little dragon's Journal

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.

9:37pm: "For Katie"
So, because I'm exploring the idea of homeschooling, I've been revisiting beloved "educational" software titles of my own youth. Think Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, and Oregon Trail.

My conclusion after revisiting these titles is that their educational merit isn't particularly great—but they are really good games. I've been playing Oregon Trail off and on for the past six months! I just tonight went looking for an Oregon Trail walkthrough...which brings us to Our Story.

At the very end of the most recent walkthrough I could find (copyright 2008-2009!), these touching words appear: "For Katie."

And I don't exactly know why I'm smiling at that, but I am. I mean, I'm certainly not having a laugh at the expense of the walkthrough author, Vinny Hamilton. Because if there's anybody who gets to laugh at the guy who wrote a walkthrough for Oregon Trail, it sure as hell isn't the person who went looking for an Oregon Trail walkthrough.

And I'm not even smiling at the idea that a computer game walkthrough is a publication deserving of its own dedication. Maybe there's something faintly ridiculous about that, but only faintly. Producing a good walkthrough is a real service, one that I honestly respect. And the fame to be gleaned from such an endeavor is very real, even if limited to a rather circumscribed community.

I guess I just like it because there's something so very artless and openhearted about those two words. "For Katie." Vinny Hamilton spent a LOT of time playing Oregon Trail and documenting his experiences. He's not wrong in thinking that others, like me, would value his account of that time. I hope he wasn't wrong in thinking that Katie would honored by the mention.

No, okay, there it is. There's why it's so sweet and funny. Because this is a thing a guy did to impress a girl, and, well, the chances that she was actually impressed are maybe not so great. But I hope she was.

For Katie. Because if she ever falls through a portal back in time and finds herself stranded in a pioneer wagon, Vinny is TOTALLY the guy she'd want by her side.

4:38pm: Nina, You Are Not Allowed to Follow This Upsetting Link
RAGE. RAGE. RAGE.

I continue to be interested in civil discourse across party lines and ideologies, but this kind of callousness is beyond anything I can understand or accept. This is inhuman.

11:15pm: Watch out, Shadowhare!
A naked threat to Cincinnati's premier real-life superhero.

Thanks to mosellegreen for bringing these dastardly doings to my attention.

6:40pm: Peter Orzag hath a blog!

Also, Linda Hirshman is a heinous douche...but really, everybody should know this already. The woman made a whole career out of slamming stay-at-home moms as dumb selfish pigs who're letting down the cause...and then feminist writers either nodded sagely or outright applauded. Now that she's going after battered women and rape victims, people are suddenly noticing how narrow, self-righteous, and oppressive her ideology really is. I guess I'm glad she's exposed herself? But I really wish she hadn't been taken so seriously for so long.

4:37pm: the one thing you ought to be reading right now
Small Peculiar, a collection of strangely compelling stick-figure comics about work, depression, writing, lobotomies, romance, and lots more. Kind of like xkcd from a humanities-oriented feminine perspective instead of a math-oriented dude perspective? They share a capacity for bleak sarcasm and aching tenderness.

Eyeteeth, maybe you should marry Randall?

5:21pm: I, uh.
I'm really close to finishing the first draft of my novel! So naturally, over the past few weeks, I really buckled down and I wrote...

...a screenplay.

Yeah. I wrote that Wonder Woman movie I was talking about. I wrote 87 pages (not even enough to qualify for
ScriptFrenzy, but because a lot of it is action I think it is about right for a feature-length film) of pure ridiculous starry-pants Amazon Princess gratification.

It's...pretty absurd. I just finished it today so I don't have the distance necessary to evaluate it critically, but I am pretty sure that it's less "Batman Begins" and more "Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales." That is, my id and my fannishness are spilling out all over the pages. There are tentacle monsters (though no penetration). There's a pretty literal deus ex machina in the third act. There are lines like "No. NOOOOOOO!" and "This sounds bad." Agent Nemesis gets far too big a role, because, of course, he's the one who gets to touch Diana, and I want to touch Diana.

It was so fun to write. I kind of forgot that writing could be so fun.

If anyone actually wants to read ridiculous Wonder Woman id-fic in Hollywood script form, comment and I'll post it on a filter.

