When you sit down to write, one of the first things you're supposed to do is ask why your characters do what they do. What is their motivation? What do they want?


This is one of those fundamental rules of writing, the ones nobody questions, like 'write what you know' and I'm going to question it, because to me it's a ridiculous question. My characters don't know what they want, in the grand serious categories, any more than I would if you asked me. 

One of the hardest things I've found to learn as a writer is that things that happen in real life don't translate into fiction. In real life people's motives and thoughts are cagey and secret. Circumspect. And you can't get away with that in writing--supposedly--because everything has to be spelled out on the page. But there's a balance there, between telling your audience everything they need to know, and telling them everything they need to know.

The Star Wars holiday just passed, so I'll use an analogy from that. We need to know Luke's father was a Jedi, even an important one, from early on. The intention is for that to become a central part of his character, so we need it. But there's a...finesse, to giving us the information. Could Obi Wan have sat Luke down and hashed the whole thing out, beginning to end? Absolutely. And I bet, given it was Alec Guinness and space opera we'd even have listened. 

But we wouldn't have cared. All that dramatic tension comes from Luke's quest to be more like his father, to live up to that. 

There's no hard and fast rule for choosing what details to give and where to give them, no guideline that'll tell you where to but your grand realization (I'm a fan of as late as possible as long as it doesn't require twisting into gigantic Deus et Machina circles). 

I spend a lot of my writing life reminding myself I don't like it when complete strangers over-share their lives with me. Other readers probably don't like it either. 

Also, here's the bunny for the Marianas Trench contest, which ends on May 15th! Send me something, anything, and this little guy might be yours. Even if I'm not happy with his butt-to-ear ratio.

So if anybody happened to be paying attention there was supposed to be a deadline, on April 20th for the Marianas Trench Fic-let contest. 
Now if anybody else had remembered it and sent me an entry by then I'd probably call it closed and do my judgey bit, and make someone a rabbit. 
But nobody else managed it either (probably because you could have used some kind of reminder in April and I fell down on that one. Mea Culpa).


All of which means...
I'm extending the contest until May 15th. There's a smallish, knitted plot bunny who'd like a home if you're interested. Just post something short, less than 3000 words, either in the comments anywhere I've mentioned the contest or send it directly to me through the comment box on the front page of the site. I'm not looking for polished magnificence, just tell me what you think is behind the door at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. 


I feel like I should rename this thing the Bunny Ides Contest or something like that. Things to ponder. 


Now go, all my little hoppers. I wish for fic-lets.  

I'm not even entirely sure what one is (some sort of outside porchy thing, not quite sure why it's not just a porch) but I want one. The weather's been nice, and my life has been...not nice for the last week and it's a new month and...

So. March goals. 

Yeah, that's enough about those.

In April I solemnly swear I will continue the blogging, and I'm doing Camp Nano at least this first pass so there will be little word counts chilling at the bottom of my blog posts.

I'm going to read Whose Body by Dorthy Sayers, and re-read Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.

I'm going to torture myself attempting to make this blanket thing I decided to do for my father.

I'm going to finish editing Watcher, in hopes of finding it a home next month.

I think I may have to reward myself with something as I move along, because clearly my normal habits aren't working this year. Oh well, you live and you learn.

Word Count--3015
Feeling: restless

"I wish I could write as mysteriously as a cat."

-Edgar Allen Poe                            

I don't quite know what to do with that. There are absolutely worse writers to be compared to, but I always attributed a certain level of...crazy to Poe. Not just in his private life, but in his writing too. I've been told I'm good at creepy, even in places I don't particularly think I'm being creepy. 

If I ever turn up incoherent in Baltimore, figure out why I died before you bury me please. And for the love of all things holy, don't let someone who hates me write my eulogy. Also, there will be no marrying of thirteen year old cousins (obviously).

It would be nice to manage a decent short story though.

For the sake of argument I put a different book snipped in their thing, and it gave me Cory Doctorow--who I'd never read and I've just fallen in love with the first twenty pages of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

It's Wednesday again, and I'm allowed to spuriously talk about writing (in that I'm usually talking about reading).

I'm sitting at the kitchen table, squeezing in a blog post because I promised I would, listening to the dish-washer whir away, and having a devilishly hard time thinking of the last time I read a book where I really liked the ending. It's entirely possible most of that is because I'm picky. Because I long ago learned the knack for liking something even if parts of it left me wanting.

I just finished John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, and I'd recommend it a hundred times over, but if you asked me for a review nearly everything I told you would be negative. Which makes me sound like some insane keyboard wielding Negative Nancy. Just because he walked away from one tiny little plot string shouldn't ruin an entire series. It doesn't. I just really wanna know what happened.

And right now, thinking about unsatisfying endings all I can think about is Anne Rice. Someone mentioned the other day that she's coming out with a new Lestat book, and this was generally greeted with happy sentiments. By everybody but me. 

I did my Anne Rice phase, and honestly I wish I was still in it some days. I gobbled up The Vampire Lestat, and suffered through Interview with a Vampire both on screen and page. I read the Violin and wondered why I was so sad about a book I didn't even particularly like.

And I read Tales of the Body Thief. 

If there was a sane, straightforward way to tell you of my love for that book, while I was reading it, I'd probably have found it in the last fifteen years or so. I haven't. I savored every page, disappeared into that world with every chance I had, slowly and methodically because I didn't want it to be over. Right until the end. 

After all that love, it's natural to be a little disappointed, right? Because I'd built it up so far there was no possible way to write me a satisfying ending. I can see that, I even accept it. That's not what happened. I wasn't mildly unsatisfied by the ending, I hated it. And if I tell you why I might not stop writing this until sometime Friday. The short answer is I finished the book and felt lied to and manipulated. 

