The Don’t Just Read Dudes Project

I read a lot. It’s what I do when I’m not doing anything else. And since 2001, I’ve been keeping a list of what I’ve been reading. Once in a while, I scan through this list, and it’s noticeable that a lot of the authors on my list have . . . Y chromosomes. It’s also noticeable that there are a lot of fantastic books by women on the list. I loved The Martian and of course I ripped through Seveneves, but now I’m ready to spend some time with a different focus. Lois McMaster Bujold, Dorothy Sayers, Octavia Butler, Ann Leckie, Ursula Le Guin, Maggie Stiefvater, and Katherine Addison are all writers I’ve read recently who write (or wrote) masterful, insightful, gripping books that make me want to read more like them.

So I decided in January that I’m going out of my way to read more great books by women. I’m going to say twenty books in the first half of 2016. I’m counting rereads, but only if it’s been at least fifteen years since the first read. I’m also not sticking to this diet exclusively, because I wanted to finish Accidents in North American Mountaineering, and Fifty Degrees Below had showed up in the interlibrary loan queue (but I was a little frustrated with Fifty: as Frank burbles on about how logical it is to sleep in the park and hang out with homeless guys every night, I can’t stop noticing how unworkable that solution would be for most people with breasts). This isn’t going to be any effort to survey the great classics of female authors, by the way; I’m just going to read whatever seems fun.

Read so far

1. What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton
2. Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary
3. Pride and Prejudice (reread) by Jane Austen
4. The Left Hand of Darkness (reread) by Ursula Le Guin
5. Ellen in Pieces by Caroline Adderson
6. Over Sea, under Stone (again) by Susan Cooper. Book one of the Dark Is Rising series, which I read through except for The Dark Is Rising itself, which I reread two years ago.
7. Greenwitch (again) by Susan Cooper
8. The Grey King (again) by Susan Cooper
9. Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper. I think this was the first time. The other books are very good, but this one I didn’t like as much. Too much magic, I think.
10. Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton
11. Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold
12. Climbing Free: My Life in the Vertical World by Lynn Hill and Greg Child. I’m very interested in motivation, and check out this one: “For me, the ascent represented a kind of performance art to demonstrate the values I believed in.”
13. Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
14. Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior by Judith Martin
15. Merchanter’s Luck by C. J. Cherryh
16. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
17. The Just City by Jo Walton
18. The Woefield Poultry Collective by Susan Juby
19. Republic of Dirt by Susan Juby
20. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Update, June 19

Earlier this month, I finished The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. It makes twenty books, so I’m calling the project finished for now. Lots of pleasant surprises in that book list. There was a bit of a digression when I blew off a Pulitzer-prize-winning Anne Tyler book to read a long piece of Harry Potter fan fiction. After the Harry Potter fan fic I had to reread the first two Harry Potters for comparison; then after The Song of Achilles, I had to dip into the Iliad for comparison.

What Makes This Book So Great?

I’ve just devoured a book I’ve been waiting to get my hands on for a while: Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy. There are two reasons this book is so great: Jo Walton likes the kinds of books I like, which means I get to read essays about some of my favourites. And she also enjoys books in the same way I do: she reads a lot, she reads books she likes, and she re-reads.

I read in cafes and tea houses. I don’t think of this as going there especially to read, any more than I think of going there to breathe. I will be reading and breathing while I am there drinking tea, that goes without saying.

I don’t know a lot of people who re-read, but to me it’s central to getting to know and enjoying a book. There’s an interesting discussion in this book about the reasons for re-reading—how sometimes you want something you know you like, and how if you read a lot there’s not an infinite supply of books that you really like. Re-readers will be enlightened by the essay on the Suck Fairy, a phenomenon known to re-readers everywhere. (The Suck Fairy sprinkles suck on your favourite books, so that when you re-read them, you find racism, sexism, and authorial tics that can’t possibly have been there when you were younger.) There are tantalizing hints throughout this book of a household that collects books because they might not be in print, or they may not be in the library. A family and a circle of friends who collect books, share them, and talk about how great they are. I would love to see those bookshelves.

I used to only read in-print paperbacks and current SF magazines in the bath, but since I moved here where I have a huge old bath and very hot summers, I have given in and now even read hardbacks, as long as they belong to me.

