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#48. Paving The Way Of The Beautiful Writers That Also Know How To Be Marketable and Accessible…(longest title ever!)

December 22, 2007 in book reviews, books, giraffes, writing | Permalink

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#48.  Water For Elephants.  Sara Gruen.  Fiction Novel.  4 stars.

I really liked this book, though I’ll be honest here, I can’t quite pinpoint why.  It’s not really my “type” of book, if I have a “type” of book.  I generally stay more off the beaten path, and rarely (never?) pick up a book that is a legitimate bestseller and have anything other than a frustrating and desperate reaction.  But this was good.  There was something beautiful and very much off the beaten path about it, but it was just accessible enough I think that it managed to mainstream itself, and good for Gruen.  Good for us all.  I wish we could do this with more great books, Water For Elephants is a great example of how to bridge the gap between really great books and what most everyone else is reading (i.e. NOT great books). 

I had a few problems with the book, primarily I suppose was the issue that while Gruen told a beautiful and engaging story, I didn’t really feel I learned anything.  The characters changed in the course of her book, it’s almost impossible for them not to I would guess, but I don’t know that I felt they “grew”, I didn’t feel the process, it was more just the exposition I suppose of what happened to the people in her story.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think I would have liked the book even more if there had been another layer to it.  Although, there was some mention in the author’s interviews/notes in the back of the book of a parallel with the story of Jacob (also the name of Gruen’s main character) from the book of Genesis in the bible.  It’s been an age since I read Genesis so I’ll have to go back and re-read and see what I see.  Ironically enough considering it is almost Christmas, no bibles have been lying around conveniently enough to pick up, that’s not too surprising though I guess considering I’m an athiest.  When I get home I’ll crack my bible open and see if this is the layer I am perhaps missing in Gruen’s book, and if necessary add an update to this review.

I highly recommend this book for people who read a lot of mainstream literary fiction and I also recommend this book to people who generally avoid mainstream fiction literature like the plague.  The story was fresh, well researched, interesting, and engaging.  Overall a great and enjoyable read.  Suitable for a beach read, but not inane in the way that beach reads often can be.

Hats off to you Ms. Gruen…perhaps you have paved the way for the rest of us.

4 stars (out of a possible 5).

NaNoWriMo Update…only seven days late…ulp.

December 7, 2007 in cheating, hack, NaNoWriMo, writing | Permalink

So I’m sure anyone who reads this blog regularly has already guessed that when I stopped posting my daily NaNoWriMo updates (about a week into November) I had stopped working.  This is both true and not true.  The whole truth is that while I netted less than 10,000 words in the month of November on my book, NaNoWritMo (the way I was doing it -which was not the correct way anyway) turned out to be incredibly effective for me.  While I did not net a whole novel in a month, or even close to one, I was thinking about it so much that I solved several of the storytelling and plot issues I had been LONG struggling with (like a year plus of struggling). 

I spent so much time thinking about the book (Lola LeFever) that I did have some major breakthroughs and I think I know how to write both Lola and the third and final installment in the trilogy (still untitled) when I finally carve out some time.  So, success through failure.  Yea!  Perhaps that should be my motto in life…it’s almost as accurate as my “semi-finalist” blog title.

Thanks for caring…if you did.  And for not calling me out as a hack-failure when I stopped updating 🙂

Rob Liefeld…OY!

November 29, 2007 in art, artists, comics, hack, writing, x-men | 4 comments

I’ve spent a lot of time on this site talking about comic book artists and cartoonists that I admire and adore, but let us take a moment to talk about one of the (if not THE) most hated comic book artists in all of history, Rob Liefield.  I am hesitant to talk about terrible artists, because I consider myself a pretty terrible artist and somehow it just seems a bit mean, however, I currently make $0 on my terrible art and comics while Liefeld has made millions, MILLIONS, which I’m sorry to say, opens him up for some serious criticism.  Criticism which has finally found a brilliant and hilarious voice with this “Liefeld Expose” on Progressive Boink. 

