Month: November 2011

Today, a Warning

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Juvenile, Reviews11 Comments

I suppose the title should have warned me.  One of my book club’s recent selections was Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson.  It was a departure from our usual genres.  I think we were all intrigued by the idea of evil librarians.

I for one was expecting it to be a group of really awesome evil librarians.  There are plenty of awesome villains out there, and a really cool group of sinister, book-wielding librarians sounds amazing.

Too bad that isn’t what this turned out to be.  First thing–Alcatraz is the lead character’s name, and the book has nothing to do with the island or the prison.  Second, and even more importantly–the evil librarians were a LONG way from awesome.  Nor were they an isolated group.  Instead, the premise of this book is that all the librarians of the world are engaged in a vast conspiracy to feed everyone misinformation.  And they’re painfully stereotypical librarians, with horned-rim glasses and buns, or bad bow ties for the men.

I cannot at all fathom why anyone would write a book insulting librarians.  I mean, they’re librarians! I may be particularly ill-suited for this premise, considering I have four friends who are librarians, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have an active library card.  But anyone likely to be reading this book probably likes books.  And if you like books, you probably like libraries and librarians–I mean, people who help you get free books, what’s not to love?

And what exactly is the message for kids here?  Librarians are evil and untrustworthy, libraries are dangerous, and almost any book you might pick up is both bad and foolish?  That’s the message that comes across.

Now, I do realize this book is not meant to be serious.  That comes across too.  But it never achieves quite that right tone of self-mocking to make it funny and not irritating.  It’s trying to give the reader a nice broad wink, and failing miserably.  I think it wants to be “Springtime for Hitler,” which is hilarious.  This book is not.

Not to mention, it’s just badly written.  Alcatraz is telling the story, and his goal is to prove that he isn’t actually a hero.  Rule #1 of writing is that the reader should like your lead character.  Or hate them, that works sometimes too.  If your reader is irritated and/or bored, your book is dead.  When your narrator states that his goal is to irritate the reader and he succeeds, there’s a problem.  Every chapter starts with a page or two of totally irrelevant introduction, in which Alcatraz interrupts the plot to ramble on about whether he’s a good person, whether the reader is irritated yet (answer: YES), tries to convince us everything going on is plausible and if we don’t believe it we’re just brain-washed morons, or points out the clever literary devices he’s using, for the purpose of being annoying.

Honestly, it’s like an example in how a book should not be written.

I haven’t even mentioned the plot, have I?  It’s not so bad, really.  Comparatively.  Alcatraz is an orphan with a talent for breaking things.  One day he meets his grandfather, who tells him he’s actually a member of a famous family who has special Talents, and Alcatraz begins to learn how he can use breaking things to his advantage.  His grandfather also tells him about the conspiracy of the Evil Librarians, and about an entire other society on a continent in the middle of the Pacific (knowledge of which the Evil Librarians have suppressed).  They set out on a mission to rescue a bag of really special sand that the Evil Librarians have stolen.

It’s not a terrible plot.  The Talents are entertaining, because they all sound like bad things (arriving late all the time) but turn out to be useful (the late person is constantly late for bullets, so he can’t be shot).  I like the idea of the secret continent.  I’ve often thought there was potential for a story in the idea that some basic fact is really false, but no one knows it, because how many things do we actually know from  first-hand experience?  How many of us have sailed across the Pacific?

It’s an okay plot in a terrible book.  And about that bag of sand.  The bag contains the Sands of Rashid.  You can definitely say “the sands of time” and I’ll accept “the Sands of Rashid” if necessary  But they keep on talking about the sands.  They have to rescue the sands and they have to get the sands back and the sands are really important.  “Sand” should not be plural!  It got to where I wanted to scream every time they said sands.

You know, I bet a librarian could have told Sanderson that you don’t make “sand” plural.

So why did I even finish this book?  Mostly because I knew that I’d be able to rant about it at Book Club and on my blog, and I figured I needed to finish it to be able to rant more effectively.

But you don’t need to.  Really.

NaNoWriMo Day 19

On By cherylmahoneyIn NaNoWriMoLeave a comment

Tired tonight…

Yesterday was a good day.  We explored the locked room, got into all sorts of character development, and wound up with almost two thousand words written.

