Goodreads Review: Tithe
Posted by Phoebe
Tithe by Holly Black
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Have you ever read a novel and wished you’d found it sooner? It might seem strange, but even though I’m a frequent consumer of YA, I rarely find myself wishing I’d read a book when I was a teenager. Usually, I’m just glad for the experience; many YA writers craft immersive worlds and likable characters so skillfully that their works feel relevant despite the fact that I’m 26 years old. And it’s not quite that I felt I was too old for Holly Black’s Tithe, the story of a New Jersey teenager who learns of her faery nature when she’s used as a pawn in the war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts.
No, instead I simply felt that Tithe would have struck a chord with me as a teenager, that it would have been incredibly relevant had I read it upon its release in 2002, when I was eighteen, rather than eight years later. Reading it now, as a grown-up, I mostly just felt nostalgic.
Black describes the world of sixteen-year-old Kaye with surprising honesty and grit. Kaye lives in a magical land that I haven’t often seen described in books, and certainly not with such accuracy: it’s the world of my youth, New Jersey at the start of the twenty-first century. There are ravers and punk boys and long, emotionally complicated nights in diners. There are gay boys who love anime. There’s the boardwalk of what I was sure must have been Asbury Park, abandoned and creepy and vivid. And, true-to-form, there’s Kaye, an honestly written heroine if I’ve ever seen one. Kaye’s a bit weird–she had fairies as imaginary friends since she was a kid–and definitely imperfect. She can’t help but seduce her best friend’s boyfriend. She gets her other friends into trouble. She’s flawed, but, dammit, she’s honest. As I read Tithe I couldn’t help but feel that I knew Kaye–she’s just about every teenage girl, complicated and conflicted. In short, she was terrific.
As were most of the supporting characters here: Corny, Kaye’s companion, one of the most realistically rendered gay friends I’ve ever seen in fiction. Corny isn’t a magical and perfect gay boy a la Mercedes Lackey, but instead a complex and complete person in his own right. Likewise, Roiben, Kaye’s otherworldly love interest, a sexy stoic with problems and a life beyond Kaye’s.
Unfortunately, the plotting of the novel doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the characters. Black takes us a long time to get us to the central conflict, and Kaye’s episodic explorations through the faery world just weren’t as interesting to me as her adventures in the in the real world. Still, there’s a lot worth exploring here–particularly if you’ve ever found magic in the magical kingdom known as New Jersey.
Tags: fantasy, goodreads, new jersey, review, ya
Hopped Up on Goofballs
Posted by Phoebe
There’s an awesome post by Sherwood Smith up at the Bookview Cafe Blog about writing for teens.
I’d have more to say about this if I wasn’t hopped up on codeine right now. Legal, I swear! I’ve had a lot of dental work lately and this weekend some mild, niggling pain turned into laying-on-the-ground-sobbing-in-pain. I’ve made an emergency dental appointment for tomorrow. Should be fun. Hello root canal?
Also, Lindsey wins the fastest beta reader award! Thanks Lindsey! I’m glad she had a good experience with reading the MS, since she knows both alternative schooling and internet community obsessiveness. Also, she gave great feedback. So there’s that, too.
This is scattered. Best go and cuddle with the cat and focus on not letting my tongue touch my teeth or my teeth touch each other. Ouch.
Tags: links, rambling, stone sorter, ya
Goodreads Review: The Books of Magic Volume 1: Bindings
Posted by Phoebe
The Books of Magic Vol. 1: Bindings by John Ney Rieber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This second volume in the Books of Magic series (numbered, confusingly, as volume 1) further develops the character of Timothy Hunter and begins to explore his mythic origins. When Tim is drawn away from his world by his birth father Tam Lin, we witness his first true trial–capture by the manticore–and learn of his otherworldly genesis. Unfortunately, the story suffered a bit in some of the same ways that the first did–sometimes I felt as if I had missed large swathes of the story, I suspect because some action took place in some comic book or another that I missed–and Tim, though his characterization is drastically improved here, still felt a little thin.
