Busy is good / summary

I have been busy with work, which is a good thing. And coaching soccer...also good! I have also been busy reading, and actually getting to more of my writing. This is great. However, I have been silent on the reviews and notes, which is less good, if not actually bad.

Here is a list of some of my recent reading, some of which I Intend To Blog About (fanfare):

Anathem, Neal Stephenson (audiobook) = my new favorite / the destroyer of many drafts of my own work

A Canticle for Liebowitz, Walter Miller: at long last, not entirely without enjoyment, and an interesting contrast and overlap with Anathem

Deliver Us from Evie, M. E. Kerr: a read-in-one-sitting, something I picked up because of a brief mention in another review, and my new model for pithy dialogue

Night Watch, Terry Pratchet: every bit as good as what I had hoped in a book with Sam Vimes as the protagonist

Journey to the River Sea, Eva Ibbotson: a reread, aloud for the kids, and full of great voices


in process:

Islands of the Blessed, Nancy Farmer: the third Sea of Trolls book, reading aloud to the boys, the second I've read (we listened to #2, first, on audio)--I'm having too much fun with the voices

A Brief History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson (audiobook): my commute salve, which fortunately the boys only hear parts of - they're fascinated, but disc 12 has a lot of profanity, for some reason

Longitude : the true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time, Dava Sobel -- a denser, less sprightly, more focused version of a James Burke look at development of fascinating ideas and technologies by three-dimensional people in exciting times

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I've also been reading online and in snippets about geophysics, astrophysics, and plot development. These are connected, for me.

More later.

All-ahoo, Patrick O’Brian’s THE MAURITIUS COMMAND audiobook, and MASTER AND COMMANDER print book

Curiously, for a book full of action, the two most notable aspects of these, the third and first Aubrey and Maturin novels, are the author’s confidence in the reader’s appetite for period naval jargon, and the long, patient accumulation of personality in the two main characters. Why, then, do readers stick with this lengthy enterprise? How does Patrick O’Brian make it work?

Taken together, the Aubrey and Maturin books I have read and listened to are a scattershot of the first half-dozen in the 30- book series. I have read elsewhere, and come to agree, that readers (and listeners) can view this as less a sequence than a great tapestry of character. There is some term for this that escapes me, romans something-or-other, that means generally this.

One test of this idea is that I entered the Aubrey-and-Maturin universe through the now-decade-old movie said to be based on two of the novels together, Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World. Years after viewing the movie, when I first read one of O’Brian’s books, I heard the movie’s actors in my head, and saw them in my mind, especially Captain (or Master and Commander, or Lieutenant, or Post-Captain, as appropriate) Jack Aubrey, Doctor Steven Maturin, and (in the movie and after the second book) Lieutenant Thomas Pullings, a very sympathetic supporting character. However, with continued listening to two different voice actors’ renderings, and with my own readings – and these critically with the aid of O’Brian’s own vivid and idiosyncratic descriptions – I developed my own standards for the principal characters’ speech. Maybe it was just the divergence of readers, actors, and descriptions that freed my imagination to create or choose voices of my own for the characters.

The movie Master and Commander bears little resemblance to the book by the same name, with the exception of those three characters, the setting, and the jargon. It seems that translating the novels into a movie required rearrangement of the events, and some characters, to suit the audience and format. It’s similar to Captain Aubrey’s practice of re-stowing the holds of the various ships he captains, or “raking the masts” of the sloop Sophie, or installing bentinck-shrouds (extra stays on the masts that support again extra sails), against naval tradition and at some cost to his military advancement, in order to eke another half-knot out of whatever assemblage of timber and canvas he currently commands.

And when the ship confronts its target, he maneuvers it and presses his advantages to leave it in sad shape. When the masts are compromised, the yardarms and ropes snapped or cut, the sails shredded, the ship’s rigging is “all-ahoo,” one of my favorite naval terms from the series. I have a recollection of the term being applied to wigs and the like, but I won’t wait to confirm that before applying it as needed in my own circumstances.

