Reading out of Jealousy

I don't think I'm very funny as a writer. When I get a laugh, it's usually when I'm being completely serious and don't expect anyone to laugh. Actually, the last time it happened, I thought it was a rather sad moment. But my teacher laughed. I don't mind. Whatever.

I have this imaginary version of myself who is funny. She is the sort of writer who skillfully wields understatement and hyperbole to draw out the ridiculousness of a situation without breaking her readers suspension of disbelief. Usually when I actually try to do this, is falls flat. And when I am being truly myself, I don't want anything to be ridiculous. I just want to be taken seriously. I flash back to my three year old self; my eyebrows sore from being pushed up to their highest possible elevation in an attempt to convey the tragic situation of a few stick figures I had drawn, to an adult who thought I was adorable, but was completely missing the point. I can take myself lightly, but everyone else must assume I am deadly serious at all times. And for goodness sake, don't smirk at me like that.

But enough of my wounded psychology.

I've been enjoying the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan. I grabbed it from the school library to look at the action sequences. I hate writing action scene because I think I'm pretty bad at it. So I am looking for examples (if anyone would recommend a middle reader or young adult book with fist fighting, chase scenes, spies, ninjas, or super hero type action, I'd appreciate it). Percy is a first person narrator. He has that dry humor that I always think I ought to have. It has taken me a book and a half to realize that this is the concrete realization of the humor for which I strive. I am not sure if I should adore him for pulling it off, or find it slightly annoying in person. 

Ironically, two other authors who pull off variations on this style of humor are Austen and Dickens. I can only read one Austen novel a year or I shall become very depressed and raw from the cynicism. And as for Dickens... When I am not reading Dickens, I very rationally tell people that I appreciate his work for it's humor, the intricacy of the plot details, and the character sketches. But when I'm reading him, those are exactly the things I hate the most.

Back to Percy Jaskson. These books are kind of a Harry Potter knock off, when you look at a summary, which may be why they got published. But, like all good books that look like Harry Potter, no one thinks of Harry Potter when they are reading it. It's a completely different world. It's America, it's Greek mythology, it's really geeky in fact. I would probably read it for the references to Greek myth alone. I don't know a lot about Greek myth, but mythology in general makes me happy. Then there is the wackiness of the premiss. If the god Hermes was running around in modern Delaware, what would he look like?

It's a bit too odd, in some ways. Perhaps it's a hair too believable. Only in this kind of culture could you write a book for middle schoolers in which the main characters are the illegitimate children of Greek gods, who haven't changed at all since they were sleeping around with mortals and not giving the products a second thought in ancient Greece. The driving force for many of the demigod characters is this complicated, angry, hurt, betrayed relationship with their parents, mortal and immortal. That's gotta be a product of the cultural decay of the family. It's quite sad.

Anyway, I have tried very hard to dislike these books. They aren't really my thing. When I am imagining my type of fantasy book, I want it to be taken a little more seriously. But every now and then, I get totally sucked in. At one point a very frustrated daughter of Athena is trying to spell cyclopes and can't do it. She is generally a Heromine Granger type know-it-all. So this made me very happy. I instantly identified with her, naturally. She just wants to be taken seriously, and she can't spell. All the demi god characters are dyslexic and ADD which makes the whole thing pretty goofy, and also makes me feel like I would fit right in.

Drums

At Christmas I am often reminded that the changes in my personality are quite organic. I guess, I remember that I am the same person I have always been, only older, If that makes sense. When I list the sorts of books and movies I loved when I was little, it looks nothing like my taste now. But I can see how one set of tastes grows out of another.

How does this relate to Christmas... well, who remembers the drummer boy stop animation video. It was never a classic in my house, but I know it is in many households. I would have loved it as a little girl. But I can't actually sit through it now. But I've always loved the carol that the movie was based on. Ironically, when I was little I liked it because I liked to say "pah-rum-pum-pum-pum." (My other favorite christmas was Oh Holy Night because it had the line "Fall on your knees")

When I was a teenager I was glad that the a cappella quartet group I was in didn't end up singing it because I couldn't get through it without tearing up. At that point, I loved it because of the second verse. I identified with the boy who is impoverished and never good enough. "I am a poor boy too/ I have no gift to bring/ that's fit to give a king"

I heard a version once that was by a band that had a great drum solo in the middle. I have never figured out who did that version, but I liked it.

I love a good choral version of this song, but somehow, it seems like the perfect song for a rougher sound.

 It's about not being polished, or high brow, or good enough for the elite, deeply religious people who really understand Christmas. Of course, that is a great contradiction because a sincere follower of Christ, no matter what their intellectual or social status, is not an elitist. So they will kneel at the manger beside the smelly shepherds and the heathen kings, and the little boy with spiky hair who makes a lot of noise on his drum set.

I like the expression on this guys face while he beats the heck out of that drum set. I have no idea who he is.

