A parody of “The Hobbit.”

I didn’t really like the movie very much . . . for me, it was nothing like as good as “The Lord of the Rings.” It didn’t stick as closely to the book as I thought it should and Jackson changed details where he didn’t need to, in ways that hurt the story. IMO.

And that fighting retreat from the goblin lair was totally, ridiculously unbelievable.

Although I must admit that I was charmed all to pieces by the bunny sled. That made up for a lot.

But whether you liked the movie or not, I hope you will appreciate this parody!

Please Feel Free to Share:

To someone who has previously focused mainly on MG and YA fantasy?

Charlotte of Charlotte’s Library requests suggestions, and this is exactly the sort of thing that is likely to make me zip downstairs to my own personal library and start selecting fabulous books that might fit the bill.

Note that Charlotte is specifically requestion relatively recent books. That makes it harder! I have LOTS of suggestions for books published a decade or more ago. She also asks for books that “are strong on character, and the characters are smart, often witty, and (if they are central characters) likable. …. These books are strong on setting, with lots of lovely details about place, and/or fascinating twists of world building (such as alternate histories) that really make the territory of the book an undiscovered country.”

As it happens, I think that it’s very likely that readers who love current YA generally are likely to prefer stories that are strong on character. I don’t think you often get a YA novel that emphasizes plot, ideas, or worldbuilding over character. A focus on character is very important to YA. And the characters do need to be likeable, generally. No Joe Abercrombe antiheros here, no characters who start off okay but become corrupted, no bad guys winning. Sure, we get semi-sociopaths like the John Cleaver in I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER, but then John is a very likeable sociopath who, during the course of the trilogy, actually carves out a niche for himself that is solidly on the good-guy side of things.

In addition the the books Charlotte lists in her post, I would add:

Barbara Hambly, particularly BRIDE OF THE RAT GOD, THOSE WHO HUNT THE NIGHT, STRANGER AT THE WEDDING, and DRAGONSBANE. I think if you don’t like those, you definitely aren’t going to fall in love with Hambly! Granted, these may not meet the “relatively current” criterion, but I think they are perfect. So is —

Doris Egan, the trilogy starting with GATE OF IVORY. Egan never wrote much, but this is a wonderful trilogy that never got the attention it deserved. And one more —

Gillian Bradshaw. In my opinion, anybody who loves fantasy should think of trying historicals, and in particular this author.

Who do you all think belongs on a list of “adult fantasy novels that would appeal to adult readers of YA”?

Please Feel Free to Share:

. . . from Heidi at Bunbury in the Stacks. Which door would you choose to step through? One that led to Hogwarts, Narnia, Westeros, Neverland, Alice in Wonderland, Middle Earth, or, um . . . right, Camelot.

I left a comment at Heidi’s blog, but I’ll give it away here, too: My pick is Narnia, my second pick is Middle Earth, and nobody else is in the running. How about you?

Please Feel Free to Share:

By which I mean, at least this time, books in which the bad guy wins. And I don’t mean a charming bad guy such as, say, Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder or Stephen Brust’s Vlad Taltos. No. I mean a real bad guy, the kind where it’s an offense against the universe when they win.

I also mean the sort of books in which the good guy loses. I mean really loses, so that his life is thoroughly screwed up at the end. Worse: the sort of story where the good guy does it to himself, so that you, as the reader, can see everything going wrong while the protagonist’s mistakes pile up and then come crashing down on him and everyone around him with all the power and inevitability of a tsunami.

Don’t tell me real life is sometimes like that. If I wanted to read stories like that, I could read current news or ancient history or whatever.

So. I picked up IN THE WOODS, a debut novel by Tana French that came out several years ago, at a recent book sale. Here’s what the back cover copy says: “. . . three children leave their small Dublin neighborhood to play in the surrounding woods. Hours later, their mother’s calls go unanswered. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children, gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours.
“Twenty years later, Detective Rob Ryan – the found boy, who has kept his past a secret – and his partner Cassie Maddox investigate the murder of a twelve-year-old girl in the same woods. No, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him, and that of his own shadowy past.”