However, there were a handful of stand-out scenes that made this book memorable: Tim’s experiences in the manticore’s den, his interactions with Death, and the rambling monologue of his surprisingly empathetic one-armed foster father. I’m having trouble evaluating this series so far as I normally do. The bits I like, I like very, very much, but as a whole, the graphic novels seem to leave me scratching my head. They’re wispy and dreamlike, not always to good effect, but the parts that were well done were well done enough to keep me reading. We’ll see if there’s any improvement.
Tags: fantasy, goodreads, graphic novel, review, ya
Why Not Moments
Posted by Phoebe
Amazing video blog from YA Rebel Victoria Schwab on risk taking:
I have to say, one of the ways I think that an MFA was not helpful for me was that it made me more afraid to take risks in my poetry. I have a very loud, very vocal internal editor already. In my very last workshop, I quite literally made apologies for emotional content in my poetry.
And I love emotional content. In 2007 and before, before I came here, I never even considered sentiment a risk.
This might have something to do with why I hardly write poetry these days. I’ll get an idea (I think of ideas in my head as seedlings–admittedly a hackneyed metaphor but I think creative ideas germinate in exactly the same way) and think “How can I make this a good story?” rather than “How can I distill this into a poem?” Part of this, sure, is that I’ve gotten used to having space to develop my ideas–poetry forces you into a sort of conciseness that fiction, even spare, sparse fiction, doesn’t. But I know that part of this is fear. I can take risks in fiction that I don’t feel comfortable taking in poetry. I’m undoubtedly more skilled, more controlled, but to be an effective artist you need to be able to forgo control every once in awhile to make an emotional impact.
I’m not sure what the cure is for this, except, perhaps, time (and maybe intoxication? That’s helped in the past, but I’m too busy these days to be drunk, which is probably a shame). Right now, I’ve been focusing on fiction–and sitting back passively, waiting for the poems to come. Victoria’s vlog is a nice reminder that sometimes, you have to grab these things, to be proactive, to be rash.
(Oh, and if you’re not following the yarebels, and you like YA fiction, you should be.)
Tags: MFA, poetry, video, writing, ya
DJ Jazzy Pho
Posted by Phoebe
I’m usually not to good at this internet networking stuff, but I got a GoodReads message from soon-to-be debuting author Kirsten Hubbard about a review I wrote awhile back and was so glad I did. And not just because I later ran into her on metafilter (gotta love those mefites). She just released the cover image for her first book, Like Mandarin, and it’s just as exciting as the blurb/premise:
I want to be beautiful like you, I thought, as if Mandarin were listening.
I want apricot skin and Pocahontas hair and eyes the color of tea. I want to be confident and detached and effortlessly sensual, and if promiscuity is part of the package, I will gladly follow your lead. All I know is I’m so tired of being inside my body.
I would give anything to be like Mandarin.
It’s hard to find beauty in the badlands of Washokey, Wyoming. Fourteen-year-old Grace Carpenter knows it’s not her mother’s pageant obsessions, or the cowboy dances and pickup trucks adored by her small-town classmates. True beauty is wild girl Mandarin Ramey: seventeen, shameless and utterly carefree.
Grace would give ANYTHING to be like Mandarin.
When the misfits are united for a project, they embark on an unlikely, explosive friendship, packed with nights spent skinny-dipping in the canal, liberating the town’s animal-head trophies, and constantly searching for someplace magic. Grace even plays along when Mandarin suggests they make a pact to run away together. Blame it on the crazy-making wildwinds that plague their badlands town.
But all too soon, Grace discovers Mandarin’s unique beauty hides a girl who’s troubled, broken and even dangerous. And no matter how hard Grace fights to keep the magic, even the best friendships can’t withstand betrayal.
I love books about complicated female friendships, and I don’t think there are nearly enough of them. So, in short, I’m jazzed about this book and this author. Keep an eye out for her, okay?
Tags: fiction, metafilter, ya
Goodreads Review: the Books of Magic
Posted by Phoebe
The Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
My wonderful husband bought me all of the many volumes of this series for Valentines Day–with a note inside that said that the best things about my writing remind him of The Books of Magic.
Aw.
He did warn me, though, that this first volume is closer to standard Gaiman fare than the rest of the series–where Tim’s story transforms into the sort of YA fantasy that he knows I love.
