Tag Archives: books

December 26, 2013 · 9:54 am

A Year in Books

2013 in booksAt the beginning of last year, I had just finished reading Stephen King’s On Writing, in which he, among other fascinating things, discusses how gargantuan of a reader he is. He said he read 80 books a year, easily, which I found mind-blowing.

I wanted to see how many books I could read this year. Thankfully, Goodreads has a Reading Challenge Widget, so this was easy (plus it reminded me to write a review after I read something).

I have a day job, a small business, a fiance and a small social life, in addition to any personal writing I want to get done, so King’s goal was stupidly out of reach. No, for me, I needed to lower that bar a little bit. So I picked a goal of 26 books, a book for every two weeks.

The other day, Goodreads let me know that I had met my goal! (Hey, Goodreads, the year isn’t actually over yet…?)

In 2013, I logged 27 books, and if I finish The Shipping News by the first, I’ll have 28 official books for the year. Of the 27 books logged in Goodreads, that is apparently 8,479 pages.

That’s pretty good! But it’s not actually the full picture.  The Wool Omnibus would have otherwise counted as three novels (or novellas; I’m not sure how Goodreads makes that distinction). I also read two books for work that I didn’t log, because they were poorly written business aphorisms that I was forced to read and never want to acknowledge actually existed. Plus I read a sizable stack of comic books (Star Wars, four issues of the Avatar comic, and Saga. Go read Saga. It’s amazing.) and I felt like it was weird to log comic books because they are generally only 12 pages long (I finally included Saga in my reviews, sort of, after I had read the whole first collection, making it sort of book-length.)

That means, without changing my habits at all, I read about 35 books in a year (and that includes some stupidly thick books like Leviathan Wakes and The Forgotten Garden. Don’t read those if you’re going for a speed challenge, kids).

35 books a year? Not too shabby!

I really enjoyed logging my books. It’s a good way to reflect on what I’ve read and what it means to me, so I’ll definitely be participating in the reading challenge for next year. Let’s clock it at officially 30 books this year.

Will you join my reading challenge? How many books would you like to read in 2014?

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December 10, 2013 · 10:30 am

Review: Wicked Plants

Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother & Other Botanical AtrocitiesWicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked up Wicked Plants as a brain-break after NaNoWriMo, and it was a great decision!

It turns out much of the natural world is trying to kill us. This book will permanently banish the idea that “natural” means “good for you.” Plants are downright homicidal, and they’re quite creative with all the ways they are out to poke, poison, incapacitate, intoxicate, inflame, nauseate, and kill us.

While it’s not exactly written as a chapter book, I choose to read it straight through as if it were. It is organized loosely alphabetically by plant name, with occasional breaks for themed sections. While the named areas go into detail and history on one particular plant, the themed sections pile in a bunch of plants with only short descriptions. The inclusion of these “quick-hits” is fantastic, because you really get more information, but they are also what make this book useless as any identification guide.

The plants are labeled with markers like “illegal,” “dangerous,” “offensive,” “deadly,” and “intoxicating,” so you’ll know exactly what kind of trouble you’re getting yourself into. The information included is basic locational and taxonomical stuff, with anecdotes about people who were killed or drugged or in some way related to this plant (including the detail about Lincoln’s mother).

One of the added pluses for this book is the detailed and beautiful cover. It’s a hardback with old-book style, and really lights up your bookshelf. It comes with a ribbon bookmark sewn into the spine and a light gold shimmer on the light parts of the cover. The interior is just as lavish, with black-and-white etchings of the plants, just in case you really need to identify something, and morbid or garish illustrations of all the ways we’re going to be murdered by our flowering foe. The pages have a faux-aged patina that looks really great. This book is an attention-getter, for sure.

This book is a riot. It’s educational, beautiful, and fun. Triple-whammy. I’ll be dipping into it for trivia night for sure. Plus, any writer worth his salt needs this book; it’s chock-full of incredible, natural, believable ways to kill off your characters.