So perhaps there is a part of me that still secretly loves the sappy and melodramatic spirit of the song. I know a lot of people hate this song for how cheesey it is. But I grew out of the type of girl who took such things very seriously. For example, I totally took Star Wars Episode One seriously until Episode Two came out and I realized that it was completely ridiculous.

So I never get tired of hearing a new version of the Drummer Boy Song. I even put up with the Celtic Women singing it, but I will spare you that video.

"I played my drum for him/ I played my best/ then he smiled at me/ me and my drum"

It's a very simple gift and a very simple acceptance from God made man.

Northern Courage.

I read this book once, called The Sea of Trolls. It was religiously pluralistic to the point of being sickening. But what stuck with me was the picture of northern culture. That Northerness that Lewis talked about loving and having in common with Tolkien. In the story, there were vikings who would tell fabulous stories that always ended with the gruesome death of the hero.

Tremendous problem, hero overcomes it in epic battle, he emerges triumphant, and trips on a shoe lace, hits his head and dies. Or, he gets one bad guy and the other one eats him. That kind of thing

Basically, it doesn't matter what the story is, it can't end well. Death or destruction always has the last word. You would think that this would be distressing, but the characters in the book loved it. They are describes as holding back the punch line, grinning with glee before announcing that the hero gets his head bashed in.

John Howe. :)

It doesn't inspire despair, but a tough kind of courage. Death is the last word for everyone, so you better prepare yourself to go in the most glorious way possible, which also might be the most gruesome way possible.
In Lord of the Rings, I always associate this kind of courage with Gandalf and called it hope. But in my Tolkien class, we have talked about it as an influence of Norse mythology. It is especially exhibited by the Rohirim.

We cannot break the armies of Mordor, but we will meet them in battle nonetheless.

...because we are just that bad ass.

This is not an argument for why it's worth it. It's not a test of strength. It's really very simple. Eomer is a courageous mortal. He stands against Mordor. Mordor has send out an army. Therefore, they go to battle, with or without hope. That's not really true. They have hope. It's just not hope of victory. They hope that Mordor's armies are at least as insignificant as they are, in the long run.

This is the sort of thing that gets labeled stupidity, or stubbornness, or even stuffiness in our very civilized society. If we are going to go out and give our very precious lives, it better be a hopeful, and worthwhile endeavor that couldn't be dealt with any other way. But I admire the training implied.

Eowyn vs Nazgul // by oliverojm
Or so said the blog where I found it. I like it.

My inclination is to become cynical when things get tough, never mind hopeless. This "realistic" view of my prospects in a given situation quickly become a paralyzing weight that makes it difficult to act in any direction at all. That interior critic tells me the paper I am writing is rubbish. But does this enable me to fix it, or throw it out and write a better one? No. It makes me slam my laptop closed and hide under my blankets, pretending that Monday will never come.

But in such a situation, Northern Courage would prompt a final defiance. I would whip that paper into whatever shape I could and turn it in on time with as much pride as I could salvage.

Nor is Northern courage a kind of unquenchable cheer leader. It can be grim. It's not about feeling happy. It's a recognition that most of my life is out of my control. In fact, the only thing I can control is how I respond to the challenges of each day, and that only when I have trained myself for such challenges.

But this courage, I begin to think, is actually necessary to do anything worth doing. The people in the world who do great things know the odds of failure, and keep going to find out the odds of success. The people in the world who don't do great things know the odds of failure, and don't care to find out if one of the chances of success is theirs.

It's almost finals week. I'm procrastinating. Also, this is the second to last finals week I will ever have to deal with. I hope to grow some courage before I get through my final finals week.

I am unemployable in a horrible economy. But I will dress up in uncomfortable shoes and turn in my resume anyway.

Enjambment

I don't understand prose poems make me rethink my major is art mostly looks like someone let their three year old finger paint on the wall was a face with only the colors out of the tube can't get any brighter than the sky today.

Confused? Me too.

I'm not a poet. The art of poetry writing is interesting to me, but not enough to make me pursue it through the dark and sticky mire of my inadequacy. There are other things that are as challenging that I find more rewarding. But I will probably continue to dabble in it. One thing that I like about poetry is the device of enjambment. Basically enjambment happens when the line ends, but the sentence in a poem doesn't. It can be used to break a pattern and then catches the reader (or maybe just me) off guard. I get used to pausing and, or, finishing a thought at the end of a line. So the instant after I have comprehended the meaning of the line, I find that the idea continues on the next line and must adjust my understanding. That haltering thought adjustment, like the quick step one takes to avoid falling when one's foot has caught on a broken edge of sidewalk, is an interesting thing to be able to cause in someone else's mind.

(Does that make me a sadist? I want to mess with everyone's mind. *evil laugh*)

I also like the way the word sounds. Enjambment. It looks rather like a word I would type out and then realize I had made some egregious spelling error.

