Monkeys and keyboards aside, one Random + CSS still doesn't make poop.

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:56:47 GMT

I read Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death series again as braincleaner. It's working, and I'm glad she's writing a fourth one.

~~

I read Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby, finally. It's strange, yeah, but it's interesting--and also functioned as braincleaner. The main character finds himself in possession of a poem that can kill, then finds himself able to kill with a thought. What follows is a fairly convoluted tale of the corrupting nature of power, mixed with the clash between modern media's force-feeding style and a situation where an influx of information can be deadly, and then sprinkled with a heaping spoonful of WTF-gender-and-sexuality and studded with liberal pokes at the fourth wall.

Old George Orwell got it backward.

Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed.

He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled.

And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.

I still really wish I'd been at the reading he did at my old college--the one where a number of people in the audience passed out.

~~

I went back and read chunks of David Foster Wallace's short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and found myself more appreciative of its frequently overly-wordy WTF than I was in college. He was an oddball, that one, but his writing style's conductive to sitting down and concentrating on what's being said--something I needed.

~~

Mark Millar's graphic novel Old Man Logan wasn't as puerile and poorly-written as Wanted, but somehow was even less cerebral or well-plotted. The story opens up fifty years in the post-apocalyptic future, as Wolverine's non-mutant kids offer to sell their working x-box in order to pay rent.

If you can't get your brain around the idea of an x-box making it fifty years without bricking, this would be a good stopping point. It just gets worse from there. Om nom nom adamantium. Seriously: if I get started, I'll rip the entire story to shreds.

Otherwise . . . I'm not sure if Millar aims for transparent bigotry or just lands there anyway. The bad guys are a black man covered in gold jewelry, a Hispanic girl with too many facial piercings, and the (morbidly obese) Hulk's cannibalistic trailer-park-living kids/grandkids--an emo-haired punker, some rednecks, and a perpetually-publicly-breastfeeding female. The protagonists? All white males. The good women? Sidelined or fridged. The young, attractive women? Evil or whores. Then there's how Wolverine/Logan is a pacifist(!) who hasn't popped his claws in fifty years and who is stomped/stands by placidly as his friend gets beaten down--but he finally turns violent and almost stabs a random bar patron in the face when they imply that he might be gay. And of course, the work completely fails the Bechdel test.

Subtlety, thy name is not Millar.

But at least it wasn't Wanted. Few things can be as bad as a monster made of Hitler's poop or the closing line "This is my face as I'm fucking you in the ass."

For braincleaner from that, I might have to dig up the Wonder Woman comic written by Jodi Picoult.

~

The thing I thought would be novella-sized is going to top out at about 15000 words. Oh well. As long as I finish it.

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:00:26 GMT

Our Bella got the flu, so we only got half the movie filmed. The rest should go fairly smoothly, though . . . well, as long as Oni continues to behave. He's mis/behaved wonderfully so far, and only managed to eat the toe out of a sock.

Don't ask. Yet. :D

~~

I finished Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and am pretty sure I'm obligated to make the man cookies at some point. The end is a little sudden, but the writing is high-level for a kids' book and overall is one of the better ones I've read in a while. I recommend it.

~~

I finally finished Chelsea Cain's Heartsick. The book's main murder mystery plot seemed eclipsed by the side(?) plot of the insane yet beautiful female serial killer and the suicidally depressed cop she's Stockholm syndrome'd, tortured, and brainfucked into a scarred, divorced, and drug-addled shadow of his former self. I'd say this is probably because the latter is a pretty new concept, while the mystery/thriller section is overflowing with the former.

Either way--the book got off to a somewhat slow start, but once it started moving (and the WTF-y interplay of Gretchen & Archie actually got going) it was interesting. If anyone wants my ARC that I've been hoarding for the past couple years, let me know.

~~

I started reading Captain Blood, too--what can I say, I wanted something out of the ordinary--and was pleasantly surprised. The main character is a near-radioactive Marty Stu (an Irishman who's the best physician around, was an awesome soldier and is still an awesome fighter, speaks perfectly accented Spanish, is oh-so-physically appealing, plots the best & sneakiest plots to ever be plotted, repeat any of those a few times over, so on and so forth) but the story rolls along really well for its originating time period, and it's written on so much of a higher level than what I've been reading lately that I'm frequently astounded. I'm not mentally tripping on the sentences because the language is archaic, I'm tripping because it's such heavy-duty wording that I as a reader have to pay close attention to in order to properly get the feel and description of things. I still don't expect much from it storyline-wise--I'm willing to bet dollars and donuts that the titular character will break hearts, defeat everyone, find treasure, get the girl, and possibly fart roses by the time it's all over--but I'll probably keep with it for a little while longer. Or at least until I find something else entertaining.

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:49:36 GMT

Justine Larbalestier's book Liar is the antithesis of the current YA/urban fantasy/paranormal romance werewolf novels.

I can't go into it very much because the pathological liar narrator creates so many WTF moments, and you as a reader have to pay so much attention, that to start explaining it is guaranteed to start spoiling it. Hell, I've thrown a bit of a spoiler in with my intro sentence here.

I kinda get the impression it won't do as well with younger readers because it does require you to weigh and think and pay attention and make your own decisions regarding the ending . . . but fuck them anyway, I thought it was kinda neat.

Also: Angry owl will eat your face if you say "Orly?" one more time.

and then there were three

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:45:32 GMT

There's currently three vampire/werewhatever authors I can stand.

Charlaine Harris, since she doesn't tend to take herself seriously (despite style problems early on in the series and varying problems later on).

Kelley Armstrong, who writes messed up (if tending towards Sue-ish) characters and who's put some interesting work into her world-building.

And now John Lindqvist, whose book Let the Right One In took everything I hate about the standard human-meets-vampire novel and threw it out the window. There's no heavy-handed vampirey seduction here: the main characters are twelve and twelve-going-on-230. There's no epic "ZOMG I R MONSTER" angst. Hell, there's not really even gender. Eli, the vampire, goes about as a girl, then reveals s/he was once a boy who was genitally mutilated before being turned and goes about as a boy, then puts on a sundress and is a girl for a bit again.

And though the prose is a bit simplistic at times, and the ending doesn't exactly blindside you, the characters are all so staggering, show-stoppingly messed up that I wanted to huggle the book and carry it around with me. Oskar, the twelve year old main character, is bullied at school, accidentally wets himself on a regular basis, and wants to be a serial killer when he grows up. Eli, beyond gender, is also frequently beyond hygiene--but not beyond picking off the neighbors. Who, by the way, are all messed up. There's the young delinquents, the aging, dreaming alcoholics, the desperate divorcees and the edging-into-abusive cops they want to be with, and oh yeah the pedophile who lives with Eli, who kills people for blood so s/he can live, who steals the money from his victims' bodies, and who gives it to the kids he can't bring himself to molest because they're not Eli.

Strangely enough, even with the pedophile and Oskar's vague interest in porn and the eventual rapacious zombie with a permanent hardon, the underlying 'ship story, of a young boy and the genderless monster who really may or may not eat him one day, comes off as strangely pure. They play with Rubik's cubes, they tap secret messages to each other in Morse code, they snuggle, they wrestle, Oskar has to explain to Eli that when he says he wants them to "go out" that he doesn't mean they have to do anything besides what they're already doing . . .