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December 5, 2013 · 10:36 am

Filling Buckets

It’s been an emotional year. I’ve attended two funerals, and wasn’t able to go to two more. These deaths were all unexpected, even for the elderly man and the friend who had cancer. No one was ready.

I’m not very good at talking about what these deaths have meant to me. Even though I know I should have gone to the receptions to support the families of the deceased, I couldn’t make myself do it. What could I possibly say? Instead, after accepting the well-intended but poorly timed greetings of those I hadn’t seen in a long time, those people who were brought back into my life only by our mutual sadness over the life of a friend, I retreated to my car, where I cried big hiccuping tears until my heart stopped hurting and I could breathe again.

I wasn’t particularly close to any of those who died this past year, but I cared for them, and those who loved them, deeply, and sometimes that empathy was like a knife to my heart. I continue to mourn for the sadness of those families still trying to recover from that pit of grief, some nearly a year later.

I don’t know if I am alone in this, but the thoughts of those who have, to put it euphemistically, passed on linger always on the edges of my mind. Sometimes I close my eyes and can see, perfectly clearly, my cousin, who died in an unnecessary and completely preventable drunk driving accident several years ago, lying unnaturally still in the coffin surrounded by perfumed white flowers. I’m starting to feel crowded in by thoughts of those who have passed; I think of them in the grocery store, in the morning as I get ready for work, in idle and unexpected moments.

I say all of this by way of explaining that I’ve been thinking about death a great deal this past year, about what causes it, whether we can understand it, what it means.

My Netflix DVD of “The Bucket List” arrived the same day that I was notified of the death of a family friend. Considering the content, I put it on a shelf and ignored it until I could wrangle my feelings.

As movies about an impending death go, it was pretty terrible. (Last Holiday was excellent, though, and I highly recommend it.) It was trite and predictable and completely lacking heart. But it, coupled with the weight of the funerals I’ve recently attended, did make me think about what things I want to do before I shake off this mortal coil.

One of those things was “write a book.” By now, fueled forward by NaNoWriMo, I’ve written three. I find it curious that, while I would like to be published — I would definitely like to be published! — that doesn’t make my list. I don’t feel like my life will be any less fulfilled if that doesn’t happen. Other things matter more, like seeing Ireland or getting married or controlling my career’s path. Writing the stories, that was the important thing.

I need to keep working on my bucket list; so much of it right now is very vague and undetermined. But I’m curious as to where ‘publishing’ falls on other writers’ lists?

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll change my mind about the importance of publishing when I’m not as melancholy. Maybe.

Is publishing an important life goal/bucket list item for you?

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December 3, 2013 · 10:00 am

Whatever You Do, Don’t Push ‘Publish’

You’ve finished NaNoWriMo! You’ve completed a whole book in a month! You are seriously hot stuff! Go get a cookie. No wait, get two. You’ve earned it, kiddo.

“But wait,” you’re saying, “I’m busy right now. I was just about to publi–”

STOP RIGHT THERE, YOU! Yes, you.

Don’t push that button.

This post was originally going to be called “Advice to Past-Me,” because I have SO been there — and still step over there when the flights of fancy get a bit giddy — but I realized this feeling probably applies to a lot of people coming down off that writing euphoria.

I know the feeling, believe me I do. You have just written the most amazing piece of writing the world has ever known. You are going to be so famous. Your book is like the lovechild of J K Rowling, Isaac Asimov, and all the best parts of your favorite movies. It’s gonna be so big, you guys.

Coming down off that writing high is exactly like being a 15-year-old who just had a first date and held hands for the first time. OMG! That was, like, the best ever! Your heart is all fluttery and it feels like it must burst if you don’t show the world RIGHT NOW because this is your moment and you owned it and nobody understands.

But I beg you: Don’t publish right away.

You may be right. I hope you are! I hope your book really is the next best thing. But if it is, then it won’t be hurt by what I’m going to recommend, and it might save you from the pain of rejection.

