Parabolic Reflections

I have seen a lot of bad book trailers in the past few months -- many of them slow-paced affairs pieced together with stock photos and twinkly music while text prints itself laboriously across the screen. You can see the effort that's gone into making the trailer pretty, or funny, or exciting, but it misfires as often as not, and I start yawning and stop watching around the 45-second mark.

This one, however, is quite a serviceable little commercial -- albeit for a series I already know and love, so perhaps I'm more inclined to be generous with it. But no, I think it's pretty well managed and paced overall, and I'm glad to see it out there:



What about you? Have you seen any really good book trailers lately you'd like to recommend?

So originally I thought I was doing this research trip to the south of England and west Wales in late October, and it would be the off-season so finding accommodation would be easy and there was plenty of time to make plans.

Now it looks like we're doing it in mid-to-late August, and... not so much. Especially as it seems unavoidable that we'll be there over the dreaded Bank Holiday weekend.

I am, frankly, overwhelmed. Flights aren't a problem, but once we get into Gatwick, my planning brain freezes.

I know London is ridiculously expensive to stay in, so I was thinking it'd be better to take the train out of London and find a B&B in some pleasant town in Kent, although I am not entirely sure which. Any suggestions from those in the know? We'll need easy access to a train station, so we can get back into London on a couple of day trips, but it would be nice to travel a bit around Kent as well.

I'd like to visit Squerryes Court in Westerham, on which my fictional "Waverley Hall" is partly based; I've had my eye on Eynsford in Dartford as a possible location for the village nearest to where the McCormicks (and the Oakenfolk) live. But other than that, I know nothing, and would be glad of recommendations for other nice places in the area that we ought to visit or where we might stay overnight without utterly impoverishing ourselves (and which can be easily accessed using public transportation, please -- I don't think we'll rent a car until we get to Wales).

After we've spent 3-4 days touring Kent and visiting London, I'd like to take a train to the Cardigan Bay area of Wales and do some touring around there before we return to London and fly back home. Again, any suggestions for what we should see (or avoid) in that area?

Thanks for any help you can offer...

ETA: By "we" I mean "my husband and I", as we will not be taking our kids on this journey. So we'd only be needing a double or twin room, no "family" accommodations or attractions. Thanks.

I have permission to share my UK cover!

( And it is THE BOMB )

cesario accused me of selling my soul for diabolical purposes to get Brian Froud as my cover artist, but it was pure serendipity, honest. Seems like he just happened to have this fierce-looking white-haired teenaged faery in his portfolio...

Anyway, the final product has an iridescent overlay, so it will be even more cool and shiny when I get the finished proofs in the mail -- which are supposed to be arriving soon. Yay!

*runs off to make LJ icons*

I was getting so stressed out about this book of mine that I have decided to take a two-week holiday from writing anything whatsoever. Hopefully that will give me the time I need to brainstorm and make notes and get ideas flowing, so that when I come back to the story I'll be ready for it instead of feeling like I'm getting ahead of myself.

It's frustrating to have to rediscover/reinvent one's entire writing process, but that seems to be what I'm doing at the moment...

Well, what do you know. One minute I'm spouting theories about the S4 finale in calapine's journal and the next minute I'm writing fic for the first time in... what, two years?

( Massive spoilers for 'Journey's End' here -- but if you've already seen it and were feeling unhappy about Certain Developments, this story might help )

The really sad thing about all of this is that I don't even have a Donna icon to use on this post.

...so that Dangerously Overinvested Readers like myself could hang out on author blogs and encourage them to write crackfic about their own characters.

(Seriously, though -- Sebastipole and Europe on the vinegar seas battling pirates and evil monsters and falling in love? WOULD BE AWESOME.)

ETA to justify this post's existence: A really smashing D.M. Cornish interview over at SFRevu.

Well, what do you know. I actually liked that. I kept expecting the whole thing to go down the drain at any moment, but though it started to spiral once or twice, it never completely sank.

( Spoilers )

Bring on the Christmas special!

WHY IS THIS NOT HAPPENING WHERE I LIVE??!

*weeps*

(Also -- 25 years? Ouch.)

I still feel pretty much entirely made of fail as far as my writing is concerned, but I remind myself that I go through this phase on a regular basis, and that if I give myself another day or two I will be back on a more even keel again. Not delusional enough to think my very first-drafty book is the Best Thing Ever, but enough that I can bear to go on with it instead of wanting to tear it apart and scatter its chapters to the four winds, anyway.

I never did get that chocolate, by the way. *cue violins* However, thanks to the nice folks at NCIX and their blazing-fast shipping capabilities, I now have sitting beside me on the desk a brand-new Wacom Bamboo Fun to replace my old Graphire II pen and tablet (which had pretty much stopped working, to the detriment of my carpal tunnel syndrome). It is shiny and black and full of cool new features, and I am looking forward to taking it for a proper test-drive soon -- if I can only catch up with all the other things I ought to do first.