But when Eli starts acting more like a little kid and less like an extremely old being in a little kid's body, and the pedophile starts to freak out because it's harder for him to justify lusting after an extremely old being that just happens to look like a child, and by the way the crazy cat man in the next building saw something that looked like a kid kill one of the local alcoholics . . .

. . . I think I have to buy this one now. :P

spreading the misery

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:10:08 GMT

The co-worker and I were taking bets on just how bad Terry Goodkind's new novel would be. After all, it was being touted as a thriller, not fantasy. We started off betting on whether the main character would be a businessman (to go along with Goodkind's Randroid-esque philosophies) or an ex-cop (for the blindingly cliche angle).

The main character's an artist, so we were both a little off-base. So we started taking bets on whether or not Goodkind would obviously tie this novel into his other novels--or whether he'd just write the same thing over again.

Turns out we were both right.

Gigantic sensitive-souled thick-haired fighter-type guy, last name Rahl, rescues a mysterious and beautiful and "obviously" intelligent ~~stone cold bitch~~ woman from out-of-control bad guys. She has a mysterious mission for him, and people want to kill him because of his name. Sound familiar?

Sorry, shikomekidomi--I don't know I can make it far enough in to find if another character has as bad a name as ~~Penis~~ Panis. But if you can make it past the first chapter, maybe you can let me know. To me, though, this just looks like Sword of Truth fanfic written by a teenager.

(For the record, I don't know if the dozens of typos are to be blamed on Borders, or a faulty c&p'd ARC. Some look like page breaks were missed, but some are repeated a few times. But even fixing them wouldn't fix the writing itself. That'd take a miracle.)

bad behavior in the book field

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:18:44 GMT

Is this a branch of Racefail, or is it just outright race & gender failure?

Justine Larbalestier wrote a YA book called Liar, about a mixed-race, dark-skinned, short-haired character--a book where the character's race and appearance factor heavily into the storyline. Publisher Bloomsbury Press decided the best cover to put on this book was a shot of a long-haired white girl.

Now, plenty of covers fuck up character descriptions--but when official people from the publishing house defend their choices with things like this:

“The entire premise of this book is about a compulsive liar,” said Melanie Cecka, publishing director of Bloomsbury Children’s Books USA and Walker Books for Young Readers, who worked on Liar. “Of all the things you’re going to choose to believe of her, you’re going to choose to believe she was telling the truth about race?”And tell the author things like this:

Since I've told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don't sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won't take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can't give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA-they're exiled to the Urban Fiction section-and many bookshops simply don't stock them at all.Yeah, not cool. Seems it's too strange a thing to have people of color on book covers, and no one wants to try to acclimate the general public to the novel idea of integration.

At least, not if a potential monetary loss is involved.

~~

And while we're at it . . . An anthology is coming out entitled The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing Sci-Fi. People checking out the book noticed that the list of included "mind-blowing" authors contains no women or people of color.

Not only has at least one of the authors come charging out of the woodwork to make an ass of himself:

(To which I said, "What the hell?")

Then the editor, Mike Ashley, came in to help make things worse.

That probably has something to do with my concept of "mind-blowing". Women are every bit as capable of writing mindblowing sf as men are, but with women the stories concentrate far more on people, life, society and not the hard-scientific concepts I was looking for.Mike Ashley also notes that he did ask for stories from women, too. Two of them. Even though all we're capable of writing about is people and society, not science.

(Also, as an editor I want to bite him.)

~~Fires need set.~~ I think The Angry Black Woman just set that fire for me. I like her. :D

Eta: Another bit of WTF has come to my attention: that of a male author with a feminine name, who wrote a story from a male's POV and had it rejected--brutally--because the editor says he, as a woman writer, doesn't know how to write a convincing male character.

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 04:16:52 GMT

I've got this Harlan Ellison quote up in my profile. I found it, I loved it, I snagged it as a mirror of my own dirty optimistic leanings.

My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration and ignoble deaths; that there is security in personal strength; that you can fight City Hall and win; that any action is better than no action, even if it's the wrong action; that you never reach glory or self-fulfillment unless you're willing to risk everything, dare anything, put yourself dead on the line every time; and that once one becomes strong or rich or potent or powerful it is the responsibility of the strong to help the weak become strong.

Imagine my surprise to find that Harlan Ellison, despite his words' implications, is a bit of an anti-woman racist douchebag. Not only has he apparently started throwing all sorts of strange slurs at a WoC (woman of color) blogger--he sexually assaulted one Connie Wilson, the guest of honor at the '06 Hugo awards, in front of hundreds of people.

I still love the quote; I still love the idea behind it. But to keep it up is to support the man, in all of his frothing, grabbing, overly-entitled insanity. So it's got to go.

(Strangely, the subsequent quote becomes much more appropriate.)

More's a pity, since I've heard so many wonderful things about his writing. (I don't remember if I've read any, but now it's kinda like Orson Scott Card--I'm not sure I'd be able to stomach it based on some of the things he's said/done.)

~~~

I made an awesome barbecue sauce last night with ketchup, creamy Dijon mustard, Old Bay, cranberry chipotle sauce, and a three-finger pinch of ginger. The mustard made it savory, the cranberry part gave it a sweet edge while the chipotle part kicked, and the ginger gave it an awesome smell & aftertaste. I ph34r I'll never be able to replicate it again.

So I went from overly complicated to ridiculously simple. About a cup of ketchup (I bought it by the gallon at Sam's. Don't ask.), about 1/2 to 2/3 a cup of dark brown sugar, and two or three heaping tablespoons of chili powder later (I used almost half of a new container), and I had something sweet & spicy that was very very tasty over chicken on the grill.

~~~

I think I cracked something in my ankle. D: Running circles 'round the bookstore's gonna be interesting . . .

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:47:22 GMT

If I do this, I'll have the time to get to everything that needs done. But that silly guaranteed-paycheck day job is in the way . . .

That being said, I've got $7 on Borders going out of business in or by August. (Last week it was $5--then I learned how close we came to going under at the end of last quarter.) We're not getting in a lot of titles again, just like we were when we didn't have credit or funds to buy books from the publishers . . . We've got bargain everywhere, trying to lure in the cheap people with non-returnables and remainders no one wanted to begin with . . . We've got empty shelves left and right, and stores that've been hit by Project Phoenix don't even have the hours to get new releases out of pallets and onto the floor . . . And then the head of Pershing, the company that owns 40% of our stocks and is in charge of our one $42.5 million loan, seems to think that we're really, really aiming towards something we're not.

The business model of book superstores, however, is likely to change over time from primarily bookstores to merchants of a wider variety of products and services which are designed to appeal to the higher-income educated consumer that, on average, spends an hour or more in a book superstore.

Hope Otakon goes well enough to cover the expected forthcoming holes in my finances. Stock-wise, I'm almost back up to where I was for ANext. Two more weeks' hard crunchwork should get me up to a decent level. I hope.

I think I shall stab the next person who asks me if this is made of "pop tabs." (Though the last person to ask me seemed borderline-illiterate--I stood an aisle away from her today at work and listened to her painful attempts at pronouncing titles, and I felt sad for her.)

