew that famous writer-type-people could be from Alabama? It’s also one of the books actually aimed at boys, which is probably why I read it in fifth grade, just after it was published.
- Below the Root by Zilpha Keatley Snyder (1975)
To this day, this remains one of the pieces of fiction that my mind goes back to, randomly, from time to time. Such a wonderful story set in an imaginative world. Science fiction, probably mostly for girls, but we come back to that whole ‘audience’ thing.
One of the three books that lit the spark of writing in me.
- The Demu Trilogy by F. M. Busby (1984)
Once more, this requires just a small amount of background. I used to make lists of books for Christmas and birthdays that my parents would distribute to people who wanted to get me something I’d actually use. But this one time, my mother just happened to be walking through a book store, saw this book cover with a cool spaceship and alien worlds on the cover and thought, “I’ll bet Gary would like that,” so she got it. I was in college by this point. I read it . . . and it blew my mind. I’ve read it over and over. It’s just so wonderful. It’s an omnibus collection of three novels and two(?) novellas that ‘fill in the gaps’ between the novels. The ideas presented in this book are just . . . my head just . . . I have no words.
And here are the short stories.
- “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury (Colliers, May 6, 1950)
- “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury (The Saturday Evening Post, September 23, 1950 as “The World the Children Made”)
- “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March, 1954)
- “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin (Astounding Magazine, 1954)
- “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed” by Ray Bradbury (Thrilling Wonder Stories, 1949, as “The Naming of Names”)
Each of those stories was mind-blowing to me. I read most of them while I was in middle school. They were in my Literature textbook (I believe), and like most kids that age, I read the entire book before school started.
What? You mean most people didn’t do that? What was wrong with them?
Anyway, the stories all stuck with me for years after I read them. I didn’t remember their names or the authors, but was able to find them later by asking a lot of questions online and running across them in anthologies and the like. Now, I’d just Google ’em, but at the time, there was no Google! I know! How did we live?
Anyway, I hope that didn’t bore you too much. If nothing else, it gave me a nice distraction from a frustrating day of debugging code that should work but refuses to. Because it’s clearly sentient and hates me.
- It by Stephen King (1987)
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Lost in Translation
A few years back, I got on a ‘best films of all time’ kick, telling myself that I’d watch the highest-rated films from the silent era up through whatever year it was. I dove into silent films with a vengeance, curious to see Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin in their heyday, as well as seminal films such as Nosferatu, Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and The Passion of Joan of Arc. I thoroughly enjoyed them all. (Watch them. Watch them all.)
Because these were DVDs, most of them had commentary tracks. So I’d watch them without the commentary first, then again with commentary. Sometimes multiple times, if there was more than one commentary track. (No, I’m not OCD, why do you ask?)
I forget which silent film I was watching — I only know it was one of the Charlie Chaplin films — when the commentator (Leonard Maltin) remarked on a unique aspect of silent films that had never occurred to me before, and which has forever changed the way I consume them when I do so.
The scene was Chaplin, as the lovable but hapless tramp, waddling down the middle of a railroad track, oblivious to the fact that there is a giant steam locomotive approaching him from behind. The train gets closer . . . and closer . . . and closer . . . and then just as it’s about to hit him, he blithely steps off the tracks, avoiding certain death by mere inches.
He never once reacts to the fact that he has narrowly escaped death. Because he never turned around to see the train. Because . . . it’s a silent film. He couldn’t hear it. Wait. What?
As I watched, I was tense. “There’s a train coming! Get out of the way, you idiot!” And as he stepped off the track, there was a corresponding release of tension. The “Whew!” moment when the hero narrowly escapes whatever peril the world / villain has in store for him. I had bought into the world entirely.
Maltin made me aware of something I had never considered while watching: we, as the audience, accept the fact that these are silent films. Only certain things make noise, even though we don’t hear them, the character does. Dogs barking, someone calling their name, dropped plates shattering on the floor — they “hear” all of this, and react to it.
But the train? He couldn’t hear it, or even feel the vibrations through the tracks. Because in the world of the silent movie, if the character doesn’t react to it, the audience knows that it is truly silent.
Never mind that in the real world, he would have heard the train approaching and leapt to safety long before death was nigh. Steam locomotives were among some of the loudest machines in the environment at the time, and yet he gave no indication that he heard it.
