little dragon's Journal

5:14pm: real life superhero news
I'm gonna say the false moustache counts as a mask.

This is via bateleur, on Google+.

"It's unusual for a woman to be a leader in Afghanistan but Zarifa Qazizadah has become the country's only female village chief through force of personality and determination to get things done - even if that means cross-dressing, wearing a false moustache and driving around on a motorbike at night.

"'I tell the men of the village, all I want is your prayers,' she says. 'When you have a problem, I'll speak to the government on your behalf and whenever there is any disturbance at night-time, I'll pick up my gun and come to your house to see what's going on.'"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18145805

7:30pm: Going strong
"In a niche of urban life that has evolved in recent years somewhere between comic-book fantasy and the Boy Scout oath, a cadre of self-cast crusaders — some with capes, some without, all with something to prove — are on the march."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/us/crusaders-take-page-and-outfits-from-comics.html?hp

2:46pm: Superheroes
Gotta see this:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/superheroes,60056/?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=feeds&utm_source=avclub_rss_daily

"Would you want YOUR kid’s teacher to be fighting crime at night in a mask?"

Yes. Unequivocally, yes. I didn't name the kid "Robin" in the hopes that he'd never take lessons from Bruce Wayne, now did I?

8:36am: Buh-bye, Smallville
So I guess Smallville is ending? Anyway, the Onion A.V. Club has a pretty great review of the finale (there are spoilers on their site, but I won't quote any of them) that merges into a succinct summary of the whole show—recognizing, accurately, that Lex Luthor was always the star of the series:

"When Smallville was still new, a friend of mine who had been watching it for a while explained to me that it was this strange but compelling show about a likable, tormented, misunderstood rich boy and the suffering he was forced to endure because of his attempts to forge a friendship with a super-powered doughnut hole.
...
Rosenbaum is the only actor who's given flesh to this take on Lex: the rueful, heartbroken genius who, after realizing that he can't be either Clark's friend or his equal, settles on a life in which he's defined as his nemesis. Rosenbaum's Lex remains one of the great TV series performances of the past ten years, and proof once again that talent will blossom in the least expected places."

11:23am: Hardcore.

“Phoenix” explained his whole super suit, including bullet-proof vest and stab plates, to Dan.

“That’s a Taser night stick. And I have Mace slash tear gas over here,” said Phoenix.

Then it was time for Phoenix to get back out on the streets, maybe not quite a super man, but an extraordinary one.

“So when I walk into a neighborhood, criminals leave because they see the suit,” said Phoenix. “I symbolize that the average person doesn't have to walk around and see bad things and do nothing.”

Phoenix said since he started his crime-fighting crusade nine months ago, he's been stabbed, and had a gun pulled on him a few times, but received no serious injuries.

http://www.kirotv.com/news/26363364/detail.html

12:37pm: *fans self*
Oh my goodness, Ryan North (the Dinosaur Comics dude) is devastatingly handsome!

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/11/23/dinosaur-comics-dudes-chickens-ryan-north/

(His picture's at the bottom, scroll down.)

8:58am: real life superheroes
Thanks to mosellegreen for drawing my attention to this article. I think the most important sentence is:

The pair are part of a loose-knit community of real-life superheroes that stretches across the country and as far as Mexico, Brazil and the United Kingdom, keeping in contact via sites like reallifesuperheroes.org and heroesnetwork.net.

I knew it was only a matter of time. Thank you, Internet.

12:59pm: new writing filter
I seem to be working on a new novel, this one high fantasy. It begins:

They sent the princess to the dragons with her handmaiden, her dog, and the least of her household gods. Of these the dog was undoubtedly the most valuable. Certainly it is hard to put a price on gods: but this one was, as noted, very small, and the dog was a true-bred Samarran warbeast. In fact the dog was so valuable that it would never have been sacrificed, were it not for the regrettable fact that, once imprinted, a warbeast will mind no second master.

The god would not be much missed. The Imperial Palace was stuffed with gods, some of them native and some of them taken as tribute from barbarian lands. A god could live in anything, after all, from a sculpted rock to a fine tapestry to a lightning-struck branch, and only the priests could tell for certain which extraordinary things might actually harbor a divine spirit. Once found, though—and so long as the women of the household took care to honor the god with the proper rites and offerings—the gods lived forever, and so they did tend to accumulate, especially in a wealthy or noble family. The god they had given the princess was so small that he did not even have a name. He lived in a carving made from some very dark, hard wood, about the length of a large man's hand, with no arms or legs but only the suggestive outlines of a face. Once the carving had been painted, but now only a few flecks of ochre remained, not enough to determine what symbols he once might have borne. Still, it was a dowry worthy of a princess, especially when one also considered the dog.