Reading China Mieville's The City & The City, and remembering how much I missed the thinking person's fantasy as opposed to the straightforward popcorn reads. While it's a little dry and the characterization doesn't really stand out in any way, it's very intelligently written and the worldbuilding's fascinating enough to help drive the narrative forward & keep my attention. I'm about a third of the way through and thus far I like it. :)

I have an ARC and might be persuaded to let it go once I'm finished. :)

once more, with classics!

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:14:31 GMT

Is it just me, or do we seem to be revisiting "Copyright: You're Doin' it Wrong" fairly frequently as of late?

The latest chapter: J.D. Salinger doesn't like when people try to make money off of him by professionally publishing fanfic of his work. Who'd have thought?

I still don't get why these little publishers would even want to risk the lawsuit and recall expenses that could come from taking something like this on. It's probably a combination of ignorance and greed that brings out defense statements like this:

Silverman, whose company distributes books by about 150 publishers, called "60 Years Later" a work of "social science fiction," saying that California doesn't plagiarize, but sets a well-known character in an alternate place and time -- as literature has done for centuries.
Fail and epic fail! This person needs to sort out the differences between plagiarism and copyright violation. Technically, only one is illegal--and that one's the one we're looking at.

Methinks this particular author and Lady Potato Moon need to get together and justify themselves to each other, in a vacuum, for the rest of eternity.

Thu, 14 May 2009 03:56:20 GMT

I've said before that reading Neil Gaiman is like having a great big bottle of wine and a whole cheesecake, and that finishing one of his books leaves one feeling lazy, sated, and sometimes a little bloated. That being said, reading Gaiman's Anansi Boys was like realizing the wine bottle you'd just finished chugging was really corn syrup, and your cheesecake was really angelfood cake, and you could really use some fucking meat and potatoes.

So I read some Jim Butcher instead. He's still fun and I still like him, though I reached my saturation point mid-book 5. Yes, everyone wants to kill Harry Dresden. Got that. Maybe I'll go back for more later, but it'll take a bit.

So I picked up the upcoming Guillermo del Toro book, The Strain. You guys know my thoughts on & reactions to vampire fiction--they generally involve me screeching and running in the opposite direction--but I figured, "Hey, it's del Toro. I like his movies . . . It'd be hard for this to go wrong. Right?"

. . .

A silly optimist, I am.

Del Toro, his co-author, or someone in there has definitely done their homework, and if you go into the book wanting to know the how & why of every little detail of Hazmat stuff, bio team reactions, solar eclipses, storing dead people, and so on, you'll be set. If you want the story to get on with it, you're screwed. And if keeping track of fifty different POV characters gets on your nerves, you'd better not pick the book up at all. The writing is simply not good enough to hold up to ten solid pages of people looking at the sky, the dialog doesn't like to stay believable, and the POV-hopping every few pages just becomes tedious.

And if you get pissed off when characters pointedly don't see the cliche wagon? Join me as I run screaming in the other direction. Seriously: a plane full of bloodless dead people lands in New York City (again, always NYC), and amongst the cargo there's a giant unclaimed black box half-full of dirt--and no one goes, "Hey, I've seen this movie before!"

(We have seen this movie, actually. Remember how in Blade II [which was directed by del Toro] the new vampire strain features a super-stabby extend-a-tongue? The stabbity comes from under the tongue in this book's case, but still. Same idea.)

I came away from what I finished of this book feeling like it was trying to be Lovecraft and missing. Lovecraft could make scenery be scary. This? Not so much.

And then there was Harris's latest, Dead and Gone. It's a staggeringly fast read and I'm about 98% certain she's taking stabs at SMeyer left and right, but I could've done without those if she'd . . . well, written a cleaner, better-structured and consistently characterized story. Hell, Viking Eric even stops being fun, and the sex scenes--now with more unnecessary dialog!--have become outright mockable.

Overall, this makes me sadface. :( I'm wondering how it'll affect the rest of the series if I pretend this book doesn't exist.

I get the feeling I'm gonna end up headed into the Literature section really damn soon.

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 17:09:52 GMT

Tried reading K. J. Parker's Devices and Desires. It was interesting how the fantastic element in this supposed fantasy novel wasn't magic but machinery, but while the characterization is fabulous the book itself is so staggeringly overwritten I had to put it down.

If anyone wants the ARC, let me know--I'll mail it to you.

I started reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys and, for the first few pages, didn't like it. And by "few" I mean "forty." I went in expecting a narrative like American Gods and found . . . yeah, something else entirely. Not only did I have problems liking the character, a gigantic dork who seems to only excel at feeling sorry for himself--the writing style was completely different from American Gods. Dog help me, some of the sentences actually clunked.

But at about forty pages in, I realized what'd happened. Gaiman had tweaked his narrative voice so hard that it no longer sounded like him. It sounded more like hearing a fable as narrated by an old Southern black woman.

Then--seriously, within pages of my little epiphany--the dorky main character's crazy half-god brother turned up, the proverbial shoe dropped, and the story finally took off. I don't think I'll put it down now.

(No, is mine. In the words of kitteh!Gandalf, You can not has!)

hate the YA section

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 04:10:13 GMT

"It's one massive circlejerk. You ever see video from Anthrocon? It's like that. It's like watching this giant pile of people in fursuits, doggies and bears and cats and maybe a lion, all rolling around humping each other. It's kinda disgusting."

Grow your own imaginations, damn it!

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:45:46 GMT

Dragging this out because it's suddenly become more pertinent . . .

I remember when the HBO series True Blood first hit the air. Some morons who’d apparently never read anything other than Twilight were freaking out in the IMDB forums and the online press release comment pages about how Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels (the base series for True Blood), had ripped off Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.

This confused the hell out of me because I knew Twilight came out in ’05, while Harris’s first Southern Vampire book, Dead Until Dark, came out five years before. But the mentions of True Blood reminded me of how I first found Harris—how I picked up Dead Until Dark back in ’01, sat down in the bookstore’s aisle, and read the whole thing there on the floor. So sometime after the show'd started (and while all the crazed Twitards were running amok, panting open-mouthed over movie posters and attacking anti-fans and shrilling that they love Edward and that Meyer was the most bestest, most original author to ever type with one hand), I went back to Sookie.

What I found doesn’t implicate that Meyer, no matter what she's said, has never read other vampire fiction. It instead seems to indicate some extensive familiarity—with Harris's series in particular.

Meyer’s lead squee-inducing male character, Edward, is a telepathic vampire who hears people’s thoughts all the time & who’s driven nuts by them. Then he meets Bella, whose thoughts he can’t hear. Then he saves her life a few hundred times and they get together.

Harris’s lead female character, Sookie, is a telepathic waitress who hears people’s thoughts all the time & who’s driven nuts by them. (The people around her think she's crazy, as she's perpetually distracted.) Then Bill the vampire walks into the bar, and . . . miracle of miracles, she can’t hear him thinking. Then they save each other's lives, fight crime, and get together.

Bella is invulnerable to vampiric mental powers like glamoring/vampire hypnotism. So is Sookie.

Jasper from Twilight was a Confederate soldier. So was the main vamp squeeze from Dead Until Dark, Bill.

