October 2011

LOOK!  I reviewed every book I read this month.  I deserve a cookie.

1. Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott (50%)
2. The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by Ellen Datlow (35%)
3. City of Veils by Zoë Ferraris
4. The Dark Mirror by Juliet Marillier (30%)
5. The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai
6. Ombria in Shadow by Patricia A. McKillip
7. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
8. The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier
9. The Company by K. J. Parker
10. The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
11. Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks
12. Little Red Riding Hood and Other French Fairy Tales translated by Jack Zipes

I abandoned 3 books.

I read 3 short story collections.

I read 10 books from my TBR list.

I read 10 fantasy or science fiction books.

I reread 1 book.

My favorite book was The Borrower.

My least favorite book was Flatland.

Tidying up the to-do list

I have a lot of things to get done before November 1.  So instead of doing them, I’m writing about them.  (How typical.)

1. October Submissions.  Since April, I’ve been sending out a minimum of five short story submissions to magazines each month.  This month, I’ve only sent one so far.  I have the stories ready, but not the cover letters, which can be quite laborious, as each one has to be tailored to the individual publication.  The work is worth it, but not necessarily enjoyable.

2. Grading.  I have about twenty-five papers left to grade.  In a very good hour, I can grade ten to twelve.  But I can only do an hour at a time before I start getting zombie-brain, so I have to spread out the work.

3. Online Job Training.  I have to do a dull-as-dirt mandatory online training program and quiz about diversity or something like that.  It takes about an hour.

4. Class Preparation.  Before tomorrow, I have to plan the week’s lessons.  This can take anywhere from one to three hours, including textbook reading and writing handout materials or PowerPoints and so forth.  My dean might also be coming to visit one of my classes, so I have to make sure the lessons are extra good.

5. Work.  And there’s work, from 1:00-5:30 today, and from 8:00-2:20 tomorrow.  So with online submissions taking, say, two hours, grading at three, job training at one, and class prep at three, I have nine hours of extra work to squeeze in around my regular work schedule of the next two days.  No, I haven’t been putting things off (except the job training).  This is normally how busy I am, plus writing.

Goodbye, reading for pleasure.  See you in December.

Sad face.

15. Little Red Riding Hood

TBR #15.  Little Red Riding Hood and Other French Fairy Tales translated by Jack Zipes.

First sentence: “A miller bequeathed to his three sons all his worldly goods, which consisted just of his mill, his ass, and his cat.”

So begins “The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots.”  All of these fairy tales are intriguingly odd–kidnapped or cursed princes and princesses, arbitrarily good and evil fairies, and talking animals abound.  While these are all a bit courtly and sometimes bizarre, they are lovingly translated and most enjoyable to dedicated readers of fantasy.

Now I want Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantments, the longer work from which these are selected.  There’s something about a lovelorn king and the youngest of three sisters that makes for delightful reading.

See how obliging I am?

Your wishes are my command.  I now commence blogging about How I Prepared for NaNoWriMo 2011.

It started with a place name, which isn’t normal.  Normally I think of a character and imagine a world around him or her; this time my subconscious invented a forest named Edgewood, with a mock announcer voice-over asking, “What is it on the edge of?”  So I set myself to find out.

Now, I’m a big fan of narratology, which is concerned with the effects of narrative structure.  When I realized Edgewood was on the edge of fairy-tale style magic, with reality on one side and supernatural happenings on the other, my mind immediately leaped to Vladimir Propp.  He wrote about narrative in Russian folktales, and I kind of love his book, which makes a formula out of narrative events, complete with outline.

So I had two pieces: Edgewood and folklore.  This was in late September, and I knew I had a lot of thinking to do before I would be ready to write on November first.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I think best on the page.  So I took my Moleskine journal, labeled thirty-one pages with the dates in October, and set myself a task: I would write one page about my novel every day.  And I have.  And it’s worked.

