anna genoese

At my dad's house in upstate New York this weekend, my dad and I pulled the last of my boxes out of his garage. A lot of my stuff was ruined from the water damage (I will forever mourn my giant box of shoes that I'd been collecting since 1999; RIP, orange lace ballet flats and neon pink stiletto heels!), but the important stuff was safe: my three favorite mugs (well, I soaked them in boiling hot soapy water, then ran them through the dishwasher on "sanitize" twice, then washed them by hand again), my Swans Crossing video tapes from 1992, and my copy of Black Wine.

While I was there, he and my stepmom and my baby sister and I piled into the car to drive north on NY-22 for a million miles (okay, like, 20) to the Circle Museum outside Austerlitz. I'd seen it the last time I was driving north on 22 (to visit the trifles family!), and have wanted to stop in there ever since. There's not a lot of information about it on the internet. There is not even an address! But it exists. It was closed up tight when we got there, but mostly it's a bunch of sculptures that are outside, so we walked around and looked at the sculptures anyway.

I have to admit... I was hoping for what I kept calling "a real museum." Like MOMA, but only art featuring circles. (So... no Mondrian, I guess!) It was, instead, just some guy's art installation -- sculptures with curved lines. Not every sculpture even had a circle! Not sure how to feel about that, you guys.

Here are some pictures anyway. Click on them to go to the Flickr page. I have "original size" turned on, if you're interested in the huge versions.





...ultimately, I don't think I'd recommend driving out that way to see the Circle Museum (especially since there are no posted hours or anything!!) unless you are big into upstate New York stuff, like trees and grass and mountains and winding roads and tiny roadside diners. Though, honestly, I love tiny roadside diners, but the ones in this area of NY seem to be particularly shitty. Or you can stop there on your way to Steepletop! I wanted to go, being a person who thinks Edna St Vincent Millay was pretty awesome, but it closes for "the season" in October, and doesn't open again until April or May. Sigh.

Well, I stopped reading Dust -- it's in the bathroom, just hanging out; maybe I'll try to pawn it off on some poor unsuspecting soul -- and picked up The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin. I bought this book mostly because a crapload of people on the internet were talking about how great it is and how much they love the author (who, as far as I can tell, sometimes says smart things about race and the way people interact).

My relationship with this book started out really strong -- I was on the subway, coming off Dust and feeling like I was never going to read an interesting book again. When I opened it and saw that at the very least the world-building and narrative were going to be interspersed, not completely separate things, I was so relieved! That relief drained away as I read more and more, until finally I tucked it inside my messenger bag, and every time I think about finishing it, I cringe.

There are a bunch of things in it that niggle at me, and then there are a few pretty huge problems -- and right now, my time for pleasure reading is so limited that I feel like it's a real, serious waste of my time to read books that aren't fantastic. I'm not saying that I'm looking for perfect books -- just ones where when I put them down, I don't dread picking them back up again.

Then, the other day, eruthros posted a mini-review. Suddenly I felt much less alone, and much more comfortable discussing (in public) my problems with this book. (And, later, I will talk about why I am definitely not going to read the rest of the book.)

My biggest problem is the characters. They are uniformly boring. They are one dimensional. We know that the evil people are evil because they smile slyly and like kinky sex and seem at least on the surface to buy into the political theater of the court. We know that the good people are good because... oh. Wait. There are no good people except the heroine! There are no shades of grey! No one else is oppressed and having to make deals with their oppressors in order to live. Everyone is either bad and working against the heroine, and therefore evil, or bad and working for the heroine, and therefore slightly more tolerable.

The heroine confuses me. She's supposed to be a badass warrior-queen/leader/something. She's been doing it for a while? Or maybe only a few weeks? Or maybe several months, but many of those months were spent traveling across the world to see a king that she doesn't even respect or care about? (Why did she travel to see the king again? I have no idea.) She's not badass at all -- she's boring. It's not even that she's an unreliable narrator -- she's just kind of stupid about people. She's in a situation she's never been in before, so I guess I could cut her some slack, but it's the author's choice to set up the book like this. It's the author's choice to make her heroine a powerless ninny. Why make that choice?

I also think the choice to narrate the story in this way was a terrible one on the part of the author and her editor. There are a lot of tangents. They are boring. World-building isn't something that should get in the way of telling the story to the reader. The almost stream-of-consciousness narration that we're subjected to is so frustrating. No, I do not want a three page tangent about something boring and unrelated -- I want to know about how the heroine is running for her life! There are better ways to wodge into the text whatever important information the author thinks her readers should have.

