Reading, Writing, and Publishing Links: 1/2/13

Not too many links today. While you read, here's Iron & Wine's "Flightless Bird, American mouth." Yes, I know it's from the Twilight soundtrack. The Twilight movies have excellent soundtracks.

1. "Loved Your Book, Can't Publish It." Lynn Price at Behler Blog writes about the frustration of trying to sell an excellent book that's not currently marketable.

2. "Just Shut Up." An excellent post about loving problematic media.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a child, nobody sat down with me after I watched Beauty and the Beast and said, “Okay, this is a movie, and it’s okay to enjoy this movie! It’s okay to think this movie is great! But just so you know, if someone in real life did to you the things the Beast does to Belle, that wouldn’t be okay. That wouldn’t be right.”  When my mind was young and malleable, there was no trusted adult pointing out, “This is a movie, and it’s okay to like this movie, but the relationship it shows is unhealthy.” And that’s not because I didn’t have those trusted adults in my life! I was lucky enough to grow up with two intelligent, liberal, kind, forward-thinking, active parents; they didn’t tell me because they didn’t know to tell me. They didn’t tell me because nobody told them. (via not language but a map)

3.  "Research -- All The Layers." An ode to research at YA Highway.

4. "How Long Should You Keep Trying To Get Published?" Jane Friedman discusses when not to try for publication, when to start thinking about it, and when it might be good to step back and take another look at what you're doing.

5. "Ten Things I Wish I'd Known." Julianne Lee at Book View Cafe talks about things beginning writers should know about the publishing process.

6. "Prophecies." Patricia C. Wrede weighs in on prophecies, why they often don't work in modern fantasy novels, and why they absolutely can work if used correctly. 

And that's all for this week! Going off to work on the winter story, and then to edit more of WOODS. Hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday season, and that 2013 is your best year yet. : )

Year-End Book Recommendations: 2012

Happy New Year, all! I hope you had a great night last night. Here are the best books I read in 2012--in chronological order, since I couldn't begin to rank them by quality. Well, except for the last one, which was probably the best I've read in a long, long time.
 
I put off posting this list for several days, because I started reading Lindsey Barraclough's Long Lankin and suspected it might earn a place here if I finished it in time. As it turned out, I didn't even get halfway through before the end of the year, but expect to see Long Lankin on the 2013 list if it keeps going as well as it started.

Note: When I say that these were "the best books I read," I mean that they're the reading experiences I enjoyed the most. Different books on this list serve different purposes, and I try to keep that in mind when I read. That's why Suzanne Collins is next to Dostoevsky. : ) 

Drumroll, please:

Overall, 'The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey' Was Pretty Fabulous

Note: I had the chance to see The Hobbit at 12:00 a.m. Friday with some of my friends. I saw the movie, and wrote this post, before I'd heard about the Newtown shooting, and so this post has nothing to do with that. There's not really anything I can say about that that hasn't been said already. It's horrible, and I wish it hadn't happened, and I'm firmly on the side of increased gun control. Fin.

Moving on:

Before I start, I have to admit that I'm not really that familiar with Tolkien's canon. I read The Hobbit in elementary or middle school, attended a panel on its literary roots at Dragon*Con in 2011, and, at the panelist's suggestion, begged a copy of The Annotated Hobbit for Christmas that year. Didn't really get into it until a few weeks a go, when I skimmed the book and looked at a number of the footnotes in preparation for a book club meeting. I have a pretty good idea of the story, but not a firm grasp on the specifics. As for The Lord of the Rings, I slogged through it in... high school?... and watched the first two movies when they came out. Yes, I know. If it makes you feel better, I'll surely be returning to it after this.

Anyway, the point is that I'm not a purist. This is atypical for me, actually, as I usually feel the neurotic need to see the story represented in its entirety. If you are a purist, and don't like things added or subtracted, then you will probably take issue with this movie. However, I felt as if... Episode I... kept to the spirit of the story remarkably well, and felt the changes made were understandable.

More specific reflections (and a number of spoilers) are under the cut.

Pixar's Brave is Cool and Sweet and Funny, and You Should Go See It.

Like it says in the title. There are spoilers below the cut, so if you don't want to know anything about Brave before you see it, then you'd better click away now.

22 Brief Reactions to Snow White and the Huntsman

I  saw Snow White and the Huntsman with a friend this evening, and had a number of thoughts about it. Here they are, in no particular order. Be ye warned: spoilers abound.

State of the Book #4: April 13, 2012

Hello, and happy Mother's Day! I hope most of you were able to see and/or talk to your mothers today (or at least kept them in your thoughts). I'm lucky enough to live with mine right now, so I get to see her every day! It's a lovely change from the last four years, when I lived overseas and saw her only on vacations.  She's a tough, smart, fantastic lady, and I love her to pieces. XOXO, Mum!

The book is continuing apace. I'm on the last edit of Chapter 3 now-- that's the read-aloud stage I find so vital for a coherent final project. This chapter started at about 10,000 words, but I had to cut a lot of them when I realized they weren't adding enough to the story. Now the chapter clocks in at about 8,000 words, which puts the entire manuscript around 29,000-- about half the expected total.

Meanwhile, I've been reading some fabulous books. Just today I finished The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England, which was an impulse buy I'm quite happy I found. It's exactly what it sounds like-- a fairly comprehensive look at the day-to-day workings of life in medieval England. It's been quite helpful already-- I was using it as a reference for a story I was writing, before I decided I didn't know quite enough about the period to do it convincingly and changed it to a modern piece. With all the "medieval-type" fantasy stories I've read, I was surprised by how many little details about the period I didn't know. For example, did you know that carrots, in their modern form, weren't known in Europe until the 17th century? It's a small thing, but if your characters are eating in a tavern and you put carrots in the soup, you've just committed the sin of anachronism.

Of course, a lot of people think that the "medieval Europe" setting has been way overused in fantasy, and to a certain extent I agree with them. I'm really interested in finding historical fantasy settings inspired by other parts of the world. Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon and N. K. Jemisin's The Killing Moon are two I've got on my to-read list, and I'd love to hear about others if you can recommend them! However, I'm also sure that the faux-medieval-European setting isn't going anywhere for a long time, if every, and there are some fantastic stories written in those kinds of worlds. If that's where your heart lies-- or if you just happen to be interested in the period-- then The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England might be a really good resource for you.

*Edit: I just learned that there's another one! Will definitely have to get my hands on a copy of The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England, as well.

I was going to post about another book I'm reading right now, Zadie Smith's On Beauty. I've had a really hard time with it so far-- not because it's hard, but because it's intensely, mercilessly honest. I think it's going to be one of the ones that really stays with me. I think I'm going to have to wait till I finish to post about it, though, so that I can make sense of what I read before I try to talk about it. Until then, have a lovely week!

Warmth in Winter (Winter Story 2011-12)

Here is my much delayed winter short story, "Warmth in Winter." It's about sentries, spies, snowshoes, and hungry ghosts. I hope you enjoy it! (You can read my Halloween story, "Under Glass," here. That one is about a girl terrorized by something that lives in her mirror.)

Warmth in Winter

Jenna was glad they’d taken Peter’s body back to town to bury. Eerie as the silence was, the moaning of his ghost would have been much worse. Even so, she wasn’t sure how much more of this cabin and this winter she could stand.