Fantasy As Required Reading

School bells are ringing and all across the nation, kids everywhere are massively bummed out.  It’s that inglorious time of year when it’s time to pile onto the school bus once again and truck off to academia.  Hopefully you got your required summer reading out of the way, and hopefully you got to read books you might actually -want- to read.

A few of my friends went to more progressive high schools than my own where this was already the case.  I, however, spent my adolescence in podunk north Georgia where this was anything -but-.  Nor had it changed much in my younger brother’s time in the county school system  three years later.

Today though I want to give a shout out to a rural school system that is doing it right.  My best friend was looking for a job in education, and excitedly e-mailed me the summer reading list for Dawson County high school.  Dawson is a fairly small county in the North Georgia mountains that abuts my own hometown. Amongst the usual suspects like Dickens, Faulkner, and Wells, there they were the works of Robert Jordan, Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Ursula K. Le Guin.  Dude! I never thought I would say it, but GO DAWSON!

“Help! I graduated from a creative writing program!”

Okay so I didn’t really graduate from a full degree program; I only had a little more than the minor.  (Electives for the win, without the hassle of the senior project) But it’s a sentiment I’ve heard expressed from my fellows who have come through full degree programs and are now transitioning out of the life of a student-writer. Confession time:  I’ll admit it, I have this problem too.  I am one of those writers who have since fallen a part during the transition -out- of a creative writing program. 

For two years now I’ve been able to blame my lack of writing on grad school, and the excuse is true enough.  I honestly did not have time to do much between a job, internships, and my course work.  It is also true that I didn’t try very hard to get anything done either, but it was okay because once I graduated I’d have time again to pursue my writing.  Right? (Hah!) Well it’s been three months now and I’ve produced very little – as in under 10,000 words when I used to be cranking out 10,000 at least, weekly. 

Initially, I freaked.  And to be honest, I’m still a little freaked but I’ve recently come to a better understanding of the problem.  The initial conclusion that I jumped to was that – Oh noes!!1!  I must be irreparably broken!  But that’s really not true, just some passing melodrama. It’s not quite writer’s block that I have.  If anything, I’m too attached to the world building process at the moment. I have five solid ideas right that I’ve been developing.  (Three of them short stories or perhaps novella length.) And in my head they continue to grow. The problem isn’t of inspiration; the problem is that I suddenly find the act of writing, uncomfortable and alien.  

I’ve grown so used to writing within the structure and safety of a classroom environment that I am now totally spoiled. Being a student was great – an able and willing support/critique group was always on hand.  There were deadlines to keep you moving forward, and prompts at the ready when I got stuck. I had a schedule.  Pieces were turned in on Friday so I wrote Monday-Thursday.  I would write before dinner and edit afterwards before bed time.  I couldn’t slack off or procrastinate, or else I wouldn’t have anything to turn in and that would have been bad.  Bad for my GPA.  Bad for my graduate school prospects. Etc. Etc.

It was a  magical time, but tricky.  Writing ceased to be a solitary activity and became something done for an assignment, for a teacher, or for a grade.  There was always an external reason to be working on a student piece, and I feel like I’ve lost sight of that internal satisfaction that I used to get from writing in the first place.  And it’s my own damn fault really and I have no one to blame but myself.  The change was just so subtle, evolving slowly over the course of four years.  It snuck up on me!  So now in addition to finding my groove once again, I’m dealing with the guilt of having allowed myself to end up here in the first place.  The guilt thing is stupid, needless, and not helping matters so I really ought to just let it go.

It will be okay though.  This is just a temporary (hopefully) and awkward transitional period.  I do not write this to point the finger at college writing programs or to imply that they are evil. They are what they are.  They take an adjustment and they require a readjustment. I learned from them and grew as a writer.  Now I just have to grow -beyond- that environment.  

If any of you have any advice on how you weathered this or personal stories, I would love to hear it.  Or any other words of encouragement or commiseration if you to are a recent graduate too.  Share and share alike; we’re all in this together right?

/End of Line

~ L.

Does anything hurt vampires anymore?

To be fair this may only be true of teen fiction, but it seems like vampires these days are impervious to well…everything.  Would the Corey’s have stood a chance against Keifer Sutherland’s band of lost boys if they had been Cullens?  What the hell happened to vampires who exploded on a sunny day like a decent creature of the night should!?  -I’m- more allergic to garlic than these young, modern vampires are!  Argh!

