Yes, all these books are for me

So I got done with work insanely early last Saturday. This almost never happens; I'm usually typing like a mad woman until past 7 (not writing, typing; this is the day job). But through a strange cluster of unpredictable events, there I was with no work to do and time on my hands. So Quin and I took the boys to the Mall of America. This is their Mecca. Not the MOA, but what lies within it, near its very heart: the Lego store.

Me? I'm not so much a Lego fan, and the store is always crowded (comes from only having 3 stores in the entire US, I think), so while Quin roamed the aisles with the boys I slipped away to the Barnes & Noble. Roaming an actual, non-virtual bookstore is a rare treat for me, I only get to do it about twice a year (and one of those times will inevitably be Christmas - ugh).

I headed straight for the graphic novel section and loaded up on Hellboys, Hellblazers (also known as Constantine), Samurai Champloo manga, and a book about Sandman. As I'm making my way to the register it occurs to me my stack is awfully testosteroney, and I'm in the mood for something a little girly too. So I head to general fiction and find this book: Cheating at Solitaire by Ally Carter. Ally is a fellow Backspacer, so I've been seeing this cover for months. I always thought it looked interesting. I tend not to like most things specifically geared towards women, but I had a sense that this might fall into the little subcategory of women things which I like.

Boy, was I ever right. I enjoyed this book immensely (I finished it in an evening and an afternoon; had I not had to work the next morning I could have easily sat up all night finishing it). It's smart and funny, and Julia, the main character, feels like a real woman. I like reading about a woman who doesn't feel like she needs a man to complete her life; it's refreshing. All of the secondary characters are well written as well; I particularly liked "the Georgias", three old women, two named Georgia and one a former Miss Georgia. But as a writer, I'm particularly impressed with the way she writes scenes. Nothing ends to soon, nothing goes on too long. The scene crafting here is just perfect. I'll be reading this one more than once.

I know I usually only recommend fantasy and sci-fi books here, but I'm going to break from tradition and recommend this one, because it's just that good.

I still miss George

It's been just about a year since I last talked about the Beatles. I mentioned that my teen years were all about John, my 20's belonged to Paul, and now in my 30's I'm all about the George. This is still true. I don't think George ever got half the attention he deserved (although I suspect he got twice the attention he really wanted).

Last week was a crummy week. I've been trying to come up with a suitably vague way of explaining it (since it's work-related, vagueness counts). Put it this way: see that Joss quote at the top of my blog? Well let's just say I had a run in with an inherent divider. It's all taken care of now, but I had a few days of feeling blue and musing on "why are people so mean?" (I'm sensitive. No really, I am).

The point being, the perfect cure for the "why are people so mean" blues is George Harrison, hands down. His music is optimistic, but it's not naively optimistic. It's world weary and optimistic at the same time. Quite a trick, but he did it. He could be quite caustic about things he didn't like (think "Taxman" or "Little Piggies") but he was a take the good with the bad kinda guy, and that always came across. He says to me, "Yes, some people suck, but isn't it great to be alive anyway?" Which is ironic, I suppose, him being dead and all.

I wish he had done more, but I get the sense he wasn't one to record crap. He held out for the good stuff, no "filler". I mean, there was 15 years between Cloud 9 and Brainwashed. Aside from the Traveling Wilburys (which I finally got on CD, at slightly inflated Ebay prices, but they're impossible to find new in stores), what was he doing?

I can see why Brainwashed took so long to record, though. He got lung cancer, then got stabbed by a crazed fan, then got lung cancer again. It's gotta be tough to be creative under those circumstances. And he raced to finish recording before he died (and didn't quite do it; it was finished by Jeff Lynne and his son Dhani Harrison, but the important stuff was done). It's still one of my all-time favorite CDs; it's a shame it never got radio play or any kind of promotion. If you're even remotely a Beatles fan I recommend checking it out. He faced death with humor and a love for everything (even the mean people, I suspect); the only remotely sad song is the instrumental "Marwa Blues". I'm not usually a fan of instrumentals, but this one has such an aching beauty (and I do mean ache). Well, you have to hear it to know. Find it. Check it out. You'll see why I love my George.

I'm gonna talk about Ian MacDonald again...

