Bummer

Maxed out my credit card in France, so now I'll have to wait until the card has cycled through its automated payment day. Hope it is soon, because I need to buy more books to read, dammit.

To blog or not to blog: questions of POV

So, another one of those: I'm going to take someone's quote and formulate my answers here and not in the original blog because I stray off-topic or some such and anyway, I'm just a digital blip and what I say here is more interesting to me than to you. And if that makes you feel all-important, remember: you're only a digital blip too.

Marshall Payne wrote (28th June):

First person narratives have their own problems. Have you ever noticed (and I'm sure you have) where the overuse of the word "I" snakes down the page like a testament to the Me Generation? Often you have to accept this as a convention of first person narrative, but as a writer it's something I try to watch out for.

I haven't, because most books out there aren't 1st but 3rd person, preferably multi-headed because in this day and age of internet brainshrink, nobody seems to be able to stick to one head.
N.B.: everybody now blames the internet for the brainshrink, but I remember the early 90s when the internet was still far too clunky to influence young brains and Google wasn't even invented: everybody blamed TV, couch-potato zap-culture and MTV's blitzkrieg on young minds (incidentally this is also before neo-R&B or urban pop or whatever you wanna name it made music channels, videos and artists uniform. It was a real blitzkrieg, like Celine Dion followed by Metallica => *head explodes*). And I still think US-styled advertisement littered television holds more responsibility in brain-fatigue issues than the internet. From experience I know that when I haven't watched BBC or a rented DVD for a while but stuck to whatever's on the tube, I notice an increase in brain-fatigue while watching a movie ("where's that damned ad break?"), and the added quirk of a conditioned bladder ("dude, pause this shit because I really have to pee").

Now, back to that remark on 1st person: As a writer I feel more at ease with 1st person than 3rd, I don't like the limitations and the choices you have in 3rd. I understand that you can do 1st person badly (and I'm certainly not saying that I do 1st person particularly well, or write well at all), but considering the "I vs. s/he ratio" in published stories/novels, for every one done badly in 1st person I can show you three done badly in 3rd person (where probably the same error, of overusing "s/he", pops up).
Now one of the main difficulties of 1st person is the need to establish your character's identity separate from the reader's identity, while or just because a reader naturally identifies with your main character. This might require some more "I" than a 3rd person character would demand. Another difficulty is that reading being an individual business, the reader is geared to the self. So if the 1st person ticks off the reader's internal critic (who'll become confused between the real and fictional "I") your story/novel is screwed. That's the problem this new main character that popped up for my new project poses: 1st person and extremely unpleasant. That's gonna be real difficult.

As a reader I like 1st person, even done badly, better than 3rd person. It's one of the reasons that kept me glued to Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms:
  a) the first 1st person I've stumbled across in a long time
  b) it was done well
  c) I really liked the voice

and a + b + c = love on first page

I'm certainly no fan of multi-POV, because in most instances it's used as a simple device to create tension, switching heads per chapter and having cliffhanger after cliffhanger after cliffhanger. It's good for one book, maybe two, then I tire of the carrot. Which is one of the main reasons I've fallen out of love with Peter F. Hamilton: too much carrot, not enough real content. Still read him, though, sort of like thinking fondly about the good times you had with an ex.
Multi-POV is also overused, in my opinion, because it is what sells in this brainshrunk market, which means stories that do not even need the reader to be inserted from different angles or different places into the story use multi-POV. Sometimes it is done well, usually when the rigidity of structure goes.

For instance, the first head-switch in Newton's Nights of Villjamur had me frown my annoyed frown and sigh my annoyed sigh (over the last 15 years, I've seen a surge in the use of multi-POV in the genres I tend to read, so it's become some sort of nervous tick). But by the second switch my nervous tick had gone to sleep, and by the end of the book I was under the impression of having read a single POV, which is how multi-POV should work: tell one story, highlighting different angles or places, but stick to one story that flows nearly continuously. Don't be tedious and have the different heads do stuff simultaneously unless it has a function ("Oh no, dude's gonna be in the corridor that other dude's about to blow up!" Agony! Tension!). And keep those instances short. Why?
Well, long chapters with different heads all running around doing stuff (near) simultaneously ("Dun dun dun!     Meanwhile ...") work the first time you read it. Next time you pick the book up, you skip everything you know wasn't either super pivotal to plot, or described or characterized extremely well.
Or maybe that's just me. But there's this choir of extras in my mental background ready to yell "Oh get on with it" whenever I even come close to thinking "'Oh no, we're switching to that stupid git/annoying twit again". I can't help it. Tad Williams and Peter Hamilton love to work with this kind of multi-head tale, and somewhere during the reading I always get this feeling the story gets subjected to the rigorous structure they've set up.
I've reread everything of Hamilton a few months ago and must say there was much skippage once past the Mandel stories. Same for Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. I've been toying with rereading Otherland, but then I figured I could better keep my forces? patience? for the rest of Shadowmarch.
And I do like rereading and finding new nuggets of beautiful language or ideas or themes that I glossed over the previous read. I don't like rereading and having to plough through superfluous pages and go SKIM! and SKIP! And I believe most of those superfluous pages are created by using another head when it's completely unnecessary.

