Another Off-Topic Post

My post from last year about women's writing in Afghanistan got a lot of hits, so I decided to share this piece from The New York Times, about a women's poetry group in that same country:


Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry

It's long, at six pages, but I read the whole thing, even with my short attention span.  Once again, as I said with the last post, it's important to really think about things I take for granted, like being able to write whatever I want, and get as much education as I want, and even just go out in public alone.  Not everyone is as lucky as I am, and it's good to remember that.

Also, I was struck with the resemblance between some of short poems the Afghan women recite and the poems from Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society which I read in a social anthropology class when I was at Harvard.  (For the record, if you are interested in including something which resembles a Muslim society in a fantasy novel, please actually read books similar to Veiled Sentiments and get a sense of what life is actually like for people in such societies.  No more generalizations based on television coverage -- I've seen enough of those.)

Essay Typer

Okay, seriously, don't actually use this as a resource.  I think it was created by someone with too much time on his/her hands:


EssayTyper

Go here, and replace "Civil War" with a topic of your choice.  You're taken to something that looks vaguely like a Microsoft Word window.  If you hit keys on your keyboard, words will appear.  (More words than the number of keystrokes.)  I don't understand why the person who created it wants to call everything "a normative critique."  (Once I typed "biscuit" in there and it wanted to do a normative critique of biscuits.)  I'm pretty sure all the content is from Wikipedia, and you can't do more than a page.

No real point to sharing this, other than that it's kind of fun to play with.  If you want this blog post to be serious, well, I am sure that someone is going to try to use this sometime to do an actual assignment.  I do believe people are just that lazy.

Oh, and you can't use it to write an essay about this blog.  (I typed "Sneaky Burrito" in there and it said it couldn't help me.)

More Science Writing

I find it interesting to read about the experiences of other graduate students in the sciences; I'm getting close to finishing my PhD in chemistry and I like some gauge of how "normal" I am versus everyone else.  (Yes, this post is about writing, so don't hit the back button yet.)

First, a link to the blog post that inspired my own post this morning: Science Writing - Academic and Creatively

So there's some truth to what the author says; it's easier to write your thesis if you've been carving out time for writing.  I've been working on my novel since last year, so writing is already a habit with me.  I've been posting on this blog for nearly a year now, as well.  I question whether writing in this blog improves my scientific writing, because that's really a rather different animal than my novel.  (I do think this blog has improved my novel, for several reasons: I can spot tired plot devices, I can spot lazy sentence constructions, I can spot grammatical errors in published works.  And then avoid them in my own.)

But the author of the blog post I link to has had a different experience in graduate school; she didn't submit her graduate work for publication before leaving grad school, it sounds like.  I've already got a couple of published papers, and one more which I will have to finish up after I defend, because of how the timing is working out.  If you're in grad school, it's a really good idea to submit your work before you leave, because the reviewers will inevitably have just one more experiment for you to perform and include.  And you can't do that if you're not there anymore.  And no one else in the lab wants to interrupt their own project(s) to finish up yours.  This is probably more the blogger's advisor's deficiency; my advisor would never let anyone finish up without at least 2 or 3 published papers.

Anyway, in a week or two, I'll be giving my thesis to my committee.  We'll see what they think of my writing.  Based on the theses I've read from other people who graduated from my lab, the bar hasn't been set real high in terms of the writing.  (But then, no one whose thesis I've read had a degree in anything other than science, and in most colleges, I'm convinced that writing instruction for science students is just not very good.)  So maybe I'll be all right.

For what it's worth, I didn't set a regular schedule for thesis writing like I did for novel writing.  (More than half the "writing" of my thesis has been making figures, anyway.)  I am capable of sitting all day at my dining room table, plugging away at my laptop.  I've stayed home from the lab a number of days to work on my thesis, and all I have left to write is the conclusion, then a round of proofreading/editing, then lots of formatting required by the school.  I'll finish next week, ahead of schedule.

I suppose if there's a point to all of this, it's that if you really like to write, and want to be a writer, you should write all the time, and lots of different types of things.  Not everyone has call to write a doctoral thesis or scientific papers, but blogs and novels are accessible to anyone who wants to try.

Covers Again

A couple more links for you related to cover art:

• Jim C. Hines is at it again.  Here is his take on men in romance novel covers.  (Or check out his women in fantasy novel covers post, which I talk about here.)
• Here is a piece from Tor.com about a trope in cover art featuring female characters.

Since I don't read the sort of books that get cover art like Emily Asher-Perrin is talking about in the Tor.com piece, I guess I never noticed it.  The books I tend to read, have lately suffered from too much of the guy-in-a-hooded-cloak-with-bladed-weapons thing.

Good Science

Bad science has always been a concern of mine on this blog, because I am a scientist (my Ph.D. defense is less than a month away...).  So I was quite excited to read the following in The Guardian:

Credible science fiction needs arts and sciences collaboration, say authors

Now apparently the US National Academy of Sciences has set up a science and entertainment exchange, which I did not know about.  I hope this blog post publicizes it in some small way, because there are a lot of authors who could really benefit (Suzanne Collins and Terry Brooks come immediately to mind, but of course they both sell so well that they won't pay a bit of attention).

It's interesting that some of the scientists express concern that a bunch of really cool science doesn't make it into science fiction.  Honestly, I'd be happy if the opposite problem could be addressed: if you're going to address scientific topics (e.g. genetic engineering or evolution, in the cases of Ms. Collins and Mr. Brooks), make sure you know what the hell you're talking about.  Wikipedia is not enough background.  You know, best not to set my expectations too high; I'll only be disappointed.

Review - The Fire Rose

The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey is another old one; there's a copyright date in my edition of 1995.  Sometimes this book is listed as the first of the Elemental Masters series, and there are definitely some features of elemental magic in The Fire Rose, but I don't think Lackey had completely settled on the system when she wrote this one.  Think of it more as a prototype or a pilot, with refinements to come later.

One difference is that this book is set in San Francisco (and a bit in Chicago) instead of Europe (usually England in the other books).  Although since most of it takes place inside a mansion, the actual location doesn't matter much.

You may be wondering why I keep doing this to myself (reading Lackey's books).  I'm not entirely sure.  I should probably stop, and I probably will after I've read all the ones on my shelf.  They're just not that great, and this one is no exception.

First of all, the villain is so evil he's a caricature.  His name is Paul du Mond and he is secretary to Jason Cameron, a reclusive rail baron.  He's also Jason's apprentice but it seems likely he'll never become a Master himself.  He's lazy and doesn't want to put forth the effort -- he wants it to be easy.  Jason's rival, Simon Beltaire, promises ease to du Mond, through initiation into the magickal system of Aleister Crowley.  So du Mond is going behind Cameron's back.  Oh yeah, and Jason's horse doesn't like du Mond either.

But wait, there's more.  Du Mond's hobby is "breaking" whores.  Taking women who've just been sold, or who are about to be sold, and raping them and demeaning them.  He also lies to his boss about a business venture and arranges to get himself set up far enough away from Cameron's mansion that he can start his training with Beltaire, which will include sex magick.  And if that wasn't enough, he takes sex slaves, usually Chinese women because the authorities would be unlikely to investigate deaths or disappearances.  When they die on him, he gets others.

So he's lazy, a liar, a rapist, a murderer, and probably a couple of other things I've forgotten.  Gee, do you think we're supposed to hate him?  It would've been enough without the "hobbies," as he was still going behind his mentor's back and all.

Simon Beltaire, meanwhile, doesn't have much of a presence.  He meets with du Mond a time or two, and has a battle with Cameron in San Francisco at the end.  That's about it.

On to Jason Cameron, the male lead, if you will.  He's a filthy rich railroad baron and a Fire Master.  Some time ago, he decided he wanted to be able to turn himself into a wolf at will.  (I don't know that the reason why is ever adequately explained.)  Well, it doesn't go so well and he ends up half-wolf, half-man.  He becomes a recluse, with du Mond handling all his interactions with the outside world.  He gets rid of servants, using instead salamanders (fire elementals) to take care of everything around the house.

So in terms of character complexity, Cameron may be the best The Fire Rose has to offer.  He's successful, but he got too ambitious and was humbled as a result.  He's powerful, but he's got some serious limitations because of his appearance, and he can't leave the house.  He's intellectually interesting to Rose (we'll get to her next), but he also scares her a little.  He relies on opiates to relieve pain, but actually tries to listen to a doctor's advice and cut back and/or use alternatives.

