October Book Report

I'm gearing up at the moment for another sprint of writing, or rather a marathon, to see how much of Mitwa I can pound out by the end of November. I'm setting 50,000 words as my goal, but I hope to have the first draft done by the end of December. I have a week off of work in December, plus two weeks break from homeschooling over the holidays, so I think that much at least is doable. Which means that if I miss my goal of 50,000 words in November, as long as I get at least 30,000 I'll consider myself quite pleased. Wish me luck!

On the reading front, I read four more Heinlein books, all collections of short stories and novellas. Namely, it was Waldo & Magic, Inc., Green Hills of Earth, Orphans of the Sky, and Assignment in Eternity. I particularly liked "Gulf" from the last of those, about a spy who is actually the next step on the evolutionary ladder. Heinlein touched on a lot of interesting ideas with language on that one (in a nutshell, the supermen speak a super language). I'll probably go back and revisit that one later. That would be my greatest writing frustration: that I can't work out how to show my ideas, about how the language you speak structures your thinking. I've played with it a bit, but I've had no real luck. In this respect movies and TV beat novels. I've been watching season one of Heroes and have really enjoyed the fact that the two Japanese characters speak Japanese with each other (and wonder why everyone in India speaks English...). I love hearing the sounds and rhythms of other languages, and getting a feel for the concepts that just don't translate. Hard to convey that in prose, though.

In the non-Heinlein front, I read Empire of Ivory, the fourth Tremeraire book by Naomi Novik. Plotwise it was slower than the first three, but ideawise it was excellent. The themes that have been slipping in and out of the background are moving to the foreground now, and I'm looking forward to book five (I suspect it will be the last, but I'm not sure).

I also read Thursday Next: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde. I love Fforde. In writing circles one of the most frequent (and by extension most tiresome) arguments is the question of literary versus genre (and what defines each). I don't think readers care as much as writers do about such questions; nearly everyone I know who reads, reads both. Jasper Fforde is very funny and writes one of the best female lead characters around, but what I like most about him is his palpable love of books: all books. If you love books all stripes, you really should be reading Jasper Fforde.

The last book I picked up was Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy by Ally Carter. This is the sequel to I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have to Kill You and is about a prep school for girls which secretly trains them to be spies. I've loved them both; it's cool to read books about teen-age girls who can do college level physics and math, speak twelve languages, and hack into computers but still deal with the horror that is strapless formal wear. As much as I love a teen-age witch, it's nice to see another path to empowerment explored. If you liked Veronica Mars, you'll like Ally Carter, I'm betting.

OK, I'm off to finish off a few last chores before I start the big writing crunch tomorrow. It would be nice to hit the ground running. I'm not sure yet whether I'll skip blogging, post word count updates, or use blogging as a mental break from the WIP and talk about other stuff; we'll see what the future brings.

So I'm starting the new thing...

...the YA sci-fi thing I've been mulling over in my head for the last few months. The third character finally told me her name. Now I can use temporary names for minor characters, or more commonly just randomly pick something and stick with it, but names and their meanings and what they say about the character are important to me for the major players; I can't start with one and switch partway through without really derailing things (I've tried it with short stories and have never been happy with the results; the other name just doesn't work, and then the original one didn't work either because I'd futzed with it).

So now I know I'm writing a story about Omesh, Takashi and Rabia, and I have enough of the outline roughed out to finally plunge into Chapter One (as much as I may seem to be a rigid outliner, the fact is that the outline is as much a work in progress as the prose itself, and I play with those index cards a lot as I go. That's why they're on index cards and not, say, stone tablets).

I don't really have a title yet, but I don't like calling things "Untitled" or "Untitled #87" or some such, so for now I'm referring to it as Mitwa. That's from a song in the movie Lagaan, which was the movie I was watching when the crucial thematic elements of the WIP finally fell into place and I realized just what it was I was going to write, what I was going to try to say. (Not that my WIP is suddenly about beating the British cantonment at a cricket match to get out of playing brutal taxes, but then I've mentioned before how far afield my mind wanders when I'm watching stuff...)

If you want to hear it, it is on YouTube (and happily it's the rare Hindi clip I've found there with subtitles).



(If you're curious to check out a Hindi movie and not sure where to start, Lagaan is perfect. I also highly recommend Rang de Basanti (both of these star Aamir Khan) and Lage Raho Munnabhai (with Sanjay Dutt), which is the funniest movie I've ever seen about Ghandhi. I suppose it depends on where you live, but here in Minneapolis you can check all these out on DVD from the public library for free.)

But I digress. Back to Mitwa and the WIP. I particularly latched onto the part of the song that goes:

O mitwa, sun mitwa, tujhko kya darr hai re
Yeh dharti apni hai, apna ambar hai re

Which means "Listen, O my friend, what's this fear you have? This earth is ours and so is the sky." Since my story is of a boy who leaves his farm in Gujarati to go live in a space station, you can probably see why that line stuck out for me. Hence the working title. Which is not the same as a character name for me, this I can change an infinite number of times without caring much. At the very least, I'll probably end up going with something in English. But for now it's Mitwa.

So we can start the meter today:

Mitwa

0 / 60,000 (0.0%)

Because it always starts with zero...