The first thing you should do? Walk away from your work for a month, minimum. Go on, you’ve earned the break! And if you still want to keep writing, go do something else. NOT a sequel or whatever. Just something totally different.

After that month, gently crack open your manuscript again, give it a read. It may not look as shiny as it did when you put it down; that’s ok, just do some edits, put in the work. If it does look amazing, first of all, you are a lucky duck. Second, get another opinion. It can be the opinion of your mom or your husband or your kid or your neighbor down the hall, but do tell them to be honest with you.

They’re not going to be honest with you. They’re going to try to be nice to you. But they might try to gently tell you they didn’t “love love” that one little teensy part. This will feel like ultimate betrayal, but this is what you need. Go work on that part.

Then, share your work with someone else, someone less close to you, if you can. Someone who can more reliably destroy your feelings for the sake of good work. (Warning: these people are often hard to get to actually read the danged thing). Take it to a critique group, if you have one.

This is going to feel like someone is stepping on your heart, crushing it into jello. But that’s okay. Your work will be better for it.

Then get your work edited, by someone who is not you. If you are exceptionally lucky, you know someone who is gifted in this area who will do it for free, but these people are special snowflakes, so don’t be discouraged if you need to pay for it. In fact, I don’t trust any unpaid editors, personally. If your work really is the best thing ever, you want it to shine! Stories with typos do not shine, as a rule. Put your money where your mouth is!

(If you don’t know where to find an editor, start Googling. I like Writer.ly. I also happen to be a copy editor, and editing is one of the things I love to do… )

Now, after you have gotten your manuscript reviewed a few times and it’s edited, now maybe it really is the best work ever.

It’s also probably been at least six months since you finished writing it. Maybe it’s a year. But that’s okay! A novel is not a mayfly, emerging whole overnight. It’s an ant colony; it takes time and coordination and help to build it up into something incredible.

Now… now you can publish. Or you can start the process of contacting agents and trying to be traditionally published.

I know that all might sound mean and/or out of touch, because that initial excitement is SO heady. Don’t lose that excitement, but do try to put it in its correct context. That’s really hard to do, particularly when it’s your first rodeo. Slow your roll, new writer. It is more rewarding then publishing prematurely and facing the barrage of poor reviews.

Don’t do it. Not yet, anyway.

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November 16, 2013 · 9:42 am

Review: The Queen of The Damned

The Queen of the Damned (The Vampire Chronicles, #3)The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am not really a horror reader — I once got scared in a haunted house during the day, when it was empty and deactivated — but I wanted to get into the All Hallows Read spirit.
Because I’m not really experienced with the genre, I can’t tell if this shouldn’t be a horror book or if the things that were supposed to be scary didn’t age well in the CSI TV era, but never was a shiver to be found.
(I also didn’t realize until I had bought it from the bookstore that it was the third book in a series. Luckily, Rice put in enough ‘reminders’ of things from previous books that I don’t think I missed anything, but that also may have impaired my reading.)
Instead, The Queen of the Damned was an intellectual musing on vampires, immortality, the failings of humanity and our reliance on religion. Most of the things that may have been supposed to be chilling were really just philosophical questions — Are there supernatural beings? Is there a God? Would the world be better off without men in it? Could and should an immortal creature deceive humans into believing she was god? — that the characters end up literally sitting around a table to muse about in the big climax.
It all adds up to a bunch of questions that would have been interesting to talk to Anne Rice about, but weren’t exactly heart-pounding to read.
That’s not to say Rice isn’t an incredible writer. She has definitely earned her place as a top novelist. Her characters are distinctive, human but also otherworldly as they take on the vampire change, possessing logic but still ultimately flawed. Her descriptions of place are vivid on more than a detail scale, imbuing everything with emotion. Her storytelling is effortless, pulling the reader gently along.
Because it was written in 1988, it was fun to imagine how this book would be different if it were written today. So much would be the same, but the things that were different — the internet, cell phones — could have dramatically changed the course of the story. Then again, it is tragic to see those things that are the same — war in Afghanistan, deprivation in Haiti, starvation in India. In fact, that ended up being the most profound part of the book for me, that it has been 25 years and these problems remain.
Ultimately, this was a book that would be a pleasure to dissect and to learn from, but the menace was gone. It’s not my usual fare, and I wouldn’t recommend it as a scary read either.