I read with great pleasure the series of essays on the Vorkosigan Saga, but I’ve also learned that my reading has some large gaps in it, so I’ll be reading some C. J. Cherryh and Steven Brust, and then re-reading the parts of What Makes This Book So Great that discuss them. In fact, I’ve got a whole list of authors to check out, so that’s a gift that keeps on giving. These essays appear online at Tor.com. The above quotes are from “Gulp or Sip: How Do You Read?”

Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James

I finally got around to reading Fifty Shades of Grey. I thought that when my name finally came to the top of the library’s hold list I’d read the first chapter and put it down with a sneer, but that’s not what happened.

Yes, the writing is clunky and the book lacks polish. There are plenty of little things that don’t ring true (Anastasia doesn’t have a computer; she trips over a clean, well-lit floor; the dancing in the nightclub scene), and I could have done with a bit less of the inner goddess. But overall I found the book fun. Everyone in the book is nice, including the brooding Mr. Grey. The story is quite upbeat, and it’s easy to read. If you’re in the right mood to fantasize along, you can have a good time.

Photo by jessdamen. Some rights reserved.

A voyage of self-discovery and transformation can be a great story, especially in the erotica genre. But the book failed for me—and I suspect this is at the root of many the complaints about Ana—by not being that. Ana shows bravery when she ventures into Christian’s world. She faces some pretty daunting challenges, and she does a good job in negotiating her boundaries. But instead of realizing that she’s kink-curious and exploring her own interests and needs, she makes it all about the man, and she gets stuck in a loop of “I want him so much, but I don’t know if I can give him what he wants.” The story comes off as being about her picking and choosing between different options offered to her instead of being about her taking action to discover who she is and what she wants. The ending is also seriously disappointing. It looks as if the author noticed she was running out of space and cobbled together a weak climax at the expense of making Ana do something that’s both ridiculous and inconsistent with her earlier actions.

The book probably isn’t going to win any awards for the Most Realistic Depiction of Kinky People. The kinky person here is high-functioning but emotionally damaged. Of course that’s necessary to raise the emotional stakes in the story—if Ana were having a relationship with a happy, well-balanced person who happened to like spanking, the conflict wouldn’t be nearly big enough—but it’s still disappointing. The BDSM is rather mild—I was kind of waiting for it to start. Some BDSM-themed books (Sleeping Beauty Trilogy, Story of O) plunge quickly into activities that would endanger life and limb, but Fifty Shades keeps things tame. Where Anne Rice’s masters hang their slaves up by their wrists all night, Christian Grey “aims for pink.”

The book combines easy reading, romance, erotic spice, and better writing than your average pulp romance with some kind of genre-busting spark. I hope it will help open the door to distinctive, well-written, entertaining, and well-produced erotica hitting the mainstream.

Reviewed from a library copy of the book.

Banned Books Week

I forgot it was Banned Books Week! Banned Books Week raises awareness of banned or challenged books and to persecution of authors.

Freedom to Read has a page on Censorship in Canada with a searchable list of banned and challenged books and magazines.

Most books that are challenged remain available; a challenge just means that someone made an effort to get a library or school to withdraw a book. However, some books and magazines are successfully made unavailable when they are seized at the border. Little Sister’s book shop in Vancouver has been fighting legal battles for years over censorship of books that describe gay and BDSM sexuality.

Read more

Banned Books Week on the American Library Association website.

Excerpt from Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie’s memoir about living in hiding after he was threatened with death for writing The Satanic Verses.

Stephen King’s Danse Macabre

I came to this book not as a horror fan, but because I really like Stephen King’s non-fiction writing. If nothing else, he broadened my view of horror; it’s much more than just haunting and slashing. He discusses books by Shirley Jackson and John Wyndham and goes into detail about Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, a book I’m very fond of.

King’s enthusiasm for the genre makes this book a lot of fun to read. In chapter 7, “The Horror Movie as Junk Food,” he explains, “Once you’ve seen enough horror films, you begin to get a taste for really shitty movies . . . Real fans of the genre look back on a film like The brain from Planet Arous (It Came From Another World WITH AN INSATIABLE LUST FOR EARTH WOMEN!) with something like real love.” (This chapter shows a great still from a movie called Robot Monster featuring a man in a gorilla suit wearing a diving helmet. What makes the picture even funnier is that to my Canadian eye it looks exactly like a bear in a diving helmet.)

The only drawback is that this book was written in 1979. This is great if you’re a fan of the books and movies of that era, but I’d love to hear about what King thinks of what’s come out in the last thirty years. Another book, perhaps?