The handmaiden was not particularly valuable, except to the princess, and of course to herself.

My LJ writing filter was invaluable to me when I was working on the last novel -- Dom and Molly were both especially wonderful in offering encouragement and advice -- so I'm going to set up another one for this new project. Anyone who thinks they might like to be on it, please just comment: and don't worry about offending me if this doesn't sound like your cup of tea. (Jennifer, I'm adding you as you already volunteered!)

I'll make the same offer I did last time, too, which is that I'm more than willing to trade critiques with anyone who is working on a fiction project of their own.

8:59pm: Charlotte Perkins Gilman really hated hats.
mosellegreen posted a link to these scans of The Forerunner, a magazine written and published in 1914 by the feminist pioneer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. They're really great. I can't help but be amused, however, by a few of her recurring themes. So far I've counted four polemics against ladies' hats, and three against women who go past their speaking times at conferences. One of them was a poem! Anyway, fantastic stuff.

10:01am: dead journal walking
So like three times lately I've started writing an entry here, and ended up moving it to my WordPress blog. I still read LJ and I log in to comment, but I would say for those interested in my life and thoughts, you should really follow me there. It was originally just a baby blog, but now it's where I put almost all of my entries.

1:14pm: Yesterday I set a goal to cut at least ten pages off the beginning of my novel (so that the first fight scene happens by page 50). I went through carefully, examining every paragraph for its utility, and managed to cut three pages total. Crapadoodle.

Had a very nice reader get back to me with comments today. I'd asked specifically about the opening pages: she said that while she was first reading it, she didn't see a problem with the pacing, "in fact I was super impressed." Then she got to page 61 and suddenly got plunged into the story, read it one sitting, turned the pages in deep reader-trance while forgetting to look at it critically at all. In retrospect, she says, the first sixty pages were more like "a fun homework assignment" whereas the last two-hundred-some were can't-put-it-down compelling.

Isn't that nice? That's so nice--and it tells me exactly what I didn't want to hear, which is that the first chapters are simply not working. If the first fifty pages read like homework, well, that's not a good. But I can't start the story on page 61 (which is now page 58); it wouldn't make sense, it wouldn't work.

I'm starting to think I need to cut way more than ten pages. I still have no idea how to do it.

4:40pm: the late lamented Miss Snark
I recently completed a second draft of my novel, and handed off manuscripts to a few close friends for their comments. While I'm waiting to get those back, I'm reading industry blogs--and to some degree re-reading, because I'm taking the opportunity to go back through the Miss Snark archives. (She's not dead or anything, she just stopped writing her blog.) Which is where I happened on this nugget:

"They know, like I do, that the final 20% of the novel is harder to write than the preceding 80%. They know too that a first draft (which is what you're talking about when you first write THE END) is hardly ever something you should show anyone except your dog. That means you're a year from being really done, if you ever finish at all."

http://misssnark.blogspot.com/

That just really struck home, because it took me so long to write the last three chapters of my book. And now that it exists in a complete form, I'm just so painfully aware of all its major structural weaknesses. It just really helps to know that's normal.

At the same time, I'm having all these Ideas for new projects. Neil Gaiman says he knows a book is done when he stops thinking about it and starts thinking about what's next. Of course, he's Neil Gaiman.

8:05am: Grr, Dollhouse: Or, Joss Whedon's Ongoing Problems With Black Characters
( Spoilers for Dollhouse, Serenity, Buffy, Angel )

11:28am: random comics notes
BATWOMAN in DETECTIVE COMICS #860

Okay, here we have the hardboiled career-military man unveiling, for the first time, the Batwoman costume he's had made (using his special-forces contacts) for his tough-as-nails daughter to take into the field.

Jake Kane: "The suit's treated with the shear thickening compound, so it's entirely flexible, but stab resistant and bullet proof. The cape is a nanotube composite, not pure, but damn strong and light, weighted at the ends. Bio-monitors in the torso, they tie into the gps and the radio, with everything on a screech repeater straight to the laptops here. All encrypted to hell and back, of course."

Kate Kane (Batwoman): "Pop...are those heels?"

Jake Kane: "They were the only boots I could find in red. It's a good color, doesn't pop during night ops."

