Perambulations in Verbiage

But I am working on it.

I decided to finish up the sample stuff I had started for that game, and have it ready, just in case the opportunity presented itself to audition with the new company that's taking the license. So that's done. Nothing may come of it, but I will at least have tried.

And in other news, I actually did some of the sewing that I had set aside in my new project-oriented sewing system. Nothing big. But compared to the zero sum creativity of this year, it feels huge.

Am also back on track with some research for a short story I wrote last year that I want to expand into a YA novel.

So I think maybe I needed that day long crying jag.

*Looks into the future. Trudges towards it.*

If I posted an entire list of everything we need to do by the end of March, I would probably collapse from exhaustion just by reading it. Instead, I think just looking at it a few pieces at a time is the way to go. So, here's how it went this past weekend.

Plans:
Clean current house for viewing by potential tenant.
Do the recyling.
Take stuff we aren't using out of closets & cabinets and bring to new place.
Sweep new basement.
Move the storage shelves & stuff on them out of the garage and into the new basement.
Go through books in garage. Divide in to Keep vs. Sell/Donate/FreeCycle boxes.

Accomplished:
Clean current house for viewing by potential tenant.
Do the recyling.
Take stuff we aren't using out of closets & cabinets and bring to new place.
Sweep new basement.
Move the storage shelves & stuff on them out of the garage and into the new basement.
Go through books in garage. Divide in to Keep vs. Sell/Donate/FreeCycle boxes.

We didn't actually get ALL of the shelves moved out of the garage, but that's largely because we didn't go through the books, so they're still sitting on the shelves.

Plans for after work this week:
Bring over & unpack at least 2 carloads of boxes a day.
Go through books in garage. Divide in to Keep vs. Sell/Donate/FreeCycle boxes. (Then do that.)
Finish moving the garage shelves.

Also, gotta say I'm glad we're moving now (at the end of winter) for another very important reason. If we were doing this in August, all the bugs & spiders that I'm encountering in the garage would be ALIVE. *shudder*

Two highly touted OFFICIAL SEQUELS have made the news recently.

Dracula: The Un-Dead is due to be released next October. It was written by Dacre Stoker, a *gasp* genuine descendent of Bram Stoker, and Ian Holt, a Dracula Historian. It largely appears to be Mr. Holt's idea, as the current Mr. Stoker was previously known for being an Olympic Pentathalon coach, and not a writer. But what really got to me was this quote from the article:

"Dacre Stoker delved into his ancestor's handwritten notes on the original Dracula novel to pen his sequel, Dracula: The Un-Dead - the original name for Dracula before an editor changed the title. The novel, out next October, draws on excised characters, existing character back-stories and plot threads that were cut from Stoker's original novel, first published 111 years ago."

Original notes or not, if these threads were cut from the novel, doesn't that indicate that the author discarded them? I thought that was part of the writing process - coming up with a lot of ideas and then streamlining them to create your story. I would actually be far more interested in seeing the notes themselves published in as complete a form as possible. (Unless they have been before, and I've just missed it?) At any rate, I just can't accept that this particular version of a Dracula sequel has any more literary legitimacy than any of the dozens of others that have been penned over the years, even with the Stoker family stamp of approval.


And then, a sequel to "The House at Pooh Corner" is due to be released later this year. An act which seems to be largely driven by money. The new author has plans to deal with an "older Christopher", as Milne "dropped hints in the 1928 book, which followed Winnie the Pooh (1924), that Christopher Robin was growing up." Isn't part of the point of the books that each child reading them gets to decide for themselves what happens as Christopher Robin grows up?

In "The House at Pooh Corner", A.A. Milne wrote this: "Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing." Those seem like pretty telling last words on the subject.


Among many other works, H. Beam Piper wrote and published two novels in his "Little Fuzzy" series before committing suicide in 1964. Some years after his death, other authors (Fuzzy Bones (1981) by William Tuning and Golden Dream: A Fuzzy Odyssey (1982) by Ardath Mayhar) tried to fill in the gaps and "complete" the series, only to be totally contradicted by Piper's own third complete manuscript, which was discovered and published in 1984. In Tuning's case, I don't even think that he wrote a bad book - it's just that he was proven not to have written the book that Piper would have. Which is pretty much my entire point.


There are huge debates in the art world about whether or not paintings and other artworks can ever be "restored" to their original appearance as envisioned by the artist. But how many people have picked up da Vinci's notebooks, or Van Gogh's sketches, or Andy Warhol's scribbles, and claimed that they have now produced new works that should be regarded as the next in a series of paintings, just as the artist intended?

Seems a bit daft, really. Why should it be different for authors?

I liked this meme, so I'm snagging it!

Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1) D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire
2) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
3) Looking for Jake by China Mieville (short stories)
4) Deerskin by Robin McKinley
5) The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
6) Dracula by Bram Stoker
7) Beauty by Robin McKinley
8) Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
9) Fairie Tale by Raymond E. Feist
10) The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers
11) Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
12) Sandman by Neil Gaiman Don't try to tell me it isn't a novel.
13) House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
14) The Merlin Trilogy by Mary Stewart Yes, trilogy - there are ONLY 3 books!
15) The Delicate Dependency by Michael Talbot

Today I am indulging in one of my favorite exercise programs - reshelving books. There's bending and stretching and lifting and walking and pushing heavy objects. When I used to do this sort of thing 20 hours a week, I was in much better shape than I am now. I've missed it. Plus, I am a chronic book-truck browser, so if a new book or two hasn't wandered back to my desk with me by the end of the day, I will be very surprised.

I've also come to realize recently that the longer I work in libraries, the less I view books as physical objects, and the more I see them as the ideas they contain.