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October 31, 2013 · 10:21 am

It’s That Time Again: NaNoWriMo!

Tomorrow begins writers’ best/worst month: National Novel Writing Month!

For those who haven’t ever heard of this wonderful thing, NaNoWriMo is 30 days of intense writing, with the goal of writing a complete 50,000 word novel. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t even have to be good — it just has to be done.
This is the writers’ version of a marathon, and I’m completely addicted. I’ve written the bulk of both of my novels during NaNoWriMo and find it incredibly invigorating to plow into my writing with a hard deadline. (I’m addicted to the deadline rush. It’s the most motivating thing to me).
It’s free to join, and you don’t have to do anything, but if you want, you can donate, buy a cool t-shirt, attend meet-ups, and, of course, write a novel!
I’ll be posting my word counts and information as we go. If you have ever thought “I could totally write a book if I only had the time,” NaNoWriMo is a fantastic method to MAKE time. If you are diligent about writing every day, it only means about 1,670 words per day. Just DO IT. It’s a kick!

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October 15, 2013 · 10:06 am

Review: The Subversive Copy Editor

The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself)The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago by Carol Fisher Saller

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked up this book when I was first really starting But I am very well aware that not everyone is as privileged to be taught that fundamentals of editing from experienced professionals who also happen to be professors, as I was. (Shout-out to Maggie and Jake at Mizzou!) For you, I say: Read this book!

Saller tackled the difficult task of talking about a fairly dry subject while making it accessible to folks who knew nothing as well as folks who know a lot. And kept it interesting.

There are two parts: 1) How to work with the text in the readers’ best interest and 2) How to work.

The first section (How to work with the text) lays out the “subversive” approach Saller advocates: basically, do no harm… even if that means not adhering completely strictly to the stylebook. (*cue communal gasp of shock from the true pedants*)

This is my philosophy, and it’s great! I think it’s the best way to keep a story true to the author’s vision while making the story comprehensible to the reader.

But it’s tricky when you’re a new copyeditor, because it more or less requires you know all the rules and then willfully choose to ignore them when it is appropriate to the book. (There’s a big difference between not changing something because you don’t know it’s wrong and not changing something because it’s wrong but it makes sense for the story.) This means acknowledging that every story is different and will have distinct needs.

Personally, I think that’s a beautiful thing, but not every editor or writer will agree with me.

The second part–how to do the business stuff–was what I was really reading the book for, and that’s the half that earned this book only 4 stars instead of 5. It told me a lot of what I already knew here, too, but the difference was that it said stuff that I figure most business people should know. Things like “don’t pick needless fights,” and “be nice to others.” I realize that’s probably idealistic of me to think most people already know that kind of thing, and it certainly is good advice for the utterly clueless, but that wasn’t really what I was coming to the table for. Aside from the one chapter on freelancing, there wasn’t a lot that I found truly applicable to my career–especially as it is increasingly unlikely that publishing house jobs will continue to exist in the future (but I’ll knock on wood, anyway). And the freelancing chapter didn’t match the kind of freelancing I actually do, so even that wasn’t ideal.

That being said, this book was great. I think it might be particularly good for a writer who is fearful of handing her manuscript over to a copyeditor or doesn’t really understand why she should bother. (We can help, I promise! In fact, we LOVE to help!)

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September 24, 2013 · 10:31 am

Review: A Long Way Down

A Long Way DownA Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the best book about four people not dying that you’ll ever read.

