Fancy That

My lovely friend Becky has created an awesome worldbuilding resource for fantasy writers. Check it out!

Also, you may have seen this already, but I just found the scanned image of one of J. K. Rowling's outlines for keeping track of subplots, and I kind of love it. It seems to me like doing this could be a great thing for editing - could really help you make sure each chapter is advancing plot and that the subplots are being advanced at an even rate.

I just found and love love love this post by Maureen Johnson, in which she expresses a view basically identical to mine (if more eloquent) about the "crisis" in "boy books" and boys reading. I had a teacher come into the library yesterday looking for a book to read aloud to her class who said she was especially concerned about getting one that would appeal to the boys. Look, I know that on some level you want to do whatever seems most likely to increase literacy and get kids interested in books. But - well, I can't say it any better than Johnson does in her post.

And finally, YA Highway is a cool blog about teen books, writing, and various related things by a group of YA authors. Fun stuff.

When I heard about Sharyn November’s blog tour celebrating Diana Wynne Jones (take the tour here - I highly recommend it), and I heard it was open for submissions, I knew I would have to participate. The dates available at this point were in early May, when I would be just recovering from a whirlwind trip through two states, but this was two steps below unimportant. This celebration is bigger than that. Diana Wynne Jones was a phenomenally talented woman who was also tremendously kind.

To prove the former description, one needs look no further than any of her books. Even those widely considered not to be her best still contain wonders. DWJ seemed to work with a different toolbox than other writers – one equipped with the best turns of phrase, the most memorable scenes, the funniest jokes, and – perhaps most of all – the most lifelike characters. DWJ seemed to be capable of writing only complex characters, making them wrenchingly sympathetic or otherworldly and inhuman as their stations demanded, but always making them just who they ought to be – who they need to be. Her storytelling creates people who seem inevitably themselves.

Indeed, I have always found DWJ’s characters to be so much livelier than most authors’ that it suggests she created them in some entirely different way. Many people have heard some variation of the story of a master sculptor whose secret turns out, to the horror of all, to consist of making her works out of real people covered in plaster. This, with a less macabre spin, has always been my impression of DWJ’s methods. While most writers are trying to put together characters who seem lifelike, here is an author who simply locates the appropriate people (“people” in a general sense, one that includes centaurs, robots, and ghosts) and pops them into her stories. (Once there, of course, they thrive considerably better than the plaster-coated victims of our mad sculptor.)

Some of this may be DWJ’s well-known habit of basing characters on real people, but if basis on a real person were all it took to create fabulous characters, then every biography ever written would be a breathtaking work of genius. Due credit must be given to the empathy and consideration DWJ needed to tell us just the things about a person that made that person real – and not just real, but someone you felt was your friend, or found deeply frightening, or rather wished would marry you. (I’ve been waiting since I was eight years old, Howl, you dog.)

As to Diana Wynne Jones’ kindness, I am lucky enough to have experienced it personally in the summer of 2007. I had sent her fan letters – one of the things I’m most glad to have done – and she responded, which fact caused me almost life-threatening levels of excitement and gratitude. Then, realizing that my summer study-abroad in Bath was only twelve miles from DWJ’s home in Bristol, I wrote to ask whether I might take her out to lunch or basically meet her in any possible way. I seriously considered offering to clean her house, if that would get me within squee-ing distance of my favorite author of all time. In the end, I had the sense not to go that far, but was still terrified I had crossed a line into creepyland. Upon reaching my study-abroad housing in Bath, I found a letter waiting for me. Diana Wynne Jones had written to say that I “must come to tea.”

I wrote a description of my visit on the day it occurred, my whole body still vibrating slightly with excitement as I typed it, and that description appears in my post on DWJ’s death. So I won’t reiterate the whole experience, but I will say that it was one of the most thrilling afternoons of my life. It was, like the reply letters she sent me, personal. This was not DWJ putting on her “graciously receiving another rabid fan” face, signing a few books, smiling and nodding while I gushed about my love for her work. This was a woman who engaged with me – a twenty-one-year-old American who might or might not have squeaked audibly when she opened the front door.