Other issues: The one (so far) same sex relationship is the cause of all the sadness and destruction in the world. The people who enjoy kinky sex are evil. That's how we know they're evil, don't you see? No one not evil could ever want to put a collar on someone else for sexual gratification of all involved! The names don't make any sense; there doesn't seem to be a naming scheme for separate countries/ethnicies, or indeed any kind of thought given to language at all. (It's possible this is secretly my #1 problem, since why make up a world if you're not going to also make up language rules for it?) Plus, you know, at this point in the life of the genre of fantasy, incest isn't some big thing that automatically makes me suck in a breath and feel shocked; it's just sort of boring. And I'm really tired of having to read about pedophilia. And you know what? I'm not interested in gods who have been sandpapered into tedious human-shapes with human morals and human desires. (What then, exactly, makes them gods? Immortality? Oh, but they can die and/or be killed? So what makes them gods? Oh, the author says so? Not good enough!)

I put a call out on Twitter for negative reviews of this book, to see if other people were coming to the same conclusions I am. Like I said, I'd only seen people talking about what they liked about the book and its author until eruthros! fadeaccompli helpfully supplied me with this review, written by someone who apparently finished the book. (So... now some book spoilers. Actual things that will likely spoil the book itself for you.) winterfox points out a blog post written by the author in which the author says...

[...] one of the staples of epic fantasy is clearly-delineated good and evil... So I needed there to be one absolute, unadulterated ratbastard in the story [...]

WHAT. How can someone believe this? If the sentence had been, "One of the tropes in some fantasy novels is that good and evil are clearly delineated," then perhaps it wouldn't have irked me. But there's a lot of fantasy out there, and some of that fantasy delights in messing around with the ideas of good and evil.

The quote winterfox pulled from the blog post ends with this:

Scimina [the evilest woman to ever evil in the book -- or so we're told by the heroine]: evil Just Because.

It was upon reading this that I realized that there's no way I can finish reading the book. It's going to lie around my house, and I am going to glare at it, and sulk about how I spent money on it, and in generally be incredibly annoyed until I talk myself into forgetting that I'm so pissed, give the book away, and move on. (Judging by how I still have not moved on from a similar epic sulk from 2007, this could take a long time!)

I am all for evil characters. I love evil characters. I think they are fascinating and wonderful and fun. I also sometimes side with evil, finding the "good" characters in fantasy novels often desperately unfun, annoying, sanctimonious, and boring. (Examples: the Harry Potter books and the first Kushiel trilogy by Jacqueline Carey.) Most of the time, one does not see an evil character reluctant to embrace their destiny of taking over the world -- often that's how we're supposed to know that said character really, truly is evil. The "good" character is a whiny brat who doesn't want to go on a quest/embrace destiny/have magical powers/save the world. I'll save my rant on the reluctant hero for another time, though.

My point is that evil can be really sympathetic. Heck, evil can be sympathetic in real life! Evil can trick people into thinking it's not evil. Evil can make you cry for it. Evil, even when it's getting what it deserves, can pull compassion from you. That's something that is great about evil (and people). Evil doesn't even have to be totally evil -- it can be in a grey area. It can -- and, in fact, often is -- not evil at all, but instead just something that we/the protagonist disagree with. (A good example of this is the first Kushiel book, in which "evil" is the political opponent whose calm, rational political views disgust a bunch of people who don't really seem to even have a dog in the fight except for their personal relationship to the king or whoever. Sorry, I haven't read those books since, like, 2001 or whatever. But still!)

The author says in that blog post that she doesn't believe some of her characters are absolutely evil (in the moral sense; as opposed to...? the other kind of evil hanging around?) because they had reasons for what they did, and because they are all capable of sorrow and regret. I'm not sure that resonates with me -- I think that without reason backing up what they do, characters become very lifeless.

In fact, advice I give often to my clients is to sit down with a list of their characters, every single character, and come up with reasons for those characters to do what they do and be who they are. I will even sometimes suggest writing short stories about each character, reminding the authors that every character probably believes zirself to be the protagonist of zir own story, regardless of how the author's chosen protagonist sees them! After all, most people do not often think, "Wow, I am a supporting character in the life of the person standing behind me in the grocery store!"

But this makes it clear that the author believes herself capable of writing nuanced characters. That's all well and good. Then she says that she did not want to know more about her "rat bastard" character -- she writes, "because it's hard to plot another person’s death if you know them and understand them"!!

Well, that's not true across the board, but maybe it's true for this author. But does that mean that her one "rat bastard" character, her one (supposedly) unambiguously evil character, must be paper-thin? To be honest, though, I doubt the author's ability to write a character that is not one-dimensional, since even her beloved (boring) heroine has got nothing going for her. And why should I spend my time reading a book when the author couldn't even challenge herself to come up with a three-dimensional, interesting, compelling villain?