He was right–which isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy this first volume regardless. Tim Hunter’s first excursion through time and space was well-written and lovingly illustrated. Although I have little familiarity with the DC canon, characters like John Constantine and Doctor Occult still seemed likable, or at the very least intriguing. And the section most redolent of Gaiman’s later work–for me, Tim’s foray into Faerie–taps the same deep sense of myth and awe that he later exploits to haunting effect in Stardust.
But Tim himself remains an enigma. We know nothing of him–not his personality or background–from the outset, and even by the volume’s conclusion are left mostly in the dark. This was problematic for me, and I think it may have been what my husband was talking about when he said this Book of Magic was not YA.
I’ve been thinking lately, thanks to some comments by teen writer Steph Bowe on Catcher in the Rye, about what makes a given work YA. I’ve come to believe that a work needs to have two things in order for the YA label to really fit comfortably: first, the author needs to intentionally be writing for an adolescent audience, taking the entertainment and educational needs into account (or at least consideration) during the process of drafting a work. Secondly, the author needs to create a protagonist with which the reader can identify. This is sometimes done by drafting a blank-slate or Everyman teen character (think: Bella from Twilight or Harry Potter), which is, in broad strokes, what Gaiman was doing here. Unfortunately, Tim Hunter is, so far, so blank as to be inscrutable. There is a brief sequence near the end of the final book in this volume where we’re given a glimpse of Tim’s home life. For me, this was also the most resonant and effective sequence–and it occupied all of three pages! Concluding, rather than beginning, with Tim’s real life, was an unorthodox choice for Gaiman, and I’m not sure it was an entirely effective one–particularly if you evaluate this against other YA works, an almost inevitable comparison thanks to Tim’s surface similarities to Harry Potter.
But I’m not sure this is a fair comparison, for this volume, at least, because it’s also clear that Gaiman wasn’t writing specifically for teenagers here–he doesn’t intend the Books of Magic to be a series primarily for teenagers. It fails my YA litmus test, even if it largely succeeds on its own.
Still, I’m excited to read the rest of the series, where (I’ve read) later author John Rey Nieber made turning Tim into an identifiable and well-actualized teenager one of his primary goals.
Tags: fantasy, goodreads, graphic novel, review, ya
It’s Not Like I Totally Hate Poetry
Posted by Phoebe
In fact, the poems of James Davis and Jessica Hammack (would link, but they’re, like, sitting in my kitchen instead of on the internet) are making me incredibly happy right now.
In related news, Jordan’s been playing Europa Universalis III all day today. He named his army The First MFA Army, so that he could say things like “The MFA Army has no leaders! The MFA Army is underfunded! The MFA Army is starving to death!” to make me giggle. Life is all right, I think.
Confession
Posted by Phoebe
After five years of watching LOST, I have a confession to make.
I hate Jack Shepherd.
(More inside; this entry contains spoilers for the sixth season of LOST.)
Tags: lost, media, spoilers, tv
How Far We’ve Come
Posted by Phoebe
If you can’t tell, I’m pretty hung up on the editing thing these days. In fact, yesterday, I did three things: cleaned up cat pee (ew!), napped, and edited. It was a good day. Except for the cat pee thing, I guess.
But damn, I can’t help but feel like it makes me a boring blogger.
Oh well. You guys will just have to bear with me for a few more weeks. Gretchen McNeil has a post today on edit progressions. This made me curious about the progress on my own first page. Here’s the first page of the first draft of THE STONE SORTER, back when it had the wonderful title of sacredgrove.doc.
Chapter 1: In Which I Take a Journey
My mother dropped me off at the curb of Newark International Airport almost three hours before boarding. When I turned to her to ask her for some help with my bags, she kept chattering away on her cellphone, so I opened up the door and struggled to lift my rolling luggage from the trunk of her Toyota myself. Then I tilted my head, walked to the passenger’s side window, knocked on it with one knuckle. She held up a finger; I was supposed to wait.