I, like legions of others, have always hated his art – and let’s not forget that on top of the digusting ridiculous art he also can’t write or plot his way out of a paper bag.  Most of us still ended up with a surprising amount of his work in our comic boxes (for me it was X-Force…poor poor X-Force…*sigh*).  This is eternally frustrating, especially since I continue to lack the ability to go back in time and correct past mistakes.   Anyway, for those who don’t know, not only is Liefeld a complete hack, but he’s also, by all reports, an arrogant ass, and again, he made MILLIONS off us…and is somehow STILL getting work…how is this possible?  Check out Progressive Boink, and have some brilliant laughs (my favorite is the bit about the “billions of teeth” on #16 – HA!) and maybe it will help you feel a little better, if you like me, EVER purchased a Liefeld book.

I’m Three for Three…

November 29, 2007 in acceptance, boyfriends, writing | 2 comments

Three times in my life I have submitted a letter (of praise, complaint, or just straight sarcasm) to legitimate publications, all three letters have been printed…including the third which I didn’t even intend for print (e.g. I sent it directly to a magazine’s writer with no thought that it would end up printed). 

My letters, in order of appearance are, at the age of about 17 I wrote a letter to the X-men comic book…I think my letter appeared in issue number #53 and it was basically a super geeky praise of what was going on in the book and a few geeky questions.  I was delighted to see myself in print. 

Cut to 14 years later and I write my second letter to the publication Time Out New York, a sarcastic somwhat bitchy three line email, which won their letter of the week (and won me a book of my choice as a prize…read more about that publication here). 

Now, less than two months later I emailed writer Julia Allison directly about a column of hers that I found promising, but ultimately a huge let down.  You can read her column about women waiting too long to say ‘I love you’ here.  I’ve pasted my published letter below, for your viewing pleasure.  Please note that the letter they printed was heavily edited, at least one whole paragraph being cut, but I’m glad, as it was a somewhat personal paragraph about my relationship, something I would not really have wanted to see in print but again, I didn’t really think I was submitting this letter for print, I guess I’ve learned you should always be prepared for it.  Fortunately, I still feel the letter is well written and represents pretty accurately what I was trying to say, even with the edits. 

So what have we all learned here today?  Apparently my superpower is to bitch, whine, and praise my way into useless letters columns everywhere…Yea!!!  I will try to use this power for good and not evil…

Love Story

“I pretty much agreed with Julia Allison for her whole “When ‘I love you’ Comes Too Late” column [Seek TONY 633] but then she surprised me by undoing everything she was talking about with this sentence:  “There are some guidelines:  If you love someone and don’t say it after dating for six months, you probably should.”  I guess I just feel like this is really bad advice to come in such an absolute sentence. 

Six months in one relationship can be a really long time, and for another it’s really not enough to know for sure that you love someone and should say it.  For so many women, myself included, relationships (and life) become about looking for the next thing to check off the list: get boyfriend, check.  Get him to say he loves me, check.  Get us to move in together, check.  What do you do when you run out of things to check off that list, which you’ve been told by society is so all important, and you didn’t bother to enjoy much of it because you were too busy looking for the next item to check off? 

I think we’d all be better off following our instincts and the organic process that is life and love.”

#44 – #47 A Pike Fest!*

November 26, 2007 in book reviews, books, christopher pike, writing | 4 comments

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#44. Weekend. Christopher Pike. Young Adult Fiction. 2.5 Stars

#45. Whisper of Death. Christopher Pike. Young Adult Fiction. 3.5 Stars

#46. Chain Letter. Christopher Pike. Young Adult Fiction. 2.5 Stars

#47. Chain Letter 2. Christopher Pike. Young Adult Fiction. 1.5 Stars

*Again, if you want to know what is compelling a 31 year old to have a Christopher Pike fest, read more here.

Okay, first and foremost, let us discuss Christopher Pike’s obsession with class valedictorians.