Which would be great, except Lackey is totally inconsistent with regard to Jason's abilities.  He has paws for hands, it sounds like.  Can't write.  Has salamanders do it for him.  I believe that when his "notes" are referred to, the salamanders could have written them.  But Jason shouldn't be referring to notes at all.  If he can read notes, he doesn't need Rose.  (He hires Rose to read books for him because apparently his eyes have been affected too.)  So can he read the notes, or not?  Depends on whether the situation demands it or not, I suppose.

And then there's his appearance.  At first we're given to believe he's truly grotesque.  But over the course of the book, he goes from being described as half animal to handsome, in Rose's eyes.  To the point where they even discuss the possibility of traveling out of the country.  So while he's got paws for hands and a decidedly lupine face early on, he's apparently not much more than a really hairy guy (like a person with hypertrichosis) by the end.  Or else Rose has a bestiality fetish.

Rose, meanwhile, is obnoxious and flighty.  She's a woman and an academic around the turn of the 20th century, when this was an unusual status for a woman.  Which we are reminded of at every freaking opportunity.  She has her bachelor's degree, and a master's degree, and by gosh, she's working on a doctorate.  But she's destitute because her father got caught up in an investment scheme and then went and died on her.  She knows all kinds of ancient languages and she's hired under false pretenses to read from Jason's books of magick in a hope that he can find a cure for his condition.

Rose is good at making do with little, but freely admits to enjoying the finer things in life (including Caruso!  at the opera!  mentioned only about 453,000 times in this book).  She contemplates suicide early in the book but changes her tune later on.  She runs through all kinds of nightmare scenarios in her mind, then goes along with whatever was happening in the first place, anyway.  One of the problems I have with her is that she's all skeptical of the idea of the existence of magick but then does almost a 180 and decides she'd like to become Jason's apprentice.  (Also she visits a Chinese herbalist instead of a doctor.  Well, I guess he is also a doctor, he's got a convenient diploma from Harvard Medical School.  Just like the other Chinese character who shows up at the end also happens to be a Presbyterian minister.  Wherever that came from.)

Another problem I have with Rose is that she sometimes expresses reservations about Jason, finds him arrogant or violent (he kills du Mond with his teeth) but then decides she's in love with him and marries him anyway.  Even though he's apparently got an anatomy consistent with killing someone with his teeth.

The amount of repetition of facts about Rose borders on insulting.  She's got all these degrees!  She likes nice clothes.  She likes opera and musicals.  She goes to visit Jason's horse every day even though she can't ride.  She's used to walking long distances.  This collection of facts just doesn't make a compelling character, to me.

I've reminded myself of something else that irks me.  In several of Lackey's books, I get the feeling that she's like, ooh, I'll be inclusive by including Arab and/or Muslim characters or references to them.  And then she goes on to treat this in the most cursory and stereotypical way (they like horses, or have multiple wives).

There's not a lot to the plot of this one, I think Lackey likes to spend time thinking about historical details (which may be less than accurate, according to some Amazon reviewers) and less time coming up with a story.  Because so many of her stories based on fairy tales (Firebird was an exception, I guess) have a female lead character who is underprivileged in some way (e.g. Maya being a woman and half-Indian doctor in The Serpent's Shadow or the obnoxious Susanne who's on the run from her creepy father in Unnatural Issue) but whose determination is strong, indeed.  So there's the generic female lead, who may or may not already know about the existence of magic(k), who has a magickal education or apprenticeship, who gets accepted by at least one person from the magickal establishment after a confrontation with some rogue wizard or magician.  It's really the same book over and over again, with the names changed.

You could argue that it's the fairy tales that aren't that different, and you'd probably have a valid point.  But Lackey should recognize that and maybe consider not turning out quite so many books which are variations on the same theme.  We'll excuse her The Fire Rose because it was one of the earliest books like this.  The half-dozen or more subsequent ones?  Well, then she should know better.

In the end, I just feel like I've read this book dozens of times already.

Couple of other random observations.  Lackey refers to Arabic as a guttural tongue; I never thought of it this way.  While I certainly don't speak Arabic, I usually reserve "guttural" as a description for harsh Eastern and Central European languages.  The sound of them is just different.  Another time, she says a "couple of telegraphs" were sent off.  This is a word use issue, too.  A telegraph is the machine, a telegram is the message that gets sent.  These are just a couple of examples that I happened to mark.  They're not that big of a deal.  I wish Lackey would tighten up her speaker attributions (way too many -ly adverbs) and describe the décor of Cameron's house a little bit less.  (Also, I don't know that we need to be treated to descriptions of all the felonies committed by du Mond's servants as none of them have any bearing on the direction of the story.)

There's one inconsistency, I think.  When Rose is trying to get Jason to ride his horse again, she says that du Mond told her the horse was a gift from another Fire Master.  Only, that never happened.  Rose spends most of the book avoiding du Mond, and she doesn't discuss magick with du Mond when she encounters him outside the horse pen.  At that time, she's unaware that magick even exists.  So I don't know why Rose would say something that wasn't true.  Unless Lackey just forgot.

Honestly, though, if you like Lackey's other Elemental Masters books, it's interesting to see this early take on that series.  And you can't blame her for the awful, awful cover, which depicts what appears to be a wolf's head on a man's body -- an image which absolutely does not gel with any of the descriptions of Cameron provided in this book.  The picture of Rose looks to be dressed in attire from a bygone era, and the "salamander" looks like a miniature dragon, though salamanders are not reptiles but amphibians, and the salamanders in this book are magical creatures which are less than corporeal.

I mean, if you're a fan and you've missed this one, go ahead and pick it up.  It is a standalone so you don't have to keep waiting for the sequel.  But if you're just looking for something to read to pass the time, there are better books out there.  (And this lukewarm ending is why I should never read books faster than I review them; I'm sure when I finished I had a lot to say, but several days later, I feel like I'm just going through the motions.)

Manuscript Progress for April

I'm getting to that point when I start to think that maybe I'm ready (or will be in the next month or so) to submit my work to publishers.  I've actually found four that publish fantasy and are accepting unagented submissions at the current time.  No, I'm not going to list them here.  I did the research on my own, and you should too.  ("Research" in this case meaning approximately 15 minutes of web surfing after making a list of fantasy publishers by looking at book spines on the shelves in my bedroom.)

I've come to the conclusion that even though 3 of these 4 don't specifically mention simultaneous submissions, I'm going to stay away from doing that.  I'll do one, wait for a couple of months or until I hear back, then do another one.  In the meantime, I'll be working on volume two of my series.

I've been tightening up the writing in the last month or so.  Getting rid of certain constructions that are very easy to use, but which aren't very artful or creative.  As I have done this, I have noticed that I use the word "thing" too often (and there are anything, nothing, everything, and something to contend with, as well).  There's not any one synonym that's appropriate in all cases, but leaving the word there sometimes, and changing it by rewording sentences or substitutions (e.g. belongings, items, supplies), is helping the manuscript sound a lot better.

Next up: passive voice.  I don't think I do a lot of this, but I may surprise myself.  I've also got maybe two scenes to add (in places where I was telling instead of showing), and then going over it one more time just to proofread.  (You make more mistakes than you realize, when you change sentences.  You accidentally delete words you didn't intend to, or leave some in you meant to take out.  Punctuation gets messed up occasionally, as well.)  Spell check, sure.  Grammar check?  No.  Sometimes you want to use particular constructions for emphasis, knowing they're not proper sentences.  This will give the computer fits.

Okay, four blog posts tonight.  Not as much as I had hoped for, but will see me through until Friday morning (when this post will appear, so this sentence will make no sense...suffice it to say, I typed these words on Monday evening).  Hopefully two reviews soon to come, and I'm actually getting to my out-of-genre book for April before the month is over.

Old Books

I thought this was fun:

Secrets revealed by dirty books from medieval times from the BBC

The scientists whose work is profiled in the piece mean books with actual dirt on the pages, which says something about the reading habits of well, at least those people in the middle ages who could actually read and had access to books, which was probably not so many of them.

Add this type of research to the list of things that would be lost if e-readers take over.  (Though with printing presses and mass-produced books, even these days it might be that only one person will ever read a particular copy of a book.)

Authors' Opinions of Fan Fiction

Thought this was interesting:

Abusing the People of Westeros

You probably know that I'm not a big fan of fan fiction.  (I've written about it here and here and here.)  If you go to the page linked to above, you can read what various authors think of fan fiction.

George R.R. Martin's argument makes a lot of sense; he created the characters and in the hands of others, they may do things that he absolutely never intended for them to do, act in ways that completely contradict what the characters are about.

J.K. Rowling is kidding herself if she thinks all the Harry Potter fanfic producers out there will keep it PG-rated.  I don't even pay much attention to fan fiction and I know that there are a ton of X-rated stories out there.