Most villains don't think of themselves as evil. I am hard-pressed to think of a book villain (in an adult fantasy novel) who sits around saying, "I'm so evil! Bwahahaha!" Most villains actually think they are the protagonists of the story. They think they are doing the right thing, that their position is unimpeachable. They think the protagonist is evil. If the author isn't going to put herself in that position, if the author isn't going to even bother trying to understand why the "villain" might think that way, not only is the reader being cheated out of an interesting villain, the reader is being cheated out of a protagonist who isn't 100% perfect in everyone's eyes.

A lot of the reviews I read (just from people on my blogroll who are readers, who are into the author's nonfiction on the subject of race and social justice) mentioned that the prose is amazing. I'll give the author this: she can write a sentence. But the sentences never string together into something really compelling. It's just the same overwrought, faux-formal narration that a lot of epic fantasy suffers from.

I think I take it back that this book's biggest problem is the characters. I think this book's real biggest problem is its hype. I could have picked this up and read it in a few hours and maybe not gotten so het up about it if eight million people hadn't told me that it's the Best! Book! Of! The! Year! And! All! The! Other! Years! Too! It's a first novel. Every bit of it suffers from a lack of editing. It's not anywhere close to being the worst book I've read this year. Heck, if it had landed on my desk, I'd've probably acquired it. The author has some interesting ideas and way better than passable writing -- she just needs to be critiqued and challenged more.

In a few years, when she's done writing in this universe, I'll pick up whatever she writes next and see if she's gotten any better. It happens!

(I hope she writes a standalone! I know, I know, I'm the only person in the world who wants standalone fantasy novels that are 200,000 words long. Whatever. Go on! Read your 15-book series! Leave me alone!)

I would be really interested to read your thoughts on this book, and on villains/evil. Comments and links to your own posts on the subject(s) both welcome.

Next to be read: The Alchemy Of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia. No one recommended this to me, and I don't know much about it. I was doing that thing where I just click around Amazon, looking for something cool to read (south Brooklyn doesn't have any bookstores to browse in meatspace; it's a tragedy!) and I found it. I read the Publishers Weekly review and decided I wanted to give it a shot -- I mean, automatons! Alchemists! Statues that want souls! Terrorists! How could I pass that up? I'll let you know how it goes.

Every week I check my website stats, and every week I see that people hit my website by searching some variation of "Is it easier to get an editor or an agent?" But I don't have an article specifically about that -- so I decided to write one.

As with everything else in the publishing industry, experiences with getting an agent vary wildly. Some people never get a rejection letter. Some people try forty agents before finding one they fit with. Some people never get an agent. Some people get an agent and stick with that agent for a while, but find that they don't really get along, and so they switch (and, like that old saw goes, it's easier to find one if you already have one). Some people never get an agent, or eventually give up having an agent entirely, finding that their career is stable enough that having an agent isn't worth it. Honestly, I think the number of people doing that last thing is dwindling in this era of fighting tooth and nail for every slot on every list, even in category/series romance.

It's a similar situation with editors -- some people find the right editor right away. Some people get a new editor for every book. Some people never find an editor, and decide to hire a freelance one and self-publish.

It is pretty much equally difficult to get either one to take your book on. You've heard my advice about how to get the attention of editors and agents a million times: Write a good book. (For value of good, you can also insert: timely, marketable, scandalous, rare, edgy, personally appealing to the particular editor/agent.) Write a decent query letter. Be professional.

I know what your next question is. You want to know: Is it better to get an agent first?

No one can answer this for you -- you have to make your own decisions based on what you know, and what you think is best for yourself, your manuscript(s), and your career.

If you submit your book to publishers and one likes you right away and takes the book on, that's pretty awesome, and you're set -- your book now has a 98% (ish) chance of being published. (There are things that can happen between signing a contract with a publisher and getting your book on the shelf. They're rare enough that I wouldn't worry about it happening to you, as long as you're working with a reputable publisher.)

Once you have a publishing contract in hand, you can then make a list of your dream agents, and go down it, contacting each one and saying, "Hi, this is Sydney Bristow, and I've written a book called My Life With Spy Daddy, and I have an offer to publish it from Alliance Publishers as a hardcover in their Livres Disparus list. I'd like to know if you'd represent me for this deal, and possibly future ones." Plenty of people get agents this way. In fact, I can even think of a couple of people who called agents who'd previously turned down their manuscripts, and the agents agreed to take them on once they had the contract in hand. I know that seems shady/annoying, but it's just business.

