Wed Reading Meme
Jul. 29th, 2015 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat[I've discovered something...plausibility like beauty appears to be in the eye of the beholder. Also, pondered this recently: why I love writing stories, but not a fan of writing stories based on someone else's characters or as a continuation of their story. I'm a fiction writer, a meta writer, a technical writer, a business writer, a legal writer, an essayist, a journalist, a play write, and possibly screen writer, and various other types, but I've never been much inclined towards fanfic.
Wrote three fanfics, one was really just a bunch of vignettes that I never finished. It was really dark, and I basically was killing off the Buffy characters one at a time. It was called "Miss Edith's Revenge" - I had Drusilla turn Dawn and Giles into vampires, along with various potential slayers.
A friend of mine kept daring me - can you write really twisted sadistic torture porn? Apparently I can. I'd prefer not to. You have to take your mind to a nasty place. And who needs that? So I stopped. Also, it apparently wasn't appealing to people (not surprising, it was really dark. I killed Xander in a horrific manner. And had Drusilla torture Dawn.) Horror though can be fun to write. I wrote this one great scene - where Buffy is fighting a vampire version of Dawn and a group of slayers who have been turned into vampires in a church. It all takes place post Chosen. If you are curious, it may still be somewhere in my live journal. I've no idea where.
Stories come to us. How or why they come, we don't know. They just come. In various flavors. For some it's the continuation of a story they've read. For other's it's another version of that story. I'm channeling a new version of sci-fi story that I wrote over 20 years ago. Over the years, I've written various versions, and it has been niggling at me since December, but I kept putting it on hold - to push out Doing Time. OR to write something more practical. More publishable. Something I thought a reader would want to read or a publisher publish. The trick to story-telling though, is to forget there is an audience or a reader. Otherwise writer's block rears its ugly head. You can't know what will appeal to a potential reader. No one does. All you know is what appeals to you. The other person is unknowable, a variable to be discovered, and hopefully connected to. Somehow.]
1. What I just finished reading
Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey - which was published in 1968. This is the Kindle version. I read it in 1979-1980 or thereabouts, when I was in the 6th grade. It's written for a third -sixth grade reading level. (Most things are - old journalism writing rule - write for a third grade reading level.) Although it has some mature themes, there's no explicit sex in it to speak of and the violence isn't that graphic. A 12-15 year old could read it without too much difficulty. There's only a few places here and there that I questioned. (Like the chauvinism, and the male attitude towards women in the books and how they manhandled women. It's not horrible (I've read far worse, certainly not on the same level as Twilight, Fifty Shades, and various other romance novels. But it could bother some people.)
There's a lot of copy-edit errors. I've become insanely aware of copy-edit and typos in books. Probably a side-effect of publishing my own book. Anyhow, I'm sympathetic. It happens a lot in the transference of text to Mobi or electronic e-book. If you know anything about digitizing text or transferring it - you know whereof I speak. It's trick and all sorts of nasty errors can arise.
Also, fixing typos isn't as easy as it looks. To be pitch perfect - you require a lot of eyes, and well that cost money, folks. Lots of money. It also helps if you aren't dyslexic.
So, I shrug off typos. If a book doesn't have any - it's not because of the writer, it's because the writer had a frigging good editor.
Overall, okay read. Didn't hold up well. Wanted to re-write the thing. Loved the dragons and the world-building. Also, the characters are intriguing. But, I wanted to re-write it. I bet these books have a lot of fanfic. Unevenly written books and tv shows tend to attract fanfic - mainly because people see the potential and want to go in and fix it.
[ETA: Discovered via Wikipedia that DragonFlight is actually a combination of two novellas Weyre Search and Dragonflight that McCaffrey won a Hugo and Nebula for, being amongst the first women sci-fi writers to win one. A lot of people have been critical of the book - but it is a product of its time.]
2. What I'm reading now?
Dragon Quest by Anne McCaffrey. (Note a while back I got the Dragon Riders of Pern series for free on Amazon Kindle.) This one is actually better than Dragon Flight. Less errors. And more character development. Although I think it has too many characters with similar names. I'm getting confused. This happened with Goblin Emperor too. What is it with sci-fi and fantasy writers and similar sounding character names? I suck at naming things too, but still.
Anyhow enjoying it.
3. What I'm reading next?
Probably The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey.