Today has involved lots of running about, and for a while there I thought I was only going to get a few hundred words down.  But, I managed some more time and dragged my characters through a couple more scenes (including one scene which probably deserves better and may get it in a revision), to wind up only 96 words behind.  Today, I’m calling that a victory.  Especially because I ended with Lyra starting another story (kind of–I’ve been having her tell backstory like it’s a separate story), and her stories are always good for my word count.  So I’m hopeful for tomorrow.

That’s all I’ve got tonight.  Have a paragraph.

It takes a very special sort of mind to be interested in whether one’s ability to light a candle magically is affected by the waning and waxing of the moon.  Maybe if the candle exploded during the full moon, that would be interesting, but Eleanora never observed any effects so dramatic.

NaNoWriMo Day 17, and a Reconciliation with Thursdays

On By cherylmahoneyIn NaNoWriMo4 Comments

So I guess I got the hang of Thursday after all.  My expected distraction today didn’t develop, and I got a nice 1,733 words written.  Which would be excellent–but it turned out that it was yesterday I couldn’t get anything done!  Fortunately, I had that big cushion built up, so I finish out today 174 words behind the goal.  That’s a paragraph or two; I can deal with that.

It’s a funny thing about those word-count cushions.  You build what seems like a nice big one, a thousand words or so ahead of the game and the chart looks so pretty with the “written” line up above the “target” line…and then one slow day knocks it all out.  I was out most of yesterday evening, and I swear I was going to be good and write when I got home…but then I had a package.  And I’m compulsive about packages, they have to be opened, and if it’s something fun…well, it was a new picture, so it had to go on the wall, and by that point I figured Lyra and Dastan could wait until today.

Which they very nicely did, and still showed up to get work done tonight.  And anyway–if I ever got too far ahead, I suspect I’d lose all my motivation.  There wouldn’t be any challenge then!

Tonight’s excerpt:

There are many locked doors in our castle.  We’ve slept behind a locked door every night, for as long as I can remember.  Any doors leading outside are locked.  There are all sorts of spare rooms that are kept under a key.

But the most incontrovertibly locked room, the room that was kept the most inviolate, the most untouched and unvisited, was our mother’s.  It had been locked the day she died and, as far as we knew, it had never been opened.

Mother and Father had always had separate bedrooms; it’s common enough among royalty, although I suppose they must have, you know, visited.  There are twelve of us, after all.  But anyway, Mother had a room that was just hers.  Vira remembers it.  I don’t.

I think we get to visit the locked room tomorrow.  I’m looking forward to it.  🙂

Sympathy for the Devil

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Juvenile, Reviews1 Comment

I found Troll’s Eye View in a very writerly fashion–I was doing research to see if anyone had come up with the same angle as I have for retelling “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.”  Subtitled “A Book of Villainous Tales,” it’s a collection of short stories, retelling fairy tales from the villain’s point of view.  That includes “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” although calling the oldest princess the villain seems like a stretch (granted, she didn’t mind people being beheaded, in the original version).

The book is edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and has some impressive writers included, like Garth Nix, Jane Yolen and Neil Gaiman.

There were some excellent stories in here, although I was dissatisfied with a number of them too.  I don’t know if you can tell from the picture, but it’s a slim book, and they fit fifteen stories into it.  I ended up feeling that several were nice ideas that didn’t get much development.  I think I’m the wrong age for those too.  I love children’s books, and very often find ones that are completely enjoyable to me as an adult.  Many of these stories, I think, really are better for just kids, who wouldn’t mind a simpler narrative.

And there were the excellent ones.  “Castle Othello” by Nancy Farmer is really clever meld of Bluebeard and Shakespeare, with a good twist to the ending.  Neil Gaiman contributed a dark poem based on “Sleeping Beauty.”  Nix and Yolen both had some good humor, although I think the shortness of the stories limited their scope.  Ellen Kushner’s “Twelve Dancing Princesses” retelling (actually, “The Shoes that Were Danced to Pieces” was how she titled it) was a clever idea, although another one with limited development–and not the same as my idea, fortunately.