Okay, Mr. Kane? Whatever your rank is? Sir? Do you not realize that while you're having the suit and the cape specially constructed out of kevlar and nanotubes or whatever, that boots can also be made-to-order?

Also, there are 11 pairs of knee-high, flat- or low-heeled red boots available right now on Zappos, just sayin'. Free shipping, dude!

I dunno, he could have said something like "The extra height gives you a psychological advantage over the enemy" or "In a pinch, a sharp heel can be a deadly weapon" or whatever, almost anything would have been better than "Yeah, this was all I could find at Payless."

On the other hand, Stephanie Brown as Batgirl has a rockin' costume, including great big stompy boots with Doc Marten treads. So that's pretty awesome.

5:45pm: OMG!
I just finished (the first draft of) my novel!

I feel...kind of shocked. I've failed at trying to write a novel before; this is the first writing project of this length that I've completed. (Final word count: a perfectly respectable 79,649 words.)

It's silly. It's rough. It's clumsy in a lot of places. I don't think I stuck the ending. But I did it, I finished it! I feel great.

I am so, so grateful to the extremely hardy bateleur, who slogged though the entire thing and posted encouragement for every chapter, even though it took me almost three years to finish. Even my mom (who was reading via email) gave up like ten chapters ago.

For those who were reading -- I mentioned a few chapters ago that I couldn't handle any negative feedback while I was pushing to the finish line. Well, I can totally handle it now. I'm gonna need to go back and do a thorough rewrite, so now is the perfect time for constructive criticism and even just brutally honest feedback: what's weak, what's clunky, what's clichéd or boring. I'm so elated right now nothing can possibly hurt my feelings.

(If anyone wants on the novel filter that isn't already, just let me know. The whole thing is posted under the avalon2000 tag.)

Omigod! I wrote a novel!

10:47am: Peter Orzag
Off the market. Sorry, ladies.

10:29pm: our marriage vows as I remember them
And do you, Sam, take this woman
In sickness and in health
In cockroaches and in no cockroaches
To capture the spiders and to take them outside
To deal with every creepy crawly thing
For as long you both shall live, amen.

We didn't have our wedding videotaped, but I would swear there was something in there about taking the spiders outside. Sam was teasing me about my extreme reaction to a bug today, and I'm all like, dude, welcome to heteronormativity. You get: hot dinners and a packed lunch, the dishes washed and the floors swept, n number of fat and happy babies. But this is your part of the bargain. If we didn't write it into the vows, we should have.

I make the doctors' appointments, do all the shopping, feed and educate your children. I write the thank-you notes and remember your mother's birthday. You protect and provide, fight and die for us if necessary, take out the trash, change the lightbulbs, and catch the spiders and take them outside. Check the fine print, it's all there.

Also, you know how the bathroom sink is all backed up? Yeah, check your vows. Pretty sure there was something in there about that.

7:10pm: oh no.
A few chapters into the fourth book of the Harry Dresden series, and have encountered a character named "Injun Joe" who is described as "inscrutable."

I'm pretty sure it's meant to be ironic and winking, but it just comes off as OH ICK.

And it's out of nowhere, too. Or mostly nowhere. Sure, love interest/spunky reporter Susan Rodriguez has been described as "a dark exotic beauty," etc, but the character is actually very winning, so I was able to handle this with nothing more than a brief wince.

But Injun Joe? Lord. This better not be a major/repeating character or I'm going to have to drop the whole series.

4:41pm: books update
I finished the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs, and feel compelled to warn everyone that it gets rapetastically hurt/comfort in the third and fourth books. I don't think it was badly done, actually, but hurt/comfort just isn't my kink, and I don't have a lot of patience with rape as a plot device, so I found it grating.

Oddly enough I am enjoying another Briggs series in the same universe, the "Alpha and Omega" books, even though they open with the rape-based hurt/comfort. Maybe because those are the ground rules going in, I was able to swallow it better than when it suddenly popped up in the Mercy series.

I picked up a compilation of four novellas that included the start of the Alpha and Omega series: it's called On the Prowl, and of the four authors featured, Briggs is definitely the best. Of the others, Eileen Wilks' magical telepath character started out interesting enough, but her story just seemed to progress in a by-the-numbers fashion, and I was bored by the end. Buying Trouble by Karen Chance was more surprising, and often funny: I'm not interested enough in the were-dragon and her fairy lover to go seeking out more books about them, but I might try something else by the same author. The last author, who apparently goes just by Sunny, was simply awful. So, so bad. I couldn't finish the story, it was that terrible. Much worse than most fanfic. I have no idea how that steaming pile of fewmets ever got published.