My tolerance for horror is fairly low, but I sometimes do like suspense and crime dramas, and I often like cop books, and this book was an Edgar Award finalist, and I liked the cover. So I read the first couple of pages. Here’s the first paragraph, to give you an idea:

“Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small-town 1950s. This is none of Ireland’s subtle seasons mixed for a connoisseur’s palate, watercolor nuances within a pinch-sized range of cloud and soft rain; this is summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue. This summer explodes on your tongue tasting of chewed blades of grass, your own clean sweat, Marie biscuits with butter squirting through the holes and shaken bottles of red lemonade picnicked in tree houses. It tingles on your skin with BMX wind in your face, ladybug feet up your arm; it packs every breath full of mown grass and billowing wash lines; it chimes and fountains with birdcalls, bees, leaves and football-bounces and skipping chants, One! two! three! This summer will never end. It starts every day with a shower of Mr. Whippy notes and your best friend’s knock at the door, finishes it with long slow twilight and mothers silhouetted in doorways calling you to come in, through the bats shrilling among the black lace trees. This is Everysummer decked in all its best glory.”

Okay, I’d call that promising, wouldn’t you? The second sentence got me. Beautiful! And then the rest of the paragraph: setting is very important to me in mysteries, and this story, set in Ireland, looks like it will be perfect. Just exotic enough to be appealing without being challenging. I may not know what Marie biscuits are or what a BMX wind is, but not knowing stuff like that isn’t going to bother me a bit.

And the writing here is top-notch. That part is undeniable. But I started to see the trend toward the protagonist’s life unraveling pretty early, and though the writing was good enough to keep me going, I definitely took a gooood step back emotionally and wound up not being very emotionally engaged with the characters. Which was wise. Because this author really ticked me off. And it’s not just because of the ending where the bad guy gets away with murder, and worse than murder, and is clearly going to go on destroying people’s lives for the foreseeable future. It’s also because of the way we get to that ending.

First, French provides one of the very, very few true nonsexual friendships between a man and a woman in all of fiction – Ryan and his partner Maddox. How often do you EVER see that? The author does it so well, the relationship comes across as totally believable. Then . . . well, then the author throws sex back in there after all and that relationship gets completely, irretrievably screwed up. I’m not saying this isn’t believable. Ryan’s all messed up because of his personal history, and although I don’t totally get his reactions with regard to this relationship with his partner, fine, I can believe he might possibly react the way he did. But I hate it. And I hate what it puts his partner through, and I hate where Ryan himself ends up.

Not only that, but Ryan’s personal history? The bit about being found gripping a tree trunk with his shoes full of blood? You see how the back cover copy invites you to believe that Ryan is going to figure out what actually happened to himself and his two friends when they were kids? And that unraveling that old mystery is going to be connected to the current murder? Well: sorry to spoil this for you if you were going to rush out and buy this book, but no.

There are hints about supernatural weirdness, probably evil supernatural weirdness, connected with those woods and that old disappearance. But in fact those hints stay completely unexplained. We never find out what really happened. Those shoes full of blood, a distinctly weird and creepy image the author rather dwells on? We never find out about those. We don’t even find out whose blood it was! Was it the blood of the two kids who disappeared? Don’t know, could be! Why was there blood in the shoes and nowhere else? We have no idea. Is there a connection between the old disappearance and the current crime? You’d think so, right? But if there was supposed to be such a connection, it was so subtle and mystical that I missed it.

And then the bad guy won.

I don’t care how good the writing was. I won’t be coming back for Tana French’s second book.

Here’s the Goodreads page for IN THE WOODS.