9:27pm: real life superhero news
via Slog, updates regarding Cincinnati's Shadow Hare, Portland's Zetaman, and Salt Lake City's The Black Monday Society.

9:58pm: I'm in love with Peter Orszag
Sam and I don't have cable, so we watch The Daily Show on Hulu. Meaning that we're at least a day behind, and sometimes more, depending on when we get around to watching it.

We just watched the episode where Jon had Peter R. Orszag, Obama's budget dirctor, on the show. And I've gotta say, HOO BOY. I'd like me a piece of that. He just hits it for me, you know? I've got this nerd-boy thing. I've got this smart-boy thing!

It was getting a little uncomfortable to watch. As Orszag answered Jon's little ripostes with a crooked smile and an actual answer, I started shifting in my chair. I started looking for a wedding ring on his finger, and wondering what it would look like if he loosened his tie.

Now Sam and I maintain our...lists. You know. I hate to admit it's from Friends, but it is. Hey, whatever, they had the money to hire the very best writers, and no matter how trite the set-up, some of the dialogue was really sparkling.

Anyway, the "lists" concept is fun. You get five celebrities on your list, and if you ever get a chance to sleep with one of them, you're allowed. As long as you've put them on your list beforehand.

Jon Stewart's been on my list for years, but I'm officially retiring him in favor of Peter Orszag. Jon's getting a bit puffy around the jowls, and Peter is yummy.

I admitted as much to Sam as we were watching, and we came to a mutual agreement: if I can arrange a threesome with Alyson Hannigan, then Sam's on-board for a threesome with Peter Orszag.

It works well for me because Alyson's on my list too.

( hawt pics behind the jump )

2:29pm: Superhero News!
lathany and bateleur alerted me to this great story:

Thai 'Spider-Man' to the rescue

An unusual disguise has helped a Bangkok fireman rescue an eight-year-old boy who had climbed on to a third-floor window ledge, Thai police say.

The firefighter dressed up as the comic book superhero Spider-Man in order to coax the boy, who is autistic, from his dangerous perch.

Police said teachers had alerted the fire station after the boy began crying and climbed out of a classroom window.

It was reportedly his first day at the special needs school.

Efforts by the teachers to convince the pupil back inside had failed.

But a remark by his mother about his passion for comic superheroes prompted fireman Somchai Yoosabai to rush back to the station, where he kept a Spider-Man costume in his locker.

The sight of Mr Yoosabai dressed as Spider-Man and holding a glass of juice for him, brought a big smile to the boy's face, and he promptly threw himself into the arms of his "superhero", police said.

Mr Yoosabai normally uses the costume to liven up fire drills in schools.

5:01pm: My New Favorite Community
is can_i_eat_this. "Food Safety For the Cheap and Adventurous." Have some mayonnaise that's been sitting in your fridge for a year? Want to know if you can eat it? ASK THE INTERNET! Seriously, from monitoring this comm, it seems like the wisdom of crowds is in full effect. For the most part people are way too cautious about their questions (OF COURSE you can eat butter that's been sitting on the counter overnight, what do you think butter dishes are for??), and the community is quick to allay such groundless concerns, but every now and then somebody has a seriously bad idea (eggs two months past their expiry date? NO DUDE NO). And the community is equally quick to react with warnings and opprobrium.

I dunno, maybe it's an outgrowth of my boundless curiosity as to what other people are eating. I love it.

Oh, uh, what else? I wore my pretty apron today while I was cleaning the house.

Oh--you were hoping for more? Something more thrilling? I got nothing. I got--well, I got this thing that lathany tagged me for. It seemed more interesting when she did it.

If you were a book, what kind of book would you be? One of those magical-realism books that has recipes in it, pretty much Like Water for Chocolate, except different and hopefully better.

What was your favorite book when you were little? It was a tie between No Flying in the House and...oh lord, another one that I can't remember its name. It was about two girls who discovered a bunch of magical things in--I think--a locked trunk belonging to a great-aunt or something. They found thousand-league boots, and gloves that made you great at any craft, and a key that opened any lock? Maybe? I don't remember. I need Jezebel's Fine Lines! They got into a lot of trouble anyway, I remember that.