SMeyer’s vampires sparkle in the sunlight ETA: and in chapter 7 of Twilight there's mention made of Edward glowing. Harris’s vampires don’t sparkle—they actually catch on fire in the sunlight—but they glow to Sookie’s vision.

The alternate love interest in the Twilight series is Jacob, the black-haired motorcycle-riding (and -fixing) werewolf from a blue-collar ~~Lamanite~~ family. He starts off close to Bella’s height and size, but later turns into a huge built guy who's physically in his mid-to-late twenties. The farthest he and Bella go is non-con and dub-con rape kissing. The alternate love interest in Dead Until Dark(’01) is Sam, a shapeshifter of close to Sookie’s height and size who turns into a collie. Later, in Club Dead (’03), the “big as a boulder, with biceps that I could do pull-ups on”(p.59) black-haired mid-to-late-twenties blue-collar werewolf Alcide shows up to be an extra love interest and to help protect Sookie from biker gang werewolves. (Harris's werewolves canonically gravitate towards blue-collar jobs or biker gangs, [or in pretend-love-interest Tray Dawson's case, motorcycle repair], being the bruisers of the 'shifter world.) Both of these relationships pretty much stay put at (consensual) kissing.

Jacob’s human nature is set up as contrary to the vampires’ in that he’s capable of eating the normal food Bella cooks for him, living a normal human life, and of possibly having a family with her. Sookie cooks for and considers Alcide in the same way—especially after thinking over how she and Bill couldn't ever have a real breakfast as a couple:

Werewolves run a higher body temperature than humans in both series, and being a full were-critter is hereditary. (The first mention I remember of the temperature thing in Harris’s series is Club Dead; s2 of True Blood drops that almost immediately after they had to change the following scene to a doctor saving Sookie from poisoning.)

In Twilight, Bella gets attacked by a vampire, and another vampire has to suck that one’s venom out to save her life. In the beginning of Living Dead in Dallas(‘02) Sookie gets attacked and poisoned by a maenad. Vampires have to suck out the poison—and almost all her blood—to save her life.

Some of Twilight's vampires develop a special talent upon being vampirized: ~~becoming Sookie~~ telepathy, "beauty" ~~wat~~, being Lily Potter, so on. So do Harris's: Some can fly, one has super-coagulating saliva, some can glamour people, Bill has a photographic memory, Stan can telepathically contact other vampires, and so on. (See: Living Dead in Dallas, '02.)

Both Bella and Sookie end up drinking blood, despite Bella's being melodramatically averse to the stuff. Bella takes hers from a sippy cup (supposedly without knowing what it was) as her doombaby couldn't just want a fucking iron-plus prenatal multivitamin. Sookie ends up mixing her (synthetic) blood with apple juice in a "big opaque plastic mug" (Club Dead, p.230) to try to mask the flavor, as she's just been severely wounded and the vampires Eric and Bill think ingesting blood (instead of getting an IV) will help her heal faster. The nature of the human digestive system doesn't make much sense of any of this. (Vitamins! More balance! Less vomit! Now in tasty gummy bear form!)

But on the blood theme: Dead to the World (‘04) introduces fairies, whose blood is so ridiculously intoxicating to vampires that they’ll stalk and stare at one like a starving doggie after a steak dinner. Sookie’s an eighth fairy (as of Definitely Dead, '06), which is the explanation for her blood tasting “different” (Dead Until Dark, '01, p.32). Bill goes on about this a number of times in Dead Until Dark alone. Bella’s blood, though, is the ultra-specialest of all, smelling like freesia(?!) and being so ridiculously intoxicating to Edward that he can’t stand it and must run off to Alaska in order to not bite her. The reason she smells so wonderful? Fuck if I know.

There’s some gigantic differences, though. Bella sticks with the first guy to catch her eye, no matter how many times he belittles her or how his treatment of her would set off a dozen red warning flags for any social worker worth their salt. Sookie, though, has enough of a spine to call Bill out when he starts acting like a possessive cock and enough of a sense of self to not be happy being treated like someone’s property. Bella's a perpetual victim; Sookie quickly gets sick of being put in the hospital, and'll grab a chain, stick, or shotgun and give as good as she gets. Bella’s a-okay with being telepathically stalked, but Sookie gets weirded out when it comes to tasting a vampire’s blood (which means he’ll always be able to sense her presence and emotions). Bella thinks it’s perfectly okay to take new cars and new credit cards and ill-gotten college acceptance letters from her sparkly wonder. When Bill tries to have Sookie use him as an all-expenses-paid account, though, she flips out on him—because she understands that it’s a shitty thing to be a kept woman, that it’s an awful imbalance of power and just leads to trouble.

And Sookie? Knows to use protection when she's with a guy who’s capable of getting her pregnant. (Harris’s vampires are really sterile—really—and Harris herself has said that fans won’t have to worry about a half-vampire ~~doom~~baby. I'm not sure if she said this before or after SMeyer's last book.) Bella’s not doing so reeks of both stupidity and irresponsibility—though hey, it’s Bella. Bella perpetually puts herself at risk with a complete lack of forethought, unbelievable incompetence, and/or in order to be close to & be saved by Edward. Sookie ends up at risk while solving mysteries—but she’s got the sense to bring backup. ~~Then we get Eric the Viking in spandex, or Bubba, and I lol forever.~~

But then again, Harris has Sookie’s relationships grounded firmly in the reality of how things build, break, and sometimes outright combust; in how sometimes the guy you thought was awesome acts like a douchebag with outdated morals, or lies to you, or cheats, or can't handle starting something new because of his psycho ex, or is sometimes just a gigantic epic jerk. Meyer? Not so much.

I don’t doubt I could find more if I sat down and read the Twilight trainwreck from one end to the next, and I'm certain this isn't the only series she's "borrowed" from, but I can’t stomach Meyer’s writing for long enough (Chagrin! Chagrin! Fucking dazzling chagrin! “ZOMG, everyone is always watching me even though I’m so plain!” "Silly little girl, why don’t you leave the problem-solving and decision-making and thinking to the big strong men?" Dust moats!) to go in and intensively search. So I’ll stick with what I’ve been saying: If you liked Twilight, go read Charlaine Harris. If you didn’t like Twilight, go read Charlaine Harris. She did it first and she did it better.

And now for the new, pertinent-today part . . .

Stephenie Meyer totally ripped off Charlaine Harris; there's no two ways about it. And surprise! Just like that other YA-section plagiarist, Kaavya Viswanathan, she's a fan of Cassie Clare's. As a matter of fact, the wonderful Borders email I got declares that Meyer is one of Clare's "biggest" fans. The Meyer quote that's slapped on the front of Clare's third book is this: "The Mortal Instruments series is a story world that I love to live in."

Read it closely. Not a world she would love to live in. A world she's currently living in. The extent to which Meyer's terrible wording choice echoes Clare's frequently terrible wording choices/nuked descriptions made me laugh a bit . . . as I cringed and died a little inside, of course. They really are two of a kind.

The question remains, though: Is this flood of irony uproariously hilarious, or stupendously depressing? I'm leaning towards the latter.