(I will pause here to say that I really do think the majority of authors need agents, especially once a house has made an offer. Agents provide a number of extremely important services to authors. Agents act as go-betweens, helping to smooth the way for authors and editors, especially when there's conflict about something. Agents are knowledgeable about the way publishing contracts work -- if you're taking the contract to someone not familiar with the industry, there's every chance they'll miss something, even if that person is a lawyer. Agents are skilled at negotiation, and know how to get the most out of the wheeling and dealing. Agents organize the money and keep track of the royalty statements. Agents can put pressure on a publishing company to live up to the spirit of its agreement with an author. Agents have connections -- not just in North America, but also in other hubs of the publishing world, and even smaller markets! Hey, don't knock being translated into Russian, German, Japanese, Spanish... A sale is a sale, and agents are uniquely equipped to make these sales. Agents have their down sides, too, don't get me wrong -- but I am of the firm belief that the up-sides outweigh those down-sides.

If you disagree, that's okay! You can write a blog post at your own blog about it!)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- publishing is subjective. Sometimes an agent falls in love with a book that zie can't get an editor to take on for love, money, or favors. Sometimes an editor loves a book that three hundred agents turned down. Heck, sometimes an editor loves a book that she can't convince her publisher to take on, and she mourns it even ten years later. Uh, not that I have any experience with that last one or anything!

The flip side of this is that if you get an agent first, a lot of doors open to you that may have previously been shut. Some agents have a lot of clout and/or know editors and publishers really well. Those agents can take your manuscript and say to an editor, "Remember when you told me you wanted a science fiction novel set in the near future featuring a female CIA agent who falls in love with a female Russian SVR agent? I've got that for you." Agents spend a lot of time cultivating their relationships with editors and publishers -- partially for this exact reason. For sure, when I was acquiring, there were agents who'd send me manuscripts, and I'd pretty much drop everything to read what they sent, because usually it was exactly my taste and exactly what I was looking for. No one's 100%, but the agents who pay attention can come pretty damn close.

Of course, there are also agents out there who don't know the editors, who don't have the same taste as the editors, who don't pay attention to what the editors and publishers are looking for, and who don't have the influence or relationships to make a scenario like that work. I certainly have met more than my fair share of agents who sent me Western historicals with notes about how they were sure I'd want that book for the romance list; once, an agent counseled her client to send me lingerie with the author's version of the manuscript's "cover" screen-printed onto it. Make sure to do your research on the agents before you submit to them, and use your brain and common sense -- that will, hopefully, help you have a much smaller chance of running into those agents.

Something to keep in mind when making your plans is that many agents will be reluctant to take on a project that's already been sent around to the major New York houses. If you've already been rejected by nine out of eleven of the editors an agent immediately thinks of when reading your manuscript, that agent's job has just been made a whole ton harder. Even if that editor never personally looked at your book -- the assistant read it and rejected it, or the editor sent it out to a reader or got a report from an intern and rejected based on that -- the editor will very likely remember at least the title, and be annoyed to see the book again, especially if it's within a year or two of the first submission.

I hope this helps people who are starting to think about where to send their manuscripts! Feel free to ask questions in the comments; as usual, I will not talk about specific agents by name and I ask that you don't name names in your comment -- but I'm happy to give you advice on your specific situation (and I know a lot of readers of this blog would be happy to jump in with advice, too!).

I'm watching Justified. Have y'all ever seen it? It is a really awful show that is nevertheless incredibly enjoyable. I love Timothy Olyphant's teeth, and his walk is, like, the definition of a "loose-hipped gait," isn't it? Like a romance novel hero.

I thought for a moment that my grasp of geography has been getting worse when in the last episode I watched, Timothy Olyphant's teeth and hips tracked a fugitive to the Mexican border. What?! Since when does Kentucky border Mexico? Then I realized that while I was counting my knitting stitches, I somehow missed them heading out to California. Haha. In this episode I'm watching now, Buster Bluth deals in art painted by Hitler! Double haha.

Today I was nosing around the book racks in WalMart, and I couldn't help but notice that two of the four bookshelves were all romance novels. One entire bookshelf was taken up with Harlequin series -- they're putting out Christmas books already! Harlequin, it is only October. You should be selling The Devil's Halloween Baby, not His Christmas Love! The other romance novel bookshelf was entirely contemporary paranormals and contemporary westerns. Now, I am a big fan of paranormals (obviously), and I do have a (not so) secret love of the western romance, full of ranches and Montana and women in cowboy hats. But... a whole bookshelf? And nothing else? That seems pretty excessive.