Another recent multi-POV that I was extremely pleased with as reader was Stephen Deas' The Adamantine Palace. The slightly more structuralized POV-switching certainly had the potential of making this a wall-collision book (as in "Not again! Harrumph!" and book colliding with wall), but Deas made it work by keeping the reader's interest on what might happen with characters while you're not following them, instead of trying to write up every little bit that happens to them MEANWHILE or working with explicit cliffhangers. If I remember well (and see, now I'm thinking of rereading a book I read only a few months ago, how about that?), he even plays around with the POV enough that you're not really head-switching: you're camera-switching, and sometimes following one character, then another, in a particular setting/group. And right up till the end I was sort of wondering/hoping/fearing (all confused) that the next switch back to the mercenary, the scene would be one with the mercenary absent and the dragon belching.

I'm having difficulty with finishing Eric brown's Necropath (I still have 5 chapters to go). The mystery is solved, what's left is a bit of thriller loose end (will Vaughan manage to find the Vaith before his nemesis finds him?). The set-up with the multi-POV has kept Vaughan at a distance, and it is clear that the nemesis will find Vaughan through Sukara, so I don't feel particularly involved in the resolution. The only reason I push myself to finish the read is because I want to find out if there is anything in the ending to justify the use of multi-POV. Up until now I have the feeling the story would have been better and stronger when told simply from Vaughan's POV. I'll come back to this when I do finish the book.

Edit 5th July: So, to conclude my reading of Necropath, I stay with my initial opinion: the story would have been stronger if Brown had stuck to the 3rd person POV.

The Unbearable Lightness of Detail

My sinuses no longer feel like I've been eating grenades all night, so I should stop reading blogs. Blogs keep me from doing real work, because they tickle my brain and then I'll just have to write some shit about a subject because I like to hear myself talk, especially in an empty room. Seriously, enter a single person and I'll shut up.

The current spark comes from MCN's blog: on tie-ins, so there, I'll ramble a bit and pretend I'm alone in this room.

I've never read a tie-in, or fanfic, or whatever. They have intrigued me over decades, but I never got round to picking one up, and not always because there was a snooty friend with snooty remarks standing right next to me. The thing withholding me from reading tie-ins is twofold:
1) it's a series, and when I read A, I know I'll just have to read B no matter what the quality of writing/storytelling/worldbuilding/yadda. Or, more wearying, if I read K, I'll want to read L *and* A. Choices! [sigh] I'm not good with choices. And no, even if it are separate stories strung out through time and produced in no specific order I must have some sort of order (no order equals more choices!), either chronological in written time or chronological in write time.
2) most of my series-quota goes to television series. Not that I watch tremendously much television, but I do have some series I follow. And when there's not enough television series, I'll go on a DVD binge and say watch all of BSG in a long weekend or some such. Because A=> B => C until my brain shuts down. It's sort of like giving me a box of delicious cookies and I'll just have one. Ha. And another. And then another to unlearn the bad habit. And well, that one just looks lonely now...

Both points together make that: to go on a binge I need to have everything on hand and in order. Believe me, you did not want to see me after my BSG-thon where I realized I had to wait for Season 4! Like, a whole summer!
So before I open the tie-in can of worms, I think, I should read Pratchett. Yes, he's one of my gaps. And since I put the library in order yesterday, I know exactly how big a gap it is.

As to writing tie-ins: when I was young I made up fanfic for Les Chevaliers du Zodiaques (Saint Seya for ye English types). I invented new characters, made sure every little detail matched up or was accounted for. It was fun and immensely gratifying, even if I never wrote down more than three sentences (all the rest is still stocked somewhere in a dark recess of my brain).
And when ST:TNG and more came along, Cow Watcher started churning out cool story lines, even if I would not hear of it because I was into *serious* literature then. No, no tie-ins! By the time I thought like it might be fun to try anyway, there were already walls filled with ST:TNG tie-ins and the idea became too daunting.