I reached into my backpack and pulled out the glossy-paged brochure that I’d tucked into the front pocket. “Sacred Grove Academy,” it said on the cover in florid calligraphy. I ran my fingertip over the embossed print. I had already memorized the image there: the school building, huge like a fortress with a stonework facade, a lush green field, dotted with orange and brown trees, that rolled out from under it like a lumpy carpet. As I started to thumb through its pages—practically salivating over the images of sweater-clad students reading in the library, or sitting at the long banquet tables of the dining hall, laughing together—I heard my mother roll the window down.
“Do you have your ticket, Miranda?” she asked. I took the boarding pass out from the back pocket of my jeans, waved it at her.
“Good,” she said, and flashed a view of her very white, very straight teeth. My mother’s had a lot of dental work done. She doesn’t like people to know that, but I think it’s clear when she smiles. No one has teeth like that, not naturally.
I stuffed the brochure, and my ticket, back into my backpack. “Are you going to help me
Here is the novel’s current opening:
Prologue
The night we first tried the spell, I looked at myself in the scratched surface of my bedroom mirror. My hair was shining and straight. My eyes were dark and warm. My olive skin looked smooth between the red straps of my ceremonial garb. I tried to see myself as Mikhail might see me, as a powerful, beautiful diviner. As a stone sorter. I was the girl—no, the woman—who would help him save his mother. I was Randy.
But all I saw was regular old Miranda. Miranda, a nerdy neat freak, dressed in a ridiculous outfit, make-up smeared ludicrously across her face.
I knew then that it wouldn’t work. I knew this deeply and truly, as certainly as I knew the streets of my hometown or the way my father liked his coffee (black and sweet). We wouldn’t be saving Mikhail’s mother that night, or maybe any night. But I couldn’t go to him and tell him that—I was in too deep already; he would never be convinced; he would never forgive me if I refused to help him, if refused to at least try. We’d already shared so much—kisses, warm, and wet, and lingering, soft strains of his music in his bedroom late at night. I couldn’t let him down, not after everything we’d been through.
So I sighed, turned away from the mirror, and went to Annie’s room. What choice did I have?
So as you can see, it’s not the same at all. In fact, the airport bit now opens chapter four. And what’s left of it is much more smoothly written: I was writing this fresh off a draft with a very rough-hewn, uneducated narrator, and that comes through in Miranda’s voice in the early versions of early chapters. It’s also frankly shorter. There’s no awkward shuffling of brochures and the luggage issue is settled in a sentence. Thank goodness.
And I got rid of my cheesy chapter headings. Thank goodness for that, too–what a terrible idea that was; though it worked to boost my NaNoWriMo wordcount, by the end of the first-draft MS, I have chapter headings like “Chapter 9: In Which There Are Issues” and “Chapter 10: Denoument, In Which the Author Wishes She Hadn’t Inserted Subject Headings to Inflate her Wordcount.”
What do you guys think? Better?
Tags: editing, stone sorter, writing
Writing about Writing
Posted by Phoebe
I’ve been meaning to write a blog post on editing for awhile, but I’ve been busy . . . editing! Who would have thunk it?
I’ve said before that editing is hard work. That’s true. But I don’t think the phrase “hard work” really even begins to encompass the sort of hard work it really is. Last week, I was deep, deep, deep in editing hell. The eighth circle of editing hell, which is, I think, where writers who feel like frauds live.
I’d already added a few chapters to my novel and marked up the manuscript for line-editing, something I’ve come to think of, thanks to Saundra Mitchell as decrufting. Just marking up these changes took about two weeks in total, perhaps because the core of THE STONE SORTER was created in about a month for NaNoWriMo and was, therefore, a bit of a mess. To give you an idea, and because I always find this sort of thing interesting, here’s some snapshots of a few MS pages:
But about halfway through committing these pages to computer file, another beta reader finished the book. And suggested changes–big changes. And she was right. But what she was suggesting was a lot of work–ohgodthework–and I suddenly hit a wall, a flip-out wall, the first big one that I’ve hit since starting to write long-form fiction. It felt insurmountable. I was suddenly a hack, unable to see these things for myself–and how could I ever expect to get an agent and be published if I couldn’t see these things for myself?!
