Sparks Fly Upward, by Stewart Granger

I'm not much of a biography reader, but after reading this interview on TCM MovieMorlocks blog, I knew I wanted to read this book. This quote from Stewart Granger in particular just really spoke to me:

"Even the happy periods are unhappy to write about because you say to yourself, 'Why the hell didn't I know I was happy then?'"

And I LOVED this book. Really loved it. He may have described writing the book as torture, but he has a very easy writing style to read, and his way of describing things is often very funny. I laughed out loud. A lot.

The only problem with this book is that it ends. And he leaves off his story in 1960, right after he made North to Alaska. Perhaps there was going to be a second book, but alas, it was never written. Too bad, as I was so not ready to leave his world and would happily have read about the next set of years.

He has many adventures, but I think what I loved most about him is how normal he was, and how much about him I could relate to, such as our shared problem of a nervous stomach, and how many things scared him. I think I might even have loved his stories about non-Hollywood stuff more than the movie-related stories. Such as his early life, and buying a ranch in New Mexico, then Arizona, and the trials and tribulation of learning to raise cattle. I commented in my last post on how happy his character was in North to Alaska. Boy, that couldn't have been farther from his real mood at the time that movie was filmed (going through divorce from Jean Simmons), which only makes me appreciate that exuberant performance even more.

He had great stories about the crazy filming of King Solomon's Mines. About exploding planes and grabbing a cobra for a shot... only to find out its fangs were not taped back like they were supposed to be. Yikes! I was very impressed with how Jean Simmons took Howard Hughes to court -- and won! Some of the sad parts of his story broke my heart. Life is not always kind to any of us, that's for sure.

I actually don't have the book in front of me right now (I forced it, er... lent it... to my sister, after I loved it so much and I really wanted someone else to read it... even if she has no clue who Stewart Granger is, LOL!), so I can't quote some of my favorite sections right now. But there were a lot. From memory, I think my absolute favorite bit was when he first arrived in Hollywood and Cary Grant took him to the Farmers Market. This was after the war, but food had still been heavily rationed in England, and Stewart Granger just flipped out over all the food on display for sale at the Farmers Market. He bought all this stuff he couldn't possibly eat all of, just because he could and he'd gone without for so long, with a bemused Cary Grant looking on wondering what the heck. I also loved a bit about him commenting on the static electricity and getting painfully shocked by anything metal. I forget that it's not this dry elsewhere in the world, and that that might actually be a new experience for someone, not something you live with.

Anyway, I'd rank this as the most enjoyable autobiography (or biography) I've read, and it really made me like him even more as a person than just the handsome, swashbuckling actor from the movies. Highly recommended for anyone interested in either Stewart Granger or old Hollywood.

Over my head

I belong to a book club, and we've been reading classics that we somehow missed in high school and college. Given that I was an English/creative writing major, it always surprises me what I missed. We just finished reading A Farewell to Arms. It's my first Hemingway novel. I've read a few short stories, but nothing longer. I owned The Old Man in the Sea, but could never get anywhere in it when I was a teenager.

A Farewell to Arms is a very easy read, but for me it was... odd. Endless descriptions of countryside that doesn't come into play in the story. And what's up with the bizarre repetitious dialogue? I swear, if that chick says she'll make him a good wife one more time, darling, I'll shoot her myself. I never could connect to a single character, because I never saw anything recognizable in any of them that I could latch onto, and I don't do well with books where I can't get emotionally involved. Call it a casualty of growing up on opera... I need to care and care deeply. And besides, the heroine was nuttier than Kirby's mother's fruitcake. What the heck did our hero see in her? Their whole love story baffled me. I literally sat there sometimes, brow wrinkled, wondering if these characters were supposed to be for real. And then the book just sort of peters out and ends... I think I'm just far too straight-forward and literal for a book like this. And as usual with something classic and highly praised that I don't get... it makes me feel stupid. Like clearly, I've missed the genius that's obvious to the rest of the world, and I'm the dolt in the corner with the dunce cap. (Poetry is the main literary offender in making me feel stupid. I just don't get poetry. But famous authors will sometimes make me go away and hide my tears of shame too.)