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:50:10 GMT

Jodi Picoult's latest, Handle With Care, is astoundingly, amazingly, mind-bendingly depressing. If Christopher Moore's Fool was like watching someone you didn't know get kicked in the nads over and over, Picoult's Handle With Care was like watching someone you recognize get their fingernails ripped out. And we're not gonna touch the ending.

~~

I decided to make a maille fringe belt ~~because I didn't want to sew~~ and my results were . . . different. I feel sorta like I need to make the mobius ball sections on the sides more dramatic, or add dangly coins, or maybe some beads onto the yarn so it can hit people properly.

Maybe with the next prototype. Hmm.

Less than two weeks until Tekko and it looks like I'm gonna have to work primarily with the shinies I already have. Egads! Nightmares! :P

~~

Ebay! My sin, my soul! My pr0nish addiction! Give me t3h pretty pictures, I shall throw my money at you as I whine in a vaguely literary fashion. This is obviously the way things must be. I just wish ~~I could quit you~~ you'd let me get other things done.

book book :)

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:55:32 GMT

I picked up Anne Bishop's latest book, The Shadow Queen, and found it vastly superior to her last few works. Her characterization abilities really came back here, with Cassidy's worries over rejection after her last court's abandonment, with Theran being a douchebag not just for the sake of douchebaggery but because he'd been through hell and grown up in a parody of proper court environment, and with how everyone who'd been driven crazy by the old regime not being auto-healed. The people who've suffered under the old rule don't trust Cassidy because of their experiences, Cassidy's love interest Gray is mentally nuked from years of torture, Daemon wigs out and starts turning on people close to him, Saetan even wigs out and starts killing people . . .

Basically, everyone's crazy and it makes me happy. The writing has improved as well--for example, at no point does Bishop use the phrase "chained sexual heat." Bishop's also making new implications for Jaenelle's abilities, even as she turns her into a bit of a religious experience. (People who recognize her for what she is are good. People who don't are either bad or well-meaning if terribly misguided.)