I’ll confess, I really liked the whole “sparkle in the sun” thing in Twilight and I could buy that as a sort of evolutionary advantage left over from the primordial times.  (like how fish are attracted to shiny lures) But now, more and more it’s seeming like -the standard- that vampires are unfazed by their traditional weaknesses.  The only weaknesses these new vampires seem to have are those of the heart and psyche.  To apply the old Superman argument, what fun is it when your hero is impervious to bullets? These new vampires seem to be blest with all the perks (immortality, lightning reflexes, beauty, grace, magic yadda yadda) but little of the baggage.  Just think of how much more interesting it would be to see the human protagonists deal with the full weight and consequence of becoming a classic vampire.  Bloodlust and heightened sensuality is only the tip of the iceberg.  Really think about what it would be like to -never- see the sunlight again.  What would that do to you?  What if you were a christian and could no longer pray on a rosary or on holy ground while these changes were happening to you?  There is a lot more serious and psychological ground that -could- be covered in vampire fiction that isn’t  (particularly in YA fiction).

/End of Line

~ L.

Reading Manga On The Kindle: Maximum Ride Review

While the Kindle has kept me from being buried alive by my books, the comics and manga just keep rolling in. For as long as I have owned my Kindle, I have dreamed of reading manga on it. I live in Manhattan in a teeny-tiny studio. Similar to many urban bookworms, I fight a loosing battle with available space for new books.  Every purchase is bittersweet because I don’t really have any place to put these acquisitions.  Manga purchases though are the worst because while I love the printed format, I only get about a half hour’s worth of enjoyment out of something that will take up space on my shelves indefinitely.  I would have loved for the Kindle to have been able to come in and be my savior.  Alas, not yet.

There are obvious reasons to be skeptic of Amazon’s e-reader as a platform for manga.  The artwork after all is the most powerful and compelling component of visual storytelling, and on the grainy screen of the Kindle 1 and 2 the fine ink strokes of an artist’s hand are not likely to translate well.  But when I stumbled upon the first volume of James Patterson’s Maximum Ride the Manga in the Kindle store, I still bought it without a moment’s hesitation.  I just had to give this a try.

I’m not going to really review the story itself this time.  As Maxiumum Rise is a graphic novel adaptation of James Patterson’s YA noveland I haven’t read the prose of Maximum Ride yet, I don’t feel like I could comment on it fairly.  The initial attraction for me was that here was the first manga that I had seen for the Kindle published and it was published by Yen Press.  I really love that house.  Though they come no where close to the volume that is manga giant Tokyopop, they’ve always put out a consistent and original line.  Small as they were in the beginning, they’ve taken some rather daring risks and I really respect them for that.  But that’s a convo for another day.  I could gush about Yen Press for quite some time.

I had little difficulty falling into the action of reading the manga over the e-reader.  I’ve been a web-comic reader for years so the idea of reading comics over a computer device is not all that unnatural.  To the Kindle’s credit I wouldn’t say the reading experience was horrible, but it does have a ways yet to climb.  It was much better than I expected. The scenes were reasonably clear and my eyes followed the story panel by panel without much stumbling.  The only confusion occurred whenever there was combat involved because the dialog got completely lost in the action. To fit on the Kindle screen, the image has to be reduced from what you would ordinarily see in a printed tpb.  That made for some very tiny type.  And though I have artificially perfect vision, my eyes really strained to make sense of what might as well have been kanji for all I could tell in places.  Now on a 1st generation Kindle I could not zoom in on the picture in order to enlarge the type.  To be fair though, the 1st generation really wasn’t designed to support graphic novels.  There have been other articles claiming that significant improvement was made n the second generation to better allow for manga and graphic novels.  And I believe you can zoom in, though don’t quote me on that.

I had to really struggle to read this volume and I definitely put in more than a half hour in order to do it.  I enjoyed it however, despite the challenges, but I’m not convinced yet that the Kindle is the place where the digital comics revolution is going to occur.  I would consider buying more comics for my Kindle; however, if a series grew into a property that I well and truly loved, I would likely switch back to paper for that line.  If you feel differently though, let me know and be sure to check out Tumor when it first pubs exclusively for the Kindle through Archaia with a HC run to follow. The first issue will be reportedly free, with the seven subsequent issues priced at .99 a piece.

/End of Line

~ L.

A Sensible Book Trailer & Sea Monsters

Oh, ho ho. I am so happy that such a thing exists.  Though I still haven’t gotten around to picking up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I’m glad to see that Quirk Books is rolling forward with this series.  And now without further adieu, I give you Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

P.S. – Love that cover!