In her blog, Gretchen McNeil refers to this as the “Faux Suckitude Doldrums.” I think it’s a perfect name, she gives a completely terrific definition:
Faux Suckitude Doldrums -noun \foʊ sʌkˌɪˌtud ˈdoʊldrəmz\
A morbid state of self-imposed dejection whereby the writer/artist/musician has convinced his- or herself that they suck beyond all hope of redemption and the best and most effective course of action is to crawl under the bed and hide there until the zombie apocalypse of the coming of the Anitchrist, whichever occurs first.Example: – “I’m thinking that I should just burn this manuscript and then cut off my hands so I can never inflict my pathetic excuse for fiction on the planet ever again.” – “Dude, put the machete down. You’re just suffering from FSD. Have some chocolate.”
In my feelings of terribleness, I decided that her writing about it was a completely great excuse to email her. So I did. And you know what’s great about YA writers, especially Gretchen McNeil? They’re really, really nice. She wrote me a totally reassuring and generous email back, the gist of which was: Quit worrying and keep writing. That evening, I wasn’t convinced. But I watched a few episodes of SuperNanny (perfect for times like these, when you don’t want to make any decisions for yourself but instead have the morality of a situation spelled out for you. Oh, those terrible parents!), slept on it, had a good conversation with my beta reader again the next morning, and realized what I had to do.
I had to keep at it, of course.
Which is where I am now. I’ve added another chapter, done some more shifting, have two or three more chapters to add, at least, before I think the knots will be untied, but I continue to press forward.
And improve. Which feels odd, in a way. After I finished this MS, I was all aflutter at how much I’d learned about novel writing in a year: that I need to know how the story ends, and the major stumbling blocks the characters face, and that I need to write a fairly clean MS to have any chance in hell of editing, and all of that. But the passages I’ve added are better written than what’s come before, and I don’t think it’s just on account of having more time to write them. Because I recently went back to a short story I wrote this summer and excised about 800 unnecessary words, easily. Editing, I realize, is a skill, too–and, like writing, one best learned by doing. Maybe that should have been self-evident. But at least now I feel okay going a little easier on myself (myself, mind you–not my drafts!), because I am, of course, still learning.
The Guardian recently posted some rules for fiction writing from fiction writers (Part One, Part Two). Some were terrific. Some I disagree with pointedly (what’s with all the internet hate? Any time I try to turn it off while writing, I just end up running to the computer every few minutes to “research.” The internet is as much a tool as it is a potential distraction). But it made me realize that I’ve learned a few things, too. I’m not full-of-myself enough to give you ten, but here’s five lessons I’ve learned the hard way:
- Writing makes you a writer. Nothing else–not self-identification or delusions of grandeur or academic credentials. When people ask me about MFA programs now (and oh, do they ask!), I tell them that they’re a good place to make friends, drink, and avoid student loan payments. But they do nothing to make you a writer. Writing makes you a writer (and of course, plenty of MFAs don’t write any more while they’re in their MFA program than they do out of them. If you can’t write while working a desk job, you probably can’t write with a pile of papers to grade and friends urging you to go get smashed, either.)
- A novel is a problem to be solved. Which is to say, your characters must face problems and solve them, but also you, as a writer, need to be actively engaged in resolving your characters’ conflicts too. Otherwise you just have a 300-page-vignette of word vomit, and the reader won’t care. Or this reader won’t, at least.
- Novels are written in two places: while you have the manuscript in front of you, and at quiet moments when you’re doing something else, like going for walks or staring out the train window on your morning commute. Or in the shower. Give yourself time to be in it. This makes you a terrible guest at parties, but a much better writer.
- Eventually, your characters will get away from you. Let them. This is scary at first, and will make you sound and feel like a 12-year-old fanfiction writer. But if your characters don’t have their own motivations, then you’ve failed to breathe life into them. Let them become their own people and shape their situation, not their actions, to drive the plot.
- Write. When inspired, write. When in doubt, write. You’re smart enough to get through this, but smart isn’t enough. Talented isn’t enough. If you’re not working so hard it hurts, you’re not working hard enough.
Tags: beta readers, editing, manifesto, MFA, stone sorter, writing
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