idiosyncreant | Entries tagged with love war books

On Twitter this was promoted by a friend as "steampunk Jane Eyre"--naturally, I was onto this like jam to toast. My library had a copy, even!

"Steampunk Jane Eyre" was enough to get me to order it, but it's not precisely the best descriptor. It's more of a fae-in-early-Industrial Age urban fantasy.

It *is* however, a Jane Eyre-made-fantasy. And marvellous.

A factoid that I found a bit startling to just read without warning--an early novellette version of this K.D. Wentworth told Connelly it read as a Jane Eyre story, and it's since been developed into that more fully.

It works as a skeletal structure for a fantasy story quite beautifully--of course, horror-tinged paranormal stories do tend toward the Gothic. This retelling has cleverly detoured the often-troublesome midway of St. John and Sisters in the original (much like the recent movie) without removing it.

( more disconnected thoughts )

Overall, a truly strong debut--I really look forward to seeing what Connolly does next. I'd even recommend if you're going to buy some new books to read this is a good one! And I hesitate to tell people how to part themselves from their money.

Actually, I had an idea that you could do something similar with Rebekah, except I don't think I should be the one to write that book, so...

Unlike Greygallows,

timeripple's romance recommendation, "Lord of Scoundrels" did not arrive with a horrifyingly gauche cover. I was a bit disappointed. It also was not a large-print edition. There is always a trade-off...

Well, to start with, from the outset this was Not Your Georgette Regency. Though it maintains a certain composed diction that one expects (and can relax into) from this set of historicals, it also established right from the prologue that it was going to be unflinching about the realities usually alluded to more coyly.

( the meat of the matter )

I know that I've talked exclusively about the hero. The heroine was markedly well-adjusted for a romance heroine! In a way, it was a story about the making of the hero, as opposed to the romance making the heroine. Bravo for that: it's one of the stream of choices made to not go the easy route but go the INTERESTING one.

Having a hero get all the complexes? LOVE IIIT.

Farm Life: Staring at the gross-looking thing the dog is chewing to be sure it's a dead thing it's SUPPOSED to have. This morning, luckily, it was just a really dirty bone. (My favorite scene for imagery remains one for horror-value in the Aolon project, that came straight out of my backyard...)

Love, War, Books: I'm really happy to announce that Archivalist is talking to me again, we met last night over the much-abused notebook I've mutilated removing traces of earlier drafts and foolishness. We're back together now.

I Am A Yarnie: And I've been updating my yarn blog a bit more lately! Working on chronicling the color-crushes that emerge into patterns when I look at my Favorites page on Etsy, presenting it as a Lookbook for fiber, etc. If you were ever curious about the kind of abstract correlations I come up with as far as palettes in fiber go, this is a good way to see like I do.

I R Srius Writur: a friend is starting a new blog on literature and the objects we associate with them, as a prelude to starting her own shop of literature related jewelry. She asked me for a contribution, and I said YES of course. I spoke on The Hobbit, and despite one glaring grammatical mishap, think it's not too shabby. Neither is her lovely blog, The Pretty Librarian. I have always admired her style, and am glad to have a way to hear from her about it regularly!
She linked to my post from her Facebook with the comment, "from a real published writer!" Which cracks me up like an Easter Egg...

Next on my Agenda of Evil: to combat the rejections that poured in yesterday with fresh submissions, continue this Misty Mountains spinning, in hopes the sunshine will one day return, and see a bit more of this new, darker Archivalists story...

I joked after finishing Letters to My Nemesis that I was going to have a deuce of a time with my next projects, because that one had felt so...competent.
Like I'd finally got a hold on what I was trying to do.

This only lasts so long before I reach to do something better and getting there is another fingernails-and-teeth fight with inertia.

xx 00 by scarabuss

Sure enough, every time I put this book down for the weekend I come back to it on Monday with something I need to go back and edit.
I had this happen with Backlash Girls, too, and so I feel a bit bad that Vigil is the book that's in my hands for this particular fight.

Backlash Girls has a lot of flaws. Like, I'm scared to go back and look at it, kind of flaws.