I didn’t know what A Long Way Down was about before I picked it up based on a recommendation. Now that I’ve read it, I’m struggling to describe it. It’s a book about suicide, but it’s not very depressing; it’s also not deeply inspirational–it is very real. It’s a good book, and I think you should read it, and maybe that’s enough of a description.

A Long Way Down centers on four people who each independently decide they would like to kill themselves by jumping off a tall building on New Year’s Eve. Except their individual sojourns are interrupted when the others have the same idea, and they all agree to come down from the building that night. But that’s not really a happy thing; now they’ve even failed at suicide and don’t know what to do with themselves.

It was purely by coincidence that I read this book during Suicide Prevention Week. While I found this book to be an excellent portrayal of deep sadness, it does have its funny parts. That being said, that doesn’t mean suicide is a funny topic, and if you are feeling like ending your life, please seek help. I hesitate to suggest that this book would help you if you were feeling that way, but it might.

Now an aside for writers: Stop what you are doing and pick this book up NOW. You’ll get a look at realistic characters like nothing else. I worship Nick Hornby for this skill. He created four completely individual characters who have very little in common and who feel completely separate.

You’ve got: a narcissistic former TV personality who can’t stop himself from being a screw up; a teenager who is decidedly unhinged and drug-addled; a sad-sack older woman who really needs to get out more; and a wayward American musician who has lost track of his life’s purpose. And it’s amazing.

Another brilliant portion of this book is the way Hornby gives voice to each character, as it is told from four distinct perspectives. This allows the reader to ‘hear’ what a character thinks of himself…and what everyone else thinks of him. It’s genius, and incredibly revealing.

And that says a lot, because I’m struggling to think of much that actually HAPPENS in this book. It never drags–on the contrary, I always looked forward to reading the next page–but an action-filled drama this is not. It’s amazing that so much story could be packed into so little motion. Great swaths of this story take place with people just sitting around a room together awkwardly, and it’s brilliant and perfect.

A Long Way Down is a rather unexpected book, but it provides a great lesson in empathy. In fact, I think that’s the biggest thing I got from this book: the deep and abiding selfishness of suicide. All teenagers and self-absorbed persons should have to read it to learn what this kind of navel-gazing looks like from the outside. It’s marvelous.

A Long Way Down is a great book and I’d recommend it to anybody. I can’t imagine, however, that a non-famous author could ever have gotten this book off the ground–how do you pitch a story about people not dying? Luckily for us, Hornby managed it

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September 3, 2013 · 11:00 am

Review: The Forgotten Garden

The Forgotten GardenThe Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Forgotten Garden is a contemporary attempt to blend fairy tales with rich realistic backgrounds–and so struggles to do either well.

The writing in this behemoth of a book is so good–the descriptions are vivid and thoughtful, the flavor of the words changes with the location, and there is a tapestry of (female) characters (more on that in a moment)–but the plot is so clunky as it strives to wind together a history over four generations of women while also incorporating fairy tale elements that it overbalances itself and becomes pedantic and predictable.

The Forgotten Garden is about the search for heritage spanning generations and time. Cassandra is the main character, the modern incarnation of a streak of women with tragedy lacing their lives. Struggling to find a sense of meaning in her own life after her sudden tragedy, Cassandra takes up the quest begun by her grandmother 30 years prior to find her grandmother, Nell’s, lost family. How was a small child left alone on a ship to Australia? Who would abandon a sweet child with just a book of fairy tales and a white suitcase on a voyage across half the earth?

But the mystery traces back even further, as Morton shows us the delicate familial situation of Nell’s mother and cousin, and the tragedy that pulled Nell’s grandmother from her place of wealth and power.

Got that?
1860s-Woman leaves rich family, has kids
– Woman is dead, daughter Eliza is rescued by wealthy uncle
1913-Child is found all alone in ship that berths in Australia
1975-Child, now grown and known as Nell, seeks to find out her past; gets interrupted by her own family struggles
2012-Granddaughter of Nell, after her grandmother’s death, seeks to understand all of the prior mysterious history

When I realized that there were no major male characters in this book, that it was literally a rare bird of a story that highlighted women, I desperately wanted to like it. It is almost certain the author pulled her concepts from sweet-but-tragic children’s stories like A Little Princess and The Secret Garden. I love those stories, so I loved those aspects I recognized in The Forgotten Garden, but it’s just too much and the story feels forced.