Here are things I’ve written about:

• Character descriptions
• Place descriptions
• Lists
• Problems with the plot
• Outlines
• Maps and diagrams
• Complaints
• Scenes and scraps of dialogue
• Backstories
• Fake dust jacket synopses
• Things that have to happen and the order they have to happen in
• Notes on tone
• A list of books I hope people will compare my book to
• Whatever comes into my brain that is ever-so-slightly novel-related

And in the course of just under thirty-one days, I’ve found that I have a novel in my head.  Not complete, of course, but with enough detail that I know what will be going on in each chapter.  The benefit to consistently writing the page is that my subconscious would often be working on plotting or problems throughout the day, so that when I sat down to write, usually in the evening, I had often more to say than I realized before I started writing.

It’s a strategy I’ll certainly be using again.

Meanwhile, I plan to stick to my regular NaNoWriMo technique: write two days’ worth  of words on Day 1 and one day’s worth faithfully after that.  That way if I ‘fall behind,’ I will write double the word count the next day to ‘catch up’ to being one day ahead.

Slow and steady is my motto, where “slow” here can be defined as a (brain)death-defying pace of 1,667 words a day every day for thirty days.

NaNoWriMo, I love you.  Can’t wait for November 1!

16. Look to Windward

TBR #16.  Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks.

First sentence: “The barges lay on the darkness of the still canal, their lines softened by the snow heaped in pillows and hummocks on their decks.”

This is a Culture novel.  Start with The Player of Games or Use of Weapons.  If you like those, you will like this one.  If not, you probably won’t.

I liked it.

Sadly, I’m running out of Iain M. Banks books–just a couple more hard-to-find SF books, a short story collection, and the massive Algebraist, before I will have to switch to Banks’s mainstream fiction.

17. The Brief History of the Dead

TBR #17.  The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier.

First sentence: “When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had traveled across a desert of living sand.”

The city is Limbo, where those who are dead live while someone alive on Earth still remembers them.  But a viral epidemic is threatening not only the extinction of all humanity on Earth but also the end of the inhabitants of the city.  Untold numbers die and disappear until there is only one woman left alive on Earth and less than a hundred thousand in Limbo.

Laura Byrd was on Antarctica when the pandemic devastated the other continents.  To keep from dying, she stays on the move, trying to find signs of other humans.  Laura’s journey and the journey of those she remembers meet in a vividly imagined and movingly written story of those who live in each other’s memories.

Though I was a bit frustrated by the novel’s ending, I couldn’t honestly expect Brockmeier to explain all the mysteries of life and death.  I liked the Laura-Antarctica chapters a lot.  On the other hand, sometimes it wasn’t immediately clear why or how the in-Limbo stories connected to Laura or to each other, which gave this book the feel of a short story collection.  A first-rate story collection, it’s true, but not as successful a novel as it might have been if plainer lines had been drawn between those dead and those alive.

New acquisitions

I went to Half Price Books.  I know, but it’s a hard habit to break.  I found some good books, one I was looking for and four I wasn’t; I’ve added them to my TBR list.

1. Banks, Iain M.  Look to Windward.  It’s a UK version of a Culture novel that hasn’t been re-released in the US yet!   True, the back cover says, Not for sale in the US, but I proved that wrong, didn’t I?
2. Brockmeier, Kevin.  The Brief History of the Dead.  After having enjoyed The View from the Seventh Layer so much, I wanted Brockmeier’s novel, which is about Limbo and Antarctica, and a global epidemic.  At least as far as I can tell from chapter two.
3. Card, Orson Scott, ed.  Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century.  This collection was positively forced on me by my husband, who wanted to read one of the stories and insisted, therefore, that I should read all of them.  I complained, but not too hard.
4. Moore, Lorrie.  A Gate at the Stairs.  My former graduate school classmates always made much of Lorrie Moore, so for $1.00, I thought I would finally see what they kept going on about.
5. Petterson, Per.  Out Stealing Horses.  This was another $1.00 find, reminiscent of when I worked at a certain no-longer-existent bookstore, where I shelved and sold a whole lot of this novel; since I always feel as though I need to read more books from other countries, more books in translation, I took a chance.

I found some good books, one I was looking for and four I wasn’t.