/ End of Line

~ L

Dune Cover Roundup (of Sorts) & Design Trends

So on a whim I wanted to do another cover round up, as I did for A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami.  And originally I set off to do Dune because being such an internationally well known piece of classic SF, I figured there would be a treasure trove of awesome vintage covers.  It’s also one of my favorite books, period.

 Shortly upon setting off on this mission I came across the cover index of Arrakis.co/uk thus rendering my efforts unnecessary. 

Anyway for your enjoyment while I go find something else to do this morning: Link!  Posted would be favorite of the lot from an older Brazilian printing of Dune.  I love vintage cover art.  It’s dated as hell, but the over the top colors have a strange sort of charm.  An electric blue sky over Arrakis?  Oh hehe. 

I wonder how book covers will appear to me twenty years from now.  Gone seem to the days of intricatlly painted 2-D covers in a Darrel K. Sweet type style, and a lot of people are probably happy about that.  How will we perceive these photo-realistic covers twenty years from now?  It’ll be curious to see the new trends evolve, and they’ll have to.  I was commenting to a friend the other day while we were at the B&N in Union Square, how hard it was to find a book in the YA section these days.  It seems like every book for females features a sole female protagonist, centered on the cover, and staring out at the audience.  There are only so many ways you can vary the book cover with effects.  The book shelves are reaching max capacity; I’m finding it hard to keep them all straight.

/End of Line

~ L.

Chinese/Japanese E-reader looking as doughty as Kindle

 Chinese IT company, Founder Group, unveiled it’s E-reader last month for Chinese and Japanese markets.  On appearances alone, the device looks like nothing more than a clone of Amazon’s Kindle.  PW reported on this in July and notes however that the device does have two internal differences that set it apart from it’s American predecessor.  

“By using a SIM card, contents can be directly downloaded to the terminal, while its cellular modem means wireless downloads will not, unlike the Kindle, be restricted to only one network.  The device is also configured to display double-byte characters – essential for reading scripts in Japanese, Chinese and Korean characters…”

But bleck…couldn’t they have improved on the design at all?  I really love my Kindle, I am glad that I have my 1st generation device.  I wasn’t a fan of the design choices made in the 2nd gen. The screen feels smaller, the type is noticeably less legible, it feels like there is a lot of wasted space inside that 

I’m really wondering whether the graphics will be of a high enough quality to legibly display the intricate characters of asian languages and wish I could have found a better picture with type displayed.  Based on the limitations of the orignal camera and my own screen resolution this new device doesn’t look like it stands a chance of being widely accepted.  Legibility is such a huge obstacle to overcome for e-readers.  No matter how cool the bells and wistles are that adorn a devicer, reading is first and formost an experience.  If the experience is a struggle or gives the reader a migraine, it won’t be one to repeat. 

Furthermore this device has to contend with the superior abilities of cellular displays in Japan and China and the mobile publishing industry.  I have been constantly amazed by how clear the screen displays were on the Japanese phones I’ve seen.  Unless this photo is just really, really bad, the display on this reader does not appear to hold a candle to them.  What then is the motivation for the consumer to buy a device like this when the keitai shousetsu (cellphone novels) market is a bit older, more consistent, and advanced market.  

Thoughts on The Wheel of Time Comic

Now that The Wheel of Time: The Eye of the World is officially underway, I wanted to chime in on the graphic novel. I hesitated when Issue #0 was released because it really wouldn’t have been fair to weigh in on what is essentially just a pair of side stories to the main event. Issue #0 uses an ordinary day in Egwene’s life to introduce us briefly to the three boys Mat, Perrin, and Rand as well as some of the superstitions, lore, and history of the Two Rivers and the Westlands at large. The material included the Prologue to The Eye of the World and a very basic summation of the world after the breaking. All of it is important information, but arguably not necessary to get into the abridged story being told in graphic novel. (I say abridged not to presume that a lot is going to get left out by the Dabel Brothers’s adaptation, but let’s face it, there is no way to wholly translate a scope of work as large and as rich as The Wheel of Time into this format.)

A few of my friends have been confused by Issue #0 and Egwene’s POV because it isn’t a part of the books that they have read. This is not new content, but an adaptation of an extra chapter that was written and included in the YA packaging of The Eye of the World: From the Two Rivers. The chapter was called “Ravens”  in case you didn’t know and want to look it up. I think it was a good decision to treat the prologue in this manner and use Egewene’s story as a plot device to introduce the reader to that past and present in one act. Issue #0 was okay, but it didn’t quite satisfy the fangirl in me. Anyway, I finally had the chance to read Issue #1 this weekend. SQUEE! Now I am a happy fangirl. I’m flipping every page, waiting to see who pops up next and what they look like while drawing strange looks from everyone at the comic store as I’m choking back giggles. That was the experience I was waiting for. 