But then, why should I be surprised? Because Diana Wynne Jones engaged with people all the time. Indeed, she still does, because that is how books work. Even after her death, Diana Wynne Jones can tell you a story. And each of her stories glows with another level of kindness – one that says, “Children of divorced parents, victims of war, neglected kids, people who are sometimes selfish or stubborn – they are worth writing about and worth reading about. They are whole people, not just the shadows of their experiences.” Her elevation of all kinds of characters – not to reverent heights, but to the status of full individuals – puts me in mind of the inscription on the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses, yearning to breath free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Diana Wynne Jones often wrote about people who were poor. She wrote about people who were tired, who had been through wars and suffering and familial misery. She wrote about them with truth, sympathy, and love, and she raised her own lamp: hope, both for the characters and for readers who empathized with them.

***************

Well, would you look at that. I came to this thinking I would write a bit about my favorite Diana Wynne Jones book, Howl’s Moving Castle. I would confess how, in my early readings, I thought Wales was another made-up fantasy place that just happened to rather resemble our world. I would tell the story of my admitting to DWJ my crush on Howl, at which she laughed and then mused that a great number of her readers seemed to develop crushes on either Howl or Chrestomanci – it seemed, in general, to be Howl for the younger set, Chrestomanci for older fans. (I have theories on this related to Howl’s recklessness and Chrestomanci’s relative stability – well, as much stability as a man can have who disappears whenever anyone anywhere says his title three times.) I can really get going on Howl’s Moving Castle. I seem, however, to have equated Diana Wynne Jones with my country’s foremost symbol of freedom, a beacon intended to welcome people to a new place of wondrous possibility. I’m now feeling hard-pressed to top myself.

Part of me thinks I may have gotten carried away, but another part says no, that’s actually quite right. Here’s to Diana Wynne Jones, whose books continue to shine a light in the world for readers everywhere.

I've just finished all the illustrations for The Book of Foxes! Since the writing was done already, and I've put them together, that means it is FINISHED! At least this draft! Huzzah!

Indulge me while I practice summarizing the story. I'll reward you with a picture afterward.

The book is the journal of our protagonist, Hoshi, a fourteen-year-old girl whose mother hasn't been seen for ten years - until today, when Hoshi is waiting for her dad to pick her up from school, and a car pulls up with her mother in it. Only Hoshi soon finds this isn't her mom, but a shapeshifting tanuki - a trickster spirit - named Kichi, who claims to be her mom's friend. Hoshi's mother was kidnapped all those years ago, and now the kidnappers have taken her father, too. These aren't ransom-demanding criminals: they're the unpredictable kitsune, trickster fox spirits. When they struck ten years ago, taking Hoshi's mom as well as Kichi's tanuki beloved, the kitsune left no trace, but this time, they've made mistakes. Which means that Hoshi and Kichi - along with the secretive Alex, a boy with a mission of his own - are coming to the rescue. In a day, Hoshi goes from a regular teen to a girl who rides dragons (as a passenger on Tatsu Air), hides out at the bottom of Lake Michigan (as a guest of its little-known guardian, Mishipeshu), and searches the largest bookstore in America for the one book that could hold the key to beating the kitsune and putting her family back together. That's a lot to deal with, so Hoshi sorts things out by writing and drawing in her math-notebook-turned-journal.

Right! Picture time. Here's what the main characters look like in the style of Hoshi's illustrations.

(I think that title gets to qualify as a play on words since I'm a librarian. Even if that fact is apropos of nothing.)

It's been forever! But how interesting is it to read yet another variation on "boy, I should update more often"? Not very. Instead, I should perhaps talk about writing, eh wot?

April is National Poetry Month. This has me thinking not so much about writing actual poetry, though most of my novels contain poems and/or songs, as about poetic language. Isn't it funny how some concepts - in particular, some objects - have become "poetic"? They're dramatic. They're symbolic. They have connotations all their own, such that people center images of them on book covers in a pointed fashion to convey, all on their own, some sense of the book. (Or, post-Twilight, there's the "disembodied hands cupping the object" school, but of late I find this largely supplanted by the "girl in an impractical dress and usually also an impractical pose" and the "close-up of a face" schools.)