(If you're interested... Bookshelf #3 was all YA -- Cassandra Clare and Rick Riordan and J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins and Stephenie Meyer. Bookshelf #4 was all action/adventure and bestselling hardcover nonfiction.)

Speaking of books! I started reading Dust by Joan Frances Turner. I can see why people are making a big deal of this book, especially since it's told from the POV of a zombie. Cool, right? But I thought it was supposed to be a grim, scary book. I'm about a third of the way through, and so far it's just sort of wandering around the worldbuilding with no real story being told -- and it's gory. It's really gory. I don't think things that are gory are scary or interesting; I think gory tends to be pretty boring. I don't get off in any way on torture porn, written or visual.

I think it would probably really interest thirteen year olds, though.

That's one of the problems with being an adult and reading YA. Were I acquiring YA for a YA audience, I would be reading with a different eye. But I'm an adult reading YA fiction for entertainment. I'm not necessarily looking to completely dump my critical reading skills, but I'm also not looking to replicate my uncomplicated childhood reading experiences, either. So I want a lot more things -- complicated things -- from YA books. And I get that from some authors, I really do. And from others... well, I can see why the target market would enjoy it, but I personally am not.

I'll probably finish the book anyway, especially since the prose is not torturous, but darn it. I was really hoping it would be super dark and super grim and super depressing and more traditionally "post-apocalyptic." Sigh!

Hey, you know what else about books? The first draft of the sequel to Salt and Silver is finished! Two weeks ahead of schedule, too. Now it's time to reread and revise!

I am thrilled to be home again. As much as I loved visiting Kat and her family (look at this video of the best baby in the world giving me a high five!), and staying with my dad and stepmother for a while, it's wonderful to be home with my cats and my french press, making the exact coffee I like to drink and settling down to copyedit what looks like an awesome sf novel about spies.

While I was gone, I did not pick up one single book. (And I only wrote 4000/25,000 words on the sequel. Oops!) I did, however, buy too much yarn, and finally finish 206 Bones by Kathy Reichs.

I like the Reichs books much better than I like the show. For one thing, no one in the books ever moralizes about how a "real" family is a mother and a father taking care of children, or how "icky" BDSM is. (Can you tell I'm no longer watching that show? I'm not judging you if you are -- I mean, I'm all about enjoying problematic media while recognizing and critiquing its problems! But I just can't do it anymore.)

I like that Tempe in the books is this flawed person who makes mistakes. She's an alcoholic who, within the last few books, has fallen off the wagon and both started and stopped drinking again. She and her ex-husband have a dance of not letting go that reminds me tremendously not only of relationships I've been in, but relationships my friends have been in. She's dating this police detective who is also totally flawed and does dispicably human things. She has a close relationship with her daughter that's not without its own problems, a very work-like work environment where people are always feeling annoyed or underappreciated or cranky, and often comes home at night to a cold, dark apartment and a Lean Cuisine.

What cinched it for me when I first picked up the books was that she spends half her time in the States and half her time in Quebec -- and her boyfriend speaks Canadian French, which is incredibly hot (and awesome). So there was never any way that I wasn't going to make it through at least the first book -- and once I was through the first book, I was really intrigued by the series, and kept reading.

To a lot of people, this would not be the makings of a really great mystery series. When I describe it to people, I often get wrinkled noses. Who wants to read about a middle-aged alcoholic with a kind of shitty boyfriend who, despite being great at her job, often has problems at work? There's no fantasy element there except the mystery-solving -- but unlike a cozy mystery, she's not a non-professional. She's not trained to solve crimes necessarily, but she is in law enforcement -- these are no Father Dowling books. (Not to knock Father Dowling; I love him. And Sister Stephanie. And do you remember that show? I had a massive crush on Sister Stephanie when I was nine.)

I love the books, though. I loved them from the first page. Partially because I'm not looking for fantasy fulfillment in the pages -- I'm looking for a decent mystery novel that doesn't pretend to trick me with silly plot twists. (Like, at the end? It's never a random person we've never met before who's done the crime. They are solveable.)

And this series has the wonderful addition that, like the show (the only thing that's like the show, actually, besides the main character's name!), she's a forensic anthropologist/pathologist. So in every single book, we're given mini-lessons on the way that bones work, and what it is that she's looking for when she's dealing with $X problem. This is also a major reason I love Nora Roberts books -- no reason I can't learn about horse training/rescue dog training/carpentry/whatever whilst reading a delightful mystery!

So we have all this. All these positive things. Here is the one issue I always have with these books -- just one, but it's a big one. A huge one.