For example, I have struggled to set aside enough time to write this, but my scheduling has been crowded and chaotic – in other words, all-ahoo. That’s why it took two weeks, allowing me to finish lsitening to Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls in the meantime. While I was listening, I found two of the 11 cds included repetitions of earlier segments of the book after the completion of the sequential segments. It was as if a printer inserted a second copy of pages 121-160 after page 244. This was, it turns out, my first application of the term “all-ahoo.” My second occurred with the realization that I was going to listen to a second book before reviewing the first (actually, first two).

One reason for my difficulty in getting organized enough to write this was coaching. I have struggled to educate myself about the many parts of soccer I never got good at. Sometimes, practices go well, and people have fun. At other times, my players and I wrestle each other for control of a small game at practice. The chaos is, well, evocative of the idea. It’s also pretty inescapable when layering five hours a week of planning and working with “U-9s” atop a lopsided routine of work, home life, and the commute between. Has anybody seen my son’s left cleat?

And a “cleat” is the key. The chaos and rush of life, or of naval warfare, or of constructing or inhabiting a fictional world, relies on a few stable points. Without them, and without them being strong enough to bear the load, the whole project flies apart. We rely on teachers, family, and neithbors to fill the gaps in our own ability as parents,  both to satisfy immediate wants and to provide more generally for the children we cross bridges to support, and again to see. A “cleat” in British seamen’s speech two centuries ago is a piece of metal, wedged into wood, on which a line can be fastened. This is only what I’ve gleaned, but this gleaning helps in reading the stories.

Fastening a few points to hang the rest of the rigging on is a bare essential for readers. Disbelief requires a capacious and sturdy framework (three masts, with stays and shrouds?) for the reader to suspend it. O’Brian’s characters do things we don’t recognize today, not entirely, and think things that are surprisingly alien. (The masts, stays and shrouds of rank in British society at the time are not very distinct to American readers of this time, generally.) Yet when one hauls on a rope (a character, say, Aubrey, encounters a barrier to his advancement based on class rather than accomplishment), the shape of the rigging is indicated by the movement of the sails. This is true for social aspects of the story, for technical aspects, and every other.

Long, slow, careful study—lightened by the fact of its pleasure—is required to generate an understanding of all of the terms in use, and all of their meanings and variations, and of the society and physical world the describe. Locally, O’Brian would have written these books for an audience a half century closer to the language, politics, society, and technology in the books than current readers. He and the initial readers and the current ones all make a substantial leap through time to inhabit that world, however briefly. The cleats, holding ropes fast to keep the masts and sails in place, bear a heavy load.

With so much difference between readers’ experiences inside and outside the novels, the author must have found more durable reference points, commonalities, than the apparent specifics. There’s a diagram of a frigate’s rigging at the front of many of the books, to help bridge the gap, but until I read the story, several of them, I found the diagram unhelpful. What allows readers to bridge that gap, to construct characters over meandering plots in thirty books, to cope with unfamiliar social customs, language, and technologies? How do we hold on and where do we step so as not to fall overboard?

“All-ahoo” is a wonderful term. I am adopting it because it makes sense, it stands out in my memory from reading, and I look forward to my next encounter with it. I have “all-ahoo” in my life because it’s universal, and I can connect with it. The real answer to the question about continuing to suspend disbelief is that there are many points of connection, many fasteners and useful concepts, flashes of recognition closing the gap between reader and characters. I care about Aubrey’s unwelcome innovations with rigging not because I am a sailor (I am not), but because I am hesitant to shake things up in my own career. Maturin’s extremes of social awkwardness are confusing at first, but each layer of details makes his behavior more intelligible. The avid loyalties of lower-ranked men seem strange until readers get a close look at Aubrey’s coxswain, Bonden, or see both sides of the relationship with Thomas Pullings. The ropes come into view a length at a time.