If a passer-by had shouted, “Hey! Look out! There’s a train!” the tramp would have “heard” and reacted. But not a train as it barrels down on him. This is remarkable if you stop to think about it. It’s never explained. You just get it.
Now. What if this were a short story, instead? Or a “talkie” film? It simply wouldn’t work at all, because we wouldn’t buy the premise.
A scene that always bothered me in the first Harry Potter film reminds me of this. There’s a pivotal scene in chapter 10 of the book in which Harry and Ron, already best buds, Seamus, Hermione, and a bunch of other first-years are attending Professor Flitwick’s class, and he is teaching the students the spell for levitation of an object.
“Now, don’t forget that nice wrist movement we’ve been practicing!” squeaked Professor Flitwick, perched on top of his pile of books as usual. “Swish and flick, remember, swish and flick. And saying the magic words properly is very important, too — never forget Wizard Baruffio, who said ‘s’ instead of ‘f’ and found himself on the floor with a buffalo on his chest.”
It was very difficult. Harry and Seamus swished and flicked, but the feather they were supposed to be sending skyward just lay on the desktop. Seamus got so impatient that he prodded it with his wand and set fire to it — Harry had to put it out with his hat.
Ron, at the next table, wasn’t having much more luck.
“Wingardium Leviosa!” he shouted, waving his long arms like a windmill.
“You’re saying it wrong,” Harry heard Hermione snap. “It’s Wing-gar-dium Levi-o-sa, make the ‘gar’ nice and long.”
“You do it, then, if you’re so clever,” Ron snarled.
Hermione rolled up the sleeves of her gown, flicked her wand, and said, “Wingardium Leviosa!”
It all works well on paper, and we, the readers, accept it without much thought. Because we, as readers, can’t actually see the swish and flick of the wand, nor hear Flitwick say the words.1 But then, neither can Ron, Harry, Seamus, or Hermione. We gloss over that fact while reading. It’s just part of the world.
And then the movie came out. And there is Professor Flitwick standing in front of the class, and he clearly says, “Wingaaardium leviooosa!” and equally clearly demonstrates the wand action. We can hear him and see him do so right there, in Technicolor and Dolby Surround.
And yet . . . only Hermione can apparently use her ears and eyes, because none of the other young witches and wizards gets it even close to right. We hear them mangling the pronunciation — Ron manages something like ‘wingardria leviosaaa — and hideously over-exaggerating the subtle swish-flick of the wand.
But we had just seen and heard the correct pronunciation and wand actions as Flitwick demonstrates them moments before on screen. Which Hermione then duplicates in her condescending tone to Ron.
What worked perfectly in the book simply made no sense on the big screen. Something bothered me about it immediately, but I didn’t really close in on what it was until much later when it dawned on me. It’s the same as Chaplin’s silent locomotive.
It would have made more sense if, say, Flitwick had a thick accent of some sort the students weren’t used to hearing, such as Russian.2 But with Flitwick and the students all being some flavor of British, they’d have grown up at least hearing the various accents spoken around them all their lives (on TV, if nothing else), and would get awfully close.3
Which brings up another point. There are languages that have sounds which English does not, and languages without sounds English does have. Would a Japanese witch be simply unable to cast the levitation spell because the ‘w’ doesn’t exist in her language? Would a wizard with an l/w lisp be likewise unable, because he couldn’t properly pronounce “leviosa”? Would he wind up with a wombat on his chest?
But I digress. :)
I find it interesting, is all, how sometimes the medium in which something is presented plays a huge role in whether the thing makes sense to the audience, and how translating it to another medium loses something fundamental.
- More importantly, Flitwick never actually speaks the words ‘wingardium leviosa’ in the book. (I checked.) I guess we’re supposed to either believe that the students read the words in their book — and Flitwick inexplicably never teaches them the proper pronunciation — or he did so off-scene.
- Rowling does, in fact, do this later, in the character of Bulgarian wizard Viktor Krum, who can’t pronounce Hermione’s name, and whose speech Rowling portrays phonetically, for example, in this question he asks Harry: “I vant to know vot there is between you and Hermy-own-ninny.”
- In the same way that, although I was born and raised entirely within the state of Alabama, I heard accents from all over the United States on television all the time, and knew that ‘dawg’ and ‘dwaug’ both meant the same four-legged, barky animal. I had an internal translation table. The same as a British kid would have had for ‘translating’ between a Geordi accent and a Scottish one.