Unfortunately, the storyline bounces between Cassidy trying to fight a new court into shape and the suddenly overwhelming plot of Daemon and Jaenelle Have Sex. It felt like I missed a chunk of Cassidy's story because I had to go watch Daemon angst and/or threaten things and/or kiss boys and/or make his dad, Saetan, not kill anyone else. The book would've been stronger if Bishop'd sunk into the blurbed-about storyline and stayed there, to show what it'd mean and what it'd take for Cassidy to become the kind of Queen that area needed--and possibly to dwell a little more on the implications of her becoming romantically involved with a guy who's brainfucked to the point that he mentally switches back and forth between adult male and paranoid, cowed young boy. Cuz yikes. D:

~~~

I also picked up Ariana Franklin's Grave Goods, which is quite possibly the best book she's written yet. Remember how I said I wanted to see more of the one young character, Emma? She's a main one in this book. Franklin's also got ten thousand things going wrong for her main character Adelia, none of which are criminally perverted clergy or torch-waving peasantry--in short, she didn't rewrite books 1 and 2 here. Thank Dog.

But yeah--I sat down with this book at 1am after a cranky, crappy day, and I said to myself, "I'll read one chapter, just to try it." One chapter turned into two, two turned into five . . . and then at about the point where I think Adelia killed Robin Hood, I said some ugly things to the clock and turned my back on it. I finished the book at five thirty and had to be up at eight. :P

(Seriously, I think she killed Robin Hood. There's a band of brigands running about in the forest, led by a guy who calls himself Wolf. They used to pillage the rich people's homes and farms and lands until one day the rich people wised up and started bribing them off--with the travelers through the forest. Adelia and a group of less-than-savory individuals are searching the forest for the bodies of Emma and her party when Wolf comes prancing out of the bushes, intending to rape and murder and possibly re-rape her little group. He threatens Adelia's people, so she stabs him--and the guy's second in command & gay lover comes flying out of the underbrush, freaking the hell out. The lover's name? Scarry. Aka Scarlett.)

But yeah. The preachiness that annoyed me in the last book is gone, though thoughts still switch confusingly between italicized and not. The characterization is epic--there's realistic portrayals of people in bad relationships, people dealing with extreme guilt, people trying to find love beyond social castes, and more layers put to the Adelia/Rowley 'ship. She doesn't want to give her self up to be with him, but can't imagine life without him. He's supposed to be a religious figure without her, but feels like a going-straight-to-hell hypocrite every time he gets up to give mass and is thinking of her. And I glee a little.

I'd definitely recommend this one.

Everything I learned about what not to do in a business . . .

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:03:12 GMT

Okay, so I'm starting to really hate Borders Group.

Lately they've been forcing the sellers to push these two books, The Middle Place and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. We absolutely have to sell these books, or we all get bitched at, written up, or possibly terminated. Grouchy anonymice at Lj's iworkatborders aren't having success either--and yet Borders Group doesn't care. We've still gotta sell it.

Because nothing sells books like a frantic salesperson fearing for their job, right? Other than a used car salesman, of course.

The fact that this particular book push runs until the middle of June doesn't help things in the least bit. We get regulars in our store. Think we can push the the same book to the same people for a few months? Without driving them away? Think again.

But who really wants these books, anyway? The Middle Place is about a woman who finds out she has cancer, then finds out her dad has cancer. It's like The Last Lecture, only with a bratty narrator that I have all kinds of problems relating to. She's at the doctor's, talking about cancer treatments. The doctor tells her she has to use this hormone therapy, and one of the side effects is that she won't be able to have kids for five years. The woman starts freaking out--she wants kids, she'll be 40-something by the time she's done with it, she can't wait that long.

The doctor points out that she already has two kids.

She doesn't care. She wants more. Now.

And at this point I'm waving the book around and going, "What the fuck, woman! You've got cancer! You could die! Get some fucking priorities! Fucking adopt!"

But yeah, I'm supposed to be able to sell this to people with some modicum of effectiveness. We've tried, of course. Two coworkers have had two separate customers start crying because someone in their families has or has died of cancer. Most customers pretty much put their hands up and rapidly back off. "Cancer, huh? Thanks but no thanks." I understand--I just wish the company's higher-ups did as well.

And for the Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet--It's like if Mitch Albom wrote Snow Falling on Cedars. I liked Snow Falling on Cedars. But when you rework that with a stagnant and contradictory narrative composed of pedestrian 4th grade reading level prose--you get a decent if stereotypical feel for the one character, but there is no joy to the writing at all--then slap a cheap bendy cardboard-feeling cover on it and try to charge more than $20 a pop? Especially in this economy, and in a market where genre fiction sales are showing an increase? Let's think about how well this works.

And yet the company continues to flood their shelves with things that don't go anywhere. Dozens of large paperback horror novels from small presses with drunken editors. Dozens more Anne Brasheres, which take up a whole shelf and don't go anywhere. Stacks of manga versions of novels. Boodith. Cassie Clare does not move in our store. Her second book only sells in conjunction with the first; people who buy the first book by itself don't come back for the second. The copies of her second book that we have? They're ones we got when it came out, a year ago. I have absolutely no idea why we haven't sent them back yet.

And yet Borders' buyers, who won't give us Joe Hill, who won't keep us stocked with steady sellers like Kelley Armstrong or Jim Butcher, who won't send us any manga series but Naruto and won't fill in starter volumes and gaps in the series we already have (The fuck you mean, we can't get the first volume of Bleach?), who think it's fine to only stock unrelated segments of any number of Nora Roberts's series and no mass markets of anything Gregory Maguire, who only sent us three of Ariana Franklin's new work though we've sold ten of her first in the past two weeks, and who somehow feel no need to send us Rothfuss's Name of the Wind--even though we sell out of that faster than anything in SF/F besides Charlaine Harris--are sending us two dozen of CC's fucking third book.

You know how many of her books we've sold since December? One.

Either someone's a fucking moron or someone's trying to force this one into bestseller status. Or both.

The one similarly snarky coworker postulates that the buyers are grabbing up whatever they can get for cheap and trying to create a market rather than deal with things from the bigger publishers--whom we as a company may or may not have book credit problems with. Guiding a market is possible. Creating your own niche product/service in a market is a feasible aim. But even I know that if you nuke your employees' morale as you sink a shitton of money and hours into trying to forcibly make a market without properly thinking things through or researching your demographic first, then you've just fucked yourself.

The first step to making money? Having a product people want to buy. What we're seeing here is the equivalent of trying to force-feed plain oatmeal to a crowd in search of fruit-stuffed and whipped-cream-topped Belgian waffles. You can hope to hell they're hungry enough to eat the oatmeal, but don't expect them to not head straight out your door and to the IHOP down the street.

Business issues aside, I'm still stuck in the morass of this disaster. I can't suggest the books I know are good fun reads (since we don't have them) and can't effectively suggest the things the company is demanding I sell (because they annoy the piss out of me or because I find the original version superior). Add in the lack of raises for everyone this year, the slashed hours, and the perpetual browbeating about everything we absolutely have to be selling (beans, bunnies, these particular books) and doing (Pull stuff to send back! Tag all these things with red stickers! Tag all these other things this way! Move this! Move that! Clean this! Rearrange that!) with the constant nasty emails from Corporate (YOU'RE JUST NOT TRYING TO SELL THIS ITEM HARD ENOUGH!) and the overhanging threat to our jobs, and . . .

Yeah. It's like watching something drown, and it's towards the end, and the flailing is going into its final panicked stages and you know that if you reach in to attempt salvation, the thing's just gonna sink its teeth into your arm and drag you down with it.

Only a few months left before we find out if the company'll go on for another year. I'm not optimistic.

a karmaic boot to the squishy bits

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 04:52:04 GMT

I picked up Christopher Moore's Fool and surprisingly ended up disliking it. A lot. Sure, it wasn't an easy task he took on, turning Shakespeare's King Lear into comedy--but the end result lost all semblance of joy. (Not that it could have much, being as the ending was very much "Rocks fall, everyone dies.") With this, though, Moore basically took the character blueprint of Biff from Lamb and made him a douchebag. Biff was trouble tempered by good intentions and his love for his best friend, Jesus. The titular Fool of this book, Pocket, is trouble with a perpetual hardon who does and says all manner of awful things because he feels the (still fairly awful) recipients deserve it.

You know how the basic idea behind King Lear was that Lear was a generally okay old guy who made a really dumb call and got kicked across his country for it? Moore's taken a different spin on things: Lear was a positively awful old bastard who was just getting what he deserved. Constantly. In spades. We shouldn't feel bad for him! He killed his father! And his brother! And his wives! And he raised his daughters to become the awful people they are! And he made someone rape someone!