Speaking of opera, my favorite parts were whenever opera was mentioned. I loved the little bits about the tenor trying to get an engagement to sing at la Scala, and having chairs thrown at him during performances. Now that I buy! And I liked Rinaldi probably the best of the characters. I perked up watching the Italian army come apart at the seams during its retreat, gruesome as it was. Finally, some plot kicked in! But I simply never could engage enough with the hero and his loony-tune nurse to care about them.

I am slightly curious to see one of the movie versions, just to see if they're any more engaging. Despite all that, I'm really glad I finally got to sample a Hemingway novel. But as of now, Hemingway is not an author who meshes with my needs as a reader.

Day 25 → Your day, in great detail

Today happened to be a Sunday, and it happened to be book club meeting day. We had just finished reading The Constant Princess by Philippa Gregory. One person hated everything about the book, the other three of us enjoyed it -- except the ending. Can you say crappiest cop-out ending of all time? The book is about Katherine of Aragon, and right in the middle of her early life (her daughter Mary has not even been born yet)... the book jumps twelve or fifteen years for a very strange sort of 3-page interlude regarding Anne Boleyn which is really meant to be some sort of hasty wrap-up, and that's it. The end. WHAT? Are you kidding me? I mean seriously, crappiest book ending ever. It's like she just ran out of time, said "I'll end the book here, in the middle, and since most people know about Anne Boleyn, I'll throw this little moment in which has nothing to do with anything that came before..." I wanted to throw the book against the wall, which is not a good thing, because, as they say, it's the ending that sticks with you. Give your readers a bad ending and it doesn't matter how good the rest of the book was, they're going to be angry and not apt to pick up another of your books.

The rest of the book was easy enjoyable reading, nothing stand out wonderful, nothing bad, just entertaining. I very much enjoyed the comparisons of life in Spain vs. life in England, the day-to-day details about how exactly, people ran their homes, etc.

But the end... grrrr.

Anyway, we enjoyed lunch, and then, since it was such a lovely day, my nephew spent an hour throwing rubber duckys into the pool while we watched. Then drove home, and there's the day, nearly gone. I've walked the dog, and all that's left is dinner, some writing or reading, and then bed.

Day 13 → A fictional book

I'm going to assume the creators of this meme mean "a book of fiction" and not a make-believe book. Well, we already covered my favorite book of all time, so now I'll list my favorite book in fantasy/science fiction genre. Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle. Oddly, I've read other books by her, and haven't really liked any of them, with the sequel to Golden Witchbreed ranking as one of my most hated books of all time. But she got absolutely everything right in Golden Witchbreed. Characters, world, plot, her style and language... everything about this book just blows me away. I might even re-read it more frequently than I do The Secret Ways. I own multiple copies and have one right here at my desk, in easy reach. Great book.

Day 04 → Your favourite book

The Secret Ways by Alistair MacLean. Read first sometime when I was in my early teens. Was my favorite book from that moment on. Re-read it regularly, and there's always a copy by my desk. The ideal fictional read for me, pushes all the right buttons. It's just a perfect match for my reading needs. One of the main characters, the Count, is also my favorite fictional character. It's one of those books of which I own several copies, featuring different covers, because I'm a dork and do things like that. :-D

Wanderer by Sterling Hayden

I finally finished this book. I stopped a couple years ago because I was enjoying it so much, I didn't want it to end. I know, silly reason not to finish a book, but I do that sometimes. Leave things hanging or unfinished just to sort of preserve that feeling of bliss. Just a quirk of mine, I guess.

But I love this book on every level. I actually can't even find the right words to describe why this book moves me so much. I simply love everything about it. I love his voice and various styles of writing. I love how clearly his love of the sea shines through, how disparaging and bitter and honest he is about his own life, and yet how glorious some moments are despite (or because of) that. I love his writing. I talked about how much I loved his writing back when I was first reading it, and, if anything, my appreciation has only grown. I wouldn't mind owning a second copy, just so I could read it again and highlight all the phrases I liked. (I have issues with writing or marking books, but maybe if I had a specific copy just for that....) There were so many sections I admired that I wanted to write down in my notebook, but I realized if I stopped every few minutes to jot something down, I'd lose the greater flow, and on the first reading, I simply wanted to enjoy the entire story. I've never tried creating a favorite list of books, but this one is right up near the very top of it. It's so much more than just an autobiography.

I'd never seen Sterling Hayden in any films before I originally started reading his book. I knew him as a writer first, actor second. I think he would have liked that.