I particularly recommend Matt Sommer’s review, which is the second one down. Yeah, what he said. There’s an interesting comment in his thread, that Ryan himself may be supposed to be a sociopath and that he himself killed his friends. I don’t think I buy it, but it’s certainly an interesting idea. I think we see enough relatively normal emotions in his head to rule out that he his himself sociopathic, and I don’t *think* he killed his friends. But I don’t know. If you’re into psychological mysteries, hey, maybe you’d like to read this one after all and see what you think.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Over at Kristen Nelson’s blog. (She’s an agent, as you may know.)

I like statistics. And I’m familiar with the notion that most queries don’t get a “send me pages” request from an agent. But check this out:

32,000 queries in 2012, and

81 full manuscripts requested.

In case you’re curious, that is two tenths of one percent of the queries. Wow.

But then, if you’re sending out queries of your own? Or thinking about it? Whatever proportion of queries look like this are not your competition.

And if you’ve never seen it, you MUST go read the post “Slushkiller” by Teresa Nelson Hayden, which has got to be just about the best post ever written about slushpile queries.

And, if you ARE thinking of tackling a query letter? Then here’s a resource you may want to explore: a list that links to various successful query letters. And of course you’re familiar with Janet Reid’s Query Shark?

Please Feel Free to Share:

Or so it says here .

In general, I don’t know that I care that much. But: here is the first comment to this article:

“Here’s my standard: any book with five stars is likely cause for suspicion. It probably means either the reviewer has something to gain or the reviewer’s standards are low and therefore untrustworthy. Indeed, of the, let’s say, 10 million books written and reviewed, maybe less than 1% deserve five stars. Five star books are those by authors whose books have stood the test of time (e.g. Tolstoy, Twain, etc.). Usually, I go straight to the negative reviews, which are often more informative and accurate in my experience.”

To which my immediate response is: Well, buddy, it’s nice you have such high high high standards, but I almost never review books I don’t like, which means I often DO give a book five stars. And I hardly think I have such low low low standards compared to you. Or need a book to become a time-tested classic before I can tell whether it’s any good. So lighten up.

You know what? Five stars is not that many. If this was a ten star system, then I expect I would be giving very few books ten stars and I’d be a bit suspicious of books that garnered a lot of ten-out-of-ten stars. But it hardly seems out of the way to give a book five-out-of-five. Four out of five is actually too low for quite a lot of books.

Which that guy in the comments actually would realize, if he could do math. Because if 1% of 10 million books — his guess, not mine — deserves five stars, that’s 100,000 books, which is going to be a whole lot of the ones people have actually heard of.

If I’m using reviews to make a buying decision, which I actually sometimes do, I personally read a good handful of both the positive and negative reviews. A negative review that declares a book is “boring” may actually be a suggestion that I will like it, particularly if someone else left a comment about the book’s leisurely pace and lyrical writing.

And! Something else that is interesting: Harriet Klausner, who is cited in the article linked above because she has 25,000 reviews on Amazon? Well, her reviews make it perfectly clear that she really did read the Griffin trilogy, and since I know *I* didn’t pay her for those reviews, my guess is, she REALLY DOES read roughly a zillion books a day. I’m glad I don’t read that fast, as how could you linger over a book long enough to actually enjoy it if you read half a dozen per day?

But, in fact, overall, I don’t know that I care that much about what Amazon does with its review policy, since I actually go to Goodreads to read reviews or post my own. Besides, it doesn’t look to me like Amazon did anything to my reviews. Not (in case you wonder) that any close family members have ever left a review for any of my books. (Not that I would object if they did.)

How about you all? Anybody tend to write reviews, and if so, do you do it at Amazon or Goodreads or someplace else?

Please Feel Free to Share:

Or at least the ones that I personally liked best — though I thought all of the cookies were good, or I’d hardly have submitted them for the contest!

