Story on the Brain

I love this book so much. It's one of my favorite books of all time. (What are the others? Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl , the Jane Gardam's Bilgewater , Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books, Code Name Verity, and, er, I can't think of the others right now.) I usually don't teach books I like since they get fingerprints all over them in the form of other people's wrongheaded ideas about things. But this one is so good for The Youth (aka many semesters of college students) that I keep on teaching it anyway. Usually I alternate with Justine Larbalestier's Liar but it's out of print now. Liar is very fun because it makes the youth bonkers trying to figure it out so they're entirely engaged. But they're always totally engaged with this one also. It starts out with Glory fully in crisis, whether she can admit it or not. This is one of A.S. King's books about getting unstuck. Dig is another one. They're kind of all about that, which isn'...

As I keep thinking about character, I keep coming back to Kira Nerys on Star Trek DS9. She wasn't my favorite character. I was in love with Bashir and wanted to BE Dax, obviously! But Kira is one of the greatest examples of how to write a character of all time, so I wanted to talk about her in more depth. Kira is a guerilla fighter at the end of a horrific war of occupation. As her enemy finally retreats, a new power steps in to keep the peace. She's understandably a little intense and she doesn't trust these new people, the Federation, any more than she trusted the Cardassians who just left.  That is A LOT to have preloaded in a character. And we learn it instantly in the first episode, the first minute we meet Kira. We can tell from how she behaves that she's on a hair trigger at all times and has no patience with any softness or nonsense. She gets along with Odo because he was fair and neutral during the occupation. She doesn't like or trust Quark because he'...

The season started out strong, with Michael Burnham making decisions and doing things, which sounds funny to say, but the season suffered greatly from a whole lot of nothing going on. And by that I mean, entire arcs that were about nothing much at all. Adira, who is a zero as a character anyway, leaves for a while and it doesn't matter and nobody cares. They showed up again and people were like, "Were you gone?" Stametts actually said, "Oh, you're back." Tilly, someone we loved, suddenly leaves the show, everyone is sad for literally thirty seconds, then nothing. Dr. Culber gradually realizes he is upset over legitimate things like BEING DEAD and decides to be allowed to be upset. This takes many scenes over many episodes. It reveals nothing. It shows no growth. He was lovely to start with and lovely to end with. Nothing changed in his behavior or choices because of it.  There is no CHARACTER in any of these characters. Imagine trying to explain one of them ...

SPOILERS FOR STAR TREK DISCOVERY     YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED     SO BE AWARE       I'm nearly to the end of the extant Discovery episodes, oh no! I have four left. I probably have to catch up on Nanowrimo today but I'll finish it this week some time. Then on to Strange New Worlds, I guess, though I just sighed and looked up and to the left in exasperation IN ADVANCE because I've been seeing gifs and stills of a very stupid episode on Tumblr in which the ship gets transformed into a children's book. I can't even express how much I hate that kind of premise. It's not cute. It's not charming. It's stupid and annoying. It's just to get the cast into fun outfits and out of their comfort zone, from what I can tell. It feels so utterly condescending and hateful. Like you think viewers will eat any old garbage, so give them garbage. Or worse, you think the viewers are such idiots that they will like this.  It takes me out of suspension of disbelie...

What makes a character interesting and memorable to begin with? It's worthwhile to take time to think about our own favorite characters and what worked so well with them. What makes Elizabeth Bennet so memorable? Someone (Jacob?) said that the best characters are fundamentally good people in impossible situations, which might be what makes her character work so well. She's intelligent and interesting and sarcastic, but in an impossible position in which she HAS to find a husband from among these extremely unpromising options, with the added handicap of her embarrassing mother and annoying younger sisters. Look at her choices. Mr. Collins is atrocious! Yet we see Charlotte accept his proposal, simply because she has to. Elizabeth also has to, but doesn't. Everything that happens in the novel makes her situation worse and worse, adding pressure to her already precarious life. Yet she still rejects Darcy's first proposal. She has the strength of her convictions ...

I really hate comma plus and . It's not a comma splice. A comma splice is two independent clauses joined by a comma, forming a fused sentence. Grammatically incorrect. Comma plus and is used in grammatically correct but horribly awkward and awful ways.  I have strong feelings about this. My feelings are that this is very bad writing. So don't do it. Now I will explain why. Every time I read my beloved Murderbot books, especially the beginning of the first novel, I get smacked in the face with so many comma plus and constructions. I really want everyone to stop doing this. There are good reasons. Connections between ideas should be more than just a plus sign, primarily. In fiction, the connections between ideas generally range from something like because to something like although . In other words, there are causal connections, not just a plus b plus c. Authors Joan Aiken and Ursula K. LeGuin, arguably my fiction parents, both have said versions of this in their works about w...

Season Two went fine, though the actor playing Ash Tyler developed a bizarre speech effect from bad dialect coaching. It will sound farfetched, but he sounded exactly like Nick Blood did when he suffered from bad dialect coaching on Agents of Shield. British people! Just let them be British! If they're not good at an American accent, don't make them try to do one. Oh boy was that distracting. It was even hard to understand him, which by the way it would not have been in his native accent. The character of Ash Tyler was a problem the whole season long. He was thrown here and there like they had no clear plan for him. The guy with severe PTSD and major identity issues who had like two hours of training to join Section 31 ended the season being head of it. More nonsense. This was the beginning of the make it up as you go along problems that became unmanageable in Season Three.  Also L'Rell had a bizarre CGI face at the beginning that threw me out of the story entirely. And I d...

I'm just starting to catch up to the modern iterations of Star Trek. After all of those, I'll catch up on Star Wars. The last Star Trek I saw, not counting the movies, was when I tried to watch Enterprise (hated it) and before that Voyager (hated it) and before that DS9 (loved it, lived it, breathed it, obsessed about it). So I am relieved but also I suppose a little disappointed that I neither hate nor love Discovery. I like it! I like it just fine.  And I have many things to say about it, because when I watch something, I think about it constantly, to the point where I can't sleep after watching. This is sort of a problem, actually. I mean I was up most of the night. I was confused about why it was so bright outside my windows, until I realized that was morning starting to happen.  Not sure what the solution to that is. "Don't think about it" has never worked with me. SPOILERS ABOUND. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. Discovery! It's fascinating to me that it's ...

This was one of my very favorite books growing up. I'm rereading comfort food books because I don't sleep when I read upsetting books, whee! And for your own writing it's essential to read things you love and think about what makes them so important to you. The heroine, Margaret Thursday, is an orphan who lives with the maid who raised her, but this year the money to support her did not show up, so her beloved Hannah and the vicar can't afford to keep her and have to send her away.  That's a terrific story beginning right there. Margaret is very proud of the fact that she was left on the church steps as a baby with three of everything of the very best quality, so that even though she has the most precarious existence and no family, she has an inner pride and strength that gets her through everything. It's fascinating to me that this is the very opposite of the Harry Potter books. Harry is abused and neglected in a cruel wealthy household. Margaret is loved and c...