(Had to attempt "egregious" three or four times before I looked up "terrible" in my thesaurus and found it. I would never have guess it began with an E. I thought I had the last part wrong some how.)

The B belongs there so delightfully adding to the surprise of the idea. I can think of several words that ought to have Bs in them and don't. And some that have them and shouldn't. So the spelling pleases me. And the way it looks, that poor B squished uncomfortable between Ms and the J looks like the N has stepped on it's tail and it is about to trip over the A, rather they way my mouth and nose feels trying to get all those sounds in between nasal consonants.
Cough.
Sometimes my mind feels like an enjambment. If I start talking before a thought it fully formed, I tend to start multiple sentences before I decide which one I really want to say out loud. This leaves the person I am talking to rather confused. I suspect that I will do this without realizing it when I get old. It will be very amusing. And I find that I change my mind about where a sentence is going half way through it. I usually start over. But now and then, I find a sentence that started to say one thing and half way through decided to conclude a different thought. It is not always clear when the shift happened. One or two words might belong in either sentence. I used to see this in other students' writing a lot when I was a writing tutor.

(Who thought it was a good idea to make me a writing tutor?)

Learning to write was a challenge to me because I didn't think in sentences.

(Sound off, people. Who thinks in complete, grammatically correct sentences? Anyone?)

I think in a tangle of related ideas that exist in a images and key words that act like hinges, swinging one idea to meet another. I can be frustrating to try and express these thoughts because they are a web rather than a string.

(Thus, the loosely organized chaos of this post and many others like it.)

Sometimes I sit down at my keyboard and can't write a single sentence. Sometimes I free write, letting words connect to each other independent of the words preceding or to follow.

(Preceding is a rather confusing word. It means "come before" something and "go ahead of" something. Does anyone else find that spatially confusing. I want to it be in the back, or in the front. The head or the foundation. but not both.)

I think it would be fun to try and express a very specific idea that way; weaving together ideas and images that suggest something larger without completing a single sentence. It would continually trip up your brain, like an enjambment. (Like those school yard songs that always change the subject just as they are leading up to saying a dirty word.) All those ideas bounding around and you catch glimpses of them as they flash past in a whirling jumble of possible sentences.

I spun ideas till I got dizzy and wanted to hurl magic words at all the misunderstandings could be avoided like the plague wasn't started by rats but we continue to ignore them and they get bigger all the time until they walk out the door and parents remember all the things they should have told me how to do this in school today I met a person who raised his hand and made us all be quiet until he thought of exactly how do you ask the right questions anyway.

Wayfaring Stranger

Thinking about a lot of things. And I've been looking for an excuse to post this video. I think it's lovely and I want to be in a group that is good enough to do it someday.

The immigrants and the slaves of the first half of our country's history were so uprooted that they had a deep understanding of what it means to be in this world but not of it. In their songs they express a longing for a perfect home, shared with their loved ones who are separated from them by oceans and mountains and often death. Sorrow and pain are not supposed to be part of our life. But we are passing through this world, where they are. The place where we are meant to live, in joy and peace, our true home, is on the other side of the time we spend here.

As I am going into my last year of undergraduate study, I am SO ready to be done and on to the rest of my life. I am young and naive and see the future full of bright possibilities. The more I dream of the life I want to set up for myself, the wonderful things I want to do, the harder it becomes to remember that this world is not my home. I worry about finding a job. Will anyone in this world want me to work for them? Will I be able to make ends meet? Will I get to do something that I love? Will I be able to live near people who love me? As an adult, I need to sort out all of these questions and prepare myself to answer, or let God answer each of them. I have to let go of my fear or rejection. It's God's job to make someone willing to hire me. It's my job to apply diligently.

Among all these questions and searching, I need to take a step back and regain a proper perspective.
My true job is to love the Lord my God with all my strength, heart, and mind. It was much easier to believe in this when I was a child, having my basic needs met by my parents. Now I must be active in this walk of faith. I need to find road by which to walk through this lonesome valley, not a place in it to call my own.

Growing up has often felt like a training course to make me fit to live in the world. Being a grown up will be a training course to make me fit to live in the next world.

Music and Writing

Looking at grad school programs. Some of them are really interested in making sure writers know how to talk about their writing process. This is a mysterious and personal subject. Certain things help everyone, but no two processes are exactly alike and no method will always work. Everyone hits a wall sometimes.

I like to listen to music. But it has to be a certain kind of music. I love music I can sing along to, but that makes trouble when I am supposed to be writing because I end up typing song lyrics in with whatever I'm working on.
The solution to this is sound tracks and classical music without vocals, or with vocals in another language.