On giving lectures: “I have written my belief that no one is exactly sure of what they mean on any given subject until they have written their thoughts down; I similarly believe that we have very little understanding of what we have thought until we have submitted those thoughts to others who are at least as intelligent as ourselves.”

On art versus exploitation (skating over thin ice): “Hooper works in Chainsaw Massacre, in his own queerly apt way, with taste and conscience.”

Children and scary movies: “The irony of all this is that children are better able to deal with fantasy and terror on its own terms than their elders are . . . The point is, if you put a little kid of six in the front row at a screening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre along with an adult who was temporarily unable to distinguish between make-believe and ‘real things’ . . . my guess is that the kid would have maybe a week’s worth of bad dreams. The adult might spend a year or so in a rubber room, writing home with Crayolas.”

Some of the books he discusses in the text:

• Ghost Story—Peter Straub
• The House Next Door—Anne Rivers Siddons
• Some of Your Blood—Theodore Sturgeon
• The Haunting of Hill House—Shirley Jackson
• Strange Wine—Harlan Ellison

Stephen King’s list of recommended horror books.

Reviewed from my own copy of the book.

Strange Flesh by Michael Olson

One thing the internet reveals is that the world contains multitudes of people just like you . . . Some people are looking to share their thoughts, others are looking to share . . . other things.

As heartbreak leads to loneliness, which leads in turn to net porn and no-strings dating sites, the wear and tear on James Pryce’s body and soul are beginning to build up. When the Randall twins, rich acquaintances from college, hire him to go undercover to find their brother, it seems like an opportunity to step off the path his life has taken recently. Instead, it leads to an online world defined by the escalating demands of the Fever, orchestrated by an artist who likes nothing better than to see his virtual creations bleed into real life.

I loved it. The ongoing themes of compulsion and addiction, secrecy and shame make for a satisfying underpinning to a well-plotted story of digital trickery and a feuding family. The technical detail rings true (although I’d never heard of using foot pedals for your modifier keys). Best of all, the writing is very good indeed, and the narrator’s dry delivery makes certain grotesqueries funnier than perhaps they should be.

So is it Neal Stephenson plus titillation? Not really. There’s geek service, but our hero is a social engineer, not a brain. And social though he is, don’t expect to find too much erotica here. It reminded me more of Chuck Palahniuk, with maybe the slightest whiff of Less than Zero. Call it a thriller with geek appeal. Transgressive geek appeal.

Publication date April 3, 2012
Strange Flesh excerpt

Reviewed from a free copy sent by the publisher.

Anne McCaffrey

I was sorry to hear that Anne McCaffrey died today. I was about twelve or thirteen when I read Dragonsong. It must have been one my first forays into speculative fiction; I remember the strange words—“sevenday,” “blackstone”—and the foreignness of the names of the characters and places. I struggled to understand the mysterious Thread, but I didn’t have any trouble imagining the dragons. Giant, gentle, flying, talking animals don’t need much explanation.

In the years after I read Dragonsong, I read almost all of the other dragonriders books, as well as a selection of her other books. Her characters were thoroughly imagined and their relationships had depth and richness. I appreciated that the people in her books weren’t threatened by mystical forces of evil; they were threatened by natural forces, and by their own inability to work together to solve their problems. They were saved by personal courage and sacrifice.

I still have a selection of my favourite dragonriders books on the shelf, including the lovely edition of Dragonsong shown here. Thank you, Anne McCaffrey.

Guest review of Reamde on StarLit

I wrote a short review of Neal Stephenson’s Reamde for StarLit, a fantasy and science fiction review site.

A Prehistoric Odyssey by Marie Mai Perron

A book that I copy edited last spring just came out a little while ago. It’s a great story, and I thoroughly enjoyed working on it.

When his friend tells him he’s solved time travel, Matthew Carrington jumps at the opportunity to prove his theory that dinosaurs could have been as intelligent as mammals. But in his desperation to save his career, he is forced to accept too many compromises in planning the expedition. Facing the prehistoric environment with incomplete information, unreliable technology, and a dangerously unstable team, science soon takes a back seat to survival.

The prehistoric environment is vividly described, with plenty of biological detail. The characters are very real, and their motives and agendas play out in a way that’s inevitable and surprising at the same time.