Seems most authors are against it, to one degree or another.  (At least the ones profiled here, most of whom are in the sci-fi/fantasy camp.  If you read the comments, at least one of them argues that the author of this piece hand-picked fanfic haters to profile.)

More Reading, Writing, Testing, and Education Stories

I'm seriously behind on writing blog posts -- hoping to remedy that some tonight.  I notice that many of the stories I have bookmarked are variations on the theme of education and standardized testing, so rather than writing four so-so short posts, I figured I'd combine them into one longer post and provide links for people to click if they're interested.  All of them are from the New York Times.

And in case you were wondering what the hell this had to do with fantasy literature -- honestly, not that much.  I do have an education sub-theme on this blog, because I bemoan writing skills of the younger generation (and of Amazon reviewers and of some published authors), and I wonder if there isn't a way to do things better.  Good writing benefits us all.

When Pineapple Races Hare, Students Lose, Critics of Standardized Tests Say

I am not a professional in the field of education; my only opinions on standardized tests come from my own experiences taking them.  And I have always done well on standardized tests.  One might argue that it's a function of my upbringing: upper middle class, white, suburban.  Any cultural cues that might help me come up with the right answers, I probably received them in childhood without even thinking about it.  I really don't have any idea what it's like to grow up in an immigrant or underprivileged or non-English-speaking or non-white family.  I don't know how that would affect one's ability to take standardized tests.  No, they didn't really ever measure the actual material I had learned in the classroom.  But because I paid attention in school, I suppose I gained critical thinking skills that helped me do well on the tests.  And I do feel there is a need for SOME metric to be used to compare students from different high schools.  An "A" from an underfunded inner city school might mean something different from an "A" from an elite East Coast prep school (regardless of which student is brighter).  Transcripts alone aren't enough.

At any rate, I wonder how typical the instance discussed at the above link is.  And why the people who changed the story in question felt the need to make the particular changes that they made.

Teach the Books, Touch the Heart

More about standardized testing.  I had been out of school for some time before No Child Left Behind was passed, so I simply didn't have endless days of test prep when I was a kid.  (My mom taught third grade for awhile after NCLB and HATED teaching to the test.)  I did a lot of reading, though, whether it was assigned or not.  To the point of recognizing a passage as being from The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne when I was taking either the ACT or SAT during high school (even though it wasn't labeled).  I am certain that my reading habits helped me -- to analyze what was happening in a passage, to learn vocabulary, etc. -- do well on tests.  Probably better than boring test prep would have!

Are College Entrants Overdiagnosed as Underprepared?

One, I am ashamed of the Department of Education (if that's who responsible) for using Microsoft Excel to make a bar graph.  Microsoft Excel makes the ugliest graphs in existence, and you can recognize them from a mile away.

Two, this is a tough issue.  I went to what I would consider a good public high school and I didn't feel prepared for college (but college was Harvard, and I worked pretty hard playing catch-up for awhile).  That's not to say I ever would've been considered a candidate for remedial classes -- they wouldn't have let me in, in the first place.  I did make it out of there with an A-/B+ average.  When I came to grad school, I did not have the required number of biochemistry classes, but I lied and entered the biochemistry program anyway, and did fine -- had to work my butt off, though, especially during my first semester.

But my life has been relatively privileged, and so many of the students I hear about getting stuck in remedial classes for no credit (e.g. at community colleges and public universities) are the same ones who have to work, or take care of kids, or both.  They're already on the edge as to whether or not they'll be able to finish.  Are remedial classes an extra burden or do they provide vital assistance to underprepared students?  How can you tell?  It could be totally different for two students from the same exact high school.

Facing a Robo-Grader?  Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously

It's too bad they make human graders finish in 2-3 minutes per essay.  I spend more time picking apart three-line Amazon reviews.  It will nearly always be possible to game the system when it comes to robo-graders, though.  It's kind of like Watson playing Jeopardy -- access to all that information and there are still hilarious f-ups.

How Many Words in a Year?

I read this profile of Jay Lake a couple of weeks ago.  It's nice and in-depth, and gives you a lot of insight onto the guy.  I was most impressed at the fact that he juggles family, a full-time job, repeated rounds of cancer treatment, and still manages to find the time to write so much.  I think the piece said about 250,000 words of fiction and about 250,000 words of blogging?  That's some serious dedication, regardless of how you feel about his work.

It got me to wondering how many words I'd written in the last year.  I know I did a little over 150,000 words in my novel manuscript (been doing much editing and revising, and haven't really started any new fiction projects).  I have 30,000 words in my doctoral dissertation right now (over 100 figures though, and I imagine they count for a big part of the length without contributing to the word count).  The dissertation isn't finished, though, so that number will go up.  And I did a quick estimate by pasting a number of blog entries into word, doing a word count to figure out an average number of words per entry, then multiplying that by the number of entries.  I got roughly 250,000 words for blogging.  So I think that's about what, 430,000 words?  (I refuse to count tweets, or resumés and cover letters...though I've been doing a lot of that stuff, too.)

I'm curious as to what other published authors turn out.  I imagine Brandon Sanderson does a lot, that guy is prolific.  L.E. Modesitt, Jr., writes books pretty fast, and also maintains a blog.

Anyway, sorry the post is so late today; it's easy to post early in the AM when I have a lot of posts stored up but not so easy when I have 3.5 hours of meetings and two extremely long walks across campus to contend with (and no posts stored up).  Look for a couple of reviews later this week, a bunch of re-blogging, and whatever the hell else I feel like writing.

Review - The Straits of Galahesh

So last year I read The Winds of Khalakovo by Bradley P. Beaulieu, and I remember enjoying it.  When I saw that the sequel (The Straits of Galahesh) was out, I bought it right away.

Overall, I was pretty happy with Straits.  Though it's a long book, it was a quick read.  There are some books I've read lately that have sat on my table for days before I got around to finishing them but this book isn't one of those.  Now, I've been pretty sick this week so I've had a lot of extra time for reading, so that may be part of it.  But really, The Straits of Galahesh is fast-paced with lots of action and lots of unexpected twists and turns.  I did have to refer to the glossary from time to time to remind myself of some of the specialized vocabulary (e.g. types of hezhan), but that was pretty easy to do.  I'm actually quite grateful for the glossary because there's a lot of specialized vocabulary in this novel, and it's been a while since I read Winds.

For some reason, I'm having a hard time coming up with specific things to say.  Let me see...well, I'll start with the characters.  I'll admit to not remembering EVERY person (it's been a while since I read Winds), but I remembered the main characters and could figure out most of the rest from context.  I remember being impressed with the female characters last time, especially as these books were written by a man.  I still liked Atiana quite a bit, but there weren't as many well-developed female characters in this book as in the previous volume (which also had Rehada).  Atiana's sister Ishkyna gets more time on the page in Straits, but we're never really inside her head.  Ushai is an Aramahn woman we encounter, and she seems independent, but she's not a major character, either.  Nasim's companion Rabiah is likewise just a supporting character.

One of the chief villains is female (Sariya) and I go back and forth between two different opinions of her.  On the one hand, she's a classic manipulator who associates herself with a powerful man and steers him towards helping her achieve her own ends; we've seen villains like this in other books.  On the other hand, she is not all-powerful and her motives are not always clear.  So we don't know whether or not Atiana should trust her.  I like that Sariya has weaknesses, and I guess she couldn't have manipulated Hakan (ruler of Yrstanla) if she'd been a man.  At least, not in the same way.  I guess I haven't made up my mind about her.  Finally, there's Kaleh, a girl who goes back and forth between helping Nasim and hindering him.  I am not clear on her motivations, either, but I imagine she'll turn up in the next book and more will be revealed.

There are really three viewpoint characters in this book: Atiana, Nasim, and Nikandr.  So some of the lesser female presence comes from Rehada being replaced by Nasim as a viewpoint character.  This probably was necessary to the story, though, seeing as Rehada is dead and Nasim has come to, so to speak.  Even though Ishkyna and Ushai, in particular, aren't viewpoint characters, they both do some things that are very important to the progression of the story.  They're not just filler characters.

As for the multiple viewpoints, I thought this was pretty well-balanced.  Usually there are about two chapters dedicated to any one character before a switch; there are something like 80 chapters in all.  There was a lot happening to each of the three main characters during the same periods of time, and Beaulieu does a good job of allocating pages to each storyline.  You don't get like 30 chapters about one character, then 1 chapter about another, etc.  Also, the storylines intersect and events affecting one character also affect the others.  So they really are intertwined; it's not like reading two separate books stuck together in one volume like with Shadow's Master by Jon Sprunk.  (By the way, Sprunk's book has a much higher sales rank on Amazon than The Straits of Galahesh, which I just can't understand.)  There are cliffhangers at the ends of a lot of the chapters, but this doesn't bother me.  I actually think it's a good thing.  You know the characters are in peril and you want to keep reading to find out what happens next.  (I read Straits in the bathtub a couple of nights and stayed there until the water was cold.  I kept thinking "just one more chapter.")