To which I said, Wait wait wait hold on--the guy he was egging on chose to rape someone and it's Lear's fault. Hm.

Which makes one wonder about the moral accountability of Pocket tricking both the wicked sisters into nailing a drooling "I'm tired of hearing about how gigantic his bits are" nitwit.

But if the overarching moral of the story is that karma's fuckin' coming for you, the entire narrative thus becomes equivalent to watching a guy get kicked in the nuts by the universe a few dozen times. It's tiresome. And by the time the editor went to sleep at around page 200, I was barely engaged enough to roll my eyes at the Luke I am your ~~Father~~ Uncle trope.

Dare I say it? I liked Diane Paxton's version, The Serpent's Tooth better.

. . . I should write a little about the latest Anne Bishop but I have to pack my wheelie-thing for tomorrow. I'm supposed to meet with the one lady who wants me to do commission/custom work and I need to be able to show off my stuff. :P

drive-by book-pimpage

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:40:30 GMT

Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind owns a piece of my soul now. Rothfuss doesn't pull punches with his characters, his narrative voice makes me a happy little monkey, and there's enough going on in the storyline that I'm nomming at the shelves waiting for his second book.

Basically, a guy who used to be a legendary hero gets dragged out of hiding/retirement and is coaxed into telling his life story. From there we get a very knotted story about him getting pwnd over and over by the universe and emerging more awesome because of it, about the strange ways legends change with time, and eventually about him versus a dragon on psuedo-heroin.

A dragon on heroin is very much like a dancing bookbag, I believe--you can't quite argue with it.

What else can I say? This guy is good and worth trying out.

(Also, the main character? A redhead.)

Also coming in line with my grabby little paws are Christopher Moore's Fool, Anne Bishop's Shadow Queen, and the upcoming books from Ariana Franklin & Charlaine Harris. (I'm scared but hopeful.) ~~*waves Sookie/Eric flag like the goofy little fangirl she is*~~

failure at America! (and sociopaths)

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 04:45:16 GMT

I had a lady come into work today looking for a state quarter book. No big deal--I showed her the section with all the coin-collecting stuff and put some of the quarter books in her hands.

Well, that wasn't it. She wanted a quarter book with a picture of the states.

I'm industrious. I dug one up and handed it to her as well.

Well, that wasn't it either. She wanted one with all the states, and spots for all the quarters. Like the ones from Washington DC, and Guam, and the Virgin Islands.

When I kindly pointed out that no, none of those are states and won't be getting quarters, she refused to believe me.

I managed to leave without insulting her to her face. If Borders was giving raises this year, I'd say I deserve a big one.

~~

Boredom at work and restricted access to Jim Butcher (We couldn't get or keep any of his earlier works in for any given time) meant I turned to Jeff Lindsey's Dexter series. I liked the first book, though the ending seemed rushed. The second book, Dearly Devoted Dexter, started with a clunk and meandered for a bit before picking up any sort of pace, and Lindsey picked up a particular predilection for perpetually shrieking IN ALL CAPS. ALL THE TIME. I'm not allowed to take a pen to the books I haven't bought and was thus saddened to the point that I had to come home and huggle my CMS.

I probably would've stopped the series there if we'd gotten Butcher's Fool Moon in, or another of Friedman's Feast of Souls . . . but alas, Borders Group seems to have problems with keeping the authors I like in stock. So instead I picked up the third, Dexter in the Dark . . . aaaaand I got cranky. And spoilery. Come on, you should expect this by now.

It seems that author Lindsey wanted to explain why the serial killer Dexter does what he does--and it can't just be that he's crazy and watched his mom get chopped up with a chainsaw when he was a kid. Nope, he's possessed. His infamous Dark Passenger, the snickering driving force behind his moonlight slayings and a good bit of his police work, is really a child of the murderous ancient god Moloch. And apparently half the people Dexter runs into are similarly affected: His old police buddy/arch-nemesis, a handful of the killers he kills, people he meets at jail, people he's chasing, his two soon-to-be step-kids . . .

And Dexter the damned, the cheerily mass-murdering anti-sexual psycho of the past two books, suddenly gets castrated when crazy ancient deity Moloch decides it wants to . . . poke at him? Have him be a good pseudo-child & make him kill more things? Either way: Dexter's Dark Passenger up and takes off, leaving him Dull Dreary & Damned Depressing Dexter--a Dexter who forgets any of his police training or years as a stalker/killer in favor of freaking out every ten seconds.

He gets followed by a car--so when he gets a chance, does he get its license plate number? Nope. When it drives slowly past where he's sitting and he stares at it, does he even bother looking at the driver? Nope. And does he tell any of this to his sister, who's busy being Super Serious Sargent Sister in Search of Student Slayers? Nope. And despite his declared proficiency at Google-fu, does he get on the damned computer and try to hunt down the person who's hunting him? Nope.

Thus there is a terrible and sudden change of character, where our dear confident intelligent conniving and murderous Dexter practically spends the entire book shrieking and running in circles with his hands in the air.

But worse--without the Dark Passenger, Dexter isn't just lost in the proverbial sea of humanity. He hunts down a child murderer; he straps the guy to a table and has a knife in his hand . . . and he can't kill the guy.

So what's Lindsey saying here? That if you rattle a sociopath, they'll stop being a sociopath? This isn't like the TV version of Dexter, who had problems killing people for a little bit re: something like performance anxiety with a weird dash of sexual implications. This is Dexter-as-a-human being unable to kill someone in the same way Dexter-with-Dark-Passenger could. And to me, this seems to be Lindsey absolving Dexter of any guilt over his prior actions. He didn't mean to kill those people, even if they did need taken out of society! He as a person wasn't responsible--it was just the bastard child of some murderous god running rampant and making him do it! (He is later able to kill the people who are actively trying to kill him and the kids, so there's at least that . . . yet an execution is beyond him.)

Seriously, can't we just have a single unrepentant murderous antihero without glossing over what they are, making them a woobie, trying to explain or justify their actions, or somehow making it not really be their fault?

But you can't forget how the absolute worst thing to ever happen to Dexter, the thing most terrible, the torture above all tortures . . . is his thinking about how without the Dark Passenger, he'd be normal forever.

And then! The CAPS LOCK OF DOOM may be under control, but the point of view hops every few pages! Lindsey didn't need to add in other points of view; he really didn't need to hit the stereotypical mystery novel back and forth of "Oh, here's our beleaguered hero. Okay, here's Evil McEvilpants gloating about how evil he is. Okay, back to the hero and his whining and the case going nowhere--Okay, back to Mr. Evil guy! Evil evil evil! Evil for the sake of gloating! Waaugh!" The story would've been much tighter if Dexter'd had to focus on his own body of knowledge to figure out what the bad guys were up to.

What probably got me the worst, though--beyond the strange statements on humanity and the back-and-forth POV and the the terribly flat, stereotypical characters (Shrieky silly fiancee, super-serious female cop, revoltingly arsty gay wedding decorator, so on)--was the complete lack of joy of the prose. It was. It functioned. That was it. Lindsey got me to pay attention with the first page of his first book, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, with prose that spiraled into predatory drunken twisted joyous edifices. Not so much with this one. I can't remember a single spot in the third work where I sat and pored over the paragraphs like I did with those first ones. This makes me sad.

Lindesy supposedly has a fourth book coming out in August. I don't think I'll look into it unless I get phenomenally bored--and even then, it's not likely.

(But I still own the first, and those first few pages still make me happy.)

OHGODMYEYES

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 05:58:11 GMT

One of the things on the new releases cart, to be put out tomorrow, was a new Dean Koontz hardcover--a graphic novel version of his wanna-be-trilogy-stuck-at-pair Frankenstein novels. If you remember, I once picked one of the novels up out of curiosity and have yet to unsee the official God-Awful Worst Sentence Ever . . . So like anyone else who suffers from acute trainwreck syndrome, I grabbed one of the graphic novels and started flipping through.

Then I paused: I knew this art style. The hair was out to eat someone's head, the musculature was worse, characters' torsos were extremely stretched, all the faces looked the same, there were about a billion perfect profiles and Stop-watching-Labyrinth you're-gettin'-a-yeast-infection-thar-sonny crotch-bulges . . .

I flipped a little further and found 'em--BOOM! Gigantic thighs! Smugglin' turkeys thighs! THIGHS of CAPS-LOCKED DOOM!

It seems I wasn't mistaken: The artist is Brett Booth, a twenty-some year comic field veteran who used to draw for the Anita Blake comic (see: The Annotated Anita Blake, 3 4 5 6 7-3 . . . oh fuck, there's no method to this madness.). I'm told the wide and wild mockery of his particular art style is the reason the Anita Blake creators & writers--a batshit insane woman not exactly known for her quality control and the editorially-challenged sycophants surrounding/enabling her--traded him in for a less OH HOLY WTF model. ~~sorta kinda~~

But Koontz & co. still picked him up/got saddled with him for this adventure.

I wonder if anyone's informed Chris of Chris's Invincible Super Blog.