AZTEC GOLD / MAYAN END-OF-THE-WORLD CHOCOLATE COOKIES

For these, I started out with the Death-By-Chocolate Cookies that Elaine T. sent me. The first thing was to de-death them so that I could use a ganache filling without overloading the chocolate tolerance of a normal chocolate-loving person. I did this by dropping the amount of unsweetened chocolate and replacing the lost chocolate and part of the butter with cream cheese – that gives a nice texture and softens the flavor. I also removed the chocolate chips entirely. Then I added a bit of chipotle powder (to make them adventurous) and, to half the dough, a bit of cinnamon. The cinnamon is the only difference between these two versions. I don’t ordinarily care for cinnamon combined with chocolate, but I found the tiny amount here very nice.

8 oz bittersweet chocolate
2 oz unsweetened chocolate
1 ½ C. flour
½ C. cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
½ tsp chipotle powder
1 tsp Ceylon cinnamon, optional – I prefer true cinnamon to the cassia that is sold as cinnamon in this country, because true cinnamon is actually less “cinnamony” and has a lighter, almost floral fragrance. But I’m not a cinnamon lover, and if you are, you would probably prefer ordinary cinnamon (which is really cassia, if you follow me, sorry, it’s not my fault, I’m not the one who decided on this the terminology).
1 ½ C. Demerara or other raw sugar
8 oz cream cheese
1 stick butter
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla

12 oz bittersweet chocolate
½ C cream
2 Tbsp Anejo tequila, optional – I didn’t use it, but I put it into the cookie lacking cinnamon to increase its “adventurousness”
¼ to ½ tsp chipotle powder
¼ tsp cinnamon extract, optional

Edible gold dust

Melt the chocolates together. Combine the dry ingredients. Cream the sugar with the cream cheese and butter. Beat in the eggs and vanilla. Stir in the flour mixture. Chill one hour to overnight. Roll into 60 balls and place on parchment-lined baking sheets. Flatten each ball to a 1 ½ inch circle with a glass dipped in flour (or sugar, or Demerara sugar, whatever you like). Bake at 325 degrees for about 12 minutes, until set. Try not to overbake.

Heat the chocolate and cream together in the microwave and stir until smooth. Add the remaining ingredients. Let set until the ganache thickens, 30 to 40 minutes. Assemble the cookies. Dust the top cookies with the gold dust, for a particularly exotic and attractive presentation – I think I got my gold dust from King Arthur Flour, and it is a beautiful touch.

Okay! And my favorite of the bunch:

TASTE FOR ADVENTURE TRIPLE GINGER CHOCOLATE COOKIES

These are basically an easy chocolate-gingerbread whoopie pie type of cookie. Even if you think you would hate chocolate gingerbread, you really might try them, because that’s honestly what I thought and boy was I wrong.

Basically what I wanted with these was a cookie like chocolate gingerbread, NOT like a gingersnap or molasses spice cookie, not flat, not chewy and certainly not crunchy. I was really happy to get this cookie just right on the first try. But they’re not a very fancy looking cookie, so I don’t know that they have much of a chance in the contest.

2 ¾ C. flour
¼ C. cocoa powder
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp ground cloves
¼ tsp ground nutmeg
¼ tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
¾ C. butter
¾ C. packed brown sugar
1 egg
½ C. molasses
2 Tbsp grated fresh ginger
2/3 C. buttermilk
½ C. minced crystallized ginger
1 ½ C. semisweet chocolate chips

Filling:

6 oz cream cheese
2 ½ to 3 C. powdered sugar
1 Tbsp grated ginger
½ C. minced crystallized ginger

Combine the dry ingredients. Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the molasses, egg, and grated ginger. Beat in the buttermilk. Stir in the flour mixture. Fold in the crystallized ginger and chocolate chips. Drop rounded Tbsp on baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes, until set. Try not to overbake. It’s easier to tell with these than some, because they’re so cake-like. If a cookie springs back when touched, it’s done. Cool about 2 minutes on the sheets. Remove to racks to cool completely.

Combine the filling ingredients, using enough powdered sugar to make a decently thick, spreadable filling – getting that right was the hardest part – and assemble the sandwich cookies.

There! I hope you enjoy all of these recipes as much as I did!