Serendipity and epiphanies

So just last night, I started a whiny, complaining email to one of my friends about writing. I got just one sentence typed in it before I decided it was rude to inflict my selfish woes on her and saved the email to draft instead of finishing and sending it. The sentence was:

I've probably said this before, but I do not appear to write well when I am not obsessing over someone.

And I thought nothing more of it. Just went to bed reading, as I usually do. My current novel is in PDF form, so I switched to a new book and read the first three chapters of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. Now, I'm not reading this book to learn how to draw (though I won't mind at all if my drawing abilities improve!), but this book is very highly recommended by Holly Lisle in her Think Sideways class. The lessons in the book are designed not so much to teach you how to draw as how to perceive things with the right half of your brain, so the drawing then comes naturally. Holly recommends this book for everyone, not just artists or even writers. I figured I'd better check it out, as I've really enjoyed the class and I respect Holly's opinion.

And right when I got ready to close the book for the night, that's when I realized (in a non-verbal right brain flash, LOL) that that's what "obsession" meant to me, and why I'd written that one sentence earlier. I've been using obsession to access the right half of my brain. It's my shortcut, my jumpstart. I mean, what happens when I obsess over some actor? I spend a lot of time daydreaming, a lot of time thinking in images not words. A lot of time letting the right half of my brain run completely and happily amuck while my left brain tries to tell me how completely silly I am, how useless it is to spend perfectly good hours lost daydreaming about dead actors, and to get back to reality. Right. This. Second. Every novel I've written has come during an obsession over one actor or another. From Sam Neill to Sean Bean to Vic Morrow to Dana Andrews to a little unknown actor no one has heard of named Fletcher Fist. I write very well when I can't get those actors out of my head.

So yes. My whining, complaining observation was actually valid: I haven't been writing well since November because I'm not obsessing over anyone anymore. Or in more logical words: I'm not accessing or listening to the right half of my brain as easily as I do when I'm gone over someone who appeals to me. And my left brain cannot write a novel without the right brain.

I guess this book has come along at a good time, as there appear to be no actor obsessions in my near future. I can use the book's techniques to get to the same place, and possibly in a better manner (though I can't see it as being quite as fun as my previous method.... :-D)

I am very interested now to finish reading this book and see where it takes me.

Books read in 2008

Following Rachel's entry (since she's the one who got me logging my reading habits two years ago), 2008 was not a particularly big reading year for me, though I was pretty much reading steadily throughout.

January

• Scardown - Elizabeth Bear
• Worldwired - Elizabeth Bear (These two comprise the rest of the trilogy following the first book, Hammered, which I read in Dec 2007. I enjoyed this trilogy a lot; they're my favorite Bear books so far, particularly the first book, Hammered, as it was the most personal of the three. The two sequels were a little more far-reaching in scope, a little less intimate-feeling, so what happened to characters didn't hit home quite as hard as it did in the first book. But all in all a fine, exciting trilogy. A very fast read.)

February

• Giacomo Puccini - Conrad Wilson

March

• The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer (this book, as I said before, took me months to read, cuz it was heavy wading through each character's section. I've read several books this year that really helped me pinpoint what I like and don't like in books. This was one of them.)
• Dust - Elizabeth Bear (based on the back cover's description, this novel sounded right up my alley... only it simply didn't work for me. There's a few reasons for this. 1) I don't think I'm the right audience for this book, 2) I think a lot of references that might have helped me understand things went right over my head due to my own ignorance, 3) the main characters never engaged me, and I think I need to read it again to figure out why, cuz I liked them, I just couldn't feel them or feel with them. I felt the entire book was telling me what to think, but not letting me truly feel along with the characters, which is an odd reaction to a Bear book; and 4) I'm told (there we go again with the telling) who the main villain is, and I'm told she did bad things, but I never actually saw them firsthand (other than briefly in the beginning, but while she did rather gruesome things, she didn't seem evil), so the entire end didn't work for me because I couldn't buy why I was supposed to be rooting for one team over another. Now, secretly, I'm hoping the assumptions the main characters make with their second-hand knowledge about the villain's supposed evil deeds is going to play into some greater plan (because this is the first book of a trilogy after all), but that could be wishful thinking on my part. This whole book was a surreal reading experience, like I was outside looking in at where all the good stuff happened, and I could see it and hear it, but not feel it, not get it. It was supremely frustrating because I like her work. I will read the rest of the trilogy when she finishes it and it comes out and hope the second two books work better for me.)