I’m still not entirely in love with the art style.  We’ll see if it grows on me over time.  The comic preserves most of the important character traits which I appreciated.  Rand towers above the Two River folks, Perrin does have very broad shoulders.  Moiraine though is a good bit taller than I pictured her to be, but otherwise my favorite of the cast that has been introduced so far.  The first issue also did a nice job of keeping the attention on the world rather than just the important players.  As Rand and Tam roll in to Edmond’s Field with the apple brandy you get to see  the things that are going on around them in preparation for Beltine such as Cenn badgering Mayor Brann about the lack of storks or a Coplin getting hen-pecked by his wife.  Rand is often in the foreground of panels which is fitting because right now, he’s not what’s important.  

Adapters Chuck Dixon and Chase Conley are taking their time with the pacing and aren’t rushing through the story in so far.  Thom hasn’t even been introduced yet.  Honestly, I expected it to be a rush job and Issue #1 to close with Narg in the kitchen, but then the end product would not have been nearly as nice.  The original New Spring comic left me with a lot of doubts, but I think this could shape up to be a good adaptation.  I worry, however, that comics fan might not pick it up and/or stick with the story.   True to novel-form, it will be a slow build.  I hope though that the series is successful enough to motivate Dabel to keep to a consistent and reasonable production schedule.

Orbit $1 Dollar E-books – The Night Shift

Orbit’s August selection is available now, The Night Shift by Lilith Sinclair.

The summary I’m putting up goes from the Little Brown UK because it is far more descriptive and thus convincing than what’s currently up on Orbit or Amazon.

Summary: Jill Kismet is a dealer in dark things and demon slayer, and it’s her job to patrol the nightside. In the cold pre-dawn, Jill is called in to assess the aftermath of a particularly savage cop-killing. Under the haunted eyes of the forensic techs, Jill picks up the stench of hellbreed and something else – something dangerous and tainted. But this makes no sense as hellbreed always work alone, distrusted even by their own kind. Jill’s a Hunter, trained by the best, but she’s in over her head. Welcome to the night shift …

Twitter Drama In The News

Oye.  From CNN: “Woman sued over defamatory tweet”

So while this is not strictly publishing related, the going on’s and changing policies of Web 2.0 is something that is important to the industry.  Also, this situation is so outrageous that it begs commentary.  I expected the media to grab am hold of Twitter related lawsuit some where down the line when a story broke. But seriously?  I cannot believe that Horizon Realty is pursuing this.

The tweet in question reads:

“@JessB123You should just come anyway. Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”

The company followed up by bringing suit against the user on the grounds that they:  “maliciously and wrongfully published the false and defamatory Tweet on Twitter, thereby allowing the Tweet to be distributed throughout the world.” Oh and they are suing for $50,000.  I have to really agree with CNN here.  “Unfortunately for Horizon, the media attention surrounding this Twitter lawsuit will likely damage the company’s reputation far beyond the scope of @abonnen’s message to her 20 followers.”

My disbelief stems from a few of the specifics that make the whole thing absurd.  The user in question had roughly 20 followers (and has since deleted the account), verses the legions that many other Twitter users can claim.  The damages real estate company is seeking seems disproportionate to the actual exposure the user’s personal opinion was likely to receive.  My understanding is that @abonnen’s Twitter account was a personal account and made no claims to be a journalistic microblog.  There was no hash tag and the complaint was attached to @reply to another user which indicates more of a direct correspondence.

There are situations where I could understand a defamation and libel case regarding a Twitter account, but only where it could be proven or observed that the user in question is using Twitter as a platform to -widely- defame and damage the reputation of an individual or corporation –and- that it has had an effect before you seek damages in the tens of thousands of dollars.  If Twitter were more formally a journalistic platform, it would make more sense, but most commonly it seems like a place to chronicle one’s stream of consciousness throughout the day.  It’s a personal and public space for opinions and people are really quite liberal with what they’ll say on Twitter.  And that’s interesting, or at least I find it interesting.  I love searching hastags when I have the time to watch the tides change when media releases or geek stories break.  I would hate to see that jeopardized and I find it unlikely that lawsuits like this will have either much success or much effect.  There are far too many angsty teenagers out there needing to shout at the world, hehe. Anyone else have any thoughts?

/End of Line

~ L.