alexandraerin

Me: Hey, Levar Burton's live-tweeting his first taste of absinthe.
My Housemate: Are you serious?
Me: Yeah... but you don't have to take my word for it.

...and now, my life is complete.

I never have much luck keeping up my blogging. I always start to feel awkward, like, "Does anybody care?"... but if they don't care, obviously, they don't have to read. So, anyway, I'm just going to blast out all the stray thoughts that I've yet to put down.

* I had the privilege of seeing Wicked on stage the other week. I know a lot of people either like the book or the musical but not both, but I'm a fan of them both. They're both ultimately retellings of the same source story... I don't think you could call the musical's interpretation of Gregory Maguire novel invalid without invalidating the novel. They exist serve different purposes, but both are needed.

Music is pretty much my spirituality. When I want a spiritual experience, I listen to music. Yes, even musical theater. It's all cheap artifice and blatant emotional manipulation, but so what? Most foma are. "Live by the showtunes that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."

* Speaking of music and spirituality, I had the even more distinct privilege of being one of the few people to hear s00j playing her first Omaha concert at the home of bryirfox. I would have drummed up a few more people, but I fail at calendars and forgot to remind them to keep that night free. Blah. It was a great concert, though.

* I've been reading The Orphan's Tales (Book One and Two), by yuki_onna of Palimpsest fame.

Just as with Palimpsest, s00j produced companion albums for both books that incorporate readings of select passages, for the curious. I recommend listening to Shipful of Monsters and Taglio! if you want to listen to something that's just plain fun. I recommend City of Marrow if you want something haunting and bluesy and beautiful. I further recommend The Kingdom of Mice if you're not terribly fond of sleeping.

* Three things in particular impress me about Cat as an author.

One is the ability to weave so many threads going off in so many different directions only to have them miraculously converge in one spot on the other side of the planet. She shows you many wonderful things, and everything you see comes to bear somehow. This was on display in Palimpsest, where much of the plot is rooted not in what is happening now but what has come before... but The Orphan's Tales is made out of it. It's a framed story where the frame is a pair of mirrors held up to each other, or a set of nesting dolls... frames within frames and wheels within wheels. Or to change metaphors completely, it's like a magic show where each trick sets up the next and then the grand finale somehow ties them all together.

Two is a sort of clarity. There are few villains in her books. There are mainly people working at cross-purposes to each other. One wants something. One wants something else. Their desires bring them into conflict. Yet they are both people, and neither one's desire exists to provide a foil for the other. Even the most unworthy and grasping among them is acting logically from his own point of view.

The world of The Orphan Tales is peopled with people who are not human, and it seems to be very clear in the author's head (or at least it seems to be very clear on paper) that they are not human, that they are people, and (in some cases) they are monsters.

They can be quite personable. They can be civil, or even civilized. But... well, at one point in the first book, a girl who has just been rescued from a life of comparative drudgery and being treated as a freakish outcast to roam the seas on a pirate ship full of similar outcasts, and she asks if they came to her community just to rescue her and is told no, they did plenty of looting and plundering. They're pirates. They can have fun and magical adventures and provide a surrogate family for the odd girl out, but they're still pirates. That's what they do.

It reminded me a bit of Amelia Atwater-Rhodes's first vampire novel, In The Forests of the Night... a young adult vampire novel that actually opens the action with the protagonist hunting a human. I liked that because that's what vampires are and that's what vampires do. The whole "struggling against my cursed nature, overcoming my instincts" thing was once a fresh new twist and now it's an excuse for people who want to write about sexy superpowered immortals. It can still be done, but if you don't establish first that vampires are vampires, it loses impact.

I mean, if you've got a good story about a lion falling in love with a lamb, write it, but never forget that the lion is a lion...

And to bring that back around to The Orphan's Tales, Ms. Valente never pretends she isn't writing about lions when she is, and she never forgets what a lion is or what a lion does, and she doesn't fall into the trap of thinking that you either have to make your monsters either monstrous or personable but never both, or that personable means essentially human and not the least bit alien except in appearance.

And the third is the amount of research and careful preparation that must go into each book. I've got a lot of stuff bouncing around in my head and some of it naturally comes out in my writing, but she really does her homework. The wrapper part of The Orphan's Tales is presented in trappings that wouldn't be out of place in The Arabian Nights, it shows strong influence from the far east, the far north, and places you'd never expect.

* I love Girls With Slingshots, but between the "Hazel freaks out and then grills her boyfriend over his sexual past" plotline and now the "Hazel freaks out and is suddenly awkward with Jamie because she 'doesn't know how to talk to lesbians'" plotline it seems like the only thing moving the plot forward is Hazel reacting to things like an idiot.

* Oh, dear God, I just had an odd moment of sympathy with my readers. :P

* After seeing how many archons, elementals, and fey are in the Monster Manual 2, I understand why they were so stingy with the same in Manual of the Planes... because if I didn't have the Manual, I would have hated to buy MM2 and find out I needed another book to get them. Similarly, I was kind of surprised to see no new kobold archetypes when there new goblins, gnolls, and most other humanoid races, but then I remembered they'd received an extensive treatment in the Draconomicon.

* Once I finish the second Orphan's Tales book, I have one more hard copy book to read (the newest Preston/Child, so it won't take long) and then I'm going to start in on shadesong's Shayara stuff, which I've been looking forward to since I first saw it back in March. When you're writing, I think it's important to remember to take breaks to read for pleasure. I know I've read quotes by some authors... I can't think of the names at the moment... who say they never read anyone else's books, and I just can't wrap my head around that.