April

• The Satan Bug - Alistair MacLean (A re-read. While MacLean is the author of my all-time favorite book, I'd only ever read Satan Bug once before, back in high school. I should have known there was a very good reason for that. This book just makes me angry. It's a prime example of how not to write a book, particularly in showing authors what information they should never keep from their readers.)

July

• South by Java Head - Alistair MacLean (A re-read - This one got rid of the bad taste left by Satan Bug. This is one of the best by him. Personally, it gives me everything I want out of book. Very satisfying.)
• A Darkness Forged in Fire - Chris R. Evans (loved it! If Sharpe was an elf and had to fight the evilest of magic and his own past, that would be this book. I was mildly disappointed that one of the characters seemed headed towards the predictable, and I'm really hoping that's authorial deception and the next book will prove me wrong! But still a quick exciting read and I can't wait for the next book!)
• Atonement - Ian McEwan (Ugh, not even worth going into again)

August

• Foot Soldier: A Combat Infantryman's War in Europe - Roscoe C. Blunt, Jr.
  
• Odalisque - Fiona McIntosh (One of my favorite fantasy authors. This was the first book in the Goddess series, and I devoured it in one day. Fiona McIntosh's one of those author's whose books I start only when I know I don't need to do something else, because I will not stop until the book is done. So far, I have loved every book of hers I've read. They are exciting, adventurous, violent, scary, heart-breaking, never boring, characters grow and change, no one is safe, no one is spared. They always leave me satisfied and remind me that yes, I still really do love books, and not to be discouraged by the bad ones. I think I've bawled my eyes out somewhere in every trilogy of hers.)
• Emissary - Fiona McIntosh (book 2 of the Goddess series, finished the very next day. Unfortunately, I didn't have book 3 then, can't remember why, now, and I got left hanging but good! I was just able to get the concluding book a couple weeks ago, and Goddess was the first book I read of 2009. Again in one day, all 550 pages of it, because there was no way I was stopping until I found out exactly what happened to everyone.)

September

• Casino Royale - Ian Fleming (quick, easy read)
• Diplomacy of Wolves - Holly Lisle (a good exciting read... again, I got left hanging because I don't own the next books in the series. Grrr.)

October

• The Road - Cormac McCarthy
• The Cellist of Sarajevo - Steven Galloway
• The Crazy Man - Pamela Porter
• Cairo Kelly and the Mann - Kristin Butcher
• I, Coriander - Sally Gardner
• Silk - Alessandro Baricco
• Catalyst - Laurie Halse Anderson
• The Foreshadowing - Marcus Sedgwick

My, but October was the month, wasn't it? The first three I read over my birthday weekend, while visiting a friend. All these books were picked for me by my friend, and all these books were fantastic. Favorites were: The Road, a post-apocalyptic setting, very dark, very affecting, very sparse and yet so vivid. It'll stay with me a long time. Catalyst - wow, powerful book. The Foreshadowing - great combo of WWI, family, and what one can do with the ability to see the future.

December

• Vellum (This book took me forever to read. I started it a year and a half ago, gave up, then started re-reading in earnest back in September. It took me the full four months to get through it. And it is another book, like Dust, definitely not written for me. I like the writing, I like the characters, but honestly? This book made me work too hard for too little payoff. It's told in multiple little circles that all interconnect and swirl and re-tell each other's little mini-stories to produce the big picture. And that's cool and rather beautiful, but I prefer a straightforward narrative, it's that simple. I stuck with it, got to the end, and came away still not knowing what the hell it was really all about or what I should carry away with me when I closed the book. I know a lot of this one referenced things that went right over my head, although, because of following the wonderful journal of writer Catherynne M. Valente, I actually knew the story of Inanna. Loved the WWI bits, and everything with Finnan, but... ultimately Vellum is not for me.)

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

Ahhhh, habit. Writing habits are a good thing, and I'm finally settling back into mine. It's a really good feeling, particularly after a night like tonight, where I whipped right through 1800 words in an hour. It was quite nice to realize I wasn't stopping every paragraph to check my word count (oooh, look ma, another 101 words... how exciting!), I just immersed and went. I did the math and I need 2000 words a day between now and Nov 30 to complete Nano. Definitely can't afford any slackage. And short stories, I've found, are a far more difficult thing to tackle in a Nano sprint than a novel. On a novel, you can just blithely plow ahead no matter what, and there's room to roam. That doesn't work so well with shorts. At least not with my shorts.

