Flights of Fantasy

Somewhat shorter comments this time since none of them enraged me. :)

Dust, Arthur Slade (Kindle) - ( A bit short for a full length novel, and simultaneously too long for its plot, but not bad. )

I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett (Hardback) - ( I love stories about the witches, and Tiffany is shaping up to be one of the best. )

I'm technically still reading "Latro in the Mist" but I've stalled slightly because a) it's a bit strange and fragmented and therefore hard to get into when reading in short bursts and b) I'm in love with my Kindle right now.

I've also read "For the Win" (Cory Doctorow) but I feel the need to take a deep breath before raving about that one, and "Let's Get Digital" (David Gaughran), which is a book version of a blog that was part of my sudden excitement about self publishing a couple of weeks back. And a short story. Shall try and write them up tomorrow. Next up on my Kindle is "Empire in Black and Gold" by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

In the last couple of weeks, I started reading again: as in, I essentially prescribed myself books and went off to read them every day at lunch time whether I liked it or not. And then I discovered that while I wasn't looking there has been some kind of indie publishing revolution and it is the most exciting thing ever and it may well be game changing. Essentially, it is now possible to self-publish and not instantly damage your reputation beyond repair - because people are doing it whose reputations are rock-solid, proving it is not just an act of vanity or a lack of talent.

So the end result is that not only am I now powering through my pile of books I've been meaning to read for years, but all of a sudden I've bought a Kindle and I've got a list of indie and traditional sources for new books, and I am writing solidly every day for the first time ever. Because it has dawned on me that this new model - producing content regularly, self-publishing, drawing in readers by just writing what they want to read - is something I've been doing for ten years or more with fanfic. It's something I could do with original fiction. That's not a new thought, but previously I figured that by doing so I'd ruin any chance of being picked up for "real publishing".

All at once I'm not sure it matters. Maybe what matters is teaching myself to produce new content quickly and skillfully and then putting it out there for people to read. Maybe I'll make money off it, but maybe it doesn't matter if I don't.

I am so excited right now. I feel like a great big anvil of expectation has suddenly dropped off my shoulders. There are other options. Where I've always had in front of me a sort of big, monolithic goal with no clear set of steps to achieve it (write-a-novel-and-get-it-published) I am suddenly seeing a set of steps. Get into the habit of writing regularly. Finish my dangling fanfics, work on my speed and self-editing so I can upload a chapter every couple of weeks instead of every three months. Start doing the same thing with original writing at the same time. Talk to people on forums and comms and blogs. Be interested in books and writing and storytelling. Go to conventions. Write stories. See if people want to read them. See if the people who like my fanfic want to read my original fic. See if there really is an audience for my weird shoujo-manga-western-fantasy-novel blended tastes.

And, of course, actually read on a regular basis. If nothing else, I've read two (traditionally published) books in the last two weeks which I'm absolutely convinced I could have written better. That's encouraging. I keep meaning to write a semi-review, which is in fact why I logged on here, but I seem to have become distracted by glee.

I also totally have a brand new Kindle sitting in a box beneath my desk and I am dying to open it and play with it...

When I was a child I played pretty much every genre of computer game in existence, for the simple reason that almost all the games we had for the Amiga were in the form of free demos my father got with magazines. So there'd be a couple of levels of a platformer or a shooter or something, and I'd play them until I could do them really well, but there was never anywhere to go after that. I just played everything we had.

Over time, I've played games less and less. Not because I don't want to play them, but because the standard price of £29.99 is (still, despite now being a grown up with a job) too much to casually spend on something which may turn out to be a bust (because it won't run on your system, because it wasn't what you hoped, because it's buggy or broken, because it's too short or aimed at hardcore players and way beyond your skill level...). If I spot a game in the shop that I like the look of, I then have to put it back on the shelf, go home, look it up on the internet, try to figure out whether the positive/negative reviews are relevant to me or products of the critic's own taste, try to work out if the system specs are what it says on the box... and honestly, by the time I've done all that, the initial "ooh, shiny!" reaction has faded and I just file it for possible later purchase. And then forget about it.

Then recently I started using Steam, and suddenly I have more games than I've had in a while, partly because it sells them cheap (much easier to impulse-buy something priced £5!) and has plenty of casual games (being as I do not have so much time to play massive multi-hour epics these days, either).

And partly because all at once, I can play demos again. Huge numbers of Steam games have downloadable demos. I can play for an hour or so and see if I like what I'm getting. This only really dawned on me yesterday, at which point I promptly went hunting for interesting things and got five or six new games to try out. So far I like most of them, although 'Amnesia' was too terrifying and I had to stop playing. :S I can't afford to just buy them all straight away, but even the most expensive is priced at the £15-20 mark, so I can reasonably keep them on my wishlist and acquire them one at a time.

Games! Shiny games! :)

Whether I write it for NaNo or not (please no, it's a trilogy for heaven's sake, although I suppose I could make it my goal to write the first book...) Demira has all of a sudden done that thing that worlds and stories sometimes do, and made a dozen connections to draw itself into a coherent whole. I walked home from work tonight just to give myself time to think. I've suddenly got the 1000 years of history that were missing sorted out, and I now know what happened to Atalan. There is a comet. It is awesome.