Maybe Vigil Assistance will hold up despite this, though. That would be nice. The saddest thing for me as a writer is looking over the graveyard of old manuscripts that will never be worth anything, and then the half-way house of the ones you're not quite sure can be saved...

Friendship. by *Be-at

You just have to go on writing believing that this book and these characters are beautiful and the best and WORTH IT, though.

If I hadn't had faith in those books I wrote when I was sixteen, I wouldn't still be doing this. And I don't know what I'd be trying to be happy doing if I wasn't writing books...

Winter has returned to Oklahoma, as if we needed a reminder it's still February. Pity.

I am happily scribbling away, and knitting away, too, to try and justify this new bizarre taste for Korean idol reality TV. (Don't ask.)

Yesterday I bought a great little book at the library book sale called The Nanny Handbook, the 2003 edition but with some much more outdated ideas. This is actually a resource for Vigil, which is officially working titled: The Nanny Rules of Vigil Assistance because rather than being sidekicks for the superheroes, they're more like PAs. And being PAs to semi-celebrity law enforcer superhumans is...a lot like being a nanny.
I'm hoping that the book will help me come up with the comic strips Jackson is going to be creating, but it's great entertainment on its own.

snippet: Jackson's First Day At Work

The man who threw open the door was the classic white posterboy for college extracurriculars or trendy jeans, except old enough to have laugh lines. The dark blonde of his hair, and lighter, scraggly half-beard brought out his jaw line and dark eyes. These eyes seemed to flinch when he saw her, but his smile right after that was warm enough. Maybe it had been the sunlight.

“Hi, I'm Jackson Marino, with Vigil Assistance—”

“You're even almost on time—I just blew up the microwave. Do you know how to work a gas range?”

He stood still, as if she wouldn't be welcome to enter if she said no.

“I've operated a couple,” she said carefully.

“Great, come on in.” He led to the kitchen. He wasn't very tall, she realized—when he'd been barring the door he had been disproportionately intimidating. “To be honest, this morning I had no idea what they thought you could do for me. I do all the cleaning for Karel anyway, he's just the living alarm clock. Don't take this the wrong way, but I am out of diapers several years now. You know what they say about acting high and mighty, though. Of course the microwave was going to blow.”

KPop Mini-Feature of the day: A Live Performance with a neat show idea for mostly non-dancing ballad crooners, 2 AM

Hyden, the "Vigilant" (superhero) MC of my new book needs a tattoo.

Of course, being me, though I'm not sure what I want it to be, I have a VERY complex set of criteria. It has to be odd and non-serious, on the lines of RDJ's Chiller font shoulderpiece:

or my uncle's chosen Muppet:

If you were so self-ironic that when you got your first tattoo you got something that almost mocked the idea of getting a tattoo...what would you get?

Day 29

It is time to write a love-letter to an author. If you write to more than one, keep it to 3 or so, and make your words count—mini-essay time!

Dear Diana Wynne Jones,

Thank you for writing what seems like whatever you feel like. I'm sure this isn't true--I'm a writer, I know a bit about how it goes.
But I love the way you've taken huge weird ideas and made them feel so common-sense in your story that it feels like only certain impossible things are possible in the book we're reading but that that anything is possible to form a world in any given book.

I haven't liked all of your books, but the ones I've loved have more than made up for it in the passions that they have formed.

I wish you weren't going so soon, but thank you for leaving your books, instead of keeping your wild ideas to yourself. It must have been very brave of you to start doing it when you started. And I know some of my favorite authors who you inspired, and I'm also grateful for them.

Much love,

Bethany

Current Mood: pensive

If I talk for more than a few sentences about my time in Japan, the jonesing to see my town again comes flooding in.

Living in Japan is the first thing I loved so much I was heartbroken when it was over. In fact, so far the only thing.

So full of things strange and beautiful--so incandescent with an alien mind.

Today's subject that got me going was looking up a map like this:

The darkened area in the middle is where the castle used to be--note how wonky the roads go before they get there, for the most part. That was on purpose--to prevent invasion. Though heaven knows the mountains circling the area were enough to challenge people needing to get OUT and there wasn't much to invade...