Recently I have been reading various authors talk about what it feels like when they are writing well. A lot of people describe a feeling of discovery rather than creation, letting characters go their own way, rather than inventing a character and making them do certain things. I don't know if I've ever had that experience. But I have slipped into a mode where ideas come and language flow easily and it builds until I am not stopping to scratch my head about how I'm going to describe something or come up with a motivation for a character to do something. It's a really great feeling.

In trying to articulate this, I found myself using the same kind of language that I might use to describe some of the music I like to listen to when I write. This is what it feels like. 

(and if you haven't seen How To Train Your Dragon, you should look up the clip that corresponds to this track. Animators having fun with body language, no dialogue necessary.)

And before this dragon movie became my guilty pleasure, (along with kung fu panda) I listened to this:

That's what a good writing day sounds like.

Reading for spite

The Tapestry:
The Hound of Rowan
By Henry Neff 

I had to look it up to figure out which of these titles was for the book, and which is for the series. My research says that the book is called "The HOund of Rowan" and "The Tapestry" is the name of the series. Neither title makes much sense to me, but whatever.

This series seems to be a shameless knock off of Harry Potter. It involves a boy named Max who discovers that he has magical powers and is immediately swept off to a school where he will learn to use them. There are magical creatures, wacky teachers, special games, lighthearted banter between new friends, a bully, and rule breaking. What would happen if Harry Potter went to school on the East coast of the good old USA?

Some special and unique features of this book are an ogre and a hag who make the meals at the school. Magical bedroom and room mate selection, creatures that can only be described as seriously evil werewolves on steroids, a singing bullfrog that removes, ahem, social inhibitions, magical pets and an ancient ship which student must not sleep on lest its sea dwelling guardian make waves that toss them overboard.

Generally, I think knock offs are rather annoying. But I gave this one a chance because I am curious to see if other authors are trying to amend Rowling as I would like to. I rather hate Rowling for failing to deliver on so many good ideas. She is really good at half the things you need to tell a good story. But this is a rant for another post. I can't help comparing this book to Potter, since it's clearly in the same sub-genre. It's an interesting comparison.

I enjoyed this book because most of the characters were believable. They were distinctive and memorable, yet not overly simplified. The adults were reasonably competent and mature and also had believable disagreements, personal grudges and biases. The children were petty and rude, often terrified, secretive, hot tempered, and sometimes rose above what was expected of people their age to show real virtue. There was one exception. I guess you could call him the Draco Malfoy equivalent. They never gave him even Draco's excuse for his bad behavior. He was just mean for the sake of being mean. Maybe they will further explain his character in another book. I was awfully proud of Max, however, because he was willing to put aside their animosity when it really counted.

I disliked some of the narrative choices the author made. There were scenes that were merely passing jokes and insignificant insidence that were not written as such. They were sometimes given more narraitve weight, so to speak. A reader can sense when the author is giving them a detail they are supposed to pay attentiong to. One of Rowling's strengths is that she is really good at leaving hints around, leading her reader on, and then tying it all up like a Christmas package. In The Tapestry there are several dramatic events that ought to hide some kind of secret or clue to be reincorporated later, and they don't. It would be tempting to dwell on such events just for the sake of the humor or drama of the whole thing. But they didn't actually have the significance in the greater story to merit it.

Another stylistic thing that bothered me was the Neff's habit of ending chapters with drawn knives, pointed guns, strangers stepping out of shadows, or new clues being uncovered, only to pick up two weeks later in the next chapter. We are not given the benefit of seeing how the characters process these dramatic events. We must just assume that they did and latch on to whatever they are interested in now.

Another thing I loved about this book was that there was no thirty pages of exposition right before the final action of the climax. The explanation of the mysterious bad things that keep happening is revealed slowly throughout most of the book and the last hundred pages are pretty non stop action with only minimal explanation. Some questions are never explained but merely proved. A character who has been portrayed as a villain for the first half, swears his good intentions half way through, leaving us in confusion, and then proves what side he is on in the climax. No explanation necessary.

Speaking of the climax, wow. The immediacy of the whole thing and the high stakes made it pretty darn intense. The climax of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (my favorite book so far) comes close. Creepy ritual, blood, desperate fighting, painful sacrifice, heroics. Only without the long monologue from the big bad guy.

Overall, The Hound of Rowan's tone was less charming (if just as whimsical. Did I mention Max has to babysit goslings for a goose who likes to shout insults at the referee at sporting events?) and darker than Potter's world in the early books. Come to think of it, it was less emotional. There was no lack of children with tragic pasts, but no one was threatening to take away Maxes birthday, so there was not the same tug on the old heart strings. Neff is weak in some of the areas in which Rowling shines, but also very strong in some areas that I think Rowling could use some work.

So, what about knock offs? Do we give our unswerving allegiance to originals only? Or do we allow imitation to be the most sincere form of flattery? If it is obviously an imitation, but done really well, does that make a difference? Is it a crime against the original creator, or homage to their art?