Am flirting with the Temeraire fantasy novels by Naomi Novvak, but they may be too young for me. I can't read YA or coming of age right now - not fitting my mood. Also flirted with a novel called The Dragon by Naomi Novaak. And a few by Jo Walton, although Jo Walton has a writing style that is at times sleep inducing. She's a very vague writer - reminds me a little be of Donna Tartt's Secret History. Which I do like, but not really in the mood for at the moment. I'd read Walton's Amongst Others, which is haunting and memorable, but a struggle to get through. She sort of writes around things, indirectly, if that makes sense? I don't know if all her books are like that - from the Amazon reviews, I'm guessing they are.
Walton appears to be more interested in discussing ideas and philosophy than developing character, and right now I could not care less about philosophy and ideas, but am very interested in character.
I prefer philosophy and ideas to be subtextual, vague, and alluded to, not direct and obvious.
I want to dig for those, while the characters are more the focus.
[In other words, I'm not a theme-oriented reader. Some people are - they read for ideas, information, or the theme or political message. They analyze from a socio-political perspective and write from that perspective. Adore allegorical works like Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Three Stigmata of Palmer K. Eldritch, 1984, The Master and the Margritta, etc. While others, prefer character driven. And other's plot. And some all three blended together. If I had my druthers, I prefer all three blended together. That's the story I'm working on now. All three blended together, with the socio-political vaguer and hidden in metaphor. I like to make you work for it. As Maya Angelou, at least I think it was her, stated once - "if you can't find the book you want to read? Write it yourself." Which is basically what I've always done.]
Wrote three fanfics, one was really just a bunch of vignettes that I never finished. It was really dark, and I basically was killing off the Buffy characters one at a time. It was called "Miss Edith's Revenge" - I had Drusilla turn Dawn and Giles into vampires, along with various potential slayers.
A friend of mine kept daring me - can you write really twisted sadistic torture porn? Apparently I can. I'd prefer not to. You have to take your mind to a nasty place. And who needs that? So I stopped. Also, it apparently wasn't appealing to people (not surprising, it was really dark. I killed Xander in a horrific manner. And had Drusilla torture Dawn.) Horror though can be fun to write. I wrote this one great scene - where Buffy is fighting a vampire version of Dawn and a group of slayers who have been turned into vampires in a church. It all takes place post Chosen. If you are curious, it may still be somewhere in my live journal. I've no idea where.
Stories come to us. How or why they come, we don't know. They just come. In various flavors. For some it's the continuation of a story they've read. For other's it's another version of that story. I'm channeling a new version of sci-fi story that I wrote over 20 years ago. Over the years, I've written various versions, and it has been niggling at me since December, but I kept putting it on hold - to push out Doing Time. OR to write something more practical. More publishable. Something I thought a reader would want to read or a publisher publish. The trick to story-telling though, is to forget there is an audience or a reader. Otherwise writer's block rears its ugly head. You can't know what will appeal to a potential reader. No one does. All you know is what appeals to you. The other person is unknowable, a variable to be discovered, and hopefully connected to. Somehow.]
1. What I just finished reading
Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey - which was published in 1968. This is the Kindle version. I read it in 1979-1980 or thereabouts, when I was in the 6th grade. It's written for a third -sixth grade reading level. (Most things are - old journalism writing rule - write for a third grade reading level.) Although it has some mature themes, there's no explicit sex in it to speak of and the violence isn't that graphic. A 12-15 year old could read it without too much difficulty. There's only a few places here and there that I questioned. (Like the chauvinism, and the male attitude towards women in the books and how they manhandled women. It's not horrible (I've read far worse, certainly not on the same level as Twilight, Fifty Shades, and various other romance novels. But it could bother some people.)
There's a lot of copy-edit errors. I've become insanely aware of copy-edit and typos in books. Probably a side-effect of publishing my own book. Anyhow, I'm sympathetic. It happens a lot in the transference of text to Mobi or electronic e-book. If you know anything about digitizing text or transferring it - you know whereof I speak. It's trick and all sorts of nasty errors can arise.
Also, fixing typos isn't as easy as it looks. To be pitch perfect - you require a lot of eyes, and well that cost money, folks. Lots of money. It also helps if you aren't dyslexic.
So, I shrug off typos. If a book doesn't have any - it's not because of the writer, it's because the writer had a frigging good editor.
Overall, okay read. Didn't hold up well. Wanted to re-write the thing. Loved the dragons and the world-building. Also, the characters are intriguing. But, I wanted to re-write it. I bet these books have a lot of fanfic. Unevenly written books and tv shows tend to attract fanfic - mainly because people see the potential and want to go in and fix it.