I read seven of his books in the last five days and every single solitary book featured as one of the main characters the high school valedictorian (or the “likely class valedictorian”). Also of note, is that these were always men. Shame on you Mr. Pike…not one female class valedictorian? And even when there was someone else competing for valedictorian that might take it from one of our main characters…as in the Final Friends Trilogy (Michael Olson vs. Dale Jensen) even that wasn’t ever a woman. I guess all the women were too busy being pretty to be class valedictorian. Oh, I’m sorry, are my claws showing? It must be the bitterness rubbing off after reading 1,467 pages of Young Adult Fiction. My brain is melting…mostly from having to read about too many girls in tight white shorts or tight white pants with a brightly colored blouse. *Sigh*.

Sidenote: He also seems to have an unhealthy obsession with the name Michael, at least three characters in his books have been named Michael – including hero Michael Olson in the Final Friends Trilogy, hero Flynn aka Michael Ryan Richardson in Weekend, and Mike from Bury Me Deep (which I did not read recently, but remember now in all my Pike-like memory recoveries). Perhaps Pike’s real name is Michael? Hmmm…food for thought. Is it really that simple? Pike’s name is Mike and he was or wished he was class valedictorian? Have we really pierced into the very soul of this 1980’s and 90’s prolific tween writer? It cannot be so simple…onto the reviews…!

I still hold that these books hold up surprisingly well over time plot wise, and the writing isn’t horrendous or anything, I certainly couldn’t have gotten through 1,467 pages of it if it was really that bad, but I did notice some of it really beginning to affect me in a negative way as I read along.

It’s also interesting to note that while Pike’s plots were pretty complicated and well hidden, I can’t imagine as a kid first reading these to not feeling a bit ripped off, was I really so dense that I did not catch on to his tedious formula? For Pike’s 1986 – 1990 work he was pretty much just dealing with teenagers and some “mysterious death or accident”, usually this “event” is perceived as an innocent accident, and by the end of the book (or trilogy in the case of Final Friends) you are basically left with a character in a room figuring it out and forcing everyone involved to come clean…in fact Law & Order’s Criminal Intent Character Detective Goren might have stolen his technique from carefully researching Pike books since that is the end of basically every Criminal Intent episode…do I smell a lawsuit? Anyway, by 1990 it seems Pike was running out of interesting ways to get teens to confess at the end of his novels, or perhaps he suspected that people were catching on to his formula and so he turned to the supernatural.

Whisper of Death, despite the horrible title (and even worse cover) was not bad, and I believe was one of his first “supernatural” focused books, published in 1991. It’s actually a pretty creative plot in which five teenagers, end up alone in the world. Handsome Pepper, attractive pretty legged Roxanne, chubby potential valedictorian Stan, big scary and apparently acne-faced Helter, and knockout future model/ porn star Leslie are the only ones left in their town and apparently in the world. It is the wrongs they have committed against a red-headed teenage witch they know that committed suicide a month ago named Betty Sue that has brought them into this purgatory in which they are killed off one by one in the same manner as Betty Sue wrote they would be in short stories that the doomed characters find in the dead town. Whisper gets major props for being WAY off the map from Pike’s other works in taking risks. By page 22 Roxanne and Pepper are aborting their love child, although Roxanne thinks she has stopped the procedure in time (has she???). Pike also kills off all his characters in this book in horrible ways, it is a decidedly risky move and one that pays off in some ways. This is by far the darkest of his early works that I read and one I remember sticking with me as a kid, I think this was a smart book for him to do, however he botches it by not giving you a chance to care about any of the characters…the very thing that make Final Friends work so well, even without the creative plot twists present here. It is the books downfall that you don’t really care when any of these characters bite the dust, even Roxanne the main character. In fact, the only truly good character was Stan…and you can’t figure out why he’s getting thrown into purgatory with the rest of the jerks, so it’s a bit unfulfilling.