Also happy-making, albeit in an extremely tense, clutch-your-heart-and-pant kind of way, is Elizabeth E. Wein's The Empty Kingdom, the second book in her Mark of Solomon duology, which I finished last night. I wanted to read all Wein's books before I posted about them in any detail, and now I have, so prepare to be lectured at:

If you love historical fiction, adventure, intrigue, complex and dynamic characters, multilayered plots that practically demand re-reading to savour their cleverness, and are looking for something different from the bog-standard Medieval/Victorian Britain norm, you owe it to yourself to get your hands on Wein's series. Her first book is The Winter Prince, an Arthurian tale of Mordred and his tortured relationship with his half-brother Lleu which is now out of print, but even if your library fails on that point you don't need to have read TWP to appreciate the next book in the series, A Coalition of Lions, which is about Lleu's sister Goewin and also introduces us to the true setting of Wein's ambitious historical cycle -- 6th century Ethiopia.

Yes, really. And it's fabulous.

If you can't get a hold of Coalition (which would be sad, because Priamos is a lovely lovely man, and it's so much fun meeting Telemakos as a young boy and getting all these delicious hints of what he will later become) you can still jump into the series with The Sunbird or even The Lion Hunter, but I think Sunbird is a better starting place if you can manage it. I could go on for pages about the complete and total awesomeness of Telemakos -- he's one of these characters who just steals your heart and breaks it into a million pieces and puts it back together again, and you just can't help but love him for it anyway. (A bit like Miles Vorkosigan without the manic energy, or Eugenides without the cockiness, by way of comparison -- Telemakos's virtues and faults are very much his own, however.)

The point is, a lot more people need to read, and buy, these books or there might not be another, and that would be a serious tragedy. So for purely selfish reasons I command my f-list to go out and read Elizabeth E. Wein's books, because I want the next one. Preferably soon.

(Oh, and Megan Whalen Turner thinks they're fab and has been urging her fans to read them, too. So you know it isn't just me.)

So I'm having this thing happen in Book Two of Faery Rebels that was never a problem with Book One, and it's driving me crazy.

See, in Knife there's a fairly complex plot involving Shocking Discoveries and Revelations, but it's not too hard to keep track of because Knife does most of the sleuthing on her own, and the whole book is from her POV.

In Wayfarer, though, I've got two POV characters plus some secondary characters finding out Important Stuff in a variety of ways (experience, conversation, research), and they all have to relay that information to each other and then make joint decisions based on what they've learned.

But it's proving really, really difficult to have all these people react naturally to surprising news and events and then have plausible-sounding conversations about them without repeating the same details ad infinitum and slowing down the forward motion of the plot.

Has anyone else struggled with this? Any suggestions for taming the narrative tangle, or examples of books in which you think this kind of joint investigation and decision-making was handled particularly well?

I have just finished reading A Drowned Maiden's Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz, and I have only one thing to say to my f-list:

All of you who recommended that I read A Little Princess before all the other books in my to-read pile? You need to go out and read Schlitz's book right. now. Because I really can't remember a better tribute, or response, to that particular classic children's story than this one.

I am normally not a fan of stories that involve spiritualism, but in this book it's both lightly and deftly handled, and among its numerous other merits, it's hard to beat a story that starts with a first line like, On the morning of the best day of her life, Maud Flynn was locked in the outhouse, singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

And now that I've realized Schlitz is also the author of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village which won the Newbery Award last year, I really must stop procrastinating and hunt down that title as well.

(I am also going to randomly bold bits of my posts, just for fun.)

I am thirty-eight years old, with a fairly diverse experience of national and ethnic cuisine and a love of fine restaurants and quality home cooking.

So why does Kraft Dinner still taste so good?

I know that Amazon sales rankings mean little to nothing in the grand scheme of things, so I wasn't planning to pay much attention to mine. I noted that when my book first went up I was somewhere in the mid 400,000's, and was content to leave it at that... but it seems some people in my family are a bit more interested. I got this message tonight from my brother (who placed the very first preorder himself, bless him):

Subject: ... and moving up!
From: Peter Anderson
Date: 10:04 PM
To: "Anderson, Rebecca"

*Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank:* 144,778 in Books

And that was all.

I suspect there can't be more than three or four people who have preordered the book at this point, so what does that say for the 250,000 or so books with a lower ranking than mine? There have to be a whole lot of books not being bought out there...

ETA the following morning: ( BWAH! )

Aw, you guys... *toes dirt bashfully*

lizbee, a.k.a. the Bookselling Goddess of the Antipodes, has just given me some amazing news --

KNIFE IS ON AMAZON.CO.UK!!!

This is so surreal. I mean, I knew it was going to happen eventually, but it seems like it's happening to somebody else, you know?

Thank you, thank you, thank you, darling lizbee! And a big Happy Birthday to you as well!