But! What this made me thing is that these things must be shaped by culture in some interesting ways. Like, say, wolves. Wolves have got some major metaphor going on in Western culture. They have drama attached to rival that of roses, or ravens, or apples. But this makes sense, because in many Western countries, for a long time, wolves were an actual menace, if not to people, then to their livelihoods. And they could, if properly motivated and not properly discouraged, actually eat one's person. So they acquired this "scary bad guy" dimension. They were threatening. If the publishing industry of the time had supported putting pictures on book covers, then slapping a wolf on their would probably serve to indicate one of two things:





"Mmm, you and/or your livestock and/or your loved ones are tasty, and this is a horror story." (Photo by AinaM)

Or,




"I am stalking you and talking to all my wolfy friends in eerie howls about how good you will taste, and this is a work of suspense."

Whereas today, thanks to the rarity of wolves, they have acquired a tragic mystique, and our book covers are more along the lines of:





"I am among the last of my kind, and I feel it keenly, and this is a paranormal romance."


Meanwhile, I'm guessing that countries that don't have wolves involved in their natural histories don't attach these kinds of meanings to them, either. (Their book covers would be like, "I'm some kind of fluffy dog, I think.") They might, on the other hand, attach great significance to, say, jaguars. This, I think, is fun to consider when building a fantasy culture. Which objects - plants, animals, devices - mean something special to them, and why?

For my March teen program at the library, I'm going to be doing a workshop on book trailers - what they are, how to make them. I feel - and this is strange for me - the desire to thank James Patterson, as he is responsible for the only book trailers I've ever seen actually aired on television. Other people have seen them too, which I hope will make it easier for them to recognize what these are and how they're sometimes used.

Anyway, I'll show some examples of various trailers, but I'm also going to walk the teens through how I made one myself. For that, I figured I'd make a new one, as my old Flyy Girl trailer is, um, a bit risqué. (Also, complicated to create.)

So! I chose the book Son of the Mob by Gordon Korman, as I read it last year and loved it. Made the following trailer in iMovie:



Then, I decided to try out Animoto. And guys, Animoto is fun. And SIMPLE. I'm going to use the one I made using that program for my step-by-step trailer how-to, because it is WAY easier than iMovie. (The downside being that, with a free account, you can only make videos that are quite short. Still, that just forces you to be creative. Editing for the win!) Anyway, here's the trailer I made with Animoto:

A link to one of my No Flying No Tights reviews - one of the more critical ones, actually - has gone up on blog billing itself as "News from Japan." Possibly they have a very broad definition of "Japan," e.g. one that includes New England.

Another of these lists has mentioned my recent No Flying No Tights reviews. Coolio!

. . . has been partly No Flying No Tights review - the last Pokémon one just went up - and partly the next bit of Looking Like Lani.

Am having an interesting time of it because I keep realizing that I've made some assumption that doesn't actually make sense for the culture in which Lani lives. Basically, most of my fantasy stories take place in the same world, but the others are all on one continent with cultures that do vary, but aren't nearly as different from one another as they all are from the continent on which this story occurs. So I'll catch myself picturing, say, an inn, the way it would be on the first continent - which, being based loosely on medieval Britain, feels pretty familiar to me anyway. And then I'll go, "Wait, this building wouldn't be made of wood," or, "They wouldn't actually put in interior walls here." It's kind of fun, actually, to keep rethinking these things.

Otherwise, doing lots of reading and lots of working, and all is going pretty well.

Author Bill Wallace has died. I liked his books a lot as a kid - after reading Watchdog and the Coyotes, I doodled coyotes inspired by the book on all my school assignments for, like, a year. I also did an oil painting once, as a pre-teen, of a scene from his book Snot Stew (which is not at all about what it sounds like). And poor Mr. Wallace was only sixty-four. He will be missed.

Another review on No Flying No Tights, that is! With another listing on MangaBlog!

In other news, reading a popular YA novel and having some doubts as to whether it's possible to foreshadow the identity of a character who has amnesia without telegraphing said identity. So you have a young man who doesn't know who he is and has only brief flashes of memory from his childhood? And you also have the oh-so-brief mention of a prince who *mysteriously died as a child*? Nice try.

[If he turns out not to be the prince, I will issue an apology. Also, pigs will take to the skies and the mythical netherworld will experience a cold snap.]