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?

coolest thing I read today: "A New Era for Scientists and Engineers"

Found on Facebook...

I read Steve Blank's announcement/contextualization of the National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps, a plan to make business development native to science and engineering entrepreneurs, not to imbue traditional business thinking in them, but to recast the challenges of business as a kind of experiment.

Blank says it better than I do, and links lots of things together, so you can follow the threads of his thoughts at will until everything starts to come together.

The first piece I read from him was about the history of business in Silicon Valley, "How Scientists and Engineers got it right, and VC's got it wrong." I found it informative and enjoyable, despite the misuse of an apostrophe. I won't let my small ideas intrude on his big ideas.

coolest thing I "read" today: the future of publishing

ironically, a video, oh my! but it's worth watching/reading

--found it at the Tor/Forge art director's blog!

Did I mention that sounds like a really great job?

Distracted...

This is hard to explain, but I recently read a book, and wanted to write about it, but forgot what it is.

My current reading list is:
1. Gennifer Choldenko, Al Capone Does My Shirts (reading aloud with the boys), soon to be followed by Al Capone Shines My Shoes; I look forward to reading these every night!
2. Kim Stanley Robinson, Fifty Degrees Below (bathroom reading...Robinson's novels are kind of filling, so I read the climate change-aka Science in the Capital-series a little at a time); Frank Vanderwal is finally growing on me, a bit
3. Lev Grossman, The Magicians (this is good enough to make me skip manga for days at a time)
4. various high-interest, low reading level books I'm reviewing and/or revising at work
5. political blogs that I haven't felt compelled to comment on
6. various manga

My non-reading demands are also high. The kids are in a sports day camp that cuts into my workday, I have lots of stuff due nownownow at work, and I've been getting more exercise lately.

I'll be interested to rediscover what it is I just read, and then think about whether it's worth sharing if I've forgotten it that easily.

coolest thing I read today: satirical reviews...and avoiding huge ships

This collection of Amazon customer reviews for How to Avoid Huge Ships is the coolest thing I read today.

I love stuff like this.

Beth Revis, Across the Universe AND Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

Note: I am laaaaazy. I started writing this at the beginning of the month, and I've made progress at the rate of about 20 words per day, on average. This is pretty darn lame. Still, there were some things I wanted to share about what I read, so please humor me by reading on.

One of my favorite first chapters is in Beth Revis's Across the Universe, which is her first novel. She wrapped me up in the story with her wrenching introduction/first act narrative. I liked how she really dove into the conflicts of one main character's starting point. Of course, the conflict changes, and Revis successfully balances a second protagonist, as well.

Ultimately, I found myself only partly pleased with the novel, and it's all Orson Scott Card's fault.

That because I was reading Card's well-aged How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy. This occasions an admission on my part, a somewhat painful one, considering that I read a lot, much of it science fiction and fantasy: I've never read a book by Orson Scott Card before.

Nope. Not one. Not even Ender's Game.

For those who don't know what kind of an admission this is, say, maybe you're not a sci-fi nut, or you've just been defrosted after an avalanche buried you in the Alps in the last Ice Age, this makes me howl with derision. It's sort of like living in the US and admitting you've never eaten corn on the cob, or growing up in the 70s without knowing what Farrah Fawcett looked like. That out of touch.

So why is this Card's fault? (I feel a need to justify this, after comparing him to corn on the cob and a 70s "pin-up girl".)

I work in publishing, and I read a lot, and I'm trying to write, and he really spoke to that confluence of concerns with his book. How to Write, that is. Not Ender.

Scott focuses on how a writer needs to think about readers as a segmented market, that they access a writer's work not by its ideas or its quality, but by its marketing. This makes eminent sense, and Card humorously and helpfully takes us through an abbreviated version of his own voyage of discovery on this, with substantial diversions into strategies to manage the channeling of creativity.

As a publisher and reader, his observations meet with my own experiences, but as a writer, I was surprised to find I had not put them into practice. Card specifically does not argue against breaking boundaries and opening new ground. He simply, and eloquently, shows how sales categories help customers find books they will like. The point-of-sale success of categories like "fantasy" and "mystery" leads booksellers, distributors, publishers, and best-selling authors, to think in those terms as well. For Card, it's a matter of how hard one wants to fight to get sales. If you're OK with the challenge, cross boundaries. If you'd just like to have your book read, consider living, and writing, within them.

He also offers some keen tidbits of advice. One of the ones I remember is about using offensive language. Consistent with his approach in this book, he doesn't moralize about this. He simply observes that market placement will constrict with expletives, and expand with their deletion. He advises against made-up expletives because they will break the spell the author is spending so much time and energy to create.


So, how did Ms. Revis lose me? I learned from Card (yep - his fault) that publishers respect the boundaries of genre fiction. For instance, the boundaries among romance, mystery, and science fiction. Those would be easy to see, right?

Of course, this isn't true at all, and the value of Revis' book lies partly in her ability to weave multiple levels of narrative together. There's a travelogue, coming of age (twice over), mystery, and the sci-fi setting, all blended into a single, very readable narrative. (Brava!)

My problem was that I was focusing too much on the different types of narrative to enjoy their combination fully.

The science fiction setting is, in the end, mainly a setting, however. I recall reading something from Philip Dick, shortly after he started to be recognized as more than a crank and a hack, and also shortly before he died, that in science fiction, the universe in which the story is set differs in one main aspect from our own, and the characters are principally involved in dealing with that difference.

Take Robert Silverberg's The World Inside. The premise is that on an overcrowded future Earth, people live in gigantic high-rises surrounded by open space. The novel isn't about how the high-rises are built, or why, or the political machinations needed to force people into them. It's about how people adapt to the circumstances they're in, which fundamentally differ from our own.

I like (but don't worship) that definition of science fiction. It mostly works. Across the Universe, however, may as well have been set on an island as on an intergalactic, intergenerational space ship. It would be a fascinating story in a different setting. And that only bothers me, I suspect, because I learned to look for this in a last-millennium "how-to" book.

coolest thing I read today: the wherefores of book titles

I'm sorry Gary Dexter's blog, How Books Got Their Titles, is no longer active, but he posted 181 essays explaining book titles, which I think is a very literary and worthy thing to do. I liked his explanation of the origin of the title Pride and Prejudice (#178) very much.

I'll definitely pay his blog a visit again (after all, I have 177 left to go!), and if you're among the handful of people reading this, I guess you might like to as well.