Overall I enjoyed it, but I'm not itching to run out and see it again. IMO this movie suffered from two of the same problems that made me dislike the Jackson LotR films:

( Spoilers )

On the plus side, however -- and there were quite a few plusses I didn't even expect:

( More Spoilers )

I'd say three out of five stars. Would have been much better if the fighting had been cut back and more time given to humor and character development. It's hard to care that much about people you've barely got to know, especially when some of them are behaving like the aforementioned utter prats.

ETA: If you have seen and reviewed this film in your LJ, can you drop me a link in Comments? I know I had to skip at least two or three reviews on my f-list for fear of spoiling or prejudicing myself...

I've seen a lot of discussion about how to generate and flesh out new characters for books, and I've dutifully worked my way through a variety of questionnaires designed to help me get to know my fledgling heroes and heroines better. Which seemed like a good idea in principle, but in practice turned out to not especially helpful, at least for me.

However, Editor Extraordinaire Cheryl Klein has a nifty Create-a-Character exercise, based on a workshop she just gave at an SCBWI conference, which incorporates not just the external "What does your character look like / Where does he or she live" questions I'm used to seeing, but also poses some questions related to the character's internal life and place in the narrative that look really fascinating and useful. In particular:

ACTION
1. Desire: What the character wants

2. Attitude/Energy: The attitude the character brings to the situation in which s/he finds him- or herself

3. Action: What they will do within the novel; the result of Desire plus Attitude

To me, those questions of desire, attitude and action are the really crucial ones in the formation of a character, not whether said character's hair is brown or black or what their favorite food might be. Of course the smaller details are important to making a character fully real, but they can always be added in later; whereas the questions of Action are the ones that actually determine the shape and character of the whole story, and if you get those wrong you may end up not really having a good story at all. Think of all the manuscripts that get rejected not because they're poorly written in terms of mechanics, but because the MC seems to have no clear goal or desire, or because they fail to take any action to push the story forward.

Anyway, the whole post/questionnaire is worth reading, so check it out.

What about you? What techniques have you found useful in developing characters for your writing? Or if you're a reader rather than a writer, what makes a character "real" to you?

Book titles are such a tricky thing. So much depends on the taste of the individual editor, or the perceived tastes of readers. For instance, in the US my book has recently been retitled Knife, the Hunter in an effort to make plain that Knife is a person; whereas my UK editor thought the title was stronger without the explanation, and so the Orchard Books version will just be called Knife. Both my publishers had good logical reasons for what they decided -- but in the end, they made different choices.

Some of my fellow debut2009 authors have fantastic titles. carrie_ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth is a great one in my estimation -- what better title for a lyrical book about the Zombie Apocalypse? I also love lkmadigan's Flash Burnout, which evokes her book's themes of photography and addiction and has a great dynamic feel to it; and there are plenty of other titles on the list that grabbed me, like Jackson Pearce (watchmebe)'s As You Wish (yay Princess Bride references!) and jenny_moss's The Queen's Shadow and laurenbjorkman's My Invented Life and lisamantchev's The Théâtre Illuminata and, and, and...

What are some of your favorite -- or least favorite -- book titles? And why?

Gacked from reveilles, this is one of the niftiest things I've seen in a long while. Full screen for best effect (though I didn't, because I get motion-sick -- don't even talk to me about the hand-held camera work at the beginning of Persuasion, for instance):

So I went to my local indie children's bookstore to pick up a special order, and... I may have gone a little nuts. And now I have this pile of stuff, all of which I've heard good things about and thought looked intriguing enough to take a risk on... but I don't know where to begin!

Poll #1198659 Help me, LJ Fairy, you're my only hope!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Which of the following shiny new books should I read first?

Endorsements for a book on the list that you particularly loved are welcomed in comments, but if you particularly hated any of these, please refrain. I like to make up my own mind about books, without being prejudiced by somebody else's dislike (even if it turns out they are right).

And speaking of shiny new books I have just read wot are fabulous -- if you have any interest in contemporary YA fantasy and particularly if you're into vampires (which I myself am not, so take that as evidence that this book is a great read), you need to check out claudiagray's Evernight (HarperTeen, May 2008).

I already knew that Claudia was an excellent writer from reading some of her short stories, so I wasn't surprised that I enjoyed her rich and vivid but never overblown narrative style; I also expected the plot would be complex yet readily comprehensible and her main characters believable and sympathetic with flashes of wry humor, which proved true on all counts. But I thought myself very clever for anticipating where the plot was going and what was "really" up with some of the characters -- and I was wrong, wrong, WRONG. There's a twist about halfway through the story that made me literally drop the book and scream right out loud with the delicious shock of it -- and yet it didn't come out of left field, it was perfectly set up. I love books that play (or prey) on my expectations like that, so I have to give Claudia Gray big kudos for this one.

Evernight is the first in a series of four, and I can't wait to see how the next part of the story develops!

I also need to burble excitedly about Elizabeth E. Wein's Telemakos books sometime, but I want to read The Empty Kingdom (which is on back order at my local bookstore, WOE IS ME) first.