Daunting because we're talking fans as a reader base. And we all know where the word fan comes from. Add to that: fans are alien creatures to me, because I completely lack the gene for fanaticism. Sure, the dude knows how to make music and I'll probably buy every CD he cranks out, but why would that make me interested in his favorite food or make me want to have his babies? Simply incomprehensible.
Daunting in no lesser way because it must be a tremendous job to write a tie-in, with all the little details you have to take into account. Unless it's your particular geek-world, I'm thinking lots of hours of studying, and editing and re-editing. And then editing some more. Somebody out there might go "The Death Star's thermal exhaust port's above the main port, numb-nuts" and the core of your superb action finale comes crashing down.

But then, looking around on the web, you even get crazy fanatics like that if its your own original fiction, and not only in the hard SF section of readership. I fear it. It scares me, how do you deal with stuff like that?

And then I take a big gulp of air and realize that whatever hairsplitting nitpickers might throw at me (once I do get published, and do get readers that might harbor one of those creeps), it's my party and I do what I want to. The thermal exhaust port's above the main port, you say? Well, *I* am using the Empire's revised designs from Return of the Jedi, nana nana naa naah! (Every time I see that Buffy scene it makes me cringe with fear and cry with joy at the same time).
It is the sort of problem solving that's inherent to the writer's toolbox, I guess, and it makes excellent subplots (well, sure, you'd think it's impossible for this guy to survive, but what you don't know, dear reader, is that he's part Frugnithal, and those aliens have yadda yadda...). Or changes to the basic plot (which is usually somewhat more annoying a problem than weeding out a splurge of subplots).
You solve the problem by giving the reader something to help suspend belief. Okay, the real die-hard nitpickers might not be so easily swayed, but they can and will be challenged to a saber fight.

See, back at the time I was watching reruns of reruns of Les Chevaliers (and Goldorak, Albator, Capitaine Flam, Dragonball) I also watched the one soap that will not die. Yes, I used to be a closet The Bold & the Beautiful watcher. I exhausted the excuse that I was a serious couch potato and simply could not help myself staring at the box with the little people in it, that I was waiting for Dragonball to come on, or whatever. Not only was I ashamed to admit I enjoyed watching this ... pulp ... people scorned me (gently) for it.

Only years later I realized that a lot of what I know about storytelling (especially concerning emotional yanking of chains and cliffhangers) I learned from watching B&B. They perfected the Art of Belief-Suspension. Studying how they fooled and lured me as a watcher was a great school. When done well, suspension of belief is a magic trick, because, seriously, how many times can she miraculously return from the dead to seek revenge on Stephanie Forrester? You make sure your reader is "in" your story, i.e. emotional involved *and* invested, and the reader will go and instantly forgive&forget whatever needs to be f&f'ed.
But then, also, suspension of belief only works as long as your audience is immersed and emotionally invested. When the TV goes off, and your audience goes: not her, not again? Where's Buffy when you need her? you might want to consider that particular horse dead and flogged.

Alright, end ramble. Need food.

New and old

So a while ago I ordered a pile of books from overseas to fill the void of words inside. I ended up with a 50-50 split of fiction and non-fiction, and I'm up to my last fiction book. If I manage to read it by the end of next week (though I really have a ton to do) I'll have read 5 books in 4 weeks. Seriously, I haven't done that in ages. And then I do mean ages. Without checking, I think Zelazny was still alive back then, and Peter Hamilton had only one or two titles to his name.

I was apprehensive about the experiment, because normally my MO for buying books was pretty much: I like his/her writing, so whatever he/she touches I buy and read. New stuff = bad stuff, unless I can ... smell it. Feel it. Read it.
But then my favorites all died, if they weren't dead already, and this made me sad. But then there were treasures found in the vault, books published postmortem, and I was happy again. For a little while. A very short while.

The idea of buying only what you know is not fully my own choice, because see, if you read English in a non-native English country, you'll find your choices are limited anyhow. Back in the days the only way to find SF/F in English was by:

a) browsing secondhand shops
This exposes you to lots and lots of different things (authors, genres, styles,...). Back in the days a copy would cost you the equivalent of 50 eurocent to 1 euro, which was the price of a beer! If that's the cost, the book you buy doesn't even have to be particularly good. If it turns out the story sucks or the style is not you or non-existent, you can use it to prop up your desk, give it away or toss it in the recycling bin and not cringe or feel guilty for wasting money.
But secondhand bookshops have gone the way of regular bookshops: unless part of a chain, most of them had to fold. And that means the lowest you can get a decent copy for is 4 euro ('decent' meaning: still glued together and cover not eaten by someone's dog), and it has nothing to do with a beer now costing 2. These4 euro will buy you a book no one really likes because they have twenty copies who were owned privately (not remaindered, because different wear and tear, names scribbled inside,...) Obviously 4 euro will buy you a book you'll want to toss in the recycling bin. So let's not.
I get to know some authors that way, who were not available in the library, English or translated: Alfred Bester, Colin Kapp, and Tim Powers (who was too new).