Kathy Reichs is not a good writer. She can string words together to make a readable sentence, but that's about it. She is not what I would call "compulsively readable" -- which actually has a few positives in my book. It means I can put any of her books down without finishing it, and pick it up again several months later, read a couple of pages, and remember exactly what was going on. It means that people who don't have super high reading levels can read these books with zero problems -- even the bone stuff is written in the language of high school science. Her writing is super accessible -- I would be equally likely to give one of her books to my grandma, my mom, my younger sisters, or a teenage kid looking for a mystery novel with a cool twist. A twist of characters, that is -- there are almost never "cool twists" of plot. Which I like, since I often see plot twists coming a mile away and think less of authors who can't pull them off.

(And, yeah, I am one of those annoying people who figured out what was going on in The Sixth Sense at the beginning.)

There's a negative, though, which is that it is sometimes painful to read her awkward prose. And it lends itself to clumsy structure -- mostly toward the end of the book, where in order to create false tension, she ends every chapter on a strange cliffhanger. Like, for example (this is not a real line from a book), "I turned the page of the forensic report and discovered something I hadn't even thought of!"

And every single chapter ends like that. But the next chapter? Often begins with something unrelated ("As I walked to Ryan's office, I resented the Montreal snow that kept me trapped, and wondered if my cat had successfully chewed through all of the sofa cushions yet" -- also not a real line, but close enough to one!) to string out this fake tension. Sometimes the reader doesn't find out what was in the forensic report (or whatever) until the very end when Tempe and Ryan (boyfriend) reveal the killer. But, of course, any reader has been solving the crime along with Tempe (and Ryan) and so already has guessed what the forensic report says!

Basically, it's frustrating as hell that she can't just tell the story and trust in her (extremely strong, interesting) plotting to keep the reader hooked.

Nevertheless, I totally recommend these books, since they are mostly great, mostly interesting, and there's almost never any stupid, bullshit moralizing -- plus, since they're not quite amazing, they're perfect to read on an airplane and leave in the pocket for the next passenger or one of the flight attendants. I myself left my copy of 206 Bones at a rest area on I-87.

Warning: this entry discusses the Hunger Games books, although not in any detail, and there's nothing I'd personally consider spoilers for any book. However, if you're all vigilant about not being spoiled for, like, names and attitudes of characters, you might want to skip this one! All the links go to my Flickr; all the pictures are SFW.


Despite my general dislike for the Hunger Games trilogy, my friends and I have been idly chatting for the last few days about our dream casting for the movies. I'm pretty solidly down with the Harry Potter style of casting for this -- the big three and their contemporaries as mostly or entirely unknowns, and then solid (and awesome) adult actors for the adult roles.

Of course, because I was bored by most of the books, I didn't really pay attention to the clear red shirt characters who were obviously going to die -- but I did, in fact, pay attention to the characters who I could mentally cast with actors I like while reading the book, and also the characters who I found charming or obnoxious or both.

One of my friends brought up the idea of Misha Collins as Haymitch, which I think is awesome, and can't get that out of my head. He does a depressed drunk guy really well (e.g., Supernatural episode 5x04, "The End"!), and if he's not cast as Haymitch, it will be a crime.

While reading the books, I immediately thought of Michelle Rodriguez for Johanna. Honestly, I can't remember how Johanna was described, and it didn't matter to me anyway, for two reasons: (1) I am a firm believer that the best movies based on books are adaptations, not copies, and that the best person for the role should be cast regardless of the way the character's physical attributes are described in the book(s). Now, if the character having black hair or green skin is a pivotal plot point, fine -- but if not, put in the actor with the right attitude. And (2) as soon as we got a sense of Johanna's attitude, I associated her with Michelle Rodriguez, so how she was physically described never really entered my mind.

Katee Sackhoff as Enobaria -- although I worry that maybe Katee will get typecast as The Sociopath! She does dead eyes really well, though...

LL Cool J as Boggs -- again, this is sort of an easy one. Who else could possibly play Boggs? Maybe my boyfriend Oded Fehr. He should definitely be getting more work as a badass action hero, too, by the way, if anyone reading this has any Hollywood pull and cares about my opinion.

(Yeah, yeah, I know LL Cool J and Michelle Rodriguez were in S.W.A.T. together a million years ago -- a movie I, by the way, unsurprisingly, really love.)

Originally I'd been down with Sigourney Weaver as Coin -- but now I'm thinking Coin should be Linda Hamilton. Although, uh, 1991 was a pretty long time ago, so I'd happily settle for Navi Rawat. Remember when she was on Angel as the crazy potential-turned-Slayer? Carrying around that bone saw? Hell yeaaaaaah.