September book report

Well, it was all Heinlein this month. Here's the list of what I tackled:

The Puppetmasters
Between Planets
Farmer in the Sky
Starman Jones
The Star Beast
Tunnel in the Sky
Time for the Stars
The Door into Summer
The Man Who Sold the Moon

I'm finding he gets better as you go, which is hardly surprising I suppose. Rather than try to come up with something to say for each (kind of time crunching at the moment; things to do, things to do), here are a few random observations:

• Mary in The Puppet Masters can tell instantly which men are possessed by aliens because they don't respond to her sexually. Now that's confidence! I can't imagine what it must be like to be so hot that every man either instantly wants you, or he's possessed by an alien.


• Farmer in the Sky is a book about farming on Ganymede. That is its entire plot. Imagine my surprise to find it such a page turner.


• I loved Pete the cat in The Door into Summer. Heinlein always writes really cool cats, but this one is my fave. He has more depth than a lot of human characters.


• I had a LOL moment reading The Tunnel in the Sky. I tackled that one while my husband was out of town, and I freely admit I had Lord of the Flies on the brain; i.e. I was subconsciously expecting an all-boy story. So when Jack said to Rod, "Yeah, you apologized, but I've got some mad I haven't used up yet." I thought to myself Geez, Jack sounds just like a Heinlein girl. Yep, sometimes I'm pretty clueless. So when Jack turned out to be Jacqueline I did in fact laugh out loud. But I loved Caroline in that novel, who always had Rod's back but was not remotely romantically interested in him (thank you!), and the ending when Rod the mayor had to go back to just being an adolescent was brilliant.

I got to arguing about women in fiction with my husband on a slightly different front recently as well. Since Lego is coming out with new sets for the Indiana Jones movies in 2008, my boys are now acutely interested in movies I could never persuade them to watch before, so over three nights we watched the whole trilogy.

Quin likes The Last Crusade the best of the three, largely on account of the tank sequence, but also on account of how they say goodbye in Austria. Heathen that I am, The Temple of Doom has always been my favorite. It starts in China then goes to India so you've already got my interest there, and where the first movie showed the Judeochristian god using some real power, this one showed the power of Kali Ma and Shiva. I've never gotten over my bitterness that with a world of cool cultures to hunt artifacts from, they went back to the Judeochristian mold for the third one (and in my opinion the third movie mined too heavily from the first in a lot of ways). Now The Temple of Doom has real flaws, mostly in that I don't think any writer involved knew the first thing about Kali Ma, the thugees, Shiva or India, frankly, but when I first saw it (I think I was 10?) I didn't either.

But then there's Willie Scott. Quin is baffled why I don't hate her. My argument is this: while I would rather they hadn't gone the Bond route of plugging in a new chick for every movie, I'm glad they decided not to keep bringing on new incarnations of the Marion character, so that every woman is basically interchangeable (can you tell the bond girls apart? Well, I liked Halle Berry but other than that they all tend to blur together in my head). Marion was ballsy and completely comfortable in Indy's environment (one presumes she grew up in that environment, as her father was Indy's mentor in the world of "archaeology"). Having Indy hook up with another woman who is almost the same would just make it more glaring that Marion wasn't there. I liked that they went the total other way: let's hook him up with a chick who is not even remotely comfortable in his environment.

Yes, she does scream a lot. If I had bugs crawling in my hair you can bet I'd be screaming too. And you'd be hard pressed to get me out on that suspension bridge even before he decided to cut it in half.

My main gripe is the idea that the only woman worth having around is the one that acts pretty much like a man. This might sound odd coming from someone who was never a girly-girl, but not being a girly-girl doesn't mean I don't understand that they are just as much being themselves as I am as being a tomboy-girl. In the world of action films I might fall more into the Trinity in The Matrix end of the spectrum, dressing and acting pretty much like the guys around me, but I appreciate that there is room for girly-girls like Charlie's Angels to kick butt too, even if they do it in heels and frilly clothes.

OK, I've been at this "short" post for three hours now (around distractions). One last aside: the night we watched The Temple of Doom with the boys Quin and I also watched the Salman Khan movie Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (which he only watched because it had Rani Mukerji in it and he likes her, but he was clearly torn whether he liked her enough to take her with Salman Khan on the side). Fairly early on Quin says, "Hey, look at Grandpa! That's Mola Ram!" And indeed it was the same actor. Which added a creep factor to the movie, the underlying sense that Grandpa could stick his hand into your chest at any moment and pulling out your still-beating heart. There's a down side to not knowing what kind of movie you're going to see ahead of time. I've quit reading the backs of the boxes when it became clear that they gave away all of the plot details down to who lives and who dies in the dramas, but it usually takes a bit of time to gauge whether I'm watching a happily ever after (which this one was) or a movie where Salman Khan is going to get the back of his head bashed in with a lead pipe (I swear I saw it actually squish, but that sort of effect must be cost-prohibitive; I'm sure it was just my overactive imagination. Still, a horrid ending to a movie, having your "hero" bash Salman Khan's skull in and then run off to be reunited with his love. Hello?!?) Once I realized I was watching the Bollywood version of Pretty Woman I could relax and enjoy the Hollywood echo (although huge parts of the plot didn't come from Pretty Woman, so it wasn't too familiar). And it turns out I've seen that actor Amrish Puri in a bunch of stuff and didn't recognize him without a red streak painted on his skull.

OK, the UPS man just delivered my copy of Naomi Novik's The Empire of Ivory, so if you'll excuse me I'm going to go read that right now...