I'm still liking the Harry Dresden books by Jim Butcher. And in a turn to nonfiction, The Food of a Younger Land is fascinating. So many historic recipes I'm now dying to try out! I'm still in the middle of this one so I might write about it more when I'm finished.

4:40pm: This makes me sick to my stomach. And reinforces my intention to homeschool.

7:14pm: books books books
I always enjoy it when people on my friendslist write book reviews, so I've been meaning to do the same, but I'm kind of behind -- I've read a lot of fun books lately. This is excellent, because for about ten years there I didn't read anything except the Internet: and that was a huuuuuge change from the obsessive bookworm I'd been as a child and a teen. I mean, I still probably spent the same amount of time (that is, most of it) engaged in the act of reading, but reading blogs and so forth is just different from surrendering yourself to the long, engrossing spell of a novel.

I like reading. I'm happiest when I'm reading, and I also notice that it's much, much easier to get forward traction on my own writing when I've been reading a lot. Here's a few of the books that have stuck with me lately (as opposed to the library check-outs that passed through my hands and out of my mind very quickly). Not everything I've read, but a few that I'd recommend.

1. Patricia Briggs, Moon Called etc.; Jim Butcher, Storm Front etc. I resisted, for an absurdly long time, the word that this new genre of "urban fantasy" had hit the market. Honestly I think a lot of it was jealousy? I've been working on a novel about a San Francisco girl who finds Excalibur and becomes driven to fight the fairy legions of Morgan le Fey for the past couple of years, and I was just mad to learn that the whole modern-day fantasy thing has become such a well known cliché. It didn't help that many of these books straddle the boundary between SF/Fantasy and Romance: I don't enjoy romance novels and don't have much respect for their literary merits. So, that's my only excuse for why I didn't pick these books up immediately.

The Briggs books are about this chick who's an auto mechanic, but she can turn into a coyote, and she fights crime, while struggling to remain independent of the local werewolf pack (some of whom would like to kill her on sight, others of whom would like to make her their mate). The Butcher books are about a noir-type private dick who also happens to be a wizard, and must juggle his arcane duties with the need to pay the rent, satisfy his hard-nosed (but cute) police force contact, and stay out of the clutches of the various femme fatales that are constantly entangling him in their wily webs.

Both of these series are prima facie awesome -- and the writing in both is perfectly competent, nothing to sneer at -- and I was an idiot not to pick them up sooner. Clearly once I'm done with both series I ought to pick up the Sookie Stackhouse books, because I've been a moron for denying myself the pleasure of the very kind of book that I love the most: the one that's set in our modern world, but introduces a paranormal element for added awesomesauce.

Slight spoilers in the next paragraph, while I attempt to get more specific about said awesomesauce:

Storm Front's climatic scene involves Our Hero hanging off a balcony of a mansion that's burning down all around him, while giant scorpions snap at his toes. If you don't think this is rad, I have nothing further to say to you, sir. Briggs doesn't structure such obviously cinematic moments -- I think because she's a girl. The appeal of her books depends more on the careful construction of clashing social obligations, and the tension that is generated when she brings two very well-drawn hierarchical worlds into conflict. She's really very good at this. Her were-coyote (it's more complicated than that, but I'm using were-coyote as a shorthand) narrator loves to slip in and out of the various social hierarchies that she encounters -- whether they be human, vampire, or werewolf -- and to tweak the authorities of such hierarchies along the way: but Mercy (said were-coyote narrator) isn't quite self-reflective enough to realize what she's doing as she's doing it. So it's left to us, the readers, to catch when Mercy's being self-destructive and foolish for the sake of defying authority. This is a neat trick to pull off with first-person narration. I'm not saying Briggs is, like, the next Ursula K. Le Guin: but she's totally competent at what she's doing, and what she's doing is really pretty nifty.

So now I want to pick up the Sookie Stackhouse books, and I'd appreciate any other recommendations for urban fantasy series I might enjoy. (I'm still shying away from Anita Blake, because as I mentioned I don't tend to enjoy romance books, so novels that are more fantasy and less romance are most likely to appeal.)

2. Mary Borsellino, The Wolf House #1: Origins and Overtures. This is an e-book, and written by an e-friend of mine. I enjoyed it a lot, so much so that I immediately started thinking it was a shame that this book wasn't traditionally published. I think the conventional editing process would have polished the story a little; but on the other hand, this way it's only $4.95. If you can stand reading longer works on the computer, The Wolf House is totally worth it.