Maybe if I'd read it in my thirties I would have been prepared for that. I've had more than a decade for the world to find new and inventive ways to disappoint me (isn't that a depressing thought) and I'm a little less surprised by it every time it happens. But that one was painful, and it's fundamentally shaped nearly every literary opinion I've had since. 

I feel like there should be a support group for this.

"Hi, my name is Jules."
"Hi Jules," you all offer kindly.
"It's been seventeen years," I tearfully confess. "I'm still not over it." 

It's not as if I don't have enough to do. It's nearly halfway through the month, and I'm woefully behind on my writing goals, and barely hanging on to the editing ones. I should have plenty of time to add extra stuff to that, right?

I'll wait for the hyenas in the back to finish.

While I was faffing about the internet looking for blog inspiration (or any kind of inspiration at all, if you happen to be paying attention) I came across this article on Buzzfeed and it sort of reached out and grabbed me. 

I read a lot, and one of my goals this year was to read more consistently. To pick a book every month and at least get through that one. January was The Cuckoo's Calling, February was TFiOS. March is the last of John Scalzi's Old Man's War trilogy. Yay, that seems to be going fine, right? Except for the whole thing where I've got nine months left, and only three more books on the list. 

There are a few on that list of books people say they've read that the haven't that I've got every intention of picking up, but a list of classics isn't what I'm looking for. I don't want books a literature professor would suggest, or the NYT Bestsellers list. I want books people love. 

So, it's time for more audience participation (and I still haven't come up with a prize for the last one, but whatevs). Now you all get to be book evangelists. No holds barred, no caveats. Any book, any genre, any content. If you love it, drop it in the comments and I'll add it to the list.

I gave in and watched Ender's Game the other day. And before someone points it out, yes, I know the 'bad guys' were closer to ants than moths, but if you've seen the movie you know what I'm talking about. 

You can't swing a cat on the internet without hitting an opinion, and I'm going to smack into a few of them talking about Mr Card. But for the moment we're talking about the movie, not his personal opinions on (insert subject of choice here).
Edit note, the first time I wrote that last sentence I said 'her' because apparently I like to randomly re-assign pronouns to famous people.

Now that I've said that I have to say something intelligent about the movie, don't I?


I've never read the book. I never even heard of it until I read his book on Character and Viewpoint and it was part of his author blurb. And before we get sidetracked on that whole 'nobody suggests science fiction books to girls' thing it's probably more to do with nobody ever suggested books to me at all as a kid. I read what I read. If there'd been dinosaurs in it, believe me I'd have found it. 

So I went into the movie with basically no information. I knew it was about kids fighting war, and that the author had foot-in-mouth disease according to the internet. And for a long time I debated trying to read the book first, because I like sci-fi movies and I have this weird issue with book/movie adaptations where whatever I see/read first is the state I attach to. With like two exceptions if I see the movie first I can't get through the book. There are a whole list of titles this has happened with that I'm sad about. Eragon, and LoTR. InkHeart.

I'm not sad this time. According to the person who's read the book they stayed close to it, and I wouldn't have made it through the beginning. Ender's brother is a psychopathic sh*t and the over-all military society it's set in would have shut me down before any potential problems with his treatment of female characters could have manifested. Maybe in the book we meet Ender's parents (we see his tearful mother for like half a second), or see if he had friends before they shipped him off to battle-school. Maybe his squad-mates had personalities. I know a lot of that get's lost in the five seconds you get in the scope of a movie.

But it wasn't bad. The cinematography and artistry were good, and it's a decently presented story-line. The female characters all center around Ender, but the entire universe centers around Ender so that's no sort of surprise. I did have a moment where I thought it would have been much better if his brother got to be the compassionate one, and his sister was the psychotic reject.

So, the ultimate question. If they made more movies in the Ender Universe, would I go see them in the theater? Probably not. But that's more to do with my general malaise about sequels than with anything they did wrong.

Now. Post note about Mr Card and his expressed views. I can't decide if I care or not. He seems to have retracted a few of them, in the last year. Maybe that was in preparation for the movie, maybe he had a change of heart. I don't have a knee-jerk 'evil' response to Mormonism, but I'm not forgiving either. I have a whopping giant button about hypocrisy that frequently gets an exercise in regard to the Church of Latter-day Saints from about every direction. And on good days when I'm calm and rational all of that means precisely zip. If he wrote books I liked to read I'd still read them (he may, when my to-read pile gets shorter Ender's Game might wind up on there). For better or worse, I always feel like the content should matter more than author context.


But there's something to be said for a persons attitude mattering, on the whole. I find his religious viewpoints and unpopular views much less damaging and off-putting than all those authors who try to nuke people for disagreeing with them. He expresses his views and clearly, frequently, I don't agree with them. That seems an extreme reason to decry everything he's ever done. Authors who plagiarize, who bully reviewers or anyone else who gives them a critique, who vastly over-react to being disagreed with I wholeheartedly support  boycotting. But we're so quick to claim the moral high-ground on the internet, and I think sometimes that happens at the detriment of remembering that equality means sometimes leaving space for people who don't agree with us. Screaming 'YOU'RE WRONG' never convinced anyone of anything.


I'll still suggest his book on Character and Viewpoint to people because it's one of the best writing books I've ever read. And maybe if I read the book I'd feel differently, like his religious viewpoint was more agitating than it was in the movie. 


Crap. I'm gonna have to read the book now. I love how I talk myself into these things.


ps. I was totally going to leave a teaser about Friday here, but I honestly don't remember what I wrote. Yep, it's been that kind of week so far.