Speaking of shorts, Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" has always been one of my favorites. I had this very treasured book growing up called A World of Events that had all sorts of fiction and non-fiction in it. I read "The Most Dangerous Game" over and over until I had sections memorized. Probably one of those early influences that led me to believe that the scariest villain will always be another human being. Here's a photo from that book (of course, I still have it!). I always loved this particular picture. I always thought Zaroff looked like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in this drawing (click pic to make big). And Ivan always scared the pants off me, as I'm sure he supposed to. And yes, this book was a teacher's edition and has all sorts of interesting annotations in the margins.

So, since I did so well on writing tonight, I had time to watch the 1932 version of The Most Dangerous Game and not feel guilty. The movie changes a few things, naturally, from the short. Mostly in adding a woman to the mix. It is Hollywood, after all. Gotta have a woman around for the hero to protect. Fortunately she's played by Fay Wray and is a nice mixture of spunky, brave, and understandably a bit freaked. And despite her, the movie rather eerily captured exactly the feelings and atmosphere reading the story gave me. Weird. I didn't expect that at all. The jungle sets (same ones used in King Kong), the foggy swamp, they all looked like I used to imagine when I was a little girl. Being chased by a bloodthirsty pack of hounds... eiiii! Now there's something that always makes me cringe and hide on the couch. (Too much of The Hound of the Baskerville when I was young, I think!)

I expected the movie to be corny, and it wasn't at all, exact opposite, in fact. It was tense and the violence and a couple of the deaths quite gruesome. Some of the dialogue was even straight out of the short story. They shortened the timeline from the story's three days to 24 hours, and that suits the movie quite well. Injects a lot more tension into it, as there's no time for the hunted to rest. This Zaroff's also quite mad, where I never quite got that impression from the story version. That makes him quite creepy in the movie. Him and his forehead scar, and his post-kill cigarette, and mad buggy eyes. AHHHH! I have to admit, if I were Fay Wray in this movie, I'd rather take my chances in the jungle too than be anywhere near Zaroff. Particularly as going into the jungle means going with Joel McCrea, and I'd go with him anywhere.

Ah yes, Joel McCrea. The real reason this movie got bumped up to the top of my Netflix queue right now. Thirty years younger here than in Ride the High Country, still learning how to act, but he's still a wonderful combo of earnest and athletic and naturally relaxed. And he's already got that intense way of looking at his female co-stars, like time just stopped for him when they entered his view and nothing else in the world matters but them. Something about the way he's so laidback the rest of the time just makes it that much more arresting. He does this in every film I've seen so far where he's the romantic lead, and it's one of the absolute sexiest things I've ever seen from any male actor, and, out here in the audience, it melts me every time.

The Most Dangerous Game only has an hour running time, so I'll probably watch it again before I return the DVD. I've always wanted to see the Richard Widmark movie variant of this story, Run for the Sun, but somehow I don't think it will be nearly as satisfying as this one.

More reading

I'm emotional right now anyway, but I've been crying during the last forty pages of the non-fiction book I just read. It's taken me several months to finish this book, "Foot Soldier: A Combat Infantryman's War in Europe" by Roscoe C. Blunt, Jr., not for any particular reason other than I just wanted to read it slowly, and I don't think I could have taken it in one fast sitting anyway. There's too much pain there to absorb any faster.

There's a huge difference between WWII fiction an WWII memoirs. No matter how grave and grim the fiction is, it just fails to convey the same reality that the memoirs do. This book had me in tears a lot, sometimes just in frustration and impotence that I can't do anything to change what happened. I thought often of the B-17 navigator I spoke with for a good hour at the Palm Springs Air Museum, how the gruesome stories he told me have that same candidness as the tales in this book. The WWII veterans who do choose to share what happened to them do so with chilling bluntness. No whitewashing, no gloss. Man's ability to abuse his fellow man is unbounded. The moments of kindness and comfort stand out almost as surreal, even when the givers are punished by death.

The last forty pages were arrival in Germany and seeing his first concentration camp through the push towards Berlin, victory, waiting to go home, and finally... home. The author's final journey simply to get home again had me crying the most.