Random (related) question: if you were reading a book set in a fantasy world with no connection to ours, would you find it misplaced if one of the characters were called Persephone? Or would you 'translate' it to assume it referenced some similar myth/concept in this other world?

It's taken me 24,000 words to get something I don't mind posting, but here we have SPONTANEOUS CREEPINESS WARGH.

( They're in the middle of a hurricane... )

It comes of being horribly spoiled with readers over on Livejournal, I suspect. However, in furtherance of my attempts to separate church and state online/public/fandom life from private life, I shall start updating here again.

Current excitement is NaNo! I have ideas, I have characters, and I don't know whether to try and hold off and write without an outline, or to have a go at plotting it out this year. At any rate, I've got PLAGUE in it, which is always a lot of fun.

I've also been reading a lot of (published) fantasy - I seem to have finally got over the disenchantment that drove me away from professional fiction and into the realms of fanfic when I was a teenager. I'm thinking about writing reviews, or recs, or trying some kind of specialist listing - books with canon slash, or interesting gender themes, or Absolutely No Romance (for when you are sick of wondering which of the female characters is going to be forced into the role of Obligatory Love Interest)... not sure yet.

About a month ago, there was a story being linked here and there on Teh Internets: Hair Stylist Keeps Armed Robber as Sex Slave. In case it disappears (it is already inaccessible on its home site), here is the text of the report.

( Hair Stylist Keeps Armed Robber as Sex Slave )

What bothered me at the time, and has continued to bother me since, to the point where I am writing this unfashionably late, is the fact that the story was universally linked as "funny". Or at the very least, bizarre and quirky. The jovial tone of the write-up above was adopted without exception (at least that I saw), and the first time I read it, I snickered along with it, and prepared to send it on to people I knew...

And then I flipped the genders in my head.

Suddenly it wasn't funny any more.

The whole thing - the article and the attention it received - very neatly avoided the more correct headline, which should have been, "Hair Dresser Rapes Armed Robber". Flip the genders. Imagine a woman who attempts an armed robbery, is subdued by a man, who then takes her away, does not call the police, and repeatedly rapes her before letting her go. Imagine the outcry if the police declared "We don't know what's going to happen now" in that instance (well, one hopes - I suppose it is, depressingly, entirely possible that there would be no outcry, that people would feel vaguely that it was justified, as though rape were an acceptable stand-in for the criminal justice system).

More than that, whole tone of that write-up is deeply disturbing. The use of the phrase "sex slave" keys straight into the porn world, and implies that the lack of consent is only cosmetic; a "sex slave" is a fantasy being who obeys your every whim and who exists only to give you pleasure. The writer tells us that the woman "had her way" with the man: a cute, coy phrase that suggests a playful dominatrix. The underlying assumption is: you can't rape a man. He's always willing. He'll never turn down free sex. Men don't say no.

(To which one is tempted to respond: so how come there are so many single women bemoaning their lack of boyfriends?)

To finish up: the same article rewritten with the genders reversed:

( Hair Stylist Keeps Armed Robber as Sex Slave - Looking Glass Version )

Strange? Yes. Unusual? Yes. Funny? Not so much.

I am currently experimenting with diet drinks to try and train myself to adjust to the taste of sweeteners. Verdict so far:

1. Coke Zero: okay while you're drinking it, tastes like real Coke, but leaves a noticeable aftertaste.

2. Diet Pepsi: tastes quite a lot like real Pepsi (which I prefer to Coke), but the sweeteners are pretty noticeable while you're drinking it, though there's no aftertaste problem.

3. Diet Coke: WTF this is easily the most drinkable of them so far. o.o Doesn't taste like real Coke, but that's okay since real Coke isn't my preference anyway, and the sweeteners aren't noticeable while drinking or afterwards as more than a brief backtaste. Am I just getting used to them?

4. Pepsi Max: will not try this except in utmost extremity as my experience of it in the past has been that it is undrinkable filth.


Other discoveries: diet tonic water is interchangeable with real, because the backtaste of the tonic itself masks the sweeteners. Fruit juice is FULL OF SUGAR WTF woez.

... I am still boggled by the Diet Coke thing, I thought it was going to be disgusting.

Well, hello there, internets.

I'm not quite sure what I'm doing with this yet. I do have a livejournal, but I'm not going to link to it here (and I will not be linking to this journal from my LJ, though if you know me from over there, feel free to say hello over here as well). My livejournal has ended up rather a mish-mash of things from various parts of my life, and I'm not always happy with the collisions.

This journal, specifically, is geared towards my original writing, online discussion of writing, meta topics, bits of journalism, and possibly the odd craft project. My intent is to try and write more frequently in it, and for what I write to be more than just a personal chronicle. I'm intending it as a "public" place, by which I mostly mean that I would like not to be hideously embarrassed by its contents* if I should suddenly become a Famous Author with fans looking me up on the internet.

... we'll see how long that lasts, shall we?

* This does not mean there will be no porn.