I didn't say much about the male characters.  Nikandr is still sympathetic, though he's a little bit of a do-gooder here.  You know, making peace with Soroush and trying to heal the children afflicted with the wasting disease.  Agreeing to command ships to protect the Grand Duchy of Anuskaya.  Etc.  But, he's not always successful in his healing attempts.  He gets short with Atiana when he finds out she's planning to marry someone else (for political reasons), then regrets it.  Sometimes he gets knocked out in fights.  So he's not perfect.  And that's a good thing.  I'm a little tired of reading about badasses who win every fight and always know exactly the right thing to do.

Nasim is also fairly sympathetic.  He recruits Sukharam and Rabiah to aid him in his quest to stop Muqallad and Sariya, although then he's hesitant to use them.  I guess I can see why he needs them; he can't touch the hezhan himself anymore, but can through others, and both of his companions are able in that regard.  In a way, this serves to differentiate Nasim from Khamal, his past incarnation.  Khamal regularly used children, even turning them into ahkoz (facially disfigured children who are bonded with fire spirits), killing them if need be.  Nasim is reluctant to do such things, so even though he *is* Khamal, he's also not Khamal.  Being young, and having spent most of his life between the corporeal world and that of the hezhan, he is also inexperienced, and he makes some mistakes, so he's also not perfect.

So, even though there's less female presence in this book, it's logical for things to be that way, considering the direction the story is taking.  And the main characters have strengths and weaknesses, which combine to make them more sympathetic and to make their problems seem real.  (Nikandr does win one sword fight but he never fights off like 20 attackers coming from all angles.)  While I guess Beaulieu did kill off Rehada in the last volume, I sort of expect Atiana and Nikandr to make it all the way through the series.  Still, I wasn't always sure how they were going to get out of sticky situations.

I've spent a long while talking about characters.  What else?  I believe this book is meant to be the middle volume of a trilogy, but I don't think it suffers from the usual "middle volume syndrome."  While the rifts between the two worlds are not sealed by the end of the book, Sariya and Muqallad are dealt with, there's war and political upheaval, and many of the Maharraht are welcomed back into the Aramahn fold.  So stuff still happens, and it's important to the flow of the series.  There's enough of it that it couldn't really be folded into other volumes.  (That's not to say that the books stands on its own, you definitely need to read The Winds of Khalakovo first!)

I can't write a review these days without doing a bit of grammar nitpicking.  There are quite a few instances of the use of "that" when "who" would be more proper.  (I understand, this rule isn't as set in stone as some others, but finding "that" when "who" is expected makes me read the sentence a couple of times to make sure I didn't miss anything.)  I found a few places where I would have done some editing:

• "It was freeing to move beyond the straits and into Vihrosh, Baressa's smaller sister that stood on the northern side of the straits.  It was much smaller than Baressa."  I would probably vary the language a bit more there.
• "If so many had passed, it may well be what she was looking for."  This is a case of "may" being used when "might" is appropriate.
• And one time, I saw the word "brusk."  I gather that according to some sources, this is an alternate spelling of "brusque," but I've honestly never seen it spelled with a "k" before.  My MacBook's dictionary doesn't even recognize the spelling "brusk."

Here's the thing...I really didn't find all that many problems like these.  Part of that may have been getting caught up in the story.  But since I am writing my own manuscript now, I know just how easy it is to overlook small errors in a large document.  And in a book of this size, if I can only find three specific instances that inspired me to nitpick, well, that's an accomplishment on the part of Beaulieu and his editor.

Okay, on to the next random topic.  (If you weren't able to tell, this is the third session of writing for this review.  I've finished another book and a half in the meantime.  So if the flow of this review isn't so great, it's because the process of writing it has been a bit disjointed.)  I haven't said much about magic or plot.  Magic is basically the same as in the last volume, with the Aramahn being able to call on the hezhan, and the Landed (some women, at least) being able to take the dark, which allows them to see events occurring far away and communicate with others who are distant (usually by possessing rooks).  I did read an Amazon review of Winds which mentioned how uncomfortable it would have been to take the dark; the women have to be naked in ice cold pools of water.  This is an interesting spin on the costs of magic, now that I think about it.  We've seen a lot of magic that's physically draining in other books (and with calling on the hezhan here, perhaps), but not a lot that's been physically uncomfortable.  There are other risks, as well, including losing oneself in the aether, never to return to one's body.  At any rate, it's not simple; there are real costs to magic and it's not always an easy way out.

Also interesting with respect to magic is that previously, taking the dark had primarily been for the Landed, whereas now Ushai, an Aramahn, can do it, and communing with the hezhan had been for the Aramahn, but now Nikandr can do that.  He manages to keep it a secret for awhile, but eventually gives himself away.  We don't see the consequences of that in this volume, but I'm sure that we'll hear about it in the next one.

The plot was pretty complex, with a lot of switching allegiances.  I could follow most of these; every once in awhile a character would do something I didn't really understand, but it was usually made clear after a couple of chapters.  There were a number of surprises, but that's a good thing.  I hate it when I can predict the ending of a book well in advance, and I definitely couldn't here.

Well, I think this review is now up to my normal length standards!  Overall, I'd definitely recommend The Straits of Galahesh, but start with The Winds of Khalakovo first, if you haven't read that one already.

Bad Fans?

From io9: 10 Ways Self-Hating Fans Make Genre Entertainment Worse

Not all of these apply to the topics covered by this blog.  But, I like numbers 1, 2, 4, and 5 in particular.  (Can't help but criticize Twilight fans, and I frequently make fun of Amazon reviewers, so I'm certainly guilty of number 3.)

I won't repeat everything here, just the main headings I want to discuss.  Click the link above to read more.

5. Not speaking up and defending our favorite stories when people launch unfair critiques.

If I don't think a critique is fair, I say so.  While reasonable people can disagree, and I can acknowledge when there may be merits to an opposing argument, that sure as hell doesn't stop me from sounding off.  Usually here in this blog, because let's face it, I need things to talk about.  It's hard coming up with 10 posts a week.

4. Getting squirrelly when people want to analyze what's really going on in these stories.

If you don't like hearing criticism of your favorite books, don't read it.  I enjoy reading a lot of books that have major critical flaws.  I've never actually put a novel down without finishing it, either.  I can still enjoy a story about a kitchen boy who's really the son of the dead king, even as I bemoan the fact that I'm seeing that trope yet again.

2. Not being able to appreciate cheesy, old-school stuff on its own terms.

In fact, sometimes this is the ONLY way to appreciate a work.  I recently reviewed Seven Princes by John R. Fultz; this book was heavily influenced by old-school sword and sorcery and is a fun read if you consider it in that light.

1. Not recognizing when we're being enablers.

I wonder if I'm an enabler if I keep buying these thief/assassin in a dark, dingy city kind of books.  Though I usually then trash them on this blog.  Regardless of whether I liked the book or not, I did pay for it.

Anyway, kind of fun to consider your own tastes in light of the list.

More Grammar and Usage

Still on a reblogging spree.  Actually, that's good, as I was running out of posts and I don't often have time to write new ones.  (I'm midway through The Straits of Galahesh but may not finish until the weekend, as I haven't had a lot of time to read this week because of AbSciCon.  Which, by the way, is an example of a conference attended by many government employees who appear to be behaving themselves and acting in a competent and professional manner.  No expensive dinners, no exotic locations...Atlanta, meh.  Whatever.  Just felt the need to say that not all government employees are like those from the GSA or the secret service who have made the news lately.)

Anyway, found another essay about common writing mistakes.

You know, these mistakes are so below my level, it's not even funny.  When I have grammar questions, I usually e-mail them to my boyfriend, because they're so obscure he has to look in this gigantic book he has (I think it's The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, which costs over $200 on Amazon).  And sometimes even then, it's hard to say what the correct answer is.  "Pore" versus "pour" or even considering "should of" versus "should have" -- these are for amateurs.  But, there are plenty of published authors who need reminding of some of these concepts.  Which is why I shared the link.

Writing Bestsellers

Found this from NPR books: On Writing a Best-Seller

I'd love to write a longer commentary, but this appears to be background material for a piece on an author (James W. Hall, author of Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers, which is, itself, as of the time of this writing, at exactly #1000 in book sales on Amazon).