Please Feel Free to Share:

On a whim last week, I tried tethering my laptop to my phone and connecting to the internet right from my own house, which has never worked. Strangely, it now DOES work. It’s been working consistently all week! Is it the weather? The season? Generic tecnology weirdness? I have no idea. But — newsflash! — it’s amazing how addictive and distracting the internet can be, if you can actually connect to it whenever you want!

Despite this new connectivity experience, I have reached 100 pages (32,000 words) on my new WIP! This is four complete chapters. It isn’t actually great progress, considering that I had about fifty pages in place when I started working on it (on Jan 1st). But it’ll do. Hey, it was a busy, busy Christmas break. Now that I’m at a stopping point, I think I will email my agent, send her the revised ms for THE MOUNTAIN OF KEPT MEMORY, and ask for her comments on the revised copy of the other WIP ms she has right now. I don’t mind going back to revisions now that I’ve made somethig resembling progress on a new project. Wish me luck in the coming year! I should have no fewer than four complete mss by the end of the year, all of which I hope wil have found a home, one way or another, by this time in 2014.

So, Dad finished installing the new shelves he made for me! Yay! Having one of youer nearest and dearest be handy with carpentry is an excellent thing. I spent the afternoon moving books and shelving the stacks that used to be piled on the floor. I now have lots of room to expand. I estimate it’ll take two years before I am again pressed for space. By then I will probably have a kindle or nook or something and space will be a lot less of a concern.

And! Almost better than actually getting new shelves, since Dad had the paint out, I asked him to put some aside for me, and spent more of the afternoon scrubbing woodwork around the house and touching up the paint. It’s all a creamy white, which is beautiful, but GOOD LORD was it showing wear! The dogs do not understand why they can’t sit on their windowsill tonight. I assured them that tomorrow they will have a beautiful clean windowsill to sit on. I also have the front door blocked off with an X-pen, the single most useful item I own that normal pet owners don’t even know about. I use it ALL THE TIME to keep dogs away from seedlings under the lights or confine a dog after surgery or to block off wet paint or, for that matter, actually as a pen when I’m showing four of them at one show or whatever.

Tomorrow I will put another coat of paint on the baby gates (which had puppy toothmarks all over them) and do more windowsill and cabinet doors until I run out of paint. Painting windowsills and stuff is an oddly satisfying activity; hopefully I will remember that and not wait ten years before touching up the paint again.

Next for the evening: choosing a book to read. I figure, hey, last weekend of Christmas break, I may as well actually take a break, right? I’m leaning toward THE KILLING MOON by NK Jemisin.

Please Feel Free to Share:

So we find that twitter is sometimes actually useful! Because I wouldn’t have noticed this infographich without a tweeted link.

See, it seems a young Chinese woman has created an infographic to show how emotions for which there aren’t English words map onto the world of emotion. Isn’t that a neat idea?

To be sure, some of the terms seem pretty indistinguishable from concepts we already have. Like this Japanese word which is supposed to express the “emotional attachment between friends, family, even animals” — I wonder how that is supposed to be different from at least a broad conception of “love”?

I like the Hebrew term which means “sick on you”, ie, obsessed. If Maria and Janet in Sharon Shinn’s shapeshifter novels had to pick a word to describe their feelings for their boyfriends, this term would certainly fit better than “love.” (Sorry, the word is given in Hebrew characters, and I have no idea what the phonetic spelling would be in English.)

I have absolutely no idea what the Turks mean by Serefe, though. I mean, what?

One of my favorites didn’t make the list — pena ajena, which is Mexican Spanish for the embarrassment you feel watching someone else’s humiliation. (That one is given below the infographic.) That’s a useful term. This emotion is exactly why I can’t stand watching sitcoms, because almost all the so-called humor in the shows is based on putting the characters in embarrassing situations and then laughing at them. I don’t think that’s funny; I think that’s embarrassing. I guess I’m not alone, since evidently we have this term for that feeling.

How about you? Any of these emotional states strike a chord of recognition with you?

Please Feel Free to Share: