Author: jasonloch

My top 5 fantasy books

During a moment of boredom, I decided to come up with a list of my five favorite fantasy books.  I’ve adopted a very broad definition of ‘fantasy:’ basically, it’s anything that has some sort of supernatural events in the plot.

(1)  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke. This is, withouta doubt, one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time.  Clarke does a great job of blending high fantasy with 18th century England.  The world she created is one of the richest fictional worlds I’ve ever encountered.  The historian in me also loves her ability to use real people and events to build her story.

(2)  The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud.  Okay, this isn’t one book, but I’m lumping the three of them together because they’re all great reads.  Like Susannah Clarke, Stroud is quite good at world building and his alternate reality England where magicians rule is quite interesting.  He also takes a risk by telling the story from multiple perspectives and, for the most part, it pays off.  The chapters from Bartimaeus’s perspective are especially fun to read, as the djinn has a fabulously snarky sense of humor.

(3)  The Scroll of Saqqara by Pauline Gedge.  This novel is a retelling of part of the famous Setna cycle of Demotic stories (a reasonably good translation of the original Egyptian text may be found here.)  It is the story of Prince Khaemwaset, who seeks and finds the legendary Book of Thoth, only to suffer the most dire consequences for himself and his family.  Gedge does a great job of staying true to the original source material, while still putting her own mark on the subject.  The twist ending  is one of my all-time favorites.

(4)  Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance.  This is more of a short story collection than a novel, but all the stories are interrelated.  Vance is one of the most technically proficient writers I’ve ever read.  He manages to use advanced and unusual vocabulary without coming across as an over-writing hack like Lovecraft.  Of all the stories in the collection, “Liane the Wayfarer” is probably my favorite.

(5)  War in Heaven by Charles Williams.  This is probably the oddest book on the list.  Ostensibly, the plot revolves around the Holy Grail, but this is worlds away from Indiana Jones.  Much of the novel is devoted to exploring themes of Christian Neoplatonism and, if you can get past the dense, philosophical passages, you’ll find an enjoyable story.  This novel has the most memorable opening line I’ve ever seen: “The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no one in the room but the corpse.”

What about you: what are your top five fantasy books?

Alice in Blunderland

Tonight the Physicist and I went to see Alice in Wonderland.  Being a huge Tim Burton fan, I’d been looking forward to seeing it.  Alas, we both left the theater feeling disappointed.

Visually, the movie is great.  The special effects are wonderful and they really bring the world alive, even when watching it in 2D.  Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter are great as the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen respectively.

But good special effects and two good performances can’t make up for a lousy plot.  The scriptwriters tried to cram way too much in and, as a result, everything just feels rushed.  The writers also decided to shoehorn in elements of Lewis Carroll’s famous poem “The Jabberwocky.”  I suspect this was done in order to sex things up with a bit of action, but it ends up being one more thing in an already convoluted mess.

Depp and Bonham-Carter aside, the acting isn’t all that great.  Mia Wasikowska’s Alice is wooden and lacks charisma.  The White Queen, played by Anne Hathaway, is just annoying with her constant vapid fluttering.

The final strike against this movie is the ending.  It’s nothing more than a cliche-ridden attempt to turn this into a Girl Power film.  This is even more frustrating because, if the film had ended a scene or two earlier, it would’ve been a much stronger ending.

FINAL GRADE: C

The cautionary tale of H. P. Lovecraft

A few years ago, I was browsing in a bookstore with a friend and he suggested that I should pick up a collection of H. P. Lovecraft short stories.  After listening to my friend praise Lovecraft, I bought the book and eagerly started reading it when I got home.

I soon discovered that reading Lovecraft could be a very frustrating experience.  There’s no doubt he was very creative.  His Cthulhu mythos is tremendously rich and I enjoyed the many cross-references he managed to work into his stories.

Despite the rich world he built, I was less than impressed with the quality of his actual writing.  His prose is filled with tortuous sentences that groan under the weight of their hyperbole.  He also demonstrates an inability to murder his darlings.  A case in point would be his (over)use of ‘blasphemous’.  The first time you come across a reference to ‘blasphemous tracks’ or the like, it’s an interesting and unconventional use of the adjective.  But Lovecraft seems rather impressed with his cleverness and so he uses the word again and again so that, by its fifteenth appearance, it’s just annoying and repetitive.

Lovecraft also frequently describes things as being too monstrous for the human mind to behold.  That’s fine once or twice, but when it’s repeated across many stories, it just comes across as something of a cop out.

That being said, there are a few Lovecraft pieces that I do enjoy.  “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” provided some of the inspiration for the plot of A Theft of Bones and “At the Mountains of Madness” does a nice job of using the Antarctic setting to convey terror and isolation.

But, for me at least, Lovecraft’s greatest value lies in his vivid demonstrations of how not to write.  A good writers’ group or a critique partner would have probably improved Lovecraft’s writing immensely, allowing him to be a great writer instead of being  America’s greatest bad writer.

Blurbage

As an aide to writing the inevitable Dreaded Query Letter, I’ve been trying to come up with a concise-yet-interesting description of the plot of A Theft of Bones (that’s the working title of my WIP).  So far, I have this:

The day college freshman Andrew Mackay is attacked in the woods by an undead creature turns out to be one of the luckiest days of his life.  That attack brings him to the attention of the Guardian Order,  the law enforcement arm of magical society.  No sooner has Andrew started training to become a Guardian than he and his new friends are confronted with a puzzling series of grave robberies where someone is using daimons to reanimate the dead.  The signs eventually point to the Children of the Emim, a fringe group of magicians that most people have written off as a bunch of cranks.  Now Andrew and his fellow Guardians must discover if the Children are as harmless as they seem, or if there might be a sinister truth behind their strange lore.

How does it sound?  If you saw this blurb on a book cover, would it pique your interest enough to buy it?

A replacement for Scrivener?

In an earlier post, I mentioned that one of the best things about having a Mac was that it allowed me to use Scrivener, a great word processing tool designed for creative writers.  Since it’s a Mac-only program, I thought I’d have to make do with Word from now on.  Now, I’m happy to report that I may have found a replacement for Scrivener that will run on Windows.  It’s called PageFour and I discovered it through a link on the Scrivener website.  Scrivener’s creator had all sorts of good things to say about it, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

My initial impression was that PageFour is basically Scrivener for Windows.  It has the same binder format that I loved in Scrivener, though here it’s called a ‘Notebook’.  It also has the snapshot functionality that proved to be so useful when I was working on the first draft of my WIP (basically, it allows you to take a ‘picture’ of the page you’re working on that you can easily revert to if you don’t like the subsequent changes you’ve made).  In fact, the snapshot tool was originally a part of PageFour and the creator of Scrivener liked it so much that he borrowed it for his program.  PageFour also has a ‘Smart Edit’ feature that allows you to scan your text for repeated words or phrases, making it easier to identify and murder your darlings.   I also think it’s easier to format text in PageFour since you have a toolbar that allows you to position text and change its attributes.  With Scrivener, you had to do all that through a pull-down menu.

PageFour isn’t a carbon copy of Scrivener and it’s missing some of the bells and whistles of its Mac cousin.  For example, it doesn’t have anything like the corkboard or the notecards.  It also doesn’t look as polished (like almost all Mac programs, Scrivener was pretty).  These issues aside, I really like Scrivener and I think I’ll end up purchasing the full version.

WIP revision update

Despite a multitude of distractions, I’ve managed to make decent progress on revising my WIP.  At first, I was disheartened at the amount of red ink I was putting on the pages.  But when I took a step back and looked at what I was changing, I was relieved to see that it was fairly minor stuff.

The majority of the changes are prose tweaks and dialog improvements.  There are also a fair number of typo corrections.  The biggest changes so far have been adjustments to some subsidiary plot points and the consequential addition of a new scene.  But the main plot is holding up well, thankfully.

One of my main priorities in revising is tightening the text by cutting unnecessary words.  I’ve pulled a lot of these little buggers from my dialog.  When you first write a conversation, I think there’s a strong temptation to follow normal speech patterns as closely as possible and have your characters begin with a greeting and some small talk.  But those things are really nothing more than a waste of space.  In most cases they aren’t going to advance the plot and most readers are going to end up tuning them out as they read because they’re basically white noise.

Another issue I’m having is tagging speech in a long conversation.  I don’t want to overuse said because that gets repetitive, but, at the same time, I don’t want to reach for the thesaurus for increasingly obscure synonyms.  So I often try to indicate who’s speaking through a description of body language or movement.  But that too can get repetitive.  I’ve already noticed that my characters do a lot of nodding, and I don’t want people to think they’re a bunch of bobbleheads.

More about Tutankhamun

The blogosphere has produced some good commentary on the recent JAMA article I discussed here.

The improbably-named Shoveling Ferret blog has a four-part series discussing the article:

Part 1:
http://shovelingferret.blogspot.com/2010/02/commentary-on-recent-tutankhamun.html
Part 2:
http://shovelingferret.blogspot.com/2010/02/commentary-on-recent-tutankhamun_18.html
Part 3:
http://shovelingferret.blogspot.com/2010/02/commentary-on-recent-tutankhamun_19.html
Part 4:
http://shovelingferret.blogspot.com/2010/02/commentary-on-recent-tutankhamun_8728.html

The author has an MA in Egyptology from Chicago and her commentary is often quite amusing, so I highly recommend checking it out.

Of course not everyone agrees with the conclusions of the JAMA article.  This blogger has posted an in-depth refutation of the idea that the KV55 mummy could be Akhenaten: http://www.kv64.info/2010/03/dna-shows-that-kv55-mummy-probably-not.html

I’m not a geneticist (I don’t even play one on TV), so I can’t comment on the scientific accuracy of her conclusions.  But I think there’s a very strong possibility that the ancient Egyptians at least thought the KV55 mummy was the body of Akhenaten, given its desecrated state.  There’s also the circumstantial evidence of the presence of some of his grave goods in the tomb.  If the mummy is in fact NOT Akhenaten, how do we explain these things?

The Quote of the Day though comes from Justine over at Shoveling Ferret.  She has this to say about the intricacies of Amarna-period royal genealogy:

Pedigree charts are annoying enough, but add in a heaping helping of incest and I’m just like “dude, they were all fucking each other and then they died, the end!”

What I’ve watched: NieA_7

I really wanted to like NieA_7.  I really did.  When the Physicist and I first started it, it seemed like it was going to be a lighthearted romp.  The characters were quirky and interesting and the series’ premise of aliens living peacefully among humans seemed like it could be really cool.

Alas, our enthusiasm was short lived.  The characters in NieA_7 manage to be even flatter than those in Wolf’s Rain.  Niea, the titular character, is amusing to watch, but her antics never progress beyond pratfalls.  Her roommate Mayuko spends the entire series moping and sulking like she’s the Queen of Emoland.  The other characters occasionally have funny lines, but, for the most part, they just exist.

Given how flat the characters are, it should come as little surprise that the plot leaves a lot to be desired.  Not much actually happens beyond Niea hamming it up and Mayuko sulking.  Subplots are hinted at: the bathhouse where Mayuko lives is facing financial difficulties and Niea has a difficult relationship with the other earthbound aliens.  But neither of these subplots end up going anywhere and few things about the series’ underlying mythology are ever explained.  For example, towards the end of the series, the wreck of the mothership that brought the aliens to earth disintegrates into a multitude of shining lights.  It’s hinted that this is a Big Deal, but we’re never told what the hell happened.

Also frustrating was the awkward attempt at drama.  After about seven episodes of lighthearted comedy, NieA_7 tries its hand at drama and fails miserably.  Drama only works if you have a compelling plot and interesting characters.

Pros

Funny.

It’s short.

Cons

Flat characters.

Forgettable plot.

Deliberate obscurity.

FINAL GRADE: C.

Shifting gears

Last spring, I took a break from my WIP and wrote a short story involving the novel’s antagonist.  I submitted the story to my writers’ group and, while it received generally favorable comments, one member made a particularly trenchant criticism: he said that my writing was too academic.

What he meant was that I had unknowingly structured my story much like a paper.  I started out with a ‘thesis’ and the rest of the story consisted of the ‘proofs.’  Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for suspense and, consequently, the story kind of plodded along.

That incident taught me that I’d have to unlearn (or at least ignore) a lot of the writing skills I’d picked up in grad school.  In academia, you’re supposed to make your point as clearly and concisely as possible with a minimum of obfuscation (though I’ve read many articles where that wasn’t the case!).  But in fiction writing, you must delight in deception in order to build a sense of suspense in the reader.  Instead of giving them a road map, you’re often giving them vague or even misleading directions.

As I work through the revisions of my WIP, I’m on the lookout for any instances of ‘academic’ writing.  Thankfully, I haven’t found any yet, so perhaps I learned my lesson.

The Theban Mapping Project

I promise I won’t turn this into Jason’s Boring Ass Egyptology Blog, but I encourage any of you who have even a passing interest in ancient Egypt to check out the website of the Theban Mapping Project: http://www.thebanmappingproject.com/.

While you’re there, I suggest you try out the Atlas of the Valley of the Kings.  It’s an interactive map that shows you every tomb in the valley and, in many cases, there’s a little video narrated by Kent Weeks (Director of the TMP) giving a bit of info about the tomb.  The 3D reconstruction of KV 14 (Taworset and Setnakt) is also worth a look.