What book(s) can you read over and over? I probably ought to read all of them again. See, I read really fast--and I'm not bragging, it's actually sort of a problem. I can't help myself, but if I get into a book, I start to skim. I glance over most of the words, just to get the gist, and plunge deep into the next part of the story. I *know* I do this because if I'm reading something really difficult, I'll keep tripping up. I was reading Gershom Scholem and every page and a half I kept realizing that I had no idea what was going on. I would blink "awake"--out of the reader's trance--look back at the previous sentence and realize that I didn't understand that either--I would keep going back and usually it was about half a page before I actually remembered something. I would start reading carefully again, until I understood things and could get lost in the material again, and then I would unconsciously start skimming and the whole cycle would repeat.

By this I know that my habitual reading style is actually more skimming than carefully reading. This is why I'm such a fast reader. Most novels take me two and a half to three hours to read: something really long, like a Neal Stephenson book, will take a couple of days. I get completely lost in these books while I'm reading them; I don't want to do anything else, and being forced to put the book down will make me very irritable. But at the end of it, all I remember are the major plot points and maybe some of the dialogue (I read dialogue slower than everything else; it seems I actually slow down to "hear" it in my head). I don't remember tricks of style or arabesques of prose. Whenever I re-read a book I always discover in it plenty of things I missed the first time around. I wish I could train myself to read more slowly and carefully, but I've tried and it doesn't seem to be within my conscious control.

Do you buy/read books if you know nothing about the book or its author beforehand? No. Who would do that? This question is nonsensical to me. Here's why I read books. The list is compiled in descending order of the probability I will buy the book for that reason alone: some books hit multiple categories of reading desirability, and of course that makes me cumulatively more likely to buy the book.

• I will definitely buy books by authors I already love. I will buy anything by Ursula K. Le Guin, Robin McKinley, Patricia A. McKillup, Neil Gaiman, Neal Stephenson, or Alan Moore. Seriously, anything.
  
• I am likely to buy books recommended by people I trust, and that includes authors I already love. Books with a blurb by one of the above authors, or that come personally recommended by someone whose taste I trust, are likely to get my money.
  
• I will sometimes buy books that fall within specific genres that I know I tend to like. I know I like cyberpunk, and there's not actually that much cyberpunk out there, so sometimes I'll buy a book just because it's cyberpunk. The likelihood that a certain genre will get my dollars depends entirely on how big the genre is. There's an awful lot of urban fantasy out there and a lot of it is bad, so I don't tend to buy urban fantasy just because the book has the right buzzwords on the back cover. Same with hard sci-fi, double for sword-and-sorcery, quintuple-freaking-million for high fantasy. You basically have to be George R.R. Martin to get me to read your fantasy epic at this point. That's not to say I don't adore Tolkien, I've just been burned by too many Dennis McKiernans at this point.
  
• Sometimes I buy a book for the cover. See next question!
  

Have you ever bought/read a book just because you liked the cover art? If yes, do you think this is a good method for buying books? Yes, I have done this. No, it is not a good idea. I've picked up fantasy books with particularly gorgeous tapestry covers--specifically, books illustrated by the same authors who contributed art for Patricia A. McKillup or Charles de Lint covers--thinking that the books inside would be similarly careful, artistic pieces. No, it doesn't hold true. Still I don't think the impulse behind my purchases was entirely stupid. If I'd stopped to articulate the reasoning, I'd probably have said that I expected the same editors and publishing house to be involved, and that I trusted their ability to find quality prose. That's not so crazy. I think probably that editors could make this kind of thing work, by signing exclusive deals with certain artists and by being careful not to dilute their brand; they just haven't really done it yet.

What book(s) do you find yourself always recommending to people? Well, I'll always lend out Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home. I never expect it back; I'm happy to go out and buy a new copy for myself. I just want as many people as possible to experience that book. Other than that, I like to think that I tailor my recommendations to the specific reader, and so there isn't any particular book that I'm always pushing on everybody.

Tagging

I tag hallowmas, mosellegreen, eyeteeth, followthatcab, and sharpest_rose. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to answer the questions and tag five others.