[ETA: Discovered via Wikipedia that DragonFlight is actually a combination of two novellas Weyre Search and Dragonflight that McCaffrey won a Hugo and Nebula for, being amongst the first women sci-fi writers to win one. A lot of people have been critical of the book - but it is a product of its time.]
2. What I'm reading now?
Dragon Quest by Anne McCaffrey. (Note a while back I got the Dragon Riders of Pern series for free on Amazon Kindle.) This one is actually better than Dragon Flight. Less errors. And more character development. Although I think it has too many characters with similar names. I'm getting confused. This happened with Goblin Emperor too. What is it with sci-fi and fantasy writers and similar sounding character names? I suck at naming things too, but still.
Anyhow enjoying it.
3. What I'm reading next?
Probably The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey.
Am flirting with the Temeraire fantasy novels by Naomi Novvak, but they may be too young for me. I can't read YA or coming of age right now - not fitting my mood. Also flirted with a novel called The Dragon by Naomi Novaak. And a few by Jo Walton, although Jo Walton has a writing style that is at times sleep inducing. She's a very vague writer - reminds me a little be of Donna Tartt's Secret History. Which I do like, but not really in the mood for at the moment. I'd read Walton's Amongst Others, which is haunting and memorable, but a struggle to get through. She sort of writes around things, indirectly, if that makes sense? I don't know if all her books are like that - from the Amazon reviews, I'm guessing they are.
Walton appears to be more interested in discussing ideas and philosophy than developing character, and right now I could not care less about philosophy and ideas, but am very interested in character.
I prefer philosophy and ideas to be subtextual, vague, and alluded to, not direct and obvious.
I want to dig for those, while the characters are more the focus.
[In other words, I'm not a theme-oriented reader. Some people are - they read for ideas, information, or the theme or political message. They analyze from a socio-political perspective and write from that perspective. Adore allegorical works like Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Three Stigmata of Palmer K. Eldritch, 1984, The Master and the Margritta, etc. While others, prefer character driven. And other's plot. And some all three blended together. If I had my druthers, I prefer all three blended together. That's the story I'm working on now. All three blended together, with the socio-political vaguer and hidden in metaphor. I like to make you work for it. As Maya Angelou, at least I think it was her, stated once - "if you can't find the book you want to read? Write it yourself." Which is basically what I've always done.]
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no subject
Date: 2015-07-30 01:50 am (UTC)Probably The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey.
Actually, if you can track them down, I'd recommend reading Dragonsong and Dragonsinger next. They actually take place pretty much at the same time as parts of Dragonquest (I normally recommend people read the first one before it and the second one after it, but they work just as well with both afterward). Dragondrums should be read after The White Dragon even though it takes place during some of the same time frame, to avoid spoiling some things.
I haven't read them in ages, but I was a huge fan when I was a teenager... even belonging to the official fan club back in the mid-80s. And yes, there was a LOT of fanfic (okay, a lot for the day... since it pretty much had to be published in physical zines).
no subject
Date: 2015-07-30 02:00 am (UTC)I don't think I ever read anything but the three books. I might have read Dragonsong, I vaguely remember reading that one. I know I didn't read Dragondrums. (Can't remember it.) Tried to read Moreta's Ride - which I had in hardback.
I was in love with the books too as a teenager. Read all the Anne McCaffrey novels that I could get my hands one. I remember loving Restoree, and the Ship who Sang series.
Also Pegasus. The sci-fi book that I wrote 20 some years ago was heavily influenced by McCaffrey, Norton, and CJ Cherryth.
McCaffrey was infamous for hating fanfic. She went on the internet and raged over the fanfic published there. I think there was a court case where she attempted to get it removed, and fanfic.net had to remove all this fanfic - it was way back in 2002-2003.
McCaffrey, Ursula Le Quinn, Anne Rice, and Diana Gabaldon all went after fanfic at different points.
I don't know why. I'd have been flattered.
no subject
Date: 2015-07-30 09:41 pm (UTC)She's written a ton of books in that series - 23 in all. I stopped at The White Dragon.
Most weren't written until long after I lost interest in the series.
Am somewhat curious about the books regarding the settlers first arriving on Pern and discovering the threat and figuring out a way of combating it.
no subject
Date: 2015-07-30 03:39 am (UTC)Also Novik just came out with a standalone novel, again, not YA, called Uprooted. I just finished reading it and I thought it was the best Novik I'd read since the first Temeraire book.
Here endeth the commercial. I promise I'm not Novik in disguise plugging her books!
no subject
Date: 2015-07-30 09:39 pm (UTC)