We really do not quite appreciate what we have, and what could be taken away so easily.

Not for me

Okay, just finished reading "Atonement" by Ian McEwan and this book is a prime example of why I don't read so-called literary books. Call me illiterate, call me a bourgeois peasant with bourgeois tastes, but I hit the end of this book and went "That's it???? That's the end?" Long, mired in detail, unsatisfying, and it makes me feel stupid because it's acclaimed and won awards and I don't get it. Why? What makes this book "great?" Clearly I must be blindly ignorant to miss greatness when I read it. But why should I fall all over myself praising something that didn't entertain me and didn't give me anything new to walk away with at the end and ponder into the night and tomorrow and the next night? That didn't give me even a moment that made me go "whoa" and sit back and watch my life change. I don't need all action and excitement and mystery, quite the contrary. But if you're going to give me something to think about, give me something to think about in a way that makes me think! There's nothing cooler than having a book change the way you see even a small part of this world, and this one failed to do that for me, even though I think it was meant to.

That aside, I did enjoy the first two parts of the book, particularly the scenes in part one from Emily's pov as she listens to the house around her. That was beautifully written and really worked for me and were my hands down favorite part. And I liked Mace and Nettle.

The Naked and the Dead

Ta-da! I finally finished the book. Took me three months, but there were long sections of time where I read other books and didn't touch it at all. Then read the last 150 pages in the last two days.

Now I've wanted to see the movie since high school, mostly because the title fascinated me (seemed very illicit and Grown Up) and I knew it was WWII, and that fascinated me. Now, having read the book, I'm not so sure. I mean 90% of the book is people's thoughts and feelings. It's what's so good about the book (and also what made it so hard to read in anything but small doses -- it's hard being that close in someone's head through those kind of circumstances). How do you turn that into a movie? Without the thought processes, the actions become meaningless, the motives lost, the friendships that come and go in mere moments pointless. I mean really, this books takes 700+ pages to cover the set up and one patrol up a mountain and back. And there's also the flashbacks into each character's life before the war, from childhood to enlistment/drafted/whatever. You can't do that well in a movie.

SPOILERS from here down!!

Then coincidentally, I found this today in an unrelated search: Naked and the Dead movie snippet. Now that just makes me sigh. It's all wrong. The whole scene on the mountain staircase is riveting and shocking in the book, but they changed some key points for the movie and completely lost the charge from it. And, ahem, I see Hollywood can't bear to kill off a major character with one shot, dead and gone. Noooooo, they have to swap characters around instead. Grrrr. So, what happens to Wilson in the movie? He was far more interesting than Hearn ever was anyway. And that's one of the big problems here. They've clearly set up Croft as the "bad guy" and Hearn as the "good guy." Cuz Hollywood needs heroes and villains. It can't deal with a squad of guys who all get equal page time, who all have good and bad traits, each character as important as the next regardless of his rank. Noooo, that won't work in Hollywood.

I particularly don't like it because Croft was my favorite character, the one I most related to in the book. Naturally, he's not a bad guy to me. Sure, he's tough, he's ruthless, but that's only parts of him. To simply categorize him as a a nasty son of a bitch (which is clearly how he's being played in the movie) doesn't show the motivating factors, the fears and doubts, the fact that he can freeze in battle like the next man and how it haunts him, what completing a mission means. It doesn't show how close to collapse he is himself. He's very human.

When I read the book, Hearn was the guy I didn't like. He was arrogant and complacent at the same time, lacked the necessary experience. Exactly the kind of man I do not want leading a recon squad behind enemy lines. If Croft had led the patrol from the beginning, there would have been a different outcome.

What makes the book work so well is the non-judgmental contrast between the two men (all the men, really -- the characters are what make this book amazing), and how throwing a guy like Hearn into an established squad changes all the dynamics, undermines discipline, etc. But Hollywood can't do that, not easily.

I'll still watch this film if it ever comes to DVD, because I'll want to see just how much more they screw up. And I'll also want to see if Aldo can save any of the book's version of Croft in the movie version.