Oh, and my "stunt casting" choice: Adam Lambert as Cinna. Now that you've thought about that, can you really ever pick anyone else for that role? I'm not even a fan of his (in fact, I am pretty ambivalent about him right now, but I do have to say that his music is perfect for singing along to in the car on road trips), but I seriously think he'd make a great, and somewhat unexpected, Cinna.

Okay, I think that's all of mine. What are yours?


(FYI: I got all these images from Google and just uploaded them to my Flickr; none of them belong to me. For much hilarity, I suggest appending the word "badass" to all Google searches. It brought me quite a bit of delight!)

It is officially fall: I have had several pumpkin spice lattes, got a mani-pedi using Essie's Wicked instead of a bright orange or pink, and slept last night with the windows open and was cold. Yay fall! Yay! Soon it will be baked potato weather, too, and time for baked apples and roasted squash and roasted vegetables and after-supper mugs of hot tea and sweaters. I am pretty excited to pull out my favorite sweater.

Now: books! A while back, I had the pleasure of copyediting a book that I enjoyed reading. Sometimes the books I copyedit (for private clients or for publishers) are not quite to my personal taste. Hey, what are you going to do? Not everyone likes everything. But, luckily for me, when I copyedit for Baen, I pretty much always am working on books I enjoy!

Often I buy the books I enjoyed working on. The one I'm staring at right now, realizing I never talked about it, is Grand Central Arena by Ryk E. Spoor. It's standalone SF, about the test flight of a faster than light drive that fails, and transports the crew on the ship to a place they learn is called "the Arena," and there's no way to get home (or get out of the Arena) without either declaring allegiance to one of the alien groups also there, or beating the crap out of a bunch of aliens so they can be declared their own faction and have autonomy.

I can't say this is a perfect book by any stretch of the imagination (find me a perfect book, though, seriously), but I really enjoyed it -- the descriptions of space, a lot of the dialogue, the action sequences! What I really liked was more of a background point -- the exploration of the Arena itself, and the way that even though it's the setting, it's also a character, and never explained so much as to take away its mysteriousness.

I've never read anything else by this guy, but I have his first novel, which I downloaded for free from the Baen website, tucked away for after I finish the bulk of the work I have to do on the sequel to Salt and Silver - slash - when I go on vacation at the end of September.

I've also got my copy of Birthmarked by Caragh M. O'Brien, which looks good!

I did open up Heist Society by Ally Carter. It looks like it's cute, but I expect a lot more from a book about thieves -- I was disappointed almost immediately by the lack of details about the thieving and cons. One of the highlights of books and movies (and TV shows!) about thieving and cons are the asides to the consumer with notes about the way things are "really" done -- think of the voice over about how to be a spy on Burn Notice, or the way they structure Leverage. It's a little harder to pull off in a book -- but Elizabeth Scott did it really well in Stealing Heaven. Too bad for Ally Carter that she is no Elizabeth Scott. I'm going to press on, though, because it's a cute premise and maybe it will get better.

Although... I'm definitely giving up on The Body Finder by Kimberly Derting. I haven't even gotten to the plot yet, but I can't suspend my disbelief long enough to get there. Kimberly Derting just did not convince me that the teenage heroine really has no idea what it could possibly feel like to have a crush on someone else. Even if the heroine really never had a crush on anyone before this point, has she never read a book or seen a movie or watched a television show? Okay, maybe she's never read a romance novel or a YA romance (really?) and maybe she never read the Harry Potter books (??!!!), or watched a Disney movie (possibly more believable, if her parents have Taken A Stand), or... yeah, I can't even keep going. It's just way too unbelievable. I could buy that she's never experienced the feelings for herself before, but to not even realize that she has a crush, that the tingling, stomach butterflies, new attraction, etc., logically add up to having a crush?

Even then, I guess I could believe it, if the author did it well and convincingly. But this isn't convincing. And if the author can't even pull off this, one of the first scenes in the book, how is she going to pull off the rest of the (cool-sounding!) story?

I'm just going to set it aside and maybe one day, if I'm feeling more forgiving, I'll give it another shot. Maybe it gets better? I want to believe that, but I don't have the free time to spend indulging books that still haven't grabbed me by page thirty, or whatever. Especially when instead of reading it, I could be reading really good books, or knitting Olatz with the repurposed purple yarn anatsuno gave me! My digital camera is down for the count right now, but as soon as I get a new one, I will be taking a huge number of pictures and posting them.

Here's my mother's father's mother's recipe for luchen kugel -- basically, Jewish noodle pudding.