Mary describes the book as "trashy vampire YA," and I think I see why she's slapping the "trashy" label on: this is a universe where all the teen protagonists are bisexual and hot, and there's a fair amount of spit swapped between characters of all sexes and types, although none of it drawn in any detail (it's YA after all!). I was personally more interested in the friendships, because these are drawn in achingly precise, if confused and incestuous, detail, making me remember in every bit of my 33-year-old bones exactly the way it felt to be 16 when your friends are your whole world.

Plus, the vampire mythology in the world is fresh and intriguing, raising many more questions that it answers (as is appropriate for book 1 in a series). The writing is professional and controlled, never dragging you out of the plot. I'm still kind of sorry that Mary chose to go with an e-publisher, because I think these books deserve a wider audience -- and a more thorough editing -- but I can't deny that the modern publishing structure is pretty fucked, and so I also admire Mary for going it alone. I think anyone who liked Buffy should ask themselves whether $4.95 is too much to pay for a scrappy, passionate, well-drawn vampire story. Again, the link is here if you come to the right answer.

3. Lawrence Yep, City of Fire

I got my mitts on a review copy of this book (it doesn't formally come out until September), and at first I was completely swept up. In fact, a few chapters into the book, I was imagining what I'd post about it on LJ:

OMG you guys, it's, like, set in a magical 1941 San Francisco? And the heroine is this girl with a miniature griffin who rides like a hawk on her wrist? And it's totally awesome?

But then, all these other people come into the story, and they leave San Francisco -- in fact they go to Hawaii, and they hook up with the goddess Pele -- and I can't quite explain how hooking up with Pele makes the book less awesome, but somehow, for me, it did. I guess I didn't buy Pele; I didn't think the book quite did her justice. There were a lot of other things in there that really should have been awesomer than they were. The narration wasn't quite up to the task, maybe?

But still, the first few chapters were so. much. fun. So I'm putting this one into the "recommend" list, even with reservations.

3:49pm: well, this sounds promising
Guy Ritchie Explains The Tender Bromance In 'Sherlock Holmes'
'These guys are sort of in love with each other,' director says of Holmes and Watson, played by Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law.

2:19pm: period accuracy
When did people start saying "my [blank], let me show you it"? It feels like it might have been a line from Buffy? I'm writing a story set in the year 2000 and want to make sure the line is not anachronistic.

Also, how much did monthly MUNI passes cost in 2000?

3:22pm: Neil Says Hi By the Way


I wish it weren't quite so obvious in my glazed expression that my fangirl brain pretty much shorted out in that moment. I thought I mostly held it together very well for the four hours that I was assigned to be Neil's handler, but when he leaned against me for the photo I kind of blanked out for a sec.

Neil Gaiman's exactly like everyone says he is: warm, polite, friendly, gracious. What I noticed most about how people interact with him is the palpable sense of restraint. His fans of course love him passionately, but nobody wants to be pushy or imposing, so we (because I was doing it too) try our best to hold it together, and in a room full of fans pretty much everybody is vibrating with the effort of their own restraint. There were people at the signing who had driven up from L.A., a six to seven hour drive, and waited in line for hours more, just for the chance to say a few words to Neil. They waited patiently, said a few things nicely, and then politely moved on: vibrating, as I say, with passion restrained.

I can see how this kind of atmosphere could easily become oppressive, but Neil either is innately, or has become through necessity and practice, extremely good at being nice to people in a quick and concentrated way. He focused on each of the hundred faces that came before him, exchanged a few words with everybody, and seemed genuinely interested and pleased to meet each new person. He was also surprisingly touchy, quick to reach across the table for a handshake or a hug; because many of the people obviously want to touch him, very much, but part of the palpable restraint I mentioned before is that none of the fans initiated such contact. So he does it for them.

It was kind of amazing to watch, honestly. What the fans want from him is a connection, however brief, and I would have said that it's just impossible for anybody to really connect with a hundred-odd people in quick succession, but Neil Gaiman gave every impression of actually doing it.

Towards the end Amanda Palmer and Maddy Gaiman came in too, so that was a treat. I got a Mysterious Present for Sara's birthday -- and no, I'm afraid it isn't Amanda Palmer in a box, but I think it's pretty good nonetheless.

4:41pm: San Francisco Comics Peeps
Check it.

Ridiculous as it sounds, I think I may actually be working security at the event.