A Happy Stumble: "No," by Brian Doyle

By unreproducible means, a work-related quest brought me almost all the way to this essay of remembrance and humor by a magazine editor. In "No," Brian Doyle offers a lovely, meandering, and brief apologia of editorial rejection. He packs it full of insight, weaves it close with experience, and draws it all through a gentle sense of humor. As an aspiring writer and sort of an editor, I caught a glimpse of the farther edges of these professions. Sir Isaac Newton's image of a boy playing with sea-shells comes to mind.

If you like to read words, these are worth reading.

Excuses, excuses... and manga (Toradora vol. 2)

Most of what I'm reading is the middle of things, so the past tense of my blog name more or less rules out reporting on it. I did also commit the folly of buying a book last night and starting it before going to sleep. It's Scene and Structure, by Jack M. Bickham. I never heard of him before last night, but I found the contents immediately informative. It's from 1993, part of a series called Elements of Fiction Writing. If you're like me, you've seen the shreds of various such series drifting about used book stores. I don't like to buy them, but I do anyway, when I feel they answer my questions. I have been struggling lately with just the sort of problems Bickham addresses, and reading only two chapters got me working on a new angle on my book.

I'm still reading (and close to finishing) the very entertaining and disappointing fantasy novel the Magicians, by Lev Grossman. It's not the novel that disappoints - it's the main character. I decided that I really don't like Quentin, and I hope he gets his ass kicked a bit more. Actually, based on what's happened in the book so far, I think the last 50 pages of the book will be very painful for him, and for me, because as much as I dislike him, I identify with him.

Work is keeping me busy as well. We just acquired another publisher in our niche, and are reviewing all of its materials in detail. We need to work all of the series - both existing stock and revisions - into our catalog and into our development calendar. In the end, I think we'll be working them into our philosophy as well. They pose a number of challenges, about reading level, about interest, about trends, and about the value inherent in the act of reading (as opposed to the content one reads). Much promise to fulfill, and much work to do.

I meant to review the hi-freakin-larious manga Toradora (story by Takemiya Yuyuko, art by Zekkyo), having just finished the second volume. The tone has changed since the first volume. There's plenty of silliness, thank goodness, but a serious consequence of the two main characters' actions in vol. 1 has arisen. The action has been replaced a little by dialogue, reflecting the change from character establishment in vol. 1 (much based on physical characteristics) to relationship building in vol. 2, which requires talking.

The setup is unoriginal for manga. There are several current or recent series with all or most of these elements. A student who looks different from the norm is treated as if his or her personality matches appearance. In this case, Takasu Ryuuji has "angry eyes," and everyone thinks he looks like a yakuza. (It doesn't help that his late father was yakuza). Ryuuji is actually a very nice guy. He lives with his inept and childlike mother (this is a theme in manga: get rid of the parents), doing the cooking and cleaning for the household, even hassling her about taking off her makeup before going to bed at night, and heating up the food he leaves for her instead of eating it cold. However, when he walks to school, people spread rumors about violent exploits and a terrible temper. It's so unfair! (another manga theme).

On the first day of school (exactly 78% of manga start then), Ryuuji runs afoul of Aisaka Taiga, a petite girl with an even more violent reputation, which she partly deserves. (Whatever her nickname is in Japanese, in the Macmillan translation, it's "Palmtop Tiger." Silly, and fitting.) However, the two soon discover they are neighbors, and that few other people will talk with them, so they develop a weird friendship that provides most of the humor from vol. 1.

The humor is raised a notch by the fact that each of them has one friend. Taiga's is the girl Ryuuji desperately loves, and can't form words around, and Ryuuji's is the boy Taiga even more desperately loves (himself a manga theme: the competent nerd). The two of them, in turn, are good friends and co-captains (another manga theme: weak plot movers) of the softball team, requiring them to bail on almost all occasions in which the four of them might socialize. This leaves Taiga and Ryuuji even more dependent on each other.