... cause his stuff's the bomb. (I swear it's not just because his name is the most frequent keyword that brings people here - well, that brings people here who go on to read other posts. "Kiss Me Kate spanking scene" is still my number one draw, but for some reason those folks never stay). I spoke briefly on his novella The Little Goddess way back here. The July issue of Asimov's has another novella of his called The Djinn's Wife which I also liked. The two stories don't connect, it's not a like a sequel, but they are both set in a near-future India. The world-building is very well done; there are so many details and they are all well thought out. But as with The Little Goddess, the world-building is just background to tell a story about a girl. Very highly recommended.

My usual experience with short story magazines of any genre is only liking 1 or 2 per issue; this particular Asimov's hit it out of the ballpark for me with four stories I liked. Two I really enjoyed - The Djinn's Wife and Impossible Dreams by Tim Pratt - and two I liked if not to the same degree: Nano comes to Clifford Falls by Nancy Kress (there just aren't enough sci-fi stories out there where the MC is a mother, in my opinion) and You Will Come to the Moon by William Preston. Preston is the only one of the bunch that I've not read before, but I'll be keeping an eye out for him now.

(EDIT: The name of the story is actually You Will Go to the Moon, which of course makes more sense (if you read the story you'll know what I mean). That's what I get for blogging from memory. Although - yay me! - I didn't mispell anybody's name. Not even "Asimov", which I routinely get wrong. I always feel like there should be two of one of those letters. Aasimov? Assimov? Oh no, not that!)

Tim Pratt, you may or may not recall, I talked about before as well, or rather I talked about his excellent novel The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. That novel I loved in large part for its attention to comic-geek detail. Impossible Dreams I love for its attention to movie-geek detail. Both have very well drawn characters, believeable and real.

At any rate, Ian MacDonald also has a novel out now, also set in near-future India, called River of Gods. I have it on order from Amazon.com, but they aren't going to ship it until July. I think they're playing hardball because I won't sign up for their next-day shipping for $80/year thing. I prefer my shipping free. Free shipping at Amazon.com used to mean 1-2 weeks. Apparently now it means a month or more. I'm not a fan of the hardball. It's still faster than B&N.com, though.

Happy Bloomsday!

Today is June 16, and that makes it Bloomsday. What, you may be asking, is a Bloomsday? Well, James Joyce wrote a novel called Ulysses which follows the wanderings of one Leopold Bloom around Dublin on June 16, 1904. This novel has many very devoted fans who gather in pubs around the world every June 16 to celebrate Bloomsday by drinking Guiness and reading the book out loud to each other (man, I never get invited to the cool parties).

Now Ulysses is hands-down my absolute favorite book of all time. But it's also a book that many people start and just can't finish. It's a lot of work, and unless it's your sort of thing, it's not worth the work. I get that. It's just so much My Sort of Thing. Someone at Backspace recently asked me why I like it so much. I hadn't really thought about it before, not in the sort of way that I could articulate it anyway. So it took me a while to come up with my response:

I think how I came to it is a huge part of why I like it, so here's the backstory of me. I've been obsessed with myths all my life. As a kid I made a point of reading all the mythology books I could find at the library: Greek and Roman, Norse (my fave), Asian, anything I could get my hands on. They were the truest thing to me: I believed in them all (still do, actually). But I was bugged by how they were condescended to in subtle (and not so subtle) ways. There was a definite "can you believe people used to actually believe in these things?" vibe. To me, the myths were always stories that pointed to deeper, darker, and universal truths. I didn't realize I wasn't the only one who took them this seriously until a high school teacher handed me THE POWER OF MYTH. I was instantly hooked, quickly moving on to all of Joseph Campbell's other books. And Joe Campbell was always talking about this writer named James Joyce...

ULYSSES to me is really about how all these deep, dark myths are still in us and with us in our everyday lives. Now, there are a lot of novels that use mythology or mythological figures (AMERICAN GODS and THE LONG DARK TEATIME OF THE SOUL are also faves of mine), but these generally involve characters physically interacting with the gods. The myths are something external. In ULYSSES the myths are internal, and they are a part of everyone. I think a lot of writers who wanted to write a story based on the Odyssey would feel inclined to make at least one of the characters some sort of mythological scholar, so they could explain everything to us. ULYSSES is about a completely ordinary schmo living out a myth, and he doesn't even realize it. I understand that Joyce had a special disdain for Carl Jung, which seems ironic, as they seem to be saying the same things. Myths are within us all; they are not just part of our culture, they are part of who we are. You don't have to know the stories to live the stories.