Chain Letter 2: The Ancient Evil (ugh, can you believe that title? only the cover is worse than the title) was the only other book I read in the past week that would fit in with Pike’s “supernatural works”, I don’t remember liking many of his supernatural books when I was a kid, which is odd, cause I like me some good supernatural stuff. Anyway, I remember disliking Chain Letter 2 intensely as a kid, and I only purchased it along with the rest because I knew I intended to read Chain Letter and would instantly be curious about how the hell he made a supernatural sequel to a pretty good first book some six years later (boy do I know myself, I’d finished Chain Letter for all of 20 seconds when I went digging for part two).

Chain Letter held up pretty damn well, despite the hokey-ness of the idea of a chain letter driving a book forward and it was pretty interesting to follow super thin neurotic but attractive Fran, gorgeous lithe blonde actress Brenda, gorgeous raven haired actress Alison, badass superhot female amazon Joan, burning hunk of man-meat athlete Tony, big nosed future valedictorian Kipp, and slight sweet innocent Neil as they receive a horrible chain letter threatening them to do as requested or they will be punished (or their crime of the previous summer – hitting a possibly already dead man with their car – shades of I Know What You Did Last Summer – will be revealed).  The pace moves well and the characters are interesting enough, there is also a traditional killer chases girl scene towards the end set in an abandoned housing track that had my heart moving pretty fast and must have had my little 12 year old head under the covers for a week the first time I read it.  Like most his books, the ending is a bit disappointing…all is resolved largely as a huge misunderstanding that is solved with “love and…understanding, of course” but at least it made sense.

Chain Letter 2…ugh. I don’t know what he was thinking. It had none of the drama of the first book, largely because he tries to squeeze in explanations of how the first book really was supernatural with all this exposition about all the stuff they didn’t reveal in the first book. It is not well done in the least and it is a perfect example of how show don’t tell should be used in books. Rather than having the characters do anything or discover anything, they just sit there while other new characters explain old plot developments to them. Pike proves he’s not afraid to kill his cast, but as a reader you already know that if you’ve read his newer work, and so the power of it is less intense.  It was really quite bad.

Weekend held up pretty well and I believe is one of his first books, published in 1986. This was also before he went over to the supernatural side, although I should mention that there are always elements of that in his books, even the early ones…but in the early books they are usually red herrings. In Weekend we have, as tradition dictates, an “accident” to a beautiful young teen full of promise (Robin)…in this case she’s not dead, but slowly dying and the teens/friends that were with her at the time of said accident – her beautiful buxom fiery red-headed slutty though likable adopted sister Lena, cute but annoying and weak Kerry, gorgeous slightly ditzy blonde Angie, gorgeous intelligent sweet perfect dark haired Shani, beautiful mysterious foreign Flynn, good natured athlete Bert, ruggedly handsome bad boy Sol, and strangely attractive future valedictorian Park as they are trapped at a beach house in Mexico as one of them (or two??) try to find out who is responsible for Robin’s accident.  The ending, as always, is a bit convenient, but unlike Chain Letter 2, Pike does a pretty great job of letting the story unfold rather than just dictating it to us and taking away all the suspense. The characters are about as likable and unlikable as always and as always, the women are gorgeous in their tight white shorts and colored blouses, although I found the protagonist Shani to be a bit weak and poorly developed compared to some of Pike’s other female protagonists.

Okay, that’s it for the YA books and review (thank the heavens I’m sure some of you are saying). It was enjoyable, but I have to say, I’m pretty off the idea of YA books. When the idea struck me to read these I thought “hey…I could do this…maybe I’ll just bang a couple crap teen books out be able to quit my job and still work on my great American novel on the side…” but it’s hard enough to write a book you love and feel proud of and to get someone else to love it and publish it, that it’s a waste of time writing something you think is crap from go…so I’ll be passing on that…for now. 🙂

Update: A brief bio I found on Pike reveals his real name to be…Kevin…not Mike. So disappointing…