b) taking a train to Brussels (which you don't do every day or week) and browse W.H.Smith and Sterling, and sometimes the small selection at Fnac. But WHS has become Waterstones and now carries a less ... adventurous range of SF/F. Sterling seems to do the job with more heart but alas far less room than Waterstones (SF/F/H all crammed together). Fnac has a smaller selection of what you'll find in Waterstones. These days, you always see the same books, whether in Fnac, Sterling or Waterstones. Duh, of course, best-sellers are best-sellers and will be in your face. But it's more... Only big sellers. Only big houses. Only no risk. It makes the shopping-for-books experience boring and bland.
We had a bit of thrill when the American Book Center opened a store in the city where I live. They were a godsend! No more train to Brussels, and they had a great selection of SF/F, not just the frontlists ofthe big houses, and also a great collection of secondhand books. But alas, they had to fold after a few years, so buying books became boring again.

So, how do you get to know new stuff then? With all my favorites dead or silent, I was in urgent need of new blood. And it was not because there was nothing out there. A trip to the UK always manages to put something new before the hubby and I, but then, oversea trips are even less common than going to Brussels for the sole purpose of shopping. And covers do matter, because between a series of all-polished-to-look-like-the-next-one covers the hubby lifted Abercrombie's The Blade Itself from the shelf. I would probably have done the same, if it hadn't been like 4 shelves over my head. But we need more. Mooooorrre, I say!

So I was becoming aware of another fact: I've never bought a book on a review alone. Half the time I can't read more then a paragraph of review anyway. I've never went to a movie based on a (printed) review alone either. I have a stubborn streak like that, always want to make up my own mind. I read the dazzling praise on the blurb, and my inner-reading voice trails off into " and blablablabla". I don't trust other people I guess.
More of the same problem: there are many authors I have not read, because everybody keeps telling me that his books are amazing and I "must simply read them! You'll love his books to bits!"
Inner-voice: "Must? Must I now? We'll see about that!" and then the books don't get read. Iain Banks used to be there, but one day everybody just shut up about him, and he was so kind to leave enough time between two titles for me to find the peace of mind to actually start reading.
It's a weird problem, isn't it? This is the main reason why LOTR was not read until after the movies. The ice was broken after the first movie, but I held off reading so I could keep my perspective on the movies. After all, I was the only one of our rpg-group that hadn't, and as long as the trilogy was unwinding on screen, we had interesting discussions on what worked or not. I mean, everybody had almost endless gripes about this interpretation, that character too prominent or not present. I, as non-LOTR infected, had only one moment where Jackson failed utterly and unforgivably, and that's the great battle: you have your well trained, daring, nimble cavalry and you send them into a head-on collision with giga-elephantors? Suicide, anyone?
Oh, now I got side-trackede.
Anyways, the books I sent for through the internet were chosen solely on samples, either through Amazon, the publisher's or the author's website. And it worked, and I still have a list for a new order.! New favorites added. Hopefully enough to keep me from pining for mooooooorrre! And hopefully those new favorites will keep doing what they're doing, because sometimes that too is the sucky part of trying something new. Sometimes great new things you like, just vanish into nothing.


Epilogue:
Since I've worked for a book distributor, I've learned about two very important persons in the book publishing business that usually aren't mentioned in the blogs, but that I know are immensely important to getting a book on the shelf:

1) the middleman, being either a distributor's or the publishing house's own salesperson. This is the person who gets to talk the shop owner or 'chef de rayon' (as they say in French; the person who does the buying for a certain range/category, Wikipedia won't help me translate) to actually put your title on the to-buy list. Especially if you're from a smaller publisher, who cannot offer those great percentages and total return policies the big houses can.

2) well, the Chef de Rayon himself, of course, because most bookshops are too big for just one human to handle. They come in all fragrances, these people, and it is very important to have someone who is interested. Back in the days, it must have been a really good guy managing the SF/F list for the Fnac, because they had a very broad range of publishers and some quirky stuff too. It's where Sterling still manages to make a slight difference.