1 lb egg noodles (medium width), cooked
6 - 8 eggs (6 extra-large, 8 large)
3/4 white sugar (more if you like it sweet)
1 - 2 apples, diced
a handful of raisins (or more)
2 tsps cinnamon

Mix everything together except the cinnamon. We do 1 - 1-1/2 tsps cinnamon mixed in, and the rest sprinkled on the top.

Bake in a well-greased 9x13 pan (we use a Pyrex) at 325F for 40 minutes, but check it -- you might need an hour. When it's done, the noodles on top will be crisp and the whole thing will be set.


(It looks like I'm going to have to alter my plans for pumpkin cinnamon caramel sticky buns, since I can't seem to get canned pumpkin anywhere! Not far enough in the fall season, I guess. How disappointing. What should I make instead? Regular caramel sticky buns? We'll see...)

Hi, folks. Two things:

1.) Um. I finished Feed by Mira Grant, and. What was that? When I finally put it down, I felt like I'd been hit by a truck that came back and ran me over again two or three times. Emotionally wrung out, mentally exhausted, and in. love. What a great book. I am jealous of the person who got to acquire and edit it, for sure. Two thumbs up, and if I could borrow someone else's thumbs, I'd turn those up, too. Everything that Suzanne Collins got wrong in her Hunger Games trilogy, this book gets right. (Although... this is emphatically not YA. On the other hand, I'd argue that perhaps Mockingjay isn't quite YA either. So. YMMV.)

Brief summary: In the future, two viruses interact and turn people into zombies. Horrifyingly, the virus is in everyone, so once you die, you become a zombie -- do not pass Go, do not collect $200, go straight to getting a bullet in the brain. Twenty-five years later, this is pretty commonplace for people, but everyone responds to the reality of it differently. The story is told from the point of view of Georgia, nicknamed George (after Romero, duh), who is a news blogger who's been invited, along with her co-bloggers (her brother, who is an action-adventure blogger, and her friend Buffy, who writes fiction and poetry about the news), to hit the campaign trail with a guy who's running for President. Plus there's a (okay, pretty transparent) mystery.

I found some of the book predictable -- but I dissect stories for a living, so it's the rare book that's going to catch me completely off guard about everything. This book did it once or twice, though, so that's pretty amazing. I loved the constant pressure of figuring out what's true vs. what's news vs. what can be both, and the way everyone copes differently with a zombie apocalypse.

Mira Grant is an open pseudonym for Seanan McGuire, although I don't think it bears too much resemblance to her other books. (Which is to say that FWIW I don't like the October Daye books, but I loved this.)

and...

2.) Regarding the unholy alliance of Facebook, LiveJournal, and Twitter... I deleted my Facebook account months ago, so you'll never have your comments (or see my entries) reproduced there. I'd appreciate it if you did not share your comments to my entries on Facebook. For anyone who is made nervous or irritated by this, here are my invite codes to Dreamwidth. Feel free to take and use; I can always get more. As they're taken, I'll strike them from this list.

XQRN3RBA7GZAFAAABY3V 7BC5NWMAHA5P9AAABY3W 4SSRWRND4GXPWAAAEAPV M5BQCRVX93KAPAAALMFD 5ADR4TE8CE4GSAAALMFE

WX5XFBFN24EC2AAALMFK RC2G3Y7SEFPGBAAALMFJ KM2MSW8P33Y9XAAALMFH EA4ZQW4PCNRBJAAALMFG QBG66RFQRTCM9AAALMFF

Oh my gosh! Last prompt! The book meme went so fast... Ah, book meme, we hardly knew ye.

What I'll probably do next week is open up a post for more prompts -- about books, about publishing, about whatever. So think about what you want me to write about and/or discussions you want me to host!

For now...

Day 30 - What book are you reading right now?

In the upstairs bathroom, where I go only to take a shower or bath, is 206 Bones by Kathy Reichs -- I'm about halfway through, I guess, but I only read a few pages every couple of days, and I don't feel any desire to read more than that;

downstairs is The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. 1: 1889-1910 -- she reminds me of no one so much as my darling sarahtales;

in the living room is Faithful Place by Tana French -- almost finished!;

by my bed is Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight by Linda Bacon and Black Hills by Nora Roberts -- both of these I am almost finished with, so.

(I have about 25 pages left in Burning Lamp by Amanda Quick, but since I've had 25 pages left since April, and the idea of picking that book back up again makes me cringe because it is so so so boring, probably I will never finish it.)

I've set all of these aside today, though, because I want to finish Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy -- and tomorrow, once my mom is finished with her copy, I'll be reading Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins!!


( Other days of the book meme )