Couple of reasons listed for books being bestsellers:

• dealing with social issues (race, sex, etc.)
• dealing with institutions and suspicion of institutions
• outsiders as protagonists

Although this article has a subtitle "Shhh, there's a formula," I don't know if that's the way to look at it.  (Granted, I haven't read the book, although I might.  Might be fun to examine in the context of fantasy bestsellers.)  At any rate, if no social issues are at stake, and everyone is happy and well-adjusted, there's not much of a story that's likely to happen.  Only when you perturb the normal flow of life do you create something which will keep people's interest.

I cringe at the idea of formulaic fiction.  It does seem to be successful (Terry Brooks and L.E. Modesitt, Jr., in the fantasy genre, have both written the same book over and over again and both are "New York Times bestselling authors.")  And people often make the argument that there's nothing in fantasy that's original (I'm wishy-washy on that one, probably because I don't want it to be true).  Of course, when someone does write something original, half the Amazon reviewers complain that it's too weird.  Argh, I give up.

Student Writing

I've posted on teaching and testing writing before.  You can read those posts here and here.

Here is a column from Inside Higher Ed about two colleges' approaches to improving their students writing skills.

I will be honest, I never got anything worthwhile from writing tests.  When I was at Harvard, we had to take a writing test our first year, before classes started.  If you passed, you got to go into the regular freshman expository writing course (small class size, four papers, consultations with the instructor, etc.).  If you didn't pass, you had to take a different writing course, then you got to take the regular one.  At my next school, they wouldn't let me out of English I and II despite the fact that I had a bachelor's degree from Harvard.  I didn't get much out of this class because my peers were all 18-year-olds fresh out of high schools in a major urban center.  The instructor was fighting a losing battle.  Some time after you'd completed English II, you took a writing test where you picked up a packet of articles, read them, and then wrote essays about them; I don't remember if there were specific questions or if you could write whatever you wanted.  After that, you had to take a writing-intensive class in your major.  For me, that meant TWO writing intensive classes, because I was a biology and chemistry double major.

The chemistry writing class wasn't so useful; they just took our physical chemistry lab and made us write extra-long lab reports.  Not much emphasis on writing quality except if the instructor saw really stupid sentences, he'd read them to everyone (without telling who had written the sentences; luckily, none of mine ever got that sort of attention).  I actually thought the biology writing class was useful; we had an exacting Englishwoman as an instructor in a very small class, and I learned a lot there.

Where I'm in grad school now, there's not a real English major, and there's not a real English department.  Students gripe about 13-page reading assignments (no kidding, I overheard a long discussion of this on a campus bus yesterday) and writing papers that are shorter than 5 pages in length.  I frequently want to smack them and tell them to shut the hell up.  And when instructors do assign term papers, the writing quality is just abysmal, as I've had the opportunity to see some of these as a TA (thankfully, I did not have to assign grades to them).  It's kind of a joke about the particular school I'm at, that the graduates can't write.  They may be darned smart, and good engineers or whatever, but their command of the written English language is subpar.  I would like to stick them in a government class at Harvard with a 20 page term paper and a couple of hundred pages of reading a week and watch them flail.

I've gone off on a rant here and have forgotten my original point.  I think what I wanted to say was that writing instruction needs to be integrated throughout the curriculum.  Just because you're in a class called "biophysical chemistry" doesn't mean you don't need to think past problem sets.  One course I was a TA for required students to choose a paper from the scientific literature, summarize it, and provide commentary.  This called for reading AND writing comprehension, and is a good way to incorporate language arts into a science curriculum.  It shouldn't be "one class and you're done."  Every class should require writing in some form, after a couple of introductory courses devoted to technique.

Pulitzer Prizes

So I guess there was no Pulitzer Prize for fiction awarded this year.

Here is a list of Pulitzers given in past years, courtesy of Wikipedia.  Seems the last time no award for fiction was given was in the 1970s (though I scrolled the list pretty quickly so I could've missed one).

Not being much of a reader of literary fiction, I'm not familiar with a lot of titles that have won the prize.  Genre fiction doesn't get a lot of play here, though I noticed a post-apocalyptic novel (The Road by Cormac McCarthy) did win, a few years back.

Here are a couple more stories/commentaries about it, from the New York Times:

And the Winner Isn't
No Pulitzer in Fiction (letter to the editor)

And, FYI, in the correct pronunciation of "Pulitzer," the first syllable sounds like "pull," not "pew."

Random E-Book Stories

I find that I have bookmarked a lot of news items and pieces of commentary about e-books and Amazon this week.  Rather than write a full post about every single one of them, I thought I would share all of them at once.


A Dark Day for the Future of Books from CNN.com

This one is mostly about the agency pricing model; I'll admit to not having paid a lot of attention to it because business news just sort of makes my eyes glaze over.  Towards the end there's a discussion about the role of big publishing houses.  It's kind of a catch-22.  If you hire your own editor and cover artist and do your own marketing and so forth, you can keep more of the revenue from your book.  But if you're an impoverished aspiring novelist like myself, the big publishing house has a lot of resources that you don't have to shell out, up front.

Even E-Readers Still Like Printed Books, Survey Finds from the Los Angeles Times

Here, the title is pretty much self-explanatory.

Amazon is Full of Knock-Off Books from the seattlepi.com blog

I've posted about fake books before; then, it was mostly about printouts from Wikipedia.  It seems there are a lot of self-published books on Amazon now, that have titles perilously close to titles of well-known books.  Like they're hoping to catch people not paying attention.  I'd like to think I'm not that dumb.  But then, I never order with one click, and I am usually giving online shopping my full attention.

Kindle Books: Does Low Price Mean Low Quality? from The Huffington Post

This is mostly a defense of low pricing of Kindle books, from the perspective of an author who is looking to introduce more readers to his work.  Couple of sentences I'd edit in there ("...they have been able to enjoy well written stories that their children have enjoyed..." for example).  But the author of the piece makes a good point; I actually figured his reasons for pricing his books low were the same reason a lot of books are priced low -- to attract new readers.  (I do wonder about the author's pointing to reviews by Top 50 reviewers, although I guess the Klausner-bot is no longer in the top 50.  And at least some of the people who are, now, have more reasonable numbers of reviews to their credit.)

Okay, think that's all for this post.  Time to feed the cats.

Sword and Sorcery

Kind of late today.  I busted my butt to get to AbSciCon by 8AM (made it), but felt so sick during the second session of the day that I just came home, took all sorts of medicine, and soaked in the tub.  It appears to be a respiratory ailment.  But I digress.

On to today's post.  In my review of Seven Princes by John R. Fultz, I said that Fultz excels at sword and sorcery but that you shouldn't consider his work great literature.  I've been thinking about it, and I feel like writing a longer explanation of what I mean, lest anyone who is a fan of sword and sorcery think I'm being derogatory.

I haven't read a lot of sword and sorcery books, but I have enjoyed the ones I've read.  They've been super important to the development of the fantasy genre and they deserve mention for that reason alone.  I absolutely think there's a place for sword and sorcery books, and I've got a few more that I plan to read in the near future (more Elric collections by Michael Moorcock, for example).

It's just, sometimes the characters fall flat (I thought Elric was an exception) and sometimes the plots are just series of improbable fights against blood-drinking enemies.  Sometimes the writing is campy or pulpy (sword and sorcery got its true start in pulp fantasy magazines).  In the introduction to Elric: The Stealer of Souls, Michael Moorcock says something to the effect of most of the stories are of a first-draft kind of quality.  These qualities don't necessarily detract from one's ability to enjoy the story, as long as the reader realizes he or she hasn't picked up Faulkner or Steinbeck or Fitzgerald.

At times, I don't want to think about deeper issues affecting society (hunger, famine, war, unfair gender roles).  I just want to indulge in a little escapism.  That's a great time to turn to sword and sorcery.

Review - Shadow's Master

Shadow's Master by Jon Sprunk is the conclusion of a trilogy which began with Shadow's Lure and Shadow's Son.

I'll admit, I had a hard time getting into this book.  I just didn't care about the characters or the plot very much.  The story is bifurcated without much crossover between the two halves.  In the first book in the series, Caim and Josey meet and seem to fall for each other.  In the second book, they go their own separate ways, with Josey leading her Empire and Caim heading North to find his mother.  You might expect that they end up together again at the end of the third book, seeing as Josey is pregnant with Caim's child, but in fact, they don't.

Now usually, when a series' ending is unpredictable, I'm all for it.  But the problem here is that it's hard to see why Caim's and Josey's stories belong in the same book, since they basically cross paths once in this volume, and she doesn't even tell him about the pregnancy.  You know, there are a lot of multiple viewpoint books where characters drift back and forth between the storylines as they travel or whatever.  But at least the halves (or thirds, or whatever) feel connected, because events on one side affect events on the other.