You'd think someone would've learned after the dismal failure exemplified at NYAF--where Random House's imprint Del Rey tried to give away copies of Koontz-as-manga and failed. (If they couldn't give the shit away, imagine how well it sold. Then again, the market for novels-to-manga seems to be pretty evenly awful. It might be in part because most of the novels being turned are . . . awful. Hmm.) It's still kinda sad, in a way: It looks like this guy's trying to get his art style under control a little, but really--it still all looks the same.

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:39:26 GMT

Lookie! I found my birthday present to myself. :D

Also: Once again, Neil Gaiman has proven himself deserving of freshly-baked cookies. I read this and guffawed so much the better half put down his video game to find out what I was up to. From his blog this morning:

You are on a speakerphone with at least 14 teachers and librarians and suchlike great, wise and

Do not start swearing like you did when you got the Hugo.

I wonder if I'll find the time to sit down and finish The Graveyard Book--it seemed like much fun, so I hope so. I also wonder if this means we'll get more than a couple copies of The Graveyard Book into our store. But Borders Group is still flailing in altogether disturbing ways, so I doubt it. Instead I still have the awful feeling that we're gonna see the axe falling on a few local places before this mess is all over.

Cnn.com tells me the economic turnaround is predicted at around the end of the second quarter, though. So what's that--six months to limp along? And if we make it that far, we'll be good? We'll see.

But I won't stop applying around. A full forty hours at minimum wage would net me more than "full time" at Borders. And with BGInc nixing any bonuses or raises this year (but giving ex-CEO George Jones $2.1 million to go away), I'd be stupid to not just take a rinky-dink job that's closer to home and make do with it.

even more wildly embellished sentimentalist poop!

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 06:17:10 GMT

Oprah's not doing so well with these authors of real-life sob stories . . . The latest person caught lying about their life story is Herman Rosenblat, who's been telling whoever'd listen that he first met his wife through the fence of a concentration camp, and that she threw him food every day to keep him alive. Oprah loved the story. Publishers loved the story; two different books were written about it, one for children (Angel Girl, by Laurie Friedman), one an autobiography. Sappy sentimentalists loved it: IIRC, the thing made its rounds through a handful of email forwards and also into a Chicken Soup collection. Even movie-makers loved the story--the movie was in the works.

Researchers debunked Mr. Rosenblat's story. Despite fighting an uphill battle with Berkley Books and the guy who wanted to make the movie, they eventually prevailed--and the movie was nixed, the kids' book was pulled from the shelves, and the (juvenile, terribly-written) autobiography shall never see the inside of a commercial publisher. (Indeed, it looks like Rosenblat's aimed straight for a DIY/vanity press.)

The question remaining for most people, it seems, is "Why?" Why do something like this, when it just gives ammunition to Holocaust deniers like David Irving--or more locally, the douchebag who named his kids Adolph Hitler and JoyceLynn Aryan Nation and Honszlynn Hinler (because he wanted them to have "good German names.") Was it greed? Was it all about the money, the attention? Was it that he just really, really wanted to meet Oprah?

Nope. It's because the guy's bugfuck crazy. He went under anesthesia for surgery and his dead mother told him to share his love story--so while recovering, he made one up.

Do I need to talk about why we don't pay attention to crazy people without doing our damned research? Really?

Didn't think so.

Maybe instead I need to consider why so many people were so willing to ignore historians and facts in favor of a wildly, unbelievably improbable love story.

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 01:34:49 GMT

I'm up to book 6 in Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series, and just hit my second wind. I'd started to get a little annoyed with Harris's clothing-and-description dumps (which have improved greatly from the start of the series), and got pretty annoyed in book 5 where the only male character who didn't want to sleep with her was really on a secret mission to kill her. My Sue-dar went a little nuts and I had to step back from the series for a bit--which kinda sucked, as I've just bought the first seven books in a box set. But I talked about the series with the coworkers, about how Sookie's an independent woman who takes no shit, refuses to be treated like property, and sees nothing wrong with dating around should one relationship crash & burn--not to mention how Harris has about ten good-sized problems marching around at once--and I went back in. And then I found a bit in book 6, Definitely Dead, where Sookie talks about fitting a size 8 on a good day but usually being more of a 10. The woman's sturdy. And not just that: as she's getting older & the series progresses, she's been gaining weight--going from a size 8/6 on a good day to 10/8--and never wangsting over it. This makes me happy. :D

(And the ex-Viking vampire Eric grabbing a severed head and going bowling for vampires just makes him that much more awesome. It's like Christmas zombies, in a way.)

I'm reading Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts and finding it enjoyable if strange. Some stories are horror, some have the directionless ramble of literature--it looks like he pretty much writes whatever genre amuses him. It's a nice change from the first-person popcorn reads. They're nice and all, but they're not giving me a brain reboot & making me want to write in the same way better-written ones do.

Next victims shall be Neil Gaiman and Jeff Lindsey; one for the sake of the wordplay and one because Jeff Lindsey's alliteration and descriptions are fun. (And maybe, just maybe, I'll get something besides maille done tonight.)

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:13:20 GMT

The last time I wheeled a cart of brand-new J.K. Rowling books out onto the floor, I wasn't sure what'd kill me first--the waiting fans or my dress/heels combo. This time there weren't waiting fans because Borders skipped out on having a midnight release party.

We had way, way more reserves for Beedle the Bard than we did for Breaking Dawn, and we had a midnight party for that. Our company's logic isn't the best sometimes.

Speaking of SMeyer's literary travesty: A girl today told me kids at school make fun of her for liking Twilight. I was a good person. I didn't laugh at her.

Speaking of Mormon insanity: I picked up Escape by Carolyn Jessop, the ex-FLDS woman who saved herself & her kids from an abusive polygamist marriage. The thing's surreal at times. She's going to high school (and glad she was able to get into a high school), she's telling stupid-girl jokes about a snooty group of girls who seriously think they have to act like idiots so they can make men feel manlier . . . and suddenly, at age eighteen, she finds out she has to marry those girls' father. Who's fifty.

The writing isn't spectacular--the narrative assumes the reader understands a number of Mormonism's quirks, like the sacred underwear and how God lives on a planet, and the wildly excessive passive voice makes me want to take a bite out of the book--but knowing it's a true story makes me want to keep going.

~~

I went looking for lighter reading other than Charlaine Harris (the clothing-infodumps and characters' somewhat stilted speech patterns were starting to bug me) and ended up finally settling on Christopher Moore. Lamb (The Tale of Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal) is made of crack. Utter howling crack. I'll probably end up buying it later. I made illusionare read the first few pages and am pretty sure he'll buy it later as well. It was nice to find an author who can write about young Jesus and co's insane misadventures (including but not limited to bringing home pet cobras, attempting to circumcise a statue of Apollo, impersonating the multi-armed bloodthirsty goddess Kali, becoming Buddhist monks, getting slavered upon by the last yeti, and deciding to scratch the part of the Sermon on the Mount about the inheritance of the dumbfucks) and still carry a solid, well-written story.

So I picked up another book by him: The Stupidest Angel, named for the misadventures of Raziel, the moron angel from Lamb. It's much slower going and a little more subtly satirical than Lamb, and while the characters are interesting the characterization doesn't pop quite the same, but I kept with it. I'm glad, too. There's nothing quite like a brain-hungry horde of Christmas zombies. :D

Maybe afterwards I'll go back for Gideon Defoe, though his works didn't seem to have as much direction and thus didn't keep my attention in quite the same way.

(For all the light reading I'm doing, the writing I'm getting done is yet more of the usual: ~~smut~~ angst and murderous mess and more angst. Strange.)

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 03:12:35 GMT

Sam's club has little tiny turkeys (read: 11 and 12 pounds) for sale, so I picked one up--only to find it won't fit in the crock pot. Bah. Then I found that though it's a name-brand turkey, it still cooked up less tender than the twice-the-size-half-the-price walmart ones.

Whininess, I has it. :P

I've got a craft show in six days and only one box of stuff to sell. I didn't realize I'd picked up this much vintage/retail merchandise until I started splitting piles. But then again, most of the maille stuff fits in a shoebox.

Whatever doesn't go this weekend goes to Etsy. Hopefully.

~~

I picked up A. Lee Martinez's book The Nameless Witch because of the front line: "A tale of vengeance, true love, and cannibalism." It looked like it'd be silly, and it was. This thing was straight-up pure fluff--sorta like if Christopher Moore was a gigantic D&D geek. Seriously, just about every critter in it is pulled from the monster manual, complete with their basic properties. But it was still fun, and I startled zen_of_nihilism a few times by snerkling mid-read . . . like around the time when the undead MFC's demonic duck familiar meets her love interest--and promptly becomes violently ill, because the love interest is an impossibly pure White Knight. Or how the MFC really really really wants to eat him, or how her broom has OCD. Or any number of things.

No, it's not a thinky book, and no, it's not Pratchett, but it's pretty straightforward and still worth it for a giggle or two. I'm working my way through his next book, Too Many Curses, over my breaks. It's been time for me to go on a cracked-out fantasy binge.