So anyway.
I'd like to go knock back a few sushi to soothe my sorrows, but I live a half-hour from even Reasor's sushi.
I'll just write my novel and hope someday I have an advance good for some sushi as well as taxes...

Current Music: Layla (Unplugged) Eric Clapton

I am doing line-edits on Aolon.
On the opening of the first volume, to be exact.
Which has a syntax of the comparative fluidity and clarity of oak planks. My effort to create something better resembles sawing said plank with a butter knife.

Not impossible, no. More hopeful still if I have exaggerated slightly, and the butter knife is actual a steel dinner knife. (Not steak knife, though.)

Still, I'm looking at emptying the Caspian Sea by the teaspoon here, to go for a fresh metaphor that still involves cutlery.

(Yes, that feeling. Thank you, Sophie.)

It's cut and dried work, though. Good for the early morning to get my brain running. Rather than trying to think through structural reworking that involves new material, which I find more like trying to carve hard glass. Especially the shattering part...

It's just the density of it that I had to whinge about.
I'm breaking it up by peeking at a later volume which was less maladjusted, and only needs little detail work. \(I think it may have huge structural issues, but I'm not borrowing trouble.)

Meanwhile, the not-quite-fanfic story continues apace, and I'm almost done with the first draft of the Con's signs for taping by doors. Mighty, yes!

Current Music: Sleepsong by Secret Garden

Helm's Deep
The piece of the soundtrack named this is one of the more beautiful movements of the normal themes throughout the movie.
I was listening to it for the first time in a long time this morning, and picturing the moment on the screen, and remembered the hardest moment of this whole epic for me.

Do you remember the glimpse during the equipping of the forces, of the young teen boys, in helmets that don't hide their children's faces?
It broke my heart.
Not because it was calculated to make you see what the battle would cost, but because it put in my eyes a reality that was painful. Boys who want to be men, standing in the gaps, be it for the defense of their people, or the whim of a drug lord. Those boys DO die, if not in Helm's Deep.

This is the power a story can have. Just that one moment was enough to hit me with a tragedy that never let go.

What are the moments of stories that have broken your heart?
Or given you revelation?

Sometimes I just need to be reminded that stories are powerful. I'm sure you do, too.

Current Location: transported
Current Music: Helm's Deep - Lord of the Rings Two Towers Soundtrack

Rewriting.

Now THIS feels like beating my brains out on the keyboard.

I rarely have it feel this hard when I'm writing, and I guess I'm lucky. When I'm rewriting short stories it doesn't always feel like pushing through an invisible wall of the consitency of that tacky glue with only the strength of my thoughts. (My thoughts are neither sharp, nor Hurcules. This is not much fun.)

But I needed to do this. I've known it and have been neatly dodging the issue in most of the book. Or just working up to it. Yeah, that's a more positive take, and likely as accurate. >,<

I did a little work on cleaning up tags but didn't tackle any of the biggies. Still not sure if I'm going to have a tag-bar longer than my posts on the front page, but we'll see.

Back to rewriting, there is a sort of exhilaration when you cut to the quick and start rebuilding something that fits the real vision of the story.
But still, brains would be leaking out my ears if I weren't taking copious breaks.
Maybe I'll get better at this? The blogging of Veteran Authors does not offer much hope on this, though...

Current Mood: under seige

Draft of Seditious Intent done! Though it's a really crappy one, I've decided that's okay. I've got Story, we're good for the moment.

Two books I think everyone who ever drops through here should read:

The Face in the Frost (John Bellairs)
one line press? I just finished reading this and am now insanely eager to OWN a copy. Munnies must come first, munnies must come first...

Women Who Run With the Wolves (Clarissa Pinkola Estes)
a book about love, life, and stories from all over that teach us (especially women) about it.

I'll add reasons here once I'm done reading the chillens more Skulduggery Pleasant.
ETA~ I's back! So, without any further ado,

( More About Them )

Current Mood: excited!
Current Music: tempus vernum - Enya

I went to Eureka Springs with my family yesterday. That was fun, and the place is lovely. I'd love to go with people who shop, and also some sort of expendable cash.

But the real highlight of this trip for me is going to be Pea Ridge, a Civil War historic national park, a totally unexpected sort of thing.