I also just love the style of it. It begs to be read out loud. Joyce was not a reader with a thesaurus; no two words have exactly the same nuance of meaning, and he put a great deal of effort into picking exactly the right words in exactly the right order. Most passages do at least double duty, meaning one thing on the surface and something more if you dig a little deeper. I would love for my writing to do that. Take for example Episode XIV: Oxen of the Sun. The only action here is a bunch of men in a waiting room while someone's wife is struggling through a long, difficult labor. Joyce is trying to make the point that all of human history precedes every birth, but of course he doesn't just say so. The story of these men waiting is told in the styles of different periods of history, starting with ancient times and working up to modern times, culminating of course in the birth of the child. How is that for show not tell?

I've been thinking about it more since I wrote that, mostly about the internal versus external use of myths. I've been trying for a while now to express how my novel is different than other novels I've read that are also based on pagan Norse characters. I guess that's what it is. My myths are all internal. You won't be reading any scenes in my book of Odin and Thor feasting together and discussing the plights of their human followers below. Not that there's anything wrong with that - American Gods and The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul are both dead brilliant books - it's just not what I'm doing. For me it's all internal. If the gods exist at all, they exist in the minds and hearts of my Norsemen. Of course that doesn't make them less real.

Of course I haven't been working on the novel in question in over a month. But any day now I'm sure I'll get back on it. You know, when I'm done spending my afternoons hauling rocks around.

Joss Whedon talks about X3...kinda

It's in this interview here. Joss hasn't actually seen the movie in question, but he's been told all about it (probably more times than he'd like). He's very diplomatic about the liberties they took with his stuff. It's towards the end of page 2, but the whole interview is interesting. Well, it is if you're a comic geek.

The new patio is in!

I didn't get any pictures of the whole thing since they were still working on it when we did this and it's raining today, but here are some photos of Aidan and Oliver putting their handprints in the concrete:

Quest for a dry basement: post the fourth

So the concrete man came yesterday and already he's half done. The patio concrete is all gone. They even took out all the steps except the bit we need to hold up the house. It's hard to tell, I didn't get a good before picture right under the sliding glass door, but there used to be a pronounced slope towards the house (it was particularly bad under the deck where the basement window is). He's already leveled out the ground, and he'll be packing it down (not sure what that means, but I think it involves machines) before he pours the concrete. The board marks the border for the new patio:

And here you can see the other board, marking where the new patio will end. We still haven't figured out what we're going to do with the rest of the former-patio space, but there's been talk of paving stones or maybe a rock garden:

And one last pic. When the concrete man gave us the estimate, it was cheaper if we let them use a Bobcat than if we made them take it all out by hand. I was wondering at the time why anyone would not go with the Bobcat option. Now I know:

I'm not too worried. We have mutant grass; that will bounce back in a week or two.

Short post on basketball

In one of Douglas Adam's novels there was a man that had rain clouds follow him everywhere he went. Vacation destinations paid him to stay away.

I think someone should pay me to not root for their teams.

It's been fun to watch the games (although I've only been able to catch parts of a few of them and most not at all; too many things to do). Basketball played really well is so much more gratifying to watch than the way the Timberwolves have been doing it the last two years. But Phoenix is out of it now, and so is Detroit, whom I was also bucking for (but I do think Flip Saunders proved that he wasn't the problem with our team last year).

So that leaves Dallas and Miami. I was despondent. Then Quin pointed out that a Miami win would mean Shaq getting a champion ring with his new team before Kobe's managed to do it with his Shaq-less Lakers. So I'm bucking for Miami, just to stick it to Kobe. See what happens when you force out all the other top-notch players on your team so you can be the only star? You lose the play-offs. On account of it being a team sport and all. Plus I just like Shaq; he seems so personable.

Go Miami! And I hope I didn't just curse you...