Perhaps it’s a consequence of the overlapping nature of this story, which flits between women and over eras as the tale unfolds, but the “mysteries” turned out to be pretty predictable–I knew the ending by the halfway point, but still had to slog through the rest of the story–and it was frustrating that, in a non-Gothic modern story, “circumstances” would frequently pop up to answer long-dormant questions. Oh, you happen to enjoy art? Well I happen to have these totally rare sketches on hand, today only! And two pages later, BOOM, you’re related to the artist.

And that kind of thing happened ALL THE TIME.

It’s just too contrived. That kind of magical circumstance would have been great if this story had just embraced itself as a fairy tale, but it insisted on remaining mundane and realistic. You can’t have both frequent miraculous occurrences and realism without both falling short.

This was also a stupidly tragic book. I recommend most of the characters get counseling; does everyone seriously need a deep and painful tragedy to haunt them their whole life? Maybe it’s the genre, I don’t know, but I found it unnecessary. Even in the end, I’m not convinced of anyone’s happiness.

I also have a beef with two of the main “villain” characters. To be fair, the author did try to contextualize and rationalize at least some of their personalities, but it just wasn’t enough. These two were chronic bitches. They were poisonous to all around them–even at the sake of their own happiness. It was so frustrating, and also so shallow. It made the Victorian Aunt, in particular, a one-dimensional meanie. I hoped, the whole time, that someone would push her out a high window (and then, when her “comeuppance” DID come, it was so trite and otherwordly that I just rolled my eyes).

I was hopeful for this book, but ultimately it was a disappointment.

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August 27, 2013 · 11:02 am

Waiting Game

It feels like all I’m doing. Waiting. Waiting to hear back on the status of my works. On if it even “works.” Waiting for November, for the full-tilt NaNoWriMo madness I love and dread every year.

Last October, I entered my first book, Alt.World, a science-fiction dystopia, into the insane HarperVoyager open submissions cattle call. I figured, “why not?” I had it edited, had sent it around for queries and got lots of rejections, gotten disheartened and set it aside. But I still love it (do you ever not love your works, even if they don’t take off?) so I figured it was worth a shot at one of the 12 digital titles Harper Voyager crazily said they’d take from open calls.

Except they got way more of a response than they expected–more than 4,500 entries in two weeks. So that kind of blew their whole timeline, and they said it would take longer. So I put on my patience hat and worked more on Undead Rising, my second novel, a zombie-survival gamebook.

In May, they said they’d read through and rejected 3,595 of those submissions, leaving 948 in their “further review” pile. I hadn’t heard anything–I’m in the further review pile.  So that was exciting, and I was content to keep waiting. After all, they promised to check in more frequently.

It’s the end of August, and no further updates. I’m checking my junk email folders twice a day out of pure paranoia. The internet rumors say maybe they’re down to fewer than 400, but no one seems to know for sure and I won’t take it as gospel until they say so. Here’s hoping they haven’t forgotten/overlooked mine somehow.

 

Patience. Patience.

And then there’s the manuscript for Undead Rising, which two agents seemed excited about at DFW Writers’ Convention in May, resulting in two glorious requests for fulls. It’s hard not to pester them (okay, I pester a little. Just a “hey, how’s it going?” email once every month. Just one sentence, I swear. Teensy pester…).

It’s hard to wait.

My writing brain can’t live in the same space as my business brain, it seems; I have to switch one off to work on the other. And lately, with all this waiting, my business brain has been fussing at me a lot.

Any suggestions for winning at the Waiting Game, folks? I felt like I was doing well at patience, but it’s starting to wear on me by now. Let me know your advice in the comments.

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