Now you might argue that the invasion of Northmen facing Josey's Empire is a result of the Shadow Lord's efforts.  But the connection takes a back burner and is barely mentioned.  There's just not enough to it, to bring things full circle.  And so we're left reading two different books that cut back and forth but don't really have any bearing on each other.

I guess if Sprunk hadn't done it this way, we'd have been bored out of our minds.  Many of Josey's early scenes were her with the army, sleeping late or reading dispatches or having pregnancy-related problems or feeding hungry villagers.  Nothing much happened.  Most of Caim's scenes, throughout the book, were of traveling with his companions in the cold.  They got chased out of a lot of towns and Malig was always looking for sex.  His companions wanted to know where they were going, and Caim would never tell them (except farther North) because he didn't really know.  That's about the extent of it.  There is something to be said for summarizing a long journey in a couple of pages, rather than having it take a whole book.  Because it really just gets boring after awhile.

In fact, I think this might've been a much better series if it had been a duology.  All three volumes were pretty short.  So if Sprunk could've cut a lot of Josey's and Caim's boring stuff from this book, and merged the second and third books, I think it would've been a tighter story.

We also see some of Balaam's (he fights for the bad guys) and Kit's stories, and they both make decisions which seem spur-of-the-moment but which will have far-reaching impacts.  Balaam's decision sort of comes out of nowhere; he decides he's "his own man" and goes against the Shadow Lord.  He's experienced a couple of failures up to this point, and this about-face may be merely self-preservation.  Kit decides to become human so she can be with Caim.  Apparently all she needs to do, to accomplish this, is to walk into her grandmother's garden and get bitten by a snake.  This is after she is shown a vision of her future as an old woman, with Caim an old man.  She isn't particularly happy after this vision, but after awhile, she decides to go through with it.  The lead-up to Kit's decision was better than the lead-up to Balaam's, but we've heretofore gone through two entire books where there wasn't even a hint of a romantic relationship between Caim and Kit, and now she's willing to give up immortality for him.

Of course Kit's transformation occurs at the least opportune time, right before the big confrontation, and now she can't help Caim by observing events without being seen, herself, and now he has to protect her (she saves him once, but gets captured easily more than once).

There's not much to the characters in this book.  Brian is a good guy, though his father plots.  Josey is the usual headstrong princess.  Malig has already been spoken of.  Users of shadow magic feed on blood.  Though Caim resists.  Caim is probably the most complex character in the whole series, and even he fails to stand out when placed among the plethora of assassins and thieves who have appeared in fantasy novels in the past couple of years.  Though I probably shouldn't, I get his backstory mixed up with Malden's from David Chandler's Den of Thieves.  The backgrounds are not at all similar, but Malden and Caim are just such stock characters that it's hard to get excited about them.

I've mentioned some of the names in the book: Josey (short for Josephine), Brian, Caim, Malig, Balaam.  Here are a few others: Aemon, Dray, Hubert, Abraxus, Dorcas.  This is a pretty bad case of the Aerith and Bob trope, maybe one of the worst I've seen since Terry Goodkind.  "Brian" for Josey's new love interest?  Really?  Brian?  (It doesn't help that there's a guy named Brian in my lab so whenever I picture the character, he looks like the Brian from my lab.)  At least I don't have any preconceived notions of what someone named "Caim" or "Dray" should look like.

Anyway, what else?  There were a lot of fights, and Sprunk is decent at describing these.  Except they usually degenerate into the shadows helping Caim.  One feature of the previous two books which is not seen in Shadow's Master, thankfully, is Caim getting his ass kicked by a shadow dude, I mean really beaten to a bloody pulp from which he should not easily be able to recover, and then coming back and finishing the guy in a later fight.  I really thought this would happen between Caim and Balaam, and it didn't, and I'm glad for that.

On the other hand, there were a few battles and these weren't described well at all.  Events which probably would have taken hours, took half a page.  Very little description of the actual battles other than the positioning of archers and some magical explosions.  Conveniently, most of Josey's command staff makes it out unscathed, even from a terrible defeat.  I suppose part of the reason the battle descriptions aren't very good is that they come from Josey's perspective, and she is unschooled in such things, but I don't think the omissions were actually intentional.  I think Sprunk needs to work on his technique a bit in this area.

Let's end by saying a few nice things.  Dialogue was mostly well done, with short sentences that people might actually say.  And when there were long paragraphs without dialogue, it was mostly describing action.  Not a whole lot of boring introspection and exposition.  So that was definitely appreciated.  Also, Sprunk has managed to end this book in a little over 300 pages, and a series in only three short books.  Probably all of Sprunk's books together have fewer pages than A Dance with Dragons.  While I like long series, there's something to be said for knowing where you're going and being able to tie it all up.

Anyway, if you really like books about assassins, you may be interested in Sprunk's work.  But if you are getting a little tired, and only want to pick the BEST books about assassins, I'd skip this one.  (The Riyria Revelations by Michael J. Sullivan starts off with an identical plot device to Sprunk's trilogy, but is a much more engaging read, and has a much stronger finish.)

Review - Seven Princes

Seven Princes by John R. Fultz was a random purchase from the Science Fiction Book Club.  Not sure what else to say about that, so I will get right into the review.

Fultz is a high school English teacher.  And while I realize that in a book-length manuscript, it is easy to miss a few errors, there are some cases where he should know better.  I saw a "might have ran" in there, and "may" where "might" should have been used in another place.  Too much use of the ellipsis and some hackish speaker attributions.  Not the worst I've ever seen, by any means, but since the author is responsible for teaching young people how to write, and about literature, we need to hold him to a higher standard.

At any rate, there are two ways you could read this book.  I started out treating Seven Princes as a serious narrative, and that was a mistake, because this book doesn't really cut it that way.  But...if you read it as a throwback to old-school pulpy sword and sorcery, well, Fultz excels at that.  Or so I imagine, not having a ton of experience with that genre (except one collection of short fiction by Michael Moorcock).  As one Amazon reviewer mentions, Fultz does pretty well at putting this in a longer novel form, whereas much of this sub-genre from the past was produced as short stories.

I would say, though, that while there was a lot of action, the book seemed long at almost 500 pages.  I think this is because Fultz felt the need to describe in detail nearly every room his characters found themselves in, down to the decor on the walls, and to describe the clothing and/or armor people wore including mention of the colors and symbols of the various kingdoms involved.  I'll admit, I glossed over a lot of this.  When every scene begins with a LONG paragraph describing the throne, the mirror on the wall, the colors the queen is wearing, the various princes' armor, etc., it gets a little old.  I honestly don't remember most of this after the fact; even though little is left to the imagination, my pictures of the characters may be totally different from what Fultz had in mind, just because I stopped reading the descriptions.

What I will say about the descriptions is that they remain true to form.  The style and the language is remarkably consistent throughout this book, which has to be hard to do because it's pretty campy.  It's actually kind of fun to read some of the sentences Fultz has constructed.

If you're looking for deep characters, this is probably not the book for you.  There is a stock Prince character, multiplied by six.  (The seventh Prince is a bit different, but we'll get to him.)  There's little differentiation among them; many are given a single character trait (Lyrilan is a Scholar, Tyro trains D'Zan in the sword, Vireon is super-strong and likes nature, etc.).  Then we learn that being a Prince otherwise pretty much means screwing everything else with two X chromosomes (until, of course, they fall in love, which Vireon and D'Zan do).

I was bothered by Alua for most of the book, as she just kind of came out of nowhere, although I will give Fultz credit for bringing her full circle by the end.  One thing that kind of did get dropped was the issue of the giants.  Vireon chases Alua into the wilderness upon their first encounter, where he discovers a whole bunch of giants living perfectly normally (for giants), whereas the giants in his kingdom have lost the ability to reproduce.  This is cause for great joy (and similar to what happens with the Numrek and the Auldek in David Anthony Durham's Acacia Trilogy, although Fultz's giants are much more pleasant).  Then we are told that a bunch of female giants who still can't reproduce are going to follow the Princes to war with the evil sorcerer and sorceress who lead a couple of neighboring kindgoms.  Not sure why the female giants don't go back North and find themselves fertile males or why it is assumed that re-mixing of the two groups will result in offspring from the infertile giants.  But then the giantesses who agree to go to war are never mentioned again.

Another thing I did like, was that Vireon's and Tadarus's father, Vod, is tricked by dreams sent by Ianthe (said evil sorceress from the previous paragraph) to go face justice for something he did a long time ago.  He has no triumphant return, but dies and no one would know his fate if not for his daughter seeking him out.  Fultz is at least somewhat willing to kill off major characters, though there are also a fair number of people who escape death Gandalf-style (minus the balrog) to reappear later.