Macmillan's subdivision Seven Seas Manga picked this up, and did a nice job with the tankoubon (usually a 6-8 chapter volume) releases. The covers are appropriately shiny and keep the original design (a plus for manga fans who rely on translations), and the printing is crisp and well laid out. Many manga and comics are printed over the gutter or trimmed too far out on one side of the sheet, cutting off text and pictures. Macmillan are pros, and the difference in quality makes this a lot more fun to read. The series itself has no redeeming social value, shows pictures of teenage girls in impossibly short skirts, and makes fun of people for how they look. What's not to like?

I was thinking of re-reading Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series...

...when the great and terrible Web intervened.

I followed a link about plot development - I couldn't resist the tone of ridicule - and found Nick Lowe's mocking 1982 "educational" essay, The Well-Tempered Plot Device.

Lowe takes down Donaldson, Susan Cooper, and JRR Tolkien (and several I don't know) for obvious plot devices, and proposes, tongue-in-cheek, a more appropriate manual for science fiction and fantasy than the usual how-to-write-a-good-novel. He proposes a how-to for cheap plot devices to get books into print and keep the sequels coming.

This all makes me feel better about struggling to write. I thought perhaps I was a hack. I thought I was taking clichéd approaches. I thought I was wasting my time. On reading Lowe's hilarious piece, I think now that I have been avoiding the simplistic plot devices he accused, almost two decades ago, of cheapening the genre I'm trying to contribute to.

I think I feel a little bit better.

brief note on abbreviations

I'm reading a lot more for work these days, even in off hours.

Come to think of it, doesn't that make them on hours?

For example, we're going to issue a new edition of an older series of books with few changes other than illustrations. I'm reading to get good specs and to check for easily correctable mistakes.

While reviewing proofreaders' marks on some galleysa few minutes ago, I left myself a note "STET cf BLK cc." Yikes! Do I actually think like that?

Well, this is how I actually think: I decided I had to look up cf, just to make sure I wasn't leaving myself a note I'd be [more] embarrassed to read later.

That's when I found The Guide to Punctuation, by Larry Trask, at Sussex University in the UK. Specifically, I read with some geeky pleasure his page on abbreviations. While over a decade old, and written primarily for British, not American, writers, it's still crisp, useful, and utterly dismissive of diversions from accepted practice.

Geeky writer types will love this stuff.

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On another note, I'm really (!) enjoying my new old CD. It's music I listened to on vinyl back in college, and I had no idea it existed on CD. It's Sheshwe: the Sound of the Mines, from Rounder Records. It's all in South Sotho, of which I understand maybe half a dozen words, and I just love it. Accordions, electric bass, drums, bells, and lyrics I don't understand, and it totally moves me. I'm a South African music geek.

politics, more Shadow Children, and self-doubt

I wanted to share this article I read about Jerry McNerny's (CA-14) opponent in the November election. Harmer is a Tea Party-branded extremist who, according to this Mother Jones article, wants to abolish public education.

I've said it before, but when will progressives and half-way decent people stop - just STOP - writing dystopian and apocalyptic novels that the right-wing then uses as instruction manuals?

• Orwell, 1984, Dick Cheney.
• Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, Christian fundamentalists.
• Haddix, Shadow Children series, Harmer.

See what I mean? I'm sure you could add to the list.


Finished Margaret Peterson Haddix' third Shadow Children series. Good world creation. Interesting characters. Multiple points of view. Short novels. I like the combination, and she's a serious enough writer to make the short fiction format a powerful vehicle for this drama-with-a-message series.

My own writing is stalled. I'm remaking my world. I was struggling with logical inconsistencies that no amount of verbiage was going to effectively paper over. I needed to resolve (and am still working on) how the world got the way it was, to ease readers' suspension of disbelief.