I find the Civil War depressing--reading a book about the overarching politics and basic history was enough for me to feel informed on the issue. Delving into the atrocities and such is not appealing to me. This trip was more than an expedition into forest trails and coming across a great abrupt bluff with spars of rock spearing up below. I read the meatier information blurbs avidly, listened to Mr. Docent when he went into the more fascinating branches carefully.

Someone, I think at a Conestoga panel, mentioned that if you want to learn about war, read up on specific battles. They mentioned a few they thought were noteworthy, but I don't write epic fantasy (*much*) and didn't think more of it.

Until watching the video of the battle here (which in a few ways, including scale is a significant one) then driving and looking out over the actual area and putting a picture together in my mind that was so compelling and new of what it looked like to fight a war.

Generalizations are the bane of Truth, you know it?
And specifics are awesome.

Current Mood: contemplative

I need to open this blog up a bit. Even I find mere status updates boring to write, so I'm going to be reference-queen and start blogging about things I'm thinking about. First:

thegraybook's post on the Deathly Hallows is what to read if you care about that sort of thing. She had a lot of the same ideas I did, and has already articulated them, besides being more cool than me. I will post a spoilerish comment to it under the cut though.

Second: Justine Larbalestier's thread on what romance works for "you" was an interesting one, because I certainly have my type and favorite storylines...but if it's plausible, it works for me. I want to know what my associates think, though. Some starting thoughts:

First of all, HP-series romance was a bit boring. This is long established by other people, and I need not argue it here; if you don't agree, I'm glad you were able to enjoy the stories that bit more. It's the possibilities around the edges that make me smile. I was, actually, pleased with the way Ginny and Harry finally get through to each other in Half-Blood Prince; it was a bright spot in the story. A much needed one. Anyway.

thegraybook talked about the devastating loss to George, with Fred gone. My solution? That excites me much more than the adorableness of the fact that Hermione will yell just like Mrs. Weasley for Ron?

He marries Luna, of course.
Can't you see her as a joke-shop proprietess? Suggesting things by accident and then being thrilled to have helped when her husband comes out with it? Telling people things that they can't figure out if she's serious or not? Honestly, Luna will figure reality out. But she'll still say things that people will not get—and if she doesn't figure it out, what's better than a serious person talking about incredible things, in a joke shop. George may take joy.

Personally, I think I'm most happy with the quiet constancy...this can be masked by the banter-rich conflict romance, which I like a lot. I blame it on the Anne books, where all Gilbert ever wanted was to impress Anne. This seems so sweet to me. And it might have been my first romance-book with any subtlety of the sort. The perfect example is Sense and Sensibility. The only reason I can forgive Edward for being lame (according to my standards) is the fact that he's enduring with a very loyal heart pulling him in two directions. But it's Col. Brandon that makes the book really lovely. He's a deep-seated romantic. He loves Marianne so much he won't demand anything from her, because he's not sure he has anything to give back.

I'll admit I watched the movie first, so Brandon is Rickman in the "whole package", but I honestly didn't even like him at first. He grew on me.

I like the ones that grow on me. And honestly, voices like dark Belgian chocolate help...

That's it for me.

And you?

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June 2022

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Ironskin by Tina Connolly
LORD OF SCOUNDRELS - not your grandma's silver fork
these things are related by chronology, not blood
Weekend Wars with Vigil Assistance...
snippet, K-Pop video, and a note from my [rather cush] trench
tattoo ideas for the quirky and ironic
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*pain*
Virtual Salon - Heart Break Moments
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"Seditious grandmothers enabling Rogues...what's up with that?"
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Ever Bethany

do we make it out alive?

Entries tagged with love war books

Ironskin by Tina Connolly

LORD OF SCOUNDRELS - not your grandma's silver fork

these things are related by chronology, not blood

Weekend Wars with Vigil Assistance...

snippet, K-Pop video, and a note from my [rather cush] trench

tattoo ideas for the quirky and ironic

(no subject)

(no subject)

pain

Virtual Salon - Heart Break Moments

(no subject)

"Seditious grandmothers enabling Rogues...what's up with that?"

(no subject)

(no subject)

Profile

June 2022

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