Relationships among kingdoms aren't terribly complex; this book lacks sophisticated politics.  The Princes all want to go to war for various reasons and of course even the reluctant Mumbazans are eventually convinced to join the cause, due to a timely attack on their kingdom by the enemy.  The pleading speeches in front of various monarchs are often comical.

The stock magic will be familiar to fantasy readers.  The bad guys (including the seventh Prince, Gammir/Fangodrel) drink blood and call forth demons and otherworldly servants.  The good guys turn into animals for fast travel and so forth, and are sometimes protected by godly sigils on their weapons.  Nothing too out of the ordinary here.

You see me trying to critique this book like it was a serious novel, because that's how I approach reviews on this blog.  And as a serious novel, there were obvious problems with Seven Princes.  But as a pulpy sword and sorcery adventure, it was top-notch (shirtless men wearing furs, men with super strength able to hoist axes meant for giants into the air, cleaving people in two, etc.).  I will say that the plot, while pretty standard, was enough to keep me entertained.  It didn't take me too long to read this book, but there was at least one late night where I didn't want to put it down (as opposed to a few books I've read lately where they sat unopened on my table for a couple of days -- when I was right in the middle of them).

So I haven't spent as long of a time writing this review as I typically do.  But I think I've covered the bases, and I haven't even had to give a lot of plot summary, which is nice.  I've left quite a bit out and I haven't resorted to too many spoilers.  I do like it when I am able to talk about a book without resorting to plot summary.  So kudos to Fultz for that.

At any rate, if you are looking for a fun, fast-paced sword and sorcery adventure, you can't go wrong with Seven Princes.  I will definitely purchase the second volume in the series when it is released.  Just don't try to interpret the book too deeply.

More Game of Thrones

I shouldn't have to warn people about this, but there's kind of a big spoiler below so turn away now if that's an issue for you.

I finally started watching Game of Thrones last night.  I wonder how much sense it makes to people who haven't read the books.  I will have to discuss this with my boyfriend periodically, as I'm watching it with him and he has not read any of them.  I was able to keep up well enough; it's been awhile since I read the first book but my memory has been jogged sufficiently by what I've seen so far.

I've got to say that the whole Bran scaling the walls thing doesn't work on screen.  It looks like Winterfell is made up of rock-climbing walls.  Which doesn't make sense for the design of a castle, unless you want invaders to dropping in all the time.  I mean, they DO have to show Bran climbing the walls, because he has to catch Jaime and Cersei together.  That's not a little detail you can leave out, because it affects EVERYTHING to do with Bran until he turns into a tree.  Still, seems like there has to be a better way to do this.

But I'm not going to review every episode.  I may have comments here and there.

Anyway, this seems like as good a time as any to mention that HBO has ordered a third season of the series.  At some point, though, I fear that they're going to outpace GRRM in terms of producing material.  Not sure what will happen then.

E-Books, Property, and the Environment

So I saw this from National Geographic:


E-Books Help the Environment One Download at a Time

And it made me think.  It sounds great.  But is it?

Let's say you buy a Kindle for ~$100.  There are a lot of options, with a Kindle Fire being almost twice that.  Let's also say an e-book will cost you $10.  According to the article above, if you buy 14 books a year, you've offset the carbon costs involved in producing your Kindle.  So, 14 x $10 = $140, + $100 for the device, so you're out $240 for one year.  This is a little over $17 a book.  I don't spend $17 a book.  If I buy hardcovers, they're from the Science Fiction Book Club and are never more than $15, plus I get a lot of free and half-price books from them.  Trade paperbacks are usually around $15 and mass market paperbacks are considerably cheaper.  (I have such a backlog of books to read that I don't really care about getting things the day they're released.)  It therefore doesn't represent much of a cost savings for a person who reads 14 books a year.  I read 60+ books a year and it would represent a cost savings for me, with that being the case.  (I haven't considered accessories in this calculation.)

But, it's not quite the same.  Even discounting all the arguments for or against e-readers and/or paper books (portability, battery life, etc., etc.), you don't actually own the books you buy for the Kindle.  It's a licensing agreement and they can (and in some cases, have) removed content from people's Kindles.  If you buy paper books, meanwhile, you can own them, write in them, give them away, re-sell them, or whatever you want.  There's something that just doesn't sit right with me about the whole licensing thing.

Then, of course, there's the constant releasing of new devices.  With more memory, faster response time, ability to do things like check e-mail and play Angry Birds, etc.  So that $100 investment becomes significantly higher if you decide to keep upgrading.

And then, there's this from Publishers Weekly:

Books without Batteries: The Negative Impacts of Technology

So there are a lot of hidden costs associated with e-reader production.  Rare earth minerals mined under horrible conditions.  Lots of wasted water.  Lots of obsolete devices piling up without being properly recycled, as people rush to get the newest technology.  Carbon footprint can't be the only thing we consider when talking about environmental impact, you know.

Just something to keep in mind.  And I'm not singling out Amazon, the figures are similar for other models of devices as well.

Hugo Award Nominees

This list is from Tor.com so the commentary is a little biased in favor of Tor contributors.  But, the 2012 Hugo Award Nominations are out.

I don't get much into fiction other than novels, and there's nothing surprising on this list, based on many of the best-of lists I posted about at the end of 2011 and other awards lists for the year.  I have only read one of the "best novel" nominees (A Dance with Dragons) and I would not rate it as one of the best books of the year.  Too much dragging...Tyrion on boats, Dany deciding which man to marry, stuff happening at the Wall with Sam and Gilly that we already knew the outcome of from the previous book.  Didn't get good until the end.  Until then it was all descriptions of food and repetition of the same things over and over again.

Anyway, if you care about such things, now you can see the list.

Challenged Books

The American Library Association has released its annual list of challenged books, and The Hunger Games is pretty high up there.  As well as a lot of other titles that make the list year after year.

Not sure what's sexually explicit about those books.  I read them a couple of weeks ago and I totally didn't catch that.  Neither did the "occult/satanic" claim make a lot of sense to me.  The people who said that are probably the same people who keep Jack Chick in business.  (I used to find his tracts in a mall bathroom back in Missouri.  Freaking hilarious, except for the fact that there are people who take him seriously.  I took them, if for no other reason than it meant no one else would pick them up.)

Fantasy always makes a good showing, although there wasn't so much of it this year.  (The Hunger Games series isn't really fantasy.  Although I almost wish it was, because that would excuse the bad science.  But I digress.)

Anyway, check out the list if you're into that kind of thing.  Forbidding books never really worked for me.  My mom used to be concerned about me reading Stephen King.  So I just read his books behind her back.  Got them from friends, bought them when I went shopping with other people, even the bus driver gave them to me.  I turned out all right.  (What a way to rebel, by the way...reading BOOKS behind my mother's back.)

Grammar: May versus Might

So I was reading the other day and I came across a sentence which read, in part: "If he turned back now, he may..."

And I'm thinking, "may?"  That doesn't sound right.  I would've written "might" there.  I wouldn't call this a grammar peeve, exactly, because this is the first time I can remember coming across it.  But it got me to wondering if there was a rule.

Here is a good explanation.  In the case of the book I was reading, which shall remain nameless for now (but when I review it, I'm sure I will bring this up again, seeing as the author is an ENGLISH TEACHER), this is a hypothetical and therefore "might" is correct.

I would say that the only way to learn these things is to read a lot.  But the problem is that if you read some of the books I've been reading lately, you'd be learning stuff that wasn't correct.  Maybe it's better that I came to fantasy in my mid to late twenties, after I'd graduated from an Ivy League college.

Fan Mail

I have never in my life been tempted to send someone fan mail.  Maybe because I'm just not the sort of person who is that interested in the lives of celebrities.  In today's world, where authors you read even stop by your blog, where you can send personal messages to authors on Twitter and sometimes even have them follow you back, relationships like the one discussed here can never develop.  That's kind of sad.

In a way, the world is more inclusive these days.  Everyone can read and comment in online discussions, they're not limited to two participants.  But there's something to be said for the exchange of lengthier correspondence, as well.  The epigraph of my PhD dissertation is Darwin's "warm little pond" quote, which is particularly applicable to my doctoral research.  This quote came out of a letter from Darwin to Joseph Hooker.  People just don't send letters like this anymore.  E-mails won't have that same staying power.