Organizing the library

Long overdue, as I've been living in the new house for 6 months now, but I finally started organizing the books. I had just emptied boxes any old which way onto shelves, just to get the boxes out of the house. Now's the fun part. And naturally, I'm finding all sorts of books I want to read. Or re-read. But I'm still (still!!) reading "The Naked and the Dead" and I have promised myself I won't start anything new until I finally finish it, no matter how long it takes. I've decided it's just so very very dense that I can only take it in small doses before I have to process and think and mull things over. The second half has been better than the first (took us half a book, but we're finally out on patrol and there's some action... yeah, I'm shallow, but I need action in between everything else) and I'm really enjoying it now, it's just no popcorn read, that's for sure! Oddly, I think my favorite bits are the flashbacks, and that's because of his choice in observations of the people. Very fascinating.

Pea soup

So, I started reading Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" about a month ago. And I'm not even halfway done. I was starting to think maybe I'm getting old, eyes not working the same, patience thresholds changing, but then I buzzed through Webmage and Cybermancy by Kelly McCullough in two days. And I just flew through Elizabeth Bear's Hammered. I just can't read "Naked and the Dead" fast. If I make it through a whole chapter, that's an accomplishment. The funny thing is, I'm really enjoying it. I like this book a lot. I simply cannot read it fast. I'm not quite sure why that is, either. The words don't feel any denser, but it takes me longer to read a sentence, to process it and move on. And, sure, the plot's slow, but that's because it's exploring the men themselves. I love that. But ten or twelve pages and I need out. So, I try to read a few pages every day, and I content myself with that, intersplicing it with the quicker reads to keep my sanity.

Plans

So, today I cleared the nano-chart off my whiteboard (where I kept track of daily word totals) and wrote down the writing projects I want to finish instead. Helps to look at their titles every time I walk into the kitchen. They're running constantly around in my head, but this gives me focus, and I can give them deadlines and keep track of progress.

Since nano, I've been mostly reading. Reading reading reading. Three novels down, working on a fourth now, a bunch of short stories, some biographical non-fiction. And, as usual, with so many words floating around in it, my brain is coming up with new stuff. And, as usual, the new stuff is little bits and images, a bunch of unconnected bubbles floating around, waiting for the links that will turn them into stories.

I need more tea

Should be working on last revision of novel, but haven't quite brought myself to that point. Maybe because I know that once I do, I'll be in it up to my neck, and there'll be no room for other things. And I have other things I need to do first. Projects with deadlines that won't wait.

It's funny, cuz I've had a very productive couple of months; the productivity has just been in other arenas.

Read a young adult novel recently called "Premonitions" by Jude Watson. It's a lesson in vividness and brevity, and I enjoyed it immensely. I got into her writing many years ago when she was writing the Jedi Apprentice books. Yes, I was in my 30's reading young adult Star Wars books. Yes, I bought the entire series as they came out. I visited the bookstore frequently, waiting specifically for the next book to hit the shelf so I could snap it up. I bought not one but two copies, and gifted my best friend with the second set, because we both love SW that much, and she had also fallen in love with Jude Watson's writing. You couldn't pry those books out of my collection, I love them too much. The first one she wrote, "The Dark Rival," is still my favorite. It was bloody brilliant, and I was an instant fan.

So, browsing around online, I found some non-SW books she'd written and bought "Premonitions." Ah, what an enjoyable book. Very similar to the SW books, in that she doesn't wimp out on the difficult topics. She dives right in and makes her characters deal. It's one of the things that grabbed me in the SW books. I've been proofing a lot of fanfiction recently for a print version of a zine, and if I see one more overwritten, prepositional phrase-loaded, participial phrase-loaded, dangling modifier (oh God, this one is killing me, kiiiiiiiiiillling me!), and adverb-loaded sentence, I'm gonna scream. And yes, I read examples that shoved all those things into one single sentence. You'd think the page would bend out of shape from all that word weight. This novel was the biggest breath of fresh air after drowning in prose that simply doesn't work. Short, concise, direct. There's much to be said for reading (and learning from) good young adult novels.

Perfection

Sometimes you read a story, and there's no words to describe how completely it satisfies. The story, the characters, the dialogue, the way the subplots cross and meet briefly, necessarily, but then go their own ways to their own conclusions, the sheer emotional impact, and the ending that makes you smile and cry all at once.

I read one of those tonight. It's a story I could never even conceive of, let alone write, and that's not a bad thing at all. On a story like this, I only ever want to be a reader.

And on the left side of the railing...