My favorite, by far and away, was “A Delicate Architecture” by Catherynne M. Valente.  This would not have been the case when I was a kid, and in fact I think it probably would have given me nightmares!  But as an adult I can appreciate the creepiness of some of the images, and the beauty of the writing.  It starts out almost as a more poetic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with a little girl describing the wonderful creations of her father the candy-maker.  There’s beautiful, vivid imagery…until the story takes a darker turn, and then the images are just as vivid, but turn into nightmares.  (Spoiler warning, because I can’t resist telling you about it!)  The little girl becomes a young woman, until finally she learns that her father’s fanciful tale of creating her from sugar is all too true.  After that she’s treated not as a person, but as a cooking implement, and hung up on the wall of the kitchen at the royal palace, to be used for the desserts…and that’s the image that would have given me nightmares as a child!  Finally she becomes a gnarled old woman, who escapes into the woods to build a house out of candy…  It’s an excellent story, and makes me want to read more by Valente!

The book on the whole was more mixed.  But it was also a quick read, and worth it for the good ones!

NaNoWriMo Day 15–Huzzah for the Midway Point!

On By cherylmahoneyIn NaNoWriMo1 Comment

It’s mid-month–I can’t tell at all if I’m mid-novel–but I am mid-wordcount!  In fact, I passed 25,000 pretty early this evening, and am now almost 1,500 words ahead on the word goal.  I had a very strong Friday and Saturday, and have managed a bit extra the last two days too.

All of which adds up to a very good thing, because I may be having another “can’t write anything” Thursday.  I haven’t had a good writing Thursday yet this month, and I’m not hopeful for next week either (being Thanksgiving, you know).  It’s just something about the day.

Now I have to quote Douglas Adams: “It must be Thursday.  I could never get the hang of Thursdays.”

So I’m happy about my word count for now.  Although it made me even happier yesterday when I hit on a relationship quirk for my characters.  There must be an official name for the concept…but it’s some back and forth that two characters keep doing throughout the book, and that probably will be used to reveal their connection.  In Red’s Girl, Red always denies needing help whenever Tam helps him, but then thanks her; by the end, she says “you’re welcome” before he gets to the thank you part.  In The People the Fairies Forget, Anthony is forever shortening Catherine’s name to Cat over her objections, until finally an emotionally pivotal moment causes her to admit she likes it–which he always knew.  Relationship quirks.

And then yesterday Dastan suggested that he and Lyra do a daily trade of ways they’re different from their multitudes of siblings.  Not sure of every way I’m going to use this, but I think it’s going to help.

I did have a nice writing point here…oh yes, that the word count is good but having a sudden character or plot breakthrough is actually more satisfying than sheer number of words.  Which is intriguing though not really surprising.

I also think I’m slightly more incoherent tonight than usual.  Lyra wanted to tell a story, so I did a lot of flowery, Brothers Grimm-style writing, and I think now I’m having a reaction, manifesting itself as random chatter.

Don’t mind me.  Too much typing.  Let me find you an excerpt and then I’m off for the night…

I know, you can have the beginning of Lyra’s story, which will probably make it on here in its entirety for some Fiction Friday.  For now, an excerpt:

Once upon a time, there was a shopkeeper’s daughter who was very beautiful.  It was a sad fact that because she was beautiful, people’s automatic inclination was to do things for her.  That might not have been so bad in itself, but she had realized this tendency early on and loved to take advantage of it.

When her mother asked her to clean the house or to help with the laundry, she’d make endless excuses to get out of it, preferring to spend the time combing her hair or trying on different dresses.  When her mother did insist on her working, she was so slow about it that the good woman would eventually give up in exasperation and do the job herself.

When her father asked her to mind the shop, she would avoid helping customers if at all possible, and when she couldn’t avoid it she was as slow as you could imagine.  She asked the customers to pack up their own purchases and couldn’t be bothered even to do the counting to hand out change.  You may expect that service was slow and the customers ended up waiting around, whenever she was minding the shop.  The men, however, so enjoyed looking at her that they didn’t often complain.  Still, her father knew that he was losing business because not everyone was willing to wait—and he wasn’t winning customers to his shop from the women in town.

One day the prince of that country passed through the town and his party stopped at the shop to buy fresh supplies for their journey.  It happened to be a day when the girl was (in theory) helping in the shop.  The prince saw her, and was sure that he had never seen anyone so beautiful, which may have been true.  He had been reading too many stories, and become convinced that such a beautiful face could only indicate a kind nature, a worthy spirit, and a personality that would match his own—in other words, that her beauty proved she was his soul mate, which it didn’t at all.