A Prehistoric Odyssey is for sale at iUniverse.com
ISBN: 978-1462018666
See a preview

Screenwriters can teach you a lot about fiction editing

I’m not a big movie watcher. When people ask me “Have you seen—,” the answer is usually “no.” Why then the interest in screenwriting? Because I am fascinated by stories, and good screenwriters know how to tell a story. (They also write a pretty good how-to book.) Here are some books on the subject, as well as an introductory note or two on writing screenplays. Thanks to Melva McLean for information about screenplay structure, scriptwriting software, where to find scripts online, and the screenwriting gurus (but any errors are mine!).

The screenplay format

Don’t mess with the format: twelve-point Courier on standard letter-sized paper. Character names and scene headings are in all caps, dialogue and action in upper and lower case.

Screenplay style guide

The Hollywood Standard by Christopher Riley.

Screenplay writing software

Celtx is a commonly used tool. It handles the formatting for you and saves you a lot of typing. A “movie” project will store the script, the novel, and the schedule, and integrates the screenplay with the schedule so that you can see which locations and characters are needed on which days. Best of all, there are a number of sample projects loaded, including the Wonderful Wizard of Oz screenplay and novel. Besides the movie project, there are a number of other project types, including novel and comic book.

I hear Final Draft is good too. Demo version available.

Sample scripts

Unlike novels, which tend to be guarded by their copyright holder, screenplays are often made available online. Fill your boots. I just hope you like monospaced fonts.
Simply Scripts
Script-O-Rama

How to structure a screenplay

This is where the gold is. How long should a screenplay be? What makes a satisfying story arc? Where does the climax go? How soon should the inciting incident come? Following the right structure in developing your story is essential to creating a satisfying experience for the viewer.

Of the authors I list below, Blake Snyder is the one who provides the most step-by-step formula for putting together a movie. Just to give you an idea, here’s a rough outline of a script, mostly based on Snyder’s beat sheet:

• Length: about 90–120 pages. The rule of thumb is that one page of script comes out to about a minute of screen time.
• Three acts: Act 1 introduces the situation; Act 2 complicates the situation; Act 3 resolves the situation.
• Inciting incident (page 12 in a 110-page script): If it’s a murder mystery, a corpse has to be found. If it’s a love story, the lovers have to meet. In a hero’s journey story, the hero is presented with the call to action.
• The transition into Act 2: The hero accepts the call, or something else happens to turn the plot in a new direction.
• Fun and games, first half of Act 2: Action that results from the premise of the story. Most of the stuff that’s in the trailer comes from this part of the movie.
• Second half of Act 2: Complications build until the crisis.
• Transition into Act 3: Hero confronts their demons and turns the situation around using tools and lessons from earlier in the story.
• Act 3: Climax and resolution.

See “Three Acts or What?” for a nice comparison of the Syd Field, Blake Snyder, and hero’s journey story structures.

Books about screenwriting

• Save the Cat!: The Last Book On Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need—Blake Snyder. He has a nice list of genres and screenwriting devices (like the title “save the cat” trick), always with examples, and then discusses in detail his plan on how to set up the three-act structure that he believes is essential to delivering a satisfying experience. I certainly notice the structure he describes jumping out at me in movies like Avatar and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. A very fun book.
• Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting—Robert McKee. Excellent book. McKee is another script guru who consults and runs workshops. He’s also got a good list of screenwriting resources on his website.
• The Definitive Guide to Screenwriting—Syd Field. Interesting, not as fun as Blake Snyder’s book, but it covers some different points, including more on the nuts and bolts of selling scripts.
• Adventures in the Screen Trade—William Goldman. Very entertaining. An analysis of the workings of the movie industry, from what makes a star (it’s someone who will bring people in to see the movie open) to the role of producers (he hasn’t the foggiest, although he knows they’re essential). There’s also plenty of concrete advice on screenwriting: how to write beginnings, how to write endings, how to protect the star—and how to protect your soul.
• The Great Movies—Roger Ebert. He goes through about 100 movies that he thinks are important and talks about why they’re good and what they mean to him.

The best magazine articles ever

Recognized some favourites in this collection of the top 25 best magazine articles ever.

Terry Pratchett on getting a book written

I love Terry Pratchett and was excited to find Once More: With Footnotes. Why is reading an author writing about his writing so much fun? Are all great fiction writers even better non-fiction writers?

Just a little way into the book I was struck by something he says in his essay “Paperback Writer”: “And if you think you have a book evolving, now is the time to write the flap copy . . . Getting the heart and soul of a book into fewer than a hundred words helps you focus.”

This reminds me of Blake Snyder’s advice to nail down the “logline,” or short pitch, for your movie script first.