I've known for a very long time that my strengths in writing are best suited to longer works: novellas and novels. And, oddly, I seem to be able to write decent flash fiction. But shorts... I struggle with them. Part of this is personal preference. I don't like reading short stories, so why should I think I would like writing them? I don't like them for the same reason I don't particularly like songs, but prefer opera, or symphonies, or a film score. I like my moods sustained. I want to go into something and stay there. I don't want to be amused for mere minutes when I could disappear into a world for hours.

That's not to say there aren't short stories that I enjoy, and I do read shorts regularly. And yet, when I look back at the stories from, say, F&SF magazine, the first two that pop to my mind are Kate Wilhelm's "Naming the Flowers" and Adam-Troy Castro's "The Funeral March of the Marionettes." Both are novellas, not shorts. Both awed me. Both rank among the best stories I've ever read. The other one that really stands out is "Death and Suffrage" by Dale Bailey, which was much shorter and just as fabulous, and any and every story written by M. Rikert. I would buy anything she wrote, sight unseen, because her stories are always that good. But those are about all that I remember by title and author. A handful out of.... fifteen years of diligently reading the magazine? That's not to say I didn't enjoy most of the stories I read. Because I did. F&SF consistently prints good stories. It's just that in the realm of the shorter stories, it's more difficult to find something truly inspiring.

So I write short stories infrequently, and most of them get read by maybe one person I trust, and then they get filed away in the "practice" folder. Because that's what 90% of my shorts feel like to me. Just practice sessions, experimenting with voices and tense and structure. They're useful for that. I have only three or four shorts that I really like and think would be worth working on. And the one I like best of all, I'm not ready to write. I know that. I'm missing something yet that would allow me to do it justice. And so it sits, just a title, the outline of the story, and a few experimental paragraphs, waiting.

unfocussed brain

Hm, slumping into a non-productive writing phase. Grrr. This annoys me, but I just have no good words in my head right now. Part of this is because I know I'll be out and about this weekend with no possibility of writing, so I tend to start drifting in anticipation.

So, I'm opting to launch into full-on reading mode to recharge the language batteries. I've actually been reading quite a bit lately, but in small doses. I'm way behind in my F&SF and Realms of Fantasy magazine reading. Like several months behind, so there's tons of short stories to read... which will be good for that Garage Sale story coalescing in my brain. But, of course, last night I started a friend's novel first, and that was the end of any consideration towards those poor neglected shorts. :-D

Book reading

Finished reading "The Florentine Dagger" by Ben Hecht, written in 1923. Interesting book. Starts out as a rather simple mystery and gets rather complex by the end. A strange obsessed narrator/hero who doubts his own sanity adds to the spice. The first murder had this guy knifed and a crucifix laid on his chest and a candle lit by his head. Now me, I'm a huge lover of Italian opera, and so I read that and exclaimed outloud, "Tosca!" Cuz after Tosca knifes Scarpia, that's what she does, sets a crucifix on his chest and a candle (or two) at his head. Then, as the novel progressed, a mysterious lady named Floria appears. Tosca's first name is Floria. I'm thinking, hm, what an odd coincidence, is there supposed to be a connection here? And as it turns out, yes, there was a deliberate connection and the ending has everything to do with Tosca. Which I dig to pieces, of course, Tosca being my favorite opera.

Which made me wonder how such a book works for someone who doesn't have this background? Does it work better or worse? Would it simply be a much more straight-forward mystery story to someone unfamiliar with Tosca? Would the end then catch them by surprise, since the foreshadowing would be meaningless? Since this book was written in 1923, the audience of that time had a much bigger chance of being familiar either with the opera or Sardou's play than anyone reading this book today. There's also a whole subplot regarding the Medici family and their violent history. None of it is explained, it's taken for granted that readers know who they were. So, does a book still satisfy when your readers are no longer conversant with things that were once more commonly known? Such questions fascinate me.


I liked this section:

"I've a lot of speeches I've always wanted to include as a part of my first and last proposal. We'll get into a cab and I'll propose."
He hailed a taxi and they entered.
"Drive," he smiled at the chauffeur, "slowly and carefully, anywhere you want."
The man nodded, grinned, and pocketed a bill.
They were silent as the cab moved away.
"Well," said Florence at last, "you may begin."
De Medici looked at her. "I love you," he whispered. "Will you marry me?"
"You promised speeches," she laughed.
"I've changed my mind," he said, staring at her. "I can't think of anything to say."