Hate mail, or rather disapproval mail, on the other hand, is something with which I'm acquainted.  I was so angry over the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 that I sent hand-written letters to the White House every week criticizing his policies.  I ran out of steam after about six months, but I still have some of the replies in a 3-ring binder around here somewhere.  (You don't get too many replies, honestly.  And some of them are pretty generic.)

In the end, I guess it's all about what you're passionate about.  Those who have sent fan letters did it to express genuine admiration, whereas I was only so inspired when I was angry.

Teaching Boring Writing

I don't usually post press releases here, but this one fits with a theme of some previous posts about high school reading and writing comprehension:

When Boring Essays Lead to Higher SAT Scores

I'm old enough that I took the SAT before the writing section was added.  I did take the SAT II writing exam, which is probably the closest equivalent from that time, and got a perfect score.  I also got a perfect score on the GRE writing section.  I didn't follow a single bit of advice about preparing for either of those, nor did I practice for them.  Now, I do happen to be very good at taking standardized tests.  But my strategy was just to write short outlines on the scratch paper they provided me, to make sure there was a point with supporting evidence, and then I went for it.  At the time I was taking these tests, I didn't care as much about good writing as I do now, but the book that the press release I link to above is about, makes me want to cry (as did this and this).

I understand that there are problems with subjective grading of essays on standardized tests.  But it seems to me that SOME kind of compromise could be reached.  An essay which included a paragraph such as the following would be graded as flawless:

"Dogs are friendlier than cats. Dogs are also softer and cuter than cats. Cats shed more than dogs and ruin furniture. Dogs are better pets than cats."

(For the record, I have one dog and five cats.  But I digress.)

Some suggestions on how to move away from that grading standard, and reward good as well as objectively flawless writing: sentence variety, use of words longer than three syllables, starting fewer than 3/4 of sentences in the same paragraph with the same freaking word.  And that's just what I can come up with in 30 seconds while I'm typing this (which I'm doing sequestered in the closet with my inflammatory bowel disease cat who hasn't thrown up for almost TWO WHOLE DAYS).

Writing shouldn't be mechanical.  Sure, there are conventions to be obeyed.  Pesky things like grammar and spelling.  Sometimes sentence fragments can even be appropriately used for emphasis, though they aren't technically "flawless."

Adapting to e-Reading?

Found this online the other day:

Americans adapt to e-reading, Pew study finds

Well, this certainly does not describe me.  (Though if more than 1 in 5 Americans have read e-books, I guess that means about 4 in 5 haven't...and if 30% of Americans own e-reading devices, 70% don't.)

I like this part..."E-book readers say they are reading more."  The averages given are 24 books for e-book readers in a year, and 15 for non-e-book readers.  Well, let me ruin their averages a bit.  I've easily read 60-65 books in the past year, NONE of them in electronic form.  (My reviews to date have been posted since May 2011, I forget exactly how many there are now, but it's over 50.  There are 3 out-of-genre books I've posted, as well, and when I started the blog, I was only reviewing new books that I read, though I read some older fantasy novels as well, which I did not post review for.  Now I am reviewing every fantasy novel I read, but there are probably 4 or 5 that got missed during the transition.)

Notice I put the word "say" in italics in the previous paragraph.  I wonder if people actually keep track of the books they read in a year?  It's easy for me, because most of what I read gets reviewed on this blog.  But I'll bet there are a good number of people who are buying more books, which may or may not actually get read.  And because they're buying more books, they think they're reading more books.

Yeah, I guess I read SOME digital content, because I only get the New York Times on weekdays, since I'm a grad student with a pittance for a stipend.  So I do look at the weekend editions online.  But that's not a book, either.

Anyway, are you all e-readers or not?  And how many books do you read in a year?

Review - Firebird

Firebird by Mercedes Lackey has been around since I graduated from high school (1996).  So far, I've only read her Elemental Masters, Obsidian, and Enduring Flame books.  I'm really on the fence about these books (liked some of the early Elemental Masters titles), and unfortunately, reading Firebird didn't really help.  If Ms. Lackey has some better books out there, please let me know.  She seems to be churning them out pretty quickly, based on her Wikipedia page.  Lots of series and all, so maybe I'm just not reading the right ones.

At any rate, a couple of things struck me right off:

One, I'm not sure who makes up the intended audience for this book.  The second half is awfully childish, with Ilya's (the hero's) main goal to get past a dragon to climb a tree in which is suspended a chest within which is a rabbit, within which is a duck, within which is a diamond-like thing which must be shattered to kill the evil sorcerer the Katschei.  The Katschei lives in a magnificent palace with twelve of the most beautiful women in the world; he occasionally makes these women dance for him and such, and apparently likes to embarrass them in front of others, but he never has sex with any of them.  He turns all their would-be rescuers into either statues or horrible nasty goblin things, and his palace is protected by a maze.  Ilya requires the help of various animals (which he can talk to) to get past the maze and deactivate the dragon.  I couldn't help but picture the Katschei as a little like David Bowie's character in Labyrinth; I guess it's not exactly the same, but that was the image that came to mind.

Anyway, that part of the story is so silly as to make me think that the book was for children.  But...Ilya spends the first half of the book arranging or thinking about arranging trysts with servant girls, and there's a lot of discussion about how he and his seven brothers and his father regularly get the servants pregnant.  Which makes it decidedly not a children's book.  It's almost like I was reading two different novels that were spliced together in the middle.

And then there are the aspects that are insulting to the intelligence of readers both young and old.  The prime one of these is the repetition of story elements.  I lost count of how many times Ilya goes to tease the dragon, then hides in the pond while the vixen goes to tease the dragon, then Ilya goes to tease the dragon again.  Or how many times Ilya got beat up by his brothers.  We get the point.  We got it the first time.  It doesn't really add anything to keep going on and on about it.

Second thing that immediately strikes me: I just don't think a fairy tale which can be written down in a few pages has enough material for a full-length novel adaptation.  The first half of this book is very slow, where pretty much all that happens is Ilya gets beat up by his brothers and pretends to be a fool, and the second is the cartoony dragon/rabbit/duck thing.  There's not quite enough material even for the faster-paced second half, and so we hear a lot about Ilya helping the gardener and stealing vegetables from the garden and so forth.  (And also an exchange where some of the goblin-creatures discuss how they like to eat human flesh, including a couple of paragraphs about one of them liking to eat penises during which Ilya takes entirely too long to get the drift, despite his obsession with sex.  Presumably this is because a stupid euphemism is used.)

Of course Ilya defeats the Katschei, and rescues the woman he believes to be the girl of his dreams, and she turns out to be a total gold-digging bitch, which I actually liked.  Because it didn't seem like there was going to be a happy ending for awhile, until Ilya conveniently catches her in bed with his brother.  Then Ilya runs off with the Firebird, a hybrid (not exactly the right word) flaming bird and woman, who has loved him all along though he doesn't realize it.  (She also helped him defeat the Katschei.)

I should mention one other thing I liked, which is that Ilya doesn't become a Tsar (apparently there are a lot of these running around).  Usually in fairy tales, after the guy gets the girl, he becomes the king or something like that.  So I did appreciate that twist, as well.

Ilya's pretty flat, as a character.  He's like Good Guy Greg except for the sleeping around thing.  He's patient, and a hard-worker, not even minding doing menial tasks like splitting wood to help out an old man.  He befriends both the priest and the shaman, he cleans out the steam baths for the stable master, he makes the head gardener's job easier at the Katschei's palace.

The Firebird is even flatter as a character.  She puts some sort of curse on Ilya because he saw her stealing cherries from his father's orchard, but then she gives him the ability to talk to animals.  She helps him out a couple of times, even comes to his rescue during the final confrontation, though she's professed a fear of the Katschei.  She hardly gets any page time, which means she hardly gets any time with Ilya, but somehow she loves him anyway?

The other characters are also as flat as pancakes.  No, make that as flat as single atom transistors.  Lackey is kind of inconsistent about Ilya's seven half-brothers; it's entirely unclear which ones of them are the children of which mother, why they hate him so much, how old they are, why some of them are nice to him sometimes, etc.

Honestly, the writing style isn't that great, either, with lots of descriptive infodumps, too much of Ilya's internal monologue, and speaker attributions that include impossibilities (like the Katschei barking) and too many -ly adverbs.

I'd really like to say something good about this book.  Well, it was better than Unnatural Issue, I suppose.  There was none of the annoying dialect, for example.  I can't help but wonder if you churn out as many books as Lackey does, as fast as she must, how any of them can be good.  I liked The Gates of Sleep, I liked The Serpent's Shadow, I liked Phoenix and Ashes. I guess that's why I keep reading Lackey's books -- hoping another enjoyable one will come along.  If you're unfamiliar with her work, start with the first three Elemental Masters books, don't start with Firebird.