McSweeney’s & Halo 3…

November 14, 2007 in boyfriends, mcsweeney's, writing | Permalink

If you have been enjoying my “Civ. 4” Comics you should take a stroll over to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and read the hilarious new short titled, “Halo 3 Cheat Codes, As Explained By Neglected Girlfriend, Janet Iverson” by Andrew Kiraly.  The only thing wrong with this piece is that it was brilliant AND written by a man…not that men can’t write brilliant things, they do, all the time, however my happiness was put on pause a bit when I realized that a woman didn’t write it.  After adjusting to the information however I have to say, good work Andrew, even more impressive that you, a man, wrote this.  You more than any man alive, must understand the Halo v. Girlfriend dilemma. 

short fiction rejection #5

November 13, 2007 in lists, mcsweeney's, short fiction rejections, short fiction submissions, writing | 1 comment

When it rains, it pours.  I just got a rejection today, not really for short fiction but rather for a “list” that I submitted to McSweeney’s for their McSweeney’s Internet Tendency Lists.  I got a nice little email from them, but it was a rejection all the same.  Why is it rejections come in little painful groups?  It’s like the rejection people see you exposed and vulnerable from a previous recent rejection and think, “oh, now’s a good time to let her know…STRIKE NOW!”  It’s so frustrating.  So debilitating.  And I am barely in the infant stages of rejection…*sigh*

The official count, revised from yesterday to reflect this submission that I forgot about:  1 for 6

short fiction rejection #4

November 12, 2007 in short fiction rejections, short fiction submissions, writing | Permalink

From Ploughshares.  Whee!

I had little hope for this piece as it’s a bit aggressive, but hey, you never know.  That leaves me with one piece still out there (to McSweeney’s) which I’m already kind of assuming is a no.  It’s time to get off my ass and start resubmitting and revising where necessary.  I got my copy of Tin House’s Fantasitical Women issue Saturday and spent all day kicking myself, because I had a really good piece for this, but missed the deadline. Ah, big sigh.

Anyway, here’s the official count:  1 for 5

#12 comic of the week…er day

November 9, 2007 in boyfriends, comic of the week, comics, writing | 9 comments

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I had to take a few liberties with this one, because while he did wake me up talking in his sleep about Civ. 4, it wasn’t anything as simple as “Aluminum”.  He talked about aluminum and his need to get it, or have it, or invent it or whatever, when he was fully conscious earlier in the week.  Clearly I was really listening to him too. 

Anyway, the days of Civ. 4 are coming to a close as Adam worked a freelance day yesterday and also found out yesterday that he got a new job – starts Monday!  Congratulations to Adam…there’s not much work out there with the writer’s strike on, but any work he can get before things fully shut down is really good news, because it’s looking like this thing could go on for quite a while.  And we will be poorer than ever.  🙁

Sidenote:  We fully support the writer’s strike.  The production Adam is working on could get stopped at anytime because of the strike, but currently they already have finished scripts, so they can at least start production…or at least that’s my understanding of it. 

sentence(s) of the day…

November 8, 2007 in NaNoWriMo, sentence of the day, writing | Permalink

I wrote the least last night (had to catch up on my comics, both reading them and writing them), but I ended up picking a couple sentences strewn together.  I know that’s cheating…shut up. 

11/07/07:

Words Written:  388

Best Sentence(s):  I wish I could explain what it feels like to be me.  Have you ever tried walking on the sun and found that you not only could, but that it made you even stronger?  It is as if the heat and flames seep through your skin and power you up like a nuke, radiating off of you in waves of pure power.  That is what it feels like to be me.  Everyday, all the time.  Walking around like a god.  You can’t ever understand what it’s like to be me, because you can’t even imagine that, can you?

Okay.  I get through these nights of “writing” knowing that most of these “best” sentences will not make it to the final draft, and also in realizing that it has definitely gotten my brain sparking in a new way.  Plotting ideas/concepts (my worst writing enemy) have definitely been firing off more frequently in my brain the last few days, so while the sentences remain crappy, at least the ideas are starting to flow.  There is hope!

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