Which means that the objects themselves can pass through my hands, leave, and come back again when I want them. Instead of being stored in boxes, rarely looked at, and hauled back and forth across the country "just in case" I need them - yes, guilty as charged. Did I mention that I have a bit of a hoarding problem? (Also a long-standing disappointment at the fact that a number of people who have the same interests as I do also seem to constitute a large percentage of the people who steal books from libraries - but that's another story, and can be told another time.) So this is a fairly revolutionary idea for me personally.

My newfound attitude doesn't apply to all my books. Some I can't replace, some have individual sentimental value, and some I just love so much that I'd have to keep them out on permanent loan. Those all need to stay. The rest though, the rest can travel. If I need them again, they'll come back.

Just another reason why I love libraries.

Libraries = freedom from stuff!

At gmskarka's insistance suggestion, I just recently finished reading "The Dark Tower" series.

On the whole, I rather liked them. There are some aspects of the last three books that would probably have upset me more had I been waiting nearly 20 years for them, but I read all of them inside of a month, so the wait was not so long for me.

I really, really appreciate and enjoy King's use of language. I have read that he doesn't think much of his ear for dialogue - even making fun of it in this series where he says that all of his characters sound like they're from Maine, even when they aren't. But I think that King's landscapes are defined by the language of the people that inhabit them. Mid-World and In-World would lack depth and life without phrases like "Thankee-sai" and "You have forgotten the face of your father".

This is also the first time that I have ever felt "the myth of the West" and its pull. Apparently, all that it took was a well-written fantasy series by an East-Coast author inspired by westerns made in Italy to point it out to me. *sigh* I suppose it's that my heroes have NOT always been cowboys.

Growing up in Kansas, and seeing it as it looks now (I mean, have you been to Dodge City?) it is sometimes hard to picture the larger-than life aspects of the area's history. I've always enjoyed Westerns, but I never appreciated the depth of the myth before this series. Perhaps because King tied it in so well with the Arthurian-quest archetype, it carried over the legendary aspects.

And while I understand the reasons that King had to end the series the way he did, I would probably recommend to anyone else reading them to stop at the point where he warns you to stop. You really don't need the denoument to enjoy the rest of the story, and for some people it will probably be better that way.

( Extra, not-to-spoiler-y short review for those who ken it. )

Finally finished "The Honest Courtesan" by Margaret F. Rosenthal. Whew! I'm kind of embarrased that it took so long for me to read. All I can say in my defense is 1) I've been busy for the last few months, and 2) It's a thesis. So it reads like...a thesis.

The most interesting sections are the (of course) last two, where Ms. Rosenthal examines the way that Franco wrote poetry in her own defense, first during her trial for heresy, and then socially during her two-year exile from Venice. Veronica used the rhetorical styles of Ovid's Heroides and Amores to turn the image of herself as courtesan from deceitful whore to a woman of honorable and honest fidelity by changing his traditional elegiac verse from a positition of male moral superiority to one centered on the lamenting female voice. It may not sound like much by our current standards, but for a woman to have been able to publish such works during the Renaissance, when a majority of women were being steadily pushed farther and farther away from the seats of intellect and discovery they had been privy to during the Middle Ages, it's a pretty big deal. She wasn't even tried for heresy a second time. :)


Also read: "Lost New York" (2000 ed.) by Nathan Silver. This one's research for the novel. It's full of black and white photos of old New York neighborhoods and buildings that no longer exist, with blurbs about where they were, and how they were lost. The coolest/weirdest thing about it for me was looking at photos of street intersections where I have been, and seeing how different they were 100 or 50 or even 10 years ago. And since the book was published in 2000, it was also a bit bizarre to read his passage about the B-25 Bomber that crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945, which finished with this statement: "It takes the work of aliens using special effects, as in the 1996 film 'Independence Day', to guarantee a complete destruction job."...*shudder*

I just finished reading "I was a Teenage Fairy" (1998) by Francesca Lia Block, a fairly well-known novelist for the YA crowd. It took about two hours. Votes are in - I still don't like her writing style much. She uses third person present-tense, I think in an attempt to draw the reader in and make things seem more immediate, but I just find it annoying after a while.

The story is pretty standard YA fare: Girl(named Barbie) gets pushed into modeling by stage mom who is living through her; girl gets molested by photographer; girl meets hot actor-boy but has problems dating him because of previous molestation.

The thing that makes it different from your typical after-school-special kind of story is that the fairy of the title is real (Barbie calls her a "Mab"), and functions in a sort of Jimminy Cricket conscience role, encouraging Barbie to speak up for herself, learn photography, etc... The Mab is also about the size of Jimminy Cricket, as Block went with "Punk Tinkerbelle" as a model. And a fairy who drinks, cusses and refers to cute human boys as 'biscuits' is pretty amusing.

I also found Barbie's desire to become a photographer, born at the same time that she is being abused by one an interesting viewpoint. She seems to feel more abused by the camera itself than by the person, and therefore the way that she tries to empower herself is by taking on the role of the abuser - the camera.

And that's all I've got to say about that for now. More books later.

Just a fluffy little post about good books.

While I was home sick with the Con Crud so thoughtfully shared by my beloved this past weekend, I finished reading "Lost in a Good Book", the second in the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. I really like these books, as they are full of clever language, good literary humor and bad puns as well as being quite decent detective fiction. And if you like that sort of thing, you'll probably like them as well.

( For Example )

Besides, I have to love any book where the main character regularly converses with the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat (used to be the Cheshire Cat, but they moved the county boundaries) and gets apprenticed to Miss Havisham.

Enjoy.